Theater Symptoms: Plays & Writings on Drama
by Robert Musil, translated from the German by Genese Grill.
Contra Mundum Press, 2020. $30.

Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Drama is an anthology bearing witness to the inexhaustible variety of Robert Musil’s oeuvre. While broadly known as one of the major novelists of modernity for his fragment-novel The Man Without Qualities, this new book out from Contra Mundum thankfully reminds us that Musil could hardly help but engage with theater as an institution and pillar of culture, and with drama as a literary genre. Theater, drama, and the notion of tragedy occupy prominent positions in his essayistic endeavors, his experimentations as a playwright and — of course, inevitably — in his work as a theater reviewer in interwar Vienna. 

Genese Grill proves once again her dedication and endurance when translating Musil’s texts, many of them here previously untranslated into English. At the same time, she suggests a new solution for the challenging German term “Schwärmer”: based on the importance of utopianism for the author’s thought and literary program, she picks the rather positively connotated “Utopians” for the play’s title.

If one chooses The Utopians as a point of entry, the wit and irony are indeed to be enjoyed straight away. On the other hand, as the increasingly demanding dialogues take off, a reader expecting major drasis and peripeteia might be disappointed and feel the need to take a step back. 

This is a key moment when experiencing Musil’s writing. The urge to pause and read additional material, before ending the literary text at hand — such as the author’s own essays or notes — is different, perhaps, than with other modern authors, where the abundance of references, the tendency to maximalism or the stream-of-consciousness distinguish the narrative flow. Moreover, it is specific: this specific urge touches on the essayistic style which is at stake. As presented in the famous chapter 62 of The Man Without Qualities, the “Utopia of Essayism” suggests trying to grasp an object of interest, a “thing” [Ding] from different points of view, hypothetically considering its numerous aspects without aiming to exhaust or completely capture it. In the case of The Utopians, in order to follow the discussions between the characters, one feels the need to understand at least some aspects of Musil’s theoretical approach and criticism in his essays on theater, before continuing reading the actual play.

And while it is obvious that behind Stader’s comment: “These dated, old-fashioned tricks still really do work sometimes! A pair of glasses, a little authority in one’s expression suffice in most cases,” Musil is criticizing the theater productions of his contemporaries, it is not yet clear what has led to the problematic situation to which he is reacting.

Thus, the very thoughtful editorial decision for a successive structure in the order of Essays, Reviews, and Plays/Play Fragments pays off. It allows the dynamics between the three genres to become clear and function in a manner that further reveals Musil’s writing as multi-layered and elaborate. We gain a glimpse into his ideal of precision and soul while at the same time following the development of his thought. Observations or beliefs outlined in earlier essays and sketches (on drama or the effectiveness of the theatrical stage, for instance) can be found as either traces or as more mature theories in these later “symptom” essays. Accordingly, his experience as a theatergoer and the routine obligation to produce texts in the evening after each play form his criticism. Experience takes the form of a review, in a moment where unfiltered enthusiasm (or disappointment) finds its place next to and into theoretical remarks, formulations, and flashes of knowledge, all of which are clearly recognizable from his essays. His own demand to understand and expose — in this case the peculiar pathology of theater — can only be grasped through essayism; also, at the same time, it paves the way for it towards a new condition [anderer Zustand] and an experimental view of the world [experimentelle Weltanschauung]; one could add here: a new theatrical condition.

As we know from his correspondence with Efraim Fisch, the publisher of Der Neue Merkur magazine, the notions of symptom, decline, and crisis have been at the epicenter of Musil’s observations from the beginning. It calls to mind the extended use of the symptom metaphor in his essay “The German Man as a Symptom” or in the discourse on crime, in the figure of the serial killer Moosbrugger. In his very own diagnostic role, which exhibits similarities to the fictitious character “Monsieur le vivisecteur”, Musil actually refuses to propose easy remedies or promise immunity. 

But what does Musil diagnose exactly? The inversion of the German Symptomen-Theater into Theater Symptoms in English harks back to the genos-eidos relation: We can, on the one hand, imagine the accumulated symptoms as cases, concrete examples, and elements of dysfunctional plays, and, on the other hand, a theater of symptoms with an inherent pathology, where the roots of the problem might go deeper than they seem. This is a differentiation crucial to Musil, who sensibly reacts to the public outcry by Viennese theater directors that appeared in the newspaper Der Wiener Tag of April 20th, 1924. From their point of view, they diagnose the crisis but also see the recovery of theater. Yet they do not seem to bother seeking the cause of this crisis. In The “Decline” of the Theater (Theater Symptoms III), Musil responds with: 

In Vienna — dependent upon the state of the market, the disastrous franc speculation, and the like — there is suddenly a new condition, which they call the decline of the theater. I don’t believe in it. What is remarkable about this situation is not the continuing course of this crisis, but the circumstances surrounding its outbreak.

With an apparent allusion to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a book he had thoroughly analyzed and criticized back in 1920/21, and with an aversion to slogans or expressionistic pathos, Musil goes on to an elaborate presentation of subsequent crises. Most notable are his deep knowledge of the development of German theater as well as his remarks on the entertainment industry. In what he calls “Amusement crisis”, his thoughts display an affinity to later critiques of capitalism and culture by the Frankfurt School — especially when it comes to the pressure of commercial success in the theater business and the resulting commodification of theater. [1]

As a social amusement, it is also obvious that the theater has contributed to the transformations associated with contemporary late capitalism. The social nimbus of the theater does, indeed, still have its force, but one no longer meets up with people in the theater, one simply goes there or drops in; the performance is reduced to a quantified option on the amusement market, which one purchases, when one wants.

Unsurprisingly, in order to sketch the “cultural education crisis” Musil turns to Friedrich Schiller [2] and other 18th century thinkers like Goethe and Herder, but he refuses to blindly adopt or merely imitate these classical authorities. Moreover, he stresses the need for cultural education and new impulses in “the organization of ideological transformations.” Theater should play a central role in this:

The theater could inspire a powerful spiritual and intellectual stream in life. It would then truly be a moral institution, not in the somewhat pious, policeman-like way that Schiller implied, but rather as a creative zone and as one of the most important nuclei of an eternally necessary social renewal.

In order to give a better sense of these ideas and the potential he sees in theater, Musil draws on examples of theatrical practice and dramaturgical mastery in contemporary theater that are adequate to all of these demands. 

In his 1921 review “Moscow Art Theater”, Musil strategically uses yet another chance to promote his ideal of the poet’s theater [Dichtertheater] — an ideal crucial to his own theatrical experiments. It is, notably, the very same text in which he directly shares with the reader his admiration for the actors (he refers to them as “theater artists”); he also mentions his encounter with them as a key moment: “In order to check my theory, I sought them out and mischievously asked them what they themselves called their style,” he writes, and goes on to present their answer as a confirmation of what he had sensed when watching them on stage. “We play every piece according to its essence,” as they say, and by doing so they embody for Musil the art of the future. What is important to him as a poet, he finds in their acting: “For they create the body of the play from out of its soul.” Meanwhile, the collaboration between the writer Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavski succeeds in ideally balancing literature (“spirit”) and performance (“the bodily share”).

This connection with the avant-garde Stanislavski School becomes something of great value for him, and it is not a matter of chance that after his first experience in 1906 — he attended Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Berlin — he did not miss an opportunity to attend their performances, just as he keeps returning to and praising these artists and this kind of acting as an example of a theater able to go beyond banal simplifications of emotion or outdated dramaturgic laws.

This fine selection of drama criticism successfully reminds us of Musil’s experiences with the works of Chekhov, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, and Pirandello — apart from the German-speaking theatrical tradition or classical writers such as Shakespeare. Furthermore, his frequent reviews of Yiddish productions highlight their importance for Viennese theater. Despite the rather different relationship Franz Kafka had to Yiddish culture, it is nevertheless illuminating to read Musil’s observations next to Kafka’s 1917 fragment on Yiddish theater. [3] It is known that Kafka was fascinated by the language and music as well as by the improvisational acting of Jizchak Löwy’s troupe in Prague. He identified in them what he saw as a vivid Eastern Jewish tradition, a contrast to the “cold” assimilated Western Jewishness his father represented. In both Musil and Kafka’s thought, it is remarkable that Yiddish theater has the aesthetic strength to revolutionize the institution but also the potential to shape the broader cultural landscape of the two cities (Vienna and Prague, respectively).

Theater Symptoms is an impressive editorial achievement backed by brilliant translatory decisions, thanks to which Musil’s style, concerns, and thought offer themselves to new readers. The book opens up the voice of an enjoyable ‘English’ Musil for literature scholars and other Musil translators, as well as for those who seek an introduction to his œuvre. For those who cannot decide where to start, there is a useful index of persons and works. I could think of a few spoiled Musil researchers who might wish there was also an index of Musilian terms!

Theater enthusiasts are going to feel a nostalgia for all these avant-garde Chekhov or Ibsen productions which may well awaken their interest in stages and troupes that no longer exist. Perhaps most vitally, this edition is a treasure trove for dramaturges, actors, and theater visionaries, who just might seize the chance and experiment with a new production of The Utopians.  //

NOTES

[1] Additionally, Musil’s particular interest in Psychotechnics becomes clear — here applied to commentary on the power of theatrical advertisement.

[2] Musil goes back to Friedrich Schiller’s The Theater as a Moral Institution (1784).

[3] This text by Kafka is a documentation of the importance of Yiddish language and culture and it has inspired Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to develop the theory of a “Minor Literature” (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1975). Musil also wrote reviews for the newspaper Prager Presse, where texts by Kafka were often published. One year after Kafka’s death, in the August 8, 1925 issue, the editors decided to publish a short Diary entry Kafka had written back in 1911: “Bühne und Musik. Tagebuchnotizen über ein jiddisches Theaterensemble.”/ “Stage and Music. Diary notes on a Yiddish theater ensemble.”