HARRISON Thomas J., Intro to Essayism—Conrad, Musil, And Pirandello

8/19/2019 HARRISON Thomas J., Intro to Essayism—Conrad, Musil, And Pirandello

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© 1992 The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America

The Johns Hopkins University Press701 West 40th StreetBal t imore, Maryland 212 11-2 190The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London

© The paper used in this book m eets the m inim um requirem ents ofAmerican National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanenceof Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-I984.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Harrison, Thomas J., 1955-Essayism : Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello / Thomas Harrison,

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8018 -4283-2 alk. paper1. Essay. 2. Conrad, Joseph , 1857 1924—Criticism and

interpretation. 3. Musil, Robert, 1880 1942—Criticism andinterpretation . 4. Pirandello, Luigi, 1867 1936—Criticismand interp retatio n. I. Title.PN4500.H28 1992809.2—dc20 91-26510


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Contents

Preface vii

Introduction 1

a r t ne The As Yet U nd ete rm ine d Relations of Things

1. Jos ep h Co nrad : The Perception of Unreality 2

2. Ro bert M usil: Th e Su spe nsio n of the W orld 56

3. Luigi Pirand ello: The M ech anica l Ph an tasm ag oria 87

a r t Tw o Co nscious Essayism

4. Jos ep h Co nrad : The Etho s of Trial 123

5. Robert M usil: Co nscious Utop ianism 148

6. Luigi Pirandello: Cheating the Image 89

Conclusion 2 7

List of Ab breviated W orks 22 7

Notes 23

Index 267


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Introduction

If Ulrich, the protagonist of Robert Musil's novel er Mannohne Eigenschaften ( 1930-43 ; The Man without Qualities , hadbeen asked what aim he had in mind with his ceaselessinvestigations of natural science and mathematico-logicalproblems, he would have answered that there was only onequestion really worth thinking about, and that was the ques-tion of right living. While neither Ulrich nor his author

provides a definitive answer to the question, it remains theoverriding concern of their investigations, existential in theone case, literary in the other. The Man without Qualities,Musil remarks to an interviewer in 1926, aims to providematerials for . . . a new morality. 2 The same could be said ofmany works of Joseph Conrad and Luigi Pirandello, with

more justification, in fact, than of almost any fiction in Musil'stime. Not that André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, and others wereunconcerned with morality. Nor even that Pirandello andConrad would necessarily have agreed with MusilVcharac-terization of the fictional enterprise. In fact, both of themhave usually been read in terms quite different from thosethat Musil proposes, namely, as analysts of grim and ratherhopeless conditions in which morality itself remains all but


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impossible to fix. And yet it is their diagnosis of these veryconditions, in which prior values are deposed and new val-ues not yet posited, that Conrad and Pirandello share withMusil.' Despite their differences, Lord Jim (1900) and II fuMattia Pascal (1904; The Late Mattia Pascal , Heart of Darkness

(1902) and Uno, nessuno e centomila (1926; One, None, and aHundred Thousand find their central concern in that searchfor a perfect accord between thinking, feeling, and acting inwhich right living can be said to consist.

If Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello do not quite succeed indiscovering a solution to such an accord (perhaps also be-

cause in a postpositivist era it can no longer be reached), theynonetheless formulate a solution for living in the absence ofthis accord. This solution to the absence of a solution is thetopic of the present study. Taking my cue from Musil, I call itessayism.

It was, Musil writes of his protagonist,

approximately in the way that an essay, in the sequence of its para-graphs, takes a thing from many sides without comprehending itwholly—for a thing wholly comprehended instantly loses its bulkand melts down into a concept—that he believed he could best sur-vey and handle the world and his life. GW1:250; MWQ :297 [62])

Ordinarily we think of an essay as an informal analysis of a

topic in writing. Implicitly, the topic is greater in scope thanits short and self-limiting treatment. Moreover, the essayusually presents its point of view as only that—one stanceamong possible others, advancing no universal or exhaustiveclaims. The object is dne thing, its theoretical treatment an-other. In fact, it is probably this very difference between a

thing in itself and a thing as viewed that Ulrich's essaystrives to remunerate, offering not a single perspective on anissue but a number of them. Like Montaigne, who compileda variety of interpretive tools, articles of knowledge, and con-flicting opinions into the body of his Essais, Ulrich aims totake a thing from as many sides as possible. The essay allows

for these flexible perspectives, freely pursuing whatever dic-tion, rhetoric, or supporting evidence its argument appears to

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require (whether factual or fictitious, exemplifying or ana-logical, ironic or earnest). In fact, to judge by its master prac-titioners from Montaigne through Roland Barthes, we mightsay that the essay possesses no definitive mode of procedure.What, if anything, the essayistic styles of the last four hun-dred years have shared is precisely a rejection of fixed, estab-lished, and authoritative literary method. And this may bewhy theoreticians of the essay have agreed that this open,self-seeking form—more digressive than systematic, moreinterrogative than declarative, more descriptive than explan-atory—tends to be antigeneric.4 The essay rejects a fixed per-spective and lens.

And yet an essay is not only a literary genre. One of itsstrongest connotations is preserved in the variant assay, as inassaying one's strength or assaying an ore to determine itsmetal. An essay sizes up a situation, exam ining and testing itscharacteristics. It is, in fact, this activity of weighing or

measuring that was originally denoted by the Renaissancefigure of the assayer (or the Italian saggiatore . Related to thismeaning of weighing is the one offered by the French essayerto attempt, to try, to put to trial or to the test. An essay is anact undertaken in deliberate uncertainty, an experimentalendeavor and project. Admitting that the achievement of itsgoal is far from likely, the essay suggests a tragic and inces-

sant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach.5

It is the form of an absolute striving, accompanied by a rec-ognition of its merely relative means. And this is why Georg

ukàcs speaks of the genre as a poetics of longing. The es-sayist can never be more than a precursor, he writes, and itseems highly questionable whether, left entirely to himself

for judged solely on the merits of his proleptic act] he couldlay claim to any value or validity. 6

To these three meanings of intellectual method, phe-nomenal test, and interminable project, Musil adds another:

The translation of the word essay as attempt, which is the gen-erally accepted one, only approximately gives the most importantallusion to the literary model. For an essay is not the provisional or

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incidental expression of a conviction that might on a more favour-able occasion be elevated to the status of truth (of that kind are onlythe articles and treatises, referred to as chips from their work-shop, with which learned persons favour us); an essay is theunique and unalterable form that a person's inner life assumes in adecisive thought. (GIVI: 253; MWQ 1:301 [62])

The key word in this passage is decisive, which in the Germanoriginal suggests an action distended over a present in prog-ress. As a participle, ntscheidend means literally deciding,engaged in the process of deciding. Musil's passage draws acontrast between a conv iction Ùberzeugung , which could

be prom oted to the status of a truth, and a decisive thought.Where does the difference lie? A conviction is the form of adecision already taken; an essay is rather the shape of theinner life in the act of reaching a decision. As explained by

various analyses in The Man without Qualities, this inner life isnot constituted by subjective certainty but, rather, by an en-

counter between subject and object, or between an intuitivepossibility and the constraints of the language in which it isexpressed. Not only does the essay give shape to a processpreceding conviction, and perhaps deferring it forever. Moreimportant, it records the hermeneutical situation in whichsuch decisions arise. For this reason the essay ultimately re-quires novelistic form, which can portray the living condi-tions in which thought is tangled.

Before addressing this development of the essay into anovel, we should recognize a philosophical issue that under-lies the aesthetic decision. Why was it that Ulrich consideredthe essay the most appropriate way to approach thought andexperience? Because that is how he perceived the world itselfto operate. Essayism, a paradigm for both thinking and act-ing, is a response to an ontology in which experience appearsalready to transpire in the manner of an essay. Generally diffused in the time in which Musil, Conrad, and Pirandellowere writing, this ontology of the essay supplies the groundfor an ethical and cognitive methodology.

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The ontology of the essay was already in the making bythe time the German idealists conceived of being as realiza-tion, or temporal and spatial self-actualization. For Schelling,Hegel, and others, every existent thing was at once an effectedand an effecting thing. Being, a process of self-realization,

amounted to the history of the forms in which it produceditself. Hegel viewed this history as unfolding the principles ofWorld Spirit in a logical narrative. While his model of rational historical progression found decisive elaboration in political theory, it was still another scheme that proved to inspire artists and metaphysicians at the end of the nineteenthand the beginning of the twentieth centuries: Schopenhauer smore turbid vision of the principle of realization as blind,egoistic, and pointless desire. Hegel s epic narrative turnedinto a tragic drama of insatiable craving. For Schopenhauerthe motor drive of history was not spirit at all but will, andwill meant ceaseless striving, holding its subjects captive toan insuperably essayistic condition, tempted and attemptingin endless process. Whatever the ultimate goal of this drive, itcould not be historically realized. In this incessant and futilestriving, the philosophy of realization gave way to a philoso-phy of «^realization. Reality, in the metaphysical sense of aunitary and stable condition of being, remained unachiev-able. As long as the craving of willful activity entailed cease-

less overcoming of all definitive accomplishment, it militatedagainst its own will to realization. And this condition, forSchopenhauer, constituted life s objection to itself.

A partial solution to the philosophy of nonrealizationme with Nietzsche, offering also a turn to a properly ethical

essayism. While agreeing w ith Schopenhauer s basic percep-tion of experience as self-trying, Nietzsche reversed the judg-ment his predecessor had placed on it. Such experienceoffered a fruitful rather than futile condition. The aim ofwillful strife was not the accomplishment of being but the adventures of becoming, not survival but power. And powermeant the enhancement of present conditions. Will was not

eternally frustrated but boundlessly productive, not incapable

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of achieving its goal but on the way, not empty but pregnantwith future. A universe of absurd and irrational conflict nowappeared as a vast laboratory of experimentation.

How can we account for Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer'sdifferent evaluations of the same condition? Schopenhauer

judged historical becoming by the yardstick of an eternal andunchanging standard. Clearly, if the object of historical effec-tuation is the permanence of Platonic being, then no rightliving can be achieved except by a retreat from action. ForNietzsche, on the other hand, unity, permanence, and ra-tional purpose were not reality principles at all; they were

ideality ones, in contrast to which historical occurrence couldonly be found wanting. What, then, does one do with thequestion of ethical justification, which seems always torely on the counter of some ideal? Now the justification forhistorical occurrence no longer consists in how well it ap-proximates an ideal but in how well it produces one. Actualexperience becomes the exclusive ground for every ideal (in-cluding unity, perm anence, and those others it fails to fulfill).In the context of becoming, the value of history can now bemeasured by the amount of idealism it succeeds in fostering,or by the resolution with which it shapes and reshapes theconditions for existential possibility. Theoretically speaking,what should be already depends on a prior sense of what

could be. The actual is not justified by its agreement with apredetermined potential but by its self-disagreement, or thedegree to which it continues to reassess such potential.

We can already spy an emerging ethos in this Nietzscheanrevision of the philosophy of realization. To live in accor-dance with the transformative nature of history is to act as afurtherer of concrete potential, to operate in the manner ofan experiment. Nietzsche calls a person who lives in this waya Versucher. The word Versucher literally tempter or at-tempter, comes from Versuch: an attempt, a trial, a test, anact of research or experimentation. A ersucher is a searcherand researcher, tempted by the goal of determining the

whither and for wha t of humanity.7 An analogous figureis Musil's possibilitarian Mbglichkeitsmensch), who tends

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not to act out a given situation's explicit scenarios but ratherto seek its inherent possibilities, the valences of its con-stitutive elements, the solutions these elements might befound to yield. A possibilitarian is less interested in realizedthan virtual forms of a historical network, its as yet undeter-

mined potential. With Ulrich in The Man without Qualities, asearlier with the protagonist of Die Verwirrungen des ZòglingsTorless (1906; The Perplexities of the Pupil Tòrless), we havean image of an unfinished, trying and tried person dieDarstellung eines Unfertigen, Versuchenden and Versuchten 8

Another type of possibilitarian can be found in the pro-

tagonist of Conrad's Lord Jim, who is striving to determinewhat could be his own ideal. In fact, the greater part ofConrad's characters are driven by precisely this compulsionto attempt achievements beyond their reach, whether in theform of heroic action or, in the case of his narrators, of theo-retical understanding. In Pirandello possibilitarianism as-sumes the features of a recurring and insuperable destiny,namely, the struggle of characters to realize their innermostpotential beyond the quotidian forms in which their lives aretrapped. In all three novelists character is portrayed as anopen existential project within a world of relatively closedactuality.

The idealism at work in these characters and narratives isnot of the abstract sort that Lukàcs criticizes in the modernnovel, defending subjective ideals against the objectively nec-essary conditions of actual history. As all three novelistsmake equally clear, the very question of possibility is firstraised by these characters' concrete situations. It is actuality[ Wirklichkeit] that awakens possibilities, Musil writes, and

nothing could be more wrong than to deny this GW 1:17;MWQ 1:13 [4]). It is actuality itself that first puts these char-acters to the test, compelling them to strive to transmutetheir habitual modes of understanding and action.. Humandestiny consists in a struggle between an imaginative agentand a virtually intractable historical condition. To live is not

only to essay the possible; it is already, and primarily, to beessayed. Wrenched away from apparently stable present con-

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ditions toward amorphous realms of future achievement, thecharacters of Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello testify to thetrials of actively developing experience. In the language oftraditional philo sop hy the y are subjected to a contest be tw eenfreedom and determinism, subject and object, value and fact,

feeling and thought, which can never be fully resolved. Noneof these novelists privilege the ideal or romantic element inthe conflict. If they have any vision of self-realization, it liesnot in their characters ' unflagging commitment to an idealbu t rather in these ch ara cters ' acquiescence in an insuperablestruggle. Pirandello makes the most of the fateful facticity in

which these characters are caught, Conrad of the ensuingbattle, and Musil of its ultimate goal, namely, that accord be-tween thinking, feeling, and acting mentioned earlier.

To understand this essayistic, or trying, destiny moreclearly, let us return for a moment to the paradoxical trans-formation of the philosophy of realization into a philosophy

of nonrealization. As it appears in Nietzsche, an ontology ofceaseless becoming is also an ontology of utopia. Utopia,however, is a self ironizing notion. It labels both an aspira-tion toward an unrealized condition and also the unrealiz-ability of the same object of aspiration. With Nietzsche realitybecomes Utopian in both of these senses, incessantly strivingto transform an d overcom e its rea l cond ition. Every appar-ent realization of experience is already predicated on a de-realization, or destruction, of some prior state of affairs. Eachoperative form must first be derealized for a different realiza-tion to come to pass (itself derealized in turn in a perpetualand restless cycle). Following Pirandello, the existential cor-relative of such a process could be described as follows:

People have a superfluity within them which continuously anduselessly torments them, never letting them be satisfied with anycondition, and always leaving them uncertain of their destiny. Aninexplicable superfluity, which, in order to vent itself creates a fic-titious world in nature . . . and yet one with which they themselvesneither know how to, nor can, be content non sanno e non possonomai con tentarsi] so that without pause they restlessly and longinglyalter and realter it.9

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The issue is not, in Lukàcsian terms, the theoretical mis-take entailed by the construction of this superfluous andformalized world; it is, rather, the ineluctability of the mis-take, for it is one and the same superfluity that causes boththe marking and the overcoming of historical boundaries,both the doing and the undoing of experience. Superfluity isof the very nature of existence.

When this self-critical superfluity of experience becomesconscious, two consequences follow. First, a person feelscompelled to question all empirical configurations and real-ity principles (such values or ideologies as an inherited politi-

cal system, monogamy, a work ethic, and so on). Resultingfrom an interaction between intention and accident, everyreality principle offers only one possible theorization of theworld, a formal sedimentation of circumstances that mightjust as well have turned out differently. When this conscious-ness arises, the mind develops a hermeneutics of suspicion

toward not only all formalizations of experience but also thevery principles of formalization (the codes of morality, thehabits of lifestyle, the rules of reason). What then becomessuspect are theorizations of the world themselves. The per-ception of the essayistic evolution of the world leads to asearch for alternatives to these uncogent world theses. Thefirst consequence represents the critical dimension of essayis-tic practice (the active assayal of historical conditions or the-orizations, whether on the part of a character or a lucid, phil-osophical narrator) and the second its Utopian one (the questfor alternative and more flexible forms of organization). In-separable though they be, the first type of essayism is the sub-ject of Part 1 of this book, the second is the subject of Part 2.

In its critical moment essayism fin s ts context amid a hostof investigations into the formal constitution of experiencecontemporaneous with the work of Conrad, Musil and Pir-andello: Mach's research into the physical indeterminacy un-derlying and belying all laws of mechanics, Husserl's reduc-tion of phenomena to intentional acts of consciousness, therigidification of vital flux in Lebensphilosophie Wittgenstein's

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understanding of language as a form of life, and the principleof psychophysical isomorphism in Gestalt psychology (orthe identity of mental and empirical structure). Presentinglife as a struggle within and against the prefigurations of ex-perience passed down by history, Conrad, Musil, and Piran-

dello become outspoken critics of precisely those possibil-ities of existence w hich 'circulate' in the 'average' public wayof interpreting Dasein today. 10 Heidegger's average possi-bilities of existence are analogous to the paradigms in thenorm ative grammar of Husserl's natural attitude —thatspontaneously realistic theory of the world by which we op-

erate, endowed with its own logic of thought and feeling. Inthis initial and critical moment Conrad, Musil, and Piran-dello are bent on dismantling the theses of this natural atti-tude. Here their affiliations reach beyond phenomenologicalresearch to that decidedly militant stance toward everydayconceptualizations of the real which is so visible in futur-

ism, surrealism, and other aspects of the avant-garde at thebeginning of the century. Here, at the midpoint betweenthe will to a system of the early nineteenth century andthe philosophy of difference of the late twentieth, art at-tempts to rally to the defense of everything excluded or re-pressed by systematic interpretations of experience (particu-larity, contingency, and whim; multiplicity, simultaneity, andcontradiction; epiphanic, unconscious, and associative pat-terns of meaning formation). Art suddenly sees its task as thevery opposite of that Hegelian-Lukàcsian one of unifyingdisparate life forces into a synthetic and normative image.Rather, it devotes itSelf to the very destructuration of norms.

Essayistically practiced, this destructuration is more thaniconoclasm, more than an attack on norms from some sepa-rate and secure vantage, and more than a leap of imaginativefaith. It is instead an imm nent critique of those very samenorms and structures, a measuring of their logic by the samecriteria of unity and coherence they already espouse. Con-rad, Musil, and Pirandello perform this critique not only bymeans of dramatic irony but also by theoretical analysis, orthat obsessive speculation that pervades their work.

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An example of this destructuring operation lies in theumorismo effected by Pirandello's art. Humor, Pirandello ex-plains, is a mischievous procedure, exposing the duplicityand contradiction underlying every synthetic and harmo-nious rule. Deliberately decomposed, interrupted, [and] in-terspersed with continuous digressions, humorous texts vig-orously oppose the construction of system s. They divulgetheir meanings by contrast rather than syllogistic analogy.While an epic or dramatic artist tends to combine disparateand opposing elements into the unity of a character, a hu-morist does the opposite: he decomposes that character into

his elements. The humorist knows no heroes ; he knowswhat legend is and how it is formed, what history is and howit is formed: all of them compositions, more or less ideal, andperhaps most ideal when they pretend most to be real: com-positions which he amuses himself to decom pose. Thehumorist begins with current, coherent visions and takes

them apart. He sees the world, if not exactly nude, in shirt-sleeves, so to speak; the king in shirt-sleeves, divested,along with his soldiers, of those hateful informs of theirsU 166; H 143).

Conrad also finds his central topics in such heroes, ideal-ists, and self-righteous characters (Jim, Kurtz, and Marlow).

Revealing the convention that lurks in all truth and . . . theessential sincerity of falsehood, his narratives tend to hingeon an uncanny dramatic rupture upsetting the stable andcogent orders on which these lives are based

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self-evident occurrences begin to elicit the unraveling opera-tions of an analytic consciousness, a thinking and rethinkingof an internal motivation that fails to be addressed by a reign-ing logic. As in Pirandello, the result is a profound distrust ofthe objective and epic organization of experience in anarrative mind, endowed with its own strategies of explana-tion and adages of wisdom.

As for Musil, both The Man without ualities and theearlier Torless recount nothing less than the story of a con-sciousness questioning the most widespread conventions ofinterpretation, offsetting them with satirical and discursive

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critique, on the one hand, and instances of dramatic anom-aly, on the other (the torturing of a student in the earliernovel, for example, and Moosbrugger's vicious murder in thelater).

It is not long before this hermeneutics of suspicion turnsinward, toward the objectifications defining the active subject.This subject, or person, comes to appear as a conglomerationof largely unchosen qualities, lacking inherent coherence.Are these qualities really one's own or just the outcome ofsome mechanical coordination? To try to get at the essenceof this subject is like attempting to determine the contents of

an iron box by tapping it with a hammer LJ 35). The effectsof this type of suspicion on a living character, dramaticallyfigured in the fictions of Conrad and Pirandello, are most ex-plicitly described in The an without Qualities. With the intel-lectual living of Ulrich there arises a pathos of distance to-ward the historical present. Experience loses all immediate

purpose, producing the sensation of a missing soul in eachof one's acts. One's habitual means of conduct are suspended.Normal occurrences elicit abnormal responses. As the con-figuration of experience becomes questionable, so does thelogic of one's innerm ost convictions and feelings. To see howthese suspicions can lead to an ethical program, we mustagain turn to Nietzsche. We others who thirst after reason,he writes, are determined to scrutinize our experiences asseverely as a scientific experiment—hour after hour, dayafter day. We ourselves wish to be our experiments andguinea pigs. '3 It is as precisely such living experiments thatConrad, Musil, and irandello portray their seafarers, theirmen without qualities, and their characters in search of an

author.Experimentation inaugurates the second, Utopian mo-

ment of essayism. This is the immanent historical idealism, orpossibilitarianism, which is prepared for by essayistic de-structuration. The issue is now how to restructure the meansof theoretical and existential operation. Needless to say, it

cannot be done by replacing one reality principle with an-other (whether the dynamo of the future or the language

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of the unconscious ). All new ideologies will only petrify thepossible once m ore. Aiming not to actualize the possible butto possibilize the actual, essayism is faced with the task of re-linquishing the very impulse to impose an ideal on the real.Only then can a realistic restructuration of experience take

place. In fact, it will not be a restructuration at all but, rather,a discovery of the possibilities inherent in the structures al-ready available. What is called for by the Utopian phase ofessayism are essentially more flexible, more imaginative,more functional, and, yes, more pragmatic organizations ofexperience than the ones ordinarily passed on from genera-

tion to generation.At this moment experience begins to reveal its own rich-ness and multiplicity. The monological lyric of unappeasablelonging, or Lukacs's abstract idealism, gives way to a dramapeopled by countless players, all vying for justice. In the placeof a single, and now fallen, reality principle there arise un-limited numbers, each open at any point to revision. In-asmuch as one cannot reject the possibility that it may in- lu e infinite interpretations, the world becomes infinite allover again.14 And only now can conscious experience start torealize itself in the manner of an essay, its progressions inter-rupted by digressions, its identifications by differentiations, itsunities, equilibria, and relations inviting additional review. InUlrich's decision to survey and handle his life in the mannerof an essay lies an intuition that the indeterminacy of everyobject of vision can actually be recompensated by multi-plicitous interpretation. A pluralistic perspective does morejustice to phenomena than any single point of view, regard-less of how encompassing this view presumes to be. Resisting

the temptation of the very logic underlying every re lityprinciple—namely, that correspondence between imageand significance on which meaning appears to rely— nessay gathers into a single composition many things that,according to common opinion, are mutually incompatible.If, as Musil continues, the essay resists objective synthe-sis, it does not do so out of indecisiveness, or indeterm i-nacy (Unbestimmtheit), but rather out of overdetermina-

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tion (Ùberbestimmtheit).The essay is a Utopian attempt todevelop the possibilities of form to a virtually infinite degree.

In this second, constructive moment, the emphasis in theessay's hermeneutics of suspicion shifts from the word sus-p on to hermeneutics, for this overdetermination of symbolic

significance can be produced only by researching the forma-tive possibilities already inherent in language. Essayistic evo-lutions of experience are not articulated by entirely newforms but only by new relations among the forms that aregiven. Instead of choosing a definitive image for an ideal andunitary significance, like classical art, the essay proceeds byinvestigating the contexts from which such an image or sig-nificance was first abstracted. Instead of a theory of a phe-nomenon, it offers a theorization, an exegesis of the lin-guistic horizon from which that phenomenon receives itsmeanings. No doubt, this exegesis is what Lukàcs had inmind when he claimed that the essay never offered a pureand original artistic form. The subject of an essay is, rather,something tha t has already been given form, or at leastsomething that has already been there at some time in thepast; hence it is part of the nature of the essay that it doesnot create new things from an empty nothingness but onlyorders those which were once alive.16 Instead of advancingnew forms, the essay rethinks the ones we have.

If Lukàcs distinguishes the essay from artistic creation(occurring ex nihilo?), Theodor Adorno elucidates its differ-ence from science and philosophy. While science and phi-losophy try to abstract their concepts from the idioms inwhich they are concretized, the essay begins its constructionprecisely by investigating such contextualized concepts and

prestructured meanings; it wants to help language, in its re-lation to concepts, to grasp these concepts reflectively. Tograsp these concepts reflectively means to test their valences,to submit them to other frames of reference, to discover theirpotentials for combination—in short, to rethink their her-meneutical capacities.

Lacking the naivete

to propose a natural or immedi-ate embodiment of a significance in an image, the essay

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reaches out for what lies behind the image, attempting toshape experiences that cannot be expressed by any ges-ture. Which experiences does Lukàcs have in mind? Fromall that has been said you will know what experiences Imean. . . . I mean intellectuality, conceptuality as sensed ex-

perience, as immediate reality, as spontaneous principle ofexistence; the worldview in its undisguised purity as an eventof the soul, as the motive force of life. Conceptuality as aspontaneous principle of human existence means the very

mediation of reality by form. If the object of the essay cannotbe represented by classical art, it is because this object—namely, intellectuality, the interpretive process at large, thenature of conceptuality, the implicit structure of any world-view—underlies the very possibility of formal expression. Ifas Lukàcs claims, poetry makes destiny appear as form, thenthe essay makes form appear as destiny, as the very destiny-creating principle. Seeking the soul-content indirectly andunconsciously concealed within forms themselves, the es-sayist reveals the destiny inherent in forms.18

Of course, this does not mean that the essayist is not anartist. Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello are as capable of givingform to destiny as anyone else; they simply do so in a lessexclusively iconic, less historically mimetic way than mostwriters of fiction, taking as the primary substance of their

representations not empirical occurrences so much as theirformative patterns. And this substance requires a frequentdisunity of event and significance in their narratives, asthough, in the uneasy and shifting relation between thesetwo elements that classical artists are wont to equate, the es-sayists sought alternatives to equational logic. The humorist

is adm ittedly a critic, says Pirandello, but always an imagi-native critic U 141; H 119). Musil stresses the same thing.The superprecision, or overdetermination, pursued by theessay is not a pedantic but an imaginative precision phan-tastische Genauigkeit GW 1:247; MWQ :294 [62]), a crea-tive discovery of new rational relations. Only through imagi-native precision can constantly new solutions, connections,constellations, [and] variables be found in the world. 19 Tying

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Pirandello's novels and plays? In fact, if the three authors areessayists, as I claim, why do they write fiction at all? Evenhere connections undermine generic differences. Conrad's,Musil's, and Pirandello's fictions engage in essayistic proce-dure on a larger scale than a literary essay allows. Governed

not merely by that conflict between an objective narrativeevent and its conc eptua l interpretation w hic h readers l ikeBenedetto Croce and Lukàcs identify as artistic failure butalso by an active pursuit of discursive multiplicity, the her-meneutical investigations of Conrad, Musil, and Pirandelloaim to recombine the forms they investigate into a higher

type of unity than that permitted by the traditional genres ofthe essay or the realistic novel. In what, asks Croce, doesPiran dello's w ork cons ist? In so m e artistic bu rsts, suffocatedor disfigured by a fitful an d incon clusive ph iloso ph izing . Nei-ther clear-cut art nor philosophy, then: impeded by an orgin-ary vice from unfolding according to one or the other. 2I The

same could be said of the other two writers. But this tensionbetween a form and its conceptualization marks the very be-ginning of the essayistic endeavor. It is in the service of es-sayistic production that the fictions of these three authorsmove from an image to its conceptu l context and then backagain, measuring historical occurrence by understanding andunderstanding by occurrence; relativizing the object throughsubjective vision; establishing discursive analogies; showingthe real story to be the story of interpreting the story. The gov-erning principle in each case is hermeneutical irresolution,intuite d to be the only me an s toward the achiev em ent of a

f inal and complete interpretat ion.

Thus, it is the very logic of essayistic form which requiresthe more expansive genre of what Hermann Broch called the

gnos iological nov el, on e focusing its investigations on thevery possibilities of knowledge.22 The essayism of Conrad,Musil, and Pirandello requires the forms of historical life, de-lineated in fiction, as the ultimate subject on which to exer-cise its theorizat ions. What is decisive in their work is not ac-tion in itself but the possibilities it harbors. In themselves thedra m atic even ts of these fictions seem insignifican t. ord

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Jim revolves entirely around an incident as completely de-void of importance as the flooding of an antheap ; and yetthis incident also suggests a truth momentous enough toaffect mankind's conception of itself LJ 57). It calls for thedivulgatory efforts of conceptual, analogical, and symbolic

thinking. And, if the historical occurrences of these fictionsfind the fluidity of their significance in theory, this theory, inturn, needs the context of an intractable historical fate. Whilethe essayistic project is subjective and open, its topic is objec-tive and closed. The arena of the essay lies between thesetwo, between the definite and the indefinite, the fact and the

idea, in an intellectually destined clash.

HARRISON Thomas J., Intro to Essayism—Conrad, Musil, And Pirandello

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