A Moving Carriage of Similes: Robert Musil and The Perfecting of a Love

Abstract

Robert Musil described his novella The Perfecting of a Love as a failure. In this paper it is suggested why he might have judged it so. The failure, if that is what it is, is attributed to an undisciplined use of simile. To that end the paper constructs a spectrum of imaginative license, defined through four points or waystations. The first three are: i) metaphors we live by; ii) relative metaphors social scientists live by; and iii) absolute metaphors poets and philosophers live by. These correspond to three ways in which thinking subjects itself to a communal discipline: the discipline of a community in everyday life, the discipline of a social science, and the discipline of poetry and philosophy. A fourth stage is then identified, called here: iv) simile running wild. It was here that Musil's striving for precision in matters of the soul resulted in something more akin to an individual's private counter-discipline.