A Dialogue between Dialogism and Interality
Jean-François Vallée
Collège de Maisonneuve
AbstrAct Dialogue and dialogism offer one of the most promising paths to interality in
the West. Concentrating on the Renaissance tradition of the Humanist dialogue and more recent philosophical practices and theories of dialogue in the twentieth century, this article argues—most notably through a close examination of two major literary and philosophical
works: Thomas More’s Utopia and Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities—that one can
trace an (interrupted) line between these two transitional historical periods, set at both ends
of the “Gutenberg parenthesis,” when relational, dialogic, and thus potentially “interalogical”
modes of writing, thinking, and being came to the forefront.
Keywords Dialogue; Dialogism; Interality; Literature; Interalogy
résUMé Les figures du dialogue et du dialogisme offrent une des voies les plus
prometteuses pour approcher la notion d’interalité en Occident. En évoquant la tradition
humaniste du dialogue de la Renaissance et les formes plus récentes de pratiques et de
théories dialogiques du 20e siècle, cet article trace—à travers notamment une analyse plus
approfondie de deux œuvres littéraires et philosophiques majeures : L’Utopie de Thomas
More et L’Homme sans qualités de Robert Musil—une ligne (interrompue) entre ces deux
périodes historiques transitionnelles, placées à chaque extrémité de la « parenthèse
Gutenberg », alors qu’ont émergé des formes d’écriture, de pensée et d’être relationnelles,
dialogiques et donc aussi potentiellement « interalogiques ».
Mots cLés Dialogue; Dialogisme; Interalité; Littérature; Interalogie
In the west, dialogue is most certainly one of the key paths leading to interality. Indeed,
in some ways, western dialogic practice and modes of thought, when at their best,
could be seen as the black dot in the proverbial taijitu symbol: the more receptive-relational yin intertwined with the otherwise predominantly yang entity and subjectivity-oriented philosophy of the west. this article attempts to show that, at certain
junctures of western history, these dialogical modes of thinking and writing came to
the forefront, prefiguring perhaps our current electric and acoustic moment where, as
eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone have suggested, the “age-old conflict between the
eastern integrity of the interval and the western integrity of the object is being resolved” (McLuhan, 1995, p. 208).
Jean-François Vallée is Professor in the département de lettres, arts et histoire de l’art at the
collège de Maisonneuve, 3800 rue sherbrooke est, Montréal, Qc H1X 2A2. email: jfvallee
@cmaisonneuve.qc.ca .
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Transitional dialogues
It might not be surprising to note that the most interalogical moments in the history
of the west—when the relational and reciprocal perspective of dialogical modes of
thinking and writing dominated—have been, as suzanne Guellouz (1992) has noted
regarding the more specific use of the written dialogue genre, “transitional” historical
periods. Interestingly, these pivotal historical moments also coincide with what French
philosopher and mythocritic Gilbert durand (1988) has identified as periods dominated by the mythological god (and interalogical figure par excellence) Hermes (or
Mercury)—messenger (angelos) of the gods, deified “trickster,” god of commerce, communication, travellers, and border crossings.1 In these periods, durand argues, “a previously dominating society’s epistemological, philosophical, religious or political
structures are unsettled” (p. 23, my translation). the main historical eras of resurgence
of such hermetic/mercurial myths include, he continues: sixth to third centuries bce
in Greece, third century bce to third century ce in rome, the Gothic renaissance of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in western europe, the renaissance, the eighteenth century, and, predictably, the second half of the twentieth.
Not so coincidentally, these same historical periods are also all ripe with dialogues
and/or marked interest in dialogism and dialogical modes of thinking. Let us take a
closer look, for example, at the period that I am the most familiar with: the european
renaissance.
The interality of the Renaissance
As many commentators have noted, the renaissance—often included now in the
longer and historically debatable “early Modern” period—could be seen as an exemplary “period of transition” (Kristeller, 1990, p. 21), a true interregnum: between the
Middle Ages and Modernity per se; between an oral/aural/scribal era and what
McLuhan (1962) has called the Gutenberg Galaxy, dominated by the more visual and
linear world of typography; between the imperium of Latin and the rise of vernacular
national languages; between a relatively unified christian world and the fragmented
and fractious christianity that followed the so-called Fall of constantinople (the city
straddling europe and Asia, the west and the east) and the reformation; between a
theocentric worldview and the more rational-scientific perspective that truly emerges
in the seventeenth century; between feudalism and capitalism; between the geocentric-Ptolemaic and the heliocentric-copernican views of the cosmos; between the incompletely mapped old world of the Ancients and the New world geography redrawn
by european navigators and mapmakers; between a more plastic and social conception of the personal ethos and the emerging notion of the autonomous modern “subject” and individual, et cetera. clearly, the renaissance, traditionally seen as the
“discovery of world and Man” (Jacob burckhardt, 1860, p. 280, my translation), could
be better understood as the discovery of an “in-between two worlds” (“un entre deux
mondes,” Fragonard, 1990, p. 21).
on this historical and epistemological ground of thoroughgoing in-betweenness,
the figure of dialogue becomes highly significant. this doubly mediated genre—straddling fiction and non-fiction, a written imitation of oral speech, built on a two-level
rhetorical structure through which the conversation of the characters in the dialogue
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guides, in various and sometimes sophisticated ways, the interaction of the author
and the reader “outside” of the book—was extremely popular especially with
renaissance Humanists, who were themselves self-described “mediators” undertaking
(through imitation, edition, translation, adaptation, commentary, philology) a translatio studii (a transfer of knowledge) between the Ancients and the Moderns.
In the period from the Italian trecento to the late sixteenth century in Northern
europe, roughly from Petrarch to Montaigne—with whom, as François rigolot (2004)
has shown, we find an “inward turn” of dialogue—there is a multitude of written dialogues in all european literatures, either in manuscript or print form, in Latin and in
the vernacular languages. All major writers of the renaissance—in Italy first (from
Petrarch to Galileo through Alberti, Valla, Pico, Ficino, Aretino, speroni, Machiavelli,
campanella, and Giordano bruno, to name just a few) and elsewhere in europe
(Nicholas of cusa, erasmus, thomas More, cervantes, Juan-Luis Vivés, Guillaume
budé, spenser …)—and many lesser-known writers wrote and published innumerable
dialogues. In fact, in this era, which also sees the rise of western polyphonic music,
even narrative works (from boccaccio to rabelais) were suffused with dialogue.2
the phenomenon is so pervasive that, in her historical survey of the dialogue
genre, suzanne Guellouz (1992) concludes that the renaissance is most certainly “the
period where the dialogue as a genre became universally triumphant” (p. 166, my
translation, emphasis in original). these dialogues—most often inspired less by the
Platonic model of Greek philosophical dialogue than by its Latin, rhetorical (especially
ciceronian), counterpart or its satirical late Hellenistic (Lucianic) avatar—could be
seen as didactic, monologic imitations on paper of true interactive conversations, but
the best examples of the genre show that, even in the context of the rising print culture
that McLuhan and others associate with the linear, homogenized, and closed off mental patterns of the Modern west, there was—at least for a moment (in the first half of
the sixteenth century in Northern europe, and somewhat earlier in Quattrocento and
even trecento Italy)—a thrust in another direction that attempted to preserve some
aspects of the relational nature of oral communication on and around the printed page
itself. to give only one telling example, let us examine closely the early editions of
thomas More’s Utopia, a peculiar book that displays many interalogical features.
The dialogical (no-) space of Utopia
As shown in more detail elsewhere (Vallée 2013), the countless modern editions of
thomas More’s Utopia are very different from the first editions published in the early
sixteenth century. For example, all the letters, poems, and engravings contributed by
other Humanists (such as erasmus) that frame the main text on both ends in these
early editions have been almost systematically eliminated from modern editions, as is
also the case for the numerous annotations that one finds in the margins of the early
avatars of the book. these modern amputations and reconfigurations of More’s book
are symptomatic of the individualistic, linear, and sealed-off conception of the “book”
and the “author” that came to dominate the Gutenberg Galaxy from the seventeenth
century on. A more careful look at the four earliest editions of Utopia (published between 1516 and 1518), however, reveals the highly sophisticated (and interalogical) textual and editorial structure of this fundamentally “dialogocentric” (Vallée, 2015)
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Humanist work that also invents the interalogical idea of utopia which Louis Marin
(1973) has equated with the “realm of the neutral [that] stands outside as something
separate but is also a transition … a gap, a space that has no knowable ontological
ground” (Hetherington, 1997, p. 67).
In fact, Marshall McLuhan (1962) too described Utopia as an essentially transitional work in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy:
st. thomas More offers a plan for a bridge over the turbulent river of
scholastic philosophy. … As we stand on the frontiers between the manuscript and the typographical worlds, it is indispensable that a good deal
of comparison and contrast of the traits of these two cultures be done
here.… writing in 1516, More is aware that the medieval scholastic dialogue,
oral and conversational, is quite unsuited to the new problems of large
centralist states. A new kind of processing of problems, one thing at a time,
“nothing out of due order and fashion,” must succeed to the older dialogue.
For the scholastic method was a simultaneous mosaic, a dealing with
many aspects and levels of meaning in crisp simultaneity. this method
will no longer serve in the new lineal era. (p. 129)
but this “new lineal era” was then still in its very early stages, far from taking over
from the already waning scholastic dialogue. In the middle, or on the “bridge” that
McLuhan sees in the book of Utopia, the new reader encountered another form of dialogic interaction, neither the scholastic-dialectic model of disputation nor yet the
monologic-linear methodic line of discourse that will emerge later, that is the
Humanist dialogue that had been retrieving, remixing, renovating various forms of
classical dialogues, since Petrarch at least in the trecento (hence even before the invention of movable type).
the lengthy description of the island of Utopia in the second book, for which the
work is mostly known today and which can, with many caveats, be seen as a precursor
of modern rational, lineal, and homogenized space, is in fact only one element of the
book of Utopia that, on closer examination, could be seen as an extremely complex,
multilayered, and profoundly dialogical attempt at “exploding” the book, a fact that
is not visible in the modern (non-scholarly) editions that, as we have mentioned already, leave out or displace much of the original textual and iconographic material.
one can identify no fewer than seven layers and four axes of dialogue in and
around Utopia:
1. thomas More’s Utopia, as a book, forms a diptych and enters into an external dialogue with another legendary Humanist book published five
years earlier (1511) by his famous friend erasmus: The Praise of Folly or, in
Latinized Greek, Moriae Encomium (dedicated to More, the morosophos or
“wise fool”). originally written as a response to The Praise of Folly, that is
as a “praise of wisdom,” Utopia is published for the first time in 1516, the
same year that erasmus’ Moriae Encomium appears in its revised and augmented edition by the same publisher, Froben, that will soon—in 1518—
provide a similar regal treatment to Utopia under the guidance of erasmus
himself. Hence, there is a sophisticated dialogue going on between these
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two books written by two very close friends (on the importance of the
topic—and topos—of friendship in and around Utopia, see Vallée, 2004b).
2. In the four early editions of Utopia (1516–1518), this “external” dialogue of
the books and of humanist friends is reflected and amplified in what has
been called the parerga—the letters, poems, and engravings from
Humanist comrades and supporters (including erasmus himself in the
two 1518 Froben editions)—that frame the main text on both ends and
that carry out what could be called a “metadialogue” with the text of
Utopia itself, corroborating or questioning its ideas and playfully alluding
to its sophisticated and paradoxical fiction. this textual and iconographic
material, generally not included in modern editions, clearly shows that
Utopia is part of a wider dialogue with other authors, politicians, and artists
of the nascent and thriving trans-european Humanist republic of letters.
3. More’s own preface—a letter addressed to his and erasmus’ friend Peter
Giles that is usually included in modern editions—must be considered
separately from the other previous letters between Humanists since it is a
part of the body of the work (confirmed by the fact that the marginal annotations one finds throughout the two following books start to appear
in the margins of this introductory letter). this extremely sophisticated
and paradoxical introduction to Utopia by the “author” More, as has been
shown at length by elisabeth Mccutcheon (1983), is at once a dizzying
rhetorical tongue-in-cheek play on the fiction of Utopia, an ode to friendship, and a modus operandi for the good and friendly reader who is the
true addressee of this letter:
the work signals its own duplicities, then, and More is not, finally,
trying to deceive us but to delight us at the same time that he
startles us into inquiry, inviting us to discover his own art and to
participate in an ongoing dialogue which he initiates. (p. 51)
4. book I then finally opens with the “narrator” and “character” More, sent
to Flanders as an ambassador (as he had been in real life), meeting his humanist friend Peter Giles, who introduces him to the fictional character
raphaël Hythloday, a traveller-philosopher, at once “guide” (like the
archangel raphael) and “sayer of nonsense” (Hythlodaeus). the three
characters move on to More’s Antwerp home to hear the story of the many
journeys of raphael (especially that of the island of Utopia), but engage
instead in a heated conversation that has been called the “dialogue of
counsel,” a lengthy debate (more than 50 pages in the Froben editions)
about the role that learned men can play with regard to the power of the
prince. the character thomas More (supported at times by his friend
Giles) defends a more pragmatic ciceronian view of civic humanism
against raphael’s idealistic Platonic perspective rooted in the tradition of
christian humanism. without entering into the subtleties of this intricate
debate, we can summarize it by saying that raphael thinks it is useless for
a philosopher to counsel the prince since it would lead to hypocrisy and
to no results, while More and Giles still believe in the possibility of influencing power, be it through more indirect methods. this dialogue, typical
of pro et contra debates and of the tradition of disputatio in untramque
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partem (arguing both sides of a question) also opposes two forms of “dialogue with the prince”: the direct, unadorned, and perhaps even insolent
philosophical discourse of raphael (sermo tam insolens) and the more subtle, rhetorical, indirect (obliquo ductu) dialogue favoured by the character
More. It is important to note that this dialogical debate about dialogue remains unresolved at the end of book I. Hence the reader after having read
the sophisticated and playful epistolary exchanges of the parerga and having been invited to partake in the game of Utopia through the “author”
More’s paradoxical prefatory letter has now become a spectator and judge
in this controversial and unsettled dialogue (set in the most typical setting
of renaissance dialogue, a garden).
5. the dialogue of book I has more than one dimension: in the middle of it,
raphael launches into a flashback, a retrospective retelling of yet another
dialogue held many years before at the court of cardinal Morton. this relatively lengthy “dialogue within a dialogue” (20 pages in the Froben editions) shows raphael counselling the cardinal and interacting comically
with courtiers (including a court jester). Used by raphael as an argument
to show that it is useless to attempt to counsel princes, this dialogue mis en
abyme actually shows, to the contrary, that some men of power, such as
Morton, could in fact be open to new ideas and perfectly receptive to counsel, thus demonstrating to the (good) reader that raphael’s discourse and
arguments must not be taken at face value.
6. It is in this framework, and after all these dizzying dialogues and preparatory interactions, that raphael Hythloday, at the beginning of book II and
at the invitation of the characters More and Giles, launches into his protracted monologue about the island of Utopia (which formed the kernel
of the first draft of Utopia when it was still called Nusquama—that is
“nowhere” in Latin). this monologue about a fictional no-space, to which
the book of Utopia has often been reduced after the early editions, should
not, however, be read as a “treatise.” Not only is it a mere “utterance” of a
dubious fictional character ensconced in all the previously mentioned layers of dialogue, but it follows the rules of a rhetorical genre, the declamatio,
that has many dialogical features (for example, erasmus’ Praise of Folly is
also a declamation, a mock encomium, to be more precise): it is held in
front of a fictional audience (More and Giles) within the book, and its use
of second-person pronouns throughout can also be seen as attempting to
carry on a dialogue with the reader. of course, this monologue does institute a rupture with the dialogue of the first book, just as the gap between
the two books, and between the dialogue and the monologue, seems to
reflect the elimination, by the Utopians, of the isthmus that is said by
raphael to have connected the island to the mainland in its early history.
but if this gap, this breach could be read as prefiguring, in some ways, the
coming breach that would lead to the “island” of Modern rationality, linearity, and homogenized space, it must be underscored that at the end of
book II the reader is brought back to the scene of the dialogue: More takes
raphael by the hand to bring him inside while questioning—in a very
ironic and paradoxical way—the very basis of raphael’s thesis (about the
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abolition of private property), thus letting the reader again be free to decide how to receive raphael’s monologue.
7. Finally, another axis of dialogue, not present in modern editions, is instituted from the very margins of these early editions: the marginalia (written, it seems, by More’s friend[s] Peter Giles and/or erasmus), where one
finds no fewer than 194 annotations (170 of which are in book II) that
“carry on a dialogue with the text” (McLean, 1988, p. 94) and create what
I have called a paradialogue with the body of the text, sometimes highlighting a passage, sometimes revealing a source or reference, sometimes
playfully hinting at the fiction of Utopia, sometimes praising or even criticizing other passages (Utopian habits, for example, which are either
praised or mocked ironically most of the time), as if the commentator himself had an ethos, a “character” (McKinnon, 1970) that establishes yet another axis of dialogue within and around the book.
Moreover, one could also consider the hugely fruitful, ubiquitous, and multifaceted reception of More’s Utopia as another potential axis of—after the fact—“dialogue,”
since this work gave birth to a common word in many languages, a literary and philosophical genre, and a social and political concept that still resonates five centuries later.
Indeed, countless imitations, parodies, counter-imitations (dystopias), intellectual and
philosophical debates, et cetera have replied to and are still “answering” More’s dialogue of five centuries ago.
Hence, beyond the better-known social and political utopia of the island Utopia,
the book itself could be seen as an (utopian) attempt at creating a transnational and
transhistorical dialogue in and around its pages. this example eloquently demonstrates what could be called the “dialogocentric” perspective that is at the root of early
european renaissance Humanism. It shows how the relationships, the actual or potential interactions and intervals, hence what lies “in-between,” are of tantamount importance to these Humanists. this is made evident also, to give only one other example,
in More’s friend erasmus’ new translation of the Bible, the Novum instrumentum, first
published the very same year as Utopia (1516).
In the beginning was dialogue
Indeed, in the 1519 second edition of this first Greek New Testament published in the
renaissance—the edition that Martin Luther himself will use for his German translation
(as will other vernacular translators)—erasmus proposes a highly controversial and
very revealing new Latin translation of the incipit (first words) of John’s Gospel.3 Instead
of the traditional In principo erat Verbum … (In the beginning was the word …) of
Jerome’s translation in the canonical Vulgate, he opts for In principo erat sermo, that is:
In the beginning was discourse, speech, conversation (sermo could also be used in Latin
to describe the written dialogue genre). It is as if erasmus rewrote the original Greek, In
the beginning was Logos, to make it read In the beginning was … dialogos. Hence, according to this view, the dialogical relationship precedes everything, it is the son of God,
and even the very incarnation of God: In principio erat sermo, & sermo erat apud Deum,
& Deus erat ille sermo (In the beginning was dialogue, and dialogue was with God, and
God was dialogue).
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The end of the Renaissance interval and the rise of
an historical interlude with fewer intervals
In the second half of the sixteenth century, however, and more consequentially in the
seventeenth century, this type of dialogic thinking (and writing) tended to wane, as
Virginia cox (1992) has shown, to give only one example, about the Italian tradition
of written dialogues. Indeed, in her last chapter about seicento Italian dialogue, “From
the open dialogue to the closed book,” cox shows that late-sixteenth-century dialogues become more and more “visually” and typographically organized (including
even subtitles, tables, et cetera) and increasingly obsessed with “method,” which, she
writes, “may be seen as one symptom of the vast shift in patterns of thought occasioned by the diffusion of print” (p. 103).
cox here is channelling the work of walter ong, Marshall McLuhan’s student, who
has provided the most convincing analysis of this late-sixteenth-century shift in the
modes not only of writing but, more importantly, of thinking in his seminal book
Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of
Reason (1958), a book which is sometimes said to have influenced his thesis advisor’s
own Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan, 1962).
ong uses the, apparently trivial, example of the then extremely popular pedagogical methods of Pierre de La ramée to demonstrate how ramus’ anti-Aristotelian
forms of logical spatialization and quantification actually played a significant transitional role toward the emergence of the “art of reason” that would beget modern science and the “discourse of method” in western europe.
the gradual dominance of such new methodological-rational-visual modes of cognition, fundamentally analytic and classificatory, combined with—or created through,
as McLuhan has suggested—the rising power of the new typographical culture could
also be linked to the rise of nation-states, the emergence of the individual-autonomous
(cartesian) subject and dualism, the waning of practical philosophy and interest in
emotions and the body, the appearance of new conceptions of (homogenous) space
and (linear) time, et cetera, et cetera, hence the new Modern rationalist paradigm—
and clearly less interalogical perspective—that is generally seen as more typical of
western modes of thought (and being). this period lasted three to four centuries, barring some exceptions (including an important moment of dialogic resurgence in the
late eighteenth century, most notably, where one finds, once again, a new wave of popularity of the dialogue genre, although in a more philosophical and rational guise, with
the likes of authors and philosophers such as Hume, berkeley, shaftesbury, diderot,
et cetera). It lasted all the way into the twentieth century, when a host of different
philosophical, scientific, and literary figures reopened the debate, not so coincidentally
just as the “Gutenberg parenthesis” (Pettitt, 2007) was starting to close with the rise
of electric, electronic, and audiovisual media.
The Renaissance of dialogue and dialogic thought
in the twentieth century
such broad stroke historical views are, of course, extremely problematic—and full of
shortcuts and gaping holes—but what is lost in the details is gained in our view of the
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477
big picture: indeed, it is impossible to deny that starting in the second half of the nineteenth century (e.g., Nietzsche, Kierkegaard) and especially at the beginning of the
twentieth century, numerous thinkers, writers, and artists question, criticize, and attack, from many different angles, the rationalist homogenous fortress of western
Modernity that had given rise to the dualist subject/object perspectives, to the detriment of contextual, practical, relational modes of thinking and being that were more
open to what lies in-between.
For example, one of the most engaging of the early-twentieth-century dialogical
philosophers is Martin buber, whose 1923 Ich und Du (I and Thou, 1937) “constitutes
a revolution by opening up the between beyond the impasses of subjectivism and objectivism with which modern thought has been so mightily struggling” (wood,
1969, p. 3). but buber’s dialogic interest in this human “sphere of between” (“das
Zwischenmenschliche”) is only one instance of what could be described as a “dialogical
turn” that one finds in different more or less dialogic guises, in the next decades of the
twentieth century, in the work of thinkers such as Mikhail bakhtin, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Francis Jacques, and many other philosophers, writers, and
artists. However, this article concentrates, in much more detail, on another deeply
utopian and important “literary” work to illustrate how this dialogical turn could also
be seen as interalogical.
The dialogical new space of Robert Musil’s utopian “novel”
robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), originally
published from 1930 to 1943, sits atop the mountain of the most significant high modernist literary adventures of the mid-twentieth century in the west, rivaled only perhaps by Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. the Austrian writer’s
sprawling essayistic novel is at once a hugely ambitious—and tellingly unfinished—
intellectual excoriation of the failures of the western Modern mindset and a tireless,
uncompromising search for a new mode of apprehending the disintegrating self and
the rapidly changing Modern world.
set in Vienna in the year preceding the start of world war I (a historical event
that epitomizes the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the crisis of Modern
western ideologies), it depicts, in its first half (of over a thousand pages), the encounters and interactions of the main character, Ulrich, the “man without qualities”
(Eigenschaftlos), a mathematician taking a “year off from life,” with various Viennese
representatives of european ideologies or “qualities” (aristocratic, bourgeois, economic,
military, scientific, aesthetic, philosophical, criminal, et cetera). Ulrich himself realizes
that his own personal qualities “had more to do with one another than with him”
(Musil, 1995, vol. 1, p. 157). He becomes secretary of the Parallel campaign, a comically
idealistic structure created to find a “big Idea” in honour of the 70th anniversary of
the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph I in 1918.
the narrator and the main character’s relentless irony and ruthless analysis—borrowing from highly rational and scientific concepts derived from mathematics, statistics, thermodynamics, and epistemology (especially that of ernst Mach, on whom
Musil had written his Phd dissertation in berlin)—progressively dissect and disintegrate the various ideological, idealistic, romantic, pragmatic, or pathological perspec-
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tives expressed by the other characters and most notably the Parallel campaign, which,
as the reader well knows, will not in reality lead to a celebration of the emperor of
Austro-Hungary, but rather to imperial demise, national fragmentation, and the First
world war. similarly, the main character’s “utopia of the exact life,” based on his impersonal, rational, probabilistic, and analytical relationship to the world and to other
characters, will also fail to satisfy his quest for a new way of being.
this lengthy first volume (containing 123 chapters), published in 1930, constitutes
only the first—“ratioid”—part of this ambitious literary and intellectual adventure. In
the unfinished and during Musil’s lifetime only partly published second volume of
The Man without Qualities, the “non-ratioid” realm was to be explored by the main
character when, on the occasion of his father’s death, he rekindles his relationship
with his lost sister, Agathe. After this major narrative caesura, a slow-moving, ambiguous, and potentially incestuous rapprochement between the sister and the brother
gradually takes over the novel, even if parallel characters and stories are still pursued
on the side. though still touching on scientific concepts, these “Holy conversations”
between Ulrich and his sister Agathe are chiefly concerned with love, religious mysticism, contemplation, unio mystica, altered states of consciousness, and other experiences that Musil classifies under the umbrella term of the “utopia of the other state
(andere Zustand).”
Hence, after having investigated various aspects and possibilities of the impersonal,
rational “absence of qualities,” the novelist and his characters explore the “suprapersonal,” non-rational world “beyond qualities” (one of Musil’s main sources for these discussions, by the way, is Martin buber’s Ekstatische Konfessionen, a collection of mystical
writings from different eras and cultures selected and published by buber in 1909). this
exploration requires a complex literary choreography including many sophisticated reflections laden with images and metaphors, protracted essays on the nature of sentiment
(in its double “senti-mental” nature—at once sensory and cognitive), dialogues interrupted by eloquent silences or abstract temporizing, and a complex narrative ballet that
constantly moves one step forward, two steps back. the prospectively incestuous love
relationship of the main characters becomes a symbol of the fusion of contraries, the coincidentia oppositorum, and constantly refers to myths of twins, doubles, Plato’s
Androgyne, Isis and osiris, hermaphrodites, et cetera, myths that all, in various ways, aspire to abolish human duality and/or sexual difference. Most interestingly for us, many
of the conversations are interested—with several caveats and careful distinctions—in
the opposition between the rational, active, “Faustian,” “western” mode and the nonrational, contemplative, “oriental” mode of being, even if the main character is careful
not to take these overly simplistic categories (popular at the time, it seems) at face value.
In the early plans of the novel, Agathe and Ulrich’s mystical-incestuous adventure—hence the Utopia of the other state (or the other condition, depending on the
translation)—was to end in disappointment and failure, after they were to consummate their relationship on an island in a chapter entitled “the Journey to Paradise”
(Die Reise ins Paradies). However, later on in the writing process, it seems Musil could
not in fact bring himself to follow this original plan and put an end to this storyline
within his sprawling novel. It could be argued perhaps that, had it not been for his
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premature death in 1942 while in forced exile in switzerland during the war (the Nazis
had banned his books), he would have managed to bring all the strands of his titanic
literary and intellectual enterprise together … if it were not for the fact that in his last
years—and even up to the very last days of his life—he was endlessly and obsessively
working and reworking on multiple versions of these chapters in which Ulrich and
Agathe were still, hesitantly, only “considering” the possibility of their union.
to understand the importance of this fact for the interpretation of Musil’s masterwork, and for our dialogic and interalogical reading of it, it is necessary to give a general
idea of the very complex issues surrounding the editions and translations of The Man
without Qualities, a task that can only be broached superficially here. to put it briefly,
after the publication (to critical acclaim) of the 123 chapters of the first volume in 1930,
only the first 38 chapters of the second volume were published during Musil’s lifetime
(in 1933) and can thus be considered in their “final” version. one then finds 20 chapters (known as the Schlussblock), initially numbered 39 to 58, that were ready to be
published … until Musil retrieved them at the last minute from the printer because
he was not satisfied and wanted to rework and even rewrite completely some of them.
All the rest of the material—thousands of pages of finished or unfinished chapters,
variants of chapters, fragments, notes, thoughts, plans, et cetera written between 1919
and 1942—is called in German the Nachlass (the “bequest”), a huge number of texts
organized by Musil with a sophisticated system of letters and numbers, links and annotations. A cd-roM version including 5,000 pages of this Nachlass was published in
the 1990s (Musil, 1992) and an even more ambitious dVd containing tens of thousands
of facsimile images of these and other materials (the Klagenfurt Ausgabe) was published more recently (Musil, 2009). this “open architecture” of Musil’s novel, its complex genesis and sophisticated system of interconnected characters, storylines, ideas,
possibilities, utopias, configurations … has led some critics to see it as a prescient vision
of the currently open, interconnected, multilinear, perpetually transforming textual
environments such as the web and other hypertextual artifacts that only started to be
conceptualized 20 years after Musil’s death. Indeed, if we look at this material retroactively, it is as if Musil was—perhaps unwittingly—“exploding” the closed form of the
printed book at the closing end of the Gutenberg parenthesis.
However, non-specialist readers generally encounter “complete” versions of The
Man without Qualities in traditional fixed and linear paper editions. And the editorial
choices made in these editions and translations have a profound effect on the readers’
interpretation of this expansive novel.
the first attempt at publishing such an edition of the two volumes was made by
Adolf Frisé in the early 1950s. this edition gave much importance to the above-mentioned plan devised by Musil in the early 1920s, when he thought, as we have said,
that the “utopia of the other state” would be a failure, Ulrich’s sister Agathe would
commit suicide, most other characters’ faith would end in death or madness, Ulrich’s
main utopias would all fail, and the First world war would commence. this 1952
German edition—which thus ends on a disillusioned and pragmatic version of the “ratioid” utopia—formed the basis of many translations, including the 1957 French translation that was the only available edition until 2004.
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In english, the first translation by ernst Kaiser and eithne wilkins, published in
three volumes (Musil, 1953–1960), offered the same material (though the announced
fourth volume with the unpublished material was never published). the translators
proposed a different editorial perspective and interpretation of the unfinished novel.
since, as we have seen, Musil had been working and reworking the Agathe-Ulrich chapters until the very end of his life, Kaiser and wilkins were convinced that Musil had
abandoned his “juvenile” plans for the second volume and had become mature
enough to adopt a mystical and contemplative perspective, and thus pulled the reader
in the direction of a “non-ratioid” reading of the novel’s “end.”
In 1978, Frisé provided a new German edition of The Man without Qualities, where
he organized a selection of about 1,000 pages of the unpublished material in its second
volume (titled Aus dem Nachlass) though not, this time, according to the early plan
he had used in his edition of the 1950s. Instead, he opted for a reverse chronological
order, starting—after the 38 published chapters (which he included in the first volume
of this new edition)—with the 20 chapters that Musil had withdrawn in galleys from
the printer, followed by six of these same chapters that Musil was rewriting in his last
months in 1942, then more variants of these sometimes renumbered chapters that the
author had worked on in 1939–1941, then 1938 versions, and then older or less advanced
material (notes, sketches, drafts), and so on. In 1995, sophie wilkins and burton Pike
provided a new english translation and a completely new edition of The Man without
Qualities (Musil, 1995) mostly based on this new German edition, but without completely following the reverse chronological order of Frisé for the posthumous material:
rather, in volume 2, after the “galley” chapters and some of the late variants, burton
Pike translated and rearranged a selection of the rest of the posthumous material “according to character groupings, narrative sections, and Musil’s notes about the novel”
(Musil, 1995, p. xi).4
these new editions and translations provide a more faithful and “neutral” picture
of the state of the posthumous material of The Man without Qualities without imposing
an interpretation, neither the “ratioid” interpretation of the first Frisé edition, nor the
“non-ratioid,” mystical reading of Kaiser and wilkins. At the same time, they open the
possibility for new readings.
Most importantly for the dialogic and interalogical interests here, and as argued
elsewhere (Vallée, 2004a), these editions, by attributing more weight (in the order of
their appearance) to the late reworking of the Agathe-Ulrich chapters, give much more
prominence to a series of chapters that are, it could be argued, neither “ratioid” nor
“non-ratioid” (and perhaps both at the same time). Indeed, in these chapters, Agathe
and Ulrich seem to be hanging in between two worlds, between dream and reality, between science and mysticism, between themselves and others, between identity and
difference … and beyond separation or union, they remain—as the title of the penultimate chapter numbered by Musil before his death illustrates—“unseparated and not
united” (Die Ungetrennten und Nichtvereinten). In the following chapter, the last one
that was renumbered by Musil, this highly significant phrase is explained in relation
to the iron fence that separates the garden, where brother and sister hold their conversations, from the outside world of the city:
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481
the name that, for its symbolism, they had given to the iron fence and to
the place they found themselves in—“unseparated and not united”—had
since taken on more substance, because they themselves were unseparated and not united and they thought that they understood, or somehow
perceived, that everything in this world could bear the same name. (Musil,
1978, vol. 2, p. 1351, my translation)
these reflections take place in chapters that are suffused with dialogue, “conversations
that reached no end and yet burst out again” (Musil, 1995, vol. 2, p. 810), such as in the
stunningly beautiful chapter “breaths of a summer day” (Atemzüge eines Sommertags),
where sister and brother hold intellectually and erotically charged conversations—interrupted by silence and inner thoughts, as they wind up lying in the grass under a
“noiseless stream of weightless drifting blossoms” (p. 1382)—about love, mysticism, the
“kingdom of emotion,” and the message of Jesus in the sermon on the Mount!
However, these sprawling dialogues of the late chapters are also, and even increasingly, interested in other subjects and ideas that shun the aforementioned fusional
myths for themes that are characterized rather by paradoxical configurations that celebrate the “magic of being identical and not identical” (Musil, 1995, vol. 2, p. 983),
gleich und nicht gleich (Musil, 1978, vol. 1, p. 906): metaphors, copies, images, reproductions, still life paintings, analogies, comparisons, et cetera. Hence, a third way, a
third form of “absence of qualities” emerges in these dialogues, neither ratioid nor
non-ratioid, neither impersonal nor suprapesonal, but transpersonal. And this is reflected in the dominating dialogic form and mode of writing of these chapters. Anne
Longuet-Marx (1986), in her book on Proust and Musil, is one of the only critics to
have noticed this momentous dialogic turn in Musil’s novel:
If the novel reverses into dialogue, it is because dialogue becomes the ideal
figure of openness, of the infinite, of incompleteness. dialogue is openness
but it also transcends the self. Indeed, the two protagonists, that had entered in dialogue at first because “they did not know how to act”, imperceptibly move on from demonstration to enchantment, their self gradually
being modified and losing all its power and even its reality. their respective
distinct self disappears behind the rhythm of their exchanged words in a
tension that comes close to ecstasy. … the ideal of the impersonality of
the hero is accomplished here in the efflorescence of speech, with dialogue
guiding this passage from distinct self to the impersonal “I” of language.
(p. 167, my translation)
Hence, through his uncompromising literary, intellectual, and ethical quest, Musil
comes to (re)discover the unending process and radical in-betweenness of dialogue.
For this reason, it can be argued that he deserves to be seen as one of the most significant twentieth-century representatives of the dialogical turn and of the renewed interest in the realm of the “in-between” in the west.
In fact, the paradoxical alliance of “precision and soul” that Musil brought to literature
was already heading in this interalogical direction from his very earliest writing, such as
in his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß,
Musil, 1955), as can be seen in the main character’s reflections on irrational numbers:
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Isn’t that like a bridge where the piles are there only at the beginning and
at the end, with none in the middle, and yet one crosses it just as surely
and safely as if the whole of it were there? that sort of operation makes
me feel a bit giddy, as if it led part of the way God knows where. but what
I really feel is so uncanny is the force that lies in a problem like that, which
keeps such a firm hold on you that in the end you land safely on the other
side. (1955, pp. 106–107)
As Achille c. Varzi (2014) has seen, the “bridge image”—the same metaphor McLuhan
used to describe More’s Utopia—is a “key intuition” here:
the standard reading is that we have, here, a metaphor of the central
dilemma of the novel—possibly the dilemma that underlies Musil’s entire
literary production: the unfathomable link between the rational and the
irrational, the visible and the invisible, the overt world of manifest happenings and the hidden world of inner life. (p. 34)
this is precisely how Musil himself, in an essay about a possible new aesthetic, distinguished “art from mysticism”: “[art] never entirely loses its connection with the ordinary attitude. It seems, then, like a dependent condition, like a bridge arching away
from solid ground as if it possessed a corresponding pier in the realm of the imaginary”
(1925/1990, p. 208). thus, it is not surprising that this highly interalogical understanding of the essence of art led Musil to dialogue.
The interality of the twentieth century in the West
of course, Musil’s exceptionally significant literary and intellectual exploration of the
realm of interality is only one example in the twentieth century among philosophers,
writers, artists, and scientists of the west who have either explored “other” realms
(the unconscious, relativity, abstraction, et cetera) or have attempted to bridge different
worlds or perspectives through various forms of relational, systemic, or dialogic apprehensions of reality and life.
As regards dialogism more specifically, the most renowned contribution is often
seen to be that of the russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail bakhtin (or the
“bakhtin circle,” with Voloshinov and Medvedev), whose concepts of polyphony, heteroglossia, and dialogism appear to be rooted squarely in the realm of interality, though
some philosophers, such as Francis Jacques (1985), have argued that bakhtin’s philosophy is still a “moderate” form (“thèse moyenne”) of dialogism, stemming from literary
intertextuality and a limited understanding of true dialogue. Jacques himself (1979,
1985), inspired by a modified Kantian philosophy, linguistics, pragmatics, and phenomenology, proposes an even more radically “intersubjective” and “interlocutory”
conception of what he calls dialogics (dialogiques).
Again, these are but a few examples among many of the “dialogical turn” of the
past century in the west (Hans-Georg Gadamer, for one, is another important dialogic
philosopher who warrants more attention). one cannot help but wonder whether the
multiplication of such dialogic—and interalogical—perspectives is a sign, as Peter
Zhang (2015), following McLuhan, has argued, of an “orientalization of western thinking in the age of postliteracy or secondary orality” (p. 94) or whether it is simply tem-
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483
porary and related again to the highly transitional state of our era—straddling mechanical and electronic, analog and digital, paper and screen, print and electronic, written
and audiovisual, industrial and postindustrial, national and global (or “glocal”), patriarchy and postpatriarchy, centralized and decentralized, linear and cyclical, fixed and
flowing, sedentary and nomadic, mass media and networked media, individualistic
and connected, Neolithic and Anthropocene, human and post/transhuman …
Indeed, perhaps we find ourselves now in an era similar to what Karl Jaspers (1953)
described as the Axial Age, an “interregnum between two ages of great empire, a pause
for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness” (p. 51). If we are lucky,
and wise enough—and if the forces of empire as well as the fervent supporters of an
unnecessary clash of civilizations are kept at bay—perhaps we will remain suspended
in this highly fertile historical moment of the in-between, of the perpetually transitional, so that the new and promising philosophy of interalogy can foster continuous
dialogue between individuals, species, communities, nations, civilizations.
Post(inter)script: Provisional remarks
to conclude, I would like to briefly interrogate the difference(s) “between” interality
and dialogism beyond their common ground rooted in relational thinking. being new
to interalogical studies (even if I have also worked from the seemingly neighbouring
perspective of “intermediality”), I do not have the pretension of defining this new (intermediary) field of knowledge (or field of the intermediary?), but it seems, from what
I have learned so far, that interality’s purpose could, at first glance, be seen as more
radically set “in between” than the realms of dialogue and dialogism. the Greek prefix
dia- (“translated” as “trans-” in Latin) involves a potential crossing, a transformation
across or beyond previous states, while the Latin prefix inter- seems more content with
staying in between, with unending interaction, with a “willing suspension of belief”
in either pole and thus with states of being (wu, ma) that are at ease with emptiness,
interstitial spaces, and other such states. dialogue however involves a back-and-forth
movement, an alternation, a continuing transformation, a reciprocity between mutually transformed entities or beings that could imply that it is only partially interalogical—unless, for these very same reasons, dialogue could be seen as paradoxically more
interalogical than interality, since it never completely abandons itself either to the pure
rational-western mindset or to a more spiritual-oriental perspective.
but I might be completely lost here in the world of the in-between! I fear further
studies—and dialogues—in and about the very promising philosophy of interalogy
will be necessary.
Notes
1. writing of one of Hermes’ traditional epithets, Stropheus (“the socket” in which the pivot of the
door moves), Karl Kerényi (1986) states that the god governs
a middle realm [metaxy] between being and non-being. … the primordial mediator and messenger moves between the absolute ‘no’ and the absolute ‘yes’,
or, more correctly, between two ‘nos’ that are lined up against each other. … In
this he stands on ground that is no ground, and there he creates the way. (p. 77)
2. on the importance of dialogues in narrative works in France, for example, see Pascal Mounier
(2007). the other major written genre of the period is also a very communicative and interalogical
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genre, based on a relational, hybrid conception of writing: the (published) letter, especially the “familiar
letter” extremely popular also in Humanist circles. on the familiar letter, and its waning in the early
seventeenth century, see Vaillancourt (2003) and Vallée (2011).
3. In fact, erasmus is reverting to a very early patristic tradition, as Marjorie o’rourke boyle (1977)
has shown in “reopening the conversation on translating JN 1.” on the controversy surrounding
erasmus’ translation, see o’rourke boyle’s “A conversational opener: the rhetorical Paradigm of
John 1:1” (2003).
4. It was only in 2004 that the recently deceased philosopher Jean-Pierre cometti provided a French
edition (Musil, 2004) of the new material that was added in the 1978 Frisé edition. contrary to Pike,
cometti follows Frisé’s order and organization of the Nachlass. the previously published chapters remained in the beautiful translation of the French poet Philippe Jacottet, while the previously unpublished material was translated by cometti and Marianne rocher-Jacquin. regarding the english
translations, it must be specified that some readers still prefer the style of the Kaiser/wilkins version
of the 1950s to the 1995 wilkins/Pike rendering, even though the new edition has a lot of new material
and provides a less biased organization of the posthumous material in volume 2. Pike himself offers a
more open and somewhat interalogical interpretation of the (possible) end of the novel: “Musil intended to have Ulrich and Agathe somehow rejoin the world after the failure of their attempt to achieve
a unio mystica, but as the reader will see, this was left completely up in the air among a welter of conflicting possibilities” (preface to “From the Posthumous Papers,” Musil, 1995, vol. 2, p. xii).
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