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Writer's pictureGenese Grill

Musil's Writing Block

Musil suffered tremendously from writer's block. One time he supposedly put a blanket over his desk and circled it, smoking, for days. Another time, Alfred Döblin came over to visit and thought it would be funny to casually sit at Musil's desk and sign his own name to one of Musil's drafts. Musil was so upset by this that he couldn't write for months afterwards.

Eventually, despite his skepticism about psychology, he sought professional help, with a student of Alfred Adler named Dr. Hugo Lukács, a Hungarian who had emigrated to Vienna in the 1920s. Part of the Adlerian treatment was for the patient to observe his or her own processes and analyze them--something Musil was quite used to doing. In his notebooks, we find a document written while in treatment, revealing some of his questions and conclusions. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the reasons he finds for his block is the difficulty of reconciling competing goals for the work, and a sort of endless cycle of new hydra-heads of arrangements and re-arrangements. This continual cycling is exacerbated by a resistance to taking the great responsibility of choosing one option over another.


Here is my rough translation of Musil's notes:


Technique sub specie Lukács


One main phenomenon: two competing conceptions of goal: Paralysis. Repression of one of them apparantly impossible; difficult coalescence. I. The original conception of goal. II. competing conceptions of goals generated by consulting other notes. III. Vastness. Boredom. Always getting longer.

 

Usual solution: wait one or two days; the power to make a determination grows weaker. A new idea creates a rearrangement. Or the opposite: a rearrangement leads to a new idea. What was important becomes suddenly unimportant and falls away. There is always too much theory and essay.

 

If you know what you want, you can. You can always know what you want. It must be, but it bores me. I ultimately get stuck in mere must-be things. [In the] military there was time, the eternal waiting, the cigarettes. Inauthentic activity. As with writing, the feeling of tua re agitur [it is a matter of concern to you]. Throttled personality. Not being able to choose one thing over another; not taking the responsibility.

 

Lukács: How and why have I constructed these impossibilities for myself?

 

It simply won’t work anymore. The machine is stuck. Unable to see why. What could be done is still utterly unclear. But it seems dreary, “just bad.”

 

One wants something in a dream and can’t move a limb: the condition is related to this powerlessness; and what one calls—somewhat one-sidedly, in reference to cases of neurotic character defects—the cowardice of the neurotic, also his “demoralization”—are these not related to the panic, the nightmarishness of such dreams?

 

Important requirement: a guiding principle (necessary as much for writing as for understanding). And that goes for the whole as well as the detail. “What is the real purport?”—This question expresses the whole desideratum. A guiding principle must be simple and drastic, otherwise it is useless.

 

 



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