This may be my favorite Broch novel. Broch's language is giddy. I get the sense that he is keenly aware of how all of German culture, working through Goethe to his present time was ripening. The ripening was both beautiful and evil, a ripening and an over-ripening, rotting.
Broch was exiled (or exiled himself). He was certainly not one of those complicit in the evils of his time. He ends up at Yale, writing non-fiction about mass psychology. *The Spell*, and *Sleepwalkers* both deal with mass psychology through fiction.
In both Broch and Musil we get a lot of talk about "the infinite". I see this as a ripening of Goethe's naturalism, with help from Nietzsche.
"But what I wish to recall is that day in March, now many months past, indeed almost a full year past, as remote as yesterday and as close as childhood, for this is the only way our memory works: it raised one event or another and thereby encompasses both living and dying; it takes hold of a single instant which in itself may not be significant at all, but because it Invests such a moment with the meaning of its past and of its permanence and transposes the human experience into that of nature, beyond death and life and into the irrevocable, because of the transmutation into the irremediable, I wish to recall that day in March...."
Nature, beyond good and evil is now extended to, "beyond death and life", virtually beyond time.
The book keeps developing this idea. The little Austrian town is a microcosm of Germany/Austria, and the new comer is like Hitler, leading the folk into collective pathologies.
The contact with the infinite fleshes out Nietzsche's and Wagner's (and J.P. Hebel's) idea that our actions are sanctioned through death. Broch explains this as a yearning for contact with the infinite, a yearning to transcend time.
(Jean Gebser calls time the last frontier, following the "perspectival" age that focused on space.)
The town is a mining town, and Broch continues the great tradition of cave/mine transformational metaphors, so rich in German Romanticism, in Novalis, Hoffmann, Goethe (the fairy tale). The mine is the alchemical limbic, the crucible, where "transmutation into the irremediable" takes place.
The development of these collective pathologies in Broch's novel, I remember being absolutely gripping, excruciating.
Broch wrote this work before 1940. Amazing how well he maps out Hilter's project before it was fully implemented.
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