Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers

My copy of Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers" came from Commonwealth Books in downtown Boston. Years later, I would see the store ordered one or two copies to replace it. Mine is now broken, split in multiple places by the spine. I've never had a book do that before. For some odd reason, I had affection enough to repair, instead of replace, the book with glue - I would paint a necklace of glue where it split, straighten it with a ruler or toothpick, then place some paperweight, a cup, another book, on it to let the glue dry, before resuming reading it. It split multiple times. Once, I didn't bother to repair it for a while.

My earliest memory of reading the book, and I'm not sure how this is possible, is in Boston University's library, during a time of rain. I'm not a BU alum. I've never been admitted. This memory seems impossible. All I recall is, reading "The Sleepwalkers" in a strange world full of strangers while the sky pouted in grey and let loose arrows of rain.

My journey with "The Sleepwalkers" is this: I picked it up when I began "Orpheus" in 2018, and some time in 2019 or 2020 I set it down. Though my writing style would be forever altered by its cold, dark, poetic prose, it had been too depressing for me. I picked it up again after the United States' 2024 election because it seemed, well, relevant.

Before I had my hands on it, "The Sleepwalkers" had particular presence to me. Gass included it among his fifty influential books. He claimed Broch was the most underappreciated writer in his list. Then he described it as so many writers described it: first a window, then the glass shattered by a stone, then the irrepressible blackness the shards revealed and the hitherto window prevented us from seeing. Hell of a way to introduce a book.

It's such a shame, then, it begins as a boor.

We begin first with a description of Joachim von Pasenow's father, Herr Pasenow, a description asserting "there were people who felt an extraordinary and inexplicable revulsion when they saw him coming towards them in the streets of Berlin, indeed, who in their dislike of him actually maintained that he must be an evil old man" (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir). Whose description is this, Joachim's or Broch's? I have read this passage maybe twice or thrice. My answer is, I don't know, and neither do I care for Herr Pasenow's grossness.

Proceeding from this is Joachim's decidedly boring life. He has a good standing in the Austrian military, but he is ultimately indifferent to the military; rather, his desire to stay on and be promoted is a mix of his family's intentions, his own fear of his uselessness, and his feeling of being safe in uniform, as if life is straightened out by his coat's buttons. After some callow remarks from his father, Joachim begins a neurotic affair with the low-class Ruzena, though his family prefers him to be engaged with the equal-classed Elizabeth.

This is all very boring. Though Broch is interested in his characters' Freudianesque neuroses, he is disinterested in the drama of their emotions, and he seems disinterested in their perspectives and prefers to judge them.

The prose, however, brightens when Joachim's brother, Helmuth, dies, the same brother whose life he secretly envies underneath his disgust, for in some small way he is the child who was "preferred". As Broch puts it,

Now his mother was crying, and Joachim, who could think of nothing to say to comfort her, once more could not comprehend why it should have been Helmuth, and not himself, who had been hit by the fatal bullet.

This is a powerful sentiment, that of the living contrasting themselves to the state of the dead. And then the prose moves onward, in its meandering way.

In my first read I was frustrated by Broch's disinterest in being ... interesting. I'm not asking for high drama, high emotions and high stakes, but a very good book shakes up the sequence of events in order to shake up the prose. Instead, Broch continues in his disinterested way to describe the mundane events of the book: Joachim's deteriorating relationship with Ruzena - which deterioration makes no sense and seems a poor comedy of errors - his peculiar relationship with Bertrand - which relationship also makes no sense - and his hastened betrothal to Elizabeth.

Which leads to possibly the most laughable passage of the book, Bertrand and Elizabeth's dialogue in the woods. I considered sparing you, but here it is:

Bertrand: He has told me a lot about your great beauty. Doesn't that please you?

Elizabeth: I have no wish to hear about my alleged beauty.

Bertrand: You are very beautiful.

Me: What the fuck is going on.

Elizabeth: I didn't think you were one of the lady-killers.

Me: Bro.

Bertrand: I couldn't bring myself even to utter that awful term, not even if I wanted to be insulting.

Me: There's four more pages of this shit.

There are sentences between the dialogue, but they really don't change the flow of this scene. For better or worse, their dialogue is the scene. It's so bizarre and lifeless.

Somewhere in this, Herr von Pasenow, by the death of his son, is experiencing the entire disintegration of his life, becoming a shell of the man he once was. This is an incredible development, that Broch goes nowhere with. Indeed, almost as if giving his audience the finger, Pasenow just ... dies.

In even more defiance of the reader, Ruzena simply goes away - with some resolution to her character - and Bertrand leaves too - with somewhat less resolution to his character. Joachim and Elizabeth marry; they're, as the audience expects, and Broch wants you to expect too, unhappy in their marriage, yet, as Broch puts it,

Nevertheless after some eighteen months they had their first child. It actually happened. How this came about cannot be told here. Besides, after the material for character construction already provided, the reader can imagine it for himself.

As you can anticipate, for my first read, I was heartily annoyed by this last sentence.

Unbeknownst to me, the reader - and I, the reader, am indeed a character in the book, though unwittingly and reluctant - the first cracks in the window appear.

But I do not know I am a character yet, and I do not see the window either. I am still on my first read.

So much for the glass. Onto its shattering.

It's an understatement to say the second book, "The Anarchist", is substantially different.

The first book, "The Romantic", is Austenesque. As a note, I actually like Austen's writing quite a bit. She has a reputation for writing supposedly-sanitized novels, but in reality Austen's disinterest in politics and class allowed her to focus on her social situations and people's behavior, revealing, as if peeling back layers, social structures and people's biases.

To reiterate what I said above, "The Romantic" has none of that. It is, indeed, a near-parody of an Austen novel, being very sanitized to the point where the characters feel alien and their problems feel quaint. If Broch was satirizing novels of this time period, he failed miserably (the opinion of first-read me) and he succeeded wildly (the opinion of second-read me).

"The Anarchist" is much better, at least aesthetically, than "The Romantic" because August Esch is indeed of the common class, and the very first section shows his class struggles against the "nefarious" Nentwig. This switch-up in situation allows Broch a coarser, more material language, for this indeed describes Esch's situation, that of constant need and deprivation. For most readers, I imagine they will feel more comfortable in "The Anarchist" than in "The Romantic".

To clarify, "The Anarchist" does not dive into the political and economic situation of 1903 Austria at all. Just as "The Romantic" is anticlimatic, so too does "The Anarchist" develop and end pathetically. The plot, essentially, is, Esch finds a new job in a different city, becomes very suddenly insecure in his own life, and then pursues love. The fin de siècle is an important element of the narrative, but it looms like an ever-watchful and passive god over Esch. Therefore, Esch's restlessness is entirely his own, even as he places the blame on other people.

"The Anarchist" is also the point in "The Sleepwalkers" when the novel becomes really depressing. Look no further than Esch and Fraulein Erna's "courtship", which has the tension of two tigers stuck in a cage eyeing one another, waiting to pounce and let out blood in their domicile. Broch makes it abundantly clear that neither of them love the other, but they are merely "replacements" for something else: for Esch, Erna represents the intimacy withheld from him throughout his life as an orphan, and, for Erna, Esch represents the lifelong disappointment she has experienced in her life as a homely bachelorette. These are very, very pathetic people, surrounded by even more pathetic people, as Erna's brother, the coarse Korn, who thinks only with his gut, the aimless Teltscher, and the ineffectual Lohberg.

But the true cornerstone of "The Anarchist" is not August Esch, but really the character Mother Hentjen. Why is Mother Hentjen called "Mother" Hentjen? She has no children, and her husband has been long dead. Mother Hentjen is only called "Mother" Hentjen because she simply hasn't refused the name.

Mother Hentjen is a guarded, but completely defenseless character. Much like the walnuts she loves to crack open, she is a shell of a human being. She, of course, is capable of emotions and thoughts, but she is so afraid of these thoughts that, at the moment of thinking them, she freezes up and mewls like an animal. There is something in here that completely fears the terror of life and the terror of her own life, an awareness that she has absolutely no control over anything and merely awaiting the next page turn, bringing in another horrifying event. And this terror allows another person, any person, to enter her life and completely alter it into his image.

Sleepwalking again

"The Realist" is the masterpiece of "The Sleepwalkers" and I'm shocked, even now, that he wrote it for his debut. It has inalterably changed my life. It is earth-shattering stuff. From the moment Gödicke arises from the earth to Hanna Wendling's late-morning haze to the genuinely earth-rumbling and damning essays titled "The Disintegration of Values", you find Broch has started a movement as final, as total, as destructive as the Twilight of the Idols.

Yet, let us discuss "The Realist" later.

I stopped reading "The Realist" at THAT chapter, the third-to-last chapter, I believe. The book entirely exhausted me. I was way too depressed by it, and I was, frankly, daunted by it. I also faintly augured that I didn't get the novel either. The last ten chapters or so were losing me and I literally had no idea where it was going; perhaps I feared the book would end as pathetically as "The Romantic" and "The Anarchist" would.

I set it aside. I moved on to Livy, Arendt, books on modern China and the current state of international relations. I just didn't care much for fiction anymore. It was a weird phase. Perhaps I was exhausted by the fiction writer's attempt to pull on the audience's heartstrings, to make them feel. Perhaps I felt this impulse was very silly as "Orpheus" was getting into groove and I was accepting what it would be. Or, I felt I had to soak in my solitude for a while and allow "Orpheus" its natural growth apart from other fiction. Who knows?

On the heartstrings thing: oh how wrong I could be.

The audacity and indifference of the United States' forty-seventh president's administration led me to sleepwalk again.

At this point, I had six years to think a lot about "The Sleepwalkers" and to love it more than I did reading it. I realized I thought in terms of "The Sleepwalkers" constantly. A book I never finished completely recontextualized fiction for me. I had read Voltaire and wrote "That Time ...", so I understood just how much of a heavyhanded presence the author themself can put on the prose.

I also understood now that "The Sleepwalkers" was written out of despair. Broch did not write a cute book to be cute in front of an audience. He was staring at the abyss, and saw it could go deeper still. In many ways he foresaw the rise of the Third Reich. As age and "Orpheus" developed, I found myself plumbing through Broch's abyss, becoming as numb as his narrator is when he begins "The Romantic", threads through "The Anarchist" and crashes out entirely at "The Realist".

This is "The Sleepwalkers": the complete loss of control in every respect, of one's destiny, one's emotions, even of one's sense of self. The frightening part is, the shattering of Gass's glass, the complete destruction of the window through which we see, happened a long time before the story even begins. We did not hear it. We did not see it. But we are forced to deal with the consequences of it. We are trapped in the car and the car is hurtling one hundred miles per hour into the wall; the situation is so absurd that we are mouthing to ourself that this cannot be real until we are flattened.

By every measure this is the most fucked-up book I've ever read. Second comings do happen. Broch kommt.

Returning to "The Romantic", it's only in hindsight that I realized Broch also does not care about Joachim as much as I did. He really could not give a shit about this out-of-touch, disaffected Junker. He did not give a shit about the reasoning behind Joachim's thoughts, his desires or his concerns about life. Joachim, to him, is an object, a sleepwalker, or, in modern parlanace, a mouth-breather.

But it's just as important that Broch examine this sleepwalker, for Broch desires to understand the very idea of sleepwalking, as in, he longs to understand our social structures, the destiny of society and just how it is history, idiotic, cruel, senseless history, can happen.

One can read, too, in Broch's indifference his fear that this character he is examining will meet a destructive fate. And, as will be revealed in "The Realist", he fears too his character's fate is his own.

I don't know if you're following me or not. I'm telling you right now, I've never encountered a novel remotely like this. So if this is all strange to you, please, I'm with you on this journey as well.

And so, Broch depicts Joachim sleepwalking. He is not in control of any part of his life: his military profession, his social circumstances, his romances. We're watching him bumble from one part of his life to another. Even his friend Bertrand begins to get annoyed by how clumsy Joachim is.

Then Joachim's brother, Helmuth, dies. The story begins to fall apart. But no one realizes this yet.

The cornerstone of "The Romantic" is Herr von Pasenow, who begins the story. If Joachim is stupid and stuck in a specific track, then his father is more stuck. The death of his other son flings him off this track, of living to a long, venerable age, watching his sons succeed and go through the same track as he did, and he is thrown onto the mud, with nowhere left to go and nothing to believe in anymore. Herr von Pasenow literally shuts off. The order of his estate no longer gives him pleasure, his visits to church give him no security, and he can't even enjoy getting the mail anymore.

To Joachim, his father has become a sleepwalker, someone who has lost all intelligence, all control, all semblance of life. But, to us, Joachim is a sleepwalker. If we are unaware of this relationship, we too are sleepwalkers. This is the moment in the second read when I began becoming very, very disturbed by this implication.

Joachim is now in a trap. With Helmuth's death, he is suddenly the only child of his parents and the ultimate inheritor of the estate; with this, he must become married, have children, et cetera. Perhaps Joachim senses he is sleepwalking into a dream; and yet, is the dream truly starting, or was his life, up to this point, the actual dream?

And so Joachim loses Ruzena. Joachim loses, too, his friend Bertrand. He marries Elizabeth. He is almost entirely indifferent to these events. But his indifference, in reality, frustrates and horrifies us, the audience. This doesn't even arise to the level of schadenfreude. Joachim's complete indifference to taking control of his own life contrasts with the other characters' autonomy in the narrative; we soon find none of the characters have autonomy, not even the free-thinking, mercantilist Bertrand.

By the way, to circle back to a thing earlier: Bertrand and Elizabeth's dialogue is still bad. I'm not sure if Broch intended it to be this way: as in, Bertrand and Elizabeth have temporarily escaped the dream and are able now to talk in a more candid way, or Bertrand and Elizabeth, caught in the dream's snares, are unable to hold a human, heart-to-heart conversation with one another. And yet, the dialogue is still aesthetically very bad.

The aforementioned dialogue is also one of the highlights of a theme in "The Sleepwalkers": the inherent artificiality of storytelling and the uselessness of writing. The canned dialogue between the two is at once a rebuke of the dramatic heart-to-hearts in other novels, but also commentary that no two human beings can truly communicate to the other. And this commentary, when stepping back from the narrative, applies to the whole novel: I, Hermann Broch, am trying to tell you something through this novel, and yet my own writing is unable to truly express to you all of the rage and sadness of my heart. Yes, the novel is that despairing of anything involving meaning. This is the real, hidden reason why "The Romantic" is so coldly, so dispassionately written: Broch is attempting to parody the romantic novel here, but he finds the very idea of a novel with characters whom the audience invests in as hollow, as shallow, as completely devoid of reason and purpose. There are no emotions to share. There are no drama to invest in. These are all pointless frivolities we entertain ourselves with until we fucking die. Thus the bit of shattered glass at the end of "The Romantic", where Broch lets on that Joachim's story is no story, it is only a character sketch of him. I was right, the ending is a huge middle finger to the audience, but a middle finger designed to blow up the audience's beliefs.

Pardon my French there. Anyway, on to "The Anarchist".

The rage and despair simmering beneath "The Romantic" boils and explodes in "The Anarchist". Because Joachim is wealthy, the change he undergoes does not bother him. Because he is well-connected, he is never in any real danger. But Esch has no such resorts, and neither do any of the characters in "The Anarchist". And, as Broch so convincingly shows, when a man has nowhere left to go, he quickly devolves into a dog. "The Anarchist" is one long narrative of dogs violently tearing at one another.

But I must say something here: "The Anarchist" is actually quite funny. And I don't know if Broch intended it to be that way.

The first genuine laugh-out loud moment I had takes place in a theatre. Esch, Korn and Erna are watching the acts. Erna, in a devious manner, flashes her checkbook so Esch can see how much money she has (and that he can own contingent on his marrying her). Esch, however, is more involved with the performances and Erna becomes frustrated with him.

I thought, What is this, a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" skit?

There are several other incidents in "The Sleepwalkers" like this, notably in scenes where Esch and Hentjen travel to Saint-Goar. In comparison to the stitled dialogue of "The Romantic", the dialogue in "The Anarchist" is lively and full of misunderstandings.

I can't wrap my head around it. The humor seems intentional. Broch may be saying, The things happening are funny because they are sad, or, The things happening are sad because they are funny. And this, too, is very disturbing.

"The Anarchist" is the logical extension of "The Romantic". "The Romantic" hides the messy details of life behind the facade of privilege and luxury. "The Anarchist" spills out these miseries like a wound.

Esch is dismissed by the chief bookkeeper of his firm, Nentwig. He finds another job in Mannheim, still holding grudges against Nentwig along the way. He finds rooming with Erna and Baltasar Korn, who is eager to see his sister married so he can profit off his brother-in-law. A chance encounter with a theatre manager sets him on a weird, neurotic journey in which he himself tries to set up his own performances and marries Frau Hentjen.

If the plot of "The Romantic" is nice and buttoned-up, focusing solely on the question of Joachim's marriage, then "The Anarchist" is messy. But both plots are pointless. If you thought Joachim was a pointless protagonist, Esch is even more pointless, more random, more confused, and it's abundantly clear that nothing he does matters at the end; even his marriage to Hentjen is dismissed with a shrug by Broch, for Mother Hentjen is an object, someone entirely incapable of expressing herself or defending herself, and so it does not matter if one is in love with her or not, if one is married to her or not. But the crucial distinction between Esch and Joachim is that Esch is actually taking action in his life, and failing miserably, horribly, and at every turn.

And this is made very clear by the destructive acts directed by Esch and directed to Esch. The woman whom Esch may be in love with, in the shallowest terms possible, mates frequently with Korn, just like an animal. Esch mocks Lohberg's vegetarianism and virginity frequently, and tries to "ruin" him by pairing him with Erna. After Lohberg's engagement with Erna, he himself then has sex with Erna, because what does it matter, right? And this precedes his rape of Mother Hentjen and then subsequent proposal to her, moving right onward to beating her because it is impossible for her to penetrate through his impregnable loneliness. And then, of course, his vow to kill Bertrand, and then - a true coward through and through - his decision to shrug it off. Because nothing, ultimately, matters.

And so we arrive at "The Realist".

Actually, I will say this: the section where Broch turns his pen to Alfons, some rando character, and Ilona, is probably the worst section of "The Anarchist". I don't think it forwards the themes of the book and it just seems laughably written. Anyway, had to get that off my chest.

The Realist

Hermann Broch was born in 1886. His family was prosperous; he attended college, in the hopes he would someday lead his father's textile factory in Teesdorf. In 1909 he will marry, and in 1923 he will divorce. In 1927 he will sell the factory and study mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna. Even then, he felt despair over philosophy, and turned to literature to put his thoughts on the spirit of the age into words, into form. Development began in 1928 and ended in 1932.

I say all of this, to then follow up with the following sentence: the Willa and Edwin Muir-translated "The Realist" contains some of the most haunting, most beautiful passages I have ever read in my life. "The Sleepwalkers" is his debut. He may have, perhaps, written some essays prior to this. But it is so hard for me to believe, even today, that someone so new to the world of literature could write such powerful prose, prose largely absent from "The Romantic" and "The Anarchist". And I say this under the context that I've poo-poo'ed several of Broch's passages above.

Take this introduction of Gödicke, bricklayer of the Landwehr, in Chapter IV:

That he went on living was inexplicable, and the Surgeon-Major's opinion that his body had nourished itself on all the bruised blood under the skin was scarcely worth calling an opinion, let alone a theory. The lower part of his body in especial was terribly injured. He was laid in a cold pack, but whether that alleviated his sufferings at all could not be determined. But it was possible that he had ceased to suffer so much, for the whimpering gradually died away. Until a few days later it broke out again more strongly: it was now - or one may imagine that it was - as if Ludwig Gödicke were recovering his soul only in single fragments, and as if each fragment came to him on a wave of agony. It may be that that was so, even though it cannot be proved; it may be that the anguish of a soul that has been torn and pulverized into atoms and must join itself together again is greater than any other anguish, keener than the anguish of a brain that quivers under renewed spasms of cramp, keener than all the bodily suffering that accompanies the process.

When I first read this, holding the page between my fingers, I trembled. This is vision. This is creativity. Listen, here's the truth: artists like to think we talk about big, important issues and we're smart, important people who have authority on these issues. But few of us have balls. Broch's sheer audacity in, first, bluntly describing the pain and suffering of this poor, poor victim of shelling, and, second, openly telling you he knows nothing about life but speculates it is a kind of reconstruction, a realignment of the soul, is an extremely rare trait in literature. Broch, the artist, here doesn't care about reality or the truth anymore - indeed, he spent "The Romantic" and "The Anarchist" blowing up any concept of a shared reality and truth - he is only interested in how things are, and what had happened was that Gödicke pulled whatever you can call his self - his ego, his conscience, his soul, I don't give a fuck - back into his body, so he may live again.

Why do we make bones about Homer being blind? It's because Homer, for us, represents the primordial desire to observe and to tell. This is what Broch has transformed into: the pure narrator, the pure observer, the pure teller, even if the passivity of such a role threatens to kill him.

Now, take the introduction of Hanna Wendling, in Chapter VIII:

Hanna Wendling was still awake. She did not open her eyes, however, for there was still a chance that she might catch her vanishing dream. But it glided slowly away, and finally nothing remained but the emotion in which it had been immersed. As the emotion too drained away, Hanna voluntarily abandoned it just an instant before it completely vanished and glanced across at the window. Through the slats of the venetian blinds oozed a milky light; it must still be early, or else the sky was overcast. The striped light was like a continuation of her dream, perhaps because no sound entered with it, and Hanna decided that it must be very early after all.

What a beautiful sequence of sense and inference, as Gass might put it. There is even much of the romantic here, in how Hanna almost physically chases her dream. But Broch's insistence that the dream is real signals to the reader a transition in the aesthetic of "The Sleepwalkers": here, the psychological, the unreal, become now very real, very present and very talked-about, demons even, because we human beings treat them as if they were real. This becomes startlingly apparent with the introduction of Jaretzki, for whom the loss of his arm is an analogy to the loss of his life, more importantly, the possibility of living a good, decent, meaningful life. The glass is shattered. We now see through, and all we see is black behind.

The ostensible focus of "The Realist" is Wilhelm Huguenau, but Huguenau, as we understand now, has very little impact on the story. The real focus of the novel is the First World War, specifically the end of it. But therein lies Broch's little twist: though the war is the greater element of the narrative, Huguenau is important because he is a direct product of the war. Yes, when Huguenau, the conscript, heard the shelling in the distance, and on his first night of duty felt the quiver of his knees, such that he immediately fled, now a deserter, the shaking of his knees presaged the buckling and collapse of all dignity and morality in their society. Now no one has to stay on script. Now no one has to pretend. There is no right and wrong, not when men are being blasted into bits, not when Paulsen the chemist is stealing people's land, and their wives. Now we know who we truly are. Let us commence the slaughter.

And even this honesty in massacre is not real.

"The Realist", to an extent, is building up to that third-to-last chapter, that same chapter that made me so angry and excited I couldn't sleep that very night. I say "to an extent" because "The Realist" is written the same as any other book in "The Sleepwalkers": it is indifferent and even careless in arriving to its end. What's more important is to observe, to see, and to analyze. And, to feel hopelessness.

But I won't talk about the end of "The Realist" and therefore "The Sleepwalkers". That's something you, the reader, should find out. And, yes, if you thought you understood "The Sleepwalkers", the fates of Pasenow, Esch, and Huguenau up to this point, Broch, the master artist he is, will completely shake your understanding of them. You must read it, and the beautiful, relentless ending of the novel which very much decisively gives no reprieve to any of its characters nor to you, the reader.

I will instead turn to the essays titled "The Disintegration of Values". If we're ignoring the structure and intent of the novel, the novel's most radical innovation technically lies in these essays. They're written by another character within the novel, a philosopher (or, a student of philosophy) observing an issue of the heart between a wedded Jewish man and a Salvation Army girl, whose only identification in the text is with "I", such that the reader is inclined to interpret him as a stand-in for the writer, Broch.

The first time I read these essays, I was radically altered. They consist of the most passionate prose in the novel, wherein Broch attempts to understand the madness of his age.

The first essay:

Is this distorted life of ours still real? is this cancerous reality still alive? the melodramatic gesture of our mass movement towards death ends in a shrug of the shoulders, - men die and do not know why; without a hold on reality they fall into nothingness; yet they are surrounded and slain by a reality that is their own, since they comprehend its causality.

Never mind postmodernism for a moment. Never mind our current shrug of a culture, which mashes up different mediums by a whim. Many writers will introduce a fourth wall-breaking essayist (whose voice is closer to the author's, incidentally) as a different perspective of the text, purportedly to give the ideas and themes of the text another twist; some do it just to be cute. Broch's use of these essays is not aesthetic alone; he is not trying to emulate the qualities of Jame Joyce's "Ulysses", as in, he does not write for the wind (though Broch, from what I understand, was very well-acquainted with Joyce and his work). The essays here are a howl; if you were unaffected by the stories preceding the essays, numb and unknowing as the characters in them, then Broch seeks to wake you up.

In these essays Broch's philosopher cites Hegel and Kant; he discusses theology; he inspects logic, and the infinite meaninglessness of a purely secular world. When I first read the book, I found his description of the Schism fascinating.

And yet, this is all prose too. These words are all meaningless. Broch's attempt to put form onto formlessness itself, the utter detachment of meaning and morality in men, is futile. He finds that even he himself cannot wake up, and observes himself as a character within his own book, imprisoned by his words and the biases that inspire them.

These are the true ideas of postmodernism, that writing itself cannot contain absolute truth because the very act of writing contains intent and therefore distortion. We are well-aware our understanding of the Peloponnesian War is determined by Thucydides, who had a particular stake in it. We, nowadays, act quite cute in our postmodernist milieu, for we believe there is, after all, a firma terra to truthfulness and virtue. But Broch's "Disintegration of Values" say the very opposite: there is no ground, there is only more abyss as you stare further.

And so, Broch's philosopher contemplates on his interactions with Nuchem (the Jewish man), Marie (the Salvation Army girl), and himself, in one of the passages that has burned into my memory:

I said to Nuchem:

"You are a suspicious people, an angry people; you are jealous even of God and are constantly pulling Him up even in His own book."

He answered:

"The law is indecipherable. God is not until every jot and tittle of the law has been deciphered."

I said to Marie:

"You are a brave but a thoughtless people! You believe that you need only be good and strike up music in order to draw God near."

She answered:

"Joy in God is God, His grace is inexhaustible."

I said to myself:

"You are a fool, you are a Platonist, you believe that in comprehending the world you can shape it and raise yourself in freedom to Godhood. Can you not see that you are bleeding yourself to death?"

I answered myself:

"Yes, I am bleeding to death."

Broch saw the bottom of the abyss, expecting to find nothing; he instead returned with Hopelessness and Despair.

This is what I mean when I say you, dear reader, are also a character in the novel, for, through the essays, Broch's philosopher attempts to understand the collapse of society and of morality through the lens of Nietzche, Protestantism, Hegel and the war, and finds himself wordlessly and uselessly sinking back onto his desk without gaining any ground as to the why of human suffering, thereby proving he cannot communicate anything to you and thus demonstrating his own total solitude and isolation from his fellow man, a prison we all live in.

So, why read this book? Better: why write this book, if none of it is real?

And that's where I, the American, have a quibble. Yes, I am an American, with an ever-optimistic belief in man's destiny and trust in man's virtues, as America is the same nation that saved Europe twice in two wars and polices the world with a just hand.

I think now America is reeling from a despair that resembles that of fin de siècle Austria. So much of what Broch says is true that it's a shock America could have ignored it, but, then again, Americans have ignored almost of the lessons post-war Europe painfully and torturously had to learn.

And yet I still feel optimistic, and I reveal my quibble: that Broch wrote at all, means there was something to share. It doesn't mean something is shared, it doesn't mean what can be shared is by Broch's intent, and it doesn't mean that Broch and the reader share the same understanding as to what is shared. But something is shared. And that means Broch is not lonely.

I understand Broch despaired of the novel being a completely inadequate vehicle of meaning, which despair pervades his next opus, "The Death of Virgil". I'm not acquainted with his arguments so I can't conclude on the truth of the overall idea, but, as trivial as Pasenow, Esch, and Huguenau's existences are, and as trivial as our existences are, what we perceive in the novel is not the truthiness of the ideas in the novel but that the novel is, that Broch so ordered and expressed his ideas in such and such a way, such that that same order can influence how we perceive life. That the novel is, seems trivial and small and insignificant, but that the novel is is irreducible and indestructible. For someone who needed assurances of a good and just world, perhaps this invincible atom of a fact suffices for Broch.

Broch may think "The Sleepwalkers", then, in his rational mind is all dream, or a pure, false invention of his diseased mind, and yet it is, and the is-ness of a novel, its proceeding and its restructuring of reality (and this reality too we perceive to share may be false), is really all the meaning a novel can really have. And by merely questioning, What is decency? What is understanding? What is meaning? Broch recreates, by their shadow, decency, understanding, and meaning, for in describing what a "bird" is I am indeed creating a definition of a bird, even if it is not conclusive. And that is what "The Sleepwalkers" is: by showing you the worst of humanity, the darkest of humanity, the dregs of humanity really not worth showing, the novel, at the very end, gives you a glimpse of what humanity can possibly be.

It is a novel real and unreal. It is a novel true and false. It is a novel bold and unassuming. It is a novel of light and darkness. "The Sleepwalkers" is a contradictory novel, because its writer so doggedly followed the extreme ends of an argument that he emerged at the morning of the other side. "The Sleepwalkers" is a beautiful novel, because Broch wrote it honestly; he wrote it so honestly, that his honesty nearly destroyed him. To write, is all. And, so long as I live, he shall never be destroyed; as many times as I need to, I shall always repair my worn-down copy of "The Sleepwalkers". (OK, maybe that's a promise I shouldn't bother keeping, but you know what I mean.)

Gass said, of his fifty influences, "The Sleepwalkers" may be the most unread. How can we let this be? How can we let excellence rust on the ground? We must correct the record, if we believe ourselves just; so, get to reading it, I say no more, and be haunted by its rhythms.