SOURCE: A preface to Five Women by Robert Musil, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernest Kaiser, Delacorte Press, 1966, pp. 7-13.

Kermode is an English critic who combines modern critical methods with traditional scholarship. In his discussions of modern literature Kermode has embraced many of the concepts of structuralism and phenomenology. He characterizes all human knowledge as affected by the perceptual and emotional limitations of human consciousness. Because perceptions of life and the world change, so do human knowledge and the meaning attached to things and events. Thus, Kermode maintains, a work of art has no single fixed meaning, but a multiplicity of possible interpretations. In the following excerpt, he discusses the ambiguities of plot, character, and description in Musil's novellas, claiming that they "reflect the ambiguities of human reality. "

Three Women (Grigia, The Lady from Portugal, Tonka) was published in the middle of a great literary period and...