May 17, 2008
Musil's World without Qualities
Musil's Man without Qualities is a book almost impossible to review. The difficulty is not due only to the book's length and blurred boundaries (it was never finished by the author himself and various existing editions incorporate more or less of the material that was left by the author at various degrees of completion). The difficulties are even more substantial than the impossibility to provide an adequate summary. It is not even easy to decide what genre this work, though ostensibly a novel, quite belongs to. And even allowing that it is in fact a novel, that it is telling a story, one will find it exceedingly difficult to determine quite what the story is. It would not be far-fetched to claim that this is perhaps rather a protracted philosophical essay in the guise of a narrative, say, a fictionalized version of Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences. But it is also a political novel, at least in sense of suggesting some of the political context of modern man's predicament. In the narrative, the ‘man without qualities’ does refer to an actual person, Ulrich, as much of a main character as the novel ever gets. But at the same time, the whole world of the novel is strangely ‘without qualities’, without firm point and characteristic. And this is also Musil's main subject matter, the strange sense of doomed pointlessness which pervades Central Europe during his lifetime. One of the worst lifetimes, too, a human being could have ever been awarded.
Austrian-born, Czech-educated Robert Musil (1880-1942) is nowadays generally acknowledged, alongside Marcel Proust or James Joyce, as one of the luminaries of modernist fiction of the early twentieth century, although still generally less known than the others. His lucid but very intellectual style does not make him easy reading, but an undeterred reader is certain to profit.
The stage is Vienna, k.k. capital of that peculiarly heterogeneous and obsolete entity, the Habsburg Austrian-Hungarian Empire (‘k.k.’ being the shorthand for kaiserlich und königlich, or Imperial and Royal, the notorious abbreviation for anything officially Austrian, which provided Musil's novel with the empire's irreverent nickname ‘Kakanien’). The time is the turn of the years 1913-14, while the longest serving emperor in its history, Franz Joseph, is approaching the 70th anniversary of his rule, due in 1918. This is obviously an occasion which calls for a major celebration, a symbolic milestone in the history of the k.k. nations. But world has changed and it seems increasingly difficult to identify precisely what values, which ideals should be singled out for manifestation of the highest aspirations of humanity at the occasion of this unprecedented moment. It is never entirely possible to forget about the geopolitical realities of the competition with Germany and keeping in rein the revolting nationalities within the empire. Yet, for the moment in any case, nations, commoners, churches, nobles, all stand united at the feet of the throne eager, so they claim, to realize the eternal hopes of humanity, to carry out in the Austrian Year 1918 a great project enacting mighty and universal ideas. But what exactly are those eternal hopes, what ideas are worthy enough to be made the ultimate goal of striving of the Collateral Campaign, the semi-official VIP gathering intent, under the leadership of a high-ranking courtier, the old count Leinsdorf, on channelling the spontaneous energies and imparting desirable and generally beneficial direction to the planned Austrian Year 1918? The Campaign, its committees and representatives shuffle along with much self-importance and idealist enthusiasm and with even more empty rhetoric and opportunism and vanity, but the atmosphere becomes increasingly one of undiluted Kafkaesque aimlessness and absurdity (Musil admired Kafka's prose and sought his acquaintance in Prague). The Habsburg stage setting may seem provincial, but Musil's canvas is a supersize one with no lesser ambition than to portray the modern human condition, paradigmatically present in the closing days of the Central European monarchy.
Ulrich von…, in his early thirties, abandons his promising scientific career as mathematician amid deep misgivings of its meaning and of his own place in the world which may well have no real use for his qualities (the newspaper front-page description of a racing horse as ‘genius’ being the ultimate trigger of his decision). Well connected, however, he is promptly recommended as personal secretary to the count Leinsdorf, the head of the Collateral Campaign’s organizing committee, which devolves into an opportune celebrity social occasion around the salon of Ulrich's relative, nicknamed by him in Greek like several other female characters, Diotima, in allusion to Plato’s Symposion. Other characters quickly crowd the scene and it is impossible to even roughly account for the many intertwining lines along which the complex narrative develops (among Musil's literary inheritance there is an extensive hand-drawn map of the architecture of characters and their relations for just the first part of the book). Grand financier and polymath Paul Arnheim, Ulrich's brilliant and pompous intellectual adversary; self-destructively Nietzschean Clarissa, one of the steady trickle of Ulrich's problematic relationships; small and corpulent general Stumm, who decides to bring some military discipline into the disorderly vagueness of Collateral Campaign's proceedings by drafting a list of civil spirituality, a ‘cadastral survey of modern culture’; these are only a few of the many who remain in memory. Another symbolically parallel line concerns the states of mind of a psychotic mass murderer Moosbrugger, sources of the self, freedom of will, and limits of law as model for self-understanding of the society after the birth of psychoanalysis (another Musil’s field beside his studies of mathematics and philosophy).
But the novel's point is not its story and it is at once characteristic and almost inevitable that it should be as open-ended as its author finally unwillingly left it. The impossibility of arriving at any kind of conclusion is inherent in the setting of the problem, just like it is paradigmatically embedded in the modern condition which is the book's theme. What must and will be the effects, for example, of really making cars, airplanes, electricity, neurology, psychoanalysis, molecular science, astronomy, theory of relativity, division of labour and expert specialization, part of self-understanding of man and his society? Musil raised these questions (by confronting a shocked Thomas Aquinas with a whizzing metropolitan tramcar, among others) but also, it seems, searched for modes in which these questions can be spoken of. This probably accounts for the peculiar style, the unsettlingly unstable modes of the third-person narration, (observing the ironic observer Ulrich) wavering between cynical skepticism, romanticism played with and dismissed, grotesque theatrical stylization, poetic impressionism, and highly abstract meditations.
Musil wrote the book through the 1930s and died in 1942 in Swiss exile (fleeing the Nazis with his Jewish wife) while trying to somehow complete it. He deliberately chose a perspective of writing from the hindsight of a Europe which had already lived the nightmare of the First World War and was heading for the Second, about a Europe which was still more or less innocently heading towards it. This is a powerful way of telling a story, for without adding a word it provides the reader with foreknowledge of the threateningly dark horizon of all events and lives portrayed in the novel, the horizon which the reader and the author see already approaching at scary speed while the characters on the novel's stage remain blissfully unaware of it and continue fruitlessly planning celebrations of anniversaries which will never arrive.
Posted by david at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)
Into our Hearts of Darkness
Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, a less well-known piece than his notorious Heart of Darkness (to become the Francis Coppola film as Apocalypse Now), but with sufficient renown still to have merited a Japanese translation, poses as fiction with elements of black humour combined with a spy story and a political thriller of sorts. But the looks may deceive, and seen in the context of the author's other works, the portrayal of paradoxically tragic consequences of a complex interplay of hidden human motivations, The Secret Agent may well be read as another profound inquiry into the darkness of our hearts. And in this respect it matters little that the novel is set in the dull lazy backwaters of Victorian England, rather than in the exotic wilderness of black Africa.
Serialized originally in (to modern sensibilities rather inauspiciously named) magazine "Ridgway's: a Militant Weekly for God and Country", the novel was soon out in book form in 1907. The center of the plot, however, takes its hint from an actual event of some years earlier, a mysterious failed bomb attack, by an anarchist Martial Bourdin, at the Greenwich astronomic observatory, in 1894. Obviously fascinated by the grotesque incomprehensibility of the choice of such target for a terrorist attack, Conrad set it in the middle of a stage of a dark drama of absurd causes and their absurd effects.
The story unfolds at several levels: Mr. Verloc, posing as a small nondescript shop owner in a narrow London backstreet, leads an uneventful family life beside his wife Winnie with her mentally handicapped brother Stevie and her aging mother; in his other life, however, Verloc turns out to be a long-serving secret agent of some renown, in the pay of the embassy of an unidentified continental power, entrusted with the task of infiltrating the leading circles of the anarchist movement in Britain. The ironic depiction of the motley assembly of comrades constituting the revolutionary headquarters, as well as the subtle political intrigues on the background of the police investigations into the terrorist attack, including the clash of wills and agendas between the respective top officers responsible for the inquiry, represent the other planes of the unfolding of events.
The new First Secretary of the unspecified embassy, out of vanity, self-importance, or sheer idiocy, tries his hand at scaring and blackmailing his long-serving spy, Verloc, into resolute action, thus setting in motion a train of unpredicted events whose effects reverberate through Home Office and Scotland Yard and ultimately cost lives of the principal actors. Britain is too self-complacent in its illusion of civil liberites and public order, and its authorities must be shaken into ruthless suppression of the sprouting revolutionary anarchist movement which finds a relatively safe haven here. This view is to an extent shared by the only true anarchist, the unfathomable "Professor", an expert in explosives in search of a perfect detonator, a pure terrorist devoted entirely to the destruction of the entire social order, of which the other anarchists merely write fashionable books. (Reproaching his comrades, Professor declares, in a speech that resonates with more than one aspect of our contemporary predicament: "To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half of our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in in its own temple. This is what you ought to aim at. But you revolutionises will never understand that.")
A fake terrorist attack of a great symbolic impact should serve to provoke British police and government to precisely such response. But things go grotesquely wrong for Verloc, enlisting his feeble-minded brother-in-law to carry out the bombing, and as things lose their previous appearance of normalcy, individuals overstep the boundaries of their conventionally defined paths of life and take shockingly destructive and self-destructive courses of action. The reader is left without a hero (or heroine) to look to and with little light to be made out at the end of the tunnel. Conrad's bleak world is one perceived through the optics of an intelligence and powers of observation so penetrating that they tend to leave their bearer in a disillusioned and deeply sceptical position regarding human condition in general.
Black humour mingles ominously with genuine chilling effect of revelations of motives which reflect the darkest of motions of the psyche of individuals. In the world of Conrad's explorations into our hearts of darkness, people give each other signals, disguised as information, which either intentionally or by mere impossibility of better mutual understanding, provide often fatally false clues as to the real motives and real thoughts of the actors. Short term practical decisions of an old lady caring for the well-being of the family, providential professional insights of a police commissioner, lifelong loyalty of a wife, or political deliberations of a leading statesman, all of these can be based on an entirely misled interpretation of those signals which reach us from others. Conrad's world is built around the scary but very real paradoxical possibility that we may and probably often do act, both privately and publicly, on beliefs about motives and feelings of others which can be fundamentally misconstrued and desperately wrong. It points not only to some very dark sides of human nature, but hints at a possibly even darker suggestion, namely that we very probably pass our lives in one huge lonely misunderstanding and that the others we thought we knew are potentially ominous universes of unknown motives and unpredictable decisions.
I have a deep respect and admiration for the man who became known under the name of Joseph Conrad, but I also privately and perhaps rather immodestly harbour a feeling of sympathy and a sense of a certain almost personal closeness. Conrad was a man who moved with some prowess across linguistic borders, a talent I envy, finding myself in a similar situation. A Polish emigré (his original name in fact was Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski) and something of an adventurer, he settled at last with the resolve to professionally write in a foreign language. He only first started learning English in his twenties; but by his thirties he already managed to have his first works published and, with a fairly extensive list of novels and short stories, Conrad ranks with Vladimir Nabokov as another Eastern-European to have become a full-fledged classic author of the English speaking world.
Posted by david at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)