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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 May 17, 2008 02:07 PM