The Man Without Qualities (1921-1942)
Robert Musil (Vintage, 1995)

2 vols; 1806 pp. First reading.
Posted 15 July 2006.


On short lists of the great works of twentieth-century literature, certain titles recur: Joyce's Ulysses in English literature, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in French. On more than one occasion, I had heard Robert Musil's enormous The Man Without Qualities mentioned as the German counterpart to those monumental works, though, curiously, I knew nothing else about it, and had never seen it on anyone's shelf. If it was in the race for literary greatness, it seemed to be the dark horse. Then, some time later, I stumbled across a statement of Thomas Mann to the effect that Musil's magnum opus was "without doubt the greatest writing, ranking with the finest our epoch has to offer". Given my admiration for Mann's own writing, I resolved at that point to read it.

Set in Austria in 1913-14, just prior to the First World War, the novel follows the activities of the oddly named Parallel Campaign, a loose committee of diplomats, civil servants, intellectuals, and artists charged with organizing a celebration to honour the seventieth Jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. Musil's decision to set the events of the novel on the cusp of the Great War, yet to make only the most indirect allusions to the coming conflict, a conflict which was to so thoroughly undo all their preparations, casts a shadow of absurdity and futility over the entire proceedings. At the center of the story is Ulrich, the eponymous 'man without qualities', a soldier turned engineer turned mathematician who serves as a focal point for the novel. Yet to speak of a focus is potentially to obscure the novel's shape, for, like much other modernist fiction, the novel's structure is highly experimental, in the precise sense of having very little structure at all. The matter of the Parallel Campaign sets the stage, but beyond that the novel has no real narrative thread, consisting instead of a long series of conversations, meetings, and events, which never accumulate momentum in any one direction. This open architecture, with which an impatient reader may occasionally express exasperation, was intentional, and can I think be understood as contributing to the overall argument of the novel.

One way in which The Man Without Qualities surely merits a place among the great works of literature is the sheer virtuosic brilliance of the prose. Musil's style is precise without being concise -- long, elaborate sentences are tailored to express complex thoughts with clarity, and much of the imagery of the novel is strikingly original. He is clearly a great master of his craft. This does not mean, however, that the novel is easy going for the reader -- quite the contrary. The novel's subject matter is relentlessly intellectual and psychologically complex.

Musil's purpose in writing was a moral one. The book is a kind of extended meditation on modernity, which Musil considers to be a culture that has lost its bearings and no longer knows how to carry on. It teems with a great swirling mass of ideas, concerned with


as Musil puts it at one point. And as this quote hints, Musil's central concern is not these ideas in the abstract, but rather their effects on the inner life of people.

Central to the book's argument as I understand it is Musil's contention that modernity prevents an individual from maturing into an integrated, steady, grounded whole. Instead, it produces the 'man without qualities', a person whose inner life is such that they fail to really acquire stable convictions or a robust stance toward life. We modern people encounter the world without a comprehensive framework for understanding it; we live in a world of competing and clashing points of view; we are skeptical of claims to truth; we are suspicious of the moral law; we 'see through things'.


It is easier to tear down than to defend, and we take the easy way. Why, we ask, should we be bound by external constraints, or humble ourselves before a mystery, or allow ourselves to be subject to something greater than ourselves? Freedom, we are told, means being unencumbered by tradition or obedience. Yet this habit of placing everything under our feet has a price:


This capacity to see two -- or more -- sides to everything does more than simply make one ambivalent, however. Pursued a little further, it exercises its power to render one's relationship to one's own experience tentative, reflective, and self-conscious; we have an incapacity for immediate experience.


Without a way to comprehend and assimilate our experience, we are unintegrated, psychologically piece-meal. If we keep our ideas and experiences at arm's length, warily, we find that we lack purpose. We are not in tune with the world, not at home. As Ulrich describes himself,


Part of the reason for this state of affairs, Musil remarks more than once, is the sheer amount of information to which we are exposed, voices clamoring without being coherent:


We are fractured, too, as everyone knows, because so many of the enduring certainties on which our civilization is founded have been brought into question by modernity. The great transvaluation of all values heralded by Nietzsche, the secular experiment in which all of life is to be reinterpreted without reference to God, has broken the old consensus and let loose a bewildering chatter of opposing views. In such a context, it is not easy for a person to take up a definite position before the world, not easy for them to interpret their experiences without doubt, hesitation, and second-guessing, not easy to form convictions and be resolute. This is the predicament that occupies Musil's attention, and he explores it from many angles.

One major force behind this destabilization of culture has been science, because it claims to be a new, comprehensive way of accounting for the world without reference to most of our traditional ideas. Musil is well aware of this, and though he does not reject science, he is critical of some of its cultural effects. He admires scientific precision of thought, but, to invoke a key phrase that appears more than once in the novel, what he really wants is "precision and soul". He makes some penetrating remarks about the dehumanizing habits of mind that a purely scientific perspective cultivates. It is odd, after all, that scientific explanations, which claim to be thorough accounts of the matter at hand, so often fail to do justice to their object:


This habit of reinterpreting our experiences in radically different terms provokes in reflective people a sundering within the inner life between knowledge and experience. When we hear that we are not free, or that our emotional life consists merely in hormonal secretions in response to stimuli, or any number of other counter-intuitive accounts of our most immediate and powerful experience, the natural response is to quarantine those experiences, to distrust them, to transcend them, to create a space within ourselves into which they do not penetrate. Yet if our experiences are not trusted to be truthful in that private center of ourselves, then nothing occupies that space, and we become, quite naturally, men without qualities.

Musil's exploration of this modern pathology in its many manifestations is undoubtedly a great achievement. Whether his subject warranted a sprawling tome of this enormous size might be a matter of occasional doubt to the fatigued reader. He has a seemingly insatiable taste for labyrinthine psychological subtleties, and at times only the careful control of his prose keeps it from degenerating into a quagmire. In my view, his probing and analysis are thought-provoking, and the dedication with which he has pursued the modern predicament and brought it before our eyes deserves our thanks. But what are we to do? Is there a way out? To this question, Musil seems not to have an answer. The novel, sad to say, and despite its length, is unfinished, as Musil died before it could be completed. What remains is a magnificent torso, a sprawling, ambitious, exhausting study in the psychology of modernity. Where do we go from here?

**

[The modern landscape]
It was an intelligent country, it housed cultivated people who, like cultivated people all over the globe, ran around in an unsettled state of mind amid a tremendous whirl of noise, speed, innovation, conflict, and whatever goes to make up the optical-acoustical landscape of our lives; like everybody else, they read and heard every day dozens of news items that made their hair stand on end, and were willing to work themselves up over them, even to intervene, but they never got around to it because a few minutes afterward the stimulus had already been displaced in their minds by more recent ones... There was the special problem for persons of cultivated sensibilities: they no longer had the gift of faith or credit, nor had they learned to fake it. They no longer knew what their smiles, their sighs, their ideas, were for. What exactly was the point of their thoughts, their smiles? Their opinions were haphazard, their inclinations an old story, the scheme of things seemed to be hanging in midair, one ran into it as into a net, and there was nothing to do or leave undone with all one's heart, because there was no unifying principle. And so the cultivated person was someone who felt steadily mounting up a debt that he would never be able to pay off, felt bankruptcy inexorably approaching; and either inveighed against the times in which he was condemned to live, even though he enjoyed living in them like anyone else, or else hurled himself with the courage of those who have nothing to lose at every idea that promised a change. (575-6)

[On advertising]
So the captain of industry, disinclined to forego greatness, which serves him as a compass, must resort to the democratic dodge of replacing the immeasurable influence of greatness by the measurable greatness of influence. So now whatever counts as great is great; but this means that eventually whatever is most loudly hawked as great is also great, and not all of us have the knack of swallowing this innermost truth of our times without gagging a little.

[A fine piece of writing]
It sometimes happened, in the midst of a social gathering in her transformed apartment, that she felt as though she were awakening in some dreamland. She would be standing there, surrounded by space and people, the light of the chandelier flowing over her hair and on down her shoulders and hips so that she seemed to feel its bright flood, and she was all statue, like some figure in a fountain, at the epicenter of the world, drenched in sublime spiritual grace. She saw it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to bring about everything that she had always held to be most important and supremely great, and she no longer cared particularly that she had no very clear idea what this might be. The whole apartment, the presence of people in it, the whole evening, enveloped her like a dress lined in yellow silk; she felt it on her skin, though she did not see it.

---

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