The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic Read online

  ROBERT MUSIL

  THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

  Translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins

  Editorial consultant Burton Pike

  With an introduction by Jonathan Lethem

  PICADOR CLASSIC

  INTRODUCTION

  The Austrian writer Robert Musil was born in the nineteenth century into an upper-class family. He was educated at a pair of military boarding schools. Trained as a mathematician and engineer, Musil had—before serving as an officer in World War One—already diverted his energies into literature. His first novel, Young Törless, published in 1908, is a slim, morbid, and unforgettable tale of adolescent sadism. After his military discharge Musil wrote stories, plays, and essays with brilliant deliberateness, establishing himself in a Weimar culture from which he held somewhat aloof; he was also a copious diarist. By 1921 he had begun work on a massive novel that would occupy him for the rest of his life, which he would never complete, and which is one of the greatest and most mysterious literary artifacts of both the twentieth century and the history of the novel. Musil was still writing it twenty-one years later, in 1942, when he died in exile in Switzerland during the height of World War Two.

  The Man Without Qualities presents itself to the reader from the first as a conundrum, from the provocative negation of the title to a prose characterized by its density and its tone of mercurial irony. The novel is distinguished by its simultaneous massiveness and instability; not only unfinished, it lacks even a clearly proposed structure, length, or conclusion. Though Musil allowed publication in two portions, in 1930 and 1933, he later expressed regret at how this had “frozen” material he might have wished to rework. Excluded from this edition are further chapters Musil withdrew, along with copious drafts, alternate scenes, and paraphrases of possible directions for the book’s continuation. For readers in English the problem of translation of Musil’s complex German prose introduces further instabilities (taking one example, the long central section titled here “Unreality Prevails” might literally be translated as “The What of It Now Happens”). Musil’s novel is the literary equivalent of what the ecological critic Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”, whose precise boundaries in space and time are impossible to measure; the question with a hyperobject is how to place ourselves in relation to it.

  Yet The Man Without Qualities is an explosively rewarding journey for its readers, and Musil one of the most unexpected “good companions” among authors. (I know too few people who’ve read the book, but among those, a number who’ve read it twice; it induces obsessions). Behind an initial chilliness, the novel reveals itself as intimate, existentially vertiginous, wildly funny, and dreamlike in the manner of Franz Kafka or Kazuo Ishiguro. At the same time, Musil’s sociologically discursive portrait of a loosely disguised Vienna in 1913 is disconcertingly prescient. When he writes about unmoored human consciousness, Musil, in his torrential evocations, seems to be conducting an inventory of what it is to be alive and human. When he indulges his preoccupation with the crisis imposed on the individual human soul under modernity, he seems to be writing about 2016, or whatever year you may happen to be reading him. In either sense you find him at your shoulder.

  The novel centers on the title character, named only “Ulrich”, whose biography loosely conforms to Musil’s: a rakish, privileged and ambivalent bachelor who, having rejected careers in the military and in engineering, begins an inchoate quest for a life worthy of the name, a search defined only by exclusion of everything that isn’t pointless, which is to say seemingly everything anyone has ever bothered to do. Yet despite his air of detachment, Ulrich rarely seems smug. Under his incapacity for settling on a sincere attitude beats a desire to locate a “next state” of being—an ethics not reliant on received legacies, shortcuts, or spare parts.

  Crucially, Ulrich isn’t a writer. He scorns his musical friend Walter, for what Ulrich sees as a retrograde, art-for-art’s-sake, aestheticism. Ulrich’s status as searcher-without-avocation slyly divides him from his industrious creator. More crucially, it defines his search outward, in the direction of other human animals. It drives his curiosity about their collective institutions, including the modern city itself, and the modern nation.

  Ulrich sees the failure of modernity partly in terms of excesses of specialization. The proliferating jargons of the technocratic classes obstruct any hope of a raw encounter with the mysteries of being. Yet the scientific part of Ulrich knows that the categorical imperative is the stuff of civilization, including the life Ulrich himself enjoys. Our capacities for generating theory, system, and narrative make a kind of dance, the tribal participation characteristic of fin-de-siècle modernity.

  Freud, Musil’s Vienna contemporary, perhaps served as a spur. Psychoanalytic theory, which presumed to rival the novelist’s domain over intimate experience, would have ratified Musil’s (already Nietzschean) view that waking human life trembled over an incommensurable ocean of unconscious drives. Freud brought into the social consciousness shocking notions of human behavior; Musil, in turn, seems to delight at including references to nymphomania, menstruation, scopophilia, and exhibitionism. Ulrich and his sister discover their dead father’s hidden stash of pornography while cleaning out his desk; Walter’s disturbed wife Clarisse, in a long flashback, suffers through ambiguous abuses strongly evocative of Freud’s “seduction theory”. Yet psychoanalysis also comes in for Musil’s contempt, its self-confirming theses being just the latest set of cultural clothes with which to dress up the naked void Musil believed lay at the heart of human experience.

  Despite his cosmic apprehensions, Ulrich becomes enmeshed in the efforts of the aristocratic-bourgeois echelons of Vienna—renamed “Kakania”—to devise an anniversary celebration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire adequate to rival the Prussian celebrations scheduled for the following year. The yearning to locate a sense of higher purpose for a lapsed and mongrel empire for which no such thing is possible is expressed in bureaucratic horseshit: pompous speeches, the filing of endless reports. These efforts are transacted in the upper-class salon hosted by Ulrich’s cousin, Frau Tuzzi, or “Diotima”, a woman whose charisma and pretensions both perplex and arouse Ulrich. This satirical milieu—named “The Parallel Campaign”—hangs under a Sword of Damocles: the horrors of the First World War would soon demolish every pretension and platitude. The Campaign itself becomes a medium in which realpolitik militarism and self-righteous nationalist paranoia advance their nightmare agendas, pushing the country toward war.

  But this morbid historical satire is only one of several kinds of fictional plot which interpenetrate the essayistic fugues of Ulrich’s solitary, flâneur-like existence. Ulrich’s triangular involvement with his childhood friend Walter and the troubled, yearning Clarisse could make the whole subject of a more conventional European novel, in the mode of the early Hermann Hesse, or like Henri-Pierre Roché’s Jules et Jim. Elsewhere, Ulrich’s flirtatious involvement with the half-Jewish daughter of a mixed family, one whose other courtier is a proto-Nazi ethnic nationalist, evokes Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, mixed with portions of Isherwood’s I Am A Camera. Then there’s the notorious proletarian sex-murderer, Moosbrugger, subject of fascination for Ulrich and Clarisse and several other characters. This provides the book with a regular does of Gothic relief; the chapters from Moosbrugger’s point of view are among the most poetic evocations of insanity I know. Ulrich’s projections onto Moosbrugger forecast Nazi horrors, but also explore the possibility that the way to a transcendent state may lie in criminality, putting us simultaneously in the territory both Fritz Lang’s M and Norman Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’. Musil is, needless to say, d
ialectical by nature.

  Still unmentioned is one of the book’s great characters: Paul Arnheim, the Jewish-Prussian industrialist-scion, famous middlebrow author and bon vivant, and Ulrich’s bête noir in the scenes at Diotima’s salon. Arnheim’s place in European society suggests a combination of the most fatuous aspects of Steve Jobs, say, married to those of Malcolm Gladwell. For several hundred pages in the middle of the second section Arnheim may seem capable of doing the impossible: stealing Ulrich’s show. Subject of Musil’s most caustic irony, Arnheim is also a model of how Musil uncannily transcends and writes through his contempt. Time and again a character seems to have been slayed upon their first appearance, only to live in subsequent chapters, to be deepened and enriched into sympathy under Musil’s scrutiny.

  Partly this is the effect of Ulrich’s radioactive thought experiments. He seems to infect other characters with his own existential condition: that of valuing most the part of ourselves that makes contact with the abyss between collective presumptions and our intuitions of something else, lurking disastrously close by: “The horrible feeling of a blind, cutoff space behind the fullness of everything, this half that is always missing even when everything is a whole, that is what eventually makes one perceive what one calls the soul.” This is a typical exhibition of Musil’s genius for spatial metaphors. Whether through architecture or cosmology, on city streets or at sea, the reader is put in a physical relationship to Musil’s ultimate subject: our immanent and incommensurable knowledge of eternity.

  Not last, not least, despite her disorienting late arrival, is Agathe, Ulrich’s “forgotten” sister, with whom he is reunited by the death of their father. Agathe is a figure of radical destabilization both to Ulrich and to the reader’s grasp of Musil’s intentions; she seems to topple the book. She’s at once feminine and manly, innocent and criminally impulsive, anti-intellectual and yet Ulrich’s match in a world that has provided him with no adequate mirror. Agathe tempts Ulrich, at last, into some version of the criminality he fantasizes as a route to transformative ethics. Yet once tempted he lingers, agonizingly, on the threshold. She arouses him, but in part to a passivity that seems to dissolve his masculinity. As a character in her own right, Agathe provides a late dose of Musil’s brutally clear-eyed feminism; she’s a version of George Gissing’s “Odd Woman”, who understands that no one knows what to do with her.

  Musil employs any number of Modernist literary techniques—stream of consciousness, interior monologue, multiple subjectivities, and non-linear time—and yet never makes an absolute formal commitment to one or another of these techniques in the manner we associate with Joyce or Woolf or Faulkner. His methods both exceed our expectations of Modernism and fall short; it contains, as if exhumed from the stomach of some mythological creature, half-digested forms: bildungsroman, historical epic and stage farce. With its profusion of unforgettable characters (I’ve neglected Soliman and Rachel, Count Leinsdorf, General Stumm, many others), and Musil’s Proustian command of slow-unfolding “mise-en-scene” (Ulrich and Diotima in her maid’s closet; the public riot against the Parallel Campaign; Clarisse’s spying on the exhibitionist in the park), The Man Without Qualities is anything but the world’s longest essay. The book is full of sex, though barely anyone has any: Arnheim wants Diotima, Clarisse wants Ulrich, and so on—everyone glances, no one leaps. Musil’s teasing goes beyond cliffhanger, into a philosophy. As Ulrich declares to Diotima, “We wildly overestimate the present.”

  The performance is like that vaudeville act in which a performer gets hundreds of plates up on broomsticks, then darts from one to the other to keep them spinning. Bob Dylan said, “The purpose of art is to stop time”; Musil’s purposes may seem to be those of someone who wants to dwell forever in the world he’s bound to destroy, as if his novel was a heroic device for preventing World War One’s arrival. Like the spinning plates, it presents a stasis which vibrates, and transfixes us with an implicit forestalled disaster. The novel seems increasingly to be reading itself, with Ulrich’s hesitations standing in for his author’s. The unpublished fragments tail into contradiction, pensiveness, and, finally, inchoate notes.

  The Man Without Qualities sails off between irreconcilable destinies. Is it an unsalvageable ruin, sidelined by history and circumstance, scarred by authorial indecisiveness? (“Volume One closes at the high point of an arch,” Musil said. “On the other side it has no support.”) Or a triumphant, unforecloseable experiment, an unprecedented escape act out of human history and the limitations of artistic form, into pure possibility? (Musil also referred to the book, not without vanity, as “a bridge into space.”) Choose as you prefer.

  JONATHAN LETHEM

  CONTENTS

  PART I: A SORT OF INTRODUCTION

  1 From which, remarkably enough, nothing develops

  2 House and home of the man without qualities

  3 Even a man without qualities has a father with qualities

  4 If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility

  5 Ulrich

  6 Leona, or a change in viewpoint

  7 In a weak moment Ulrich acquires a new mistress

  8 Kakania

  9 The first of three attempts to become a great man

  10 The second attempt. Notes toward a morality for the man without qualities

  11 The most important attempt of all

  12 The lady whose love Ulrich won after a conversation about sports and mysticism

  13 A racehorse of genius crystallizes the recognition of being a man without qualities

  14 Boyhood friends

  15 Cultural revolution

  16 A mysterious malady of the times

  17 Effect of a man without qualities on a man with qualities

  18 Moosbrugger

  19 A letter of admonition and a chance to acquire qualities. Rivalry of two accessions to the throne

  PART II: PSEUDOREALITY PREVAILS

  20 A touch of reality. In spite of the absence of qualities, Ulrich takes resolute and spirited action

  21 The real invention of the Parallel Campaign by Count Leinsdorf

  22 The Parallel Campaign, in the form of an influential lady of ineffable spiritual grace, stands ready to devour Ulrich

  23 A great man’s initial intervention

  24 Capital and culture. Diotima’s friendship with Count Leinsdorf, and the office of bringing distinguished visitors into accord with the soul

  25 Sufferings of a married soul

  26 The union of soul and economics. The man who can accomplish this wants to enjoy the baroque charm of Old Austrian culture. And so an idea for the Parallel Campaign is born

  27 Nature and substance of a great idea

  28 A chapter that may be skipped by anyone not particularly impressed by thinking as an occupation

  29 Explanation and disruptions of a normal state of awareness

  30 Ulrich hears voices

  31 Whose side are you on?

  32 The forgotten, highly relevant story of the major’s wife

  33 Breaking with Bonadea

  34 A hot flash and chilled walls

  35 Bank Director Leo Fischel and the Principle of Insufficient Cause

  36 Thanks to the above-mentioned Principle the Parallel Campaign becomes a tangible reality before anyone knows what it is

  37 By launching the slogan “Year of Austria,” a journalist makes a lot of trouble for Count Leinsdorf, who issues a frantic call for Ulrich

  38 Clarisse and her demons

  39 A man without qualities consists of qualities without a man

  40 A man with all the qualities, but he is indifferent to them. A prince of intellect is arrested, and the Parallel Campaign gets its Honorary Secretary

  41 Rachel and Diotima

  42 The great session

  43 Ulrich meets the great man for the first time. Nothing irrational happens in world history, but Diotima claims that the True Austria is the whole world

  44 Continuation
and conclusion of the great session. Ulrich takes a liking to Rachel, and Rachel to Soliman. The Parallel Campaign gets organized

  45 Silent encounter of two mountain peaks

  46 Ideals and morality are the best means for filling that big hole called soul

  47 What all others are separately, Arnheim is rolled into one

  48 The three causes of Arnheim’s fame and the Mystery of the Whole

  49 Antagonism sprouts between the old and the new diplomacy

  50 Further developments. Section Chief Tuzzi decides to inform himself about Arnheim

  51 The House of Fischel

  52 Section Chief Tuzzi finds a blind spot in the workings of his ministry

  53 Moosbrugger is moved to another prison

  54 In conversation with Walter and Clarisse, Ulrich turns out to be reactionary

  55 Soliman and Arnheim

  56 The Parallel Campaign committees seethe with activity. Clarisse writes to His Grace proposing a Nietzsche Year

  57 Great upsurge. Diotima discovers the strange ways of great ideas

  58 Qualms about the Parallel Campaign. But in the history of mankind there is no voluntary turning back

  59 Moosbrugger reflects

  60 Excursion into the realm of logic and morals

  61 The ideal of the three treatises, or the utopia of exact living

  62 The earth too, but especially Ulrich, pays homage to the utopia of essayism

  63 Bonadea has a vision

  64 General Stumm von Bordwehr visits Diotima