The Man Without Qualities

apropos of upcoming reading group with Samantha Rose Hill

What is this book that many Americans only know by its title and imagine it to be so daunting and difficult that many do not dare to even begin to read it?

It is Musil’s great work, but he did not consider it to be separate from his other major works, The Confusions of Young Törleß, The Utopians, Three Women .

All of these works were part of the same project and treat, in different scenarios and styles, Musil’s central questions: how do we know the world, through our senses, through what is calculable, through what is irreducible, through reason or emotion, or through all of these means (the last is his answer); how, in response to this knowledge, do we live a good, meaningful, ethical, aesthetically alive life? Considering that the traditional ballasts of universal truth, religious dogma, positivistic science were crumbling or had crumbled, considering that his contemporary scientific thinkers were demonstrating that even matter was a matter of relative perspectivism that shifted with every moment and in response to different stimuli, Musil was striving to shape a new ethical-aesthetic conduct of life, comensurate with these new fragmented and trembling variegated realities.

How might that be done? He would look at things that others saw as self-evident from different perspectives. He would eschew generalities and universals in favor of exceptions and specificities. He would question the validity of simple cause and effect links, showing that one outcome could have been impelled by any number of stimuli, more or less unpredictably. Importantly, none of this spelled nihilism or despair for Musil, nor did it make him doubt the power of art or language as tools of creative ethical expression. While expression and truth were admittedly always going to be approximations, it was vitally important to him that human beings attempted to communicate and explain and express their unique and strange experiences of the world. The task was to find means of communication, one person to another, that did not abrade the edge of otherness, individual irreducibility. Moments of wholeness and significance—perhap even universals—he called “the Other Condition” (akin to Woolf’s Moments of Being, or Proust’s Exceptional Moments) were a central focus amid the shifting ground of normal experience.

Even though he had studied physics, mathematics, the science of sense perception, he felt that the best way to explore these questions was literature, a realm as irreducible as reality itself.

If all this sounds rather abstruse and intellectual, the minute one reads the first page, one discovers that the book is charming, funny, and deeply engrossing, filled with marvelously drawn characters and scenarios, within the alluring milieu of Austro-Hungarian Vienna the year before the outbreak of WWI. The so-called “man without Qualities,” is Ulrich, largely based on Musil’s own life, a man taking a year-long vacation from life to figure out how to live.

The book and its planned trajectory grew under Musil’s hands and amid the tumultuous historical circumstances in remarkable ways. While it begins as a crisp satire of society and its mores, it develops into a serious and sometimes essayistic exploration of philosophical questions, and then develops further into a deep and emotional mystical narrative about love, eroticism, time as an extra-temporal metaphoric and utopian experience, which does not last, but is nevertheless extremely life-changing (like the reading of a book such as this). The turn in the book from the social to the personal and romantic-mystical is formally strange—almost as if it were a different book. But Musil always planned to bring the reader back to the social world, its problems and commitments.

Sometimes I say that Musil needed to establish himself as cynical and intelligent in the first parts of the book in order to let himself go into the mystical and emotional in the latter parts. This may be true, but it is also true that the mystical and emotional are present from the start (at one point Ulrich says about something he is mocking, “I only make fun of it because I love it”), and the intense intelligence remains to the end.

You will meet Clarisse and Walter, Ulrich’s childhood friends. Walter is a pianist, a painter, a dilletante and Romantic counterpart to Ulrich’s cynicism; Clarisse, a brilliant and intense piantist who goes mad after Ulrich gives her Nietzsche’s complete works for a wedding present. General Stumm von Bordwehr is a lovable and bumbling military man; Bonadea is a nymphomaniac who would like to be a faitthful wife, but cannot resist her desires. Diotima is Ulrich’s cousin, the hostess of the meetings of the “Parallel Campaign”—the absurd attempt to come up with one reigning idea that embodies the Empire to celebrate Franz Josef. Diotima and Arnheim, a German industrialist based on the statesman Walter Rathenau and Thomas Mann, fall in love, and their resistance to consumation is a subject of much delicious mockery. Rachel, Diotima’s lovable Jewish serving maid, and Soliman, Arnheim’s African page are a hilarious counterpart to their employers. Hans Sepp, boyfriend of Ulrich’s friend Gerda, and bane of Gerda’s Jewish banker father, is a representative of the confused and resentful young men who would be drawn to National Socialism. While Gerda’s mother begins to succumb to the rising Anti-Semitism and begins to wish she had not married a Jewish man. I almost forgot Moosbrugger, the psychotic sex murderer who fascinates Ulrich and becomes an obsession to Clarisse. He seems to represent the savagery hidden in all of us. In Agathe, the “forgotten” sister of Ulrich, who appears quite late in the book, one meets one of the most lively, intelligent and attractive women in all literature (she reminds me of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It). I dare you not to fall in love with her.

All the characters, whether ridiculous or respectable, have a tendency to sometimes say something brilliant, something that Ulrich himself might have said. He is then, while on the one hand, a consumate outsider and rebel against society, also a sort of refracting mirror of all of it. He is not, really, without qualities, but rather without rigid ones. Musil believed that all character was malleable, plastic, which had its good side (as creative, perspectival, open-ended), but also its dangerous one: people were susceptible to social engineering and treacherous conformity. One of the great impetuses for writing the book was to explain how so many people, including young Musil himself, had been swept up into the enthusiasm for WWI. He wanted to understand the role of irrational impulses in humankind so that we would not understimate their force and thus not be overtaken by them in the future. Tragically, a second great wave of treacherous irrationality swept Austria and Germany during the writing of the book, proving, Musil felt, that his presentiments about what humans are capable of (already foreshadowed in the sadism treated in Young Törleß) were unfortunately correct.

Yes, the book is incomplete, but two volumes of it were published during Musil’s lifetime and another large section had been ready for printing when world events overtook him. These latter proofs he revised and rewrote for the last years of his life, while in exile in Switzerland from 1938-1942, and they constitute some of the most beautiful and brilliant writing, not only of Musil himself, but, in my opinion, ever.

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