We are in the hands of the thing. We travel in it day and night, and do everything else in it too: shaving, eating, making love, reading books, carrying out our professional duties, as though the four walls were standing still; and the uncanny thing about it is merely that the walls are travelling without our noticing it, throwing their rails out ahead like long, gropingly curving antennae, without our knowing where it is all going…
(The Man Without Qualities, Volume One, chapter 8)
Four problems
Musil’s masterpiece ought to be a difficult read for at least four reasons:
1. It is translated from 1930s German and a) all translation are imperfect and fail to capture the nuances (and pleasures) of the original (as every translator of Kafka unfailingly points out, much to the English reader’s frustration), and b) it must be in a style and phraseology which is nearly 100 years old.
2. It is unfinished: Musil died in 1942 and, to quote Wikipedia:
In 1930 and 1933, Musil published his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), in two volumes consisting of three parts, running to 1,074 pages. Volume 1 (Part I: A Sort of Introduction and Part II: The Like of It Now Happens) and the 605-page-long and unfinished Volume 2 (Part III: Into the Millennium (The Criminals)). Part III did not include 20 chapters withdrawn from Volume 2 of 1933 in printer’s galley proofs.
So the work as a whole is both unfinished, and the structure of what exists is a little difficult to grasp (volume one contains two parts, volume two contains part three) and there exist some 20 additional chapters in various stages of completion, which may or may not be included in the printed editions you come across.
3. The Man Without Qualities is long, very long – well over 1,000 pages in the Picador paperback edition.
4. And not only notoriously long, but also notoriously meandering, with little or no plot.
Tone of voice
All of which explains why it came as a very pleasant surprise to find that, when I actually got hold of a copy and started reading it with some trepidation, The Man Without Qualities turns out to be an extremely pleasurable read.
This is because of the tone of voice and authorial attitude.
The Man Without Qualities is told in the third person and the narrating voice is extremely warm and humorous. The author is wryly amused by the whole world, including his characters.
When a man has set his house in order, he should also take to himself a wife. Ulrich’s mistress in those days was called Leontine and was a singer in a small cabaret. She was a tall, plump girl, provocatively lifeless, and he called her Leona.
‘Provocatively lifeless’, that made me smile, and the narrative is full of perky, unexpectedly humorous, wry and ironic touches like that, throughout.
You quickly realise that it doesn’t matter that the book has little or no plot because it is so enjoyable listening to the narrator’s intelligent, urbane, meandering musings on existence and modern life.
These meanderings aren’t particularly revolutionary – there are rarely any of the flashy ‘modernist’ techniques I’ve recently come across in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers or in Alfred Döblin’s much more overtly tricksy Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Instead there is a warm and gentle tone of mockery and amusement, about everything – modern life, modern love, cities, economies, work, cultural values, history, human nature. You name it, Musil has something wry and amusing to say about it.
Sometimes the ‘ideas’ or insights are worth mulling over, but you get the sense the author doesn’t even care whether you find them original or amusing. He is sublimely indifferent to his characters, his opinions and our opinions of his opinions – and it is this quality of elegantly amused detachment which makes the book so moreish, so quaffable. There aren’t many laughs, but I found myself almost continuously smiling.
There are of course in all ages all kinds of countenance; but there is also one that is exalted by the taste of the time and acknowledged to be the image of happiness and beauty, while all other faces try to approximate to it, even ugly ones succeeding more or less by the aid of hairdressing and fashion; and the only ones that never succeed are those faces born to strange triumphs, those in which the regal and exiled ideal beauty of an earlier age is expressed without compromise. Such faces drift like corpses of earlier desires in the great insubstantiality of love’s whirlwind…
You are in the company of an immensely intelligent, observant and ironical man, a man who has stopped worrying about life or achievement, a man who has realised his own existence is just one more leaf floating in the breeze or in the turbid airs of the huge modern city, and is elegantly amused by the entire charade, up to and including the charade of writing the book itself.
It is characteristic that part one of this epic text is given the very off-hand title, ‘A Sort of Introduction’, and many of the chapter titles are equally languid and ironic. I particularly liked the chapter heading ‘Even a man without qualities has a father with qualities’.
Even when the protagonist is quite badly beaten up, after being mugged, in chapter seven, this only serves as a prompt for yet more urbane reflections about the paradoxes and ironies of human civilisation.
Mankind produces Bibles and guns, tuberculosis and tuberculin. It is democratic but has kings and nobility; it builds churches but universities which educate against the churches; it turns monasteries into barracks, but allots chaplains to the barracks. It provides hooligans with rubber tubing filled with lead to beat a fellow human being’s body black-and blue, but afterwards it has feather beds waiting to receive the solitary, man-handled body, beds such as that enveloping Ulrich at this moment as though it were filled with sheerest respect and consideration. This is the well-known matter of the contradictions, the inconsistency and imperfection of life. One smiles or sighs over it.
‘One smiles or sighs over it.’ Quite so. And the incident is only relevant in the overall narrative because Ulrich staggers to his feet, out into the road and cadges a lift home from a smart lady in a horse-drawn cab who is so impressed by the combination of Ulrich’s beaten-up state and his heady eloquence that she promptly becomes his mistress!
The man without qualities
The protagonist, Ulrich, a thirty-year-old bachelor, has abandoned all thoughts of being a success or making his mark in the ranks of his great nation. Instead, he has decided to take a year’s holiday from the world and from himself – to become an observer of the quirks of modern urban life, and of his own life, which he views with amused detachment.
We are introduced to him in chapter two:
The street in which this minor accident had occurred was one of those long winding rivers of traffic that radiate from their source in the centre of the city and flow through the surrounding districts out into the suburbs. Had the elegant couple followed its course for a while longer they would have seen something that would certainly have appealed to them. It was an eighteenth or even perhaps seventeenth-century garden, still in parts unspoilt; and passing along its wrought-iron railings one caught a glimpse through the trees of a well-kept lawn and beyond it, something like a miniature chateau, hunting-lodge, or pavilion d’amour from times past and gone. More precisely, its original structure was seventeenth-century, the garden and the upper storey had an eighteen-century look, and the facade had been restored and somewhat spoilt in the nineteenth century, so that the whole thing had a faintly bizarre character, like that of a super imposed photograph.
But the general effect was such that people invariably stopped and said: ‘Oh, look!’ And when this pretty little white building had its windows open, one could see into the gentlemanly calm of a scholar’s house where the walls were lined with books.
This house belonged to the Man Without Qualities. He was standing at one of the windows, looking through the delicate filter of the garden’s green air into the brownish street, and for the last ten minutes, watch in hand, he had been counting the cars, carriages, and trams, and the pedestrians’ faces, blurred by distance, all of which filled the network of his gaze with a whirl of hurrying forms. He was estimating the speed, the angle, the dynamic force of masses being propelled past, which drew the eye after them swift as lightning, holding it, letting it go, forcing the attention – for an infinitesimal instant of time – to resist them, to snap off, and then to jump to the next and rush after that.
Smooth and eloquent, isn’t it? Much more enjoyable than Hermann Broch’s tone of strained hysteria, or the thought processes of Alfred Döblin’s brutal, grunting pimps and thieves.
We learn that Ulrich set off in life to be a cavalry officer but, the very first time he was reprimanded (for chatting up the wife of a state official at a ball), he resigned in a huff.
He then trained for a while as an engineer but gave that up and migrated to an interest in pure mathematics. These are given as the reasons why Ulrich likes stopwatches and slide rules and thinks of the city as a set of intersecting vectors and sees everything through a scientific prism.
In other words, the text does feature some passages which give the impression of a ‘modernist’ interest in inserting maths and measurement and a pseudo-scientific view of the world – but not many. Such a relaxed and easy-going text barely needs its own pretexts and explanations. They’re sweet pretexts, but not very compelling
Kakania
The novel is set in 1913, in Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I like the way Ulrich has a nickname for his homeland, Kakania. Even to its inhabitants the Austro-Hungarian Empire felt like a peculiar and ramshackle institution.
The nickname isn’t as random (or as potty-mouthed) as it seems. Because of the uneasy alliance between Austria and Hungary which formed the basis of the ‘Empire’, its ruler, Franz Joseph, was the Emperor of the Austrians but the King of the Hungarians, the two words in German being kaiser and könig, respectively. This led to the anomaly that many official bodies and servants had to be both imperial and royal, at the same time, or in the appropriate situation.
All in all, how many remarkable things might be said about that vanished Kakania! For instance, it was kaiserlich-königlich (Imperial-Royal) and it was kaiserlich und königlich (Imperial and Royal); one of the two abbreviations, k.k. or k. k., applied to every thing and person, but esoteric lore was nevertheless required in order to be sure of distinguishing which institutions and persons were to be referred to as k.k. and which as k. k.
So the nickname Kakania arises naturally from saying these two ks.
It is just one example of the narrator’s finely honed sense of the absurdity of everything. If the state you live in, the capital city, the language and all its institutions are a little laughable, then surely life is laughable, too.
There, in Kakania, that misunderstood State that has since vanished, which was in so many things a model, though all unacknowledged, there was speed too, of course; but not too much speed. Whenever one thought of that country from some place abroad, the memory that hovered before the eyes was of wide, white, prosperous roads dating from the age of foot travellers and mail-coaches, roads leading in all directions like rivers of established order, streaking the countryside like ribbons of bright military twill, the paper-white arm of government holding the provinces in firm embrace.
And what provinces! There were glaciers and the sea, the Carso and the cornfields of Bohemia, nights by the Adriatic restless with the chirping of cicadas, and Slovakian villages where the smoke rose from the chimneys as from upturned nostrils, the village curled up between two little hills as though the earth had parted its lips to warm its child between them.
Of course cars also drove along those roads – but not too many cars! The conquest of the air had begun here too; but not too intensively. Now and then a ship was sent off to South America or the Far East; but not too often. There was no ambition to have world markets and world power. Here one was in the centre of Europe, at the focal point of the world’s old axes; the words ‘colony’ and ‘overseas’ had the ring of something as yet utterly untried and remote. There was some display of luxury; but it was not, of course, as oversophisticated as that of the French. One went in for sport; but not in madly Anglo-Saxon fashion. One spent tremendous sums on the army; but only just enough to assure one of remaining the second weakest among the great powers.
The problem for me wasn’t that the book is long (very long), it’s that I kept finding myself rereading these long lazy paragraphs for the pure pleasure of the rolling rhythm of the language and the diverting ideas.
Es ist passiert, ‘it just sort of happened’, people said there [in Kakania] when other people in other places thought heaven knows what had occurred. It was a peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no equivalent in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought itself.
‘Light as eiderdown, light as thought itself’ – yes, that seems to be the blowing-on-the-wind quality Musil is aiming for.
It all came as a welcome relief from the super-earnestness of Hermann Broch, whose gloomy trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, is designed to pummel into the reader how everything is going to the dogs. On the contrary, Musil’s character humorously concludes that the very notion of ‘everything going to the dogs’ is a trite and easy escape for simpletons who can’t cope with the complexity of the modern world.
In this case, he’s referring to his friend Walter, who everyone expected such high things of, but who is slowly turning into a failure, and was looking for someone or something to blame when he had a brainwave. Of course! Blame the spirit of the times!
But the tangle of clever, stupid, vulgar, and beautiful is precisely in such times so dense and involved that to many people it evidently seems easier to believe in a mystery, for which reason they proclaim the irresistible decline of something or other that defies exact definition and is of a solemn haziness.
It is fundamentally all the same whether this is thought of as the race, or vegetarianism, or the soul, for all that matters, as in the case of every healthy pessimism, is that one should have something inevitable to hold on to… Had it up to then been he who was unfit for work and felt out of sorts? Now it was the time that was out of sorts, and he the healthy one! His life, which had come to nothing, was all at once given a tremendous explanation, a justification, in terms of centuries, that was worthy of him.
Precisely. The decline and fall motif flatters the self-importance of those who expound it. it is not I who have failed – it is these lamentable times. What can a man do?
It’s no coincidence that it’s frustrated Walter who bursts out in the criticism of his old friend Ulrich, which sheds light on the title.
Walter was frustrated. He searched, he wavered. Suddenly he burst out: ‘He is a man without qualities!’
‘What’s that?’ Clarisse asked, with a little laugh.
‘Nothing. That’s just the point – it’s nothing!’
But the expression had aroused Clarisse’s curiosity.
‘There are millions of them nowadays,’ Walter declared. ‘It’s the human type that our time has produced.’ He was pleased with the expression that had so unexpectedly come to him. As though he were beginning a poem, the words drove him forward before he had got the meaning…
Who is Clarisse? Walter’s wife. She married him because everyone said he was a genius and she had a fierce ambition to marry a genius. Now that Walter is turning out not to be a genius, Clarisse is undergoing a crisis, one which the couple’s friend Ulrich is amused to observe, on his occasional visits to their house and on his leisurely strolls with her.
None of this is very earth-shattering, but the characters’ thoughts and feelings and perceptions and opinions of each other are conveyed – in my opinion – with a much lighter and, therefore, much more persuasive touch that Hermann Broch’s attempts to do a similar sort of thing.
Moosbrugger
Alas and alack, however, Musil is a Germanic writer and so he has to include a psychopath in his novel.
I was deeply disappointed when, after a 100 pages of amused insights into ‘modern’ life amid a handful of well-heeled and sophisticated characters, alas and alack, Musil introduces a woman-murderer, the monstrous psychopath Moosbrugger.
The connection is that Ulrich attends the trial of the monster, whose crime (hacking a small, vulnerable prostitute almost to pieces) is sensationally reported in all the newspapers.
Ulrich finds Moosbrugger a fascinating study. And indeed Musil does a very good job of getting inside the mind of a thuggish, uneducated brute, a semi-animal at the mercy of inarticulate desires, not so much for sex, but motivated by an inchoate hatred of the pretty women who always seem to be walking past him in the street, tittering at him behind their hands, mocking him, threatening his sense of stability and self-possession.
And so, we learn that this brute periodically Moosbrugger lashes out (he has, we learn, killed before) not even consciously murdering women, but just trying to get rid of that sense of being followed, mocked and haunted, trying to get rid of the other self which dogs his mind.
Yes, it’s an impressive description of the inside of a low, brutish psychopath but, God, I was disappointed to be turfed back into the same psychological slum described by Hermann Broch in the character of his murderer and rapist Huguenau, or the brutal would-be rapist and murderer Reinhold in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. How these Krauts love their rapists and murderers. Mack the Knife.
The ‘Parallel Campaign’
In the last chapter of this first introductory part, Ulrich receives a letter from his long-suffering father asking him when he is going to pull himself together and get a job.
His father tells him about a plan which has been hatched by senior members of the administration to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the accession of the Emperor Franz Joseph (who became Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Croatia, King of Bohemia, and monarch of many other states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1848 – thus 1818 will mark the 70th year of his reign).
It is nicknamed the Parallel Campaign, because it is in fact copying a German idea (how inevitable, Ulrich ironically reflects) which is to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 (the Kaiser ascended the German throne in 1888).
Ulrich’s father has secured him an interview with the state official planning this celebration and also an introduction to the wife of an influential courtier, who is to play a leading role in organising the social aspects of the celebration.
So the first hundred or so pages of part one turn out to have introduced us to: the central protagonist, Ulrich; some of his small circle of friends, Walter and Clarisse; the ominous figure of Moosbrugger who already, we can guess, acts as a kind of symbol of the dark underbelly of the Empire; to this idea of the Parallel Campaign, which will turn into the central narrative thread of the main central part of the novel – and to the long, leisurely, languid and deeply enjoyable style in which the whole thing is going to be told.
And with Ulrich’s father’s injunction ringing in his ears, part one ends. This is Musil’s own summary of part one.
Part 1 A sort of introduction, chapter listing
1. Which, remarkably enough, does not get any one anywhere.
2. House and home of the Man Without Qualities
3. Even a man without qualities has a father with qualities
4. If there is such a thing as a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.
5. Ulrich
6. Leona, or a change of viewpoint
7. In a weak moment Ulrich acquires a new mistress
8. Kakania
9. First of three attempts to become a man of importance
10. The second attempt
11. The most important attempt of all
12. The lady whose love Ulrich won after some talk about sport and mysticism
13. A race-horse of genius contributes to the awareness of being a Man Without Qualities
14. Friends of his youth
15. Intellectual revolution
16. A mysterious disease of the times
17. The effect of a Man Without Qualities on a man with qualities
18. Moosbrugger
19. An admonitory letter and an opportunity to acquire qualities
Related links
Austro-Hungarian literature and history
History
- The Last Years of Austria-Hungary edited by Mark Cornwall (1989)
- The Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1867 to 1918 by John W. Mason (1985)
- The Eastern Front 1914 to 1918: The Suicide of Empires by Alan Clark (1971)
The Good Soldier Švejk
- The Good Soldier Švejk, the Life of Jaroslav Hašek
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume One: Behind the Lines (1921)
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Epilogue to Volume One
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Two: At the Front (1922)
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Three: The Glorious Licking (1922)
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Four: The Glorious Licking Continues (1923)
Franz Kafka
- The Stoker (1911 to 1912)
- The Metamorphosis (1912)
- In the Penal Colony (1914)
- The Trial (1914 to 1915)
- Max Brod’s afterword to the Trial
- The Great Wall of China (1917)
- A Country Doctor and other stories (1917)
- The Castle (1922)
- Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka (1922)
- A Hunger Artist and other stories (1924)
- The Burrow (1924)
- Franz Kafka on the tenth anniversary of his death by Walter Benjamin (1934)
- Max Brod’s book on Kafka and some of my own reflections by Walter Benjamin (1938)
- Albert Camus on Franz Kafka (1942)
- W.H. Auden on Franz Kafka
- Vladimir Nabokov on Franz Kafka (1954)
- György Lukács on Franz Kafka (1955)
- Milan Kundera on Franz Kafka (1979)
- Jorge Luis Borges on Franz Kafka (1981)
- John Updike on Franz Kafka (1983)
- The Nightmare of Reason: The Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel – part one (1984)
- The Nightmare of Reason: The Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel – part two (1984)
Books & Boots 