45. The Man Without Qualities: A Sort of Introduction; Pseudo Reality Prevails (Vol. 1 of 2) by Robert Musil
translation: from German by Sophie Wilkins, with assistance from Burton Pike (1995)
published: 1930
format: 725-page Vintage paperback
acquired: June read: July 28 – Sep 23 time reading: 35:00, 2.9 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: novel of ideas theme: Robert Musil
locations: Vienna, 1913-1914
about the author: 1880-1942, Austrian, but grew up mainly in Bohemia (then within the Austro-Hungarian empire, now within the Czech Republic). “In 1938, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, Musil and his Jewish wife, Martha, left for exile in Switzerland” (Wikipedia)

An unfinished novel of ideas, considered a kind of under-appreciated classic.

Musil's setting is a satire on the Austro-Hungarian empire before WWI, which he calls Kahkania (This is a play Austro-Hungarian's ruling Habsburg family, known as "Kaiserlich und Königlich", or Imperial and Royal, abbreviated k. u. k.). His main character, a kind of alter-ego, Ulrich, is a mathematician in his 30's with no career prospects. Through a cousin, he gets involved in royal campaign in 1913 that is planning to celebrate the 70th year of the reign of Franz Joseph I in 1918. As 1918 will also mark the 30th year the reign of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, there is some pressure on Austria to have a better celebration, one of peace. The competitive idea in Austria is named The Parallel Campaign.

The problem with the campaign, other than that the future will make it irrelevant, is that no one is sure what to celebrate. The campaign leadership is given to Ulrich's cousin, the wife of an important mid-level diplomat. Ulrich calls her Diotima for her beauty and chastity. Diotima is political an asset for her husband, but she is known for her propriety not her creativity. She leaves much of the leadership to a sort of hired man who's spell she has fallen under, the charismatic Paul Arnheim. Except Arnheim is awkwardly Prussian, and, in a growing antisemitic climate, Jewish.

As the novel progresses, Diotima and Arnheim will fall in love, several characters will fall in love or lust with Ulrich. Ulrich will largely stand passively aloof of this all. And Musil will have a great deal of fun with the oddities he comes up with. But he will also use this story as a prompt for his unconcluded ideas. Musil explains his novel as an essay, by which he roughly means he is working within and around his ideas, ideas that defy simple summaries or closure. That's maybe also why he never finished the novel.

Musil's interests are broad and hard to summarize, but he has a love/hate relationship with the sciences, which he pursued in depth in the early days of space-time. He presents a world in an awkward state of rapid flux, where traditional values and religious ideas are meaningless, while practical material needs and cutthroat finance are creating new values no one is comfortable with. This creates lots of contradictions, part of which he addressed in Ulrich and others.

Ulrich ponders the soul within this:

"a soul.
What is that? It is easy to define negatively: it is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series.
But positively? It seems successfully to elude every effort to pin it down."

And he thinks through fragmentation in a variety of ways

"There are several thousand occupations in which people lose themselves, where they invest all their wits. But if you are looking for a universal human element, for what they all have in common, there are really only three possibilities left: stupidly, money, or, at most, some leftover memory of religion"

...

"But we know the picture art presents today. Fragmentation everywhere; extremes without connections. Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert have already created the epic of the new mechanized social and inner life, while the demonic substrata of our lives have been laid bare by Dostoyevsky, Strindberg, and Freud. We who live today have a deep sense that there is nothing left for us to do."

Another major there, which in Ulrich is presented as a sort of artistic/rational divide, an almost irreconcilable divide, is how to manage the nature of human spiritual needs and the practical meaning of science which very much undermines this, leaving humanity in oddly irrational mindsets. I found this very relevant to today:

"Credible received wisdom indicates that it all began in the sixteenth century, a time of the greatest spiritual turbulence, when people ceased trying to penetrate the deep mysteries of nature as they had done through two millennia of religious and philosophical speculation, but instead were satisfied with exploring the surface of nature in a manner that can only be called superficial."

...

"And while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of all the traditional, terminological husks of faith, freed from ancient religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn."

...

"Now he experienced a moment of that special lucidity that lights up everything going on behind the scenes of oneself, though one may be far from being able to express it. He understood the relationship between a dream and what it expresses, which is no more than analogy, a metaphor, something he often thought about. A metaphor holds a truth and an untruth, felt as inextricably bound up with each other. If one takes it as it is and gives it some sensual form, in the shape of reality, one gets dreams and art; but between these two and real, full-scale life there is a glass partition. If one analyzes it for its rational content and separates the unverifiable from the verifiable, one gets truth and knowledge but kills the feeling."

There is a quite a lot here, and no easy way to break it down. I read a few web-availably analyses, and each picked a part of the book to talk about, and left a whole lot unaddressed (as have i here). The ideas accumulate and build on each other as the novel progresses. And, that alone provides the novels pulsive drive...if there is any. But it has an awkwardness to it because of where he started and ended. He started in 1920, but only published these 1st 2 parts in 1930, to a changed world. The novel is difficult & slow. It gets better as it goes, but I never found it gripping. I imagine I‘ll appreciate it more down the road. But for now I‘m happy I made it through.

A note on the translation

Musil never uses an easy phrasing. His wording is very careful, and that comes across in translation. But it also defies translation.

Regarding the title, I found this:

For readers of an English translation of Musil’s magnum opus, the difficulties begin with the book’s title. For while Eigenschaften can indeed mean “qualities,” it carries with it a penumbra of associations that no English word quite captures. “Qualities,” “properties,” “attributes”—Eigenschaften can mean any or all of these things. But it suggests something more. Eigen is the German word for “own,” as in “for one’s own use.” Hence the eigen in Eigenschaften insinuates a sense of self-possession that remains inexplicit in the English approximations. To speak of a man without Eigenschaften is therefore not so much to deny that he exhibits any definite qualities but rather to suggest that whatever qualities he displays are not really his. To be without Eigenschaften is in this sense to be without character—that inscribed residuum of identity that makes us who we are—though to be without character is by no means to be anonymous. As Ulrich admits to himself, “he was, after all, a character, even without having one.”

source: https://newcriterion.com/issues/1996/2/the-qualities-of-robert-musil

The same article explains that the translator's title of the second part, "Pseudoreality Prevails", is entirely made up. A previous translation came up with "“The Like of It Now Happens" - not particularly satisfying, but also completely different.

2022
https://www.librarything.com/topic/342768#7944230 ( )

I hated this book. Tedious and hopelessly intellectual without any sympathetic characters (I know, that's the point). It was as though the author never edited it. Like a crappy Swann's Way. Kindle readers can eat me! I couldn't stand to think of wasting my life on (the unfinished!) volume 2. ( )

This unfinished tome of a book is an extremely strange one to experience. Written in a very Magic-Mountain-like way, we find ourselves party to the life of Ulrich, a minor official in the vast machine of empire that is the Austro-Hungarian empire in the early 20th century.

Ulrich finds himself involved in various projects of state that consume the lives and ambitions of those in government around him. There are relations with various women and other officials and there are long discussions of how things ought to be done and plans carried out.

No clear conclusions are ever reached and, as a result, nothing ever seems to get done however. In this, Musil has composed a dense satire not only of his day, but rather prophetically pretty much every major infrastructure project attempted by the British government of the early 21st century. Quite an achievement.

It is testimony to the quality of the immense work that Musil put into this in the 20 years leading up to his death that I find myself at a loss to describe what it’s actually about other than a satire on the pointlessness of ‘civilised society’. You can pick that up (and write it down) in 150 pages. You don’t need 1,500 at 300 pages a year.

This however, is not a novel without qualities. Its prose is readable and the characters are memorable characatures. Satire, however, is subtle humour at best, and German humour is subtler still. Once you’ve got the gist, the whole thing becomes very boring. You’ll need to be really keen to get to one of the many endings.

You’d have to have something of a death wish to read all of those many endings. The novel disintegrates like it was fed into a shredder and has been reassembled by zealous Iranian hostage takers. It’s a mess best left for specialists of 20th century German literature to pore over.

Most of the world can leave this work calmly gathering dust on the shelf as I did when I put it back in the library in Saudi Arabia pretty confident that I was the only one who had ever read it and the only who ever would read it. There are better satires of government out there. Just dial up some back episodes of Yes Minister on YouTube. They’re a lot easier to consume and you’ll come away with the same conviction that, however we vote, the government always gets in. ( )

the front cover tells me it's "the third member of the trinity of 20th-century literature, complementing Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past." the back blurb summarizes it as "Ulrich navigates the chaotic labyrinth of Viennese society."

so it was much to my surprise to find that this was not remotely sprawling, at least not in the same way as the other two in the "trinity." there's a tight focus on about 10 characters who all have their own little philosophies on life. i don't know if these characters are stand-ins for actual schools of philosophy like Camus' The Plague, but it was impressive the way Musil juggled them all so carefully and kept them so distinct as they interacted with each other. the only character whose allegorical significance was obvious enough for a fella like me was the sex murderer Moosbrugger. this extravagant leitmotif was easily the most fun part of the book.

as for the rest, what can i say, it's not my thing, i don't like this breed of philosophy at all. didn't care for the prose either, which was clean enough, but the main literary device seemed to be these weird ugly analogies that make your head turn cuz there's something so stiff and anti-aesthetic about just throwing out random images like this. there's one on every page; here, i'll flip around:

"For her vision had been like an image appearing between the branches of a tree, with the leaves suddenly flickering like candle flames, but gone in an instant as the branches snap together again..."

"For whether one sets a final period to a brawl with a knife, or ends a musical piece by crashing all ten fingers simultaneously down on the keyboard a few times, or whether the dancer bows to his lady, or whether one passes a resolution it would be an uncanny world if events simply slunk off..."

"What happened then, until the moment he stood in the street with his legs buckling and his things thrown after him, was like a big red cloth being ripped to shreds..."

or maybe this is also just not my thing and i don't like Prose much anymore. i think this is the first novel i've read this year actually. thanks for listening to my story about how i had no interest in this book but read it all anyway. ( )

Intermittently excellent. Fact that the plot doesn't go anywhere plays into the themes of the novel, but, still, the plot doesn't go anywhere -- some plot momentum would've been nice to power through a work of this length and density. But the pages and paragraphs that are brilliant are truly that, and there are many of them. ( )