The Man Without Qualities

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”.