The Man Without Qualities


The Man Without Qualities is an unfinished modernist novel in three volumes and various drafts, by the Austrian writer Robert Musil. It is typically considered to be one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century.
The novel is a "story of ideas", which takes place in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's last days, and the plot often veers into allegorical digressions on a wide range of existential themes concerning humanity and feelings. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organizes ideas about life and society, though the book is well over a thousand pages long in its entirety, and so no one single theme dominates.

Plot summary

Part I, titled A Sort of Introduction, is an introduction to the protagonist, a 32-year-old mathematician named Ulrich who is in search of a sense of life and reality but fails to find it. His ambivalence towards morals and indifference to life has brought him to the state of being "a man without qualities", depending on the outer world to form his character. A kind of keenly analytical passivity is his most typical attitude.
Musil once said that it is not particularly difficult to describe Ulrich in his main features. Ulrich himself only knows he is strangely indifferent to all his qualities. Lack of any profound essence and ambiguity as a general attitude to life are his principal characteristics.
Meanwhile, we meet a murderer and rapist, Moosbrugger, who is condemned for his murder of a prostitute. Other protagonists are Ulrich's mistress, Bonadea, and Clarisse, his friend Walter's neurotic wife, whose refusal to go along with commonplace existence leads to Walter's insanity.
In Part II, Pseudoreality Prevails, Ulrich joins the so-called "Collateral Campaign" or "Parallel Campaign", preparations for a celebration in honor of 70 years of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's reign. That same year, 1918, the German Emperor Wilhelm II would have been ruler of his country for 30 years. This coincidence prompts Count Leinsdorf to suggest the creation of a committee to explore a suitable way to demonstrate Austria's political, cultural, and philosophical supremacy via a festival which will capture the minds of the Austrian Emperor's subjects and people of the world forever. On that account, many bright ideas and visions are discussed.
A couple of people take part in the organization team or catch the eye of Ulrich. Ermelinda Tuzzi, called Diotima, is Ulrich's cousin as well as the wife of a civil servant; she tries to become a Viennese muse of philosophy, inspiring whoever crosses her path; she miraculously attracts both Ulrich and Arnheim, a Prussian business magnate and prosaic writer whose character is based on the figure of Walter Rathenau. The nobleman in charge of the Campaign, the old conservative Count Leinsdorf, is incapable of deciding or even of not-deciding. General Stumm von Bordwehr of the Imperial and Royal Army is unpopular for his attempts in this generally mystical atmosphere to make things systematic and German businessman Paul Arnheim is an admirer of Diotima's combination of beauty and spirit, without feeling the need to marry her.
While most of the participants try to associate the reign of Franz Joseph I with vague ideas of humanity, progress, tradition, and happiness, the followers of Realpolitik see a chance to exploit the situation: Stumm von Bordwehr wishes to get the Austrian army income raised and Arnheim plans to buy oil fields in an eastern province of Austria. Musil's great irony and satire is that what was planned as a celebration of peace and imperial cohesion in fact turns out as a path toward war, imperial collapse, and national chauvinism. The novel provides an analysis of political and cultural processes that contributed to the outbreak of World War I.
Part III, entitled Into the Millennium , is about Ulrich's sister Agathe. They experience a mystically incestuous stirring upon meeting after their father's death. They see themselves as soulmates, or, as the book says, "Siamese twins".
As it was published, the novel ends in a large section of drafts, notes, false-starts and forays written by Musil as he tried to work out the proper ending for his book. In the German edition, there is even a CD-ROM available that holds thousands of pages of alternative versions and drafts.

The history of the novel

Musil worked on the novel for more than twenty years. He started in 1921 and spent the rest of his life writing it. When he died in 1942, the novel was not completed. The 1,074-page Volume 1 and 605-page Volume 2 were published in 1930 and 1933 respectively in Berlin. Part III did not include 20 chapters withdrawn from Vol. 2 of 1933 while in printer's galley proofs. From 1933 until death, Musil was working on Part III. In 1943 in Lausanne, Musil's widow Martha published a 462-page collection of material from literary remains including the 20 galley chapters withdrawn from Part III, as well as drafts of the final incomplete chapters and notes on the development and direction of the novel. The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1 was published in English first in 1953 in translation by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Vol. 2 followed in 1955, and 3 – in 1961.. They were titled: Vol. 1 – A Sort of Introduction, The Like of It Now Happens ; Vol. 2 – The Like of It Now Happens ; Vol. 3 – Into the Millennium , and had xxxv+365, vii+454, xi+445 pages respectively. In 1995, Knopf published a two-volume edition in translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. Parts I and II are in Vol. 1, while Part III, the twenty galley chapters, and unfinished chapters, are in Vol. 2.
Musil's almost daily preoccupation with writing left his family in dire financial straits. The book brought neither fame nor fortune to him or his family. This was one of the reasons why he felt bitter and unrecognized during the last two decades of his life. The combination of poverty and a multitude of ideas is one of the most striking characteristics of Musil's biography.
There are strong autobiographical features to be found in the text as the main characters' ideas and attitudes are believed to be those of Musil. Most of the aspects of the Viennese life in the novel are based on history and Musil's life. The plot and the characters are invented. Elsa von Czuber, whom Musil met while he studied in Brno between 1889 and 1901, inspired him with the image of Ulrich's sister Agathe. Donath and Alice Charlemont, Musil's friends, were models of Walter and Clarisse and Viennese socialite Eugenie Schwarzwald gave birth to the character of Diotima. Arnheim may have been based on Walther Rathenau and Thomas Mann.
His detailed portrait of a decaying fin de siècle world is similar to those of Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, Karl Kraus' The Last Days of Mankind or Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday.
Some of Musil's working titles were The Gutters, Achilles or The Spy.

Style and structure

Musil's monumental novel contains more than 1,700 pages in three volumes, the last of which was published by Musil's wife after his death. The novel is famous for the irony with which Musil displays Austrian society shortly before World War I.
The story takes place in 1913 in Vienna, the capital of Austria-Hungary, which Musil refers to by the playful term Kakanien. The name Kakanien is derived from the German abbreviation K und K for kaiserlich und königlich or "Imperial and Royal", used to indicate the status of Austria-Hungary as a Dual Monarchy. But 'kaka' is also a child's word for faeces in German, just as in American English, and 'kakos' is a Greek term for bad borrowed by a number of words in German and English, and Musil uses the expression to symbolise the lack of political, administrative and sentimental coherence in Austria-Hungary.
Musil elaborates on the paradoxes of the Kakanian way of life: "By its constitution it was liberal, but the system of government was clerical. The system of government was clerical, but the general attitude to life was liberal. Before the law all citizens were equal, but not everyone, of course, was a citizen. There was a parliament, but it used freedom in such an excessive way that it was kept almost always closed.".
The story contains approximately twenty characters of bizarre Viennese life, from the beau monde to the demi-monde, including an aristocrat, an army officer, a banker, three bourgeois wives, an intriguing chambermaid, a black pageboy, and last but not least a man who murders a prostitute.
The novel is told in the third-person omniscient point of view.
According to Italian writer Alberto Arbasino, Federico Fellini's film 8½ used similar artistic procedures and had parallels with Musil's novel.

Production

Musil's aim was to arrive at a synthesis between strict scientific fact and the mystical, which he refers to as "the hovering life."
Musil originally opposed publishing only sections of his still unfinished work and later regretted submitting to his publisher's insistence, because what was already printed could not be subjected to further amendments. Some chapters were redacted by Musil from the printers after he had already sent them for publication. Critics speculate on the viability of Musil's original conception. Some estimate the intended length of the work to be twice as long as the text that survives.

Legacy

In 1996 Knopf published a new English translation of Man Without Qualities by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. The translation received a special citation for the PEN Translation Prize.
Writing about the Wilkins-Pike translation in The New York Times, Michael Hofmann wrote "Of all the great European novelists of the first third of the century -- Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf -- Robert Musil is far and away the least read; and yet he's as shapely as Gibbon, as mordant as Voltaire, as witty as Oscar Wilde and as indecent as Arthur Schnitzler."
Writing about Musil in The New Criterion, Roger Kimball wrote, "Whatever else one can say about it, The Man Without Qualities stands as one of the great modern works of satire."
Robert McCrum ranked it one of the top 10 books of the 20th Century: "This is a meditation on the plight of the little man lost in a great machine. One of Europe's unquestioned 20th-century masterpieces."