A child’s toy town deserted by the imagination
The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil
This summer I’ve been tackling Robert Musil’s magnum opus The Man Without Qualities (translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike). I’m about three-quarters of the way through the first book, which includes the first two of three volumes. It makes for an interesting companion read to The Magic Mountain, which I wrote about last year. Both of them were written after World War I, and both of them concern the years immediately before the war, when most of European society had only a vague concept — if that — of the bomb about to go off. The central question, the post-catastrophe question posed by these novels is: what, exactly, were we thinking?
After a catastrophe, we can look back at the things that preoccupied us before it happened, and pass judgment. We might be nostalgic and wish to return to that state of innocence, but another natural reaction is scorn: what idiots we were!
The Man Without Qualities mostly takes that latter position. It takes issue, much as The Magic Mountain does, with the idea that the right intellectual frame, the right sequence of logical moves, the right ideological axioms, the right art and social constructs, can fix the essential violence and aimlessness of modern life. Since both Mann and Musil are most at home in the world of ideas, this gives both novels a fundamental ambivalence. They overflow with thinking, are obsessed with thinking! And still can never be sure whether the thinking is doing any good.
The Magic Mountain takes an allegorical approach and has two characters, both philosophers, act as mouthpieces for specific ideas. The Man Without Qualities is more direct in its aims: pretty much everyone in the novel is a mouthpiece for some idea or other. It’s also satirical in tone and much funnier than the other novel (this is a pretty low bar). Two characters embody the intellectual poles of the novel. The first is Ulrich, the titular man, who doesn’t commit to any particular belief system and delights in being what we might now call an Edgelord: taking extreme positions he’s not sure if he even believes, delighting in provoking whoever he’s talking to. The other is a society wife, Diotima (after a character in Plato’s Symposium), who has a fervent and almost erotic belief in the power of great minds, great ideas, and great works of art to change the world for the better.
I’m including below a few of the passages from The Man Without Qualities that struck me (keeping in mind that I’m not all the way through), with a few notes.
In chronological order:
Ulrich saw desperately little value even in doing away with guns here, with monarchs there, in making some lesser or greater progress in cutting down on stupidity and viciousness, since the measure of all that is nasty and bad instantly fills up again, as if one leg of the world always slips back when the other pushes forward. One had to find the cause of this, the secret mechanism behind it! How incomparably more important that would be than merely being a good person in accordance with obseolescent moral principles, and so in matters of morality Ulrich was attracted more to sercice on the general staff than to the everyday heroism of doing good.
An early statement of pessimism on the ability of better laws and policies to meaningfully improve the human condition.
For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, an possibly even a private character to boot. He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other such rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character, that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled. This permits a person all but one thing: to take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them; in other words, it prevents precisely what should be his true fulfillment. This interior space — admittedly hard to describe — is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet it is in both places the same: an empty, invisible space, with reality standing inside it like a child’s toy town deserted by the imagination.
One of the recurring themes is the illusion that there is something called the self, or the soul, a coherent thing that is not simply the product of circumstances. The way I interpret this passage is that, if such a thing as the soul exists, it manifests itself not in action or visible personality traits but in the unfilled space of the mind, that which we have yearned for but left undone, the absence.
It is hard to say why engineers don’t quite live up to this vision. Why, for instance, do they so often wear a watch chain slung on a steep, lopsided curve from the vest pocket to a button higher up, or across the stomach in one high and two low loops, as if it were a metrical foot in a poem? Why do they favor tiepins topped with stag’s teeth or tiny horseshoes? Why do they wear suits constructed like the early stages of the automobile? And why, finally, do they never speak of anything but their profession, or if they do speak of something else, why do they have that peculiar, stiff, remote, superficial manner that never goes deeper inside than the epiglottis?
Engineers still, by and large, dress badly.
He had at long last reached the point where no further obstacles stood in his way. The quiet, secluded, semi-scholarly job that sheltered him from the corruptions of the art market gave him all the time and independence he needed ot listen exclusively to his inner call. The woman he loved was his, so there were no thorns in his heart. The house “on the brink of solitude” they had taken after they married could not have been more suitable for creative work. But now that there was no longer anything left to be overcome, the unexpected happened: the works promised for so long by the greatness of his mind failed to materialize. Walter seemed no longer able to work. He hid things and destroyed things; he locked himself in every morning, and every afternoon when he came home; he went for long walks, with his sketchbook shut; but the little that came of all this he never showed to anyone, or else tore it up.
Many people (myself often included) still carry around the comforting thought that if only we were unencumbered, if only we had time and solitude to devote to our calling, that we would be capable of great works. Walter, above, is not.
For if, in the course of time, commonplace and impersonal ideas are automatically reinforced while unusual ideas fade away, so that almost everyone, with a mechanical certainty, is bound to become increasingly mediocre, this explains why, despite the thousandfold possibilities available to everyone, the average human being is in fact average. And it also explains why even among those privileged persons who make a place for themselves and achieve recognition there will be found a certain mixture of about 51 percent depth and 49 percent shallowness, which is the most successful of all. Ulrich had perceived this for a long time as so intricately senseless and unbearably sad that he would have gladly gone on thinking about it.
On the mathematical inevitability of conformity.
In their youth, life lay ahead of them like an inexhaustible morning, full of possibilities and emptiness on all sides, but already by noon something is suddenly there that may claim to be their own life yet whose appearing is as surprising, all in all, as if a person had suddenly materialized with whom one had been corresponding for some twenty years without meeting and whom one had imagined quite differently. … They then have only vague recollections of their youth, when there was still an opposing power in them. This opposing power tugs and spins, will not settle anywhere and blows up a storm of aimless struggles to escape; the mockery of the young, their revolt against institutions, their readiness for everything that is heroic, for martyrdom or crime, their fiery earnestness, their instability — all this means nothing more than their struggles to escape.
This reminds me of my series of posts on “midlife crisis books:”
Something is not quite in balance, and a person presses forward, like a tightrope walker, in order not to sway and fall. And as he presses on through life and leaves lived life behind, the life ahead and the life already lived form a wall, and his path in the end resembles the path of a woodworm: no matter how it corkscrews forward or even backward, it always leaves an empty space behind it. And this horrible feeling of a blind, cutoff space behind the fullness of everything, this half that is always missing even when everything is a whole, this is what eventually makes one perceive what one calls the soul. We always include it, of course, in our thoughts, intuitions, feelings, in all sorts of surrogate ways and according to our individual temperament. In youth it manifests itself as a distinct feeling of insecurity about whether everything one does is really the right thing, after all; in old age as a sense of wonder at how little one has done of all one had really meant to do. In between, one takes comfort in the thought that one is a hell of a good, capable fellow, even if every little thing can’t be justified; or that the world is not the way it ought to be either, so that one’s failures come to represent a fair enough compromise.
Again, the soul as an absence of things done.
This faith in the immutable guidelines of reason and progress had for a long time enabled him to dismiss his wife’s carpings with a shrug or a cutting retort. But since misfortune had decreed that in the course of his marriage the mood of the times would shift away from the old principles of liberalism that had favored Leo Fischel — the great guiding ideas of tolerance, the dignity of man, and free trade — and reason and progress in the Western world would be displaced by racial theories and street slogans, he could not remain untouched by it either. He started by flatly denying the existence of these changes, just as Count Leinsdorf was accustomed to deny the existence of certain “unpleasant political manifestations” and waited for them to disappear of their own accord. Such waiting is the first, almost imperceptible degree of the torture of exasperation that life inflicts on men of principle. The second degree is usually called, and was therefore also called by Fischel, “poison.” This poison is the appearance, drop by drop, of new views on morals, art, politics, the family, newspapers, books, and social life, already accompanied by the helpless feeling that there is no turning back and by indignant denials, which cannot avoid a certain acknowledgement of the thing denied.
This one describes a successful Jewish professional, who came of age in a progressive time, in denial about the rise of mystical, reactionary nationalism and antisemitism. Even his own (gentile) wife and daughter are swept up in it and have grown to resent his Jewishness.
Putting all of these together, they paint a very pessimistic and cynical picture of the nature of humanity: that we are caught in currents we can’t control, that we tend inevitably towards disappointment and mediocrity, that progress and ideals are myths and no idea can solve anything, that if the soul exists it is a powerless emptiness inside us. The brisk humor makes The Man Without Qualities an enjoyable read nonetheless: quick-moving, full of dazzling leaps and canny observations. Still, if I compare it to The Magic Mountain (with the caveat that I haven’t finished this one), I think it’s the lesser work. So often it seems like Ulrich himself: striking a clever and cynical pose, no matter how eloquent and detailed, can seem like a dodge to avoid engaging with the fullness of life and the humanity of others. Still, I recommend it. It has more interesting thoughts per page than most things I’ve read, and it even sometimes has the effect, oddly, of making me feel a bit better about life.
This is a fine appreciation. I read about half of MwQ many years ago, and I keep meaning to go back to it and finish what I started (even if the author didn't). The essayistic nature of the book is one of the best things about it (and tends to run contrary to how we're "supposed" to write fiction nowadays). As you noted, there's a lot of humor, and this helps.
Knowing I'm unlikely to predict the next calamity and knowing that If I were unencumbered, I would be unlikely to do great things, is not really knowing. From experience, that indeed, neither are certainties, is strange comfort, but the comfort of inaccurate prediction. If we are looking, we have inklings. We have inklings of inklings - recursion of the mind. There is your soul, an emergent property of feedback. ;-)