Robert Musil’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The Man Without Qualities - Part I. A Sort of Introduction
A three part study of Robert Musil (1880-1942) and his novel The Man Without Qualities
From 1924 onwards, Robert Musil (1880-1942) worked almost exclusively on The Man without Qualities. The novel was conceived in four parts. The first volume, consisting of Part I, A Sort of Introduction, and Part II, Pseudoreality Prevails, was published in 1931. The second volume was published in 1933, consisting of Part III, Into the Millenium (The Criminals), composed of thirty-eight chapters. In 1938, Musil withdrew twenty chapters in galley proofs to have been added to Part III. The definitive version of Part III was not completed in Musil’s lifetime, nor that of Part IV which remained in note form.
Musil did not finish The Man Without Qualities, although he often said he intended to. There is no way of telling from either the parts published in his lifetime or his posthumous papers how he would have done so, or indeed whether he could have done so to his own satisfaction. This is because of the novel’s rigorously experimental structure, consisting of an “open architecture” that could be developed in many directions from any given point. The novel does contain coherent individual threads and incidents, but Musil firmly rejected the idea of a plotted narrative whole. Therefore, while the drafts of the twenty chapters in Part I of “From the Posthumous Papers” carry on from where “Into the Millenium” left off, the material in Part 2 is not preliminary to a final version in the usual sense, but consists rather of notes, sketches, and drafts that Musil was keeping in suspension for possible use in some form at some place in the ultimate text, a version he never decided upon and that must forever remain the object of tantalising speculation. (Pike, “Preface” xi)
The novel starts in the summer of 1913 and was originally intended to end with the outbreak of WWI in August 1914, although the published version never reached this point and, in any event, Musil in later papers suggested he had revised his original plan and intended Ulrich to survive the Great War and indeed participate in WWII (Rising 528). A Sort of Introduction is divided into 19 chapters. Ulrich, the man without qualities, is a thirty-two-year-old mathematician, son of a wealthy and well-connected lawyer, living in a pleasant chateau in Vienna, albeit unidentified, in a state called Kakania.
All in all, how many amazing things might be said about this vanished Kakania! Everything and every person in it, for instance, bore the label of kaiserlich-königlich (Imperial-Royal) or kaiserlich und königlich (Imperial and Royal), abbreviated as “k.k.” or “k.&k.,” but to be sure which institutions and which persons were to be designated by “k.k” and which by “k.&k.” required the mastery of a secret science. On paper it was called the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but in conversation it was called Austria, a name solemnly abjured officially while solemnly retained emotionally, just to show that feelings are just as important as constitutional law and that regulations are one thing but real life is something else entirely. (Musil, The Man Without Qualities 29)
To realise his Nietzschean ambitions to become “a great man” (31), Ulrich, not unlike Musil himself, had pursued three careers, a cavalry officer, civil engineer and, most recently, mathematician, with varying degrees of success but none had fulfilled him. “And since, now that genius is attributed to soccer players and horses, a man can save himself only by the use he makes of genius, he resolved to take a year’s leave of absence from his life in order to seek an appropriate application for his abilities” (44). In Part I, two of Ulrich’s mistresses are introduced. Leontine is a singer in a cabaret and a glutton.
She was tall, curvaceously slender, provocatively lifeless, and he called her Leona. (16) … Of course, if the art of trading for money not the entire person, as usual, but only the body must be called prostitution, then Leona occasionally engaged in prostitution. But if you have lived for nine years, as she had from the age of sixteen, on the miserable pay of the lowest dives, with your head full of the prices of costumes and underwear, the deductions, greediness and caprices of the owners, the commissions on the food and drink of the patrons warming up to their fun, and the price of a room in the nearby hotel, day after day, including the fights and the business calculations, then everything the layman enjoys as a night on the town adds up to a profession full of its own logic, objectivity and class codes. Prostitution especially is a matter in which it makes all the difference whether you see it from above or below. (18)
Leona disappears from the published novel upon Ulrich meeting his next mistress, Bonadea, although she reappears in Musil’s posthumous papers as having affairs with two significant characters, Arnheim and Fischel. Bonadea is married to a judge and mother of two children. She brings Ulrich to his villa in her carriage after she finds him injured on the street after a brawl and returns the next day.
It was she herself, who had not wanted to give her name and address, but had now come in person to carry on the adventure in her own romantically charitable fashion, on the pretext of being concerned about his health. Two weeks later Bonadea had been his mistress for fourteen days. (26) … She had only one fault: she could become inordinately aroused at the mere sight of a man. She was not lustful; she was sensual, as other people have other afflictions, for instance suffering from sweaty hands or blushing too readily. It was something she had apparently been born with and never could do anything to curb. … But Ulrich was only the most recent of God knows how many men in her life. Once they have caught on, men tend to treat such nymphomaniac women no better than morons for whom the cheapest tricks are good enough and who can be tripped up in the same way again and again. The tenderer feelings of male passion are something like the snarling of a jaguar over fresh meat – he doesn’t like to be disturbed. Consequently, Bonadea often led a double life, like any other respectable citizen who, in the dark interstices of his consciousness, is a train robber. (39)
Ulrich’s affair with Bonadea ends in Part I.
All at once she understood that Ulrich had grown tired of her. Given her temperament, she had hitherto never lost her lovers except as one mislays something and forgets it when attracted to something new, or in that other easy-come, easy-go fashion, that, no matter how personally irritating sometimes, still had something of the air of the workings of a higher power. And so her first reaction to Ulrich’s quiet resistance was the feeling that she had grown old. She was humiliated by her helpless and obscene position, half-naked on a sofa, an easy target for insults. Without stopping to think, she got up and grabbed her clothes. But the rustling and swishing of the silken chalices into which she was slipping back did not move Ulrich to remorse. (133)
A revival of the affair in Part III is abruptly ended by Ulrich.
Ulrich turned to her with a smile and said spontaneously: “My sister is coming here in a few days to stay with me – did I tell you? We’ll hardly be able to see each other then.” “For how long?” Bonadea asked. “To stay,” Ulrich answered, smiling again. “Well?” Bonadea said. “What difference will it make? Unless you’re trying to tell me that you sister won’t let you have a lover?” “That’s just what I am trying to tell you,” Ulrich said. (967)
Clarisse and Walter, childhood friends of Ulrich are aspiring artists who play a central role in the novel. Clarisse is increasingly disillusioned by Walter’s failure to achieve the greatness she had imagined for him.
“You don’t care about Walter,” she said. “You’re not really his friend.” It sounded like a challenge, though she said it with a laugh. Ulrich gave her an unexpected answer. “We’re just boyhood friends. You were still a child, Clarisse, when the two of us were showing the unmistakeable signs of a fading schoolboy friendship. Countless years ago we admired each other, and now we mistrust each other with intimate understanding. Each of us would like to shake off the painful sense of having once mistaken himself for the other, so now we perform the mutual service of a pitilessly honest distorting mirror.” “So you don’t think he’ll ever amount to anything?” Clarisse asked. “There is no second such example of inevitability as that offered by a gifted young man narrowing himself down into an ordinary young man, not as the result of any blow of fate but through a kind of preordained shrinkage.” (47)
In Part II, Ulrich recalls an unconsummated but seismic affair he had as a twenty-year old cavalry lieutenant with the wife of an army major, the memory of which recurs throughout the novel. Retreating to an island, Ulrich transforms the experience into the metaphysical embodiment of love.
It was not very long before she had turned entirely into that impersonal center of energy, the underground dynamo that kept his lights going, and he wrote her a final letter, setting forth that the great ideal of living for love actually had nothing to do with physical possession and the wish “Be mine!” that came from the sphere of thrift, appropriation, and gluttony. This was the only letter he mailed, and approximately the high point of his lovesickness, from which it soon declined and suddenly ended. (131-32)
Eithne Wilkins traces the importance Musil attributed to this affair through unpublished manuscripts dating from between 1925 and 1928.
Musil’s notes reveal that this ‘exceedingly important’ affair is a paradigm of the central conflict in his protagonist’s make-up: between the ‘appetitive’ (agein, getting on in the world, aggressive, sexual, ‘bad’) and the ‘non-appetitive’ or ‘contemplative’ (pathein, withdrawing from the world, passive, asexual, ‘good’) aspects of life as seen by both the author and his hero Ulrich, the Man Without Qualities. (75)
Moosbrugger, another significant figure introduced in Part I, is a 34-year-old carpenter and regular inmate of psychiatric wards who is sentenced to death for the sadistic murder of a young prostitute. Ulrich is present at his sentencing. The moral judgment of leading characters on Moosbrugger’s responsibility for the murder in the light of his mental condition becomes a central theme of the novel.
Even as the guards were leading him out, he turned around, struggling for words, raised his hands in the air, and cried out, in a voice that shook him free from his guards’ grip: “I am satisfied, even though I must confess to you that you have condemned a madman.” That was a non sequitur, but Ulrich sat there breathless. This was clearly madness, and just as clearly it was no more than a distortion of our own elements of being. Cracked and obscure it was: it somehow occurred to Ulrich that if mankind could dream as a whole, that dream would be Moosbrugger. (76-77)
The final Chapter in Part I introduces the historical setting for the novel. Ulrich’s father, determined that Ulrich should abandon his life of seclusion, informs him he has arranged an introduction to the Imperial Court, the purpose of which is to prepare for Ulrich’s involvement in the planning of a year-long celebration of the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef on 2 December 1918. This celebration had to outshine the jubilee in Germany of Emperor Wilhelm II’s thirtieth year upon the throne on 15 June 1918.
Bibliography
Musil, Robert. Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Qualities]. Translated by Sophie Wilkins, Picador Classic, 2017.
---. From the Posthumous Papers, by Robert Musil, translated by Burton Pike, Vintage Book, 1996, pp.1135-1770.
Pike, Burton. Preface. From the Posthumous Papers, by Robert Musil, translated by Burton Pike, Vintage Book, 1996, pp. xi-xvi.
Wilkins, Eithne. “Musil’s ‘Affair of the Major’s Wife’ with an unpublished text.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 63. no. 1, 1968, pp. 74-93. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3722647.