Robert Musil’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The Man Without Qualities. Part III. Into the Millenium (The Criminals)
The concluding part of a review of The Man without Qualities
The first twelve chapters of Part III of the novel take place during the period of his father’s funeral and narrate the developing relationship between Ulrich and his twenty-seven-year-old sister Agathe. Jill Scott argues that the death of their father is the pivotal event in Part III where Musil marks the novels’ shift away from the dominant Oedipus myth to that of Elektra.
A new narrative voice emerges as the Atrean myth of Electra seeps through the pages of the third book and stains the characters with the painful legacy of patricide and sibling incest. This is no parlor joke –the patriarch’s sudden death, precipitating haunting reverberations of Agamemnon’s ghost, coupled with the much anticipated reunion between Ulrich and his long-absent sister, Agathe, constitutes the peripeteia in the novel. Electra’s story is unearthed in this poignant recognition scene. Never mentioned by name, the myth has been scraped to its bare bones, reduced to a few crucial clues. The first of these is the death of the father. The children seem almost pleased at the passing of their overbearing father. However, the recurring sense of loss and confusion in the second half of the novel is akin to that felt by the Atrean children at the senseless murder of Agamemnon. The other major element of the myth’s structure is precisely the anagnorisis of Electra and Orestes. During the much-anticipated recognition scene, the earth ought to cease rotating on its axis for one long gaping moment of silence. Musil heightens the suspense of this encounter by maneuvering his subjects into place and then delaying their meeting in much the same way as does Sophocles in his Attic version. (Scott 161-62)
Ulrich meets Agathe at his father’s house after a long period of separation following Agathe’s second marriage five years previously to a prominent educationalist, after her first marriage ended with the death of her husband on their honeymoon.
But when he entered the room where his sister was waiting, he was amazed at his costume, for by some mysterious directive of chance he found his appearance echoed in that of a tall, blond Pierrot in a pattern of delicate gray and rust stripes and lozenges, who at first glance looked quite like myself. “I had no idea we were twins”! Agathe said, her face lighting up with a smile. … They did not greet each other with a kiss but merely stood amicably facing each other, then moved apart, and Ulrich was able to take a good look at his sister. They were of matching height. Agathe’s hair was fairer than his and had the same dry fragrance as her skin, the fragrance that was the only thing he liked about his own body. Instead of being all bosom she had small, firm breasts, and her limbs seemed to have the long, slender spindle shape that combines natural athletic ability and beauty. (Musil, Man Without Qualities 734-35)
Jill Scott argues that the first recognition scene, which she refers to as the “Pierrot scene” (164), is exemplified by the coolness with which the two meet and does not meet the emotional intensity required of anagnorisis in Greek tragedy. Such emotional intensity, according to Scott, is exemplified in the recognition scene between Orestes and Elektra in the play of Sophocles, which Hugo von Hofmannsthal had represented in his 1903 stage play Elektra and his subsequent libretto for Strauss’s opera Elektra, first performed in 1909 (173). Scott argues that the “second recognition scene” (164) occurs much later in Chapter 45, entitled Beginning of a Series of Wondrous Experiences, which forms part of the chapters removed from the publication of Part III by Musil in 1938, and follows the decision of Agathe and Ulrich to live together.
Brother and sister were changing to go out for the evening. There was no one in the house to help Agathe aside from Ulrich; they had started late and had thus been in the greatest haste for quarter of an hour, when a short pause intervened. Piece by piece, nearly all the ornaments of war a woman puts on for such an occasion were strewn on the chair backs and surfaces of the room, and Agathe was in the act of bending over her foot with all the concentration that pulling on a thin silk stocking demands. Ulrich was standing at her back. He saw her head, her neck, her shoulders, and this nearly naked back; her body was curved over her raised knee, slightly to one side, and the tension of this process rounded three folds on her neck, which shot slender and merry through her clear skin like three arrows: the charming physicality of this painting, born of the momentarily spreading stillness, seemed to have lost its frame and passed so directly and abruptly into Ulrich’s body that he moved from the spot and, neither with the involuntariness of a banner being unfurled by the wind nor exactly with deliberate reflection, crept closer on tiptoe, surprised the bent-over figure, and with gently ferocity bit into one of these arrows, while his arm closed tightly around his sister. Then Ulrich’s teeth just as cautiously released his overpowered victim; his right hand had grabbed her knee, and while with his left arm he pressed her body to his, he pulled her upright with him on upward-bounding tendons. Agathe cried out in fright. (Musil, From the Posthumous Papers 1176)
The siblings cancelled the dinner engagement.
But evidently he was standing there in similar fashion before her gaze, with blue eye sockets in his white face, for she went on: “Do you know what you like now? Like ‘Pierrot Lunaire’! It calls for prudence!” … Agathe’s hand had found Ulrich’s. Ulrich continued softly and passionately: “To our time, the bliss of feeling means only the gluttony of feelings and has profaned being swept away by the moon into a sentimental debauch. It does not even begin to understand that this bliss must be either an incomprehensible mental disturbance or the fragment of another life!” (1181-182)
Jill Scott interprets this scene as follows:
Later in the novel, his love for Agathe awakens in him “Sehnsucht sie zu sein” (4, 1311): he yearns to be his sister at any cost. But to be his sister is far more than simply wishing to unite completely like Siamese twins. It becomes a code word for a particular way of being that Ulrich and Agathe begin to cultivate consciously after their mystical recognition; they step deliberately beyond the confines of moral codes and strict social structures and withdraw into what they call “ein zweigeschlechtiges Mönchtum.” (169)
This desire for oneness is explored in the chapter in Part III entitled Siamese Twins.
Ulrich had said: “It’s not only the myth of the human being divided in two; we could also mention Pygmalion, the Hermaphrodite, or Isis and Osiris – all different forms of the same theme. It’s the ancient longing for a doppelgänger of the opposite sex, for a lover who will be the same as yourself and yet someone else, a magical figure that is oneself and yet remains magical, with the advantage over something we merely imagine of having the breath of autonomy and independence. This dream of quintessential love, unhampered by the body’s limitations, coming face-to-face in two identical yet different forms, has been concocted countless times in solitary alchemy in the alembic of the human skull. ...” (Musil, Man Without Qualities 982)
Musil in his completed chapters never intimates that Ulrich and Agathe physically transgress the incest taboo. However, in a draft chapter entitled Ulrich-Agathe Journey in the Posthumous Papers, they retire to a sea-side town:
It was somewhere in Istria, or the eastern edge of Italy, or on the Tyrrhenian sea. They hardly knew themselves. They had got on the train and travelled; it seemed to them as if they had been crisscrossing at random / in a way … that would prevent them from ever finding their way back. (1451)
While the draft text remains ambiguous, their physical contact is intensified to the point of submerging their individuality in physical union.
Agathe lay half fainting against Ulrich’s chest. She felt at this moment embraced by her brother in such a distant, silent, and pure fashion that there was nothing at all like it. Their bodies did not move and were not altered, and yet a sensual happiness flowed through them, the like of which they had never experienced. It was not an idea and not imagined! Whenever they touched each other, whether on their hips, their hands or a strand of hair, they interpenetrated one other. (1457)
The draft chapter finishes with the sundering of their unity.
—But what is to become of us? Agathe saw nothing before her. —You must marry or find a lover—I said that before. —But we are no longer one person? she asked sadly. —One person also has both within himself. —But if I love you? Agathe shouted.
—We must live. Without each other—for each other. Do you want the art historian? Ulrich said this with the coldness of great effort. Agathe dismissed it with a small shrug of her shoulder.
—Thank you, Ulrich said. He tried to grasp her slack hand and stroke it. —I’m not so—so firmly convinced either. … (1473)
The theme of fraternal incest, unresolved in Musil’s novel, had been employed by Thomas Mann (1875-1955) in his novella The Blood of the Walsungs, originally intended for publication in 1906 but withdrawn and subject to a limited private edition in 1921, and in his historical novel The Holy Sinner (1951) (Erlich 114). Fraternal incest would later form the theme of the film Sandra (1965) by Luchino Visconti (1906-1976). During his stay after their father’s death, Agathe tells Ulrich that she is determined to end her marriage and presents him with two related moral dilemmas. The first is her desire to kill her husband. Ulrich deflects the question onto a philosophical plane.
“There’s something wrong here, you see; on this frontier between what goes on inside us and what goes on outside, some kind of communication is missing these days, and they adapt to each other only with tremendous losses. One might almost say that our evil desires are the dark side of the life we lead in reality, and the life we lead in reality is the dark side of our good desires. Imagine if you actually did it: it wouldn’t be all what you meant, and you’d be horribly disappointed, to say the least. …” (Musil, Man without Qualities 806-07)
On his return to Vienna, Ulrich recalls the second dilemma which Agathe had told him of, just before his departure: her intention to forge their father’s will to disinherit her husband.
“He won’t keep as much of me between his fingers as would be left if a woollen thread had been burned away between them! (Musil, Man without Qualities 862). … “One really shouldn’t,” he began hesitantly, “even think such things!” “Why not?” Agathe retorted. Such questions are simple as long as they are left alone, but the moment they rear their heads they are a monstrous serpent that had been curled up into a harmless blob. Ulrich remembered answering: “Even Nietzsche asks the ‘free spirits’ to observe certain external rules for the sake of a greater internal freedom!” He had said this with a smile, although he felt it was rather cowardly to hide behind someone else’s words. “That’s a lame principle!” Agathe said, dismissing it out of hand. “That’s the principle behind my marriage!” (863-64)
She then goes ahead and commits the forgery in his presence.
Picking up the echoes of Beyond Good and Evil in these two chapters, we might say that Musil is presenting Ulrich as someone who wants to maintain the creative energy that goes with the sense that, as Nietzsche put it, our highest insights should ‘sound like crimes’ (BGE 30). He is also putting his gloss on Nietzsche’s sense that we are moving towards an extra-moral age in which the significance of an act is no longer judged in terms of the inferred intention behind it (BGE 32). But by situating the discussion in a social context Musil is also relating it to the need to justify acts and judgments in terms which an existing social community can recognize. (Midgley 37)
While sorting through his father’s papers, Ulrich comes across a collection of pornographic material which he shows to Agathe.
Agathe had meanwhile knelt down before the stove; she had the bundle of pictures and paper on the floor beside her. She looked at everything once more, piece by piece, before pushing it into the fire. She was not entirely unsusceptible to the vulgar sensuality of the obscenities she was looking at. She felt her body being aroused by them. This seemed to have as little to do with her self as the feeling of being on a deserted heath and somewhere a rabbit scutters past. (Musil, Man Without Qualities 837)
Ulrich visits Clarisse and Walter, with whom Meingast is now living. One night, the four witness from a window in Meingast’s room a man conceal himself in shrubbery adjoining a gas-lit path. He appears to be preparing for a sexual assault on a passing woman but is frustrated by the arrival of two passers-by. He then exposes himself to a teenage girl who runs off screaming.
The man finally realized his intentions when a perfectly ordinary woman came along who looked at him aghast and with loathing, involuntarily shocked into stopping for a moment, and then tried to pretend she had not seen anything. During this instant, he felt himself, together with his roof of leaves and the whole topsy-turvy world he had come from, sliding deep into the defenceless woman’s resisting gaze. … “Funny!” Ulrich suddenly said into the darkness, the first of the four to break the silence. “What an absurdly twisted notion it is to think how this fellow’s fun would have been spoiled if he only knew he was being watched the whole time!” Meingast’s shadow detached itself from the nothingness and stood, a slender compression of darkness, facing in the direction of Ulrich’s voice. “We attach far too much importance to sex,” the Master said. “These are in fact the goat-like caperings of our era’s will.” He said nothing further. But Clarisse, who had winced with annoyance at Ulrich’s words, felt borne forward by what Meingast had said, although in this darkness there was no telling in what direction. (860-61)
The depiction of sexual perversion and experimentation was common in fin-de-siècle Viennese art and literature. Egon Schiele’s contorted nudes are often representations of himself or his younger sister Gerti.[1] Arthur Schnitzler in his novel Traumnovelle (1926) recounts Fridolin’s dalliance with the Viennese sexual demi-monde when he enters uninvited a secretive masked orgy, and in his scandal-provoking play Reigen (1900) depicts through ten dialogues between ten characters a chain of linked sexual liaisons. This undercurrent of sexual perversion is reflected in a story Ulrich tells Agathe of his infatuation with a young girl he watches on a tram.
“But it’s what I’ve always wished for. When I was a boy I made up my mind to marry only a woman I’d have adopted as a child and brought up myself. I think plenty of men have such fantasies; they’re pretty banal, I suppose. But as an adult I actually once fell in love with such a child, though it was only for two or three hours!” And he went on to tell her about it. (Musil, Man Without Qualities 1023)
The fact Musil never finished the novel meant many of the decisions he would have had to take as to the future actions of the characters remained unresolved. This inability to decide between options plagued Musil, as it did Ulrich.
For a man, such as the man without qualities, permanently in thrall to the sense of alternative possibilities, deciding becomes impossible, inasmuch as – as the Latin etymology (decaedere) and the German etymology (entscheiden) both remind us – decision is called upon in any case to make a cut, to exclude, to cut out, to give a complete and definite shape to the numerous different courses of action. Although in this way decision tends to become an extreme gesture, in Musil, however, all this in no way entails an ethical, or worse, a political theory of a decisionist nature. (Musio 69)
The Man Without Qualities with its frequently disconnected chapter structure reads as a novel, a philosophical and psychological investigation, a satirical tour de force on the machinations of Imperial bureaucracy and a record of Viennese society in the declining years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Daigger), and much else. As a novel, Musil never reconciled himself to a final narrative outcome at the outbreak of WW1 and instead indefinitely postponed any resolution to what became an intractable problem. From a philosophical and psychoanalytical perspective, the book has been interpreted as influenced by The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical (1897) by Ernst Mach (1838-1916) (Musio; Scott 167-79), and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (Midgley and works cited in n.4; Scott 173-74), although Musil is seen to have rejected Freudian theory, notable the Oedipus complex (Scott 163), despite echoes of the Oedipus scenario in his own family background (Rising 524-25). It is this richness and complexity that makes The Man Without Qualities into a masterpiece ranking with those of his contemporaries Heimito von Doderer (1896-1966) and Thomas Mann (1875-1955).
Works Cited
Braun, W. “The Temptation of Ulrich: The Problem of True and False Unity in Musil’s Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften.” The German Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1, 1956, pp. 29-37. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/401166.
Daigger, Annette. “Mit Robert Musil in Kakanien. Österreichbilder Im Roman Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften.” Modern Austrian Literature, vol. 30, no. 3/4, 1997, pp. 158–169. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24648804.
Erlich, Gloria Chasson. “Race and Incest in Mann’s ‘“Blood of the Walsungs’.” Studies in 20th Century Literature, vol. 2, no. 2, 1978, pp. 113-26. New Prairie Press, doi: doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1051.
Midgley, David. “In Pursuit of a Post-Conventional Morality: Critical reflections of Nietzsche’s Thought in Musil’s Man Without Qualities.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, no. 13, 1997, pp. 30-39. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20717667.
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.
Musio, Alessio, “The Crisis of Substance and the Difficulty of Decision. Musil’s Subject.” Studia austriaca, XXII, 2014, pp. 61-72. Doi: doi.org/10.13130/1593-2508/4037.
Pike, Burton. Preface. From the Posthumous Papers, by Robert Musil, translated by Burton Pike, Vintage Book, 1996, pp. xi-xvi.
Rising, Catharine. “Ulrich Redux: Musil’s Design for His Man Without Qualities.” American Imago, vol. 65, no. 4, 2008, pp. 523-545. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26305506.
Scott, Jill. “Oedipus Endangered; Atrean Incest and Ethical Relations in Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.” Writing the Austrian Traditions: Relations between Philosophy and Literature, edited by Wolfgang Huemer and Marc-Oliver Schuster, Wirth-Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies/U. of Alberta, 2003, pp. 160-80.
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.
[1] See Jane Kallir’s Egon Schiele’s Women, Prestel, 2012.