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Robert Musil

Robert Musil, the great Austrian novelist, collapsed in the middle of his gymnastic exercises in April 1942, and died with an expression of ironical amusement. He was sixty-one years old. He left his masterpiece The Man Without Qualities unfinished. Even in its unfinished state, it is longer than War and Peace.

The novel is one of the most important of the 20th century and takes its place beside Ulysses and Remembrance of Times Past. I would personally place it above Joyce and Proust, but I am aware that some readers would think this view eccentric. It has a tough, intellectual, unemotional quality that I find profoundly satisfying. Regrettably such qualities are not in wide demand. After his death, Musil was forgotten in Germany for ten years; his publishers, Röwalt, only got around to publishing the complete (or rather, unfinished) novel in the early fifties. The first volume of the projected English translation appeared in 1953; two more followed in 1954 and 1960, leaving one to go. Wayne State University Press announced a complete four-volume edition for 1963; but it is still unpublished. I wrote to the English publisher Fred Warburg, to ask him when Volume Four might appear. He told me the answer was: probably never. There was no demand…

The preceding essay was written for Books and Bookmen in the 1960s. For years thereafter, I made routine enquiries with my American bookshop to find out if the final volume of the English translation of The Man Without Qualities was yet in print. In the early 1980s, an American friend reported that the novel had been reprinted and had become a bestseller; but when I enquired, it turned out that the version that had taken the university campuses by storm was simply a paperback reprint of the first three volumes.

Then, in 1995, the news I had been awaiting for so long - the whole book had finally been published in America by Knopf. I lost no time in ordering, and it arrived in January 1996 - two handsome volumes in a slipcase. I was delighted to that together they amounted to about 1,800 pages, roughly 600 pages more than the original three volumes. In fact, this contains another volume (although shorter than the others) that Musil sent to the printers, then withdrew when they were in galleys to do further work on it, as well another 350 pages of ‘posthumous’ notes and sketches.

SALVATION THROUGH A RELATIONSHIP

The new material makes fascinating reading, and helps to place this amazing novel in perspective. It now becomes clear that if Musil had finished the novel, it would probably have been twice as long. I say this because we can now see that the first two volumes - amounting to more than 700 pages, are, as incredible as this sounds, merely an introduction to the novel, which really gets started with Volume Three, in which Ulrich meets his sister Agathe.

And now it becomes possible to see why Musil could never have completed The Man Without Qualities, even if he had lived to be 90. Quite simply: the novel really begins with Volume Three because its basic subject is Ulrich’s relationship with his sister Agathe, who goes to live with him. The question Musil had in mind when he began the novel was: would Ulrich be able to achieve some kind of ‘salvation’ through a relationship with a woman with whom he had some deep fundamental sympathy? This is the question he wished to explore.

EVOLUTION THROUGH SEX

It is significant that Musil was upset that he had to allow any of the novel to be printed, and that he only did so at his publisher’s insistence. Even after he had reluctantly agreed, in 1930, to the publication of the first volume (a bulky volume that included what we now regard as the first two volumes), and it had brought him a certain fame, Musil still felt that he had been poured into a kind of mould, which he would find it impossible to break. He wanted to leave all his options open, to rewrite and recast - if necessary - from the very beginning.

It is hard to decide whether this caution was justified. My only feeling is that it was probably not. This ‘complete’ edition makes it more clear than ever that The Man Without Qualities is basically about sex. Musil was trying to find his answer - to the problem of Ulrich’s evolution - in sex. And it is clear that he was doomed to fail, for despite the assertions of the Romantics, sex is not the answer to anything. That is why so many men of genius - Leonardo, Michelangelo, Beethoven - have managed to live virtually without it. Anyone who has studied the psychology of modern serial killers will know that, driven by an overpowering sexual impulse, they are are convinced that taking sex by force will satisfy some deep inner craving, like the saint’s craving for God, leaving them peaceful and fulfilled. In fact, sexual violence is like an addictive drug, like heroin, which can only lead to misery and confusion. Even relatively harmless and law-abiding Don Juans - like H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Frank Harris - find themselves, in later life, undermined by a strange sense of futility, of being the victim of a confidence trickster.

So it was quite inevitable that Ulrich’s quest was going to end in failure. But in the first volume, Musil is not yet aware of this, and he pursues his argument with infectious enthusiasm.

HOUSEWIFELY CHARMS

When we meet Ulrich, his mistress is a cabaret singer called Leona. Ulrich was attracted to her because of "the dolefully passionate expression of her symmetrically beautiful long face, and the sentimental songs she sang instead of risque ones." Ulrich finds her wooden gestures and ‘housewifely’ voice oddly piquant. It is obvious to the reader that he wants to possess her because she is a kind of sex-doll; he thinks he can make use of her body without any personal involvement, any of the irritation that an intelligent man feels when he discovers that a desirable woman is also empty headed. He soon discovers he is mistaken. To begin with, Leona is ‘monstrously greedy’. A deprived childhood means that she has an overwhelming passion for expensive delicacies. But this is not the reason that Ulrich finds their relationship irritating. Leona wants to be seen in public, to be taken out to restaurants and theatres, and Ulrich has no desire to be seen in public with her. She finds his intellectuality boring; she prefers the kind of man who will say: "Your bum is driving me crazy", and smacks his lips with desire.

BONADEA

In short, Ulrich’s desire for this Junoesque creature is purely physical, and he would be perfectly contented if she was a robot who he could turn on with a touch of a switch, and then store in a cupboard after he has made love to her. She - understandably - wants to be treated as a ‘person’. But on this level they have nothing whatever in common. Musil is laughing at Ulrich - and himself - for falling into this trap. He does not even bother to describe how the relationship came to an end.

Next Ulrich acquires himself a nymphomaniac, Bonadea, the wife of a lawyer; she helps Ulrich home after he has been beaten up in a brawl, calls on him the next day, and becomes his mistress. She also has ‘social aspirations’, and badgers Ulrich to introduce her to his cousin Diotima, the wife of a government official, who is higher up the social scale. (Bonadea and Diotima are Ulrich’s nicknames for these women.) Unlike Leona, who hardly ever speaks, Bonadea wants to talk about art and her soul. Ulrich is soon aware that he has made another mistake.

Then there is a rebellious and bored young banker’s daughter called Gerda, whom Ulrich finds vaguely attractive, and ends by luring into his bedroom. But although she wants to lose her virginity, her body revolts, and she has hysterics. Ulrich helps her on with her clothes, and escorts her to the door. Again, sex has gone wrong.

There are three more ‘seductions’ in the novel, but we only hear about these in Musil’s voluminous notes. Ulrich and his cousin Diotima - a voluptuous but highly respectable socialite - work together in the Collateral Campaign to celebrate Franz Joseph’s seveny years on the throne. Nothing seems less likely than that she and Ulrich should land in bed together. But the campaign brings about a certain intimacy; so does her knowlege that Ulrich had an affair with Bonadea, who has succeeded in becoming her friend. As far as we know, Musil never got around to writing the scene in which Ulrich and Diotima tumble into bed (a large quantity of his sketches for the novel were destroyed during the war). But one cryptic note reads: "Diotima-Ulrich afterwards. Diotima looks at him, upset. Everything in her is destroyed. He has put her feelings back on track again." This seems to imply - what the reader could have guessed anyway - that Ulrich and Diotima are totally unsuited to one another, and after that surrendering, she feels that the whole thing was a mistake.

MOOSBRUGGER’S APPETITES

Clarisse apparently leaves Walter for Ulrich, and in one version, she leaves her husband and joins him on an island. But Clarisse is neurotic, and in the course of the novel, she goes insane. She manages to somehow free Moosbrugger, with whom she has become obsessed, and arranges for Diotima’s little maid Rachel - who has left Diotima’s service - to live in a room with him; Rachel becomes his mistress. Because she is virtually his keeper, Moosbrugger makes no attempt to harm her. But one day, Musil tells us, he goes out drinking, picks up a woman, and virtually tears her to pieces. (In the Rachel chapter it becomes clear that Moosbrugger is physically huge.) He is arrested, and later executed. What finally begins to emerge is that Musil saw Moosbrugger as a symbol of the ‘reality’ of male sexuality: a crude desire to possess a woman and treat her as a ‘throwaway’. There is, of course, an element of this in Ulrich, for all his culture and imagination.

And what does Clarisse symbolise? She is, apart from Agathe, the most intelligent woman in the book; but she is also utterly frustrated. Ulrich sympathises with her because he realises that - unlike Leona and Bonadea - she has a real ‘inner life’. Yet they are clearly not made for one another - the mere fact that two people are intelligent and sensitive does not make them soul mates. There can be no doubt that she prefers Ulrich to her weak and ‘artistic’ husband. Yet any relationship would be just as unsatisfactory as all his other sexual relationships in the novel.

Which, of course, leaves his sister Agathe. Like Clarisse, she is also bored and dissatisfied with her husband - a German pedagogue whose liberal ideas on education have made him a celebrity. She leaves him simply because she finds life with him utterly unsatisfying. In his careful description of her husband Haguer, we feel that Musil enjoys trying to explain why relationships go wrong. One of the basic aims of Man Without Qualities is to attempt to describe human relationships in all their subtlety, turning his back on the simplifications adopted by most novelists, who assume that a man and woman can fit together as neatly as two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle - whereas the truth is that it is only on the rarest of occasions that the two pieces fit exactly. Musil is also fascinated by the fact that so many women find their marriages oddly unsatisfying and unfulfilling (in this sense he could almost be regarded as one of the founders of the Women’s Lib movement). It obviously amuses him that Ulrich, who is many ways far more honest and clear-sighted than most of the men in the novel, is still unable to satisfy the women with whom he becomes involved. (We should note that Musil’s attitude towards Ulrich is by no means uncritical.)

Agathe is the exception - or at least, Musil intended her to be. The pages in which the brother and sister - who are almost strangers - meet and find one another attractive, are among the most fascinating and absorbing in the novel. (Anyone who has bought the novel and finds it a hard work should turn straight to the chapter ‘The Forgotten Sister’ in Volume Three.) She and Ulrich decide to live together.

INCESTUOUS STIRRINGS

But at this point, Musil finds himself confronting an insoluble problem. Brother and sister have a sympathy, an understanding, that contrasts with Ulrich’s other relationships in the novel. These two pieces of a jigsaw fit perfectly; this is no longer a comedy of incompatibility. But what can they do? The whole exicitement, the whole piquancy, of the relationship, depends upon the fact that they are brother and sister, and that therefore it is no inevitable that they should end up in bed together. So to begin with, they live together like lover and mistress without any physical relationship, simply revelling in the pleasure of having found another human being who is so close, a ‘soul mate’. But this cannot go on forever. Chapter Forty-Five of the Fourth Volume is entitled: ‘Beginning of a Series of Wondrous Experiences’. We are told that Ulrich and Agathe are getting ready to go to a party, and they are dressing in the same room. Agathe’s clothes are strewn all over the place, and she is in her underwear, bending over as she pulls on a stocking. Ulrich finds her aesthetically attractive - like one of those Degas paintings of a ballerina pulling on her shoe - and bends over to kiss the back of her neck, putting his arms around her.

A UNIO MYSTICA

All this is playful; then Agathe allows herself to fall into her brother’s arms, "carried away from all earthly unrest." At this point, Musil’s insistence on intellectual detachment makes the writing obscure and almost pretentious. But Ulrich merely carries her to a window-seat, where they sit looking into each other’s eyes. He rings up to cancel their engagment, but all they do instead is talk. It is as if Musil has recognised that if he allows them to become lovers, he will have walked into a blind alley - for where can they go from there? According to the translator, Musil experimented with various possibilities, "sexual relations, sometimes aggressive and perverse, with his sister." They even go away together to an island to attempt a ‘unio mystica’. But it fails, and they return to society. (In another version, it is Clarisse with whom Ulrich retires to the island, but this also fails.)

Sartre would have commented that all human ‘relations’ are a failure by definition, and pointed to the passage in Being and Nothingness in which he points out that the sadist’s desire to ‘absorb’ his victim is as much a failure as Romeo and Juliet’s attempt to become part of one another. But then, Sartre’s solipsistic view of sex and human relations is an integral part of his pessimism which, on close examination, turns out to be philosophically indefensible, based upon his failure to grasp the insights of Husserl’s phenomenology. All the same, Sartre has a point. The ‘unio mystica’ of brother and sister is no answer to the problems and frustrations of ‘the man without qualities’, and Musil’s attempt to find a solution in incest is doomed from the beginning - as he himself seems to realise instinctively. The intensity of the attraction between Ulrich and Agathe is due to the fact that they are ‘forbidden’ to one another. If they decide to sweep aside the barriers, the magic will turn into a bread-and-butter sexual relation. It would be like trying to satisfy one’s admiration for a beautiful still life of a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine by eating it, or of an exquisite scent by drinking it.

MONOGAMY UNSATISFYING

In the 19th century, an American evangelist name John Humphrey Noyes founded a religious sect based on the notion that monogamy is basically unsatisfying. In the Oneida Community, every man could sleep with any woman, and vice versa. But since contraception was virtually unknown in those days, Noyes taught a system be called Male Continence; the male had to observe a strict self-discipline, and to withdraw from his partner the moment he felt there was the slightest danger of impregnating her. Apparently this system provided both partners with far more satisfaction than the normal ‘undisciplined’ sex practised by most married couples. The same thing applies to Ulrich and Agathe; with all their restraints removed, the relationship would be bound to lose the intensity based upon self-restraint.

We could say, then, that the real achievement of The Man Without Qualities emerges in the first two volumes, in which Ulrich’s problems are presented and analysed - that vague hunger for which he can find no satisfaction.

HAPPINESS AND BREVITY

The essence of this problem emerges in a fragment of Musil’s journal, quoted towards the end of the Posthumous Papers. He writes: "I now see the task more clearly. Something in life makes happiness short, so much so that happiness and brevity go together like siblings." It sounds like the usual romantic lament - but the next sentence makes it clear that this is not what he is talking about. "This makes all the great and happy hours of our existence disjointed - a time that drifts in time in fragments - and gives to all other hours their necessary, emergency coherence." Then, suddenly, he reveals what he is talking about. "This ‘something’ causes us to lead a life that does not touch us inwardly... It is the reason why all that happens is always only ‘pseudoreality’, what is real merely in an external sense."

In fact, his new translator calls the second volume ‘Pseudoreality Prevails’. This is the problem - that Ulrich feels his life is a ‘pseudoreality’.

The cause of ‘pseudoreality’ is, in fact, quite simple. We live much of our lives mechanically. I have elsewhere labelled this mechanical aspect of man ‘the robot’. We have a kind of robot servant who does things for us. We learn some complicated activity, like typing or driving a car, with a painful slowness; then the ‘robot’ takes over, and does it far more efficiently than ‘we’ could. Yet he does not only do the things we want him to do - like typing a letter or speaking a foreign language - but also the things we would prefer to do ‘ourselves’. A symphony moves us deeply; but the tenth time we hear it, the robot is listening too, and it loses half of its impact. (Who can listen to the Beethoven Fifth Symphony as if hearing it for the first time?) When we become tired, the robot takes over, and does our living for us.

This is why Ulrich makes such heroic efforts to find a way of non-mechanical living, first as a soldier, then as an engineer, then as a mathematician. This is why he seduces women he doesn’t really want to sleep with, like Diotima. This is why he hopes Agathe will provide the answer. But in fact, the answer lies in recognising the problem and making a determined attempt to live non-mechanically. Doctor Johnson put his finger on the solution when he remarked: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’

FAILED MASTERPIECE

Now in writing The Man Without Qualities, Musil was making his own attempt to live non-mechanically. The novel is so successful because he succeeded so well. We can actually feel Musil’s enjoyment as he writes, just as we feel Tolkien’s enjoyment in sending his Hobbits off on a journey and encountering strange adventures. It sounds odd to compare Musil with Tolkien, yet this similarity - the sheer pleasure they take in writing - is more important than all the differences.

But because he looked in the wrong place for the solution of Ulrich’s problem - in the relationship with Agathe - the novel is ultimately a failure. Ulysses and Remembrance of Times Past leave the reader with a sense of satisfaction, like the end of a great symphony. Musil could never be said to have achieved this kind of success in The Man Without Qualities, because the novel was unfinishable; Musil is trying to square the circle, and it cannot be done. So we have to accept it for what it is - a masterpiece gone-wrong.

On the other hand, the Musil enthusiast is not unduly concerned about the lack of an ending, for what gives him pleasure is Musil’s idiosyncratic vision of human beings, with its amusing turn of phrase and its delightful precision. In describing his characters, Musil is like a crack shot who always hits his target, even when it is in motion. At his worst he can be too abstract and verbose, and his philosophical digressions often seem wilfully obscure. But at his best - which is at least 75% of the time - he is one of the most satisfying novelists of the 20th century.

(from ABRAXAS 15)

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