Robert Musil
Paperback | Pages: 1072 pages Rating: 4.37 | 937 Users | 77 Reviews
Define Books In Pursuance Of The Man Without Qualities: Volume II (The Man Without Qualities #2)
| Original Title: | Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften |
| ISBN: | 0679768025 (ISBN13: 9780679768029) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | The Man Without Qualities #2 |
Commentary Toward Books The Man Without Qualities: Volume II (The Man Without Qualities #2)
One of the most well-read men I’ve ever known died a few years ago at the age of 104. His name was Daniel Aaron. He was a cofounder of the Library of America and taught literature first at Smith, then at Harvard where he kept an office long after retirement. In fact, to the day of his passing, you’d find him behind his desk, editing his commonplace books [abridged and published by Wafer Press].When a centenarian—whose years overlapped twenty-six presidential terms, who witnessed some of the most devastating wars and economic depressions, and whose joie de vivre, nevertheless, was reading—when someone like that tells you that the last book he wants to reread is [fill in the blank], you listen.
I remember seeing on his desk the monstrous second volume of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities tattered from page-turning and opened roughly halfway, so that the thousand pages that heaped to either side of the story’s middle distributed evenly what surely must have been a gravitational disturbance in the room.
The Man without Qualities was DA’s final literary indulgence. He said to me, “This is one you must read slowly and carefully.” And so I did. Over a three-year period, in fact—starting, stopping, starting over, and starting over once more.
It was an emotional moment, reading the final pages of this unfinished lifework by Musil—not because of the story itself, which is more of a strain on the mind than it is on the heart, but because it felt like a promise kept. It felt like finishing something, not just for myself, but for DA and for Musil both.
In The Man without Qualities, Musil attempts the kind of thing Jorge Luis Borges so often wrote about: a book of books. Musil’s experiment (to make a slight distinction) was to contain all that was, is, or will be for someone in Austria, 1913.
You have to imagine that “all that was” before the first world war has disappeared like breath on glass. And you have to understand that what “will be” may not be. So that, in the end, what “is” is a universe in medias res, without comprehensible beginning, without a discernable conclusion.
Our antihero, Ulrich, is our quintessential man “without qualities.” In the first volume, he’s taking a sabbatical. It’s to be a year of serious thought and self-inquiry. He considers human nature, the boundaries of reason, the foundation of ethics—in short, the “qualities” on which we once felt we had a secure grip.
But it’s a new age, a new era. Populations are growing, nations and industries are growing. And growing too is the overall anxiety about what happens next. Things are moving fast, faster than they’ve ever moved. The West needs something to settle its nerves, something to regulate its ambitions. It needs an Idea.
Enter Diotima, Ulrich’s cousin, a lady of some social standing and the wife of Section Chief Tuzzi. Diotima dreams of an Austrian utopia, and in service to that dream, she organizes what comes to be known as The Parallel Campaign. Think of Ralph Nader’s utopian novel, Only the Super Rich Can Save Us—one of those secret societies where the world’s elite (read: rich, privileged, etc.) pool their resources to meet a global crisis. Of course, what that crisis is becomes a matter of such interminable debate that not one thing ever gets done.
That’s Musil’s genius at work. A “parallel” campaign is one that, by definition, never touches its adjacent concerns. There will be no bridge—not in this volume anyway—between the Idea and the Problem.
The first book dwells on beautiful absurdities. It’s full of humor and sitcom, especially in the Parallel Campaign meetings where politicians, high society gadabouts, entrepreneurs, and snooping army officials gossip themselves into conspiratorial fervor. All want a piece of the utopian pie that, whether they know it or not, is full of blackbirds.
The first volume ends with the death of Ulrich’s father, which, in a way, signifies the death of everything comfortably reliable before the first world war: the idea of a fatherland, the idea of familiar hierarchy embodied by the state, the idea of a filial deference to that state or culture or economy, and so on.
“Fundamental idea: War. All lines lead to war,” writes Musil in his outline for the novel. No matter the intention, no matter the conviction, no matter the appeal to love and reason: war.
Therefore, in volume two, the Parallel Campaign abandons ideas for action, as tempers and suspicions escalate. In the process, charity and good will fall apart.
At the end of the previous volume, Ulrich had been reunited with his twin sister, Agathe. In volume two, Ulrich and Agathe abandon the sinking ship of social reform and consider the implications of a new century, a century devoid of moral guidance. What now is morality? Where do we go to find it? If morality condescends to the empirical and the concrete, what hope is there for the good, the beautiful, the just?
Freud caught the gist of the modern era with the notion of the “double.” And Musil’s second volume is a treatise on the matter. Ulrich and Agathe, time and again, refer to themselves as one person, but a person divided by the rational and the emotional. Ulrich dives deep into the abyss of relative reasoning, where nihilism swims in endless pursuit of its own tail. And Agathe’s impulsive behavior toward the men in her life pushes her to the edge of society’s mores.
It’s an ancient dichotomy: enlightenment and romanticism. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Both can give meaning to a person’s or society’s existence. But Musil seems to ask, Can they ever join themselves into some nobler morality?
It’s a wonderful move on Musil’s part, voicing this dilemma through twins, since to consummate these two philosophies has been taboo historically. Ulrich and Agathe acknowledge, both to themselves and to each other, that together (as in, really really together) they would transcend the problems their species has inherited, morally and intellectually. But success would ostracize them too. And no one would understand. And no one would accept. And no one else would get better.
So where does that leave them? Where does that leave everyone?
The story ends without resolution, not that Musil could have resolved it anyway. The additional chapters he sketched have a kind of pick-your-own-adventure quality. They could go in any number of directions. He had in mind something radically experimental, and that’s saying a lot, given Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and the rest of Musil’s gifted and inventive contemporaries.
But the best thing about the inclusion of Musil’s posthumous papers is that he spends a great deal of time thinking through his own motivations on the page. So in some ways, we don’t have to guess what was on his mind.
I’ll end by copying out a couple passages from his own outline for the novel. But I do want to add a word or two in terms of recommendation, since The Man without Qualities was highly recommended to me.
Volume one has intrigue (a serial killer named Moosbrugger who denies responsibility); tension (Clarisse, a man trapped in a woman’s body, and Walter, her husband and a musician of squandered genius); humor (the irony and satire of the campaign and of Austrian society in the lead-up to the war); and plot (the traction and momentum of each character as his/her motives and secrets are revealed). Volume one works and works well. Read the first paragraph and you’ll get a sense of Musil’s astute but amusing take on the times. It opens with barometric pressure, isotherms, relative humidity, and phases of the moon, only to say, “even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a find day in August 1913.”
Volume two lacks almost everything I’ve just described. It wallows, with no apologies to the reader, in its own naval-gazing. For pages and pages . . . and pages, Ulrich discourses on the nature of morality in the driest academic manner. No butter on that toast—and burn it! It’s all there: philosophy, economics, aesthetics, psychology, politics. But no poetry, no irony, no strangeness, and no plot.
It’s a goldmine for intellectual historians, because Musil does capture the confusion felt at all levels of Austrian society at the crossroads of the twentieth century. For philosophy-enthusiasts too, there’s a great deal to admire in Musil’s assimilation of intellectual trends. And for literary masochists like myself, there’s always that jolt of dopamine you get from defeating another behemoth! (Next, War and Peace?)
But I honestly don’t think it’s worth the casual reader’s time. And probably not worth the time for more-than-casual readers either. Read The Confusions of Young Törless instead. You’ll get Musil at the height of his powers, but unlike The Man without Qualities, Törless renders the fascist insanity of the time in more visceral, more violent detail. Think: Lord of the Flies. A pristine cruelty.
Here is Musil on the unfinished masterwork that is The Man without Qualities:
“When I think of the reviews of Volume One, I note again and again as something they have in common the question as to what will or might happen in the second volume. The answer to this is simple: nothing or the beginning of the World War. Note the title of the major portion of the first volume: Pseudoreality Prevails. This means that in general today the personal givens of events are definite and delineated, but that what is general about them, or their significance, is indefinite, faded, and equivocal, and repeats itself unintelligibly. The person awakened to awareness of the current situation has the feeling that the same things are happening to him over and over again, without there being a light to guide him out of this disorderly circle. I believe that this characterizes a major idea of the first volume, around which large parts of the material could be ordered. Above all, there is a continuity in that volume that permits the present period to be already grasped in the past one, and even the technical problem of the book could be characterized as the attempt to make a story at all possible in the first place.”
“I add that what I have just referred to in other terms as the unequivocal nature of the event (of life) is by no means a philosophical demand but one that in an animal would already be satisfied, while in a person it can apparently be lost.”
“This makes comprehensible that the major problem of the second volume is the search for what is definitely signified or, to use another expression, the search for the ethically complete action or, as I might call it ironically, the search for 100 percent being and acting.”
“The more general investigations of the first volume permit me to concentrate here more on the moral problems or, according to an old expression, on the question of the right life. I attempt to show what I call ‘the hole in European morality’ (as in billiards, where sooner or later the ball gets stuck in such a hole), because it interferes with right action: it is, in a word, the false treatment that the mystic experience has been subjected to.”
“But here I would like to stop burdening your desire for information with the impossible problem of philosophical window dressing and conclude: Ulrich, who has traveled to his father’s funeral, encounters in the house cleared out by death his almost unknown and unremembered sister. They fall in love, not so much with each other as with the idea of being siblings. I greatly regret that this problem has a certain higher banality, but on the other hand, this proves that it is the expression of broad currents. My representation is aimed at the needs leading to this expression. I contrast the two theses, one can love only one’s Siamese-twin sister, and man is good. This means (the relation of brother and sister to each other is at first purely spiritual) Ulrich returns after a period filled with their being together in intense intimacy; his sister follows him, and they begin a provisional living together according to principles revealed to them, but they are disturbed by the attention of society, which is deeply touched by this act of brotherly and sisterly devotion” (1745-1746).
You get the picture.
Is this the book I’d have open on my desk at 104 years old? No. Definitely not. But I can see why it would be such a fascinating read for someone born into that historical and distorted milieu. I can understand why one would spend a lifetime rereading Musil’s book for clues about the great big HOW of it all. And I can certainly imagine that reader being rewarded with profound insights each and every read.
Describe Based On Books The Man Without Qualities: Volume II (The Man Without Qualities #2)
| Title | : | The Man Without Qualities: Volume II (The Man Without Qualities #2) |
| Author | : | Robert Musil |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 1072 pages |
| Published | : | December 9th 1996 by Vintage (first published 1933) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Literature. Classics. European Literature. German Literature. Philosophy |
Rating Based On Books The Man Without Qualities: Volume II (The Man Without Qualities #2)
Ratings: 4.37 From 937 Users | 77 ReviewsEvaluation Based On Books The Man Without Qualities: Volume II (The Man Without Qualities #2)
Volume 2 is for the fans, with the novel ending halfway and then about 600 pages of drafts, notes and rough chapters. (Apparently the German edition has thousands, on a supplementary CD.) Actually, all of this - along with some notes from the translator - is quite helpful in understanding where Musil was going with this large, saggy haystack of a novel, and what he intended it to mean. Also, once you slog through the sometimes interminable Ulrich-Agathe dialogues where they talk in circles andNote: Volume II of the newer Pike/Wilkins translation and Volume II of the older Wilkins/Kaiser translation do not cover the same material. This review is for the later.From the first time I heard it, the title, The Man Without Qualities, struck me as surreptitiously suggestive of some vital meaning that I could only find behind the cover on which it was written. And perhaps it was all of my previous reading experience that then subtly bade me to wean my expectations from this promise. For that
By connecting no idea or every idea with myself, I got out of the habit of taking life seriously. I get much more out of it when I read about it in a novel, where its wrapped up in some point of view, but when Im supposed to experience it in all its fullness it always seems already obsolete, overdone in an old-fashioned way, and intellectually outdated.
It's still unfinished - like Schubert
honestly? this volume is like guermantes way but. more of a slog. i have glazed over so many times. why is it so long. i get it? but? why is it so long. cmon volume 3 u best save this situation cos i am Exhausted.
On second read, this volume is much less interesting and enjoyable than the first. Musil's wonderful sarcasm and almost bitter humor are nearly absent and he grapples with "big questions" with much less grace.
I spent all of March 2017 reading this translation of Musil's masterwork (Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, 1954) alongside the latest translation by Sophie Wilkins, 1995. After a staggered start, I overlapped two chapters in one, then two chapters in the other, always re-reading a chapter I'd just finished in the "other" version.A brilliant novel depicting a time and place via a multitude of characters, upon which floats the strange disaffected character of the Man Without Qualities. While
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.