The Men Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities is often praised as the lesser known deity among the triumvirate of so-called twentieth-century masterworks, Ulysses and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu being the other two notables. One can only wonder how Ulrich himself -- Ulrich the skeptic surgeon operating on the metaphysically cancerous psyche of the turn of the century central Europe, Ulrich who is as rigorous in his passivity as he is in his analysis, Ulrich the protagonist of Robert Musil's magnum opus -- would have explained such tame categorization, categorization that smacks of worst kind of intellectual defeatism. How easily we have given in to the sterile lust for classification. If all the blarb writers and book critics are to be taken seriously, then reading Musil is supposed to complete an equatorial circle around some sort of a mental universe that one begins to traverse the moment one encounters Buck Mulligan meeting Stephan Dedalus down the staircase. As if all great novels in a particular century are tied together by some invisible thread of mutually recognizable aesthetic. The moment someone mentions three such disparate writes under one breath he creates an illusion, a very vulgar illusion of intellectual and artisitic kinship that often induces a bias towards a certain interpretation of a work, an interpretation that spectacularly fails to appreciate the gestalt, the aesthetic unity of that work.

The most common criticism that I have heard usually made against The Man Without Qualities is something like this -- "After reading Proust, Musil just doesn't cut it.He is so dry and acerbic and overly abstract. The characters are not well formed. Not much of a plot." This of course is the voice of prevailing bias towards psychological realism. A great novel has its own manifest intelligence in its organization, in its structure, in its psychological insights, in its conscious as well as accidental tricks of creating a mirage of labyrinth by reflecting a thin slice of time and place on a house of mirrors, in its own sonority. But a great novel is almost never single-mindedly cerebral, it never risks the creation and exposition of original philosophical ideas with the logical rigor of a philosopher through its landscape of characters and events, it almost never consciously rejects the subterranean appeal of viscerality (or of charm, each depends on the other). Robert Musil, more specifically in his unfinished The Man Without Qualities ( some of his earlier works, especially Young Torless can be read in the context of contemporary literature with its psychological exploration and political metaphors), is a notable exception. The originality of Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften -- that is how it is known in German and in translation all the connotations of the orignal 'Eigenschaften' are lost -- lies in its relentless epistemological quest to reach at the heart of all human experiences and intercourses, in its uncompromising exploration of spiritual decay all married to a precise and accurate evocation of the turn of the century Viennese aristocracy.

The temptation of mentioning Herman Broch's The Sleepwalkers while talking about The Man Without Qualities is overwhelming, notwithstanding all the obvious differences between them. In Broch's trilogy the somnambulists are the people who are trapped between the death of old value systems and birth of new ones which in Broch's view are becoming less and less ethical since the beginning of Renaissance. In the third part of the trilogy,chronicling the post-war chaos of Germany in the 1920s, there is an wonderful essay, interspersed with the narrative thread, about the disintegration of values. If we are to risk an oversimplification, the sleepwalkers Broch talk about are spiritually regressing at every juncture of history towards becoming, more and more, Men Without Qualities.

One can hardly argue with such a thoery if one is to look at some of the modern critical works and encounter the intellectual void, the total absence of any rigor, at the center of those works. An example in case is Joachim Köhler's Nietzsche and Wagner:A Lesson In Subjugation. It is a bit of celebrity sensationalism veiled in haphazard psychological pretensions and a forced and repetitive analogy to the Greek myth of Ariadne (and hence a theory about some intellectual-sexual labyrinth, mentioned ad nauseam!). Nietzsche is claimed to be a weak homosexual (without much proof but based on speculations about Wagner and Cosima's speculative remarks) who was originally exploited by Wagner to do mundane deeds insulting to Nietzsche the philosopher and the man. Apparently Wagner later singularly went after that same Nietsche because of his homosexuality. In a strange and twisted way, Cosima and Nietzsche are supposed to be kindred spiritis because of their oppressive childhoods which by the way, also opened them up for easy subjugation by Wagner. Nietzsche's works are not analyzed for what they are but what possible impact they might have had on Wagner. And the list goes on...

Lately I saw an wonderful Danish movie, The Inheritance (Director Per Fly), which chronicles the descent of a man into loneliness and spiritual disscoiation from his surroundings. A man who loses the things that he cared for and he built assiduously simply because of his inability to make moral decisions and own responsibility for them. Christoffer, to follow Musil literaly, is a modern day man without Qualities.

The Inheritance, in some superficial aspects, resembles Visconti's The Damned. The Damned also is about the control of a steel factory but the background is the power struggle of the post-WWI Germany and the movie ends immediately after 'The Night Of The Long Knives'. However admirable Visconit's camerawork might have been, I still think to judge by his otherwise lofty standard The Damned is a failure. There is too much kitsch, an overabundance of commonplace symbolism, that ruins the movie. A kind of hysterical extremity that ruins some of the later movies of Fellini too. But that is for another day...