Last night after I came back through the blizzard to the apartment, I finished the final 30 or so pages of Volume 1 of The Man Without Qualities, the modernist classic by Austrian Robert Musil. Written in the 1930s, the novel takes a somewhat satirical look at Vienna in the years leading up to the first world war, when a committee is assembled under the leadership of striving aristocratic idealist (the wife of a mid-level diplomat) to celebrate the 75th year in power of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph; the committee becomes a highly publicized (and eventually political) affair as different factions attempt to promote their own visions of a unifying idea to celebrate Austria (e.g., The Year of Austria, The Year of Peace, The Year of Nietzsche, etc.) and later to put this idea into practice (e.g., parades to soup kitchens are proposed).
The chapters move between perspectives from an ensemble of characters, all of whom are somehow tied to one primary character (Ulrich, or the actual ‘man without qualities,’ as his friends refer to him). Ulrich is intellectually gifted but rather aimless and unmotivated; at the prodding of his father, he gets a job as the secretary to an important count, who then assigns him to work on the committee, the leader of which (the diplomat’s wife) also happens to be a distant cousin. He is skeptical of the committee’s ability to accomplish anything, and in this way serves as a foil to his cousin as they discuss themes related to life in the modern era, ranging from whether great ideas are still possible (and related questions of genius and beauty), to fame and success, to how one should navigate the emotional waters of love and sex and fidelity, all of which form currents that run under the more superficial machinations of the committee. Subplots involving an insane murderer who may or may not be condemned to death and the countess’s maid and her affair with an African-born servant of a Prussian man who also serves on the committee allow Musil to examine ideas related to class and servitude and responsibility (i.e., how in the modern era, we can order or pay others to do things that would be too odious to be carried out on our own, and the larger implications of this reality).
As you might expect from the title, there’s a detached quality to the prose and observations that generally makes it feel as much like a philosophical treatise as a literary drama (I mean this in a good way); it’s less likely that you will be ‘swept away’ by the unfolding story here and more likely that you will find moments of enlightenment and beauty in Musil’s discussion of his characters’ psychologies and their relation to the society in which they live, particularly in his understated but often-breathtaking use of simple but poetic metaphor, e.g., ‘irrationalism…haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.’
Near the end of the book, I was struck by a theme that I think ties Musil to Proust, and which I’ve seen most clearly elucidated by the philosopher Richard Rorty, namely the idea that one of life’s goals is to make sense of the inevitable chaos of our lives, to create a retrospective narrative, no matter how random or nonsensical events might have seemed at the time we encountered (or more often: endured) them. Musil: “[I]t struck [Ulrich] that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one’s life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: ‘First this happened and then that happened….’…. Terrible things may have have happened to [someone], he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as contented as if the sun were warming his belly. This is the trick the novel artificially takes into account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway in pouring rain or crunching through the snow and ice at ten below zero, the reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if this eternally dependable narrative device…were not already part and parcel of life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers.”
Or, as it occurred to me as I watched the snow flying across the rooftops of Washington Heights last night: we live half of our lives as if we were staggering blindly through a blizzard, and the other half trying to shovel our way out when the wind calms down, giving us the chance to see where we are before the next storm hits.
BOOK NEWS ALERT: Check it out, The Metropolis Case was selected as ‘required reading’ by the New York Post this weekend! Tomorrow (12/28) is the official ‘on-sale’ date…order on-line here or take a stroll to your local bookstore to buy the real thing.
