This man, born exactly one hundred years ago today – on 6 November 1880 – this Austrian, Robert Musil – is he the last writer of a prior era, or the first writer of the era we inhabit now? Perhaps he is situated at their point of intersection.
It is not a settled fact that everyday reality and literature have anything to do with each other; neither the Renaissance nor the Baroque era, strictly speaking, assumed as much. Above all because, from the philosophical perspective, reality, in those days, was a volatile appearance; stability was only granted to perennial ideas. And when literature and the real do sustain some kind of relation, this draws, subtly, on the interconnections, the weave of multiple resonances, between external reality – the visible world – and its internal counterpart: the world of the text, which is not a double of the real, but its translation into another order, that of literary fiction. What captivates us, then, is not the world itself, but the world become literature. And this is what occurs in Musil.
Osmosis takes place between the writer and his protagonist, the mathematician Ulrich. Ulrich is the man without qualities, not so much a man without manly attributes as one lacking in all that might properly be considered pertinent to a man of the time: a man without properties – not physical, but moral ones – or, to put it otherwise, without characteristics, positive or negative. Ulrich is a neutral, an abstract man: the man of the idea, the idea made man. Ulrich breaks the current, the fabric of the world: while others participate, he observes. He is contemplative, but not passive. Analytical.
Ulrich is, though in a different way, as marginal, as strange, as intensely lucid as K., protagonist of Kafka’s major novels. Like K., he lives in a precise historical world: the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ritualistic, precise as a metronome, and at the same time bereft of genuine moral substance, this inwardly atrophied world recollects those Parisian ceremonies detailed by Proust. If it strikes us as unusual, this is largely because it crowns a different literary and philosophical tradition, and displaces the center of attention from the specter of the social, even from gradations of consciousness, to home in on the spirit of the age, which finds itself in technophiliac zeal.
It is a beautiful day in August of 1913 in Vienna when he begins The Man Without Qualities. The automobiles hurtle by; in an old palace, restored in successive phases, with a garden, lives Ulrich, exempt, disposable, the man without qualities, a spectator and nothing more. He is struggling to calculate, when we meet him for the first time, the immense quantity of energy a man requires to do nothing, to simply resist the psychic shock of living in a big city. The man without qualities has no sense of reality; he is unsuited to practical life. With a watch in his hand, he times the vain traffic on the street. Ten minutes have passed: Ulrich puts aside his watch and laughs. As he passes, he throws a blow at the punching bag hanging from the roof. In Musil’s world, actions are like this: violent spasms of futility amid the crude brilliance of the intellect.
6 November 1980