The Man without Qualities: Book Review
It’s unfinished. Whatever you read about it, you’ll learn that much.
Musil himself reportedly suggested that the work was not so much a novel as an essay that grew past its boundaries — boundaries presumably being the size and scope of what a “novel” or even a “book” can be. Perhaps it couldn’t be finished: “unfinishedness,” in any case , has become one the book’s own Eigenschaften, its intrinsic qualities.
I have no quarrel with the translation of “Eigenschaft” as “quality.” There are reasonable alternatives in English, say “trait” or “feature”. But none of the three convey the stronger sense of something singular and personal carried by the German word “eigen” — roughly, “self”. (“Eigenliebe” is self-love, or narcissism, “Eigentum” is property or possession), as in “The Man without his OWN qualities,” or “The Man without a Sense of Self.” This very slightly different emphasis seemed to me to take “The Man without Definition” as a working title, and in turn to reconsider the novel as the account of someone whose social context is in turmoil, incoherent, and whose identity is therefore necessarily unfinished.
It took me weeks to read. There was time to “inhabit” Vienna 1913 — meet people, discover details of their personalities and their relationships, their histories, assumptions and positions, hopes and fears, their search for common value and their experience of stark, unbridgeable differences, all continually changing. “The man…” of the title…Ulrich…is continually changing too. We are continually accumulating experiences — both past and present — with the ongoing challenge of absorbing them into the sense of a coherent character. “The Man” of the title, is of respectable family with strong social connections, a good education, financial security, but somehow “between positions,” having studied philosophy and literature, begun a career in mathematics and become disenchanted with it. He analyses everything — people, institutions, organizations and ideas — but sees himself apart from them, at a distance. Because he projects the figure of a young man of great promise with no immediate obligations he is drawn into a sort of public-relations project, an effort to define and promote Austria internationally. It puts him in contact with an extraordinary spectrum of people, and gives him a kind of platform in which to exercise both his considerable powers of observation and analysis and, often, his excellent sense of humour. Like a huge weather system, the structure expands, grows increasingly complex and never quite arrives at a stable configuration. Every aspect of humans’ concerns seem to enter Ulrich’s considerations — gender, class, nationality, profession, family — each having weight, value, but none capable of crystallizing a coherent identity from the turbulence.
