A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.
Robert Musil
All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!
Robert Musil
Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.
Robert Musil
Art peels kitsch off of life. Kitsch peels life off of language. And: The more abstract art becomes, the more it becomes art. These are two splendid syllogisms. If only we could resolve them!
Robert Musil
Crimes are the concentrated form, within sinners, of everything other people work off in little irregularities, in their imagination and in innumerable petty everyday acts and attitudes of spite and viciousness.
Robert Musil
Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?
Robert Musil
Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing?
Robert Musil
I am (spiritually and moral) exhausted.
Robert Musil
I have become too abstract and would like to use this diary to re-educate myself to the story-telling, through paying respect to daily life.
Robert Musil
If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.
Robert Musil
It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.
Robert Musil
It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!
Robert Musil
It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.
Robert Musil
Layer by layer art strips life bare.
Robert Musil
Life is living: you cannot describe it to someone who does not know it. It is friendship and enmity, enthusiasm and disenchantment, peristalsis and ideology.
Robert Musil
Life is to blame for everything.
Robert Musil
On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.
Robert Musil
Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.
Robert Musil
Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
Robert Musil
Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
Robert Musil
The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.
Robert Musil
The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.
Robert Musil
The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.
Robert Musil
Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.
Robert Musil
Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.
Robert Musil
What a backwards contention it is to claim that life is more important than art! Life is good as long as it holds up to art: that in life which cannot be employed for art's sake is kitsch!
Robert Musil
What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.
Robert Musil
A Writer With Qualities
Overqualified: Viennese chronicler Robert Musil
The restoration of Robert Musil's epic novel
'The Man Without Qualities'
By Harvey Pekar
Austrian writer Robert Musil's first novel, Young Torless, was published in 1906, and from then until several years ago, he was underappreciated. Gradually, though, Musil's been getting his due. With the recent publication by Knopf of the most complete version to date of his massive, unfinished, panoramic novel about Vienna on the eve of World War I, The Man Without Qualities, Musil threatens to become the most frequently discussed of all underrated authors, one whom everyone wants to take credit for discovering.
Certainly, Musil should be considered among the great fiction writers of our century, an author of great power and formidable intellect. The son of an engineering professor, Musil (1880-1942) delved into several fields before deciding to be an author. He went to military school as a teenager, then studied civil engineering and spent time in the army. Still uncertain about a career, he returned to school, getting a degree in philosophy in 1908.
Meanwhile, however, Young Torless, based on his experiences in the military academy, had been published and well received, and he decided to become a professional writer rather than an academic. He worked as an editor, critic and essayist but published few works of fiction. In addition to Young Torless and The Man Without Qualities, there is available, in English, Five Women, a superb and unfortunately overlooked volume of novellas, and a collection of short stories in the Eridanos anthology Posthumous Papers of a Living Author.
In some respects, the writing in Musil's novellas is more ambitious than that in The Man Without Qualities. His themes in Five Women are not only love and eroticism, which he seeks to explore from a woman's point of view, but also the life of the mind. A great deal of Five Women takes place inside his characters' minds. Some of his more abstract work might be considered stream-of-consciousness writing, depending upon one's definition of the term. Consider, in any event, this passage from the novella The Perfecting of a Love:
On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room. The objects all around held their breath, the light on the walls frozen into gold lace ... everything was a silence and a waiting and was there because of them. Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering ... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.
It's possible that Musil was influenced by another Austrian writer, Arthur Schnitzler, who wrote one of the first stream-of-consciousness novels, Lt. Gustl, in 1901. Schnitzler, a physician, was also profoundly concerned with psychological states. The impressionistic, intensely poetic quality of Musil's work, however, is not really characteristic of Schnitzler's writing. Whether he was aware of them or not, Musil's work shares a good deal in common with the French Symbolists.
Musil's work had an expressionistic side as well. His imagery, metaphors and similes are often highly original, due, in part, to his knowledge of science and technology. Note, for example, on the opening page of The Man Without Qualities:
Automobiles shot out of deep, narrow streets in the shadows of bright squares. Dark clusters of pedestrians formed cloudlike strings. Where more powerful lines of speed cut across their casual haste they clotted up, then trickled on faster and, after a few oscillations, resumed their steady rhythm. Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding here and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off and dissipating.
The protagonist of The Man Without Qualities, Ulrich, is in his early 30s, an engineer from a well-to-do family. Unmarried, physically attractive, socially prominent, he draws the attention of a variety of desirable women; he's had a string of mistresses. He possesses a keen intellect, however, which leads him to alternate truth-seeking and pleasure-seeking.
Musil, like Theodore Dreiser, uses his gigantic novel as a vehicle to express all manner of opinions and observations, philosophical, psychological and political, and to paint a portrait of the Hapsburg empire on the brink of destruction.
The work has a huge cast of characters and a number of themes. Among them is the Collateral Campaign, meant to celebrate the 70th year of the reign of Hapsburg emperor Franz Josef, a project in which Ulrich becomes involved.
Another theme involves a psychotic murderer of prostitutes, Moosbrugger, who sits in his cell awaiting a verdict for his crimes--will he be executed or imprisoned in an asylum? His case has caused a sensation in
In certain respects, author and character are detached observers and critics of humanity with somewhat similar educational and social backgrounds. Musil was touched but also amused by the social and economic scrambling and competitiveness he witnessed, and he often wrote in an ironic mode.
In the third volume of The Man Without Qualities, Ulrich and his younger sister, Agathe, discover each other after having been separated for years. They quickly form a mutual attraction, intellectually and sexually. Ulrich says to her, "Now I know what you are, you're my self love." More than one commentator has noted that the novel focuses on this motif of love as a form of self-realization. Indeed, later, Ulrich observes:
It goes back a very long way, this desire for a doppelgänger of the opposite sex, this craving for the love of a being that will be entirely the same as one's self, and yet another, distinct from one's self, a magical figure that is one's self and that does nevertheless remain a magical figure as well and is more than any figment of the imagination in that it has the life-breath of self-sufficiency and independence.
There are more than 632 pages of "posthumous papers" included at the end of the Knopf edition. Musil was a painstaking, even obsessive, writer who worked over his material again and again and experimented with taking the novel in different directions before making a final decision.
Perhaps he wouldn't have completed The Man Without Qualities if he lived to be 90. Currently, some critics are ranking The Man Without Qualities with Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past. I question this judgment. Musil, though a great and original author, did not compare to Joyce, Proust or Russian symbolist Andrey Bely as an innovator, and his writing is sometimes heavy-handed.
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