Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

 So before I read this, I read another, wholly unrelated novel, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda.  It's considered one of the great Italian novels, or so they say; a sort of existential murder mystery.  I ended up not caring for it that much; you can see what people see in it, but there is just SO MUCH endless digression to god knows what point, that in the end I thought it was just okay.  

But my point is, it's also a very dense novel.  So before I started I thought; self, if you're going to tackle this, you've gotta be disciplined about it.  You  can't just fuck around and take six months to finish it and get little out of it.  So, I was: I read it in a week or so, and I felt quite good about that, because I feel like my literary interest, for whatever reason, was waning a bit; now I feel good about it again.  So anyway, feeling thus refreshed, I decided, what the fuck, I will tackle this German novel that is seventeen hundred seventy-four pages of small, densely-set text.  It's one of those books I knew about and vaguely wanted to have read for quite a while, but after Proust, I wasn't sure I had it in me to tackled another meganovel.  But it turns out I did!  In almost exactly two months.  Boom.

It's divided into four sections.  The first, "An Introduction of Sorts," is...I don't know; maybe you can guess?  It gets into gear with the second section, "Pseudoreality Prevails."  The story novel is that it's 1913, which obviously is meaningful; there's Ulrich No-Last-Name, the titular Man, a former army officer and scientist who is basically withdrawn, trying to figure out what's going on, but being without qualities means that he doesn't have fixed ideas the way other people do and feels generally ambivalent about things.  This is all in Austria, Musil was Austrian, and what's happening, mainly, is that Ulrich is working with some other people on this so-called "Parallel Campaign" which is meant to celebrate the seventieth jubilee of Franz Joseph's reign--dang, that guy did some reignin', so they want to figure out, like, how to best represent and glorify Austria, as compared to Germany.  Other characters include Diotima, Ulrich's cousin and a kind of intellectual socialite; Arnheim, a business magnate and middlebrow writer; Clarisse and Walter, a couple being torn apart by their various incompatibilities and by the fact that she's slowly going mad; the decidedly Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque General Stumm; and of course Moosbrugger, an insane serial rapist and murderer, whom other characters, especially Clarisse, grow unhealthily obsessed with.  There is a LOT of back-and-forth philosophizing, as you'd expect, on a wide range of topics relating to history, emotion and how to live.  The Parallel Committee goes resolutely nowhere; no one can decide on anything, and they mostly just form subcommittees and things while various people internally debate whether or not to have affairs (usually not).

In the third part, "Into the Millennium (The Criminals)," the Parallel Campaign goes on the back burner as it's mainly devoted to introducing us to Ulrich's sister Agathe, who was unalluded to in the previous parts.  She and Ulrich are more or less strangers, having not seen each other since early childhood, but they are brought together by the death of their father.  Agathe is similar to Ulrich in many ways, but feels if anything more alien to the world around her.  She's widowed (her first husband and only love having died of typhus a week into their marriage) and married to an intellectual type who isn't a bad person or anything but whom she doesn't love.  Agathe and Urlich have this kind of mystic relationship that simultaneously is and isn't incestuous while somehow going past that.  It really has to be read to be understood.

Did I like all this?  Well...I loved it.  Astounding stuff.  Who knows if me liking it so much more than Proust is down to something in the text itself or just my attitude, but I tend to go with the former.  Proust's characters, in general, are much more dickish than the ones here; Ulrich is meant to be a mixture of likable and unlikable, whereas Marcel in Proust is just unbearable (it's obvious that some percentage of this long-winded philosophizing is just off-the-dome stuff that he doesn't really believe or at any rate hasn't thought about, which is a pretty entertaining dynamic).

Hmm, did I say there were four parts?  Well, as you do or don't know, this is unfinished; Musil worked on it steadily from 1921 to 1942, then died (in Switzerland, in exile from the Stephen Miller forebears).  Dammit.  To tell the truth, though, given how obsessive he was, I have my doubts that he would have finished it even with another twenty years.  He doesn't seem like the finishing type.  

So the first three sections of the book were published by Musil in his lifetime.  He didn't want to, and regretted it afterwards, since he wanted to keep revising, but money reasons made it necessary.  And "Into the Millennium" was published in 1933, so there's at least nine years of previously unpublished material.  And so there's a fourth part, "From the Posthumous Papers," comprising material from all phases of his writing.  That adds another six hundred pages right there.

You might be asking: okay, but do I really NEED to read this extra stuff?  It's not even finalized, so who knows how much of it Musil would've meant to publish, so can't I just read the novel "proper," if you want to call it that, and be done?  Well, I was agnostic before reading it, but I'm here to tell you, no, you cannot.  Sorry, but them's the breaks.  Actually, I found a bit of the early part rocky going.  It seems a bit more didactic than the main text; there are a number of chapters that consist just of "and then Agathe kept reading Ulrich's journal, as follows:" which is a bit on the indigestible side.  But believe me, things really, really do crank up, leading to some of the best stuff in the novel: Ulrich and Agathe away on vacation!  Clarisse going mad!  Extremely ill-advised Moosbrugger stuff!  A fairly gruesome suicide!  I mean, I suppose if I had never deviated from my goal of reading it to have read it, I might've justified skipping this stuff, but if you actually enjoy the book to any degree, you can't miss it.  Well, you might miss the last fifty pages or so, consisting of just short, disjointed notes, but hey, if you got this far, why not see it through?

Of course, the somewhat slippery thing is that there's really no way to know how much and which parts of this would have been included in Musil's final conception of the novel, if there be such a thing.  Normally we accept that if someone writes something really outre in a draft of a book but then decides not to publish it, it's not part of the novel.  But that somehow doesn't seem to apply to Musil, who really didn't want to publish ANY of it and whose final vision was never wholly revealed (a lot of plotlines just sort of stop with no resolution or intentional non-resolution).  It adds this very weird aura to the book.  It's not like many other things I've read.

I had a one-volume copy of Musil lying around, which only includes the first three sections.  I had gotten it because, I guess, that way seemed less intimidating.  But as soon as I knew I was going to be into this, I got the two-volume edition, and I have to object in very strong terms: there is no reason for the one-volume tome to exist.  Ridiculous.  Well, I guess there is one reason: I dropped off the single-volume edition at a free little library.  Somebody did take it, so the hope is that they'll start reading it, have the same revelation I did, get the two-volume edition, return it to the library for someone else, and the cycle can continue.

I started this in mid-September, and I was a little worried that the American people in their wisdom electing a nazi with a nazi staff would throw me off my game.  But I have to say, it didn't; consolation through art may not be super-helpful practically speaking, but we do what we need to do.  We have to stay sane somehow, and if reading a massive Austrian novel is what it takes, that's what you gotta do.