Robert Musil is the great also-ran, the Pete Best of modernism, forever overshadowed by his contemporaries Marcel Proust and James Joyce. He is, along with Eugene Ionesco and perhaps Curzio Malaparte, one of that strange class of authors it sounds sophisticated to confess one hasn’t read. This is a shame, because Musil anticipated our uniquely outlandish present, which even contemporary novelists have struggled and largely failed to portray. Though his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, is now more than 70 years old, its parables of blinkered utopianism, all-consuming doubt, and intellectualized violence all feel fresher and more timely than Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte or Dave Eggers’s ham-handed Trump satire The Captain and the Glory.
Musil’s career is an admonition about the dangers of perfectionism. Although he published relatively few works in his lifetime, he left behind thousands of pages of diaries, drafts, unfinished chapters, and alternative versions. In the early 1920s, he was well along with The Twin Sister, a novel that introduced many of the themes and characters of The Man Without Qualities in miniature. Yet he eventually consigned it to the rubbish bin as a result of writer’s block, illness, and the 1924 publication of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which hinted at a new direction for Musil but fell short of his ambitions.
The first two parts of Musil’s magnum opus, when they appeared in 1930, introduced a revolutionary conception of the novel. He sought to represent ideas as they are felt, instinctively and emotionally, “in that vast sensuality with which life simultaneously satisfies all the rival contradictions in its measureless body.” Though not an irrationalist, he suggested that reason may guide people along paths dictated by urges they neither recognize nor understand. The Man Without Qualities, set in the waning days of Habsburg Vienna, examines these themes through a collection of eccentric personalities brought together by the Parallel Campaign, a scheme intended to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Emperor Franz Josef’s rule but vague enough to accommodate any number of more or less absurd idealistic proposals.
Ulrich, the novel’s protagonist and Musil’s alter ego, is not only a man without qualities but also a set of qualities without a man. At times, he presents himself as an unmoored consciousness navigating a series of possible perspectives; at others, he is a mere voice for contradictory stances devoid of any moral or intellectual core. He is, in this way, an embodiment of the infirmities of Europe on the verge of World War I, of a people who prize the possession of convictions over their substance. When Ulrich asks his collaborator Diotima whether she has some sense of what “truly great idea” they should “bring to life” with the Parallel Campaign, Musil notes:
The death of Ulrich’s father at the end of Part II announces a personal renewal. Weary of the knowing cynicism that suffuses the earlier sections of the book, Ulrich returns home to put his inheritance in order with the thought of devoting himself to something more solemn than the “vacation from life” with which he began the novel.
What this would be, and where it would lead, remains an open question. A third part of The Man Without Qualities was published in 1933, but it is inconclusive, and Musil himself considered it rushed. He withdrew the 20 chapters that followed it when they were in galleys in 1938. By then, he was penniless, ill, and living in exile in Switzerland. He would complain that the book weighed on him “like a pair of handcuffs,” yet he continued to revise it until his death three years later. “I have not gotten further with [it], but I hope deeper,” he wrote to a former editor.
Agathe, Or the Forgotten Sister, translated by Joel Agee, reshuffles a selection of this later material to extract from it a novel in the round. The plot is simple: Ulrich, back at his father’s home, meets his sister, Agathe, whom he barely knows or remembers. After arranging their father’s funeral, sharing reminiscences, and altering the old man’s will to deprive Agathe’s hated husband of any part in the bequest, they move back to Vienna to pursue a life of nonconformism and muted passion, channeled into philosophical discussions about love.
Agathe is a bold project but not an entirely convincing one. The omission of intervening chapters, even those present in the editions of The Man Without Qualities published in Musil’s lifetime, reduces the book’s broad cast of characters to a duet at the expense of nuance, suspense, and occasionally coherence. Compared with Burton Pike’s and Sophie Wilkins’s 1995 translation of the same material, Agee’s at times feels dubious: Ulrich’s donning of “a pajama-like leisure suit” will give readers visions of wing collars and Sansabelt pants, while substituting “boxing ball” for “punching bag” recalls Ted Cruz’s “basketball ring” gaffe from 2016.
In a letter to Paul Auster, J.M. Coetzee observed that when sex lost the aura of the sacred, incest ceased to be a concern of high literature. Certainly, the will-they-won’t-they tension that must have gripped Musil’s early audiences no longer suffices to bear readers through Agathe’s 400 pages. One longs for them to get on with it, to embrace or reject their life of vice, to stop talking and do something. But there is a further structural problem that Musil seems never to have capably resolved. The Man Without Qualities is a chronicle of disaggregation: It lays bare the gulfs between values and deeds, self and self-image, the real and purported ends of individuals, groups, and institutions. By the time of his father’s death, Ulrich’s insights in this regard come to trouble him, and he looks to love as a possible avenue toward integrity and authenticity. Unfortunately, only in the fragment “Loving is Not Simple” does Musil begin to ask himself what love is. His meditations owe a great deal to On Love by Stendhal (whom his wife translated into German), and his haziness on the subject is a step down from the sociological rigor evident elsewhere in his work.
Despite his relativizing throughout The Man Without Qualities, Ulrich never frees himself from the quintessential moral question of how a person should live, and in Agathe, the appearance of a priggish figure, the teacher and sermonizer Lindner, may offer clues as to the nature of the purity Ulrich comes to long for. Critics don’t have much sympathy for Lindner, who is a grating goody-two-shoes, but Musil’s figures are rarely one-dimensional, and I doubt the author’s tongue is too far in his cheek when he has Lindner tell the suicidal Agathe, who has confessed her wish to divorce her husband:
Musil’s diaries are filled with mystically tinged reflections on love, that “other situation” that represented liberation from the burdens of selfhood. To depict such a state in a novel that spends hundreds of pages ridiculing sincerity was perhaps an impossible task. As an attempt, Agathe retains a measure of interest. It is a meander, an object of contemplation, a possible aim for a possible novel, like The Man Without Qualities as a whole.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
