the man w/out qualities

[Dan Schmidt]

Reiner Haehnle responds to:
: Can anyone dis' or recommend Musil's The Man Without Qualities as I am
: considering reading the beast, but Good Gravy, 1800 pages is quite a load
: for this eternal untermensching churl...

| I first read MoE (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) thirteen years ago. It
| is still one of my all-time favourite books. I continue to read a
| chapter or two now and then.
| 
| Like GR, for me this is a book I can come back to time and again. Each
| re-reading reveals new and surprising details.
| 
| BTW, at the end of the second volume of the German edition a bunch of
| early stages of chapters, variants and incomplete chapters are
| collected. It gives a fascinating view of Musil's workshop. Some
| chapters he reworked dozens of times. I hope they bothered to include
| some of this stuff in the American edition.
| 
| Perhaps I should also mention that Musil could not complete the
| book. He died in the midst of working on it and an ending was not even
| in sight...
| 
| I am not sure how well the extraordinary atmosphere created in the
| book is preserved by the translation (I read it in German), but I
| recall somebody mentioning that the translation is quite good.


I read The Man Without Qualities last year, though I must admit that I
stopped once I got to the addendum of unpublished stuff (around 1100
pages in).

It's really good.  It started out great, surprisingly pre-postmodern
with a sardonic authorial voice poking its way in all the time, but
that seemed to fade after the first hundred pages or so.  My interest
was starting to flag around the end of book 2, but it picked up again
enough to make it to the end.

Lots of great little essays scattered throughout; in fact, that was my
favorite part of the book.  The plot itself doesn't amount to much.

This is the translation that came out last year, which was critically
very well received.  You might want to check if there's a paperback
version coming out any time soon; the hardcover was around $50.  It
does include around 600 pages of unpublished work in various states of
completion (from entire sequences of finished chapters to one-sentence
notes).

When reading it, I typed in a few passages that struck me.  Here's
one:

   For some reason newspapers are not the laboratories and
   experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the
   public's great benefit, but usually only its warehouses and stock
   exchanges.  If he were alive today, Plato - to take him as an
   example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the
   greatest thinker who ever lived - would certainly be ecstatic about
   a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new
   idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of
   the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime,
   while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out
   instantaneously for its content of reason and reality.  He would
   have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that
   heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively
   that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists
   when talking to their children or employees.  And of course if
   Plato were to walk suddenly into a news editor's office today and
   prove himself to be indeed that great author who died over two
   thousand years ago, he would be a tremendous sensation and would
   instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers.  If he were
   then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in
   three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories,
   perhaps even turn one or the other of his older works into a film,
   he could undoubtedly do very well for himself for a considerable
   period of time.  The moment his return had ceased to be news,
   however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his
   well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the
   editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column
   on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but
   in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember
   the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry,
   but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so,
   because there were so many other good writers to be considered.
   And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they hand
   done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of
   European publicists but still was a bit outdated.

Dan Schmidt  |  dfan at lglass.com  |  http://www2.lglass.com/~dfan