VLVL2 (15): The Robert Musil Story

[umberto rossi]

In data 26 May 2004, verso le 14:30, dedalus204 at comcast.net si trovò 
a scrivere su VLVL2 (15): The Robert Musil Story:

> I am unfamiliar with the Musil work, although I know it's been compared to
> Mann's _The Magic Mountain_.  Would Otto (or anyone else) care to
> enlighten us on _The Man Without Qualities_, as well as its relation to
> the Pee-wee gag?

Comparing it to Mann's novel is quite misleading. Mann was deeply 
interested in mythology and anthropology, and flirted with 
conservative nationalism during W.W.I but was too old to join the 
army. While Musil took part in the war and then was quite critical of 
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like other Austrian writers of the 1st 
half of the 20th century, he's got anyway mixed feelings about the 
Imperial and Royal state. 

The novel is highly ironic, and deals with the planning of an 
undetermined event that should celebrate the Habsburg Family and the 
Empire, which, since the novel has been written after the collapse of 
the Empire (1918), is highly ironic in itself. A wealth of characters 
is involved in this grotesque cabal, called the Parallel Action, 
whose purpose and scope nobody can actually understand, not even 
those who started it. Sounds like the Trystero, or the 00000 rocket. 
I guess Musil was a quite important source of ideas for Pynchon, one 
of those writers who are just too big for a single country...

There is also something slightly entropic in Musil's novel, which has 
been written by a learned man who was a philosopher and a scientist. 
Maybe he was too good a philosopher to be an accomplished novelist, 
and some parts of the novel read like a philosophical essay, but 
Musil is so clever you can forgive him anything. The issue of entropy 
in Musil has never been discusses afaik, but I'm no Musil specialist. 
As you read the huge novel (I guess the comparison with Mann is only 
due to the fact that they both wrote in German and both books are 
huge), you have a distinct feeling of thihgs getting more and more 
complex, of disorder overwhelming any plan the characters in the 
novel may have devised, etc. Set in the years before W.W.I--we are 
more or less in Godolphin's territory--the novel foreshadows the 
dissolution of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the intellectual 
koiné which relied on that political entity. Don't forget that that  
multinationational empire gave us Kafka, Wittgenstein, Freud, 
Boltzmann, Kraus, Musil, Kokoshka, Schiele, Schonberg, Berg, Webern, 
Klimt & many others.

I might add much more, but we might get far from TRP.

umberto rossi
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