by Robert Musil
Agathe . . . found it very understandable that nothing could be understood, and replied: “I suggest you look into a mirror at night sometime: it’s dark, it’s black, you see almost nothing; and yet this nothing is very clearly something other than the nothing of the rest of the darkness. You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some remnant of the ability to shimmer, and yet you see nothing!”
Ulrich’s response to his sister’s advice is to laugh at her “readiness to strip knowledge of all its honor; he himself was far from thinking that concepts have no value and was well aware of what they accomplish, even if he did not exactly act as if he did.”
We are not told how Agathe felt about the laugh, but one can’t help wondering if Ulrich isn’t being obtuse in his thinking as well as his feeling. Of course concepts have value, and of course they accomplish a great deal, but they cannot open the gates to the liberated state in which self-centered existence comes to an end with the realization of the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Agathe knows this with an instinctive clarity that tends to elude her theorizing brother, though she does not seem to know that she knows it.
•
Ulrich thinks of himself as “a believer who just didn’t believe anything,” but that is not entirely true. He believes in possibility. He believes, in particular, in the possibility of translating the other condition into a lasting state, not in heaven but in Vienna, or wherever any given man or woman happens to be. That would be the Millennium. It is, ultimately, for all human beings—if not now, then in a future that may never come—that Ulrich aspires to bring heaven down to earth, because the eternal round of seinesgleichen geschieht is not worthy of a species that is capable of such beatitude as he experiences with Agathe in their walks through the city.
•
Despite her natural aptitude for non-conceptual gnosis, Agathe emulates her brother’s gift for clear-eyed rational thought. She depends on Ulrich to point the way to the Millennium, and he does, by engaging with her in loosely discursive philosophical inquiries that range from questions of ethics and the nature of feelings to the baneful role that chance plays in favoring the statistical average over individual genius in determining the fate of humanity. All these themes are contiguous to the other reality, and Agathe burns with impatience for her brother to take a decisive step over that border. (Perhaps she believes that then their union will become indissoluble.) Ulrich, however, moves from one tentative proposition to another, even one that may contradict the first, always stopping short of a definitive conclusion. That is the experimental method he has learned from science and is not willing to forfeit for the facile certainties of dogmatic belief and emotional conviction. But for Agathe, doubt, necessary though it is as a safeguard against illusion, threatens to undermine faith itself. She carries with her a vial of poison with which she will kill herself if hope dies again.
Her instinctive approach to their common quest is diametrically opposite to his. She is ardent. The image of fire in its various manifestations shows up frequently when her inner state and even her appearance is described. As one of the four classic symbolic elements, fire is action itself. It does not hesitate. Its movements are unprepared by any calculus of motive or conscious design. And of course, in its innocent heedlessness, fire can also destroy.
3
Ulrich: “It is an everlasting pity that there are no trained scientists who have visions!”
Agathe, tempting him: “Do you think they could?”
Ulrich: “I don’t know. Maybe it could happen to me!” Then, hearing his words, “he smiled in order to limit their meaning.”
It is hard to escape the impression that Agathe’s and Ulrich’s voices are expressing temptations and anxieties in Musil’s own consciousness, and that by giving birth to Agathe from Ulrich’s hyperintellectual head, Musil introduced a muse who helps not only Ulrich but his author to talk about aspects of mind that are not accessible to ordinary consciousness.
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Every one of the gnomic sayings cited by Agathe as she peruses Ulrich’s books comes from a single volume, Martin Buber’s Ecstatic Confessions, an anthology of mystical writings from many traditions and historical periods.§ I don’t believe it is farfetched to regard the tale of Ulrich and Agathe’s voyage to the Millennium as Musil’s ecstatic confession. He could not pour it out in bursts of rhapsodic surrender. It had to be wrested from constraints set by his training in, and fealty to, science and mathematics, and by the no less exacting artistic deliberations that governed the composition of every metaphor and the shape and rhythm of every sentence. The “and” in his watchword, “precision and soul,” is a sign of uncompromising, almost ascetic severity. But if there is any question that Musil belongs in the company of mystical poet-philosophers like Hildegard von Bingen or Meister Eckhart, I propose a reading of the last chapter, “Breaths of a Summer Day,” in the light of such a comparison. Here time, which flowed like a slow-curving stream in earlier chapters, debouches into eternity. With a few concrete particulars—a garden, two deck chairs, sunlight and shade, a man, a woman, and a steady drift of blossoms in the air—an imponderable mystery is invoked. The presence of the miracle is never named, yet it displays itself with stunning simplicity—not as a deciphered riddle but as revelation through words.
•
Musil died of a stroke an hour after a morning’s work on this chapter. His wife found him collapsed in a bathtub with a smile on his face that she described as spöttisch, which could be translated as “mocking” or “ironic.” I find the second meaning more plausible.
The handwritten manuscript of “Breaths of a Summer Day,” the latest of many versions he wrote over several years (not all of them under this title), is studded with deletions and inserts and stops on a note of inconclusion. Like the great novel of which it forms a part, it is a magnificent fragment.
—JOEL AGEE
*The word translated above as “intimate kinship” is Geschwisterlichkeit. It is usually translated as “fraternity,” but the root of the German word is Schwester, meaning “sister.” In such subtle ways is Agathe prefigured—announced as it were—early on in the novel.
†Hagauer is the name of her husband.
‡The danger of falling prey to phantasmagorias is mentioned again and again, but at no point are we permitted to conclude from Ulrich and Agathe’s exchanges that they are deluded.
§It may not be insignificant, in view of Agathe’s portrayal, that a great deal of space is given in Buber’s book to the testimony of medieval Christian women.
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
I FIRST read The Man Without Qualities sixty-one years ago, which happens to be the span of Robert Musil’s life, when I was eighteen years old and living in the part of Berlin that at the time still called itself the capital of the German Democratic Republic. I found the thick, handsomely bound volume on my stepfather’s desk, among other books published in the West that he had ordered for possible review in a literary magazine he edited. I asked his permission to read it. I couldn’t have understood much of the book, but I read it with tremendous excitement. I think what bowled me over at first was its sheer stylistic brilliance and wit and the way even the more foolish characters spoke like philosophers and sometimes like poets. But the true entrancement set in with Agathe’s arrival. I had never read anything that could compare for sheer erotic charm with the exquisite balance of forbiddenness and enticement that developed between this brother and sister. And there was something else for which I had no preparation. It was the news (I took it to be news, not an artifice of fiction) of a mystical state that had nothing to do with the worlds of politics and culture that surrounded me, and that bestowed on those lucky souls who discovered it a fulfillment of happiness and love that was unmatched by anything in ordinary experience. I believed in this “other condition” and was convinced that I already had intimations of it. It was of course Musil’s prose that made me believe it.
Being invited to translat
e precisely those late chapters from The Man Without Qualities was a surprising and welcome gift. It was an opportunity to reacquaint myself with a work and an author that had shaped my own vocation as a writer like probably no other. The reacquaintance proved, in some important respects, to be a discovery. The enchantment I had experienced as a boy was no doubt due to my own receptive capacity, but on the other end, so to speak, was a versatility and subtlety of language I was not experienced enough as a reader to fully appreciate.
There exists a theory according to which, in fiction, particularities of language are not crucial, so that if one has read Dostoyevsky in translation, one can legitimately say that one has read Dostoyevsky; whereas the equivalent cannot be said if one has read Pushkin in translation, the reason being that the language of poetry entails rhythm and metaphor and other tropes of poetic diction that are not easy to carry across into another language. This theory may have merit in a general way, but it makes rather short shrift of prose fiction as a form of poetry, and it certainly does not apply to a novelist like Musil, who so clearly requires and rewards close attention not only to what he says but to how he says it. I can’t think of another way to do justice to this immensely resourceful stylist than to attend to both the literal and the figural meanings of his words, and to strive to re-create in English the shape, the rhythm, the web of associations and implications, the nuances of irony, the lyricism, the architectural equilibrium, the pleasures to the ear as well as the mind in the composition of any sentence he wrote. There is also at times a strange newness of meaning—to borrow the philosopher Owen Barfield’s prime criterion for poetic beauty—that startles not only the English but also the German reader in Musil’s prose. With it, inevitably, comes some oddness in expression. Musil hardly ever employs a common turn of phrase, for instance, without varying it in a subtle and unexpected way. It is a temptation for a translator to mitigate strangeness in the original with something more familiar. In my view, this temptation must be resisted.
Such criteria unavoidably impose on the translator of Musil strictures and anxieties not dissimilar to those that tormented the notoriously self-exacting author. Again and again, as my work progressed, and despite a comfortable deadline, little zephyrs of unease beset me: Could this or that detail not have been rendered more accurately, or more aptly? At one point, to choose one of many examples, Ulrich says to his sister: “Das Verstehen macht einem unstillbaren Staunen Platz.” The adjective unstillbar, derived from the verb stillen, which denotes the settling of a baby’s distress or hunger by suckling, here forms an alliterative unit with its noun, Staunen. That word presented me with a first puzzle: Was it “amazement” or “astonishment,” or was it “wonder”? Feeling out the gradations of meaning in those three words, and comparing them with the vibration of Staunen in the passage in which the sentence appears, I chose “astonishment.” For unstillbar, “unquenchable,” “insatiable,” and “unappeasable” offered themselves, but they all implied a voraciousness or greed that I didn’t hear in the German word with its infantine connotation. I settled, uncomfortably, for “ceaseless astonishment.” Months later, after a Google search for unstillbar in a variety of contexts, I saw that I had been mistaken: a hungry baby is indeed voracious, and unstillbar is very adequately translated as “unquenchable.” I mentioned this to a friend, who suggested “unslakable” as an alternative: “After all,” he said, “doesn’t a mother slake her baby’s thirst rather than quench it?” And so, in the end, “Understanding gives way to unslakable astonishment,” odd as it sounds, seemed the best possible translation for the equally odd combination of words in Musil’s sentence.
Several excellent translators have previously applied their skill and imagination to translating all but two of the chapters included in this volume: Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser in the first English-language edition of The Man Without Qualities in 1953 (which comprised only the chapters published during Musil’s lifetime), and Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike in the 1996 edition by Alfred A. Knopf. It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the advantage to me, as their successor, of being able to consult their approaches to some difficult problems—not to crib them but to sharpen, by their relative success at or distance from ideal fidelity, my perception of the challenge posed by the German text. In a few instances, when there sprang out at me from their pages an ingenious and, it seemed, irreplaceable solution, rather than settle for something less felicitous, I adopted theirs and acknowledged it in an endnote.
—J.A.
EDITORIAL NOTE
ROBERT Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is, notoriously, unfinished. Unlike that other seminal masterpiece of the first half of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, there is no climactic passage that satisfies the reader by making sense of all that has come before. In fact, it is quite unclear what an ending might have looked like, and Musil had different thoughts at various stages of the book’s genesis without clearly settling on an answer. Thousands of pages of manuscript exist from different periods of the book’s composition, including chapters that Musil was working on when he died unexpectedly in 1942. The publishing history of these drafts is complex both in German and in English, and many English-speaking readers do not explore beyond the chapters that had been published in Musil’s lifetime.
Some two-thirds into the published chapters of The Man Without Qualities, the focus of the book changes with the arrival of Agathe, the sister of Ulrich, the man without qualities. As George Steiner writes in his essay “The Unfinished” (from The New Yorker, April 17, 1995), “what was previously a kaleidoscope narrows to a laser.” In both the published chapters and their continuation, which he was working on when he died, Musil changes his emphasis from the political and social satire that dominates the book until that point and turns the novel’s philosophical inquiry into the search for a viable way to “be” in a modern world where the available modes of existence have lost their value. Musil explores what it is to lead an authentic life, even if that means contravening social norms. This exploration has an explicitly mystical character. It is shown through the burgeoning relationship between brother and sister, who withdraw from society and engage in a series of dialogues that they themselves conceive of as a spiritual experiment.
Agathe consists of a selection of these chapters, two of which have not previously appeared in English. Together they stand as a remarkable exploration of the human condition by one of the greatest of twentieth-century writers.
On the Selection
Two sections of The Man Without Qualities were published in Musil’s lifetime, in 1930 and 1933, and he was still working on the novel when he died nearly a decade later. In 1938, he had withdrawn from publication a set of chapters that had been set up by the printers in galley proof as a continuation of the chapters published in 1933; these were the sections of the novel he was revising when he died. In addition over the years he left many thousands of pages of manuscript presenting alternative versions of the novel’s key plots. In German, a number of different editorial approaches have been taken to these drafts, starting with Martha Musil’s publication of 1943. It was not until the comprehensive Klagenfurter Ausgabe (Klagenfurt Edition, CD/online) of Musil’s complete works that transcriptions of all of his manuscript workings were made readily available.*
In choosing the sequence of the chapters that make up Agathe, the editorial approach has been to favor narrative continuity over completeness. Episodes involving Ulrich and Agathe in chapters that include the cast of characters from earlier parts of the book have been left aside as their inclusion was not essential to creating a coherent continuous sequence and would have involved substantial editorial interference. One exception has been made in chapter 22 where the dialogues between Ulrich and Agathe seemed too important to leave out. Other than in this chapter, a minimal amount of editing of what Musil actually wrote has been necessary in order to avoid references to story lines and characters that are not included in our selection.
Chapters 1 to 22 of Agathe are drawn from part 3 of The Man Without Qualities, which was published in 1933, during Musil’s lifetime. Chapters 23 to 30 are the first eight of the Druckfahnen (galley proof) chapters he withdrew from publication in 1938, in which he subsequently made stylistic and other revisions but which he did not alter drastically before he died. Chapters 31 to 36 are from the manuscript continuations of galley chapters that Musil reworked significantly in 1940–1942 during his exile in Switzerland; in fact he was working on Agathe’s chapter 36, “Breaths of a Summer Day,” on the day he died. Chapters 31 and 32 have not been translated in any previous English edition. It is important to emphasize that we do not know which of the posthumous chapters Musil himself might have chosen to publish had he lived to continue work on the sequence and there is no claim that chapter 36 was designed by Musil as a conclusion to the story of the siblings’ relationship, although it serves well as a resting point for the story.
The Agathe project was proposed to NYRB Classics by Nicholas Berwin, who would like to express his gratitude to George Steiner for a seminal conversation that suggested publishing the posthumous draft chapters as a way of introducing the English-speaking reader to Musil’s most exceptional writing.
—EDWIN FRANK
Editor, NYRB Classics
*Currently, the digital edition platform Musil Online is being prepared at the Austrian National Library in Vienna; a trial version will be available starting in December 2019. The plan is to make all 12,000 manuscript pages of Musil’s posthumous legacy accessible on the Internet as facsimiles with transcriptions, reading texts, and text-genetic dossiers, along with the entirety of the works published during his lifetime and an additional interdiscursive commentary.