by Robert Musil
Testament. Notes
The unnecessary expansiveness. A function of the understanding.
Irony is: presenting a cleric in such a way that along with him you have also captured a Bolshevist. Presenting a blockhead so that the author suddenly feels: that’s partly me too. This kind of irony, constructive irony, is fairly unknown in Germany today. It is the connection among things, a connection from which it emerges naked. One thinks of irony as ridicule and jeering.
Mysticism: One can only advise every reader: he down in the woods on a lovely or even a windy day, then you’ll know it all yourself. It is not to be assumed that I have never lain in the woods.
The hardest thing to bear: the current misery. But I have to do my work, which has no currency, I must at least carry on with it, after having begun it beforehand.
People expect that in the second volume Ulrich will do something. People know what’s to be done. How to do it: I won’t give the German Communist Party, etc., any tips. Active spirit and spirit of action.
Why the problem is not an out-of-the-way one.
The practical (political-social) usefulness of such a book. (Avant garde.)
Wilhelm Meister was also well-to-do.
People want Ulrich to do something. But I’m concerned with the meaning of the action. Today these are confused with each other. Of course Bolshevism, for example, has to occur; but (a) not through books, (b) books have other tasks. Similarity with the war situation and the Ministry of War Information.
***
Quotes from Kerschenstein are used too. Arnheim. Lazarsfeld. Forster.
Psychoanalysis!
Frame of mind directed against the present. Therefore, too, against narration, action…
That I conclude unfavorably, and precisely in this volume make the greatest demands on the reader, without making it easier for him by means of recapitulation in what happens later.
Also unfavorable structurally.
(There must be something about well-to-do people that lets them admire Thomas Mann. And about my readers that they are people without influence.)
The religious today “represses” (that must be some kind of historical process). This book is religious with the assumptions of the unbeliever.
Always: An intellectual adventure, an intellectual expedition and voyage of exploration. Partial solutions are only one way of expressing this. Here really and truly in a different condition of life. That’s not why I’m describing it, but because it touches on a basic phenomenon of our morality. Perhaps a writer can’t say “basic phenomenon/’ but it has to be deeper than the superficial phenomenon. Then it is independent of developments.
One tells a story for the sake of telling, for the significance of the story, for the sake of the significance: three steps.
Afterword: This book had to be broken off before its climax because of lack of money, and it is uncertain whether it will be continued.
For the afterword (and interim preface)
“An affect can induce a violent external action, and internally too the person involved can appear to be quite agitated, and yet it can be a matter of a very superficial affect with little energy” (Kurt Lewin, “Researches on the Psychology of Actions and Affects I” Psychologische Forschung VII, no. 1/2 [1941], p. 309). A sentence such as this has been made possible only by psychology’s having become literary. But do we writers have a preliminary activity to fulfill? If we did, then in external nature our messiah would have been something like the geographer or botanist! The problem first arises, of course, with the novel. In the epic, and also in the truly epic novel, the character derives from the action. That is, the characters were embedded far more immovably in the action because the action, too, was far more of a piece. So how do I come to insert even a digression on psychology? In ten years it can be superseded and thereby outdated. But the weightiness of the step, the responsibility of the turning toward God, compels the greatest conscientiousness. As does the nature of the adventure in the inductive picture of the world. And that of the “final” love story. And that of the hesitation.
Kitsch: Inadmissibly simplifying the task of life in every situation. (Hence, too, the affiliation of certain kinds of politics with kitsch.)
Quite presumptuously: I ask to be read twice, in parts and as a whole.
One of my principles: it does not matter what, but how, one depicts. In the psychology chapters that’s taken to the point of abuse. Hence the observation belongs (where?) that today one does not describe the automobile as a miracle but says: car, brand Y, type X.
Moreover, in art one can also do the opposite of everything.
What is brief in relation to the whole, because the appropriate length becomes evident, can be considered long, indeed perhaps endless, if presented by itself. And the tempo is determined only as the sequence unfolds.
***
About the chapters on the psychology of the emotions: this is not psychology (in its ultimate intention), but description of the world.
During my work on it and under my hand this book has become a historical novel; it takes place twenty-five years ago! It has always been a contemporary novel developed out of the past, but now the span and tension are very great; but still, what lies beneath the surface, which is one of the chief objects of representation, does not need to be laid significantly deeper.
If I should be reproached with going in for too much reflection, then—without my wanting to go into the relationship between thinking and narrating—today there is too little reflection.
There are too many people in the world who say exactly what must be thought and done for me not to be seduced by the opposite. Strict freedom.
It appears that much is superfluous, present only for its own sake, in the first volume. It is my view that narrated episodes can be superfluous and present only for their own sake, but not ideas. In a composition I place unpretentiousness above the so-called wealth of ideas, and in the case of this book there should be nothing superfluous. The statements about the joining together of emotions and ideas which this partial volume contains permit me to establish that hke this: The chief effect of a novel ought to be directed at the emotions. Ideas are not to be included in a novel for their own sake. And, a particular difficulty, they cannot be developed in the novel the way a thinker would develop them; they are “components” of a gestalt. And if this book succeeds, it will be a gestalt, and the objections that it resembles a treatise, etc., will then be incomprehensible. The wealth of ideas is a part of the wealth of emotions.
Noted to be mentioned:
Anachronisms in general, and particularly that the representation of the psychology of the emotions stands between that time and today.
Satire getting ahead of itself, procession, possibly Lindner.
Excuse for theory: today we have to explain what we describe.
Where?
Too heavy. Unsolved task of mediating instances.
For an expert, on the other hand, too unfocused!
H. F. Amiel quotes von Csokor: “There is no rest for the spirit except in the absolute, no rest for the feeling except in the infinite, no rest for the soul other than in the divine!” This book is just as opposed to such responses as it is to materialism.
From a book that was a world success (S. Salminen, Katrina, from the Swedish, Insel Verlag S. 334-335):”…She pulled away from him to the wall, but when he folded her in his arms she did not resist. Only her soft, timid gigghng sounded through the dark room. When Gustave saw Serafia with the other village girls on the street, he looked at her full of disquiet. No, no, it had all been in a dream, it had never ever happened. The whole night had been unreal. Yet a few days later, when, late at night, he was passing by Larssons farm, the unreal came to life again and everything real became strange. He left the road, went across the yard, opened the door and stepped into the room.” (A rather idiotic, misshapen creature with lovely eyes, exciting mouth, and voluptuous breast.)
If I could just accustom my
self to this a little, I could write such passages too. It’s the inception of a double world, of a double person—narrated. But I don’t want to. Any talented person can carry on this tradition. And so I have rather attempted the unenjoyable. Someone, sometime, must tie the final knot in this endless thread.
This is, provisionally, still a matter of analyzing peaceful times, but the analysis of pathological times has its foundation here (and some aspects of this will come out in what follows).
What is boring for one person goes by too quickly for another; the expanse of a book is a relation between its actual fullness of detail and the interests of the time.
***
Because a specific section, an adventure, needs to be narrated extensively should not make one forget that Ulrich was by nature energetic and a man with fighting instincts.
[Quoted by Musil in French]: “This feeling is regarded by the Germans as a virtue, as an emanation of the godhead, as something mystical. It is not vibrant, impetuous, jealous, tyrannical, as in the heart of an Italian girl: it is deep and resembles illuminism. Stendhal, De Va-mour (p. i49)(chapter 48), quoting an author of 1809 (Voyage en Au-triche par M. Cadet-Gassicourt). (Invented? I don’t know.): So this book of mine is a little German?
That I cannot say what this book is, but rather what it is not…
A novel’s major effect should be on the emotions. Ideas can’t be present in it for their own sake. Nor can they—this is a particular difficulty— be developed the way a thinker would; they are “parts” of a Gestalt And if this book succeeds, it will be Gestalt, and the objections that it resembles a treatise and the like will then be foolish. The richness of ideas is part of the richness of feelings.
Ulrich’s afterword, conclusion
Idea from mid-January 1942.
Thought about the world’s political situation. The great yellow-white problem. The coming new epoch in cultural history. China’s possible role. On a smaller scale, the quarrel between Russia and the West. Hexner’s question, how do you imagine it happening in reality, can’t be put off. Even the man without qualities can’t ignore it. But that would be a volume of historical, philosophical, etc., essays, or the last of the volumes of aphorisms.
Moreover, influenced by my renewed interest in Dostoyevsky. Hastily noted the impression in a note for my style. I would like to write an essay about his “journalism.” About its interpretation by Zdanow, about Pan-Slavism, the Pushkin speech, etc. Before the current background it yields ideas about Russia that I have not even attempted to think through.
This is not to be taken up in the second part of Volume Two, although it is quite pertinent to it.
In this fashion concluding somehow and (instead of or after “A Kind of Conclusion’) write an Afterword, concluding word, of Ulrich’s.
The Ulrich of today grown older, who experiences the Second World War, and on the basis of these experiences writes an epilogue to his story and my book. This makes possible the union of my plans concerning the aphorisms with this book. It also makes it possible to consider the story and its value for current and future reality.
To be harmonized: the romantic or even Pirandellesque irony of the character above the author.
The story of the characters, considered historically.
Important: the argument with Lao-tsu, which makes Ulrich, but also my task, comprehensible, carried out afterward by Ulrich. Abdul Hasan Summun and Sufism. The story of Agathe and Ulrich would have been more impressive told as a story about him!
Translator’s Afterword
Musil’s idiosyncratic prose style is unique in German. It is a medium intended to directly engage the readers emotions as well as his thoughts in a search for the right life in the midst of a crumbling social order. Musil’s use of language is virtuosic, and language itself is one of his subjects: it is our vehicle for relating to ourselves and the world and for shaping and expressing both our moral sense and our culture. But language is unstable: “No word means the same thing twice,” Agathe says in one place and the author in another.
Language, then, is much more than the vehicle of The Man Without Qualities; it is the lever that has the potential to raise up new worlds. This view of language has its roots in Nietzsche, who broke up the classical German sentence along with the attitudes behind it, and close parallels in Musil’s Austrian contemporaries Wittgenstein, Freud, Rilke, Kafka, and Karl Kraus. Musil’s language is radically experimental: analytical and essayistic, but at the same time permeated with powerful feelings, it is a vividly metaphorical language designed to fuse “precision and soul” and to make die reader feel the fusion. It is a unique achievement. This translator often found himself comparing the style of the novel with the ways in which color, form, and light are variously used in Impressionistic, Expressionistic, and Abstract painting in an attempt to create in the viewer an actual sense impression (including the medium of the paint itself), which is seen as somehow closer to truth than a writer simply “telling a story” would be.
Musil’s writing is striking and challenging, not comfortable, and in the Modernist vein makes few concessions to the reader, who is expected to do some work. A translator usually looks around in his own language for a model on which to base his translation, so that readers will be able to relate the foreign work to something they are famihar with. Leishman and Spender did this in modeling the translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies on the august tradition of the English elegy, with the result that Rilke’s great cycle was domesticated (in every sense) in English. Unfortunately, Rilke, Musil’s favorite poet, was doing something far more radical, disruptive, and astonishing with language than the Leishman-Spender model could encompass. But with Musil—all of Musil—one looks in vain in English for any equivalent. Lacking a model, the translator has to stick more closely than he otherwise might to the original, every nuance of which was weighed with great precision by the author. The translators intention was to have the writing startle the reader in English in the same way it startles a reader in German.
Musil was an experimental writer who was trained as a scientist (behavioral psychologist, mathematician, and engineer) and widely read in psychology and philosophy, so that his impressive literary style is not based on a literary formation. He often writes on a level of semi-abstraction that is meaningful and focused in German but that only produces indigestion in English, the most ruthlessly concrete of languages.
While the novel is analytic and largely essayistic, Musil devoted enormous attention to his characters. He puts himself into their minds: what would this person see in this particular situation, how would he feel, she respond, how would they talk at this moment? These characters speak in their individual voices of background, social class, and profession as well as of personality and mood, and all their perceptions are encapsulated within their individual languages, their idiolects, without the characters themselves being aware of it (as Musil makes the reader aware). Stumm talks like a general in the Austrian army he struggles to transcend; Fischel talks like a self-made businessman; Rachel talks like an uneducated servant girl with delicate feelings who yearns for “higher things.” Count Leinsdorf, the feudal aristocrat as influential politician, looks at the modern world through medieval eyes. The sex murderer Moosbrugger has a quite astonishing relation to language, one of the most subtle ventriloquistic effects in the entire novel. This is a function of his entire presentation, but for example the spin on Moosbrugger’s ingenious distinction between Weib (a loose woman) and Frau (a woman one can respect) is beyond translation, rooted as it is in both his sick imagination and the cultural values of his time; and when he refers to Rachel’s breasts as Dinger (those things), he is indicating his own inability—which also has cultural overtones—to confront the female body.
The narrators essayistic language (that is, when he is speaking in his own voice), again differs from the characters’, as the characters’ language differs from individual to individual. The conflicts and misunderstandings on the level of language
render vividly the ways in which the conflicted and dying culture of the old Austrian Empire, “Kakania,” had become in every sense a Babel.
As a writer, Musil was an obsessive perfectionist and polisher, and his words have a poetic concision and a freight of nuances that must be the despair of any translator. His sentences are rhythmic but often syntactically convoluted, reflecting the old Austrian culture, itself a huge catalog of infinitely nuanced gradations, that this novel memorializes with wit and wonder. It is simply not possible to render all these subdeties in English. There is also the problem of anachronism: although the novel opens in 1913, Musil began working on it in earnest only after World War I, and he was still writing when he died, in exile, in the middle of World War II. So The Man Without Qualities is only ostensibly limited by its given year of 1913-1914. Writing after the collapse of the Austrian Empire in 1918 and through the Nazi period and World War II, Musil took subde but full advantage of anachronisms of reference and language in order to broaden his canvas.
A great help in translating was the discovery that Musil read his writing over aloud. Once the complex rhythms of this prose were understood as spoken rhythms, in spite of the analytic and metaphoric incisiveness, it was possible to more closely approximate the original, whose hallmark in the polished sections is the cadence of clauses set off by semicolons. (Musil is the master of the semicolon!) Paying close attention to the rhythm of Musil’s German helped capture both the music and the unremitting sense of urgency that mark the original.
The material in Part 2 of “From the Posthumous Papers” presented different problems. It consists largely of unpolished drafts and fragments encompassing a wide range, from Musil’s cryptic notes to himself to fairly worked out scenes. Care had to be taken not to “brush up” inadequacies and inconsistencies but to keep a sense of the relative finish of the different passages, while at the same time making these fragments comprehensible to the reader. There were the mundane and not quite minor problems that always bedevil the translator, exemplified in Musil’s extraordinarily plastic use of the pronoun es (it), which darts in all sorts of directions, often in flagrant disregard of the rules governing its use. Musil is fond of the term unheimlich, which is difficult to render in English; something that gives you a shiver is unheimlich, hence uncanny, haunted, haunting, spooky, weird—none of which, however, capture the immediacy of the German word in its literary use. (It also has a casual and vague colloquial usage.) Musil’s most noticeable tic is the overuse of the phrase in diesem Augenblick (at this moment), although it follows logically from his insistence on presenting his characters as living in a succession of particular moments, and this succession of moments consequendy becomes at least the de facto organizing principle of the novel. There is also his use of the pronoun man, which was carefully kept, for the most part, as “one” in English, although its usual translation would be “you” or “we” or a passive construction. Musil uses man as a distancing device, to keep his narrator detached from the plane of the characters. This narrator remains as the experimental moralist above the characters, including his protagonist, Ulrich.