As a political novel: the most significant of all. As a psychological novel: equalling throughout the works of Meredith, Henry James and Marcel Proust. As an impressionistic novel: one would like to call it the first really successful one.
As a novel of irony: surpassing Anatole France at his best. As a social satire: superior to every model. Karl Corino, in his long-awaited 2,000-page biography of Musil, quotes Bernard Guillemin’s review as a typical example of the enthusiasm elicited by Musil’s work:Īs a critique of culture and contemporary life, is without example. The Times Literary Supplement noted, with British sobriety: ‘When completed, this should be the prose-epic of the Habsburg Monarchy hastening to its decay.’ German critics felt that this was not just the book of the year but one of the novels of the century. The first two volumes of The Man Without Qualities were met with great acclaim in the early 1930s. the War Ministry can sit back and serenely await the next mass catastrophe.’ As Ulrich, the novel’s central protagonist and chief secretary of the Campaign, predicts: ‘it’s the Millennial War of Religion. A thousand or so pages later, the idealistic efforts of the Parallel Campaign lead to the outbreak of World War One. The Campaign is to culminate in 1918, the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph’s coronation, with a celebration of peace and a demonstration of unity among all the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The novel begins with the launch of the so-called Parallel Campaign by Vienna’s political and cultural establishment in 1913. In his major work, The Man Without Qualities (originally published as Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften with a first volume in 1930, a second in 1932, and the rest left unfinished), the transformation from order to chaos is of world-historical proportions. What matters in these stories is less the manifest content than the finely tuned narrative language, which records how a certain state of affairs is turned into its opposite: the faithful wife becoming an adulteress, the dutiful schoolboy turning into a fascist torturer-but without their noticing when they pass the point of no return.Ĭrimes without identifiable perpetrators, events without visible cause, historical shifts without agency-Musil’s works are inquiries into the multiple determination of human action and social change. In Musil’s second book, Unions (1911), a woman’s promise of matrimonial fidelity activates subconscious processes that drive her to sleep with another man.
Such is the case with Musil’s literary debut, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), in which the innocuous rivalry among a group of boarding-school boys builds up to homosexual abuse and sadistic humiliation. His narratives spiral downward from the daylight world of bourgeois conventions into the night of madness, the negativity of disorder, criminality and war. To read Robert Musil is to sense an approaching catastrophe.
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