1-5 A Sort of Introduction

Maybe all I'll have to do in this blog is pull in extended quotes and let the reader join in the laughter.  What immediately strikes me about the first few chapters is how droll the narrator is.  Every sentence exudes a satirical intent. Musil seems to be indulging in a "novel as essay" style with heavy commentary by the narrator.  Fortunately, the narrator is funny (even more than Proust's Marcel).

Here is the narrator on the upper classes:

They clearly belonged to a privileged social class, with their distinguished bearing, style of dress, and conversation, the initials of their names embroidered on their underwear, and just as discreetly, which is to say not for outward show but in the find underwear of their minds, they knew who they were and that they belonged in a European capital city and imperial residence. [4]

Here he is on patriotism:

Children are, of course, show-offs, love to play cops and robbers, and are naturally inclined to regard the X family on Y Street as the greatest family in the world if it happens to be their own. So patriotism comes easily to children. But in Austria, the situation was slightly more complicated. For although the Austrians had of course also won all the wars in their history, after most of them they had had to give something up. [13]

But I need to discuss at least one thing amid all the laughter: why Musil calls his hero, a mathematician named Ulrich, a "man without qualities."  Chapter 4, "If There is a Sense of Reality, There Must Also be a Sense of Possibility" is devoted to exactly such an explanation.  Here's the first paragraph:

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor [Ulrich's father] had always lived, is simply a requisite sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility. [10-11]

To further "clarify" the distinction between "a sense of reality" and "a sense of possibility" (if Musil really intends to clarify and not just tease us), the narrator comes up with an analogy:

. . . the man with an ordinary sense of reality is like a fish that nibbles at the hook but is unaware of the line, while the man with that sense of reality which can also be called a sense of possibility trawls a line through the water and has no idea whether there's any bait on it.  His extraordinary indifference to the life snapping at the bait is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. [12]

Musil then ends Chapter 4 with a succinct statement of Ulrich's problem:

And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities. [13]

Ulrich's inability to summon up a sense of his own reality leads him to curious thoughts and actions.  Two examples are initially brought to our attention.  In school "Ulrich wrote in his essay on love of country that anyone who really loved his country must never regard it as the best country in the world." We then get another example of Musil's tone:

Then, in a flash of inspiration that seemed to him especially fine, although he was more dazzled by its splendor than he was clear about its implications, he added to this dubious statement a second, that God Himself probably preferred to speak of His world in the subjunctive of possibility . . . for God creates the world and thinks while He is at it that it could just as well be done differently.  Ulrich gloried in this sentence, but he must not have expressed himself clearly enough, because it caused a great uproar and nearly got him expelled from school, although nothing happened because the authorities could not make up their minds whether to regard his brazen remark as calumny against the Fatherland or as blasphemy against God. [13-14]

The second example has to do with Ulrich's method of renovating his house.  He takes it somewhat seriously because "he felt quite shaken by the responsibility of having the opportunity to renovate a house, what with the threat hovering over his head of "Show me how you live and I will tell you who you are!" --- which he had read repeatedly in art magazines."  In renovating his house, Ulrich, faced with infinite possibilities, was "in that familiar state . . . of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center. . . Finally he dreamed up only impractical rooms, revolving rooms, kaleidoscopic interiors, adjustable scenery for the soul, and his ideas grew steadily more devoid of content." [15]

The so-called "logic" of his thinking, results in the following solution:

For a man's possibilities, plans, and feelings must first be hedged in by prejudices, traditions, obstacles, and barriers of all sorts, like a lunatic in his straitjacket, and only then can whatever he is capable of doing have perhaps some value, substance, and staying power.  Here, in fact, was an idea with incalculable implications.  Now the man without qualities, who had come back to his own country, took the second step toward letting himself be shaped by the outward circumstances of life: at this point in his deliberations he simply left the furnishing of his house to the genius of his suppliers, secure in the knowledge that he could safely leave the traditions, prejudices, and limitations to them. [15-16]

In a way, Ulrich's dilemma reminds me of Hamlet, so I'll end this entry with a quote from the melancholy Dane who also has problems with his individual "sense of reality."

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?