(A)Teleology of Modernity: Critique of Time & Narrative in ...
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Research Master’s Literary Studies Faculty of Humanities
University of Amsterdam
Graduate Master Thesis
(A)Teleology of Modernity: Critique of Time & Narrative in
Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities
by
Kasparas Varžinskas
2020
Supervisor: Second reader:
Dhr. dr. A.K. Mohnkern Dhr. dr. N.D. Carr
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Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 3
i. The Hegelian Premise of Teleological Time of Modernity ............................................................. 5
ii. Teleology of the Novel in the Nineteenth Century ......................................................................... 9
iii. The Indefinite Ateleology of The Man Without Qualities ........................................................... 11
Chapter I. Topos of Ateleological Time ............................................................................................... 14
i. Acceleration and Frenetic Standstill: Dissolution of the Teleological Premise ............................. 14
ii. Progress as the Teleological Principle of Time ............................................................................ 19
iii. The Indecisive Storytellers of History ......................................................................................... 20
iv. Crisis of the Present and the Aimlessness of History .................................................................. 23
v. Retrogression of Achronic Love ................................................................................................... 27
Chapter II. Techne of Ateleological Time ............................................................................................ 30
i. Narrative and Time of Failed History ............................................................................................ 31
ii. Subverting the Novel .................................................................................................................... 33
iii. Essayism as an Ateleological Response to Action ...................................................................... 35
iv. Temporal Disorientation. Weeks, Seasons, Disruptions .............................................................. 37
v. The Man Without (Temporal) Qualities ....................................................................................... 40
vi. The War as a Protracted Telos ..................................................................................................... 45
Epilogue. Towards the Metanarrative Critique ..................................................................................... 46
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................... 49
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Introduction
The issue of time in the European cultural history was always present – ranging from
Shakespeare through Kant and Saint Augustine, the problem of an individual questioning their
own temporal experience was nothing new. However, it was the sociocultural landscape of the
twentieth century with its discursive shifts that rendered the notion of time as a conceptual
problem extending over to numerous domains of life: Einstein’s theory of relativity,
Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, Bergson’s concept of duration, Heidegger’s existentialism structured by
temporality, and Husserl’s investigations of internal time-consciousness. Simultaneously, the
rise of formalism and structuralism foregrounded time as a narrative faculty that became a
potent research locus for literary fields, take, for example, Bakhtin’s legacy of a chronotope.
Time previously understood as a naturalized teleological flow of historical passing, in cultural
forms, was no longer a phenomenon of experience that can be ignored.
Around the turn of the century, modernist practices brought to the fore the problem of
time as a structural and conceptual problem. The notion of time along the teleological
conceptualization of history was amongst other Enlightenment categories whose positivist
qualities started to lose stability - the shift from the classic Newtonian idea of linear and
absolute time to Einstein’s theory of relativity introduced a significant turn where the scaling
of temporal experience became dependent on different points of reference rather than on total
and objective empiricist axioms. In literary modernism, such authors as Marcel Proust, Virginia
Woolf, and Thomas Mann foregrounded the heightened aesthetic and poetic awareness of the
passing of time. The novels like To the Lighthouse and In Search of Lost Time emphasized the
notion of subjective time (which correlated with phrenic rather than objective representation),
and the novelistic narrative became a site of new temporal practices that drew attention to its
structural configuration of time as a theme and a formal device. In effect, the realist and
romanticist narrative modes of Bildungsroman and Entwicklungroman that had dominated the
landscape of the nineteenth-century novel started shifting in terms of relativist temporality and
causality.
As the modernist novel moved against the stable notion of objective reality and validity
of representation (Dowden 11), new aesthetic positions began questioning the limits of
narrative and its relation to literary genre-formation. The dislodged sense of temporality of the
modernist novel carried further subversive implications towards the notions of narrative,
teleology, and identity. And if one is to abide by the classical structuralist tenets of treating
narrative forms as deep structures of sociocultural relations, the jeopardized modernist
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narrative might suggest a myriad of problems that extend beyond the enclosed formal qualities
of a text.
This paper treats The Man Without Qualities as the modernist epitome of signifying the
disillusionment of the Enlightenment project – namely, its obsession with teleological
development and the stability of historical time. The thesis approaches the form of the novel
as an artifact of storytelling that for Musil functioned both as an instrument and a thematic
object. With the innovative storytelling, Musil parodically exploits the very same temporal
foundations that supported the form of a teleological narrative of history in the wake of
modernity. In the center of Musil’s critique stands the progressivist notion of history and
development, a constellation that is subverted through an elaborate system of “undone”
temporal structures.
The paper is constituted of three parts. The following introductory chapters present the
Hegelian conceptualization of time during the rise of modernity and its inheritance in the
teleological modes of writing as a hypothesis that the rise of the novel and the modern notion
of historical progress since the age of Enlightenment shares the structural principle of narrative
development. The following major chapters of analysis – Topos and Techne – focus on utilizing
the presented context of teleological modes of thinking as a counterpoint, a process during
which the paper conceptualizes ateleological time as a working principle in Musil’s
experimentalist project. The first chapter focuses on the plot elements and contents of the story
that constitute a locus of critique towards the central notions of teleological time – the five
subchapters dissect the categories of speed, progress, historicist imagination as aspects through
which the novel presents its critical standpoint towards Hegelian modes of modernity. The
second chapter focuses on the poetics of the narrative and analyzes formal and structural
strategies through which Musil upsets the Hegelian modes presented in the first chapter – the
six subchapters trace a system of subversions that include unfulfilling novelistic genre tropes
(such as a character), time disfiguration, and disruptive orders of time.
Through this research project, the Musilian narrative development will be
conceptualized as a case of innovative writing that illuminates the stagnation and crises of the
Enlightenment values in the context of pre-war modern Europe. The inextricably linked
constellation of content and form, of history and a story, will allow seeing Musil’s novel as a
modernist project that seeks to undo the teleological discourse of time and presents a
metareferential critique through its self-reflexive nature.
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i. The Hegelian Premise of Teleological Time of Modernity
In his essay Historia Magistra Vitae, Reinhart Koselleck addresses the eighteenth century as a
significant epoch of change when concepts of cyclical time structure started to be replaced by
those that define history under the conditions of linear temporality. The idea of temporal
passing became heavily historical as the progress became a catalyst for an upward teleology of
development.1
During this time, the French Enlightenment with Condorcet’s seminal text Sketch for a
Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) conceptualized historical time as
progressive unfolding in which reason plays a crucial role – because of rational achievements
and secularization,2 Western civilization has now developed the possibility of reflecting upon
its stage that is above the previous stages of development (Woolf 144). The focus on progress
that fuels the teleological development of history for Western thought was also heavily
supported by treating the newly discovered continents and their inhabiting natives as examples
of the “primitive” stage. Through the figures such as Condorcet and Adam Smith, colonialist
historiography argued that these people would eventually “catch up” to the European temporal
advancement, a claim that further propelled the ambition of the future as naturally promising
for the Western world.3
The Enlightenment conceptualization of historical progress was developed further by
Hegel, who, according to Habermas, “was the first philosopher to develop a clear concept of
modernity” (1987: 4). Precisely during his time, modern society started ascribing great
significance to historical time as a reference point for improvement.4 In Philosophy of History
(1837), Hegel argues that “historical change in the abstract sense has long been interpreted in
general terms as embodying some kind of progress towards a better and more perfect
1 “Up until the eighteenth century, the course and calculation of historical events was underwritten by two natural
categories of time: the cycle of stars and planets, and the natural succession of rulers and dynasties. […] The
naturalistic basis vanished and progress became the prime category in which a transnatural, historically immanent
definition of time first found expression” (Koselleck 1985: 33).
2 Daniel Little in this regard pays special attention to Montesqieu and Condorcet who “rejected the religious
interpretation of history but brought in their own teleology, the idea of progress—the idea that humanity is moving
in the direction of better and more perfect civilization, and that this progression can be witnessed through study
of the history of civilization” (Little 11).
3 Lucian Hölscher calls this view an “a-synchronic development that had a highly normative potential when used
as an instrument for prognosticating future developments” (144).
4 Michel Foucault writes that “the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history” (1994:175) while Walter
Benjamin emphasizes “narcotic historicism” of the nineteenth century (391).
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condition” (124), a process through which “progressive recognition” (151) leads towards an
apotheosis of personal and sociocultural self-understanding. For Hegel, the relationship
between historical progress and individual life was inseparable in the shared faculty of
sequential development: “All progress takes the form of following the successive stages in the
evolution of consciousness. Man begins life as a child and is only dimly conscious of the world
and of himself; we know that he has to progress through several stages of empirical
consciousness before he attains a knowledge of what he is in and for himself” (129).
Foucault notes how Kant before Hegel had already delineated the main tenet of the
Enlightenment as “the internal teleology of time” (1984: 34); however, it was Hegel who
ascribed the narratological quality to the concept of historical time. Mirroring the development
of an individual, history for Hegel was then structured by a beginning, development, and an
endpoint – stages of unfolding because of which history and the notion of time adopted a
teleological narrative frame of progress. In this model, the consciousness of Western
civilization throughout centuries of reflection strives towards freedom from the circularly
unconscious domain of Nature: in Hegel‘s vision, the consciousness of the Spirit transforms
this cyclicality into a constant vertical development – “In the natural world, the species does
not progress, but in the world of the Spirit, each change is a form of progress” (128). In short,
the potential freedom of the human spirit is possible due to the historical (so to say, developing)
impetus of the Western way of thinking.5
Informed with Hegel’s thought, the Enlightenment idea of historical progress now
displayed qualities of a goal-oriented narrative. “In our language, the word ‘history’
(Geschichte, from geschehen, “to happen”) combines both objective and subjective meanings,
for it denotes the historia rerum gestarum as well as the res gestae themselves, the historical
narrative and the actual happenings, deeds, and events. […] This conjunction of the two
meanings should be recognized as belonging to a higher order than that of mere external
contingency: we must in fact suppose that the writing of history and the actual deeds and events
of history make their appearance simultaneously and that they emerge together from a common
source” (Hegel 135). Thus, Hegel’s notion of history was established as a story of progress that
ascends to a higher plane of understanding and perfection.
5 In opposition, Hegel places the Orient civilizations as ‘not-yet-developed’, unarticulated in their own historical
consciousness, still belonging to the realm of Nature in a form of subordination and primitive collective
dependency. In contrast, historical teleology for Hegel begins with a self-aware individualism, in the case of
European history, Ancient Greece.
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As the concept of progress became the catalyst for history, the modern historical
imagination increasingly put the focus on innovation. In a way, during modernity, society
became self-reflexive in conceiving its own temporality: the modern consciousness
disassociated itself from the cyclical repetition of eternal time and started relying on the
constant novelty of the present. The constant anticipation of the new present, which manifests
itself in the form of the future, introduces the central concept of progress that breaks away from
the past via what Habermas called a continuous renewal (1987: 7). Simultaneously, the
historical orientation shifted radically from the past to the future as the notion of the past started
losing its didactic agency. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, already paved by
revolutions dealing away with past regimes that were no longer compatible, developed a utopic
concern for “newness.” Koselleck further argues that in this way, historical consciousness
eventually became accelerated by “the anticipation of a future both desired and to be quickened
through the technicalization” (1985: 57). Modern historical consciousness now depended on
an irreversible sense of progress and future-oriented action leading to a state of perfection as
the future itself became an optimistic goal of improvement.6
Hegel’s ideas on teleology had an immense effect on the perception of history in the
nineteenth century – most notably with Auguste Comte’s positivism, the notion of teleological
progress gained deterministic qualities. With the inherent structure of a developing narrative,
not only was the progression towards a better future possible, it was now inevitable (Woolf
184).
How, in relation to this model, are the crises and catastrophes of history addressed?
Hegel saw failure and injustice such as bloodshed of the crusades, witch-hunts of Reformation,
unjust feudal system, and wars as crucial moments in the dialectics of history that, although
appearing like setbacks, set up conditions for further development on the grand scale of time.
(Pinkard 551). It must be stressed that Hegel wrote during the turn of the eighteenth century in
the spirit of German Idealism and did not live until the state of historical acceleration that
dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Although some
Hegelians might argue that the First World War outbreak was another natural narrative shift in
teleological history, the accelerated technological rigor, the record amount of casualties, and
the shattering global political effects were without precedents in Western history. Moreover, it
set up grounds for another, even deadlier conflict, emerging only twenty-one years after 1918.
6 “The future is the telos. […] Time is no longer a simple classificatory principle, but rather an agent, the operator
of historical progress” (Hartog 124).
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It was finally the event that introduced a significant crack of doubt in the European project of
modernity built on the concept of progress that was further followed by series of
disillusionments regarding imperialism, ethical coherence, and Enlightenment values, and
ultimately, the soundness of historical teleology.
The nearing eclipse of the nineteenth century showed the first signs of disillusionment
in the utopian teleology of modernity. Nietzsche, one of the first thinkers to bring Hegel’s
teleology of history into question, in Untimely Meditations (1873), observes how at the end of
the nineteenth century the neo-Hegelian historiography naturalized the Western idea of
historical progress and how the European modernity was celebrated as the proof of it:
Contemplation of history has never flown so far, not even in dreams; for now the
history of mankind is only the continuation of the history of animals and plants; even
in the profoundest depths of the sea the universal historian still finds traces of himself
as living slime; gazing in amazement, as at a miracle, at the tremendous course mankind
has already run, his gaze trembles at that even more astonishing miracle, modern man
himself, who is capable of surveying this course. He stands high and proud upon the
pyramid of the world-process; as he lays the keystone of his knowledge at the top of it
he seems to call out to nature all around him: ‘We have reached the goal, we are the
goal, we are nature perfected.‘ (107-8)
Nietzsche saw the nineteenth-century notion of history as the naturalized product of
historiography that bears an ideological sense of truth – the historians informed by Hegel for
Nietzsche were figures that construct historical narratives based on subjective and national
judgments and interests (in Gadamer’s terms, such historiography is always hermeneutically
structured by their own horizons of expectations). In Nietzsche’s view, the contemporary
concept of the historical consciousness was misleading because the teleological narrative of
history in the nineteenth century was exalted to the state of deterministic necessity. Always
praising the transitory present as the next providential checkpoint towards the better, inevitable
future marked “the total surrender of the personality to the world-process” (107).
The subsequent series of disasters of the twentieth century became an argumentative
constellation against Hegel’s teleological fulfillment of progressive history (Osborne 39). After
the First World War, “faith in history as progress became no longer tenable, “and the war
became one of the events that “ended a way of thinking about history, a way of conceptualising
time“ (Hölscher 134;138).
With The Man Without Qualities, Musil’s project suggests an endpoint, but this
endpoint is the opposite of what Hegel envisioned – parodically, Musil hints at the impending
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War as a teleological disaster of modernity that is structured by the anxious suspension of the
narrative and the disintegration of the social order. What has been regarded as the progress of
modernity is being exhausted, and the very idea of an upward development reaches its own
endpoint – the novel proclaims the decline of the Enlightenment project, which until then was
regarded as the great narrator of the historical time. In such regard, Musil acknowledges
Hegel’s insistence upon treating history as a narrative; however, he structures his own story
around the idea that the narrative practices of history reflected in the form of the novel are no
longer valid in order to conceptualize the late stage of modernity.
ii. Teleology of the Novel in the Nineteenth Century
Modernity marked an emerging temporalization of history by endowing it with a central notion
of development (Entwicklung) (Koselleck 2018: 108), a Hegelian notion which envisioned any
self-aware experience as temporally structured. Having a historical self-reflection,
consciousness no longer merely “collects” experiences but employs them in a progressive way
towards a more perfected knowledge (Tygstrup 254). These ideas eventually found their place
in literature, most predominantly in the rising genre of the novel,7 which in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries became concerned with temporal unfolding8 far more than in the past as
the time regimes informed by Enlightenment started shifting from cosmic cyclicality (mainly
structured by the past) to causal linearity of development (mainly oriented towards the
secularized notion of future).9
Even though Hegel himself was quite dismissive of the genre of the novel due to his
dislike of Romantic Ironists, the influence of teleological narrative has been observed in the
emerging forms of the novel – according to Franco Moretti, Bildungsroman as the nineteenth-
century defining genre exemplifies the “teleological rhetoric of Hegelian thought” (7) where
the meaning is accumulated via the development and life of a protagonist leading toward an
endpoint. Ian Watt further links the Hegelian teleology with the rise of the novel: “One can
7 In Time and Narrative vol. 2, Paul Ricoeur notes how “inherent in the name itself, the “novel” became a form
originality – a category that during the Middle Ages denoted an ancient beginning (1985: 163).
8 Ricoeur takes after the Hegelian insistence of treating history in tandem with a fictional narrative. Because of
the shared narrative structures, fiction and history for Ricoeur are in a “interwoven reference” due to the power to
refigure time in the form of a narrative (1988: 101).
9 Karl Löwith observes how during this transition, modernity managed to “secularize the Christian notion of the
eschatological time” by turning it into an optimistic idea of progress where Man replaced God and gained direction
of their own future, leading to the salvation of humankind without the promise of Kingdom of God (Löwith 200).
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perhaps go further, and, like Hegel, regard the novel as a manifestation of the Spirit of epic
under the impact of a modern and prosaic concept of reality” (Watt 239). Watt’s apt wording
of the “prosaic concept of reality” suggests the novel’s broadened preoccupation with the levels
of different orders - the social, psychological dimensions – that were associated with a sense
of teleological completion and development. During this era of classical modernity, the novel
reached the status of narrative art that strives to encompass life with all its aspects. The realist
novel of the nineteenth century is without a doubt a project of such maximalist ambition.
Especially around the time when the novel (mostly in Great Britain and France) was imbued
with an aim to expose the social structures in a realistic manner, the genre expanded in its size
and mission with examples like Dickens’ Bleak House, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and most
importantly, the grand project of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. As a maximalist endeavor of
studies and scenes that elevated the form of the novel to a degree of research and scientific
significance, La Comédie humaine displayed an obsessive compulsion towards totality and a
full amplitude of reality. Fredric Jameson notes that like Dickens, Balzac was an author for
whom the role of a novelist implied an obsession towards this totality via omniscient narration,
an encyclopedic sense of completeness.10
Similar to Entwicklungsroman, Bildungsroman was an exemplary form embodying the
notion of progress and development: “The narrative representation of the linkage of past,
present, and future bears the form of a story of progress and development that contains a
reconstructible, meaning-constituting goal horizon” (Rosa 230). The goal is, of course, a
formation of identity for the character that lets them integrate themselves into the social order,
or in the later development of the genre, reject the status quo. Nevertheless, the focus is on the
result as a state of upward progression of self-knowledge. At its height, the novel in the
nineteenth century became “the culturally dominant symbolic form of the idea of a
temporalized human experience” (Tygstrup 257), where the passage of time is utilized as a
linear trajectory of progression.
10 “In this sense, we must accustom ourselves to rethinking the pallid category of the “omniscient narrator” in
terms of sheer passion, as an obsession to know everything and all the social levels—from the secret conversations
of the great all the way to the “mystères de Paris” and the “bas fonds.” Balzac was supremely what the Germans
call a besserwisser, a know-it-all at every moment anxious to show off his inside expertise (which he was
unfortunately less able to put into practice). But surely Dickens had the virus as well, who was so proud of knowing
all the streets in London; and we many safely attribute an analogous concupiscence of knowledge to all the other
great encyclopedic fabulators, from Trollope to Joyce” (Jameson 115).
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iii. The Indefinite Ateleology of The Man Without Qualities
Focusing on the temporal structure and narrative development techniques, this thesis paper
seeks to render Musil’s project as an experimental site that questions the stability of history,
progress, the linear conception of time, and, ultimately, narrative-making practices.
With The Man Without Qualities, Musil consolidated his core ideas and influences –
the novel successfully employs the philosophies of Nietzsche, Emerson, as well as sociological
angles found in Dilthey, Simmel, all of this amounting to a systemic novel of ideas. With an
overarching influence of the experimental physics of Ernst Mach, The Man Without Qualities
accentuates Musil‘s lifelong focus on indefinite forms of existence and search for the “other
condition” that would open space for an alternative sense of reality within the frames of modern
history.
Around the years of finishing the doctorate thesis on Mach’s philosophy, Musil
published his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), which had brought him
significant fame. He was quickly recognized in the Vienna and Berlin literary scenes as a
promising voice that has led him to abandon academia and devote himself to becoming a writer.
After the war, Musil entirely devotes himself to The Man Without Qualities around. Very soon,
Musil and his wife started struggling financially. In 1930, after being pressured by his
publisher, Musil published the first volume of The Man Without Qualities, containing part I, A
Sort of Introduction (“Eine Art Einleitung”), and part II, Seinesgleichen geschieht (“The Like
of It Now happens” or “Pseudoreality Prevails”).11 The novel’s initial success was short-lived,
albeit praised by his literary contemporaries, such as Hermann Broch and Thomas Mann;
however, his reluctance to follow up with the second volume and the rise of the Nazi regime
in Germany stalled his career. In 1933, Musil published the unfinished second volume with
part III, Into the Millenium (The Criminals) (“Ins tausendjähriche Reich/Die Verbrecher”),
after which his work kept slowing down due to increasing financial troubles and constant
revisions. As Hitler’s regime came to Vienna in 1938, Musil fled to Switzerland and spent his
time in borderline poverty and diminished status, still working on the novel right until his
sudden death in 1942.
While working on the book between 1920 and 1930, Musil keenly observed such
historical developments as the Great Depression and the rise of Fascist ideology in the Weimar
11 The translations of Seinesgleichen geschieht differ between the first (1953) and the second English editions
(1995).
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Republic. This anachronistic entanglement of different time levels accounts for Musil’s
accumulating ambition for the novel, as every passing year of writing introduced new ideas of
updating the already sketched out narrative – in the words of J. M. Coetzee, the book was
“overtaken by history” (Coetzee 4). In a way, the novel was working against the author, and
the initially planned four-volume structure12 with its concluding section titled “A Sort of
Conclusion” (mirroring the “A Sort of Introduction”) was put on hold and was never realized.
In the end, the problematic production of the book left behind three parts in two volumes due
to Musil’s struggles of finalizing the book.
The Man Without Qualities is set in pre-war Vienna and follows the demise of the social
and political layers of the Austro-Hungarian (or Musil’s coined name “Kakania”13) Empire
during 1913 and 1914. At the center of the seemingly uneventful narrative stands Ulrich, a
talented young man in his thirties who returns to Vienna after a series of career experiments
(not unlike Musil himself) to finally “seek an appropriate application for his abilities” (44).
Immediately pushed by his father to pursue a career, Ulrich becomes a secretary for the
“Parallel Campaign” - a political movement constituted of high circles of the social elite that
sets out to prepare the national celebration of Emperor Franz Joseph’s 70th year of reign to
mirror Emperor Wilhelm II’s rule of Germany of 30 years in conjunction with the idea of
displaying the imperialist Austrian glory on a global level. Ulrich’s distanced passive
indifference towards his surroundings becomes the primary lens to experience the satirical
cross-section of the pre-war Viennese society. Alongside the impotent political idealism of the
Parallel Campaign, Musil presents an array of radically different characters that masterfully
contribute to an analysis of such notions as ethics, truth, and progress. With the looming
disaster of 1914, The Man Without Qualities is a monumental novel of ideas that depicts the
eclipse of the European Enlightenment project and the utopian promises of modernity – in other
words, Musil’s portrait of the modern world is built on the ironical premise that the world
fueled by a sense of progress and anticipation of the future is oblivious to what it is heading
towards.
Similar to Mann and Broch, Musil stylistically is far less radical than his English and
American modernist contemporaries – if Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf found such devices as
12 For a more in-depth look into the publishing history of The Man Without Qualities, see Walter Fanta’s “The
“Finale” of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Competing Editions and the “Telos” of the Narrative”.
13 Stemming from the abbreviation “k.k” (kaiserlich-königlich), Kakania is a satirical term that bears an
association with the word “kaka” denoting excrement.
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stream of consciousness as the primary means to structure a modern novelistic discourse, Musil
in this sense is more traditional. A lack of formal deviations excludes Musil from the
phenomenological episteme that delineated modernist experimentation regarding such
categories as Bergsonian immediate data of consciousness and the sensory rendition of reality.
These aspects might have been one of the reasons why in the modernist canon, The Man
Without Qualities is often overlooked, 14 albeit often cited by other authors and thinkers as one
of the most monumental works of the late twentieth century.15 It is an oddly ambitious work
that resists the status of a conventional novel; far more often, it bears a label of “a novel of
ideas” or “a philosophical novel”. In it, Musil’s peculiar employment of various systems of
thought, disciplines, and sciences in relation to his skepticism towards positivist objectivism
results in a dialectical synthesis of scientific experimentation – the novel is a laboratory of ideas
that illuminates the modern condition of disillusionment towards the Enlightenment project
and its blind hope in progress that has led into Europe into the historical turmoil of the early
twentieth century.
Stylistically, with The Man Without Qualities, Musil puts into praxis what Broch in
1936 formulated as a need to step back from the mimetic representation and the aspects that it
entails (Dowden 31) – relative orders of meaning and heightened metafictional mistrust of
objective narrative had to become the guiding principles of storytelling. In a rather blatant way,
the novel opens with “a sort of” an introduction (Eine Art Einleitung) only to be followed by
the “like of it” narrative (Seinesgleichen geschieht). The novel addresses a particular historical
tipping point of Europe, but with such unstable framing, the narrative is not historical in the
classical sense - it is instead “historical in a curiously parodic way” (Perloff 79) as it questions
the whole teleological foundation that the Western culture has held axiomatic since the Age of
Enlightenment. In this regard, Musil is dismissive of treating his historical rendition as
“truthful” as he opts to frame his novel as an attempt, an experiment that strives to present the
times of disorder in a self-conscious, suspicious, and ironic way.
14 Specifically with The Man Without Qualities, Musil has been gaining more attention during the past twenty
years – leading criticism includes Genese Grill’s “The World as a Metaphor in Robert Musil's The Man Without
Qualities: Possibility as Reality” (2012); Stijn de Cauwer’s “A Diagnosis of Modern Life: Robert Musil's Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a Critical-Utopian Project” (2014); Patrizia McBridge’s “The Void of Ethics: Robert
Musil and the Experience of Modernity” (2006); as well as editions of collected essays such as “Robert Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities” (2005) edited by Harold Bloom, and “A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil”
(2007) edited by Bartram, Payne, and Tihanov.
15 The novel has received significant attention from thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles
Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-François Lyotard, and authors often associated with the genre of the
philosophical novel such as Thomas Mann, Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee.
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Exemplifying the post-First World War consciousness that has “ceased to believe in
history” (Coetzee 1), Musil plays with the parallel of historical progress and narrative
evolution, a foregrounded constellation in which the very notion of idealist fulfillment is being
questioned. In Musil’s ironic rendition, the naturalized conception of upward development in
modern society (and, by extension, narrative practices) leads to a state of confusion, alienation,
and fragmentation rather than a realization of teleological achievement. In this way, content
and form are in unison: the dissolution of meaningful political, cultural coherence and the
indecisiveness of the society of Kakania are enforced by the structural lack of temporal
consistency that results in the ateleological non-development of the novel. To showcase the
disintegrating teleology of history, the story must upset its own temporal structure and the
syntagmatic structure, hence the employment of time no longer serves the function of ordered
development that was the cornerstone for the realist impetus of the pre-modernist novel.
Chapter I. Topos of Ateleological Time
The last introductory chapter presented Musil’s novelistic situatedness as a point of revising
the conventions of the realist novel and the Enlightenment project of teleological temporal
imagination laid out in the wake of modernity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This first chapter of analysis focuses on the thematic scope of temporality as well as its
ateleological exposition. Firstly, the analysis will employ Hartmut Rosa’s concepts of
“acceleration” and “frenetic standstill” as fundamental principles of modern dynamization of
temporality. These notions will help illuminate Musil’s foundation of critique as a focus on the
exhaustion of progress, and by extension, destabilization of conventions of time. Secondly, the
discussion will focus on how the problem of suspension is structured by undecidability in the
example of the Parallel Campaign and how it undermines the teleological model of historical
past, present, and future. Finally, the notion of transgressive love will be taken up as an
aesthetic alternative against the previously addressed accelerated categories of speed, progress,
and history.
i. Acceleration and Frenetic Standstill: Dissolution of the Teleological Premise
The notions of speed and increasing velocity in a record short time became the normative
factors of perceiving collective temporality as such innovations as the train and the telephone
presented the possibility of spanning vast spaces in a shortened amount of time. Hartmut Rosa,
in his sociological study of modernity Social Acceleration, takes up Koselleck’s fascination
Varžinskas 15
with acceleration and focuses on the notions of accelerated time, speed, and movement in
temporal structures of society – categories that since the industrial revolution marked a new
conceptualization of time with cyclical cosmic time being replaced by the mechanical
governance of the clock. On a micro level, the notion of time during modernity became more
fragmented and detailed than before16 , and the notion of speed became the governing temporal
prerequisite to achieving success (Mendilow 10) as time became a currency that had to be
“spent” efficiently. “An acceleration in the temporal structures of modern society” (26) for
Rosa marks the developing speed gaining an exponential aspect. Rosa claims that at the
beginning of late modernity,17 acceleration has transformed its telos – its future – from a fixed
idea of an endpoint into an open prospect of uncertainty: “In the functionally differentiated
society of high modernity, finally, a linear time consciousness with an open future
predominates: historical development is no longer understood as running toward a determinate
goal, and its ending remains uncertain” (Rosa 15). The exponential quality of social
acceleration seemed to have reached the tipping point that had “opened up” the future in a
violent way – the rushing flux of history was no longer governed by the idealistic teleology of
the Enlightenment’s18 idea of progress since the acceleration has broken its linear conception.
Koselleck himself had already prefigured this shift by claiming that society was initially
“accelerating towards an unknowable future, but within which was contained a hope of the
desired utopian fulfillment” (1985: xv). With reference to Rosa, the critical notion of “hope”
has now shifted to “uncertainty”.
The Man Without Qualities structures the zeitgeist of late modernity precisely in these
terms of acceleration and uncertainty. Musil’s pre-war Vienna of 1913 is a “rapidly growing
world that had to get things done quickly” (379), an urban microcosm rendition of a world in
which the author places streetcars, trains, and industries as monuments of an increasingly
rushing historical progress. During this time, such notions as speed and acceleration became
16 While discussing St. Augustine’s philosophy, Paul Ricoeur notes how “no more than did classical antiquity,
Augustine has no word for units smaller than the hour. This does not change until the eighteenth century” (1984:
232).
17 The referred historical timeframes in this thesis paper are borrowed from Hartmut Rosa who himself takes up
the periodical framework delineated by Marshall Berman: “classical modernity” as the period from 1790 to 1900,
while “late modernity” corresponding to 1900 and onwards.
18 Philipp Blom (similarly to Rosa) marks how speed and gaiety of progress between 1900 and 1914 suddenly
became accompanied by anxiety and vertigo: “[…] nobody felt confident of the shape the future world would
have, of who would wield power, what political constellation would be victorious, or what kind of society would
emerge from the headlong transformation” (3).
Varžinskas 16
the normative principles of urban modernity that coincided with efficiency, power, as well as
the futurist valorization of the machine as a symbol of the future that eschews the stagnant,
slower past. As social acceleration involves not only technological advancement but also
changes the socio-cultural norms, The Man Without Qualities hints at a condition that in the
narrative is manifested by attributing the notion of genius to the mechanical speed of a
racehorse or optimizing labor efficiency with a shorthand script, 19 or elevating journalism to a
new, more effective standard of storytelling.20 These modes of efficiency are inherently related
to the metropolitan space, and right from the start of the novel, Vienna is displayed as a hub of
various accelerated forces where time is governed by velocity, efficiency, and chaos. One of
the key events in the first pages is the auto accident - the crash describes the victim who is both
attacked and then saved by a mechanistic speed when a truck is replaced by an ambulance, an
exchange whose efficiency is applauded by the bystanders. The speed and bustle of Kakania
are accompanied by “irregularity”, “failure to keep step”, and “chronic discord”, in short, a
sense of discordance which structures this accelerated state of a progressive city:
Like all big cities it was made up of irregularity, change, forward spurts, failures to keep step,
collisions of objects and interests, punctuated by unfathomable silences; made up of pathways
and untrodden ways, of one great rhythmic beat as well as the chronic discord and mutual
displacement of all its contending rhythms. All in all, it was like a boiling bubble inside a pot
made of the durable stuff of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions. (MwQ 4)21
19 The discussed idea of introducing a shorthand script as the main means of writing at the Parallel Campaign
meetings corresponds to what Charles Taylor refers to as “instrumental reason” – Taylor argues that as one of the
three malaises of modernity, instrumental reason is “the kind of rationality we draw when we calculate the most
economical application of means to a given end. Maximum efficiency, the best cost output ratio, is its measure of
success” (10).
20 The notion of journalistic narrative in the novel deserves additional attention - the journalistic mode of
accounting for reality in the novel is approached as an emerging modern form of narrative, the “truest narrative
art” (“die echteste erzählerische Kunst”) (1101/1036). The prominent journalist Meseritscher is praised as “the
Homer of our era” (ibid.) as the notion of journalistic writing is presented as replacing the old forms of storytelling.
To take it further, journalism becomes the primary literary discourse of the public sphere. Bakhtin comes to mind
when he writes that “the journalist is above all a contemporary. He is obliged to be one. He lives in the sphere of
questions that can be resolved in the present day (or in any case in the near future). He participates in a dialogue
that can be ended and even finalized, can be translated into action, and can become an empirical force.”
(1986:152). The genre of journalism as “modern rhetoric” (ibid., 150) becomes an instrumentalized means of
narration that is “translated into action” by being immediate, empirical, fast, and most importantly, contemporary.
Treating Meseritscher as “the Homer of our era” is also significant as it merges poetic and rhetoric discourses into
a new medium of modernity, the “truest narrative art”. Does not Musil by this phrasing undermine journalism as
the modern discursive outcome by suggesting that the “truest” art cannot eschew a sense of fiction and myth?
21 For the quotes from the novel, “The Man Without Qualities” will be abbreviated as “MwQ”.
Varžinskas 17
To elaborate further, Musil sustains the mechanistic aspect of accelerated modern
experience and describes the temporality and progress of Kakania by using a metaphor of a
train, a significant chronotopic image:
We travel in it day and night, doing whatever else we do, shaving, eating, making love,
reading books, working at our jobs, as though those four walls around us were standing still;
but the uncanny fact is that those walls are moving along without our noticing it, casting their
rails ahead like long, groping, twisted antennae, going we don’t know where. Besides, we
would like to think of ourselves as having a hand in making our time what it is. It is a very
uncertain part to play, and sometimes, looking out the window after a fairly long pause, we
find that the landscape has changed. What flies past flies past, it can’t be helped, but with all
our devotion to our role an uneasy feeling grows on us that we have traveled past our goal or
got on a wrong track. Then one day the violent need is there: Get off the train! Jump clear! A
homesickness, a longing to be stopped, to cease evolving, to stay put, to return to the point
before the thrown switch put us on the wrong track. (MwQ 28)
Musil’s usage of the train imagery is already a mark of accelerated technology and innovations
impacting the modern temporal imagination. The experience of time is now being realized by
a technologically modern concept of the train, hence the transformative nature of acceleration
influencing temporal structures. As the narrator observes, the goal of this “train of time” is
unknown, and being the passenger is “a very uncertain part to play.” The uneasiness and
uncertainty that Rosa ascribes to social acceleration for Musil bursts out in the “violent need”
to get off the train of progress that has lost its teleological destination. There seems almost a
primal anxious need to “be stopped” and “cease evolving” as an epiphany of the modern subject
who was under the illusion that they are in accordance with the historical time. Musil here
mocks the viewpoint of having control over time, a conquering mindset of “making history”
that has dominated modern progress. In effect, time has almost reached an independent state
via the notion of accelerating progress, leaving the perceiver behind and without control: “Time
was on the move… But nobody knew where time was headed. And it was not always clear
what was up or down, what was going forward or backward” (7). These first instances in the
novel mark the disillusionment with the progressive temporal structures and introduce a sense
of something dangerous and dystopic at the end of the journey.
In this vein, Musil sets out to “undo” the classical notion of time, whose linearity was
previously inextricably linked with the idea of progress and development. The Musilian subject
is a figure that has invested trust in this “train of time” but has become disenchanted, although
it is too late to leave it. In Musil’s ambitious critique of modernity, the subject is no longer a
Varžinskas 18
master of their time as it has almost reached an independent state via the accelerating progress.
In other words, time in the world of the novel gains speed surpassing the individual’s capacity
to conceptualize it as instrumental for their own historical standpoint. The rush of modernity
marks the loss of time, leaving the subject immobile, stuck, and half-realized.
This paradoxical result of inertia as an effect of acceleration can, in this sense, be
viewed in relation to Rosa’s accompanying concept of “frenetic standstill”. By this notion,
Rosa marks the shift from “classical modernity” to “late modernity” by observing how social
acceleration eventually led to societal rigidity after “utopian energies are exhausted because all
the intellectual and spiritual possibilities appear to have been tried” (15). The previously
opened future of progress now paradoxically gains a status of “frenetic standstill” in the
development of ideas, which means that “nothing remains the way it is while at the same time
nothing essential changes” (283). The acceleration exhausts the fleeting present to the point
where it loses temporal orientation and results in rigid inertia, a paradoxical state of
exhaustion,22 and perpetual action that does not crystallize into a coherent form or idea solely
due to the overbearing speed. Thus, the instances of standstill amidst the rushing experiences
in the novel are symptomatic of a modern expenditure – such examples range from the inactive
ambitions of the Parallel Campaign to such characters as Ulrich‘s youth friend Walter who,
once envisioned as a progressive, modernist artist, finds himself blaming the modern present
for his failed aspirations; or Leo Fischel, a bank director who believes in progress in parallel to
the accumulating capital but becomes oblivious to the timely inception of proto-fascism
kindled in his own household after his daughter gets involved with antisemitic German
nationalists.
The duality of acceleration and frenetic standstill correlates with the ambivalent
temporal structures of the narrative of The Man Without Qualities – Vienna’s social and
cultural life is portrayed as governed by an increased pace of life, increasingly rushing
modernity and technology. In contrast, the narrative order or the novel itself works towards a
perpetual suspension, a state of a standstill rejecting the idea of a teleological and, therefore,
future-oriented development.
22 In this sense, Habermas compliments Rosa’s ideas of the frenetic standstill when he writes that “modern time-
consciousness has repeatedly slackened” (1987: 13) due to an accelerating need for progressive novelty. As the
notion of “progress became the historical norm” (ibid., 12), modernity started losing its vitality and stalled.
Varžinskas 19
ii. Progress as the Teleological Principle of Time
In Kakania, the primary ideological principle is the belief in progress. For example, a bank
director Leo Fischel associates the notion of progress with the accumulating wealth of his
capital,23 while Diotima sees the Parallel Campaign as a historical means of progress.
Specifically, in Arnheim, Diotima sees “the New Man, destined to take over the helm of history
from the old powers” (357), moreover, during their relationship, Diotima is presented as a
person who “regards each age she passes through as a step on a stairway leading upward from
below” (313) and by introducing Arnheim into the Parallel Campaign, she feels “with absolute
certainty that her life had reached a pinnacle” (357). In her eyes, her own self-worth is
symbolically coincident with the Parallel Campaign, and she associates this gathering with
teleological development.
Meanwhile, Ulrich is a counter-figure to such trust in the notion of teleological
progress. The category of history itself for him is governed by chance rather than certainty:
The course of history was therefore not that of a ball which, once it is hit, takes a definite line-
but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets,
turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he
arrives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain
going off course. (MwQ 392)24
In Ulrich’s eyes, anything is susceptible to sudden, abrupt changes, as seen in the erratic
description of historical time. There is no finality to becoming. Its outcome is never clear – in
this sense, the outbreak of the war displayed how the Enlightenment project and its
teleologically charged historicism turned out not to be prophetically utopic.
23 “Director Fischel, for instance, could form no concept at all of true patriotism or the true Austria, but he did
have his own opinion of true progress, which was certainly different from Count Leinsdorf's opinion. Exhausted
by stocks and bonds or whatever it was he had to deal with, his only recreation an evening at the opera once a
week, he believed in a progress of the whole that must somehow resemble his bank's progressively increasing
profitability” (MwQ 142).
24 While walking through Vienna, Ulrich speculates that the course of historical time may not be determined by a
teleological trajectory of a line but rather susceptible to abruptions that are outside temporal anticipations. As he
is having these thoughts, he gets lost after the series of distractions of the city and the narrative connects these
categories of historical and personal experience – historical motions are not unlike an individual capacity to go
“off course”: “He had been numbering his own answers and digressions as he went along, while glancing now
into some passing face, now into a shop window, to keep his thoughts from running away with him entirely, but
had nevertheless gone slightly astray and had to stop for a moment to see where he was and find the best way
home” (MwQ 392).
Varžinskas 20
As for the historical present itself, Ulrich’s perception of modernity is heavily informed
by the accelerated state of progress to the point where humanity’s efforts seem to start losing
their foundational grounding and causality. “Our era is dripping with the energy of action. It’s
not interested in ideas, only in deeds. […] Everyone spends his whole life repeating the same
thing over and over again” (804).
Ulrich is aware of the social acceleration and frenetic standstill that the Viennese
experience; however, he chooses to avoid entangling himself in such a position by denouncing
to believe in the teleological utopia and the idea of progress. In the introductory scene, Ulrich
is presented standing behind his apartment window watching the traffic and “ticking off on his
stopwatch the passing cars, trucks, trolleys, and pedestrians. He was gauging their speeds, their
angles, all the living forces of mass hurtling past that drew the eye to follow them like lightning,
holding on, letting go, forcing the attention for a split second to resist, to snap, to leap in pursuit
of the next item” (6). Quickly enough, he becomes disillusioned with the idea of “calculating
the incalculable” and “after doing the arithmetic in his head for a while, he slipped the watch
back into his pocket with a laugh and decided to stop all this nonsense” (7). Ulrich ceases
counting the urban traffic from behind his window, and by refusing to measure modern life in
terms of mechanical clock time, he is introduced as one who ceases to see it in terms of
progress.
iii. The Indecisive Storytellers of History
Building the model of Kakania, Musil drew timely parallels with the political and cultural
realities of pre-war Vienna. The city exemplified the Empire’s inability to maintain itself,
which was suffering under the indecisive political regime before the war. While addressing the
pre-war political climate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Caroline de Gruyter notes how the
complex national diversity increasingly rendered the state unsustainable to rule: “Habsburgers
always played for time because a common decision was impossible while the emperor always
notoriously took his time to make a decision” (de Gruyter 2012). As an aporetic place of many
conflicting ethnicities, regimes, and ideologies,25 “the grotesque Austria” in Musil’s eyes was
“nothing but a particularly clear-cut case of the modern world” (Musil 1998: 209), a
background of action displaying the stagnated and decaying fin-de-siecle sensibility
25 “The government was clerical, but everyday life was liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but not
everyone was a citizen. There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept
shut” (MwQ 29).
Varžinskas 21
complemented by the fading aristocratic ideas, administrative impotence, and cultural
aimlessness of the Habsburg empire, All of this is present in the Dual Monarchy of Kakania of
1914, a microcosmic place and time of many juxtapositions.
At the vanguard of Kakanian collective psyche stands the Parallel Campaign, which
functions as a metonymical representation for the Kakania as a whole – it is a central political
endeavor of the Empire struggling to sustain its disintegrating social order but which is defined
by aimlessness, political fragmentation, and inability to generate ideas that would be socially
coherent. As the ultimate attempt to provide an ideological grounding for the disintegrating
Dual Monarchy, the Parallel Campaign is firstly an endeavor of writing history by placing itself
ahead of the historical time with such mottos as “we cannot forget at this moment we owe all
our energies to the realization of a historic event!” (187). The campaign is responsible for
“recovering” the grand ideological narrative of the Habsburg Empire. At the same time, Count
Leinsdorf, a conservative Realpolitik official, and Diotima (Ermelinda Tuzzi) are figures
preoccupied with sustaining that narrative for the future. In other words, the Campaign
envisions themselves as storytellers responsible for laying out the future narrative for the
Empire:
But there is also something else involved which has not yet been mentioned, and that is the
delight in storytelling itself; it takes the shape of that conviction so common to authors that
they are working on a good story, that passion of authorship that lengthens an author’s ears
and makes them glow, so that all criticism simply melts away. Count Leinsdorf had this
conviction and this passion, and so did some of his friends […] (MwQ 561)
The passion of the Parallel Campaign’s ideological storytelling is thus firmly rooted in the
Hegelian teleology of progress that has been exalted to a naturalized status. With Count
Leinsdorf as the leading figure, the Campaign treats history as a judicial procedure, a “lawful
process” that forms a “smoothly ascending line” (181) – tenets of classical modernity along
which the Campaign seeks to situate itself. The Parallel Campaign harbors a profound principle
that they can reclaim control over history, a modern mindset that echoes the words of Zygmunt
Bauman when he writes: “The deepest, perhaps the sole meaning of progress is made up of two
closely interrelated beliefs - that “time is on our side,” and that we are the ones who “make
things happen” (Bauman 132). In such a manner, the Parallel Campaign stands for the
progressive modern consciousness envisioning itself as the frontier of historical time.
The political impotence of the Campaign also lies in its fragmentary nature. The initial
idea of gathering the expert minds to conjure an idea embodying the glory of Kakania fails
Varžinskas 22
most ironically - each one of them remains separate in their personal ambitions,26 “trapped in
the cage of his or her specialized knowledge” (McBridge 5) without reaching any consensus.
Max Weber saw the disenchanted modern condition as a testament to the loss of unity due to
accelerated differentiation of life-spheres that compartmentalized experiences into enclosed,
hermetic loci. In Diotima’s words, the Parallel Campaign is concerned with this “need to
recover that unity of mankind that had been lost because the disparity of interests in society
had grown so great” (189). Ironically enough, by trying to amend this crisis of the fragmented
modern present, the Parallel Campaign resorts to the means exemplifying the same condition
and gathers an ensemble of individuals27 who are unable to cooperate as each of them
represents only individual ambitions and disparate ideologies – for example, Arnheim is
eventually exposed as using the campaign solely for influential purposes. Simultaneously,
General Stumm’s motivation lies in a bureaucratic attempt to obtain funding for the Austrian
army. A homogenous ideology is no longer possible in the modern world due to an accelerated
differentiation and specialization, and fragmentation of human experiences that the Campaign
reflects.
Quite quickly, it becomes clear that the Campaign will remain an idea without content,
a gathering of progress and excitement without substance and realization. Musil’s novel
exposes the blind nature of this teleological and progressive mindset – despite the disintegrating
unity, Kakania still harbors a belief in progress without seeing any clear manifestations.
Without holding any ideological potential, the Campaign is destined to fail its mission – from
the start, it remains to be an effort of “action without purpose” (Goodstein, 394). In this light,
Leinsdorf and Diotima’s obsession with the recurring sense that “something’s got to be done”
(878) and “something’s going to happen” (110) serves as a satirical impression – instead of an
idea that would encompass the spiritual superiority of the Habsburg Empire, Europe falls into
the worst conflict of humankind seen at that time. With its phantomic anticipation, the year
1918, in the unrealized mist of time, becomes a historical point of disintegration instead of a
glorious celebration.
26 Habermas observes this condition in claiming that modernity since the Enlightenment has “segregated science,
morality, and art into autonomous specialized spheres splitting off from lifeworld and administered by specialists”
(1997: 54).
27“As agreed at the inaugural sessions, they had divided up the world according to the major aspects of religion,
education, commerce, agriculture, and so on” (MwQ 241).
Varžinskas 23
iv. Crisis of the Present and the Aimlessness of History
In Chapter 62, Ulrich and his cousin Diotima set out on one of the countryside trips that “serve
the purpose of winning support for the campaign from influential or wealthy persons” (299),
and they end up taking an excursion into a valley. While strolling, they find themselves
discussing topics like will, power, and desire when Ulrich suddenly turns the conversation
towards the notions of time and history:
We wildly overestimate the present, the sense of the present, the here and now; like you and
me being here in this valley, as if we’d been put in a basket and the lid of the present had
fallen on it. We make too much of it. We’ll remember it. Even a year from now we may be
able to describe how we were standing here. But what really moves us—me anyway—is
always—putting it cautiously; I don’t want to look for an explanation or a name for it—
opposed in a sense to this way of experiencing things. It is displaced by so much here and
now, so much Present. So it can’t become the present in its turn. (MwQ 312)
What is at the center of Ulrich’s ambiguous attack on “the sense of the present”? Bearing in
mind Ulrich’s skepticism towards the teleological principle of historical time, his stance runs
counter to the treatment of the present as a providential episode in the grand narrative of history.
In other words, the “overestimated” present that is “being made too much of” refers to a
teleological sense of present historical time that is charged with a notion of progress. Ulrich
here denies the significance of the present - be it historical or phenomenological – that is
essentially meaningless at its unfolding.
As previously discussed, the Parallel Campaign embodies the progressive teleological
drive of “making history” and being at the “helm of history,” a movement for which “every
moment may be that of a great historic turning point.” The present reflected by such ideology
becomes overvalued as the obsession with action forces one to infuse the present with
teleological meaning. Musil’s position of writing in 1921 further proves this notion of the non-
significant present as the Viennese society in the brimming present of 1913-1914 was oblivious
to the looming disaster28. It seems that for Musil, the meaning of the present is only possible
once it becomes a reflected past, in other words, when it becomes a simultaneous narrative of
28 At the same time “people not yet born in those days will find it hard to believe, but even then time was racing
along like a cavalry, camel, just like today” (MwQ 7). The present of “today” for the retrospective narration
exhibits the same quality of the present of 1913 – nobody in that time was suspectful of the disastrous future, and
the same could be said about any year or any present moment. This way, Musil acknowledges his own present
positioning towards the unknown future devoid of teleological order as the historical judgment is exchanged by
temporal intuition.
Varžinskas 24
(hi)story assuming a sequential form of a narrativized past - the present must settle into the
structure of a narrative before it can carry historical meaning and significance of being past.
As historical distance articulates events of the past retrospectively29 via sequential ordering,
there is no way of understanding the present until it becomes a past under the guise of a
narrative, until the present becomes a past for the present of the future. In Musil’s own words
from the essay The Writer in Our Age: “One knows just as little about the present. Partly this
is because we are, as always, too close to the present” (Lukács 1963: 35).
That is why Ulrich abstains from treating the modern notion of the present as a
teleological stage towards perfection; instead, with his claim, “I don’t want to look for an
explanation,” he approaches it as an erratic space of possibility where positivist determinism
is eschewed in favor of speculation. The present for Musil is problematic in its
meaninglessness, but precisely because of it, the present becomes a sphere of potential
possibilities and contingencies rather than a providential steppingstone towards the teleological
future. As an ineffable matter, the issue of the present is a subject that Ulrich tries to address,
but it is also the condition in which he finds himself thinking about it. The heightened spatial
and temporal awareness of the valley30 constitutes the present moment in which Ulrich tries to
conceptualize the notion of the present, but he fails as Musil is quick to mention that “he did
not really know what he was aiming at” (313).
The undermined teleology of the present is also prevalent in the Parallel Campaign’s
attitude towards the potential betterment of the future, namely in the scene where Count
Leinsdorf is talking with Ulrich, who is cataloging proposal ideas from the public regarding
the celebration into two folders of ones arguing for going back to the past and others for the
future:
“I have already, incidentally,” Ulrich continued, “two folders full of general proposals, which
I’ve had no previous opportunity to return to Your Grace. One of them I’ve headed: Back to!
It’s amazing how many people tell us that the world was better off in earlier times and want
29 Louis Mink draws on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the phenomenological unfolding of history and suggests that
historical understanding is a “mode of uniquely retrospective intelligibility. For the advents and passages […]
could not have been understood by their own agents and participants as we can now understand them” (116).
Thus, the historical present is devoid of meaning until it becomes a past for the present of the future. George
Herbert Mead similarly treats the category of the present as “nothing but textureless data”, “abstractions from
things [that] must be given their places in the constructive pasts of human communities before they can become
events” (240).
30 Musil often portrays places as intersections of time and space, similarly to Balzac‘s tendency to “see time in
space” as noted by Bakhtin (1981:247).
Varžinskas 25
the Parallel Campaign to take us back there. Without counting the understandable slogan, Back
to Religion!, we still have a Back to the Baroque, Back to Gothic, Back to Nature, Back to
Goethe, to Ancient Germanic Law, to Moral Purity, and quite a few more.
“Hmm, yes. But perhaps there is a real idea in there somewhere, which it would be a mistake
to discourage?” Count Leinsdorf offered.
“That’s possible, but how should one deal with it? ‘After careful consideration of your
esteemed letter of such-and-such a date, we regret that we do not regard the present moment
as suitable .. .’? Or ‘We have read your letter with interest, please supply details on how
restoration of the world as it was in the Baroque, the Gothic, et cetera, et cetera, is to be effected
. . . and so on’?” Ulrich was smiling, but Count Leinsdorf felt he was treating the situation
with a little too much levity, and twiddled his thumbs with renewed vigor to ward it off. His
face, with its handlebar mustache, assumed a hardness reminiscent of the Wallenstein era, and
then he came out with a most noteworthy statement:
“Dear Doctor,” he said, “in the history of mankind there is no voluntary turning back!”
This statement surprised no one more than Count Leinsdorf himself, who had actually intended
to say something quite different. As a conservative, he had been annoyed with Ulrich, and had
wanted to point out to him that the middle classes had spumed the universal spirit of the
Catholic Church and were now suffering the consequences. He was also on the point of
praising the times of absolute centralism, when the world was still led by persons aware of
their responsibilities in accordance with fixed principles. But while he was still groping for
words, it suddenly occurred to him what a nasty surprise it would be to wake up one morning
without a hot bath and trains, with an Imperial town crier riding through the streets instead of
the morning papers. And so Count Leinsdorf thought: “Things can never again be what they
were, the way they were,” and as he thought this he was quite astonished. For one assumed
that if there was indeed no voluntary going back in history, then mankind was like a man
driven along by some inexplicable wanderlust, a man who could neither go back nor arrive
anywhere, and this was a quite re-markable condition. (MwQ 251-52)
Hypothetically, turning back to the mythologized ideas of the past would also mean turning
back to the holistic sense of the past with all its past elements. As the leading figure for a central
political movement, Leinsdorf illustrates the modern habit of looking at the past selectively,
and by these bits and pieces, a narrative constellation of elements that serve ideological agenda
is conjured without acknowledging the holistic impact of the past upon the present. While
negating the decadent present in favor of the glorious past, Leinsdorf, at this moment, suddenly
realizes that the past also implies losing the comfortabilities of progress that is taken for
granted. In the wake of late modernity, the notion present for Leinsdorf and the Campaign starts
Varžinskas 26
shifting towards uncertainty as it becomes the time of crisis, albeit still serves the function of
seizing the moment and “making history.” However, after acknowledging the impossibility of
going back to the past, Leinsdorf is left with the idea of the future, which itself is losing its
teleological promise because the present, for his conservative (and borderline reactionary)
mind, is not an improvement of the historical past. This marks a kind of schizophrenic status
of the notion of historical time as one portion of society seeks salvation in the future and the
other half in the past, hence the sense of being disoriented and unable to rely on neither the past
nor the future. Truly enough, just a couple of chapters later, Ulrich describes to Diotima this
aporetically “unbearable” state of the present. “Half of them seek salvation in the future and
the other half in the past.[…] Permit me to say that we’re in a very peculiar situation, unable
to move either forward or backward, while the present moment is felt unbearable too” (294).
Such condition again evokes the notion of the frenetic standstill as the simultaneous state of
being stuck while being unmercifully propelled forward supposes the loss of control.
Kakania is caught between two diverging temporal directions – the conservative past
and the progressive future – which is marked by a “directionless historical transformation.”31
Thus, the crisis of historical time in the novel lies within an idea that the present loses its
teleological quality towards the future, and so does the past. As an effect, the Parallel Campaign
is caught in a frenetic standstill that undermines any forms of a clear decision - throughout the
series of meetings, the committees cannot come up with any coherent plans or actions while
diving further and further into open and at times certainly obscure discussions. The governing
principle of the Campaign is Leinsdorf’s habit of postponing as a means of neither saying yes
nor no “as long as we have no firm idea what our central goal is” (242). By extension, indecisive
postponing eventually becomes a central issue to the Parallel Campaign as this practice
becomes increasingly repetitious. The movement remains a list of names with an occasional
proposal of vague ideas that do not develop into anything complete. As a result, the issue of
indecision grows larger, and at the end of Volume II Leinsdorf asks Diotima:
“Tell me, my dear, haven’t you come to a decision yet?” he would ask. “It’s high
time. […] Diotima obediently promised to hurry; but then she forgot again and did
nothing. And then one day Count Leinsdorf was seized by his well-known energy and
31 “While history took on the character of a directed and politically shapeable movement in classical modernity,
in late modernity the perception of a directionless historical transformation that can no longer be politically steered
or controlled becomes more and more prevalent. Politics forfeits its directional index, and the concepts
“progressive” and “conservative” lose or switch their meanings: progressive politics no longer has any
accelerating function and its insistence on the political possibility of controlling social development makes it
rather a late modern decelerator” (Rosa 313).
Varžinskas 27
drove straight to her door, propelled by forty horsepower. “Has anything happened
yet?” he asked, and Diotima had to admit that nothing had. (MwQ 1079-80)
Volume III closes with the same tone, as Leinsdorf adjourns the final meeting of volume with
the words “we’ve decided to continue this evening’s meeting another time” (1130).
As a political and socio-cultural frontier, the Campaign manifests as a parodic
contradiction of deliberate “history-making” that fails to arrive at decided results in a series of
indefinite postponing. Situated on a tipping point of history, the Campaign fails to decide
precisely because of the frenetic standstill caused by order of acceleration – the past is no longer
feasible and effective while the future starts to lose its teleological promise of hope. Leinsdorf,
through his practice of repetitive postponement, abstains from decisive action that would
validate the Parallel Campaign, and eventually, the movement disintegrates.
v. Retrogression of Achronic Love
The accelerated sense of time in Vienna is eventually challenged by a letter to Ulrich in which
he learns that his father has passed away. Taken aback by the sudden news, Ulrich plans out
his return to the hometown to prepare for the funeral and meet his sister Agathe that he has not
seen in years. In conjunction with Ulrich stepping into the realm of youth memories after
returning to the hometown, he enters a different historical time frame that has not yet been
urbanized. The “strange and familiar” (369) streets greet him with peace and calmness
contrasting with the speed and bustle of metropolitan Vienna. Opposite to the city, the nameless
hometown is also is a frame of a different epoch – Ulrich’s home still holds the remnant aura
of upper-middle-class with the long-serving family servant and Biedermeier decorum marking
the sensibilities of the nineteenth century. Like the nameless hometown, Ulrich’s home
becomes a space of stillness and memories – after their meeting, Ulrich and Agathe spend most
of the time reminiscing and talking about their youth in their childhood rooms and hallways.
Enforced by a solemn aura of their father’s death, the house becomes a suspended space of
relived reminiscences.
The “strange and familiar” aura of the home extends to the incestuous romance with his
sister Agathe that is based on the same aporetic principle of simultaneous sameness and
difference. Ulrich immediately recognizes her as a mirror image and her androgynous
semblance of himself. During the time at home, Agathe is presented as spontaneous and lively,
however, disenchanted with reality and longing for nothingness (930). Agathe has an
“unusually exact memory” (925) but fails to make sense out of the past events; moreover, she
Varžinskas 28
carries a poison capsule around her neck, which in Musil’s sketches, she uses in an attempt to
commit suicide. Time for Agathe is virtually suspended as the past for her is not significant,
and the future does not hold any promises either (870). In this fashion, Agathe displays qualities
that are counter to every other character in Vienna – she exemplifies a disinterested approach
to life akin to Kant’s idea of purposiveness without purpose – a lack of motivation to influence
reality, which in Ulrich’s eyes becomes a creative and positive force. Even more than Ulrich,
his sister has no illusions that the world can be improved or that one should take up such a
mission, and this evokes a peculiar and irresistible attraction. For Ulrich, Agathe’s charm lies
in her dismissal of action that in Volume I was displayed in terms of obsession and accelerated
life.
After becoming infatuated with each other, the siblings engage in what could be called
a series of transgressions,32 e.g., Agathe in front of Ulrich puts her garter into the late father’s
coffin while later they start scheming against Agathe’s husband by forging the inheritance
documents in his disfavor. In the novel’s words, the incestuous romance becomes “a protest
against life” (1022), and in its achronic mysticism, it is also a protest against reality and time.
As Musil’s modern consciousness yearns for a halt of time in order to lose the sense of
acceleration, the achronic love in the story becomes the counter-reference to the uncontrollable
“train of time” described at the beginning of Volume I. In this regard, such sensibility of Ulrich
is transformed into the desired state with Agathe – a transcendent form of love defined by an
infinite present.
For the first time in the novel, Ulrich’s love for Agathe prompts an impetus of decision:
“He decided to do all he could for her. He even decided to look for another husband for her.
This need to be kind restored to him, although he barely noticed, the lost thread of his
discourse” (978).33 In this regard, love can be claimed to be the only act of subjective decision
of Ulrich that invokes meaning and a sense of purposeful narrative trajectory. However, even
assuming a function of a goal, their love – bearing the interchangeable labels “The Millenium”
and “Other condition” – does not conform to a temporally causal teleology. The utopia that the
siblings envision is a realm where “love isn’t a stream flowing toward its goal but a state of
32 After falling in love with Agathe, Ulrich ascribes a strong ethical dimension to the transgressive romance.
Keeping in mind that Agathe’s name in Greek (Agathos) means “good”, the introduction of Agathe sets up
morality as a central issue for Volume II. Their love could be called a second instance of Musil’s thematic exposé
where the issue of morality and ethics is approached via acts of transgression – just like Moosbrugger’s aporetic
pathology, Agathe attracts Ulrich in a way that could be surmised as a positioning outside the social order.
33 The “thread of his discourse” is a direct reference to the “thread of narrative life” of Chapter 122 that will be
discussed in the next chapter.
Varžinskas 29
being like the ocean,” a fluid “state of motionlessness and detachment, filled with everlasting,
crystal-clear events” (871). As the time spent with Agathe marks Ulrich’s escape from the
social order, time becomes no longer social as it gains aspects of metaphysical transcendence.
The budding romance seems to be hinging on the notion of abstraction replacing a linear logic.
The incestuous love between Agathe and Ulrich is also achronic due to its retrogressive
nature – during one of the discussions between siblings, Agathe mentions the Platonic myth
about the original human being halved into male and female by gods (980):
“You know that myth Plato tells, following some ancient source, that the gods divided
the original human being into two halves, male and female?” She had propped herself
up on one elbow and unexpectedly blushed, feeling awkward at having asked Ulrich if
he knew so familiar a story; then she resolutely charged ahead: “Now those two pathetic
halves do all kinds of silly things to come together again. […]
“You’d think that siblings might have succeeded halfway already!” Agathe interjected
in a voice that had become husky.
“Twins, possibly.”
“Aren’t we twins?”
“Certainly!”
Thus, falling in love for the siblings becomes an attempt to find each other’s lost halves that
are simultaneously identical yet different. The conjoining informs the transcendent quality of
the timeless Millenium of two twin parts (by them both envisioning themselves as Siamese
twins) amounting to a communal totality:
Well, we’ve already spoken of being twins,” Ulrich responded, getting noiselessly to
his feet, because he thought that she was finally being overwhelmed by fatigue.
“We’d have to be Siamese twins,” Agathe managed to say. (985)
Transgressive love becomes a form of longing for something lost, something that is no longer
reachable in the historical timeline – Musil hints at a transcendent struggle for disinterested
mythologism, an almost primordial state of suspended morality and time outside the social
order. This mystical state of two mirroring individuals reaching a sense of home and belonging
suggests a return to the mother’s womb, a strive for primeval safety that goes against the
merciless march of time. However, it must be noted that incestuous love is a retrogressive act
of degeneracy that negates the prolongation of family and continuity of future-self. In their
Varžinskas 30
romance lies desperation to seek safety outside the order of time and society, but it also implies
a teleological self-negation – thus, the retrogressive impetus of the modern individual opposes
the notion of progressive development.
It hints at a point of origin that still had the sense of a whole being before being halved
into male and female.34 At this point in the narrative, the alternative realm of the romance
evokes a sense of mythical significance as a precursor to the novelistic development - the
retroactive veering towards the antique35 rather than the modern present is also supported by
Musil’s initial plans to name his protagonist “Achilles” as well as the introduction of Agathe
(by herself, etymologically bearing a Greek notion of “goodness”) who introduces the dual
protagonist structure reminiscent of the Greek epic (Erwin 88). Overall, the idea of an eternal
present during which a retrogressive communion is reached becomes Ulrich’s salvation, an
escape from the accelerated social time and its constraints of progress.
Chapter II. Techne of Ateleological Time
Throughout Chapter 1, the analysis focused on the contents of undone time in terms of the
series of temporal crises that the world of Kakania presents: it was discussed how structured
by acceleration and challenged by frenetic standstill, the notions as progress and teleological
vision of historical time in modernity started losing its potency, a state from which the Musilian
subject turns to a transgressive achronic love.
This second chapter of analysis shifts towards the form and focuses on Musil’s narrative
strategies and techniques in his ateleological project. The analysis will demonstrate how
through the destabilization of conventions of narrative time, the novel achieves the sense of
lost temporal orientation, suspends teleological narration, and generates the conceptual level
of narrativity and history. This chapter claims that these thematic and aesthetic issues correlate
directly with the ambivalent temporal structure of The Man Without Qualities – Vienna’s social
and cultural life is portrayed as governed by an increased pace of life, rushing modernity, and
34 Stephen Dowden treats Musil’s eroticism a central theme of the novel that culminates in the desire to reinforce
the “dyonisian sources of myth and the sacred” (38). However, he further writes that such employment of eroticism
is harmonious with the flow of time signifying the act of escape. I hold the position that it is neither – siblings’
love is primarily retrogressive.
35 In this sense, Musil evokes the modernist disregard for the present and very-near past tradition – his interest in
the ancient tropes through the last chapters of Volume II points backward into an unreachable past, a point of
origin, similarly how Pound, Joyce, H.D. eschewed Victorian literary tradition in favor for antique tropes.
Varžinskas 31
technology, but the narrative itself is suspended in a state of a standstill without teleological
development.
i. Narrative and Time of Failed History
Musil’s focus on the notion of time is different from the phenomenological time that prevails
in the stream-of-consciousness modernism, namely championed by Virginia Woolf, James
Joyce, William Faulkner – authors, all of which have primarily explored time as a subjective
and interiorized category. Time for Musil was interesting in its pragmatic nature, namely as the
structuring faculty of teleological thinking in the form of a narrative. The notion of narrative is
usually employed as a stratum of unity, a means of conceptualizing time as an order for action
and development that generates meaning (Lloyd 11). It seems that Musil undoes time by
revising the homogenous notion of progressive/successive time that structures the conventional
Western narrative practices.
In the introduction of the book, the narrative presents a world of rushing speed and
accelerated time. However, as the title of the chapter ironically reflects (“From which,
remarkably enough, nothing develops”), with the introduction of the main actants of the
Parallel Campaign and Ulrich, the novel immediately stalls and sustains that temporal mode
throughout the whole story. The novel is a monument to an uncontrollable speed of progress,
but through its structure, it paradoxically suspends the sense of movement: the narrative
becomes a condensed window of suspended time during a historical tipping point.
Musil’s storytelling holds a quality of an attempt rather than a stable story that should
be taken for granted. It marks an experimentalist effort to present the notion of narrative as a
site of possibilities. Time in this environment becomes unstable, and its property of governing
narratological causality of the events loses its validity. As Musil remarks at the very start of
the novel, “time was on the move, but nobody knew where it was headed. And it was not always
clear what was up or down, what was going forward or backward,” (7) and this modern
temporal disorientation extends into the mechanism of the narrative itself. In other words, loss
of temporal footing in the novel extends beyond the diegetic level of the story – on a macro
level, the disorienting time discourse marks the break with the traditional modes of storytelling
in which time was employed to serve the teleological principle of development. Musil, with his
temporal upsetting, is very conscious of it and does not let this idea slip back into a coherent
story that would suggest causality and resolution.
Varžinskas 32
In other words, Musil’s Kakania is defined by a paradoxical practice of speed and
movement that no longer serves any purpose of development.36 Seinesgleichen geschieht also
describes a stage in history where events are always taking place, but their significance is
unclear and indefinite (Müller-Funk describes Kakania as “a space in terrific and lightning
movement but without any direction” (261)). “The person awakened to awareness of the
current situation has the feeling that the same things are happening to him over and over again,
without there being a light to guide him out of this disorderly circle” (MwQ 1178). Truly, the
narrative proves to be a series of repetitions of failed decisions.
At one instance, Musil reiterates the Hegelian meaning of Geschichte, interrelating
notions of a story and history and equating them in terms of narrativity. “[…] world history
[Weltgeschichte] undoubtedly comes into being like all the other stories [Geschichten]” (MwQ
391). The active notion of the verb geschehen as “happening” is etymologically linked with
the noun Geschichte that denotes both concepts of “history” and “story.” For Musil, both the
historical nature of the novel and the narrative properties of historical conception are
inextricably related. It is difficult to name precisely the “it” of Seinesgleichen geschieht;
nevertheless, “something” happens that operates on the terms of Geschichte, suggesting both
historical and narratological dimensions. On one level, the novel approaches the notion of
history as no longer a stable narrative delineated in the Hegelian teleology; moreover, the
narration with its poetic subversion of realist modes also illuminates fiction practices as
primarily a represented story rather than reality. Taking both options into account, Musil’s
novel places history and story on the plane of literary fictionality, and the elusive
Seinesgleichen geschieht can be formulated as “the like of history-and-a-story now happens.”
It is neither a story in the conventional sense about a hero nor a historical account of a place
and time that would fit a teleological model.
Musil’s project revolving around the ateleological principle deconstructs the
conventionality of the genre of the novel that used to be a form of totality and teleological
closure. From the post-WWI literature perspective, Musil mimics the state of shock and the
sense of failed modernity – the telos of progress turned out to be an epoch of destruction and
alienation rather than upward salvation of humankind. In the same vein, the novel, with its
roots in the realist mode of teleological unfolding, does not fulfill its totality governed by
36 McBridge notes how the narrative is persistent on being “fundamentally static and intimates a timeless condition
rather than a historical development.” (12), while Müller-Funk writes that “Musil’s novel evokes the image of a
restless and purposeless dynamic modernity” (240).
Varžinskas 33
completion principles. In Musil’s eyes, history proves to be parodic, constructed, inessential,
and he fashions out his narrative alongside the shared basis.
ii. Subverting the Novel
Teleological completion was the crux of a classical realist novel in which narrative trajectories
leading to a culmination and resolution have been established as the fundamental narratological
properties. Musil disregards such a model and goes against the very goal of the genre – his
narrative is an active resistance towards completion and finality.37 Within the novelistic
structure, Musil empties out the genre of the novel of its action impetus and exposes the
structures upon which the old-fashioned novel was built, namely the teleological necessity of
narrative and the total sense of reality. The novel for Musil seems to appear to have run out of
steam regarding its capacity to convey the struggle of the modern consciousness understanding
its environment.38 However, he still uses the novel as a formal vessel to question its genre, and
that might be conceptualized as parodic poetics39 as the narrative employs reflective techniques
of reminding the reader about its atypical nature. The title of the second part, “Pseudoreality
prevails,” aptly reflects the strategy of constructing reality supported by the realist conventions,
but in a suspicious, ironic, and, one might argue parodic manner.
To start with, the novel opens with a weather report that is concluded with an ironic
touch: “In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned:
It was a fine day in August 1913” (MwQ 3). The realist novel was concerned with representing
the world in its truthful totality, amounting to a systematic way of rendering reality and life
from various perspectives, including the social, individual, and psychological paradigms. The
nameless couple of the opening chapter also contribute to the subversion of the realist poetics
– after introducing them, the narrator rejects the already established information about their
identities and leaves the reader without any suggestion of who they are. Musil is evidently
poking fun at the “fairly” accurate “old-fashioned” forms of the realist novel that often had
been exalted to the status of scientific significance, study, research (eg. Balzac, whose name
37 Peter Osborne calls The Man Without Qualities “a negative form” of the Bildungsroman (229).
38 Frank Kermode argues that Musil treated “the novel as a form corresponded to a failed myth of reality and so
he sacked it, writing instead essays with a narrative binding” (96).
39 In terms of employing parody to subvert a novelistic narrative, Musil stands alongside Proust and Mann, two
authors that were also working within the old-fashioned forms of the novel in order to reconfigure narrative
techniques in a new light.
Varžinskas 34
eventually became a synonym for the “traditional” novel (Culler 223). If in Père Goriot Balzac
exclaimed that “this drama is neither fiction nor romance! All is true.” (Balzac 8), Musil stands
in the opposite, always reminding that the reader is engaging with an opaque, resistant narrative
of the aporetic times.
In effect, Musil constructs a narrative abiding by the realist conventions but
deconstructs the essence of it - his novel does not fulfill its goal precisely because the story
does not seek completion or teleological resolution. Instead of treating this genre as a truthful
rendition of the historical reality, Musil regards it as an experimental site of possibilities where
the sense of the world becomes skewed, unstable, incomplete. The question of reality for Musil
is defined mostly by the categories of fluidity, irrationality, and mystique as countermeasures
to the governing scientific positivism of modern analysis. The novel, thus, simply cannot
imitate the world in a definite way – Musil’s project is an innovative form built on the model
of the old-fashioned novel to render reality as fleeting and labyrinthic. The open-endedness
and ateleological development of the book suggest a denial to “frame” the world; moreover, it
thematically addresses the modern world’s impossibility to be “framed” as it was in the realist
novel. In the form of the novel, Musil still sees the utility of penetrating reality, even if realism
with its teleology inherited from the Enlightenment now appeared as an insufficient attempt.
In a way, Musil rejects the way reality has been sought after, but not the principal impetus
itself.40
For Musil, the novel - and by proxy poetics in general - ceased to be a transparent
rendition of reflected reality and became “a realm for the imaginative experimentation with
creative alternatives to reality” (McBridge 14). Musil does not negate reality or time as
radically as some other avant-garde and modernist authors, but he presents these aspects in a
refracted way, favoring possibility instead of precise realism: “Whoever has it does not say, for
instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this
or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will
think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise” (11). Instead of representing the world,
Musil presents a self-conscious rendition of the world, “as if” it was real, but not quite.
The novel's formal self-reflexivity also points to the underlying transformative effect
of fiction – literature portrays reality but not only reflects it in a mimetic procedure but
constructs its own version, hence the “pseudoreal” / “like of it” resemblance, somewhere
40 “Art required the fractured and distorting techniques of modernism in order to be adequate to a fractured and
distorting world, or, we might say, to continue to be realistic” (Abel 227-228).
Varžinskas 35
between factual and imaginary. The world's order levels, both the social and the
narratologically sequential, are equally compromised by disintegrating systems of values and
disillusionment with the classical modern ideas such as progress and historical telos. This
introduces the modernist mistrust of mimetic representation in a very conscious way that
structures the novel. Essentially, Musil poses a conundrum – if the old models of society and
the teleological promise of modernity have all failed, how can literary imagination convey the
sense of alienation through narrative forms that rely on the very same principles of linear
teleology? The answer lies in Musil’s use of his essayistic method, which plays an integral part
in the ateleological narrative.
iii. Essayism as an Ateleological Response to Action
Essayism or “essayismus” as a concept is first introduced in Chapter 62 as a core philosophy
of Ulrich in which hypothetical thinking replaces a rigid logic of precision. Musil associates
this precision with such utopic modern notions as purposeful action, career, evolution, and
other teleological models that proceed as “a spiral, which climbs higher with every change of
direction” (MwQ 268). While describing Ulrich, Musil presents him as a figure who opts for
the opposite way of “living hypothetically” - a prerequisite attitude that structures Ulrich’s
essayistic thinking “that in haphazard, paralyzing, disarming way resisted all logical
systematizing” (ibid., 269-273).
Throughout the reading of this chapter, it is easy to forget that Musil is using Ulrich as
a character reference – it rather seems that by “essaysim”, he is actually developing a new
theoretical angle of self-reflection that focuses on ateleological impetus where the lack of aim
is the defining feat of any experience. If one seeks to transfer such an experimentative principle
unto the narrative at hand, essaysim can be defined as Musil’s principal strategy of ateleological
storytelling. It spontaneously incorporates elements of such interconnected discourses like law
or ethics that can suddenly depart from a story being told, but at the same, being the
indispensable dimension of an event. It is “a style of writing blending narrative and discursive
modes” (Hunt 116) where a philosophical reflection becomes a part of the narrative, amounting
to a speculative narration where theoretical and philosophical fields are “incorporated into the
fabric of fiction” (Moretti 30). As a result, the whole narrative becomes full of such essayistic
“pockets” exploring metaphysics, ethics, and theology, but never a linear progression towards
a teleological fulfillment. Musil’s essayistic moments in the narrative seem to freeze the active
development of events before letting action take the narrative charge again.
Varžinskas 36
In the structure of the novel, the essayistic instances already begin with Chapter 4, in
which the narrator leaves the initial exposition of Ulrich and solely discusses the relation
between the notions of reality and possibility. After the chapter ends with an assumption that a
sense of reality is only possible via the possession of personal qualities, Ulrich is brought to
the fore again as a counter-figure – the man without qualities proper. This method – although
not always tidily isolated from other chapters as in Chapter 4 – serves as an experimentative
mapping of meaning. Every scene, every encounter of the characters can be suddenly
interrupted by essayistic inquiries about a theme, ranging from economy to dynamics of sex or
relativism of human psychology. This mode - that at times escalate almost into a research field
- obscures the narrative discourse time and opens spaces to analyze a subject without
constraints of developing action.
Therefore, the essayistic principle, translated as an attempt (from the French essayer)
can never be precise – as the narrator describes, essayism “explores a thing from many sides
without wholly encompassing it - for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and
melts down to a concept” (MwQ 270). Between the events of the plot, the essayistic narrative
presents a series of interwoven attempts that are governed by indefinite speculation that halt
action and development. In such a manner, Musil’s essayism hints at a failure of completion
that is positive – the world remains eternally open-ended for interpretation. The novel
renounces the principle of a stable teleological development as it eschews the chronical
continuum of classical narrative in favor of the composition of shifting nomadic fragments,
each of which never means totality but only alludes (Ulfers 2007) to anything that it tries to
convey. In effect, the essayistic mode of the novel becomes a critical response to the linear
teleology of conventional narratives.
The interchanging modes of narrative sequences and the essayistic “pockets” that are
wedged in-between create a plane of inextricably linked time modes – time of action and time
of thought. This plane is an alternative version of reality, the pseudoreality where action cannot
develop in a tidy sequential manner as it is continuously challenged by the indefinite essayism,
which is not only happening in a “timeless” discourse but itself undoes the chronological
teleology of the narrative on the macro-level of the novel as it constantly intercepts the events.
Varžinskas 37
iv. Temporal Disorientation. Weeks, Seasons, Disruptions
With the introduction of the Parallel Campaign and Ulrich as the main actants and axes around
which the narrative events revolve, the novel somewhat ironically stalls41 and sustains this
temporal structure throughout the whole story: as Chapter I exclaims, “nothing develops” (2).
This way, Musil starts organizing time around suspension rather than what could be
emphatically spoken of as the discourse of development and progress. Actions and events are
either forestalled or allowed to move slightly up to the point where the goal becomes painfully
unattainable and distant. As a result, the whole narrative becomes a meditative explorative site
of different themes but never a linear progression towards a teleological fulfillment. Keeping
in mind the previous discussion on the teleological hope exchanged for uncertainty, Jonathan
Lethem calls Musil’s project a work of “someone who wants to dwell forever in the world he’s
bound to destroy” (Lethem 7). The novel is a monument to a sense of uncontrollable speed of
progress, but through its narrative structure, it paradoxically suspends an understanding of
sequential development via time: the narrative becomes a condensed window of suspended
time as a historical tipping point of modern accumulation just before bursting into destruction.
The fabula of Volume I seems to last about a year from the summer of 1913 until the
spring of 1914, framed by Ulrich’s arrival to the city and his leaving at the very end; however,
the novel actively resists employing clear temporal indications of the narrative discourse,
resulting in an ambiguous kind of time exposition. The narrative often confuses imagery of
contrasting seasonal times, obfuscating a clear indication of the temporal situation – a
seasonless spring day in autumn (276), a sunny day at the beginning of 1914 (615), and the
mild October night in late winter (633). The effect of the ambiguous time is disorientation and
unfixed linearity, suggesting a loss of causal hermeneutic establishment. While working on the
novel, Musil, in his letters, has mentioned this as a deliberate strategy42 to renounce linear time
as the ordering principle, which also complicates the linkage of causality. Complimented by
the essayistic method, such temporal ordering of the narrative serves not as a structuring mode
to support the unfolding of the story but to irritate, if not dissolve, the sense of temporal
progression.
41 Gene Moore claims that the opening chapters serve as an “active beginning” for the narrative to become still
(43).
42 A letter to Bernard Guillemin in 1931: “[...] der erste Band verzichtet auf die Dimension der Zeit, des Ablaufs,
der zeitlichen (und wie ich gleich beifügen will: damit auch der kausalen) Entwicklung. Sie sehen dem
richtigerweise einen Verzicht auf den "Stil der Erzählung" vorangehen. Das Vorher und Nachher ist nicht
zwingend, der Fortschritt nur intellektuell und räumlich” (Musil 1978:496).
Varžinskas 38
Formally, this dissolution can be attributed to the temporal devices that the ateleological
narrative employs in order further to deconstruct the idea of the linearity of time. More than
often, Musil’s story relies on conveying the passing of time mostly with the use of the temporal
unit of a week. Semantically, the German original of “a week” (Woche) is a denomination that
is etymologically linked with the concepts of moving (Weichen) and changing (Wechsel),
acting as a notion of constant morphing rather than a definite narratological device or a
reference point in a gradual and sectional development: “Two weeks later Bonadea had been
his mistress for fourteen days” (26); “But after a few weeks had passed in this fashion, she had
to face the fact that no inspiration whatsoever had come her way” (110); “In the following
weeks Diotima's salon experienced a tremendous upsurge” (201); “At about this time Ulrich
had to report to His Grace two or three times a week” (240); “The good news was that these
committees were making great strides from week to week” (241); “The days rocked along and
turned into weeks. The weeks did not stop moving, either, but formed links in a chain” (484).
The weeks govern the relations inside the narrative, and as the last quote suggests, in
their inner temporal structure, a sense of succession is at work, albeit a fruitless one. The text
of Volume I under such a decentralized weekly regime displays a formal tendency to connect
the events in rather loose, chainlike associations that renders time as merely successive but not
successful in terms of being consequential or meaningful. The events in the novel are structured
around passing weeks that “do not stop moving,” indicating this marker’s resistance to being
situated within a causal and linear progression. As the text exclaims, time via these weeks is
presented as a chain whose pure homogeneity suggests only metonymic relation rather than
clear temporal situatedness. All of the weeks are suspended somewhere between 1913 and 1914
because neither the week before nor the week after frame events in a clear temporal chronology
as the weeks morph into each other. On top of that, the repetition of this temporal marker over
time gains an effect of “diminishing returns” – the linearity of the chronological time flattens
out to an extent where it loses its discursive structuring meaning and reinforces the dissolution
of temporal orientation. According to such a chainlike organization of “weekly” time, the
narrative through this repetition becomes not a developing progression of a semiotic meaning
formation but a horizontal trail of non-active morphing and change.
While discussing the syntax of narrative order, Gérard Genette in Narrative Discourse
briefly conceptualizes a discursive usage of “achrony.” It is a kind of temporal framing
resembling anachrony, but where “no inference from the content can help the analyst define
the status of anachrony deprived of every temporal connection, which is an event we must
ultimately take to be dateless and ageless” (Genette 85). The so far observed modes of temporal
Varžinskas 39
dissolution on the narrative level achieved by the oxymoronic usage of season imagery and the
non-fixed flux of weeks are precisely achronic – Musil deliberately avoids clear temporal
markers to maintain the “dateless” tone throughout the whole novel. The overused temporal
indication of the week as the duration of indefinite morphing accompanied by conflicting
seasons disorients the reader to a point where it is nearly impossible to discern which particular
week of the year or the season an event takes place. This way, Musil’s narrative departs from
historically real causality, and the whole year of 1913-1914 in narrative discourse is suspended
in uncertainty and causal immobility.
In addition to the constant achronic disorientation, Musil often introduces teleological
disruptions in the unfolding events that further undermine principles of causality and consistent
development. For example, in chapter 143 of Volume II, Ulrich sets out to meet Count
Leinsdorf to obtain permission for Clarisse to visit Moosbrugger in the asylum. Having his
increasing reservations about the Parallel Campaign, Ulrich’s motivation for the whole meeting
is strictly Moosbrugger-related. However, from the very start of the conversation, Leinsdorf
turns the topic to the issues of collapsing Empire, consequently praising Ulrich as a spokesman
for the Parallel Campaign and pleading him to continue serving his role. The whole twelve-
page chapter is mostly Leinsdorf’s monologue closing with an outcome that goes against
Ulrich’s motivation for this conversation – Clarisse’s grant for meeting Moosbrugger is left
virtually untouched, and Ulrich falls back into the system that he seeks to depart from. In this
case, Ulrich’s narratological motivation for meeting Leinsdorf is clearly indicated in the
previous chapter; however, this “goal” is wholly neglected and even subverted. The chapter
framed as this particular meeting serves not as the fulfillment of Ulrich’s aim; quite contrary,
it presents an outcome that was not even anticipated while the initial idea is virtually ignored.
This way, Musil’s ateleological narrative presents an evident narratological disruption by
which the story is organized around irregular causality and random outcomes. A similar thing
happens in the chapter where Clarisse, her brother Siegmund, Ulrich, and General Stumm visit
the mental institution with a wish to meet Moosbrugger. Having been escorted by Dr.
Friedenthal, the company observe various wings of demented patients only to be at last second
held off from the final meeting - suddenly, Dr. Friedenthal is called to attend an unnamed
emergency, and Clarisse’s request to meet Moosbrugger is postponed as the chapter closes
without the prospective outcome.
Keeping in mind the Parallel Campaign's frenetic standstill, there is not a single event,
relationship, or interaction in the novel that would reach a point of conclusion or closure.
Walter and Clarisse’s marriage fails, Moosbrugger’s execution is indefinitely postponed,
Varžinskas 40
Arnheim and Diotima’s romantic tension is never resolved, and even the transcendent utopia
of Ulrich and Agathe eventually fails. At best, the few culminating episodes that do get resolved
end up in disappointment, for example, the short-lived romantic relationships of Soliman and
Rachel or Gerda and Ulrich, not to mention the fiasco of the Parallel Campaign. Nevertheless,
most events in the book are letdowns as their culmination is different from expectations, and
the teleological fulfillment is continuously disrupted.
v. The Man Without (Temporal) Qualities
In the previous sections of Chapter I, the analysis accentuated Ulrich’s disbelief in the
progressive notion of history as a principal counterpoint to the teleological tradition of the
Parallel Campaign. However, there is still a need to delineate the main tenets of Ulrich as the
main focalizer, which will enable the conceptualization of his narratological and formal
functions in the ateleological narrative.
As a sort of a post-Hegelian figure, Ulrich holds beliefs that go against the teleological
notion of history; for example, during the valley scene with Diotima, he exclaims: “We can't
say that it [Earth] has evolved toward perfection, nor what its true condition is. And the same
goes for its daughter, mankind” (312). Counter to Diotima and the Parallel Campaign in
general, Ulrich treats the history of humankind as not governed by an ascending teleological
line. This is further emphasized when Ulrich displays his disbelief in the teleological stability
of reality:
The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is
final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete.
He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self,
no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless
transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is
nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. (MwQ 269)
Ulrich‘s emphasis on invisible and ceaseless transformation evokes the Bergsonian notion of
seamless duration, perception of time in terms of qualitative multiplicity rather than
quantitative multiplicity.43 Thus, the problem of time and reality for Ulrich arises in terms of
43 In reference to the homogenous duration of time, Bergson accentuates its perception in terms of continuous
morphing: “[…] Duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and
permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one
another, without any affiliation with number […]” (2001: 122); “The truth is we change without ceasing...there is
Varžinskas 41
narrativity – to experience reality means to divide it into a model of “this has been-this is now-
this will be,” amounting to a clear-cut chronology of sequences, relating to one another,
quantifying time in episodic frames. Ulrich’s perception of time is absent of such clear-cut
linear divisions. If there is no means of bracketing of the experience of the past in an episodic
framing, there is no possibility of a developing, successive (implying both senses of
“productive” and “consequential”) narrative. All Ulrich is left with is the constant flat state of
becoming and changing, never amounting to a particular result that would enable the next
“frame” of the narrative of life to ensue because there is no stable temporal reference point, to
begin with.
Therein reality is rendered as an experiential flux where possibility and ambivalence
reign against stability and coherence. For Ulrich, nothing is ever finished because what has
been in the past has not “congealed” into a fixed image – at every moment of self-reflection,
Ulrich is being narrated as a figure of indefinite becoming acting upon possibilities rather than
teleological precision. If everything is dependent upon relative possibilities without fixing
oneself in a precise idea, the temporal experience must be ateleological and non-linear, open
to endless morphing through which the subject does not realize a goal that would mark a
temporal standing and an endpoint. Ulrich, in this manner, is devoid of qualities because the
individual attributes are acquired temporally in a causal fashion, a principle that Ulrich seems
to be completely detached from:
So without much exaggeration he was able to say of his life that everything in it had
fulfilled itself as if it belonged together more than it belonged to him. B had always
followed A, whether in battle or in love. Therefore he had to suppose that the personal
qualities he had achieved in this way had more to do with one another than with him; that
every one of them, in fact, looked at closely, was no more intimately bound up with him
than with anyone else who also happened to possess them. (MwQ 50)
Not only do the temporally acquired qualities manifest in time, but they also form a chain of
changes that, through a lifetime, gain teleological progression and become meaningful. Rather
than being the one who follows the temporal unfolding of life’s events, he only observes the
sequences without ascribing meaning to them. Here arises the central problem of Ulrich’s
epistemology towards his own life – Ulrich views his life in terms of merely having, but not
owning and, as the quote shows, possessing the “achieved personal qualities.” Thus, the
no essential difference between passing from one state to another and persisting in the same state. […] the
transition is continuous” (1944: 4).
Varžinskas 42
autobiographical time seems to be playing a key role in Musil’s treatment of identity that starts
to disintegrate once its temporal framing is brought into question.
With such a subversive position opposing the hero's figure as a figure of development
of the nineteenth-century literature, Ulrich stands alongside such modernist characters as
Svevo’s Zeno and already prefigures Sartre’s Roquentin or Sarraute’s Martereau in his “refusal
to become a full character” (Culler 270). Under the guise of existential ennui, Ulrich
deliberately puts himself into a state of waiting for nothing to happen, a form of deliberate
boredom that renders the personal time of a protagonist inconsequential. In a subversive way,
Ulrich’s boredom becomes a mode of ethical equilibrium – it is a way of neither agreeing nor
disagreeing with the world but assuming an atemporal position that favors possibility over
precision: as Clarisse thinks to herself, “A man without qualities doesn't say No to life, he says
Not yet! and saves himself for the right moment” (MwQ 483). There is a great irony in
Clarisse’s words – the right moment will never arrive44, there cannot be a moment of epiphanic
resolution that would establish a teleological structure of experiences as Ulrich is in a perpetual
state of disruptive waiting:
Perhaps one could say on his behalf that at a certain age life begins to run away with incredible
speed. But the day when one must begin to live out one's final will, before leaving the rest
behind, lies far ahead and cannot be postponed. This had become menacingly clear to him now
that almost six months had gone by and nothing had changed. He was waiting: all the time, he
was letting himself be pushed this way and that in the insignificant and silly activity he had
taken on, talking, gladly talking too much, living with the desperate tenacity of a fisherman
casting his nets into an empty river, while he was doing nothing that had anything to do with
the person he after all signified; deliberately doing nothing: he was waiting. (MwQ 276)
The mode of “living hypothetically” (269) that combines indefinite morphing and waiting
implies an instability against fixed identity and the loss of the disinterested self. Waiting as a
self-imposed form of non-teleological ennui of the present becomes a modus operandi
experiencing the metonymic chain of loose events in which Ulrich unfolds not as a driving
agent but as a “collection of possibilities detached from action” (Spencer 7). This parallels the
macro level of the novel - the suspension of happening contributes to the undoing of time and
does not seek for the narrative to be valid as it does not strive for the ultimate truth.
44 The “not yet” prevails and extends beyond Ulrich – the Parallel Campaign and Leinsdorf are equally in the
position of “not yet” by the practice of postponing.
Varžinskas 43
Ulrich, the figure that bears the title of “a man without qualities,” showcases a modern
consciousness that undergoes a crisis and disintegration of stable identity.45 Amongst other
solipsistic modernist protagonists such as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Eliot’s Prufrock, or
Svevo’s Zeno, Ulrich exhibits the timely features of alienation, fragmentation, and hollowness.
However, Ulrich’s nature of being “a man without qualities” extends beyond the diegetic level
of being a person without clear aims, ambitions, or goals. Instead, it is a formal and structural
absence – within the frame of the narrative, Ulrich is the man who lacks the temporal qualities
of narratological fulfillment. By choosing to designate Ulrich as his protagonist, Musil
deliberately creates for himself a problem that questions the very nature of Ricoeurian life
narration – how can the novel tell a story about a person who sheds off all quintessential
narrative features that would drive the story forward? By shedding his ambitions of seeking
individual totality in a precise form, Ulrich is a satirical form of the classical protagonist, a
character who, by losing his social identity, disregards his narrative identity too.
The novel starts with an ironic position of the main protagonist – Ulrich has just come
back to Vienna from abroad after numerous attempts of establishing himself as a man of
profession. In other words, Ulrich is introduced through the lenses of an already “failed
Bildung” (Erwin 84). Ulrich immediately does not conform to the grammar of a hero as he is
already past his journey that has failed. An opposing view could state that it is only a
consequential section of a trial on a macro level of his self-becoming. However, the sobriquet
“the man without qualities” given by Walter and Ulrich’s own deliberate choice to take a
“year’s leave of absence from life” introduce a structural dimension – Ulrich is not only a
disillusioned person, but he is a modernist character that discards the central notion of quest
and its teleological drive. The observable progress of an identifiable hero developing in the
Bildungsroman and Entwicklungsroman is no longer the working principle for Musil, and this
immediately undermines the confines of teleological closure and totality. Let us take a look at
a scene where Ulrich reflects on his biographical narrative qualities as a subject:
It struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic
law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple
order that enables one to say: "First this happened and then that happened .... " It is the simple
sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented in a
unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space
45 Müller-Funk notes that Musil’s critique of modernity already foresees the post-structuralist notion of identity
as a “complex, fragmented and doubled phenomenon” (8).
Varžinskas 44
and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it
seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say "when," "before," and "after"!
Terrible things may have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he can
tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as contented as if the sun were warming
his belly. […] [Most people] love the orderly sequence of facts because it has the look of
necessities, and the impression that their life has a “course” is somehow their refuge from
chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to
which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be
narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven
surface. (MwQ 709)
Identity here is problematic in its narratological and temporal structure – an individual
perceives themselves as a figure that has undergone a series of life sequences based on causality
and temporal ordering. The fundamental loss of such structural unity46 concerns the modern
inability to keep relying on traditional narrative forms (fictional, personal, historical) as tidy,
sequential, progressive order of passing. Ulrich is also a character who is “doubtless a believing
person who just didn’t believe in anything” (897). Hence Ulrich is not simply an existential
nihilist of modern negation – he still employs belief and struggles for meaning, but his horizon
is empty of any reference points that could be regarded as legitimate values or properties to
rely on. In effect, Ulrich is unable to fit such “discontinuous life experiences into the shape of
traditional storytelling” (Evers 314), longs for the lost narrative order, and displays “a
melancholic desire for simpler forms of life” (Goodstein 345), the lost thread of life governed
by simplicity and unobtrusive temporal causality.
The narrative crisis that Ulrich is experiencing is thus an identity crisis – losing the
narrative thread of life implies losing temporal causality of the past self that constitutes the
classical idea of a subject. Here Ulrich’s reasoning evokes a treatment of identity as a narrative
project in which temporal perspective plays the critical role. If there is no biographical history,
there can be no stable self. For Ulrich, there is no teleological endpoint to either historical or
personal time, and the whole linear model built on the idea of progress loses its potency.
In a self-reflexive manner longing for a simple linear narrative, ''the man without
qualities" parts with the literary practices of the nineteenth-century novel and the idea of
teleological unfolding and narrative progress. Ulrich realizes that he is past the way of
46 “The whole person has been flung into uncertainty. Discussions are of no use to him, he needs the solidity that
has been lost. Hence the desire for resolution, for ‘yes’ and ‘no’” (MwQ 1162).
Varžinskas 45
perceiving reality in a progressing series of life and must abandon that sensibility. At the same
time, it marks the novel itself as a new form of storytelling, parting ways with the fundamental
conventions of the nineteenth-century novel.
vi. The War as a Protracted Telos
So far, the analysis helped to conceptualize Musil’s employment of time as a central theme of
ateleological historicism as well as a problem of poetics that subverts the conventional
underpinnings of the novel genre. In both cases, it can be observed that the crux of teleological
fulfillment as an axiom cannot be pinpointed in the stage of late modernity due to the undone
structures of the classical notion of time. As much as one can invest themselves into Musil’s
ateleological system, a question persists – after all, was there a goal of any sort?
Keeping in mind the unfinished status of the novel, speculation arises whether Musil
really believed in the idea of the finished form of the narrative. As ultimate proof of Ulrich’s
negative assertions towards reality and completion, it seems that an authorial decision to
finalize the work would have implied a disastrous sentence on a project that was inherently
built on the concept of perpetual possibility and becoming, resisting a complete shape.47 The
open-ended text robs the reader of a culminating event, a convergence point that would be the
final actant of fulfillment and resolution in a narratological sense.
The repetitious and non-developing narrative is supported by the absence of clear
temporal markers and evokes a lethargic, slow flow of time. Through the reading experience,
there are no suggested trajectories for any plotline except the impending sense of the war, an
event omitted in the story. As Robert Hampson notes, the citizens of Kakania “do not know, as
we do and Musil does […] that the Austrian empire is going to be swept away by war” (151).
There is a sense of anticipation during the reading experience, but that is all that the narrative
offers. In other words, there is no way of reading the novel without being reminded of what
will happen in the approaching summer of 1914, a historical brake that eventually happens.
The narrative is structured around that knowledge, and the suspense builds because the reader
knows what happened historically. In this light, the endpoint of the war can be treated as a kind
of latent and paratextual information that lies at the margins of the narrative - the ateleological
suspension of fulfillment pervades throughout the novel culminating in the moments before the
outbreak of the First World War. Saint-Amour aptly calls this suspension a “nearly infinite
47 Man Without Qualities holds the same quality that Malcolm Bradbury and John Fletcher use to define Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past – the narrative can never be complete because incompleteness is its real form (404).
Varžinskas 46
protraction of the war’s foretime” (267), a quality of ateleological narrative in which the notion
of war lingers but is not actually realized.
Returning to our initial question of this chapter, war, with its paratextual suggestion in
the story, can be conceptualized as a temporally protracted telos, an ultimate event that marks
the disintegration of the project of modernity. Framing this paratextual protracted telos, Musil’s
temporal indefiniteness is a negation of teleological unfolding, but it is also a desperate stand
against the outbreak of the destructive turning point of 1914 – the novel undoes the idea of time
by stripping off its teleological qualities and enriching it with an indefinite duration that refuses
to deliver a final climactic point. Hence, both the war and the final closing sentence from Musil
remain suspended on the horizon. Complimenting this view, Burton Pike agrees that “the
hovering, implied outbreak of the war must always remain for this novel an unrealized future
action. It provides a framework for the novel, but its arrival would not provide a conclusion”
(367). Thus, indefiniteness becomes a positive aspect that protracts the catastrophe into an
unattainable future.
Epilogue. Towards the Metanarrative Critique
In 1923, T.S Eliot wrote about James Joyce’s employment of mythical structure for the
beginning of the twentieth century as a “way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and
significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”
(483). Similar things could be said about Musil’s ateleological narrative – via the self-reflexive
structure, The Man Without Qualities is a grandiose attempt to order the times of disorder, a
conscious attempt to resist the teleological nature of the nineteenth-century novel and the
notion of progressive history. The contents of Musil’s non-eventful story illuminate the
exhausted state of the accelerated modernity in which decisions fail, and the historical utopias
are losing their potency as they are sought to be replaced by the rebellious retrogression in the
face of the impending war. At the same time, the formal execution follows suit by structuring
the events around the principles of suspension, disorientation, and numerous subversion of the
teleological expectations of the novelistic genre, including protraction and essayistic
digressions. These shared Topos and Techne levels both contribute to the overall ateleological
suspension and “undoing” of discourse time, and the mistrust in teleological history reflected
in the novel prefigures one of the central postmodern tenets – the fall of metanarratives. As
Musil‘s pre-War world is losing its agency and hope in the great Hegelian story of progress, so
does the structure of the immense text itself. There is no discernible direction or goal neither
Varžinskas 47
for the novel (due to the “undone” time) nor the historical standpoint of 1913. As discussed in
the analysis, the modern treatment of history and the idea of a literary story operate on the same
teleological principles; however, Musil subverts the intrinsic Hegelian element in this equation
and jeopardizes both the idea of history and the idea of a fulfilling story.
Governed by the various techniques of stalling and suspension, the novel formally
rejects its function as the traditional mode of narrating modernity - it is both a political and
aesthetical statement against its own genre conditions. The extensive metanarrative of
modernity about progressivism of modern Europe becomes unstable via the unfixed teleology
of the novel, and Musil manages to expose this turning point of structural upsetting decades
before Lyotard’s48 seminal work Postmodern Condition. Lyotard’s conceptualization of
postmodernity is primarily rooted in the notion of narrative knowledge that has propelled the
progressive mechanism of modernity and legitimized reality through positivist knowledge. By
defining the postmodern as “incredulity towards metanarratives,” Lyotard proclaims that the
narrative function of history “is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great
voyages, its great goal” (xxiv). In this regard, Musil stands out amongst other modernists as for
him, the notion of a great narrative was more than a thematic issue and more than a stylistic
problem. With his ateleological narrative, he exposed the temporal structures that are
inseparable from conventional storytelling and historical imagination. In an encompassing
way, The Man Without Qualities is a project of subverted poetics of modernity.
To view Musil’s project in the light of metanarrative criticism does not mean merely
rendering him a postmodernist. Instead, the suspicion towards teleological grand narratives of
history elucidates The Man Without Qualities as a monument for the eclipse of modernity
where a subject like Ulrich is at odds with the accelerated sense of reality and time. The effects
of temporal nausea, disorientation, anxiety, and the subsequent dissolution of teleological
narrativity contribute to the vague principle of pseudoreality, but they also contribute to the
creative mode of the possibilist Möglichkeitssinn and the essayistic hope of modernist
experimentation.
With the employment of ateleological poetics in the forms of such temporal disruptions
as suspension of action, repetitions, and relative orders of time, Musil attacks the stability of
time and history. In other words, showing the chaotic nature of time enables one to effectively
address the narrative of teleological historical imagination that has been held axiomatic
48 Alongside Lyotard, Musil’s ideas regarding parallelism between fictional narrative and historiography can be
traced in Hayden White’s seminal work Metahistory (1973) in which he utilizes literary structural criticism to
highlight how historical imagination relies on narrative explanatory systems.
Varžinskas 48
between the dawn of modernity and the beginning of the twentieth century. The ateleological
sense of aimlessness in the modern world suggests that to be modern for Musil means to be
obsessively conscious of the present but also to be oblivious to the fact that the future – counter
to its teleological historical-narrative practices - may not turn out being as redeeming in the
utopic sense as was once believed. Musil’s response to this conundrum is as aporetic as one
could imagine – an unfinished novel of ideas where the indefinite essayistic method interrelates
and disrupts the teleological time of action revolving around an outsider protagonist who
disregards his linchpin function in the narratological fulfillment. It is a work that showcases
the modern condition of disillusionment by poetically and aesthetically enacting the failure of
storytelling. It is a stance against the reality that has been narrated in terms of progress.
Georg Lukács criticized Musil’s novel for its ateleological qualities, its lack of direction
and definition, “rejection of reality, containing no concrete criticism” (1996: 150). For Lukács
as a neo-Hegelian Marxist, the novel was lacking potential in being “destined to lead nowhere,
an escape into nothingness” (ibid.), a project, like many from other modernists, too removed
from the material domain of the world that does not culminate in a coherent ideological
statement. Musil must be defended here, even more so, Lukács’ criticism can be subverted and
seen as a positive and productive insight – truly enough, the novel is a rejection of reality, but
in the sense that it constructs his own plane of sociohistorical critique. The concrete criticism
lies in the overlapping of the content and form domains, which collectively create a chance to
go against the historical rush of time. While sustaining the essayistic principle, the novel rejects
reality in an attempt to give a voice to modern consciousness, which is disillusioned with the
accelerated forms of imagination. Thus, The Man Without Qualities disregards reality, but he
does it in terms of its narrative jurisdiction that has been based on the teleological models,
foregrounding the notions of time and narrative as dialectical. As much as every present
moment can be unpredictable, aimless, and chaotic, they hold the capacity for possibility, play,
entry into a fictional realm of imagination towards experimentation. The open-ended nature of
the novel, after all, points to a future for which The Man Without Qualities could be held as an
attempt – as a project of creative destruction directed against the Hegelian models of positivist
imagination, it suggests a potential synthesis of fiction and inductive scientific thinking based
on an experimentative and nomadic search for new forms that run counter to the malaise of late
modernity, its fragmental compartmentalization of experiences and obsession with linear
teleology of development.
Varžinskas 49
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