40 The New York Review
and, no question, this is a difficult
book—but these are elementary mis-
takes. They are the sort of misunder-
standings that bespeak a translator
not equably accompanying an author
on their way together so much as look-
ing around and wondering in a blind
panic where he can have got to. They
are mistakes that make of German—
where many short, everyday words
exist in more than one sense—a sort
of German roulette. In the opening
scene of the first story, Claudine pours
tea. “Aufschlug,” given as the perplex-
ing “flung open” (like a door?), is the
sound made by the tea being poured;
“Strahl” is a column of liquid, not a
“shaft of light”; the “etwas eingebo-
gene Flächen der Kanne” is in the haut
bourgeois context highly unlikely to
be “the slightly battered surface of the
pot” but rather something decoratively
and modishly concave. Think perhaps
Jugendstil.
That’s in the first couple of pages.
And then on and on, dozens of them.
“Laich” is frogspawn, not the inex-
plicably peculiar “drool of oysters on
the stagnant surface of fallow water”;
the roof of the railway station, “von
schmutz igem Glas und wirren eisernen
Streben,” is not “filthy glass, reverber-
ating against scattered, iron resolve”
but glass and a tangle of iron struts.
“Einer spitzen Zunge” is a pointed
tongue, not one that is “lacey.” “Un-
bestimmt,” an important word that
crops up frequently, means “vague” or
“uncertain,” but never “nondescript.”
Musil describes everything: to him,
“nondescript” would be an admission
of failure.
There is one particularly calamitous
mistake when Claudine, far into the
night, having fought down an earlier
attack of lust and shut herself up in
her room, tries to picture the man she
half-fancied (“Dann machte sie den
Versuch, sich den Menschen vorzustel-
len,” in the original). Wortsman, no
doubt thinking nymphomania, reads
the masculine singular accusative as
a dative plural and gives the verb the
wrong sense, throws in a comforting
final phrase, and writes, “After that
she attempted to introduce herself
to the people in the inn.” What she
was actually doing was picturing the
man.
At the end of another sentence,
one finds this: “an Olympic bauble of
foolishness tried to coax her into feel-
ing like a woman who believed in it.”
In context, it’s even more mystifying.
Musil’s meaning is that she took one of
the bearded, dwarfish locals, a man of
Olympian abjectness, and tried to see
him through the eyes of a woman who
adored him. Sometimes one has the
feeling with this book that everything
that can go wrong in the way of approx-
imation and miscomprehension and
faulty construction and a glib tolerance
for any amount of one’s own nonsense
has gone wrong.
Whatever help one may have from
publishers, editors, friends, or native
speakers, at a certain point as a transla-
tor, one is alone. Almost in advance of
any other requisite qualities, one needs
intuition. It is the absence of this, the
Instinktlosigkeit, as it would be termed
in German, that is so puzzling about
Wortsman. It can’t be pleasant to offer
up so many instances of one’s incom-
prehension; to make of a book to which
one has contributed an unctuous after-
word on “Preserving the Imprint of the
Ineffable in Musil’s Prose” something
so inept.Turn over. Cut. All change. While just
as “impossible” as the two novellas in
the exuberant complexity of its intel-
lectualism, its endlessly modified ex-
patiations, its inability to cross a street
without entering into an argument,
its heaping of formulations, charac-
ters, speeches, ideas, reflections, inci-
dents, and all-round dazzle, The Man
Without Qualities is a comedy. In the
course of the twenty years since the
very serious Vereinigungen, Musil has
discovered humor. It perhaps sounds
like a detail, a flourish, an ornament; it
makes all the difference in the world.
With its all- capable soldier-engineer-
mathematician hero Ulrich, “resolved
to take a year’s leave of absence from
his life in order to seek an appropri-
ate application for his abilities,” and
its elastic plot—a pan-Austrian “Paral-
lel Campaign,” a hush-hush bid to cel-
ebrate the seventieth anniversary of the
coronation of Austrian Kaiser Franz
Joseph (in December 1918) before the
Germans pip them by celebrating the
thirtieth of their own Kaiser Wilhelm
II in June—it is something like a vanity
of human wishes.
We know, after all, what hap-
pens next (begins with “S,” ends with
“o”; capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina).
Among these vain human wishes is
one of Musil’s own, the wish to write
a sweetly panoptical satire of moeurs
contemporains that would incorporate
every level of society, from murderers
to generals and counts to maids and
rich wives and mistresses, as well as
airing the author’s abundant and pro-
phetic ideas on every subject. It is like
an all-encompassing sculpture made
of—why not, didn’t Leonardo make
one of butter?—Schlagobers: whipped
cream. It will fill any space allotted to
it, and, unlike water, not even find its
own level. More character? Check.More characters. Digression? Digres-
sions. Soliloquy? Soliloquies. Stream of
consciousness? Whoosh. Authorial or
narratorial commentary? Absolutely.So what has been lost?
Something imponderable. An
omen. An illusion. As when a mag-
net releases iron filings and they
fall in confusion again. As when
a ball of string comes undone. As
when a tension slackens. As when
an orchestra begins to play out of
tune. No details could be adduced
that would not also have been pos-
sible before, but all the relation-
ships had shifted a little. Ideas
whose currency had once been
lean grew fat. Persons who would
before never have been taken seri-
ously became famous. Harshness
mellowed, separations fused, in-
transigents made concessions to
popularity, tastes already formed
relapsed into uncertainties. Sharp
boundaries everywhere became
blurred and some new, indefinable
ability to form alliances brought
new people and new ideas to the
top. Not that these people and
ideas were bad, not at all; it was
only that a little too much of the
bad was mixed with the good, of
error with truth, of accommoda-
tion with meaning.... At this point
a new era had definitely arrived.Musil seems to have little of the di-
rectedness of most novelists. We don’t
know—I think he didn’t know—where
his book is headed. He is epic and un-
planned, or, better and stranger, mock-
epic and unplanned. His arrow flies,
but it doesn’t seem to matter to him
where it is going. Being airborne is
enough for him and for it—and it ought
to be enough for his readers, too. The
Man Without Qualities gives one the
feeling of being ineluctably, inextrica-
bly unterwegs, underway. Does any-
one need to be told what a delightfulsense that is? There’s no end in sight,
or ever. Kafka subdivides; Musil rami-
fies. Ramifies and rises and swells. His
aesthetic is an aesthetic of postpone-
ment. Adventitiousness and postpone-
ment. Something will turn up. June
1918 stands there as some sort of telos,
but it doesn’t seem to get any closer.
The Man Without Qualities is like one
of those theoretical heavenly bodies
that gather mass as they move, and not
at the speed of light, but at something
less than the speed of life. Not really an
arrow at all. A mode of being.
The opening chapter, calmly entitled
“From which, remarkably enough,
nothing develops,” is one of the great
beginnings in literature: a leisurely-
technical paragraph on the weather:
“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.” This is followed by two-and-a-
half pages on a car crash that Ulrich
happens to witness. (Yes, it’s 1913, but
it feels like 2013, if not 2113.) Seven
hundred pages later, like a second loco-
motive where one might have expected
a restaurant car, a second beginning,
quite as good, comes along, in which
Ulrich arrives in the railway station
of his father’s small provincial town to
bury his father and take care of the for-
malities arising from his death.The hero at this point feels armored
and perfunctory and dutiful, a young
god descending with the callousness
of youth and the snobbery of one who
lives in the capital, and never having
been especially close to his father any-
way, who has played no great part in the
narrative thus far. Neither has Agathe,
his younger sister—twenty-seven to his
thirty-two. They were brought up for
the most part separately; he has practi-
cally forgotten her existence, and even
her appearance in the book now seems
like an afterthought or an accident, a
sudden and unexpectedly broad tribu-
tary opening off a majestically slow
estuary. Now, their simultaneous entry
in matching, impious, leisure suits—re-
member, they are there for a funeral,
and that of their father!—sets the tone
for everything that follows:It was a wide, soft, woollen pa-
jama, almost a kind of Pierrot cos-
tume, checkered black and gray
and gathered at the waist, wrists,
and ankles; he liked it for its com-
fort, a quality that felt pleasant as
he came down the stairs after the
sleepless night and the long jour-
ney. But when he entered the room
where his sister was waiting for
him, he was more than a little sur-
prised by his outfit, for by a secret
directive of chance he found him-
self face-to-face with a tall, blond
Pierrot swathed in delicate gray-
and-rust stripes and diamonds,
who at first glance looked quite
like himself.
“I didn’t know we were twins!”
Agathe said, her face lighting up
with amusement.For the remaining 350 pages, the ques-
tion is, What do they do with this
knowledge?
“What was previously a kaleidoscope
narrows to a laser,” George Steiner ar-
gued twenty-five years ago in “The Un-
finished,” an essay in The New Yorker.
I think Steiner overstates it, or he hasMILGATE HOUSE 1976
“I want words meat-hooked from the living steer”
—Robert LowellRecumbent on the king bed where you gaffed
mixed figures—literary lion (or sphinx)
as odalisque!—you handed me a draft
of your new poem, on Circe and Ulysses
(her avatar was downstairs mixing drinks),
and fixed me with your understanding glare,
a curious big cat’s, mane of gray hair
a wild halo framing the black-rimmed glassesyou’ll wear in the New York taxi, dubious
to be sure but thinking perhaps to close,
by any bloody hook or crook, your hero’s
circle (taxi: task and tax, done and paid),
thinking to lie down in the bed you’d made,
thinking no man is Odysseus.—Stephen Yenser