March 26, 2020 41
chosen the wrong metaphor. Musil has
merely swapped one eye-catching im-
possibility for another. Not unlike his
hero Ulrich, who “switched from the
cavalry to civil engineering,” he has
changed horses mid-novel, from intro-
spective social panorama (it’s some-
thing like that!) to love story. Where
once there was to be either the Great
War (as at the end of The Magic Moun-
tain?—but Musil detested Mann and
his works) or just possibly some coun-
terfactual hullaballoo, now the reader is
given “the last possible love story,” the
congress between Ulrich and Agathe,
to look forward to. Musil doesn’t really
seem drawn to either outcome—or per-
haps indeed any outcome—
very much. Outcomes serve
to announce a general direc-
tion of things—the reader has
an irritating habit of liking to
know where he’s going—but
with Musil she shouldn’t as-
sume he’ll ever get there.
Musil is a tease. He delivers
what are technically known
as disappointments.
To me, the consummation
of incest and the celebration
of Global Austria are like two
different backdrops hanging
at the back of the stage, two
impossible, narrowing per-
spectives. They have little
to do with whatever the ac-
tors happen to be doing. But
you need something there,
you don’t want the audience
to look through the back of
the theater. Hence, these
two yellow- brick roads. They
have much more in common
than not: as I say, they are set
up as impossibilities. At the
most, one might put it that
in The Man Without Quali-
ties, Ulrich/Musil has his
hands and knees and elbows
full with all kinds of instru-
ments, and is tackling society,
nation, history, culture; he
is a vastly busy one-man or-
chestra. In the passages that
make up Agathe, or, The For-
gotten Sister, he is playing a chamber
(or boudoir!) sonata on a single exqui-
site instrument. Neither composition
is meant to end; in a sense, Musil has
made it impossible for either of them to
end. He is a novelist of ideas, which is
to say a novelist without qualities.
Agathe is 350 pages, a respectable
length, and yet it feels—especially
against the perspective of the nihil
alienum, all-singing, all-dancing Man
Without Qualities—almost like a no-
vella. The personnel are greatly re-
duced—for the most part, we are in the
company of one or the other or both
the siblings, rarely more. The time is
from a perceived winter to spring. The
scene shifts once, from the house of the
father in the provinces to Ulrich’s gay
little castello in Vienna. The agenda,
almost throughout, is how a man is to
live with a woman; the fact that she is
his sister qualifies it as a useful and ex-
treme test case. There is not really any
more to be transacted than there is in,
say, Turgenev’s First Love. Ulrich ar-
rives to bury his father; he meets his
sister (as above); there are some fare-
wells, some business with the will, with
an academic rival of the father’s, one
Professor Schwung; Agathe tells Ulrich
she wants a divorce from her second
husband, the unattractive and pedantic
Hagauer (Ulrich one might charitably
describe as attractively pedantic); Ul-
rich is persuaded to assist her.
The siblings spend some restful days
in the house of their childhood, be-
coming reacquainted; Ulrich returns
to Vienna; after a few days, Agathe
follows him; there are a few more rhap-
sodic days together in Vienna; then,
after one reverse or snub or go-slow
too many, with a feeling melodramati-
cally perceived as suicidal, she takes
off and happens to meet a man of an-
other pedantic sort, Lindauer (I find it
hard to take him altogether seriouslyas a contender, though it seems Joel
Agee does; anyway, much of Musil’s
glory and inventiveness is in precisely
his minor characters); she returns to
Ulrich; and there is a sort of fade-cum-
dazzle with the two of them lying out
in parallel deckchairs in Ulrich’s gar-
den, the last passage Musil lived to add
to his book:The sun, meanwhile, had risen
higher; they had left the chairs
like stranded boats in the shallow
shade near the house and were
lying on a lawn in the garden be-
neath the full depth of the summer
day. They had been doing this for
quite a while, and though their
circumstances had shifted, they
had almost no consciousness of
any change. Not even the pause
in their conversation brought this
about; their speech had been sus-
pended without any sense of a
rupture.“Like the great novel of which it
forms a part, it is a magnificent frag-
ment,” writes Agee at the end of his
introduction. It reads like a transcrip-
tion of a Bonnard painting, colored
blurs and white canvas, Edenic prose
as beautiful as any poetry:The garden where these things
were spoken, with the strange flow-
ers whose names they didn’t know,
the butterflies that settled on them
like tired drunkards, and the
light that flowed over their faces
as though heaven and earth were
melted together in it.Perhaps the first thing to say is that
Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister abso-
lutely works as a book—a fractal fractal,
an unfinished novel lifted from within
another unfinished novel. It seems to
have been reasonably straightforward
to isolate this strand of the narrative
from the others; Agee has simply cut
out three or four interven-
ing chapters. All that’s left
are a handful of references to
the cast of The Man Without
Qualities: Count Leinsdorf,
Walter and Clarisse, Moos-
brugger, Rachel and Soliman.
Ulrich spends a night with
Bonadea (as Musil is wont
to do sometimes, he leaves a
judicious fermata in the nar-
rative; he is a master of omis-
sion as much as commission);
but there is only one scene in
which Agathe is brought face
to face with the personnel
from the Parallel Campaign.
For the rest, she seems to
have largely taken over the
book, and Musil’s imagina-
tion. Where Ulrich says “yes,
but... ” and dithers and rea-
sons—he is a very early man-
splainer—Agathe is gung-ho
and surprising and all for it.
Action to his contemplation.
Their configuration is like
that of an accelerator pedal
next to a brake. Sometimes,
the brake fails through over-
thinking, and functions like a
second accelerator. His very
prudence, his mathemati-
cian’s logic, is what makes
him so often wild and precari-
ous: “She was not such a fa-
natical person as her brother,
she felt what she felt.” This is
what gives the book its suspense and its
fascination: it is the meeting between
the irresistible force and (for once) the
somewhat movable object; the two lines
converging at infinity.Both characters are, in their different
ways, rebels. The book shows them se-
cluded from the world, islanded, clos-
eted with each other. Ulrich, who would
like to overthrow the world through
speech, has ten times as many lines to
say as Agathe, perhaps fifty times, but
it doesn’t matter: “Much of what he said
she had already thought.” She, mean-
while, displays an Eve-like, no, a Lilith-
like physicality, and, it seems to him, a
“gently savage resoluteness, in which
purity and crime were indistinguishably
mixed.” A characteristic negotiation is
something like the following. She needs
help with a dress, he is abashed, eager,
stunned, and counters with the idea that
she represents something like his self-
love, which he hadn’t known he had.
“It was his first attempt that evening
to form a judgment on the meaning of
his sister’s arrival” is Musil’s ringingly
dry summary of his dry hero, all “judg-
ment” and “meaning.”
Everything with Ulrich is translated,
frustratingly, into words, words andideas. He understands that “in order
for me to experience anything with real
interest, it has to be part of some con-
text, it has to be controlled by an idea.”
While Ulrich gets to work at convert-
ing his sister into an idea, then, she
is in the time-honored way seducing
him. On one unforgettable occasion,
“ Agathe had already bent down and
slid a wide silk garter off her leg, lifted
the magnificent shroud, and pushed the
garter into her father’s pocket.” This of
course doesn’t fail to have an effect on
Ulrich: “The barbaric idea of sending
the frigid dead man on his way with a
garter still warm from his daughter’s
thigh constricted his throat and started
all sorts of disorder in his brain.” The
operative word here is the last, “brain.”
Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister is
one of those books where writer and
translator keep company. It reads like
a book Agee was born to translate.
I wonder if I have ever read a better
translation. The book shines with plea-
sure, the complex sentences opening in
front of you, balanced and sequential
and easy to follow in all their twists and
curlicues. Here, two writers have truly
found each other, the intelligent slither
of polysyllables, sometimes amusing,
sometimes drily determined to make
some vanishingly small distinction of
vast implications, suddenly giving way
to a line or two of dialogue, a small ac-
tion, and some note of haiku-like com-
pression. Immense cloudy calculations
are abruptly brought down to a pithy
formula, a sprinkling of constants, a
variable or two, a low coefficient. A su-
perlative translation, it is equally good
over long distances (making it less sus-
ceptible to quotation), and in bravura
passages timed to perfection, as this,
on the pedantic schoolmaster Lindner:If someone had tallied the sched-
ule of his days, he would have
noticed that in every instance it
added up to only twenty-three
hours, so that sixty minutes of a
full day were missing, and of these
sixty minutes forty were invari-
ably earmarked for conversation
and kindly engagement with the
aspirations and nature of other
human beings, an endeavor that
comprised visits to art exhibitions,
concerts, and entertainments. He
hated these events.“Earmarked...kindly...endeavor...
hated”—it is the perfectly measured
diction that captures the pharisaical
Lindner in his hypocrisy, as though
he had graciously marked this hour
“Free Association.” Agee is equally
good at the phrases—sheer esprit,
their ideal, inspired, and sweated-over
combination of lightness and heavi-
ness, originality and depth—that are
the great joy of Musil’s style, the little
facets that catch the mind and glitter:
Agathe’s “rebelliously intruded divan”
in their late father’s study, “the honor-
less luster of oilcloth on the tables or
the linoleum wasteland on the floor,”
“the alert impassivity that was some-
times characteristic of her” (I love the
“sometimes”!), “the sweet, toxic taste
of soliloquy faded from his mouth,”
“the brutal ploys of self-adornment,”
“the sultry intermittencies of a physical
union,” “the average man is the sedi-
ment of all probability.” Even if you
keep back The Man Without Qualities
for some hereafter, Agathe is for now.
The unforgettable sister. QErnst Ludwig Kirchner: Self-Control, 1928Van Ham Kunstauktioner