100
PARTISAN REVIEW
of
The Man Without Qualities,
sold moderately well; and one of his
plays enjoyed a prestige success. There was even something of a Musil
cult sustained by a nucleus of devoted followers who supported him
financially and in whose critical estimate he undoubtedly ranked with
Proust and Joyce. Such a comparison, however, is exaggerated and super–
ficial. Musil was not the exceptional case; which does not detract from
the significant contribution he did make.
If
we are looking for critical
comparisons, Musil, I think, had certain affinities with Henry James
and with Gide: with James, in his style and composition, the social
setting, and perhaps outlook on life; with both James and Gide, in his
intense intellectualism.
As a matter of fact, Musil's most significant contribution, his
achievement as well as his failure as a writer, lies in the ingenious treat–
ment of the theme of the intellectual in the modern world. And it is
this aspect of his work which I wish to discuss primarily.
To satisfy the conditions of a halfway accurate report, however, I
must at least mention two other topics which are usually singled out by
critics as providing the thematic structure of
The Man Without Quali–
ties:
the portrait of a society in decay and, running counterpoint to this
social theme, the portrait of a psychotic sex murderer, called Moos–
brugger. The former is largely responsible for the comparison with
Proust. Musil depicts the decline of the Austrian Empire during the last
year before the outbreak of World War
I.
The picture reveals a keen,
critical intellect at work and is drawn along amusing, satirical lines.
But it is not comparable to Proust's work-either in the vast scale on
which the latter reconstructed the Swann and Guermantes ways of life,
or in Proust's quest for time lost and the "eternal essences" through which
it might
be
recovered, or, most importantly, in the abundance of memor–
able, unforgettable characters and situations created by Proust. Nobody
will go away from Musil's book remembering the "feel" of the world
he describes-in fact, there are no sights, smells, or any other qualities
of direct sensory experience in it at all-nor the "feel" of the characters
as in Proust. In Musil it is not what the characters are like which is
memorable as in Proust, but rather what they say or think.
The running down of the Empire is presented in conjunction with
a stupid, sterile cultural publicity campaign in which the major repre–
sentatives of Austria's cultural and political elite are engaged to prepare
for the celebration of the seventieth jubilee of the reign of the Emperor
Francis Joseph. The campaign is completely devoid of meaning, and gets
nowhere. The real forces of disintegration, however, are revealed by the
Moosbrugger episode, in which most of the people active in the cultural
