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campaign are also involved in trying to save the murderer's life. Moos–
brugger is Dostoevsky's "underground man." (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and
Balzac were Musil's favorite authors.) He represents the threatening,
uncontrollable, destructive forces behind the fa«ade of high society and
cultural cant. Since he is frightfully real in terms of the underground
forces inside the people who come into contact with him (one woman
most interested in saving his life is almost as psychotic as Moosbrugger),
his fate becomes a symbol of the bad conscience, the
mauvaise foi
of the
others, and their attempts to save him, a symbol of their futile attempt
to save themselves and Austria.
These two components of the work are intertwined with the major
theme expressed in the title,
The Man Without Qualities,
which is Musil's
designation of the hero, only known by his first name Ulrich. Ulrich is
the prototype of the intellectual bringing to bear the full powers of his
(or Musil's) critical intelligence upon an analysis of himself and the
actions, motives and ideas of the people around him. This function of
The Man Without Qualities
has earned the work other critical cliches;
for example, that it is a "psychological novel" or, in Mr. Geismar's words,
a "distinguished novel of ideas," again inviting comparisons with Proust
and Joyce. I have never understood what the term "psychological novel"
means, or for that matter, the term "social novel." What novel is
not
a psychological and social document? Anyway, as far as Joyce is con–
cerned, the comparison is again quite superficial. Musil did not invent,
as Joyce did, a new literary technique to exhibit unconscious psycho–
logical motivation, nor did he embark upon the ambitious project of
Joyce's later works to achieve an aesthetic fusion of complex psycho–
logical, social, historical and mythological elements. The translators call
attention to the fact that the action in
The Man Without Qualities
is
compressed within the time-span of one year analogous to Joyce's use of
one day or one night. They might have added that, like Joyce, Musil
began his career as an artist by writing a portrait of himself as a young
man based upon his recollections of the years spent in the barracks of
a military academy, not so different from Joyce's experiences in the
Jesuit College of Belvedere House. But these are trivial points. Musil
did not care for Joyce's work; and this attitude makes sense. His own
work was altogether different from Joyce's, a much more self-conscious,
reflective, intellectual analysis of psychological processes and ideas than
a concrete, dynamic presentation of them in the lives and actions of
people.
The result, of course, may be called a "novel of ideas"; but it is
worth noting that even the ideas Musil deals with, or the way he deals
