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PARTISAN REVIEW
with them, further restrict the significant scope of the work.
The Man
Without Qualities
is primarily a work about an intellectual, addressed to
intellectuals. This explains why its appeal and contribution is definitely
limited-unlike, say,
The Magic Mountain,
also a novel of ideas, but
of a much wider scope-while its reputation is extremely high among
those who can identify with it because they feel it was written especially
for them. I wish to consider two aspects of this general topic: the writer
as an intellectual, and the portrait of the intellectual itself. On both
points, I think, the work makes an interesting and often original con–
tribution.
As a writer Musil was endowed with an exceptionally brilliant
mind. Born in 1880, hc received his early education in the confined,
authoritarian quarters of military academies; and later (in 1906) pub–
lished his first novel about his experiences in these military prep schools,
one of which had previously been attended by the young Rilke. This
work was one of the earliest documents of its kind: detailing the terror
and misery, the anguish and guilt engendered and transmitted by these
European institutions of culture and cruelty. (Joyce's
Portrait
was com–
pleted in 1914.) Shortly before Musil was to receive a commission, he
abandoned a career in the army in favor of studying mathematics and
engineering. He obtained a degree in civil engineering, taught the sub–
ject, and contributed a significant technical invention to the field.
Meanwhile, he also developed a great interest in and ability for logic,
experimental psychology and philosophy, took further academic work
in these subjects at the University of Berlin, and received a degree in
philosophy on the basis of a dissertation on the epistemology of Ernst
Mach. Musil thus came to literature and the arts from experimental
work in the sciences, special studies in logic and mathematics, and a
positivistic philosophical orientation associated with the so-called Vienna
circle founded by Moritz Schlick. The only other writer I have heard
of with a similar intellectual background was Musil's contemporary in
Vienna, Hermann Broch.
This intellectual background and attitude Musil incorporated
In
Ulrich, the man without qualities. Ulrich is Bentham's "impartial spec–
tator," or a kind of Viennese intellectual Prufrock. He has also known
them all; he has also measured out his life in coffee spoons; and he
does not presume. Only, unlike Prufrock, he is a man of extreme intel–
ligence (by profession a mathematician, always on the verge of making
a great scientific discovery) who is engaged in a constant, self-conscious
process of cross-examining himself and everybody else.
