BOO KS
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The attitude of intense intellectual analysis that goes into Musil's
work is not always successful from an aesthetic point of view. Like Gide,
Musil seems to have developed his literary ideas from notebooks in
which he first tried to think through the problems which he subsequently
converted into the concrete, sensible images of a work of art. Like Gide
he often failed in this process of conversion. The aesthetic failure is par–
ticularly noticeable in the last two volumes (the first comes off best)
where Musil's ideas are rarely translated into anything but lengthy con–
versations; in the last, unfinished volume, Musil's long preparatory
notes, reflections, and discourses are often not yet transformed into con–
versational material; but even conversations, however interesting and
ingeniously contrived, are not enough to make a novel. What the work
lacks from an aesthetic point of view, therefore, is the successful con–
version of ideas into, or integration with, human actions, concrete situ–
ations, and the development of specific characters. (This, in my minor–
ity opinion, also shows a certain affinity with Henry James.)
What makes
The Man Without Qualities
worth rediscovering, none–
theless, I think is partly that these aesthetic shortcomings are by no means
characteristic of the entire work-the first volume, in particular, con–
structs a social canvas on which the people and situations often come
very much and excitingly to life- and partly that the work has a great
deal to say about all the topics touched upon by Musil's critical intelli–
gence, but especially about the problem of the intellectual itself. Why
is Ulrich called a man without qualities? Because no qualities are worth
possessing in a world in which it has become "a habit to speak of geniuses
of the football field, the boxing ring," not to mention the "race horse
of genius." Ulrich who was, to begin with, what we would call a
promising young man, possibly a budding genius in the sciences and
certainly aspiring to be a "man of importance," comes to recognize the
depressing futility of this mad race in competition with the horses of
this world. He "suddenly grasped the inevitable connection between his
whole career and this genius among race horses. For to the cavalry, of
course, the horse has always been a sacred animal, and during his youth–
ful days of life in barracks Ulrich had hardly ever heard anything talked
about except horses and women. That was what he had fled from in
order to become a man of importance. And now when, after varied ex–
ertions, he might almost have felt entitled to think of himself near the
summit of his ambitions, he was hailed from on high by the horse, which
had got there first."
Thus Ulrich embarks upon the career of the unattached, free–
floating intellectual, in Mannheim's terminology, or the totally
non-
