Research Master’s Literary Studies Faculty of Humanities

University of Amsterdam

Graduate Master Thesis

(A)Teleology of Modernity: Critique of Time & Narrative in

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

by

Kasparas Varžinskas

2020

Supervisor: Second reader:

Dhr. dr. A.K. Mohnkern Dhr. dr. N.D. Carr

Varžinskas 2

Table of Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 3

i. The Hegelian Premise of Teleological Time of Modernity ............................................................. 5

ii. Teleology of the Novel in the Nineteenth Century ......................................................................... 9

iii. The Indefinite Ateleology of The Man Without Qualities ........................................................... 11

Chapter I. Topos of Ateleological Time ............................................................................................... 14

i. Acceleration and Frenetic Standstill: Dissolution of the Teleological Premise ............................. 14

ii. Progress as the Teleological Principle of Time ............................................................................ 19

iii. The Indecisive Storytellers of History ......................................................................................... 20

iv. Crisis of the Present and the Aimlessness of History .................................................................. 23

v. Retrogression of Achronic Love ................................................................................................... 27

Chapter II. Techne of Ateleological Time ............................................................................................ 30

i. Narrative and Time of Failed History ............................................................................................ 31

ii. Subverting the Novel .................................................................................................................... 33

iii. Essayism as an Ateleological Response to Action ...................................................................... 35

iv. Temporal Disorientation. Weeks, Seasons, Disruptions .............................................................. 37

v. The Man Without (Temporal) Qualities ....................................................................................... 40

vi. The War as a Protracted Telos ..................................................................................................... 45

Epilogue. Towards the Metanarrative Critique ..................................................................................... 46

Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................... 49

Varžinskas 3

Introduction

The issue of time in the European cultural history was always present – ranging from

Shakespeare through Kant and Saint Augustine, the problem of an individual questioning their

own temporal experience was nothing new. However, it was the sociocultural landscape of the

twentieth century with its discursive shifts that rendered the notion of time as a conceptual

problem extending over to numerous domains of life: Einstein’s theory of relativity,

Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, Bergson’s concept of duration, Heidegger’s existentialism structured by

temporality, and Husserl’s investigations of internal time-consciousness. Simultaneously, the

rise of formalism and structuralism foregrounded time as a narrative faculty that became a

potent research locus for literary fields, take, for example, Bakhtin’s legacy of a chronotope.

Time previously understood as a naturalized teleological flow of historical passing, in cultural

forms, was no longer a phenomenon of experience that can be ignored.

Around the turn of the century, modernist practices brought to the fore the problem of

time as a structural and conceptual problem. The notion of time along the teleological

conceptualization of history was amongst other Enlightenment categories whose positivist

qualities started to lose stability - the shift from the classic Newtonian idea of linear and

absolute time to Einstein’s theory of relativity introduced a significant turn where the scaling

of temporal experience became dependent on different points of reference rather than on total

and objective empiricist axioms. In literary modernism, such authors as Marcel Proust, Virginia

Woolf, and Thomas Mann foregrounded the heightened aesthetic and poetic awareness of the

passing of time. The novels like To the Lighthouse and In Search of Lost Time emphasized the

notion of subjective time (which correlated with phrenic rather than objective representation),

and the novelistic narrative became a site of new temporal practices that drew attention to its

structural configuration of time as a theme and a formal device. In effect, the realist and

romanticist narrative modes of Bildungsroman and Entwicklungroman that had dominated the

landscape of the nineteenth-century novel started shifting in terms of relativist temporality and

causality.

As the modernist novel moved against the stable notion of objective reality and validity

of representation (Dowden 11), new aesthetic positions began questioning the limits of

narrative and its relation to literary genre-formation. The dislodged sense of temporality of the

modernist novel carried further subversive implications towards the notions of narrative,

teleology, and identity. And if one is to abide by the classical structuralist tenets of treating

narrative forms as deep structures of sociocultural relations, the jeopardized modernist

Varžinskas 4

narrative might suggest a myriad of problems that extend beyond the enclosed formal qualities

of a text.

This paper treats The Man Without Qualities as the modernist epitome of signifying the

disillusionment of the Enlightenment project – namely, its obsession with teleological

development and the stability of historical time. The thesis approaches the form of the novel

as an artifact of storytelling that for Musil functioned both as an instrument and a thematic

object. With the innovative storytelling, Musil parodically exploits the very same temporal

foundations that supported the form of a teleological narrative of history in the wake of

modernity. In the center of Musil’s critique stands the progressivist notion of history and

development, a constellation that is subverted through an elaborate system of “undone”

temporal structures.

The paper is constituted of three parts. The following introductory chapters present the

Hegelian conceptualization of time during the rise of modernity and its inheritance in the

teleological modes of writing as a hypothesis that the rise of the novel and the modern notion

of historical progress since the age of Enlightenment shares the structural principle of narrative

development. The following major chapters of analysis – Topos and Techne – focus on utilizing

the presented context of teleological modes of thinking as a counterpoint, a process during

which the paper conceptualizes ateleological time as a working principle in Musil’s

experimentalist project. The first chapter focuses on the plot elements and contents of the story

that constitute a locus of critique towards the central notions of teleological time – the five

subchapters dissect the categories of speed, progress, historicist imagination as aspects through

which the novel presents its critical standpoint towards Hegelian modes of modernity. The

second chapter focuses on the poetics of the narrative and analyzes formal and structural

strategies through which Musil upsets the Hegelian modes presented in the first chapter – the

six subchapters trace a system of subversions that include unfulfilling novelistic genre tropes

(such as a character), time disfiguration, and disruptive orders of time.

Through this research project, the Musilian narrative development will be

conceptualized as a case of innovative writing that illuminates the stagnation and crises of the

Enlightenment values in the context of pre-war modern Europe. The inextricably linked

constellation of content and form, of history and a story, will allow seeing Musil’s novel as a

modernist project that seeks to undo the teleological discourse of time and presents a

metareferential critique through its self-reflexive nature.

Varžinskas 5

i. The Hegelian Premise of Teleological Time of Modernity

In his essay Historia Magistra Vitae, Reinhart Koselleck addresses the eighteenth century as a

significant epoch of change when concepts of cyclical time structure started to be replaced by

those that define history under the conditions of linear temporality. The idea of temporal

passing became heavily historical as the progress became a catalyst for an upward teleology of

development.1

During this time, the French Enlightenment with Condorcet’s seminal text Sketch for a

Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) conceptualized historical time as

progressive unfolding in which reason plays a crucial role – because of rational achievements

and secularization,2 Western civilization has now developed the possibility of reflecting upon

its stage that is above the previous stages of development (Woolf 144). The focus on progress

that fuels the teleological development of history for Western thought was also heavily

supported by treating the newly discovered continents and their inhabiting natives as examples

of the “primitive” stage. Through the figures such as Condorcet and Adam Smith, colonialist

historiography argued that these people would eventually “catch up” to the European temporal

advancement, a claim that further propelled the ambition of the future as naturally promising

for the Western world.3

The Enlightenment conceptualization of historical progress was developed further by

Hegel, who, according to Habermas, “was the first philosopher to develop a clear concept of

modernity” (1987: 4). Precisely during his time, modern society started ascribing great

significance to historical time as a reference point for improvement.4 In Philosophy of History

(1837), Hegel argues that “historical change in the abstract sense has long been interpreted in

general terms as embodying some kind of progress towards a better and more perfect

1 “Up until the eighteenth century, the course and calculation of historical events was underwritten by two natural

categories of time: the cycle of stars and planets, and the natural succession of rulers and dynasties. […] The

naturalistic basis vanished and progress became the prime category in which a transnatural, historically immanent

definition of time first found expression” (Koselleck 1985: 33).

2 Daniel Little in this regard pays special attention to Montesqieu and Condorcet who “rejected the religious

interpretation of history but brought in their own teleology, the idea of progress—the idea that humanity is moving

in the direction of better and more perfect civilization, and that this progression can be witnessed through study

of the history of civilization” (Little 11).

3 Lucian Hölscher calls this view an “a-synchronic development that had a highly normative potential when used

as an instrument for prognosticating future developments” (144).

4 Michel Foucault writes that “the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history” (1994:175) while Walter

Benjamin emphasizes “narcotic historicism” of the nineteenth century (391).

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condition” (124), a process through which “progressive recognition” (151) leads towards an

apotheosis of personal and sociocultural self-understanding. For Hegel, the relationship

between historical progress and individual life was inseparable in the shared faculty of

sequential development: “All progress takes the form of following the successive stages in the

evolution of consciousness. Man begins life as a child and is only dimly conscious of the world

and of himself; we know that he has to progress through several stages of empirical

consciousness before he attains a knowledge of what he is in and for himself” (129).

Foucault notes how Kant before Hegel had already delineated the main tenet of the

Enlightenment as “the internal teleology of time” (1984: 34); however, it was Hegel who

ascribed the narratological quality to the concept of historical time. Mirroring the development

of an individual, history for Hegel was then structured by a beginning, development, and an

endpoint – stages of unfolding because of which history and the notion of time adopted a

teleological narrative frame of progress. In this model, the consciousness of Western

civilization throughout centuries of reflection strives towards freedom from the circularly

unconscious domain of Nature: in Hegel‘s vision, the consciousness of the Spirit transforms

this cyclicality into a constant vertical development – “In the natural world, the species does

not progress, but in the world of the Spirit, each change is a form of progress” (128). In short,

the potential freedom of the human spirit is possible due to the historical (so to say, developing)

impetus of the Western way of thinking.5

Informed with Hegel’s thought, the Enlightenment idea of historical progress now

displayed qualities of a goal-oriented narrative. “In our language, the word ‘history’

(Geschichte, from geschehen, “to happen”) combines both objective and subjective meanings,

for it denotes the historia rerum gestarum as well as the res gestae themselves, the historical

narrative and the actual happenings, deeds, and events. […] This conjunction of the two

meanings should be recognized as belonging to a higher order than that of mere external

contingency: we must in fact suppose that the writing of history and the actual deeds and events

of history make their appearance simultaneously and that they emerge together from a common

source” (Hegel 135). Thus, Hegel’s notion of history was established as a story of progress that

ascends to a higher plane of understanding and perfection.

5 In opposition, Hegel places the Orient civilizations as ‘not-yet-developed’, unarticulated in their own historical

consciousness, still belonging to the realm of Nature in a form of subordination and primitive collective

dependency. In contrast, historical teleology for Hegel begins with a self-aware individualism, in the case of

European history, Ancient Greece.

Varžinskas 7

As the concept of progress became the catalyst for history, the modern historical

imagination increasingly put the focus on innovation. In a way, during modernity, society

became self-reflexive in conceiving its own temporality: the modern consciousness

disassociated itself from the cyclical repetition of eternal time and started relying on the

constant novelty of the present. The constant anticipation of the new present, which manifests

itself in the form of the future, introduces the central concept of progress that breaks away from

the past via what Habermas called a continuous renewal (1987: 7). Simultaneously, the

historical orientation shifted radically from the past to the future as the notion of the past started

losing its didactic agency. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, already paved by

revolutions dealing away with past regimes that were no longer compatible, developed a utopic

concern for “newness.” Koselleck further argues that in this way, historical consciousness

eventually became accelerated by “the anticipation of a future both desired and to be quickened

through the technicalization” (1985: 57). Modern historical consciousness now depended on

an irreversible sense of progress and future-oriented action leading to a state of perfection as

the future itself became an optimistic goal of improvement.6

Hegel’s ideas on teleology had an immense effect on the perception of history in the

nineteenth century – most notably with Auguste Comte’s positivism, the notion of teleological

progress gained deterministic qualities. With the inherent structure of a developing narrative,

not only was the progression towards a better future possible, it was now inevitable (Woolf

184).

How, in relation to this model, are the crises and catastrophes of history addressed?

Hegel saw failure and injustice such as bloodshed of the crusades, witch-hunts of Reformation,

unjust feudal system, and wars as crucial moments in the dialectics of history that, although

appearing like setbacks, set up conditions for further development on the grand scale of time.

(Pinkard 551). It must be stressed that Hegel wrote during the turn of the eighteenth century in

the spirit of German Idealism and did not live until the state of historical acceleration that

dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Although some

Hegelians might argue that the First World War outbreak was another natural narrative shift in

teleological history, the accelerated technological rigor, the record amount of casualties, and

the shattering global political effects were without precedents in Western history. Moreover, it

set up grounds for another, even deadlier conflict, emerging only twenty-one years after 1918.

6 “The future is the telos. […] Time is no longer a simple classificatory principle, but rather an agent, the operator

of historical progress” (Hartog 124).

Varžinskas 8

It was finally the event that introduced a significant crack of doubt in the European project of

modernity built on the concept of progress that was further followed by series of

disillusionments regarding imperialism, ethical coherence, and Enlightenment values, and

ultimately, the soundness of historical teleology.

The nearing eclipse of the nineteenth century showed the first signs of disillusionment

in the utopian teleology of modernity. Nietzsche, one of the first thinkers to bring Hegel’s

teleology of history into question, in Untimely Meditations (1873), observes how at the end of

the nineteenth century the neo-Hegelian historiography naturalized the Western idea of

historical progress and how the European modernity was celebrated as the proof of it:

Contemplation of history has never flown so far, not even in dreams; for now the

history of mankind is only the continuation of the history of animals and plants; even

in the profoundest depths of the sea the universal historian still finds traces of himself

as living slime; gazing in amazement, as at a miracle, at the tremendous course mankind

has already run, his gaze trembles at that even more astonishing miracle, modern man

himself, who is capable of surveying this course. He stands high and proud upon the

pyramid of the world-process; as he lays the keystone of his knowledge at the top of it

he seems to call out to nature all around him: ‘We have reached the goal, we are the

goal, we are nature perfected.‘ (107-8)

Nietzsche saw the nineteenth-century notion of history as the naturalized product of

historiography that bears an ideological sense of truth – the historians informed by Hegel for

Nietzsche were figures that construct historical narratives based on subjective and national

judgments and interests (in Gadamer’s terms, such historiography is always hermeneutically

structured by their own horizons of expectations). In Nietzsche’s view, the contemporary

concept of the historical consciousness was misleading because the teleological narrative of

history in the nineteenth century was exalted to the state of deterministic necessity. Always

praising the transitory present as the next providential checkpoint towards the better, inevitable

future marked “the total surrender of the personality to the world-process” (107).

The subsequent series of disasters of the twentieth century became an argumentative

constellation against Hegel’s teleological fulfillment of progressive history (Osborne 39). After

the First World War, “faith in history as progress became no longer tenable, “and the war

became one of the events that “ended a way of thinking about history, a way of conceptualising

time“ (Hölscher 134;138).

With The Man Without Qualities, Musil’s project suggests an endpoint, but this

endpoint is the opposite of what Hegel envisioned – parodically, Musil hints at the impending

Varžinskas 9

War as a teleological disaster of modernity that is structured by the anxious suspension of the

narrative and the disintegration of the social order. What has been regarded as the progress of

modernity is being exhausted, and the very idea of an upward development reaches its own

endpoint – the novel proclaims the decline of the Enlightenment project, which until then was

regarded as the great narrator of the historical time. In such regard, Musil acknowledges

Hegel’s insistence upon treating history as a narrative; however, he structures his own story

around the idea that the narrative practices of history reflected in the form of the novel are no

longer valid in order to conceptualize the late stage of modernity.

ii. Teleology of the Novel in the Nineteenth Century

Modernity marked an emerging temporalization of history by endowing it with a central notion

of development (Entwicklung) (Koselleck 2018: 108), a Hegelian notion which envisioned any

self-aware experience as temporally structured. Having a historical self-reflection,

consciousness no longer merely “collects” experiences but employs them in a progressive way

towards a more perfected knowledge (Tygstrup 254). These ideas eventually found their place

in literature, most predominantly in the rising genre of the novel,7 which in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries became concerned with temporal unfolding8 far more than in the past as

the time regimes informed by Enlightenment started shifting from cosmic cyclicality (mainly

structured by the past) to causal linearity of development (mainly oriented towards the

secularized notion of future).9

Even though Hegel himself was quite dismissive of the genre of the novel due to his

dislike of Romantic Ironists, the influence of teleological narrative has been observed in the

emerging forms of the novel – according to Franco Moretti, Bildungsroman as the nineteenth-

century defining genre exemplifies the “teleological rhetoric of Hegelian thought” (7) where

the meaning is accumulated via the development and life of a protagonist leading toward an

endpoint. Ian Watt further links the Hegelian teleology with the rise of the novel: “One can

7 In Time and Narrative vol. 2, Paul Ricoeur notes how “inherent in the name itself, the “novel” became a form

originality – a category that during the Middle Ages denoted an ancient beginning (1985: 163).

8 Ricoeur takes after the Hegelian insistence of treating history in tandem with a fictional narrative. Because of

the shared narrative structures, fiction and history for Ricoeur are in a “interwoven reference” due to the power to

refigure time in the form of a narrative (1988: 101).

9 Karl Löwith observes how during this transition, modernity managed to “secularize the Christian notion of the

eschatological time” by turning it into an optimistic idea of progress where Man replaced God and gained direction

of their own future, leading to the salvation of humankind without the promise of Kingdom of God (Löwith 200).

Varžinskas 10

perhaps go further, and, like Hegel, regard the novel as a manifestation of the Spirit of epic

under the impact of a modern and prosaic concept of reality” (Watt 239). Watt’s apt wording

of the “prosaic concept of reality” suggests the novel’s broadened preoccupation with the levels

of different orders - the social, psychological dimensions – that were associated with a sense

of teleological completion and development. During this era of classical modernity, the novel

reached the status of narrative art that strives to encompass life with all its aspects. The realist

novel of the nineteenth century is without a doubt a project of such maximalist ambition.

Especially around the time when the novel (mostly in Great Britain and France) was imbued

with an aim to expose the social structures in a realistic manner, the genre expanded in its size

and mission with examples like Dickens’ Bleak House, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and most

importantly, the grand project of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. As a maximalist endeavor of

studies and scenes that elevated the form of the novel to a degree of research and scientific

significance, La Comédie humaine displayed an obsessive compulsion towards totality and a

full amplitude of reality. Fredric Jameson notes that like Dickens, Balzac was an author for

whom the role of a novelist implied an obsession towards this totality via omniscient narration,

an encyclopedic sense of completeness.10

Similar to Entwicklungsroman, Bildungsroman was an exemplary form embodying the

notion of progress and development: “The narrative representation of the linkage of past,

present, and future bears the form of a story of progress and development that contains a

reconstructible, meaning-constituting goal horizon” (Rosa 230). The goal is, of course, a

formation of identity for the character that lets them integrate themselves into the social order,

or in the later development of the genre, reject the status quo. Nevertheless, the focus is on the

result as a state of upward progression of self-knowledge. At its height, the novel in the

nineteenth century became “the culturally dominant symbolic form of the idea of a

temporalized human experience” (Tygstrup 257), where the passage of time is utilized as a

linear trajectory of progression.

10 “In this sense, we must accustom ourselves to rethinking the pallid category of the “omniscient narrator” in

terms of sheer passion, as an obsession to know everything and all the social levels—from the secret conversations

of the great all the way to the “mystères de Paris” and the “bas fonds.” Balzac was supremely what the Germans

call a besserwisser, a know-it-all at every moment anxious to show off his inside expertise (which he was

unfortunately less able to put into practice). But surely Dickens had the virus as well, who was so proud of knowing

all the streets in London; and we many safely attribute an analogous concupiscence of knowledge to all the other

great encyclopedic fabulators, from Trollope to Joyce” (Jameson 115).

Varžinskas 11

iii. The Indefinite Ateleology of The Man Without Qualities

Focusing on the temporal structure and narrative development techniques, this thesis paper

seeks to render Musil’s project as an experimental site that questions the stability of history,

progress, the linear conception of time, and, ultimately, narrative-making practices.

With The Man Without Qualities, Musil consolidated his core ideas and influences –

the novel successfully employs the philosophies of Nietzsche, Emerson, as well as sociological

angles found in Dilthey, Simmel, all of this amounting to a systemic novel of ideas. With an

overarching influence of the experimental physics of Ernst Mach, The Man Without Qualities

accentuates Musil‘s lifelong focus on indefinite forms of existence and search for the “other

condition” that would open space for an alternative sense of reality within the frames of modern

history.

Around the years of finishing the doctorate thesis on Mach’s philosophy, Musil

published his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), which had brought him

significant fame. He was quickly recognized in the Vienna and Berlin literary scenes as a

promising voice that has led him to abandon academia and devote himself to becoming a writer.

After the war, Musil entirely devotes himself to The Man Without Qualities around. Very soon,

Musil and his wife started struggling financially. In 1930, after being pressured by his

publisher, Musil published the first volume of The Man Without Qualities, containing part I, A

Sort of Introduction (“Eine Art Einleitung”), and part II, Seinesgleichen geschieht (“The Like

of It Now happens” or “Pseudoreality Prevails”).11 The novel’s initial success was short-lived,

albeit praised by his literary contemporaries, such as Hermann Broch and Thomas Mann;

however, his reluctance to follow up with the second volume and the rise of the Nazi regime

in Germany stalled his career. In 1933, Musil published the unfinished second volume with

part III, Into the Millenium (The Criminals) (“Ins tausendjähriche Reich/Die Verbrecher”),

after which his work kept slowing down due to increasing financial troubles and constant

revisions. As Hitler’s regime came to Vienna in 1938, Musil fled to Switzerland and spent his

time in borderline poverty and diminished status, still working on the novel right until his

sudden death in 1942.

While working on the book between 1920 and 1930, Musil keenly observed such

historical developments as the Great Depression and the rise of Fascist ideology in the Weimar

11 The translations of Seinesgleichen geschieht differ between the first (1953) and the second English editions

(1995).

Varžinskas 12

Republic. This anachronistic entanglement of different time levels accounts for Musil’s

accumulating ambition for the novel, as every passing year of writing introduced new ideas of

updating the already sketched out narrative – in the words of J. M. Coetzee, the book was

“overtaken by history” (Coetzee 4). In a way, the novel was working against the author, and

the initially planned four-volume structure12 with its concluding section titled “A Sort of

Conclusion” (mirroring the “A Sort of Introduction”) was put on hold and was never realized.

In the end, the problematic production of the book left behind three parts in two volumes due

to Musil’s struggles of finalizing the book.

The Man Without Qualities is set in pre-war Vienna and follows the demise of the social

and political layers of the Austro-Hungarian (or Musil’s coined name “Kakania”13) Empire

during 1913 and 1914. At the center of the seemingly uneventful narrative stands Ulrich, a

talented young man in his thirties who returns to Vienna after a series of career experiments

(not unlike Musil himself) to finally “seek an appropriate application for his abilities” (44).

Immediately pushed by his father to pursue a career, Ulrich becomes a secretary for the

“Parallel Campaign” - a political movement constituted of high circles of the social elite that

sets out to prepare the national celebration of Emperor Franz Joseph’s 70th year of reign to

mirror Emperor Wilhelm II’s rule of Germany of 30 years in conjunction with the idea of

displaying the imperialist Austrian glory on a global level. Ulrich’s distanced passive

indifference towards his surroundings becomes the primary lens to experience the satirical

cross-section of the pre-war Viennese society. Alongside the impotent political idealism of the

Parallel Campaign, Musil presents an array of radically different characters that masterfully

contribute to an analysis of such notions as ethics, truth, and progress. With the looming

disaster of 1914, The Man Without Qualities is a monumental novel of ideas that depicts the

eclipse of the European Enlightenment project and the utopian promises of modernity – in other

words, Musil’s portrait of the modern world is built on the ironical premise that the world

fueled by a sense of progress and anticipation of the future is oblivious to what it is heading

towards.

Similar to Mann and Broch, Musil stylistically is far less radical than his English and

American modernist contemporaries – if Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf found such devices as

12 For a more in-depth look into the publishing history of The Man Without Qualities, see Walter Fanta’s “The

“Finale” of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Competing Editions and the “Telos” of the Narrative”.

13 Stemming from the abbreviation “k.k” (kaiserlich-königlich), Kakania is a satirical term that bears an

association with the word “kaka” denoting excrement.

Varžinskas 13

stream of consciousness as the primary means to structure a modern novelistic discourse, Musil

in this sense is more traditional. A lack of formal deviations excludes Musil from the

phenomenological episteme that delineated modernist experimentation regarding such

categories as Bergsonian immediate data of consciousness and the sensory rendition of reality.

These aspects might have been one of the reasons why in the modernist canon, The Man

Without Qualities is often overlooked, 14 albeit often cited by other authors and thinkers as one

of the most monumental works of the late twentieth century.15 It is an oddly ambitious work

that resists the status of a conventional novel; far more often, it bears a label of “a novel of

ideas” or “a philosophical novel”. In it, Musil’s peculiar employment of various systems of

thought, disciplines, and sciences in relation to his skepticism towards positivist objectivism

results in a dialectical synthesis of scientific experimentation – the novel is a laboratory of ideas

that illuminates the modern condition of disillusionment towards the Enlightenment project

and its blind hope in progress that has led into Europe into the historical turmoil of the early

twentieth century.

Stylistically, with The Man Without Qualities, Musil puts into praxis what Broch in

1936 formulated as a need to step back from the mimetic representation and the aspects that it

entails (Dowden 31) – relative orders of meaning and heightened metafictional mistrust of

objective narrative had to become the guiding principles of storytelling. In a rather blatant way,

the novel opens with “a sort of” an introduction (Eine Art Einleitung) only to be followed by

the “like of it” narrative (Seinesgleichen geschieht). The novel addresses a particular historical

tipping point of Europe, but with such unstable framing, the narrative is not historical in the

classical sense - it is instead “historical in a curiously parodic way” (Perloff 79) as it questions

the whole teleological foundation that the Western culture has held axiomatic since the Age of

Enlightenment. In this regard, Musil is dismissive of treating his historical rendition as

“truthful” as he opts to frame his novel as an attempt, an experiment that strives to present the

times of disorder in a self-conscious, suspicious, and ironic way.

14 Specifically with The Man Without Qualities, Musil has been gaining more attention during the past twenty

years – leading criticism includes Genese Grill’s “The World as a Metaphor in Robert Musil's The Man Without

Qualities: Possibility as Reality” (2012); Stijn de Cauwer’s “A Diagnosis of Modern Life: Robert Musil's Der

Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a Critical-Utopian Project” (2014); Patrizia McBridge’s “The Void of Ethics: Robert

Musil and the Experience of Modernity” (2006); as well as editions of collected essays such as “Robert Musil’s

The Man Without Qualities” (2005) edited by Harold Bloom, and “A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil”

(2007) edited by Bartram, Payne, and Tihanov.

15 The novel has received significant attention from thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles

Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-François Lyotard, and authors often associated with the genre of the

philosophical novel such as Thomas Mann, Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee.

Varžinskas 14

Exemplifying the post-First World War consciousness that has “ceased to believe in

history” (Coetzee 1), Musil plays with the parallel of historical progress and narrative

evolution, a foregrounded constellation in which the very notion of idealist fulfillment is being

questioned. In Musil’s ironic rendition, the naturalized conception of upward development in

modern society (and, by extension, narrative practices) leads to a state of confusion, alienation,

and fragmentation rather than a realization of teleological achievement. In this way, content

and form are in unison: the dissolution of meaningful political, cultural coherence and the

indecisiveness of the society of Kakania are enforced by the structural lack of temporal

consistency that results in the ateleological non-development of the novel. To showcase the

disintegrating teleology of history, the story must upset its own temporal structure and the

syntagmatic structure, hence the employment of time no longer serves the function of ordered

development that was the cornerstone for the realist impetus of the pre-modernist novel.

Chapter I. Topos of Ateleological Time

The last introductory chapter presented Musil’s novelistic situatedness as a point of revising

the conventions of the realist novel and the Enlightenment project of teleological temporal

imagination laid out in the wake of modernity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This first chapter of analysis focuses on the thematic scope of temporality as well as its

ateleological exposition. Firstly, the analysis will employ Hartmut Rosa’s concepts of

“acceleration” and “frenetic standstill” as fundamental principles of modern dynamization of

temporality. These notions will help illuminate Musil’s foundation of critique as a focus on the

exhaustion of progress, and by extension, destabilization of conventions of time. Secondly, the

discussion will focus on how the problem of suspension is structured by undecidability in the

example of the Parallel Campaign and how it undermines the teleological model of historical

past, present, and future. Finally, the notion of transgressive love will be taken up as an

aesthetic alternative against the previously addressed accelerated categories of speed, progress,

and history.

i. Acceleration and Frenetic Standstill: Dissolution of the Teleological Premise

The notions of speed and increasing velocity in a record short time became the normative

factors of perceiving collective temporality as such innovations as the train and the telephone

presented the possibility of spanning vast spaces in a shortened amount of time. Hartmut Rosa,

in his sociological study of modernity Social Acceleration, takes up Koselleck’s fascination

Varžinskas 15

with acceleration and focuses on the notions of accelerated time, speed, and movement in

temporal structures of society – categories that since the industrial revolution marked a new

conceptualization of time with cyclical cosmic time being replaced by the mechanical

governance of the clock. On a micro level, the notion of time during modernity became more

fragmented and detailed than before16 , and the notion of speed became the governing temporal

prerequisite to achieving success (Mendilow 10) as time became a currency that had to be

“spent” efficiently. “An acceleration in the temporal structures of modern society” (26) for

Rosa marks the developing speed gaining an exponential aspect. Rosa claims that at the

beginning of late modernity,17 acceleration has transformed its telos – its future – from a fixed

idea of an endpoint into an open prospect of uncertainty: “In the functionally differentiated

society of high modernity, finally, a linear time consciousness with an open future

predominates: historical development is no longer understood as running toward a determinate

goal, and its ending remains uncertain” (Rosa 15). The exponential quality of social

acceleration seemed to have reached the tipping point that had “opened up” the future in a

violent way – the rushing flux of history was no longer governed by the idealistic teleology of

the Enlightenment’s18 idea of progress since the acceleration has broken its linear conception.

Koselleck himself had already prefigured this shift by claiming that society was initially

“accelerating towards an unknowable future, but within which was contained a hope of the

desired utopian fulfillment” (1985: xv). With reference to Rosa, the critical notion of “hope”

has now shifted to “uncertainty”.

The Man Without Qualities structures the zeitgeist of late modernity precisely in these

terms of acceleration and uncertainty. Musil’s pre-war Vienna of 1913 is a “rapidly growing

world that had to get things done quickly” (379), an urban microcosm rendition of a world in

which the author places streetcars, trains, and industries as monuments of an increasingly

rushing historical progress. During this time, such notions as speed and acceleration became

16 While discussing St. Augustine’s philosophy, Paul Ricoeur notes how “no more than did classical antiquity,

Augustine has no word for units smaller than the hour. This does not change until the eighteenth century” (1984:

232).

17 The referred historical timeframes in this thesis paper are borrowed from Hartmut Rosa who himself takes up

the periodical framework delineated by Marshall Berman: “classical modernity” as the period from 1790 to 1900,

while “late modernity” corresponding to 1900 and onwards.

18 Philipp Blom (similarly to Rosa) marks how speed and gaiety of progress between 1900 and 1914 suddenly

became accompanied by anxiety and vertigo: “[…] nobody felt confident of the shape the future world would

have, of who would wield power, what political constellation would be victorious, or what kind of society would

emerge from the headlong transformation” (3).

Varžinskas 16

the normative principles of urban modernity that coincided with efficiency, power, as well as

the futurist valorization of the machine as a symbol of the future that eschews the stagnant,

slower past. As social acceleration involves not only technological advancement but also

changes the socio-cultural norms, The Man Without Qualities hints at a condition that in the

narrative is manifested by attributing the notion of genius to the mechanical speed of a

racehorse or optimizing labor efficiency with a shorthand script, 19 or elevating journalism to a

new, more effective standard of storytelling.20 These modes of efficiency are inherently related

to the metropolitan space, and right from the start of the novel, Vienna is displayed as a hub of

various accelerated forces where time is governed by velocity, efficiency, and chaos. One of

the key events in the first pages is the auto accident - the crash describes the victim who is both

attacked and then saved by a mechanistic speed when a truck is replaced by an ambulance, an

exchange whose efficiency is applauded by the bystanders. The speed and bustle of Kakania

are accompanied by “irregularity”, “failure to keep step”, and “chronic discord”, in short, a

sense of discordance which structures this accelerated state of a progressive city:

Like all big cities it was made up of irregularity, change, forward spurts, failures to keep step,

collisions of objects and interests, punctuated by unfathomable silences; made up of pathways

and untrodden ways, of one great rhythmic beat as well as the chronic discord and mutual

displacement of all its contending rhythms. All in all, it was like a boiling bubble inside a pot

made of the durable stuff of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions. (MwQ 4)21

19 The discussed idea of introducing a shorthand script as the main means of writing at the Parallel Campaign

meetings corresponds to what Charles Taylor refers to as “instrumental reason” – Taylor argues that as one of the

three malaises of modernity, instrumental reason is “the kind of rationality we draw when we calculate the most

economical application of means to a given end. Maximum efficiency, the best cost output ratio, is its measure of

success” (10).

20 The notion of journalistic narrative in the novel deserves additional attention - the journalistic mode of

accounting for reality in the novel is approached as an emerging modern form of narrative, the “truest narrative

art” (“die echteste erzählerische Kunst”) (1101/1036). The prominent journalist Meseritscher is praised as “the

Homer of our era” (ibid.) as the notion of journalistic writing is presented as replacing the old forms of storytelling.

To take it further, journalism becomes the primary literary discourse of the public sphere. Bakhtin comes to mind

when he writes that “the journalist is above all a contemporary. He is obliged to be one. He lives in the sphere of

questions that can be resolved in the present day (or in any case in the near future). He participates in a dialogue

that can be ended and even finalized, can be translated into action, and can become an empirical force.”

(1986:152). The genre of journalism as “modern rhetoric” (ibid., 150) becomes an instrumentalized means of

narration that is “translated into action” by being immediate, empirical, fast, and most importantly, contemporary.

Treating Meseritscher as “the Homer of our era” is also significant as it merges poetic and rhetoric discourses into

a new medium of modernity, the “truest narrative art”. Does not Musil by this phrasing undermine journalism as

the modern discursive outcome by suggesting that the “truest” art cannot eschew a sense of fiction and myth?

21 For the quotes from the novel, “The Man Without Qualities” will be abbreviated as “MwQ”.

Varžinskas 17

To elaborate further, Musil sustains the mechanistic aspect of accelerated modern

experience and describes the temporality and progress of Kakania by using a metaphor of a

train, a significant chronotopic image:

We travel in it day and night, doing whatever else we do, shaving, eating, making love,

reading books, working at our jobs, as though those four walls around us were standing still;

but the uncanny fact is that those walls are moving along without our noticing it, casting their

rails ahead like long, groping, twisted antennae, going we don’t know where. Besides, we

would like to think of ourselves as having a hand in making our time what it is. It is a very

uncertain part to play, and sometimes, looking out the window after a fairly long pause, we

find that the landscape has changed. What flies past flies past, it can’t be helped, but with all

our devotion to our role an uneasy feeling grows on us that we have traveled past our goal or

got on a wrong track. Then one day the violent need is there: Get off the train! Jump clear! A

homesickness, a longing to be stopped, to cease evolving, to stay put, to return to the point

before the thrown switch put us on the wrong track. (MwQ 28)

Musil’s usage of the train imagery is already a mark of accelerated technology and innovations

impacting the modern temporal imagination. The experience of time is now being realized by

a technologically modern concept of the train, hence the transformative nature of acceleration

influencing temporal structures. As the narrator observes, the goal of this “train of time” is

unknown, and being the passenger is “a very uncertain part to play.” The uneasiness and

uncertainty that Rosa ascribes to social acceleration for Musil bursts out in the “violent need”

to get off the train of progress that has lost its teleological destination. There seems almost a

primal anxious need to “be stopped” and “cease evolving” as an epiphany of the modern subject

who was under the illusion that they are in accordance with the historical time. Musil here

mocks the viewpoint of having control over time, a conquering mindset of “making history”

that has dominated modern progress. In effect, time has almost reached an independent state

via the notion of accelerating progress, leaving the perceiver behind and without control: “Time

was on the move… But nobody knew where time was headed. And it was not always clear

what was up or down, what was going forward or backward” (7). These first instances in the

novel mark the disillusionment with the progressive temporal structures and introduce a sense

of something dangerous and dystopic at the end of the journey.

In this vein, Musil sets out to “undo” the classical notion of time, whose linearity was

previously inextricably linked with the idea of progress and development. The Musilian subject

is a figure that has invested trust in this “train of time” but has become disenchanted, although

it is too late to leave it. In Musil’s ambitious critique of modernity, the subject is no longer a

Varžinskas 18

master of their time as it has almost reached an independent state via the accelerating progress.

In other words, time in the world of the novel gains speed surpassing the individual’s capacity

to conceptualize it as instrumental for their own historical standpoint. The rush of modernity

marks the loss of time, leaving the subject immobile, stuck, and half-realized.

This paradoxical result of inertia as an effect of acceleration can, in this sense, be

viewed in relation to Rosa’s accompanying concept of “frenetic standstill”. By this notion,

Rosa marks the shift from “classical modernity” to “late modernity” by observing how social

acceleration eventually led to societal rigidity after “utopian energies are exhausted because all

the intellectual and spiritual possibilities appear to have been tried” (15). The previously

opened future of progress now paradoxically gains a status of “frenetic standstill” in the

development of ideas, which means that “nothing remains the way it is while at the same time

nothing essential changes” (283). The acceleration exhausts the fleeting present to the point

where it loses temporal orientation and results in rigid inertia, a paradoxical state of

exhaustion,22 and perpetual action that does not crystallize into a coherent form or idea solely

due to the overbearing speed. Thus, the instances of standstill amidst the rushing experiences

in the novel are symptomatic of a modern expenditure – such examples range from the inactive

ambitions of the Parallel Campaign to such characters as Ulrich‘s youth friend Walter who,

once envisioned as a progressive, modernist artist, finds himself blaming the modern present

for his failed aspirations; or Leo Fischel, a bank director who believes in progress in parallel to

the accumulating capital but becomes oblivious to the timely inception of proto-fascism

kindled in his own household after his daughter gets involved with antisemitic German

nationalists.

The duality of acceleration and frenetic standstill correlates with the ambivalent

temporal structures of the narrative of The Man Without Qualities – Vienna’s social and

cultural life is portrayed as governed by an increased pace of life, increasingly rushing

modernity and technology. In contrast, the narrative order or the novel itself works towards a

perpetual suspension, a state of a standstill rejecting the idea of a teleological and, therefore,

future-oriented development.

22 In this sense, Habermas compliments Rosa’s ideas of the frenetic standstill when he writes that “modern time-

consciousness has repeatedly slackened” (1987: 13) due to an accelerating need for progressive novelty. As the

notion of “progress became the historical norm” (ibid., 12), modernity started losing its vitality and stalled.

Varžinskas 19

ii. Progress as the Teleological Principle of Time

In Kakania, the primary ideological principle is the belief in progress. For example, a bank

director Leo Fischel associates the notion of progress with the accumulating wealth of his

capital,23 while Diotima sees the Parallel Campaign as a historical means of progress.

Specifically, in Arnheim, Diotima sees “the New Man, destined to take over the helm of history

from the old powers” (357), moreover, during their relationship, Diotima is presented as a

person who “regards each age she passes through as a step on a stairway leading upward from

below” (313) and by introducing Arnheim into the Parallel Campaign, she feels “with absolute

certainty that her life had reached a pinnacle” (357). In her eyes, her own self-worth is

symbolically coincident with the Parallel Campaign, and she associates this gathering with

teleological development.

Meanwhile, Ulrich is a counter-figure to such trust in the notion of teleological

progress. The category of history itself for him is governed by chance rather than certainty:

The course of history was therefore not that of a ball which, once it is hit, takes a definite line-

but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets,

turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he

arrives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain

going off course. (MwQ 392)24

In Ulrich’s eyes, anything is susceptible to sudden, abrupt changes, as seen in the erratic

description of historical time. There is no finality to becoming. Its outcome is never clear – in

this sense, the outbreak of the war displayed how the Enlightenment project and its

teleologically charged historicism turned out not to be prophetically utopic.

23 “Director Fischel, for instance, could form no concept at all of true patriotism or the true Austria, but he did

have his own opinion of true progress, which was certainly different from Count Leinsdorf's opinion. Exhausted

by stocks and bonds or whatever it was he had to deal with, his only recreation an evening at the opera once a

week, he believed in a progress of the whole that must somehow resemble his bank's progressively increasing

profitability” (MwQ 142).

24 While walking through Vienna, Ulrich speculates that the course of historical time may not be determined by a

teleological trajectory of a line but rather susceptible to abruptions that are outside temporal anticipations. As he

is having these thoughts, he gets lost after the series of distractions of the city and the narrative connects these

categories of historical and personal experience – historical motions are not unlike an individual capacity to go

“off course”: “He had been numbering his own answers and digressions as he went along, while glancing now

into some passing face, now into a shop window, to keep his thoughts from running away with him entirely, but

had nevertheless gone slightly astray and had to stop for a moment to see where he was and find the best way

home” (MwQ 392).

Varžinskas 20

As for the historical present itself, Ulrich’s perception of modernity is heavily informed

by the accelerated state of progress to the point where humanity’s efforts seem to start losing

their foundational grounding and causality. “Our era is dripping with the energy of action. It’s

not interested in ideas, only in deeds. […] Everyone spends his whole life repeating the same

thing over and over again” (804).

Ulrich is aware of the social acceleration and frenetic standstill that the Viennese

experience; however, he chooses to avoid entangling himself in such a position by denouncing

to believe in the teleological utopia and the idea of progress. In the introductory scene, Ulrich

is presented standing behind his apartment window watching the traffic and “ticking off on his

stopwatch the passing cars, trucks, trolleys, and pedestrians. He was gauging their speeds, their

angles, all the living forces of mass hurtling past that drew the eye to follow them like lightning,

holding on, letting go, forcing the attention for a split second to resist, to snap, to leap in pursuit

of the next item” (6). Quickly enough, he becomes disillusioned with the idea of “calculating

the incalculable” and “after doing the arithmetic in his head for a while, he slipped the watch

back into his pocket with a laugh and decided to stop all this nonsense” (7). Ulrich ceases

counting the urban traffic from behind his window, and by refusing to measure modern life in

terms of mechanical clock time, he is introduced as one who ceases to see it in terms of

progress.

iii. The Indecisive Storytellers of History

Building the model of Kakania, Musil drew timely parallels with the political and cultural

realities of pre-war Vienna. The city exemplified the Empire’s inability to maintain itself,

which was suffering under the indecisive political regime before the war. While addressing the

pre-war political climate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Caroline de Gruyter notes how the

complex national diversity increasingly rendered the state unsustainable to rule: “Habsburgers

always played for time because a common decision was impossible while the emperor always

notoriously took his time to make a decision” (de Gruyter 2012). As an aporetic place of many

conflicting ethnicities, regimes, and ideologies,25 “the grotesque Austria” in Musil’s eyes was

“nothing but a particularly clear-cut case of the modern world” (Musil 1998: 209), a

background of action displaying the stagnated and decaying fin-de-siecle sensibility

25 “The government was clerical, but everyday life was liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but not

everyone was a citizen. There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept

shut” (MwQ 29).

Varžinskas 21

complemented by the fading aristocratic ideas, administrative impotence, and cultural

aimlessness of the Habsburg empire, All of this is present in the Dual Monarchy of Kakania of

1914, a microcosmic place and time of many juxtapositions.

At the vanguard of Kakanian collective psyche stands the Parallel Campaign, which

functions as a metonymical representation for the Kakania as a whole – it is a central political

endeavor of the Empire struggling to sustain its disintegrating social order but which is defined

by aimlessness, political fragmentation, and inability to generate ideas that would be socially

coherent. As the ultimate attempt to provide an ideological grounding for the disintegrating

Dual Monarchy, the Parallel Campaign is firstly an endeavor of writing history by placing itself

ahead of the historical time with such mottos as “we cannot forget at this moment we owe all

our energies to the realization of a historic event!” (187). The campaign is responsible for

“recovering” the grand ideological narrative of the Habsburg Empire. At the same time, Count

Leinsdorf, a conservative Realpolitik official, and Diotima (Ermelinda Tuzzi) are figures

preoccupied with sustaining that narrative for the future. In other words, the Campaign

envisions themselves as storytellers responsible for laying out the future narrative for the

Empire:

But there is also something else involved which has not yet been mentioned, and that is the

delight in storytelling itself; it takes the shape of that conviction so common to authors that

they are working on a good story, that passion of authorship that lengthens an author’s ears

and makes them glow, so that all criticism simply melts away. Count Leinsdorf had this

conviction and this passion, and so did some of his friends […] (MwQ 561)

The passion of the Parallel Campaign’s ideological storytelling is thus firmly rooted in the

Hegelian teleology of progress that has been exalted to a naturalized status. With Count

Leinsdorf as the leading figure, the Campaign treats history as a judicial procedure, a “lawful

process” that forms a “smoothly ascending line” (181) – tenets of classical modernity along

which the Campaign seeks to situate itself. The Parallel Campaign harbors a profound principle

that they can reclaim control over history, a modern mindset that echoes the words of Zygmunt

Bauman when he writes: “The deepest, perhaps the sole meaning of progress is made up of two

closely interrelated beliefs - that “time is on our side,” and that we are the ones who “make

things happen” (Bauman 132). In such a manner, the Parallel Campaign stands for the

progressive modern consciousness envisioning itself as the frontier of historical time.

The political impotence of the Campaign also lies in its fragmentary nature. The initial

idea of gathering the expert minds to conjure an idea embodying the glory of Kakania fails

Varžinskas 22

most ironically - each one of them remains separate in their personal ambitions,26 “trapped in

the cage of his or her specialized knowledge” (McBridge 5) without reaching any consensus.

Max Weber saw the disenchanted modern condition as a testament to the loss of unity due to

accelerated differentiation of life-spheres that compartmentalized experiences into enclosed,

hermetic loci. In Diotima’s words, the Parallel Campaign is concerned with this “need to

recover that unity of mankind that had been lost because the disparity of interests in society

had grown so great” (189). Ironically enough, by trying to amend this crisis of the fragmented

modern present, the Parallel Campaign resorts to the means exemplifying the same condition

and gathers an ensemble of individuals27 who are unable to cooperate as each of them

represents only individual ambitions and disparate ideologies – for example, Arnheim is

eventually exposed as using the campaign solely for influential purposes. Simultaneously,

General Stumm’s motivation lies in a bureaucratic attempt to obtain funding for the Austrian

army. A homogenous ideology is no longer possible in the modern world due to an accelerated

differentiation and specialization, and fragmentation of human experiences that the Campaign

reflects.

Quite quickly, it becomes clear that the Campaign will remain an idea without content,

a gathering of progress and excitement without substance and realization. Musil’s novel

exposes the blind nature of this teleological and progressive mindset – despite the disintegrating

unity, Kakania still harbors a belief in progress without seeing any clear manifestations.

Without holding any ideological potential, the Campaign is destined to fail its mission – from

the start, it remains to be an effort of “action without purpose” (Goodstein, 394). In this light,

Leinsdorf and Diotima’s obsession with the recurring sense that “something’s got to be done”

(878) and “something’s going to happen” (110) serves as a satirical impression – instead of an

idea that would encompass the spiritual superiority of the Habsburg Empire, Europe falls into

the worst conflict of humankind seen at that time. With its phantomic anticipation, the year

1918, in the unrealized mist of time, becomes a historical point of disintegration instead of a

glorious celebration.

26 Habermas observes this condition in claiming that modernity since the Enlightenment has “segregated science,

morality, and art into autonomous specialized spheres splitting off from lifeworld and administered by specialists”

(1997: 54).

27“As agreed at the inaugural sessions, they had divided up the world according to the major aspects of religion,

education, commerce, agriculture, and so on” (MwQ 241).

Varžinskas 23

iv. Crisis of the Present and the Aimlessness of History

In Chapter 62, Ulrich and his cousin Diotima set out on one of the countryside trips that “serve

the purpose of winning support for the campaign from influential or wealthy persons” (299),

and they end up taking an excursion into a valley. While strolling, they find themselves

discussing topics like will, power, and desire when Ulrich suddenly turns the conversation

towards the notions of time and history:

We wildly overestimate the present, the sense of the present, the here and now; like you and

me being here in this valley, as if we’d been put in a basket and the lid of the present had

fallen on it. We make too much of it. We’ll remember it. Even a year from now we may be

able to describe how we were standing here. But what really moves us—me anyway—is

always—putting it cautiously; I don’t want to look for an explanation or a name for it—

opposed in a sense to this way of experiencing things. It is displaced by so much here and

now, so much Present. So it can’t become the present in its turn. (MwQ 312)

What is at the center of Ulrich’s ambiguous attack on “the sense of the present”? Bearing in

mind Ulrich’s skepticism towards the teleological principle of historical time, his stance runs

counter to the treatment of the present as a providential episode in the grand narrative of history.

In other words, the “overestimated” present that is “being made too much of” refers to a

teleological sense of present historical time that is charged with a notion of progress. Ulrich

here denies the significance of the present - be it historical or phenomenological – that is

essentially meaningless at its unfolding.

As previously discussed, the Parallel Campaign embodies the progressive teleological

drive of “making history” and being at the “helm of history,” a movement for which “every

moment may be that of a great historic turning point.” The present reflected by such ideology

becomes overvalued as the obsession with action forces one to infuse the present with

teleological meaning. Musil’s position of writing in 1921 further proves this notion of the non-

significant present as the Viennese society in the brimming present of 1913-1914 was oblivious

to the looming disaster28. It seems that for Musil, the meaning of the present is only possible

once it becomes a reflected past, in other words, when it becomes a simultaneous narrative of

28 At the same time “people not yet born in those days will find it hard to believe, but even then time was racing

along like a cavalry, camel, just like today” (MwQ 7). The present of “today” for the retrospective narration

exhibits the same quality of the present of 1913 – nobody in that time was suspectful of the disastrous future, and

the same could be said about any year or any present moment. This way, Musil acknowledges his own present

positioning towards the unknown future devoid of teleological order as the historical judgment is exchanged by

temporal intuition.

Varžinskas 24

(hi)story assuming a sequential form of a narrativized past - the present must settle into the

structure of a narrative before it can carry historical meaning and significance of being past.

As historical distance articulates events of the past retrospectively29 via sequential ordering,

there is no way of understanding the present until it becomes a past under the guise of a

narrative, until the present becomes a past for the present of the future. In Musil’s own words

from the essay The Writer in Our Age: “One knows just as little about the present. Partly this

is because we are, as always, too close to the present” (Lukács 1963: 35).

That is why Ulrich abstains from treating the modern notion of the present as a

teleological stage towards perfection; instead, with his claim, “I don’t want to look for an

explanation,” he approaches it as an erratic space of possibility where positivist determinism

is eschewed in favor of speculation. The present for Musil is problematic in its

meaninglessness, but precisely because of it, the present becomes a sphere of potential

possibilities and contingencies rather than a providential steppingstone towards the teleological

future. As an ineffable matter, the issue of the present is a subject that Ulrich tries to address,

but it is also the condition in which he finds himself thinking about it. The heightened spatial

and temporal awareness of the valley30 constitutes the present moment in which Ulrich tries to

conceptualize the notion of the present, but he fails as Musil is quick to mention that “he did

not really know what he was aiming at” (313).

The undermined teleology of the present is also prevalent in the Parallel Campaign’s

attitude towards the potential betterment of the future, namely in the scene where Count

Leinsdorf is talking with Ulrich, who is cataloging proposal ideas from the public regarding

the celebration into two folders of ones arguing for going back to the past and others for the

future:

“I have already, incidentally,” Ulrich continued, “two folders full of general proposals, which

I’ve had no previous opportunity to return to Your Grace. One of them I’ve headed: Back to!

It’s amazing how many people tell us that the world was better off in earlier times and want

29 Louis Mink draws on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the phenomenological unfolding of history and suggests that

historical understanding is a “mode of uniquely retrospective intelligibility. For the advents and passages […]

could not have been understood by their own agents and participants as we can now understand them” (116).

Thus, the historical present is devoid of meaning until it becomes a past for the present of the future. George

Herbert Mead similarly treats the category of the present as “nothing but textureless data”, “abstractions from

things [that] must be given their places in the constructive pasts of human communities before they can become

events” (240).

30 Musil often portrays places as intersections of time and space, similarly to Balzac‘s tendency to “see time in

space” as noted by Bakhtin (1981:247).

Varžinskas 25

the Parallel Campaign to take us back there. Without counting the understandable slogan, Back

to Religion!, we still have a Back to the Baroque, Back to Gothic, Back to Nature, Back to

Goethe, to Ancient Germanic Law, to Moral Purity, and quite a few more.

“Hmm, yes. But perhaps there is a real idea in there somewhere, which it would be a mistake

to discourage?” Count Leinsdorf offered.

“That’s possible, but how should one deal with it? ‘After careful consideration of your

esteemed letter of such-and-such a date, we regret that we do not regard the present moment

as suitable .. .’? Or ‘We have read your letter with interest, please supply details on how

restoration of the world as it was in the Baroque, the Gothic, et cetera, et cetera, is to be effected

. . . and so on’?” Ulrich was smiling, but Count Leinsdorf felt he was treating the situation

with a little too much levity, and twiddled his thumbs with renewed vigor to ward it off. His

face, with its handlebar mustache, assumed a hardness reminiscent of the Wallenstein era, and

then he came out with a most noteworthy statement:

“Dear Doctor,” he said, “in the history of mankind there is no voluntary turning back!”

This statement surprised no one more than Count Leinsdorf himself, who had actually intended

to say something quite different. As a conservative, he had been annoyed with Ulrich, and had

wanted to point out to him that the middle classes had spumed the universal spirit of the

Catholic Church and were now suffering the consequences. He was also on the point of

praising the times of absolute centralism, when the world was still led by persons aware of

their responsibilities in accordance with fixed principles. But while he was still groping for

words, it suddenly occurred to him what a nasty surprise it would be to wake up one morning

without a hot bath and trains, with an Imperial town crier riding through the streets instead of

the morning papers. And so Count Leinsdorf thought: “Things can never again be what they

were, the way they were,” and as he thought this he was quite astonished. For one assumed

that if there was indeed no voluntary going back in history, then mankind was like a man

driven along by some inexplicable wanderlust, a man who could neither go back nor arrive

anywhere, and this was a quite re-markable condition. (MwQ 251-52)

Hypothetically, turning back to the mythologized ideas of the past would also mean turning

back to the holistic sense of the past with all its past elements. As the leading figure for a central

political movement, Leinsdorf illustrates the modern habit of looking at the past selectively,

and by these bits and pieces, a narrative constellation of elements that serve ideological agenda

is conjured without acknowledging the holistic impact of the past upon the present. While

negating the decadent present in favor of the glorious past, Leinsdorf, at this moment, suddenly

realizes that the past also implies losing the comfortabilities of progress that is taken for

granted. In the wake of late modernity, the notion present for Leinsdorf and the Campaign starts

Varžinskas 26

shifting towards uncertainty as it becomes the time of crisis, albeit still serves the function of

seizing the moment and “making history.” However, after acknowledging the impossibility of

going back to the past, Leinsdorf is left with the idea of the future, which itself is losing its

teleological promise because the present, for his conservative (and borderline reactionary)

mind, is not an improvement of the historical past. This marks a kind of schizophrenic status

of the notion of historical time as one portion of society seeks salvation in the future and the

other half in the past, hence the sense of being disoriented and unable to rely on neither the past

nor the future. Truly enough, just a couple of chapters later, Ulrich describes to Diotima this

aporetically “unbearable” state of the present. “Half of them seek salvation in the future and

the other half in the past.[…] Permit me to say that we’re in a very peculiar situation, unable

to move either forward or backward, while the present moment is felt unbearable too” (294).

Such condition again evokes the notion of the frenetic standstill as the simultaneous state of

being stuck while being unmercifully propelled forward supposes the loss of control.

Kakania is caught between two diverging temporal directions – the conservative past

and the progressive future – which is marked by a “directionless historical transformation.”31

Thus, the crisis of historical time in the novel lies within an idea that the present loses its

teleological quality towards the future, and so does the past. As an effect, the Parallel Campaign

is caught in a frenetic standstill that undermines any forms of a clear decision - throughout the

series of meetings, the committees cannot come up with any coherent plans or actions while

diving further and further into open and at times certainly obscure discussions. The governing

principle of the Campaign is Leinsdorf’s habit of postponing as a means of neither saying yes

nor no “as long as we have no firm idea what our central goal is” (242). By extension, indecisive

postponing eventually becomes a central issue to the Parallel Campaign as this practice

becomes increasingly repetitious. The movement remains a list of names with an occasional

proposal of vague ideas that do not develop into anything complete. As a result, the issue of

indecision grows larger, and at the end of Volume II Leinsdorf asks Diotima:

“Tell me, my dear, haven’t you come to a decision yet?” he would ask. “It’s high

time. […] Diotima obediently promised to hurry; but then she forgot again and did

nothing. And then one day Count Leinsdorf was seized by his well-known energy and

31 “While history took on the character of a directed and politically shapeable movement in classical modernity,

in late modernity the perception of a directionless historical transformation that can no longer be politically steered

or controlled becomes more and more prevalent. Politics forfeits its directional index, and the concepts

“progressive” and “conservative” lose or switch their meanings: progressive politics no longer has any

accelerating function and its insistence on the political possibility of controlling social development makes it

rather a late modern decelerator” (Rosa 313).

Varžinskas 27

drove straight to her door, propelled by forty horsepower. “Has anything happened

yet?” he asked, and Diotima had to admit that nothing had. (MwQ 1079-80)

Volume III closes with the same tone, as Leinsdorf adjourns the final meeting of volume with

the words “we’ve decided to continue this evening’s meeting another time” (1130).

As a political and socio-cultural frontier, the Campaign manifests as a parodic

contradiction of deliberate “history-making” that fails to arrive at decided results in a series of

indefinite postponing. Situated on a tipping point of history, the Campaign fails to decide

precisely because of the frenetic standstill caused by order of acceleration – the past is no longer

feasible and effective while the future starts to lose its teleological promise of hope. Leinsdorf,

through his practice of repetitive postponement, abstains from decisive action that would

validate the Parallel Campaign, and eventually, the movement disintegrates.

v. Retrogression of Achronic Love

The accelerated sense of time in Vienna is eventually challenged by a letter to Ulrich in which

he learns that his father has passed away. Taken aback by the sudden news, Ulrich plans out

his return to the hometown to prepare for the funeral and meet his sister Agathe that he has not

seen in years. In conjunction with Ulrich stepping into the realm of youth memories after

returning to the hometown, he enters a different historical time frame that has not yet been

urbanized. The “strange and familiar” (369) streets greet him with peace and calmness

contrasting with the speed and bustle of metropolitan Vienna. Opposite to the city, the nameless

hometown is also is a frame of a different epoch – Ulrich’s home still holds the remnant aura

of upper-middle-class with the long-serving family servant and Biedermeier decorum marking

the sensibilities of the nineteenth century. Like the nameless hometown, Ulrich’s home

becomes a space of stillness and memories – after their meeting, Ulrich and Agathe spend most

of the time reminiscing and talking about their youth in their childhood rooms and hallways.

Enforced by a solemn aura of their father’s death, the house becomes a suspended space of

relived reminiscences.

The “strange and familiar” aura of the home extends to the incestuous romance with his

sister Agathe that is based on the same aporetic principle of simultaneous sameness and

difference. Ulrich immediately recognizes her as a mirror image and her androgynous

semblance of himself. During the time at home, Agathe is presented as spontaneous and lively,

however, disenchanted with reality and longing for nothingness (930). Agathe has an

“unusually exact memory” (925) but fails to make sense out of the past events; moreover, she

Varžinskas 28

carries a poison capsule around her neck, which in Musil’s sketches, she uses in an attempt to

commit suicide. Time for Agathe is virtually suspended as the past for her is not significant,

and the future does not hold any promises either (870). In this fashion, Agathe displays qualities

that are counter to every other character in Vienna – she exemplifies a disinterested approach

to life akin to Kant’s idea of purposiveness without purpose – a lack of motivation to influence

reality, which in Ulrich’s eyes becomes a creative and positive force. Even more than Ulrich,

his sister has no illusions that the world can be improved or that one should take up such a

mission, and this evokes a peculiar and irresistible attraction. For Ulrich, Agathe’s charm lies

in her dismissal of action that in Volume I was displayed in terms of obsession and accelerated

life.

After becoming infatuated with each other, the siblings engage in what could be called

a series of transgressions,32 e.g., Agathe in front of Ulrich puts her garter into the late father’s

coffin while later they start scheming against Agathe’s husband by forging the inheritance

documents in his disfavor. In the novel’s words, the incestuous romance becomes “a protest

against life” (1022), and in its achronic mysticism, it is also a protest against reality and time.

As Musil’s modern consciousness yearns for a halt of time in order to lose the sense of

acceleration, the achronic love in the story becomes the counter-reference to the uncontrollable

“train of time” described at the beginning of Volume I. In this regard, such sensibility of Ulrich

is transformed into the desired state with Agathe – a transcendent form of love defined by an

infinite present.

For the first time in the novel, Ulrich’s love for Agathe prompts an impetus of decision:

“He decided to do all he could for her. He even decided to look for another husband for her.

This need to be kind restored to him, although he barely noticed, the lost thread of his

discourse” (978).33 In this regard, love can be claimed to be the only act of subjective decision

of Ulrich that invokes meaning and a sense of purposeful narrative trajectory. However, even

assuming a function of a goal, their love – bearing the interchangeable labels “The Millenium”

and “Other condition” – does not conform to a temporally causal teleology. The utopia that the

siblings envision is a realm where “love isn’t a stream flowing toward its goal but a state of

32 After falling in love with Agathe, Ulrich ascribes a strong ethical dimension to the transgressive romance.

Keeping in mind that Agathe’s name in Greek (Agathos) means “good”, the introduction of Agathe sets up

morality as a central issue for Volume II. Their love could be called a second instance of Musil’s thematic exposé

where the issue of morality and ethics is approached via acts of transgression – just like Moosbrugger’s aporetic

pathology, Agathe attracts Ulrich in a way that could be surmised as a positioning outside the social order.

33 The “thread of his discourse” is a direct reference to the “thread of narrative life” of Chapter 122 that will be

discussed in the next chapter.

Varžinskas 29

being like the ocean,” a fluid “state of motionlessness and detachment, filled with everlasting,

crystal-clear events” (871). As the time spent with Agathe marks Ulrich’s escape from the

social order, time becomes no longer social as it gains aspects of metaphysical transcendence.

The budding romance seems to be hinging on the notion of abstraction replacing a linear logic.

The incestuous love between Agathe and Ulrich is also achronic due to its retrogressive

nature – during one of the discussions between siblings, Agathe mentions the Platonic myth

about the original human being halved into male and female by gods (980):

“You know that myth Plato tells, following some ancient source, that the gods divided

the original human being into two halves, male and female?” She had propped herself

up on one elbow and unexpectedly blushed, feeling awkward at having asked Ulrich if

he knew so familiar a story; then she resolutely charged ahead: “Now those two pathetic

halves do all kinds of silly things to come together again. […]

“You’d think that siblings might have succeeded halfway already!” Agathe interjected

in a voice that had become husky.

“Twins, possibly.”

“Aren’t we twins?”

“Certainly!”

Thus, falling in love for the siblings becomes an attempt to find each other’s lost halves that

are simultaneously identical yet different. The conjoining informs the transcendent quality of

the timeless Millenium of two twin parts (by them both envisioning themselves as Siamese

twins) amounting to a communal totality:

Well, we’ve already spoken of being twins,” Ulrich responded, getting noiselessly to

his feet, because he thought that she was finally being overwhelmed by fatigue.

“We’d have to be Siamese twins,” Agathe managed to say. (985)

Transgressive love becomes a form of longing for something lost, something that is no longer

reachable in the historical timeline – Musil hints at a transcendent struggle for disinterested

mythologism, an almost primordial state of suspended morality and time outside the social

order. This mystical state of two mirroring individuals reaching a sense of home and belonging

suggests a return to the mother’s womb, a strive for primeval safety that goes against the

merciless march of time. However, it must be noted that incestuous love is a retrogressive act

of degeneracy that negates the prolongation of family and continuity of future-self. In their

Varžinskas 30

romance lies desperation to seek safety outside the order of time and society, but it also implies

a teleological self-negation – thus, the retrogressive impetus of the modern individual opposes

the notion of progressive development.

It hints at a point of origin that still had the sense of a whole being before being halved

into male and female.34 At this point in the narrative, the alternative realm of the romance

evokes a sense of mythical significance as a precursor to the novelistic development - the

retroactive veering towards the antique35 rather than the modern present is also supported by

Musil’s initial plans to name his protagonist “Achilles” as well as the introduction of Agathe

(by herself, etymologically bearing a Greek notion of “goodness”) who introduces the dual

protagonist structure reminiscent of the Greek epic (Erwin 88). Overall, the idea of an eternal

present during which a retrogressive communion is reached becomes Ulrich’s salvation, an

escape from the accelerated social time and its constraints of progress.

Chapter II. Techne of Ateleological Time

Throughout Chapter 1, the analysis focused on the contents of undone time in terms of the

series of temporal crises that the world of Kakania presents: it was discussed how structured

by acceleration and challenged by frenetic standstill, the notions as progress and teleological

vision of historical time in modernity started losing its potency, a state from which the Musilian

subject turns to a transgressive achronic love.

This second chapter of analysis shifts towards the form and focuses on Musil’s narrative

strategies and techniques in his ateleological project. The analysis will demonstrate how

through the destabilization of conventions of narrative time, the novel achieves the sense of

lost temporal orientation, suspends teleological narration, and generates the conceptual level

of narrativity and history. This chapter claims that these thematic and aesthetic issues correlate

directly with the ambivalent temporal structure of The Man Without Qualities – Vienna’s social

and cultural life is portrayed as governed by an increased pace of life, rushing modernity, and

34 Stephen Dowden treats Musil’s eroticism a central theme of the novel that culminates in the desire to reinforce

the “dyonisian sources of myth and the sacred” (38). However, he further writes that such employment of eroticism

is harmonious with the flow of time signifying the act of escape. I hold the position that it is neither – siblings’

love is primarily retrogressive.

35 In this sense, Musil evokes the modernist disregard for the present and very-near past tradition – his interest in

the ancient tropes through the last chapters of Volume II points backward into an unreachable past, a point of

origin, similarly how Pound, Joyce, H.D. eschewed Victorian literary tradition in favor for antique tropes.

Varžinskas 31

technology, but the narrative itself is suspended in a state of a standstill without teleological

development.

i. Narrative and Time of Failed History

Musil’s focus on the notion of time is different from the phenomenological time that prevails

in the stream-of-consciousness modernism, namely championed by Virginia Woolf, James

Joyce, William Faulkner – authors, all of which have primarily explored time as a subjective

and interiorized category. Time for Musil was interesting in its pragmatic nature, namely as the

structuring faculty of teleological thinking in the form of a narrative. The notion of narrative is

usually employed as a stratum of unity, a means of conceptualizing time as an order for action

and development that generates meaning (Lloyd 11). It seems that Musil undoes time by

revising the homogenous notion of progressive/successive time that structures the conventional

Western narrative practices.

In the introduction of the book, the narrative presents a world of rushing speed and

accelerated time. However, as the title of the chapter ironically reflects (“From which,

remarkably enough, nothing develops”), with the introduction of the main actants of the

Parallel Campaign and Ulrich, the novel immediately stalls and sustains that temporal mode

throughout the whole story. The novel is a monument to an uncontrollable speed of progress,

but through its structure, it paradoxically suspends the sense of movement: the narrative

becomes a condensed window of suspended time during a historical tipping point.

Musil’s storytelling holds a quality of an attempt rather than a stable story that should

be taken for granted. It marks an experimentalist effort to present the notion of narrative as a

site of possibilities. Time in this environment becomes unstable, and its property of governing

narratological causality of the events loses its validity. As Musil remarks at the very start of

the novel, “time was on the move, but nobody knew where it was headed. And it was not always

clear what was up or down, what was going forward or backward,” (7) and this modern

temporal disorientation extends into the mechanism of the narrative itself. In other words, loss

of temporal footing in the novel extends beyond the diegetic level of the story – on a macro

level, the disorienting time discourse marks the break with the traditional modes of storytelling

in which time was employed to serve the teleological principle of development. Musil, with his

temporal upsetting, is very conscious of it and does not let this idea slip back into a coherent

story that would suggest causality and resolution.

Varžinskas 32

In other words, Musil’s Kakania is defined by a paradoxical practice of speed and

movement that no longer serves any purpose of development.36 Seinesgleichen geschieht also

describes a stage in history where events are always taking place, but their significance is

unclear and indefinite (Müller-Funk describes Kakania as “a space in terrific and lightning

movement but without any direction” (261)). “The person awakened to awareness of the

current situation has the feeling that the same things are happening to him over and over again,

without there being a light to guide him out of this disorderly circle” (MwQ 1178). Truly, the

narrative proves to be a series of repetitions of failed decisions.

At one instance, Musil reiterates the Hegelian meaning of Geschichte, interrelating

notions of a story and history and equating them in terms of narrativity. “[…] world history

[Weltgeschichte] undoubtedly comes into being like all the other stories [Geschichten]” (MwQ

391). The active notion of the verb geschehen as “happening” is etymologically linked with

the noun Geschichte that denotes both concepts of “history” and “story.” For Musil, both the

historical nature of the novel and the narrative properties of historical conception are

inextricably related. It is difficult to name precisely the “it” of Seinesgleichen geschieht;

nevertheless, “something” happens that operates on the terms of Geschichte, suggesting both

historical and narratological dimensions. On one level, the novel approaches the notion of

history as no longer a stable narrative delineated in the Hegelian teleology; moreover, the

narration with its poetic subversion of realist modes also illuminates fiction practices as

primarily a represented story rather than reality. Taking both options into account, Musil’s

novel places history and story on the plane of literary fictionality, and the elusive

Seinesgleichen geschieht can be formulated as “the like of history-and-a-story now happens.”

It is neither a story in the conventional sense about a hero nor a historical account of a place

and time that would fit a teleological model.

Musil’s project revolving around the ateleological principle deconstructs the

conventionality of the genre of the novel that used to be a form of totality and teleological

closure. From the post-WWI literature perspective, Musil mimics the state of shock and the

sense of failed modernity – the telos of progress turned out to be an epoch of destruction and

alienation rather than upward salvation of humankind. In the same vein, the novel, with its

roots in the realist mode of teleological unfolding, does not fulfill its totality governed by

36 McBridge notes how the narrative is persistent on being “fundamentally static and intimates a timeless condition

rather than a historical development.” (12), while Müller-Funk writes that “Musil’s novel evokes the image of a

restless and purposeless dynamic modernity” (240).

Varžinskas 33

completion principles. In Musil’s eyes, history proves to be parodic, constructed, inessential,

and he fashions out his narrative alongside the shared basis.

ii. Subverting the Novel

Teleological completion was the crux of a classical realist novel in which narrative trajectories

leading to a culmination and resolution have been established as the fundamental narratological

properties. Musil disregards such a model and goes against the very goal of the genre – his

narrative is an active resistance towards completion and finality.37 Within the novelistic

structure, Musil empties out the genre of the novel of its action impetus and exposes the

structures upon which the old-fashioned novel was built, namely the teleological necessity of

narrative and the total sense of reality. The novel for Musil seems to appear to have run out of

steam regarding its capacity to convey the struggle of the modern consciousness understanding

its environment.38 However, he still uses the novel as a formal vessel to question its genre, and

that might be conceptualized as parodic poetics39 as the narrative employs reflective techniques

of reminding the reader about its atypical nature. The title of the second part, “Pseudoreality

prevails,” aptly reflects the strategy of constructing reality supported by the realist conventions,

but in a suspicious, ironic, and, one might argue parodic manner.

To start with, the novel opens with a weather report that is concluded with an ironic

touch: “In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned:

It was a fine day in August 1913” (MwQ 3). The realist novel was concerned with representing

the world in its truthful totality, amounting to a systematic way of rendering reality and life

from various perspectives, including the social, individual, and psychological paradigms. The

nameless couple of the opening chapter also contribute to the subversion of the realist poetics

– after introducing them, the narrator rejects the already established information about their

identities and leaves the reader without any suggestion of who they are. Musil is evidently

poking fun at the “fairly” accurate “old-fashioned” forms of the realist novel that often had

been exalted to the status of scientific significance, study, research (eg. Balzac, whose name

37 Peter Osborne calls The Man Without Qualities “a negative form” of the Bildungsroman (229).

38 Frank Kermode argues that Musil treated “the novel as a form corresponded to a failed myth of reality and so

he sacked it, writing instead essays with a narrative binding” (96).

39 In terms of employing parody to subvert a novelistic narrative, Musil stands alongside Proust and Mann, two

authors that were also working within the old-fashioned forms of the novel in order to reconfigure narrative

techniques in a new light.

Varžinskas 34

eventually became a synonym for the “traditional” novel (Culler 223). If in Père Goriot Balzac

exclaimed that “this drama is neither fiction nor romance! All is true.” (Balzac 8), Musil stands

in the opposite, always reminding that the reader is engaging with an opaque, resistant narrative

of the aporetic times.

In effect, Musil constructs a narrative abiding by the realist conventions but

deconstructs the essence of it - his novel does not fulfill its goal precisely because the story

does not seek completion or teleological resolution. Instead of treating this genre as a truthful

rendition of the historical reality, Musil regards it as an experimental site of possibilities where

the sense of the world becomes skewed, unstable, incomplete. The question of reality for Musil

is defined mostly by the categories of fluidity, irrationality, and mystique as countermeasures

to the governing scientific positivism of modern analysis. The novel, thus, simply cannot

imitate the world in a definite way – Musil’s project is an innovative form built on the model

of the old-fashioned novel to render reality as fleeting and labyrinthic. The open-endedness

and ateleological development of the book suggest a denial to “frame” the world; moreover, it

thematically addresses the modern world’s impossibility to be “framed” as it was in the realist

novel. In the form of the novel, Musil still sees the utility of penetrating reality, even if realism

with its teleology inherited from the Enlightenment now appeared as an insufficient attempt.

In a way, Musil rejects the way reality has been sought after, but not the principal impetus

itself.40

For Musil, the novel - and by proxy poetics in general - ceased to be a transparent

rendition of reflected reality and became “a realm for the imaginative experimentation with

creative alternatives to reality” (McBridge 14). Musil does not negate reality or time as

radically as some other avant-garde and modernist authors, but he presents these aspects in a

refracted way, favoring possibility instead of precise realism: “Whoever has it does not say, for

instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this

or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will

think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise” (11). Instead of representing the world,

Musil presents a self-conscious rendition of the world, “as if” it was real, but not quite.

The novel's formal self-reflexivity also points to the underlying transformative effect

of fiction – literature portrays reality but not only reflects it in a mimetic procedure but

constructs its own version, hence the “pseudoreal” / “like of it” resemblance, somewhere

40 “Art required the fractured and distorting techniques of modernism in order to be adequate to a fractured and

distorting world, or, we might say, to continue to be realistic” (Abel 227-228).

Varžinskas 35

between factual and imaginary. The world's order levels, both the social and the

narratologically sequential, are equally compromised by disintegrating systems of values and

disillusionment with the classical modern ideas such as progress and historical telos. This

introduces the modernist mistrust of mimetic representation in a very conscious way that

structures the novel. Essentially, Musil poses a conundrum – if the old models of society and

the teleological promise of modernity have all failed, how can literary imagination convey the

sense of alienation through narrative forms that rely on the very same principles of linear

teleology? The answer lies in Musil’s use of his essayistic method, which plays an integral part

in the ateleological narrative.

iii. Essayism as an Ateleological Response to Action

Essayism or “essayismus” as a concept is first introduced in Chapter 62 as a core philosophy

of Ulrich in which hypothetical thinking replaces a rigid logic of precision. Musil associates

this precision with such utopic modern notions as purposeful action, career, evolution, and

other teleological models that proceed as “a spiral, which climbs higher with every change of

direction” (MwQ 268). While describing Ulrich, Musil presents him as a figure who opts for

the opposite way of “living hypothetically” - a prerequisite attitude that structures Ulrich’s

essayistic thinking “that in haphazard, paralyzing, disarming way resisted all logical

systematizing” (ibid., 269-273).

Throughout the reading of this chapter, it is easy to forget that Musil is using Ulrich as

a character reference – it rather seems that by “essaysim”, he is actually developing a new

theoretical angle of self-reflection that focuses on ateleological impetus where the lack of aim

is the defining feat of any experience. If one seeks to transfer such an experimentative principle

unto the narrative at hand, essaysim can be defined as Musil’s principal strategy of ateleological

storytelling. It spontaneously incorporates elements of such interconnected discourses like law

or ethics that can suddenly depart from a story being told, but at the same, being the

indispensable dimension of an event. It is “a style of writing blending narrative and discursive

modes” (Hunt 116) where a philosophical reflection becomes a part of the narrative, amounting

to a speculative narration where theoretical and philosophical fields are “incorporated into the

fabric of fiction” (Moretti 30). As a result, the whole narrative becomes full of such essayistic

“pockets” exploring metaphysics, ethics, and theology, but never a linear progression towards

a teleological fulfillment. Musil’s essayistic moments in the narrative seem to freeze the active

development of events before letting action take the narrative charge again.

Varžinskas 36

In the structure of the novel, the essayistic instances already begin with Chapter 4, in

which the narrator leaves the initial exposition of Ulrich and solely discusses the relation

between the notions of reality and possibility. After the chapter ends with an assumption that a

sense of reality is only possible via the possession of personal qualities, Ulrich is brought to

the fore again as a counter-figure – the man without qualities proper. This method – although

not always tidily isolated from other chapters as in Chapter 4 – serves as an experimentative

mapping of meaning. Every scene, every encounter of the characters can be suddenly

interrupted by essayistic inquiries about a theme, ranging from economy to dynamics of sex or

relativism of human psychology. This mode - that at times escalate almost into a research field

- obscures the narrative discourse time and opens spaces to analyze a subject without

constraints of developing action.

Therefore, the essayistic principle, translated as an attempt (from the French essayer)

can never be precise – as the narrator describes, essayism “explores a thing from many sides

without wholly encompassing it - for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and

melts down to a concept” (MwQ 270). Between the events of the plot, the essayistic narrative

presents a series of interwoven attempts that are governed by indefinite speculation that halt

action and development. In such a manner, Musil’s essayism hints at a failure of completion

that is positive – the world remains eternally open-ended for interpretation. The novel

renounces the principle of a stable teleological development as it eschews the chronical

continuum of classical narrative in favor of the composition of shifting nomadic fragments,

each of which never means totality but only alludes (Ulfers 2007) to anything that it tries to

convey. In effect, the essayistic mode of the novel becomes a critical response to the linear

teleology of conventional narratives.

The interchanging modes of narrative sequences and the essayistic “pockets” that are

wedged in-between create a plane of inextricably linked time modes – time of action and time

of thought. This plane is an alternative version of reality, the pseudoreality where action cannot

develop in a tidy sequential manner as it is continuously challenged by the indefinite essayism,

which is not only happening in a “timeless” discourse but itself undoes the chronological

teleology of the narrative on the macro-level of the novel as it constantly intercepts the events.

Varžinskas 37

iv. Temporal Disorientation. Weeks, Seasons, Disruptions

With the introduction of the Parallel Campaign and Ulrich as the main actants and axes around

which the narrative events revolve, the novel somewhat ironically stalls41 and sustains this

temporal structure throughout the whole story: as Chapter I exclaims, “nothing develops” (2).

This way, Musil starts organizing time around suspension rather than what could be

emphatically spoken of as the discourse of development and progress. Actions and events are

either forestalled or allowed to move slightly up to the point where the goal becomes painfully

unattainable and distant. As a result, the whole narrative becomes a meditative explorative site

of different themes but never a linear progression towards a teleological fulfillment. Keeping

in mind the previous discussion on the teleological hope exchanged for uncertainty, Jonathan

Lethem calls Musil’s project a work of “someone who wants to dwell forever in the world he’s

bound to destroy” (Lethem 7). The novel is a monument to a sense of uncontrollable speed of

progress, but through its narrative structure, it paradoxically suspends an understanding of

sequential development via time: the narrative becomes a condensed window of suspended

time as a historical tipping point of modern accumulation just before bursting into destruction.

The fabula of Volume I seems to last about a year from the summer of 1913 until the

spring of 1914, framed by Ulrich’s arrival to the city and his leaving at the very end; however,

the novel actively resists employing clear temporal indications of the narrative discourse,

resulting in an ambiguous kind of time exposition. The narrative often confuses imagery of

contrasting seasonal times, obfuscating a clear indication of the temporal situation – a

seasonless spring day in autumn (276), a sunny day at the beginning of 1914 (615), and the

mild October night in late winter (633). The effect of the ambiguous time is disorientation and

unfixed linearity, suggesting a loss of causal hermeneutic establishment. While working on the

novel, Musil, in his letters, has mentioned this as a deliberate strategy42 to renounce linear time

as the ordering principle, which also complicates the linkage of causality. Complimented by

the essayistic method, such temporal ordering of the narrative serves not as a structuring mode

to support the unfolding of the story but to irritate, if not dissolve, the sense of temporal

progression.

41 Gene Moore claims that the opening chapters serve as an “active beginning” for the narrative to become still

(43).

42 A letter to Bernard Guillemin in 1931: “[...] der erste Band verzichtet auf die Dimension der Zeit, des Ablaufs,

der zeitlichen (und wie ich gleich beifügen will: damit auch der kausalen) Entwicklung. Sie sehen dem

richtigerweise einen Verzicht auf den "Stil der Erzählung" vorangehen. Das Vorher und Nachher ist nicht

zwingend, der Fortschritt nur intellektuell und räumlich” (Musil 1978:496).

Varžinskas 38

Formally, this dissolution can be attributed to the temporal devices that the ateleological

narrative employs in order further to deconstruct the idea of the linearity of time. More than

often, Musil’s story relies on conveying the passing of time mostly with the use of the temporal

unit of a week. Semantically, the German original of “a week” (Woche) is a denomination that

is etymologically linked with the concepts of moving (Weichen) and changing (Wechsel),

acting as a notion of constant morphing rather than a definite narratological device or a

reference point in a gradual and sectional development: “Two weeks later Bonadea had been

his mistress for fourteen days” (26); “But after a few weeks had passed in this fashion, she had

to face the fact that no inspiration whatsoever had come her way” (110); “In the following

weeks Diotima's salon experienced a tremendous upsurge” (201); “At about this time Ulrich

had to report to His Grace two or three times a week” (240); “The good news was that these

committees were making great strides from week to week” (241); “The days rocked along and

turned into weeks. The weeks did not stop moving, either, but formed links in a chain” (484).

The weeks govern the relations inside the narrative, and as the last quote suggests, in

their inner temporal structure, a sense of succession is at work, albeit a fruitless one. The text

of Volume I under such a decentralized weekly regime displays a formal tendency to connect

the events in rather loose, chainlike associations that renders time as merely successive but not

successful in terms of being consequential or meaningful. The events in the novel are structured

around passing weeks that “do not stop moving,” indicating this marker’s resistance to being

situated within a causal and linear progression. As the text exclaims, time via these weeks is

presented as a chain whose pure homogeneity suggests only metonymic relation rather than

clear temporal situatedness. All of the weeks are suspended somewhere between 1913 and 1914

because neither the week before nor the week after frame events in a clear temporal chronology

as the weeks morph into each other. On top of that, the repetition of this temporal marker over

time gains an effect of “diminishing returns” – the linearity of the chronological time flattens

out to an extent where it loses its discursive structuring meaning and reinforces the dissolution

of temporal orientation. According to such a chainlike organization of “weekly” time, the

narrative through this repetition becomes not a developing progression of a semiotic meaning

formation but a horizontal trail of non-active morphing and change.

While discussing the syntax of narrative order, Gérard Genette in Narrative Discourse

briefly conceptualizes a discursive usage of “achrony.” It is a kind of temporal framing

resembling anachrony, but where “no inference from the content can help the analyst define

the status of anachrony deprived of every temporal connection, which is an event we must

ultimately take to be dateless and ageless” (Genette 85). The so far observed modes of temporal

Varžinskas 39

dissolution on the narrative level achieved by the oxymoronic usage of season imagery and the

non-fixed flux of weeks are precisely achronic – Musil deliberately avoids clear temporal

markers to maintain the “dateless” tone throughout the whole novel. The overused temporal

indication of the week as the duration of indefinite morphing accompanied by conflicting

seasons disorients the reader to a point where it is nearly impossible to discern which particular

week of the year or the season an event takes place. This way, Musil’s narrative departs from

historically real causality, and the whole year of 1913-1914 in narrative discourse is suspended

in uncertainty and causal immobility.

In addition to the constant achronic disorientation, Musil often introduces teleological

disruptions in the unfolding events that further undermine principles of causality and consistent

development. For example, in chapter 143 of Volume II, Ulrich sets out to meet Count

Leinsdorf to obtain permission for Clarisse to visit Moosbrugger in the asylum. Having his

increasing reservations about the Parallel Campaign, Ulrich’s motivation for the whole meeting

is strictly Moosbrugger-related. However, from the very start of the conversation, Leinsdorf

turns the topic to the issues of collapsing Empire, consequently praising Ulrich as a spokesman

for the Parallel Campaign and pleading him to continue serving his role. The whole twelve-

page chapter is mostly Leinsdorf’s monologue closing with an outcome that goes against

Ulrich’s motivation for this conversation – Clarisse’s grant for meeting Moosbrugger is left

virtually untouched, and Ulrich falls back into the system that he seeks to depart from. In this

case, Ulrich’s narratological motivation for meeting Leinsdorf is clearly indicated in the

previous chapter; however, this “goal” is wholly neglected and even subverted. The chapter

framed as this particular meeting serves not as the fulfillment of Ulrich’s aim; quite contrary,

it presents an outcome that was not even anticipated while the initial idea is virtually ignored.

This way, Musil’s ateleological narrative presents an evident narratological disruption by

which the story is organized around irregular causality and random outcomes. A similar thing

happens in the chapter where Clarisse, her brother Siegmund, Ulrich, and General Stumm visit

the mental institution with a wish to meet Moosbrugger. Having been escorted by Dr.

Friedenthal, the company observe various wings of demented patients only to be at last second

held off from the final meeting - suddenly, Dr. Friedenthal is called to attend an unnamed

emergency, and Clarisse’s request to meet Moosbrugger is postponed as the chapter closes

without the prospective outcome.

Keeping in mind the Parallel Campaign's frenetic standstill, there is not a single event,

relationship, or interaction in the novel that would reach a point of conclusion or closure.

Walter and Clarisse’s marriage fails, Moosbrugger’s execution is indefinitely postponed,

Varžinskas 40

Arnheim and Diotima’s romantic tension is never resolved, and even the transcendent utopia

of Ulrich and Agathe eventually fails. At best, the few culminating episodes that do get resolved

end up in disappointment, for example, the short-lived romantic relationships of Soliman and

Rachel or Gerda and Ulrich, not to mention the fiasco of the Parallel Campaign. Nevertheless,

most events in the book are letdowns as their culmination is different from expectations, and

the teleological fulfillment is continuously disrupted.

v. The Man Without (Temporal) Qualities

In the previous sections of Chapter I, the analysis accentuated Ulrich’s disbelief in the

progressive notion of history as a principal counterpoint to the teleological tradition of the

Parallel Campaign. However, there is still a need to delineate the main tenets of Ulrich as the

main focalizer, which will enable the conceptualization of his narratological and formal

functions in the ateleological narrative.

As a sort of a post-Hegelian figure, Ulrich holds beliefs that go against the teleological

notion of history; for example, during the valley scene with Diotima, he exclaims: “We can't

say that it [Earth] has evolved toward perfection, nor what its true condition is. And the same

goes for its daughter, mankind” (312). Counter to Diotima and the Parallel Campaign in

general, Ulrich treats the history of humankind as not governed by an ascending teleological

line. This is further emphasized when Ulrich displays his disbelief in the teleological stability

of reality:

The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is

final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete.

He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self,

no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless

transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is

nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. (MwQ 269)

Ulrich‘s emphasis on invisible and ceaseless transformation evokes the Bergsonian notion of

seamless duration, perception of time in terms of qualitative multiplicity rather than

quantitative multiplicity.43 Thus, the problem of time and reality for Ulrich arises in terms of

43 In reference to the homogenous duration of time, Bergson accentuates its perception in terms of continuous

morphing: “[…] Duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and

permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one

another, without any affiliation with number […]” (2001: 122); “The truth is we change without ceasing...there is

Varžinskas 41

narrativity – to experience reality means to divide it into a model of “this has been-this is now-

this will be,” amounting to a clear-cut chronology of sequences, relating to one another,

quantifying time in episodic frames. Ulrich’s perception of time is absent of such clear-cut

linear divisions. If there is no means of bracketing of the experience of the past in an episodic

framing, there is no possibility of a developing, successive (implying both senses of

“productive” and “consequential”) narrative. All Ulrich is left with is the constant flat state of

becoming and changing, never amounting to a particular result that would enable the next

“frame” of the narrative of life to ensue because there is no stable temporal reference point, to

begin with.

Therein reality is rendered as an experiential flux where possibility and ambivalence

reign against stability and coherence. For Ulrich, nothing is ever finished because what has

been in the past has not “congealed” into a fixed image – at every moment of self-reflection,

Ulrich is being narrated as a figure of indefinite becoming acting upon possibilities rather than

teleological precision. If everything is dependent upon relative possibilities without fixing

oneself in a precise idea, the temporal experience must be ateleological and non-linear, open

to endless morphing through which the subject does not realize a goal that would mark a

temporal standing and an endpoint. Ulrich, in this manner, is devoid of qualities because the

individual attributes are acquired temporally in a causal fashion, a principle that Ulrich seems

to be completely detached from:

So without much exaggeration he was able to say of his life that everything in it had

fulfilled itself as if it belonged together more than it belonged to him. B had always

followed A, whether in battle or in love. Therefore he had to suppose that the personal

qualities he had achieved in this way had more to do with one another than with him; that

every one of them, in fact, looked at closely, was no more intimately bound up with him

than with anyone else who also happened to possess them. (MwQ 50)

Not only do the temporally acquired qualities manifest in time, but they also form a chain of

changes that, through a lifetime, gain teleological progression and become meaningful. Rather

than being the one who follows the temporal unfolding of life’s events, he only observes the

sequences without ascribing meaning to them. Here arises the central problem of Ulrich’s

epistemology towards his own life – Ulrich views his life in terms of merely having, but not

owning and, as the quote shows, possessing the “achieved personal qualities.” Thus, the

no essential difference between passing from one state to another and persisting in the same state. […] the

transition is continuous” (1944: 4).

Varžinskas 42

autobiographical time seems to be playing a key role in Musil’s treatment of identity that starts

to disintegrate once its temporal framing is brought into question.

With such a subversive position opposing the hero's figure as a figure of development

of the nineteenth-century literature, Ulrich stands alongside such modernist characters as

Svevo’s Zeno and already prefigures Sartre’s Roquentin or Sarraute’s Martereau in his “refusal

to become a full character” (Culler 270). Under the guise of existential ennui, Ulrich

deliberately puts himself into a state of waiting for nothing to happen, a form of deliberate

boredom that renders the personal time of a protagonist inconsequential. In a subversive way,

Ulrich’s boredom becomes a mode of ethical equilibrium – it is a way of neither agreeing nor

disagreeing with the world but assuming an atemporal position that favors possibility over

precision: as Clarisse thinks to herself, “A man without qualities doesn't say No to life, he says

Not yet! and saves himself for the right moment” (MwQ 483). There is a great irony in

Clarisse’s words – the right moment will never arrive44, there cannot be a moment of epiphanic

resolution that would establish a teleological structure of experiences as Ulrich is in a perpetual

state of disruptive waiting:

Perhaps one could say on his behalf that at a certain age life begins to run away with incredible

speed. But the day when one must begin to live out one's final will, before leaving the rest

behind, lies far ahead and cannot be postponed. This had become menacingly clear to him now

that almost six months had gone by and nothing had changed. He was waiting: all the time, he

was letting himself be pushed this way and that in the insignificant and silly activity he had

taken on, talking, gladly talking too much, living with the desperate tenacity of a fisherman

casting his nets into an empty river, while he was doing nothing that had anything to do with

the person he after all signified; deliberately doing nothing: he was waiting. (MwQ 276)

The mode of “living hypothetically” (269) that combines indefinite morphing and waiting

implies an instability against fixed identity and the loss of the disinterested self. Waiting as a

self-imposed form of non-teleological ennui of the present becomes a modus operandi

experiencing the metonymic chain of loose events in which Ulrich unfolds not as a driving

agent but as a “collection of possibilities detached from action” (Spencer 7). This parallels the

macro level of the novel - the suspension of happening contributes to the undoing of time and

does not seek for the narrative to be valid as it does not strive for the ultimate truth.

44 The “not yet” prevails and extends beyond Ulrich – the Parallel Campaign and Leinsdorf are equally in the

position of “not yet” by the practice of postponing.

Varžinskas 43

Ulrich, the figure that bears the title of “a man without qualities,” showcases a modern

consciousness that undergoes a crisis and disintegration of stable identity.45 Amongst other

solipsistic modernist protagonists such as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Eliot’s Prufrock, or

Svevo’s Zeno, Ulrich exhibits the timely features of alienation, fragmentation, and hollowness.

However, Ulrich’s nature of being “a man without qualities” extends beyond the diegetic level

of being a person without clear aims, ambitions, or goals. Instead, it is a formal and structural

absence – within the frame of the narrative, Ulrich is the man who lacks the temporal qualities

of narratological fulfillment. By choosing to designate Ulrich as his protagonist, Musil

deliberately creates for himself a problem that questions the very nature of Ricoeurian life

narration – how can the novel tell a story about a person who sheds off all quintessential

narrative features that would drive the story forward? By shedding his ambitions of seeking

individual totality in a precise form, Ulrich is a satirical form of the classical protagonist, a

character who, by losing his social identity, disregards his narrative identity too.

The novel starts with an ironic position of the main protagonist – Ulrich has just come

back to Vienna from abroad after numerous attempts of establishing himself as a man of

profession. In other words, Ulrich is introduced through the lenses of an already “failed

Bildung” (Erwin 84). Ulrich immediately does not conform to the grammar of a hero as he is

already past his journey that has failed. An opposing view could state that it is only a

consequential section of a trial on a macro level of his self-becoming. However, the sobriquet

“the man without qualities” given by Walter and Ulrich’s own deliberate choice to take a

“year’s leave of absence from life” introduce a structural dimension – Ulrich is not only a

disillusioned person, but he is a modernist character that discards the central notion of quest

and its teleological drive. The observable progress of an identifiable hero developing in the

Bildungsroman and Entwicklungsroman is no longer the working principle for Musil, and this

immediately undermines the confines of teleological closure and totality. Let us take a look at

a scene where Ulrich reflects on his biographical narrative qualities as a subject:

It struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic

law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple

order that enables one to say: "First this happened and then that happened .... " It is the simple

sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented in a

unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space

45 Müller-Funk notes that Musil’s critique of modernity already foresees the post-structuralist notion of identity

as a “complex, fragmented and doubled phenomenon” (8).

Varžinskas 44

and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it

seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say "when," "before," and "after"!

Terrible things may have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he can

tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as contented as if the sun were warming

his belly. […] [Most people] love the orderly sequence of facts because it has the look of

necessities, and the impression that their life has a “course” is somehow their refuge from

chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to

which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be

narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven

surface. (MwQ 709)

Identity here is problematic in its narratological and temporal structure – an individual

perceives themselves as a figure that has undergone a series of life sequences based on causality

and temporal ordering. The fundamental loss of such structural unity46 concerns the modern

inability to keep relying on traditional narrative forms (fictional, personal, historical) as tidy,

sequential, progressive order of passing. Ulrich is also a character who is “doubtless a believing

person who just didn’t believe in anything” (897). Hence Ulrich is not simply an existential

nihilist of modern negation – he still employs belief and struggles for meaning, but his horizon

is empty of any reference points that could be regarded as legitimate values or properties to

rely on. In effect, Ulrich is unable to fit such “discontinuous life experiences into the shape of

traditional storytelling” (Evers 314), longs for the lost narrative order, and displays “a

melancholic desire for simpler forms of life” (Goodstein 345), the lost thread of life governed

by simplicity and unobtrusive temporal causality.

The narrative crisis that Ulrich is experiencing is thus an identity crisis – losing the

narrative thread of life implies losing temporal causality of the past self that constitutes the

classical idea of a subject. Here Ulrich’s reasoning evokes a treatment of identity as a narrative

project in which temporal perspective plays the critical role. If there is no biographical history,

there can be no stable self. For Ulrich, there is no teleological endpoint to either historical or

personal time, and the whole linear model built on the idea of progress loses its potency.

In a self-reflexive manner longing for a simple linear narrative, ''the man without

qualities" parts with the literary practices of the nineteenth-century novel and the idea of

teleological unfolding and narrative progress. Ulrich realizes that he is past the way of

46 “The whole person has been flung into uncertainty. Discussions are of no use to him, he needs the solidity that

has been lost. Hence the desire for resolution, for ‘yes’ and ‘no’” (MwQ 1162).

Varžinskas 45

perceiving reality in a progressing series of life and must abandon that sensibility. At the same

time, it marks the novel itself as a new form of storytelling, parting ways with the fundamental

conventions of the nineteenth-century novel.

vi. The War as a Protracted Telos

So far, the analysis helped to conceptualize Musil’s employment of time as a central theme of

ateleological historicism as well as a problem of poetics that subverts the conventional

underpinnings of the novel genre. In both cases, it can be observed that the crux of teleological

fulfillment as an axiom cannot be pinpointed in the stage of late modernity due to the undone

structures of the classical notion of time. As much as one can invest themselves into Musil’s

ateleological system, a question persists – after all, was there a goal of any sort?

Keeping in mind the unfinished status of the novel, speculation arises whether Musil

really believed in the idea of the finished form of the narrative. As ultimate proof of Ulrich’s

negative assertions towards reality and completion, it seems that an authorial decision to

finalize the work would have implied a disastrous sentence on a project that was inherently

built on the concept of perpetual possibility and becoming, resisting a complete shape.47 The

open-ended text robs the reader of a culminating event, a convergence point that would be the

final actant of fulfillment and resolution in a narratological sense.

The repetitious and non-developing narrative is supported by the absence of clear

temporal markers and evokes a lethargic, slow flow of time. Through the reading experience,

there are no suggested trajectories for any plotline except the impending sense of the war, an

event omitted in the story. As Robert Hampson notes, the citizens of Kakania “do not know, as

we do and Musil does […] that the Austrian empire is going to be swept away by war” (151).

There is a sense of anticipation during the reading experience, but that is all that the narrative

offers. In other words, there is no way of reading the novel without being reminded of what

will happen in the approaching summer of 1914, a historical brake that eventually happens.

The narrative is structured around that knowledge, and the suspense builds because the reader

knows what happened historically. In this light, the endpoint of the war can be treated as a kind

of latent and paratextual information that lies at the margins of the narrative - the ateleological

suspension of fulfillment pervades throughout the novel culminating in the moments before the

outbreak of the First World War. Saint-Amour aptly calls this suspension a “nearly infinite

47 Man Without Qualities holds the same quality that Malcolm Bradbury and John Fletcher use to define Proust’s

Remembrance of Things Past – the narrative can never be complete because incompleteness is its real form (404).

Varžinskas 46

protraction of the war’s foretime” (267), a quality of ateleological narrative in which the notion

of war lingers but is not actually realized.

Returning to our initial question of this chapter, war, with its paratextual suggestion in

the story, can be conceptualized as a temporally protracted telos, an ultimate event that marks

the disintegration of the project of modernity. Framing this paratextual protracted telos, Musil’s

temporal indefiniteness is a negation of teleological unfolding, but it is also a desperate stand

against the outbreak of the destructive turning point of 1914 – the novel undoes the idea of time

by stripping off its teleological qualities and enriching it with an indefinite duration that refuses

to deliver a final climactic point. Hence, both the war and the final closing sentence from Musil

remain suspended on the horizon. Complimenting this view, Burton Pike agrees that “the

hovering, implied outbreak of the war must always remain for this novel an unrealized future

action. It provides a framework for the novel, but its arrival would not provide a conclusion”

(367). Thus, indefiniteness becomes a positive aspect that protracts the catastrophe into an

unattainable future.

Epilogue. Towards the Metanarrative Critique

In 1923, T.S Eliot wrote about James Joyce’s employment of mythical structure for the

beginning of the twentieth century as a “way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and

significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”

(483). Similar things could be said about Musil’s ateleological narrative – via the self-reflexive

structure, The Man Without Qualities is a grandiose attempt to order the times of disorder, a

conscious attempt to resist the teleological nature of the nineteenth-century novel and the

notion of progressive history. The contents of Musil’s non-eventful story illuminate the

exhausted state of the accelerated modernity in which decisions fail, and the historical utopias

are losing their potency as they are sought to be replaced by the rebellious retrogression in the

face of the impending war. At the same time, the formal execution follows suit by structuring

the events around the principles of suspension, disorientation, and numerous subversion of the

teleological expectations of the novelistic genre, including protraction and essayistic

digressions. These shared Topos and Techne levels both contribute to the overall ateleological

suspension and “undoing” of discourse time, and the mistrust in teleological history reflected

in the novel prefigures one of the central postmodern tenets – the fall of metanarratives. As

Musil‘s pre-War world is losing its agency and hope in the great Hegelian story of progress, so

does the structure of the immense text itself. There is no discernible direction or goal neither

Varžinskas 47

for the novel (due to the “undone” time) nor the historical standpoint of 1913. As discussed in

the analysis, the modern treatment of history and the idea of a literary story operate on the same

teleological principles; however, Musil subverts the intrinsic Hegelian element in this equation

and jeopardizes both the idea of history and the idea of a fulfilling story.

Governed by the various techniques of stalling and suspension, the novel formally

rejects its function as the traditional mode of narrating modernity - it is both a political and

aesthetical statement against its own genre conditions. The extensive metanarrative of

modernity about progressivism of modern Europe becomes unstable via the unfixed teleology

of the novel, and Musil manages to expose this turning point of structural upsetting decades

before Lyotard’s48 seminal work Postmodern Condition. Lyotard’s conceptualization of

postmodernity is primarily rooted in the notion of narrative knowledge that has propelled the

progressive mechanism of modernity and legitimized reality through positivist knowledge. By

defining the postmodern as “incredulity towards metanarratives,” Lyotard proclaims that the

narrative function of history “is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great

voyages, its great goal” (xxiv). In this regard, Musil stands out amongst other modernists as for

him, the notion of a great narrative was more than a thematic issue and more than a stylistic

problem. With his ateleological narrative, he exposed the temporal structures that are

inseparable from conventional storytelling and historical imagination. In an encompassing

way, The Man Without Qualities is a project of subverted poetics of modernity.

To view Musil’s project in the light of metanarrative criticism does not mean merely

rendering him a postmodernist. Instead, the suspicion towards teleological grand narratives of

history elucidates The Man Without Qualities as a monument for the eclipse of modernity

where a subject like Ulrich is at odds with the accelerated sense of reality and time. The effects

of temporal nausea, disorientation, anxiety, and the subsequent dissolution of teleological

narrativity contribute to the vague principle of pseudoreality, but they also contribute to the

creative mode of the possibilist Möglichkeitssinn and the essayistic hope of modernist

experimentation.

With the employment of ateleological poetics in the forms of such temporal disruptions

as suspension of action, repetitions, and relative orders of time, Musil attacks the stability of

time and history. In other words, showing the chaotic nature of time enables one to effectively

address the narrative of teleological historical imagination that has been held axiomatic

48 Alongside Lyotard, Musil’s ideas regarding parallelism between fictional narrative and historiography can be

traced in Hayden White’s seminal work Metahistory (1973) in which he utilizes literary structural criticism to

highlight how historical imagination relies on narrative explanatory systems.

Varžinskas 48

between the dawn of modernity and the beginning of the twentieth century. The ateleological

sense of aimlessness in the modern world suggests that to be modern for Musil means to be

obsessively conscious of the present but also to be oblivious to the fact that the future – counter

to its teleological historical-narrative practices - may not turn out being as redeeming in the

utopic sense as was once believed. Musil’s response to this conundrum is as aporetic as one

could imagine – an unfinished novel of ideas where the indefinite essayistic method interrelates

and disrupts the teleological time of action revolving around an outsider protagonist who

disregards his linchpin function in the narratological fulfillment. It is a work that showcases

the modern condition of disillusionment by poetically and aesthetically enacting the failure of

storytelling. It is a stance against the reality that has been narrated in terms of progress.

Georg Lukács criticized Musil’s novel for its ateleological qualities, its lack of direction

and definition, “rejection of reality, containing no concrete criticism” (1996: 150). For Lukács

as a neo-Hegelian Marxist, the novel was lacking potential in being “destined to lead nowhere,

an escape into nothingness” (ibid.), a project, like many from other modernists, too removed

from the material domain of the world that does not culminate in a coherent ideological

statement. Musil must be defended here, even more so, Lukács’ criticism can be subverted and

seen as a positive and productive insight – truly enough, the novel is a rejection of reality, but

in the sense that it constructs his own plane of sociohistorical critique. The concrete criticism

lies in the overlapping of the content and form domains, which collectively create a chance to

go against the historical rush of time. While sustaining the essayistic principle, the novel rejects

reality in an attempt to give a voice to modern consciousness, which is disillusioned with the

accelerated forms of imagination. Thus, The Man Without Qualities disregards reality, but he

does it in terms of its narrative jurisdiction that has been based on the teleological models,

foregrounding the notions of time and narrative as dialectical. As much as every present

moment can be unpredictable, aimless, and chaotic, they hold the capacity for possibility, play,

entry into a fictional realm of imagination towards experimentation. The open-ended nature of

the novel, after all, points to a future for which The Man Without Qualities could be held as an

attempt – as a project of creative destruction directed against the Hegelian models of positivist

imagination, it suggests a potential synthesis of fiction and inductive scientific thinking based

on an experimentative and nomadic search for new forms that run counter to the malaise of late

modernity, its fragmental compartmentalization of experiences and obsession with linear

teleology of development.

Varžinskas 49

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