Now fall is coming, I’m reading more, while the leaves turn golden outside and begin to pile up on the pavements of the West End. Days are shorter than nights, now that we’ve passed the equinox, and the sun sets before seven in the evening. On overcast days, there’s that blue-grey quality to the light that seems unique to the Pacific Northwest, shown in the photograph above. If I read more, I do find I read more slowly nowadays, and, unless I’m careful, less attentively. I retain less, too, so that sometimes I struggle to recall details of a novel I read only a year or two ago. A friend who’s older than me and now has impaired vision confesses to me that for him reading a novel now is like climbing a mountain. He takes it in small sections of twenty pages or so, before his eyes tire. The achievement of continuing reading, of slowly climbing up through the landscape of the book, is almost more important to than the content.
I’m not quite at that stage yet, but I also do have mountains of novels to climb. There are a number of texts that, as someone who spent a lifetime reading and professing literature, I always felt I should have read, and yet I’ve never completed. Two of these are James Joyce’s Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In each case, I’ve started the novels repeatedly over the years, and then broken off, because for me their richness somehow conflicts with the onward pressure of the narrative. I become caught up in words with Joyce, or memory with Proust, and find myself unable to move forward. This month, though, I’ve as some success with another monumental novel that I’ve encountered yet avoided reading over the years, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As I write this, I’m still only half way to the peak, six hundred pages into a thousand-page book. Yet I’ve travelled far enough to know that I now will make it through to the end of the novel, making myself move forward at a slower pace than usual, and take in the environment on the way.
Musil’s novel, if we can call it that, is set in 1913 and 1814, in the country of Kakania, in a thinly-disguised Vienna during what we readers know, and yet its protagonists blithely do not realise, are the last days of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Musil began the novel in 1921, after the cataclysm of the First World War and the disintegration of the Empire into new nation-states. He was still working on it when he died in exile in Switzerland during the Second World War, over twenty years later. In terms of plot, at least in the substantial section of the novel I’ve read, nothing too much happens. We are introduced to a cast of characters. At the centre is Ulrich, in his thirties, the eponymous man without qualities, a cavalry officer become engineer become mathematician, an emotional and cognitive flaneur who moves artfully between successive – and indeed often simultaneous – intellectual and sexual liaisons. Ulrich, almost by accident, becomes involved in the Parallel Campaign, a project initiated to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Emperor Franz Jozef and thus outshine the thirty-year jubilee of the German Kaiser. Other characters circulate in this cultural whirlpool: at the centre is his cousin Diotama, who attempts to coordinate and shape the Campaign, and the Prussian “man of stature” Arnheim, with whom she contemplates embarking on an extramarital affair. Further on the periphery are Ulrich’s spurned lover Bonadea, and his friends Clarisse and Walter. From here the circle widens to include other family and acquaintances, members of Kakanian intellectual, political and artistic elite who attend Diotama’s salons, trying and failing to manufacture essence of Austrian identity, and also to figures such as the mass-murderer Moosbrugger and Rachel, Diotama’s Jewish maid.
The novel proceeds episodically in small vignettes or fragments of anything from two to ten pages. While there’s always the hope that the deliberations of the Parallel Campaign will reach a conclusion, the longer the narrative carries on, the less likely this seems. There’s also some interest in Ulrich’s affairs of the heart – or more accurately, perhaps, the loins – and how they will turn out. But I think the real attraction of the book to me is the way in which it superimposes embodiment and cognition, without prioritizing either. It’s unclear whether the mind and the intellectual pursuits in which Ulrich and others direct the body, or whether the drives of the body and its desires are simply rationalized by the mind. We see very few of the characters from the outside, but we are given a very intense access to both their thoughts and their sensations of embodiment, often at at the same time. And what keeps me reading, above all, despite the callous self-absorption of the main character, is Musil’s wonderfully inventive and often ironic use of metaphor.
Here’s an example, from Ulrich’s contemplation of history:
The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard 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. The present is always like the last house of a town, which somehow no longer counts as a house in town.
In the last week I’ve facilitated an online writing group in which we’ve looked at metaphorical language, and the way in which it carries meaning from what we know to something we do not. What I find curious about Musil’s metaphors is that they are often mixed, and represent thought-in-action, a trying on of vehicles until one fits the tenor. Here we start with a reasonably obvious negative comparison. History isn’t like billiards, not only in terms of travelling in straight lines, but also in terms of cause and effect, where one ball, if hit at just the right angle, can be made to clip another, and send it on its way to a pocket. When searching for a positive comparison, Ulrich first tries out the movement of clouds before discarding the image, exploring the richer metaphor of someone moving speedily through a city, and finding that encounters lead them astray, or “off course.” This is still fairly straightforward. However, the extension of the vehicle in the last line is more ambiguous: I’d take it to mean that while the present is the result of a historical journey we often don’t see it as such, but perceive it as detached from the historical process: at the same time the future, beyond the town that we have travelled through, is unknowable.
In reading of, course, we don’t pause to decode metaphors fully, and so their affective and connotative elements stay with the reader, not quite resolved, as they move on. I’m also not sure whether The Man Without Qualities is a success or a failure. At times it’s characters disquisitions and discussions seem caught in a hall of mirrors of infinite irony. But in reading for me there is an uncanny doubling of time and space that I experience more often now. I read in Vancouver of Vienna a century ago, the Vienna that we also traced on our visits to sites such as Freud’s house in the city earlier this year. And yet also, with the leaves falling, and news of Palestine, and Ukraine, and the US elections trickling into my life even while at some level I’d like to shut it all out, there’s a sense of how contemporary Musil’s novel is. At times it seems that we are also caught up, as Ulrich and his companions in the Parallel Campaign are, in a whirlpool of solipsistic thought that sucks us all in, so that we no longer wander through the city and encounter shadows, crowds, or new architectural outcrops that suggest alternative ways of being. But then to walk off in the city, rather than to enter the salon, is a lonely business: we can observe, but cannot really influence, the future that is unfolding. What exists in the darkness beyond the light of the last house in town?