Getting Underway; or, our first glimpse of 'the Utopia of Essayism'

The Musil class officially begins on Tuesday, October 1

A cartoon of the scene in the Großer Saal of the Musikverein in Vienna on March 31, 1913. Arnold Schoenberg conducted a program of new music (Webern, Berg, Zemlinsky, his own Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9) so shocking to listeners that it set off a riot. From Die Zeit, April 6, 1913.

Dear Subscribers,

There are just about 40 of us (and counting!) as we prepare to set out on the first volume of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities—the author’s grand unfinished paean to “the Utopia of Essayism,” or that fugitive, highly rarified state of Knowledge (“erkenntnis” in German) that Robert Musil spent his adult life trying—and failing—to achieve in language.

This is going to be a brief “welcome” message to orient you to this Substack course on Robert Musil. If you’re here, wherever “here” is, you’ve been in touch with me already about the class, and you’ve received the first five posts, dating back to September 11th (“Sabbatical from Life”).

What is “essayism,” exactly, and how does it relate to our reading of Musil’s novel? We’re going to be spending a fair amount of time discussing the essay (the word in English comes from the word in Middle French “essai,” or “attempt”) and just what narrative qualities or tendencies make a work of narrative fiction “essayistic.”

Here is how Ulrich, the protagonist of Musil’s novel, defines “essayism” as a way of life in chapter 62:

It was more or less in the way an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, 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—that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life.

A little later on, Ulrich muses on the wholly new, beguiling moral possibilities that living in a state of “essayism” would allow:

To recognize [this new possibility] is to see the moral norm no longer as a set of rigid commandments but rather as a mobile equilibrium that at every moment requires continual efforts at renewal. (italics mine: by this definition, characters in the novel who walk the tightrope of Essayism, like the sex murderer Moosbrugger, have a special authority. It is something like what Emerson called “an original relation to the Universe.”)

Essayism is the term that Musil uses—or rather, a translation of the term in German that he uses—to describe the novel’s fundamental narrative strategy, its machinery and its geist (or spirit). For much of the novel’s opening chapters, Musil takes pains to establish his protagonist’s peculiar condition: one brought on my life in the Modern metropolis, with all of its contingencies. And a metropolis that happens to be Vienna in 1913, on the eve of its sudden reduction in status from the capital city of a global, multinational power to the dusty, shabby capital of a lesser Germany. Vienna in 1913 might as well be Atlantis.

The novel’s form is made to measure for Ulrich’s triathlon of high-minded indecision, and his pursuit of a formula for living in a world so known and measured that even to cross a busy street in a city like Vienna can “dwarf the energy needed by Atlas to hold up the world.”

Here is a succinct definition of Musil’s “essayism” from a terrific essay on Musil by scholar Thomas Harrison in Republics of Letters:

What calls for an essayistic novel is nothing less than the effort of human beings to understand their place in the circumambient world and what behavior is best suited to it. This challenge resounds already very loudly in Musil’s first book, The Confusions of Young Törless (Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless, 1906). Twenty years later, in The Man without Qualities, it becomes altogether clear to its author no less than to its protagonist Ulrich that ultimately “there was only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live” (MWQ, 275).

In the years that separated the two novels the Great War had changed the terms of the inquest, appearing even to render all answers futile. Basic certainties about Western society, convictions of right and wrong, the status of the human subject, and belief in freedom, rationality, and the credibility of the intellect seemed suddenly to be as precarious as the great Austro-Hungarian Empire that had imploded overnight in 1918.

And here is the kicker:

The Man without Qualities was an essay on all of this, not just on the great question of right living that the war had made so complex. It required a long cast of characters, a careful exposition of an intricate cultural landscape, and an immense breadth of flexible mental reflection marshaled together to “assay”—to test, to try, and to critique—the principles on which such a culture was based, as well as other principles that might hold up better in the future.