In The Man without Qualities, Musil satirizes not only journalists (as I highlighted in my previous post), but writers and intellectuals of all types. He says about the “Great Author,” for instance:
The most indispensable condition for being a Great Author is always that one has to write books or plays that will do equally well for high and low. To effect the desired good, one must be an effective writer to begin with; this is the basic principle of every Great Author’s life. It is a strange and wonderful principle too, a fine antidote to the temptations of solitude, Goethe’s very own principle of effective action: if you will just get things done in a good world, everything else will fall into place. For once a writer has made his effect, his life undergoes a remarkable sea change. His publisher stops saying that a businessman who goes into publishing is a sort of tragic idealist because he could do so much better for himself by dealing in textiles or unspoiled paper.
Furthermore, he sarcastically observes:
Meaning no offence, but dogs prefer a busy street corner to a lonely cliff for their calls of nature, so why should human beings who feel the higher urge to leave their names behind choose a cliff that is obviously unfrequented? Before he knows it, the Great Author ceases to be a separate entity and has become a symbiosis, a collective national product in the most delicate sense of the term, and enjoys the most gratifying assurance life can offer that his prosperity is most intimately bound up with that of countless others.
And as far as the critic is concerned Musil has this to say:
The critics discover him [the Great Author] as a worthy subject for their labors, because critics are often not really bad people at heart but former poets who, because times are bad, have to pin their hearts to something that will inspire them to speak out; they are war poets or love poets, depending on the nature of the inward gleanings for which they must find a market, so their preference for the work of the Great Author rather than just any author is quite understandable.
Even librarians are not exempt from being the targets of his wit. The librarian that appears in the novel has this to say about his profession: “The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the titles and tables of contents, ‘Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian,’ he explained. ‘He’s bound to lose perspective.'”
I spent several hours last night reading Musil’s Diaries, 1899-1941, in the hopes that they would shed some light on his feelings about his craft and his fellow writers and I was not disappointed. Musil’s entries throughout these years are filled with comments about his process and how serious and meticulous he was with his writing. It is important to him that his characters be drawn from real life and his own experiences and he spends countless hours composing sketches of his characters. In an entry from 1911 he writes, “In Torless, the unifying momentum comes from the desire to narrate a particular story that has been thought out in advance. That is the backbone around which all other things—my interpretation and conception of the story—are grouped.”
There are many remarks and comments about authors he admires—Nietzsche, Emerson, and, not surprisingly, Tolstoy. In my first post about Musil I felt that The Man without Qualities was similar in style of narrative to War and Peace. Musil says about reading Anna Karenina:
The way that Tolstoy removes the cozy “family magazine” quality from those fortunate average people—KatJa, Lewin, Oblonsy—is almost a trick, but it’s overwhelming nonetheless. He does so by not glossing over slightly ridiculous, or evil, minor impulses—for example, when Oblonsky is moved to tears when he comes from Karenin and feels glad about the good turn that he is trying to perform, but, at the same time, is glad about a joke that he is working on: what is the difference between me, acting as a peacemaker, and a commander in the field, or something of the kind. In all cases he sees his people as a mixture of good and evil or the ridiculous.
Musil also doesn’t hesitate to record notes about authors for whom he had no professional respect. Hermann Broch, Franz Werfel and Thomas Mann are among those he despises. He says about Thomas Mann: “Thomas Mann and similar authors write for the people who are there; I write for people who aren’t there!” This brings to mind Musil’s satire about the Great Author, the critic and the publisher who pander to what’s popular among the mob for the sake of glory or cash.
Philip Payne, the translator of Musil’s Diaries, points out that a leading Germanist at the time conducted a survey of noteworthy, contemporary authors and Musil himself was not among those named. For an intellectual man who studied not only literature and the humanities, but science and the social sciences this was a great snub. It also helps us to understand, a least a little bit, his sarcasm for contemporary writers. Put in Homeric terms, they failed to honor the Best of the Achaeans. I don’t blame him for being upset.
This psychological thriller starts innocently enough with a kind old woman offering to split a cake with a young woman she meets outside of a bakery in Vienna. But Stift’s novella becomes gruesome, disturbing and haunting very quickly.
Linda Stift in an Austrian writer. She was born in 1969 and studied Philosophy and German literature. She lives in Vienna. Her first novel, Kingpeng, was published in 2005. She has won numerous awards and was nominated for the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2009.
thebookbindersdaughter.com 