#Musil2020: Book Twitter Reads The Man without Qualities

PHOTO STOLEN FROM PAPER PILL's (@reemk10 's) TWITTER's CALL TO READING, "LET'S DO THIS!"

What would Musil have thought of Twitter? A vast network driven by algorithmic connections and allusions, necessarily swift in its aphoristic pronouncements, trivialized by "trends" and "influencers," advertisements, and shallow, superficial alliances? Another encyclopedic, infinite, non-linear realm in which what is important gets lost? Or?

In any case, so-called "Book Twitter," an extremely sophisticated and charming corner of this otherwise often unwieldly and unfriendly interwebverse, in response to the cheerleading of a reader whose handle is Paper Pills (@reemk10), initiated a group reading of The Man without Qualities. It began on January 1st, and participants are reading approximately 23 pages a day, intending to finish the approximately 1700 pages of the Knopf edition (translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike) by March, at which point yours truly will be interviewed on the Feeling Bookish podcast. Comments, discussions, and quotations can be found under the hashtag #Musil2020. 

At first I did not know if I would participate. Did I really want to stop all my other reading to re-read this enormous book that I imagined I already knew so well? But once I picked it up, I found it so utterly engaging and brilliant, and found it so easy to read a mere 23 pages per day, that I am happy to take part in this joyous collaborative venture!

Having to keep one's comments to small bits is challenging, but maybe in a good way. Here are some of my comments, by day, with twitter-sized bits combined for easier reading: 

DAY 1: 

1st 25 pages #Musil2020: Different discourse vocabularies for looking at world (science, anthropology, literature, technology, etc.), undermine accepted simplistic view. Note patterns, systems and deviations from patterns, i.e., accident as something that has broken rank. Ulrich's absurd attempt to clock/measure forces & counterforces. Uncertainty/ different possible versions (they might have been Tuzzi & Arnheim, but...). Possibility sense as subjunctive case, but always linked to reality. Most of all, on the sentence and paragraph structure, the constant complexification. Something is described, then qualified, then twisted again, into further complexification. Nothing is simple; everything is ambiguous . Despite ambivalence, the forces, desires, tensions, dynamics are exciting and fascinating. Ulrich is struggling, and we struggle with him, to find the possibilities inherent in the new realities of modern world.

Note also: Ulrich' s vision of Leona compared to Swann' s of Odette in Proust: beauty amplified by fitting a face into an already pictured pattern or archetype. The ever present tension between pattern and deviation from pattern!

Choices, existentialisism, exemplified in Ulrich's problem of decorating his house...modern world without god, fixed center, shared morals leaves one paralyzed...or open...remember: being without qualities can be positive too...can mean openness, non attachment to preconceptions or dogma...possibly based on Meister Eckhart' s phrase. ..denoting singleness, non attachment...

DAY 2:

Returning to yesterday' s premonitions on recurring patterns\deviations (#Musil2020 ): "Ultimately a thing exists only by virtue of its boundaries, wh means by a more or less hostile act against its surroundings: without the Pope there wld be no Luther, and without Pagans no Pope, so there is no getting away from the fact that man's deepest social instinct is his antisocial instinct". And: "Mankind produces Bibles and guns, tuberculosis and tuberculin. It is Democratic, with kings and nobles; builds churches and, against the churches, universities; turns cloisters into barracks, but assigns field chaplains to the barracks. It naturally arms hoodlums with lead-filled rubber truncheons to beat a fellow man within an inch of his life, and then provides featherbeds for the lonely, mistreated body....". Lest one read this as resigned nihilism, note that Ulrich "hated this mixture of resignation and infatuation in regard to life...." and felt that one must "find the cause of this, the secret mechanism behind it! How incomparably more important that wld be than merely being a good person in accordance with obsolescent moral principles...". A premonition of the protagonist's motivation.

DAY 3: Musil called himself "Monsieur le vivisecteur," but he was also constantly seeing likenesses, commonalities, sometimes between things, persons, ideas we like to keep separate, scandalizing our pretensions to moral difference, by suggesting that "if mankind could dream as a whole, that dream would be Moosbrugger," the misogynist murderer. As we read on, we will see that all sorts of characters, presented as foolish or otherwise reprehensible (anti-semites, absurd mystical demagogues, industrialists, bad poets) will say things that could have come from the mouth of our hyper-intelligent anti-hero Ulrich. This lack of fixed qualities does not signal a state of nihilist relativity of values, but a radical openness in search of comprehensive principles upon which to base an ethical-aesthetic life.