Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is an unfinished novel written in Vienna between the wars. Opening in the summer of 1913, it depicts the Habsburg Empire and the long, liberal nineteenth century on the eve of their collapse. Like many modernist writers, Musil prioritizes the inner world over the outer, and most of the novel is dedicated to searching intellectual and psychological analyses of its characters and their world. Consistently with this, the city figures in some respects as an idea or a state of mind more than a geographically specific place. In other respects, however, the novel arises from a historical and cultural moment specific to Vienna. In using this moment as a launch pad for his philosophical explorations of modernity, Musil, somewhat ironically, contributes to situating the Austrian capital towards the center not just of the European map but of the European twentieth century.

This entry first discusses The Man Without Qualities through the idea of essayism – a coinage of Musil’s that is fundamental both to the novel’s form and content. It then proceeds to explore the ways in which the intellectual abstraction of the novel contributes to a similarly abstract vision of Vienna as a city without qualities. Finally, the piece suggests some ways in which even this abstraction, along with other features of the novel, can be seen as arising from the concrete situation of the Habsburg Empire and its capital.