To commemorate the 80th anniversary of Robert Musil's death on April 15, 2022 we will read the Man Without Qualities. Please note that this is a placeholder, and we will do a Musil Seminar in 2023.
The Man Without Qualities is one of the great Modernist Novels of the twentieth century, frequently compared to In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses. It is incomplete and fragmented as Robert Musil never finished it, spending over 12 years trying to complete it before his death on April 15, 1942.
The novel is a "story of ideas", which takes place in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's last days, and the plot often veers into allegorical digressions on a wide range of existential themes concerning humanity and feelings. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organizes ideas about life and society, though the book is well over a thousand pages long in its entirety, and so no one single theme dominates.
"The most ancient philosophies, obscure and almost incomprehensible as they are to us, often speak of a male and female principle...."
"We are sometimes told that emotion is simply identical with the internal and external events, but we are usually merely told that these events are to be considered equivalent to the emotion. Sometimes emotion is called rather vaguely, 'the total process,' sometimes merely internal action, behavior, course, or event. Sometimes it also seems that two concepts of emotion are being used side by side, one in which emotion would be in a broader sense the 'whole,' the other in which it would be, in a narrower sense, a partial experience that in some rather hazy way stamps its name, indeed its nature, on the whole. And sometimes people seem to follow the conjecture that one and the same thing which presents itself to observation as a complex process, becomes an emotion when it is experienced; in other words, the emotion would then be the experience, the result, and, so to speak, what the process yields in consciousness...."
"And God alone knows what would become of us if feelings did not appear in swarms, these loves and hates and suffering and goodnesses that give the illusion of being unique to every individual. We would be bereft of all capacity to think and act, because our soul was created for whatever repeats itself over and over, and not for what lies outside the order of things...."
Volume 1 purchase link:
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Qualities-Vol-Introduction/dp/0679767878/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539076233&sr=8-1&keywords=man+without+qualities
Volume 2 purchase link:
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Qualities-Vol-Millennium/dp/0679768025/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1539076233&sr=8-2&keywords=man+without+qualities
