Austrian Post-Mortem

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES (355 pp.) --Robert Musil--Coward-McCann ($4).

An ex-officer of the Austrian army sat down one day in 1922 to write a panoramic novel about the decline & fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At his death, 20 years later, Robert Musil had completed 2,000 pages. His work, The Man Without Qualities, was still unfinished, but he had written enough to persuade enthusiastic European critics that Musil had been at work on one of the most searching post-mortems of modern fiction. Now, something like the first fifth of his novel has been translated into English.

The Man Without Qualities is a satirical account of social and moral hollowness. The old Austro-Hungarian aristocracy is going bourgeois, while the middle class yearns to be aristocratic; meanwhile, a muscular and gullible type that Continental writers like to call the "mass man" is pushing his way, for better or worse, to the front of the stage. Musil's satire has a deadpan deadliness. Without a flicker of visible distaste, he simply lets his characters talk themselves into positions of advanced absurdity.

The Unheroic Hero. The central figure of the novel is Ulrich, "the Man Without Qualities." An ex-cavalry officer, ex-civil engineer and ex-mathematician, Ulrich has chosen the role of aloof observer. Even as modern heroes go, Ulrich is spectacularly unheroic. In his private life he is a drab roue, and his public life is just as futile. Against his better judgment, he gets involved in a grandiose piece of foolishness known as "the Collateral Campaign," which is intended to honor the Emperor on his joth Jubilee. The moth-eaten dynastic symbols behind this campaign do not delude Ulrich, but he hangs on from morbid curiosity.

At the committee's meetings. Ulrich meets a variety of "important personages" undoubtedly intended to reappear in the later pages of the novel: a befuddled aristocrat; a Prussian millionaire with a vast amount of useless erudition; a general who insists that the Collateral Campaign must recognize the military glories of the Empire ; and the female inspiration behind the whole campaign, a statuesque middle-class beauty given to high-minded speeches about Kultur. As might be expected the meetings of the committee end merely with decisions to set up still more committees.

In contrast to this bureaucratic farce stands the criminal vitality of Moosbrugger, a murderer and sex maniac. From his many bouts with the law, Moosbrugger has picked up a weird blend of legal and psychiatric jargon, by which he expresses the chaotic resentments which seethe within him--and which, hints Novelist Musil, also seethe within millions of his fellow men. In his deluded fashion, Moosbrugger comes to think that "his whole life had been a battle for his rights." And Ulrich, though his exact opposite, feels a certain sympathy, even a sneaking identification, with Moosbrugger. "If mankind could dream collectively," he says, "it would dream Moosbrugger."

The Confident Author. Musil's book is slow and heavy-footed, often bogs down in long passages of abstract speculation about the problems his characters face. In his own fashion, however, Novelist Musil is often sardonically effective. The human soul, he writes, "is simply what curls up and hides when there is any mention of algebraic series." And "at night a man has only a nightshirt on, and what comes next under that is the character." With a kind of pachyderm playfulness, Novelist Musil encourages his characters to blow themselves up--the better to measure their hollowness.

Like the hero of his novel, Robert Musil went through several careers before choosing to become a chronicler of human life. Before he was 35, he was successively a civil engineer, a philosopher and an army officer. Most of his later life was spent in seclusion, writing his book and living on subsidies from a group of admirers who called themselves the "Musil-Gesellschaft." He achieved little fame in his lifetime, but was sure that his book would live.

Some English critics have classed Musil with James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Judging by the translated section, this is too much praise. Musil lacks Joyce's verbal liveliness and inventiveness, Proust's sensitivity to the most subtle gradations of social rank. More important, he lacks the creative spontaneity and abundance which mark their work. Where they were artists who sometimes felt a need to write as philosophers, Musil reads like a philosopher who felt a need to write as an artist.

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