4 - Understanding Fact and Fiction in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
Summary
Kakania as a State of Mind
Robert Musil's story of the murderer Moosbrugger, whose mental compe- tence to stand trial is at the heart of the novel The Man without Qualities, exemplifies Wittgenstein's ‘limits’ proposition 5.6 in more than one sense. Borders between fact and fiction blur as Musil shows us poignantly to what extent Moosbrugger's use of language is misunderstood by his fictional lawyers and psychiatrists, and for what reasons. This chapter suggests that the key to Moosbrugger's plights is the clash of views on language espoused by those involved in his case.
Musil's biographer, Karl Corino, points out that Musil's life cannot be portrayed without attention to the strong link between the themes in The Man without Qualities and its author. That is not to say that the novel can be understood only along the lines of a romantic, psychological hermeneutics as promoted by Friedrich Schleiermacher. It means that some insight at least is required into the man who thought of himself as a being without qualities, because in his portrayal, or perhaps we should say definition, of Ulrich, the novel's protagonist, Musil inscribes his own experience and view on humanity:
The inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by the many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled. This permits a person all but one thing: to take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them; in other words, it prevents precisely what should be his true fulfillment. (MWQ 30)
Robert Musil was born on 6 November 1880 in Klagenfurt, the son of the engineer Alfred Musil and his wife, Hermine Bergauer. The family later moved to Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic), where Alfred was appointed professor at the Hochschule.
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- Judging from ExperienceLaw, Praxis, Humanities, pp. 64 - 79Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018