Eigenschaften ohne Männer

I am at present engaged in gnawing away at a novel that everyone praises but few actually read, at least not all the way through.  It is Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (vol. I: 1930; vol. II: 1932) by Robert Musil, better known to  algolagniacs  as the author of Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906).   It’s the sort of book that you (and by “you” I mean, that tiny segment of humanity that is the sole intended audience of this blog) -- that you always mean to read, it’s on your list, along with A la recherche du temps perdu and other hefty, worthy tomes, but you keep putting it off, and putting it off;  until one day  there comes a knuckly knock on the door, and there he stands, The Reaper, with his hollow skull and even hollower grin;  and your jaw drops and you stammer “B-but - but - but … I haven’t yet had time to read Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften !  Just give me another year!”

Then slowly, slowly, Death shakes his head:  “I haven’t yet got around to it either;  and I have all the time in the world -- this world and the next.”

The enigmatic title of this novel (“The Man Without Qualities”/”L’Homme sans propriétés”) is part of its media appeal:  though in truth, it would seem a more promising premise for a sketch.   To labor through over a thousand dense pages concerning an individual who lacks … qualities (characteristics, traits), recalls the Monty Python skit about the “Invisible Man” (“O….ver…. heeerrrrrre, … Dave …..”)

It is one of the few major novels whose protagonist is presented as being a mathematician.    Now, mathematicians are (if you please) god-like beings;  yet with very few exceptions (Galois,  Erdös ..) they do not lead colorful lives.  The man who settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, for instance, Andrew Wiles, is … um …. ahh… actually, I cannot think of a predicate -- he just is.   As a group, they are less given to florid personalities than, say, theoretical physicists:  one labors in vain to recall a figure so publically obstreperous as Murray Gell-Mann or Wolfgang “What Professor Einstein says is not so stupid” Pauli.   (Well okay, Grothendieck;  but he is extra-terrestrial.)  You might say:   A mathematician swims so deeply in the realm of ideas (qualities of transcendent reality) that he has no time for foibles of his own.

And this particular médaille has an appropriate revers -- its mathematical dual, we might  posit.  For:  Mathematical properties might well be described as Eigenschaften ohne Männer, since  in their essence  they are independent of whatever species happens to perceive them (or whether they are perceived at all, here below).  

Nay more:  Though a Platonist, I readily concede that mathematical “objects” could be described as dingsda ohne Eigenschaften, since individually they have neither heft nor taste, but only patterns linking them:  the patterns are primary, the ‘objects’ are but nodes.

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[Notice to obligate anglophones]

Obligate anglophones, like obligate anaerobes, are severely stenotopic.  Nevertheless, we at the World of Dr Justice  have a heart  as big as all outdoors, and solicitously cater to one and all, however severe their disability;  and accordingly bring you the good news  that Musil's massive work  has been expertly re-translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (available from Knopf  for the low-low price of sixty dollars).    Some German writers, like Christian Morgenstern or Karl Kraus, are halt unübersetzbar; but Musil manages to fall within the subtle toils of this fine translation-team.

[Even so, a stab at translating Morgenstern  here.]

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(Update 12 III 14) Listening to a bit of “Fresh Air” re the movie “Grand Budapest Hotel”, sent me back to reading that other MittelEuropa-phile work by an American, Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project.  Slowly taking in each sentence.  The work has been superbly translated, and is very dense -- though its depth does not match its density.  And I’ll have to revise that halt unübersetzbar:  Franzen and his German collaborators have done a splendid job. More here.

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Consult as well:  der Bube ohne Eigenschaften


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