NOTHING PERSONAL
In Which I Presume to Propagandise for an Aesthetic of Depersonalisation
The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil’s colossal fragment, has one of the most perfect openings of any novel I’ve read - up there with Bleak House, The Girls of Slender Means and The Trial. By conventional standards, though, it’s odd, almost anti-novelistic. That much is evident from the title of the first chapter, “From Which, Remarkably Enough, Nothing Develops”. After all, what kind of writer introduces the inaugural incident of his book with an acknowledgement of its effective redundancy?1
This inauspicious heading certainly sets the tone. The sentence that follows is ostentatiously arid: “A barometric low hung over the Atlantic.” The whole first paragraph is like this, an elegant but technical description of the meteorological conditions that prevail over an initially unspecified region of Europe. “The isotherms and the isotheres were functioning as they should… The water vapour in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal…” So runs the weather report, which Musil does not belabour, concluding in good time with a sudden and disarming punchline: “In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.”
Having sardonically overturned a time-honoured novelistic cliché, Musil then descends to ground level for a condensed and powerfully estranging description of the street life in a city that is eventually revealed to be Vienna. The movement of people and vehicles is evoked as though it, too, were only a matter of weather: “Automobiles shot out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark clusters of pedestrians formed cloudlike strings. Where more powerful lines of speed cut across their casual haste they clotted up, then trickled on faster and, after a few oscillations, resumed their steady rhythm.” Yes, this is Vienna, but it could just as easily be any other metropolis, as Musil takes pains to emphasise: “Like all big cities it was made up of irregularity, change, forward spurts, failures to keep step, collisions of objects and interests, punctuated by unfathomable silences; made up of pathways and untrodden ways, of one great rhythmic beat as well as the chronic discord and mutual displacement of all its contending rhythms.” This is modernity schematised, the rich profusion of sensory phenomena that make up one of the distinctive and culturally radical cities in the world reduced to the play of abstract forces and a set of lyrical but barren formulas.
Next we are introduced to a man and a woman who might be mistaken, as Musil archly informs us, for Ermelinda Tuzzi and Dr. Arnheim, two individuals who will go on to play a major role in the subsequent pages. “Here we go: some characters!” we scarcely have time to think before Musil punctures our illusions. Since Tuzzi and Arnheim are both known to have been otherwise engaged at this moment in August 1913, these two people can’t possibly be them, he tells us, and “we are left to wonder who they were”. Two nameless ciphers, then, plucked from the general maelstrom on account of their resemblance to another pair with whom the reader has yet to be acquainted: their only mark of distinction in fact a point of similarity: their location a city that may technically be called Vienna, but which could just as easily be Berlin, London or Prague. The effect of these destabilising narrative techniques is to place every element of this chapter’s non-story between a pair of qualifying brackets - to reduce them to variables within a larger equation whose general structure is always the same, no matter what values happen to take the place of ‘x’ or ‘y’.
But wait! Suddenly, the atmosphere of detached triviality is ruptured; the couple are stopped in their tracks. A truck has careened off the road and struck a pedestrian, who is now lying on the kerb “as if dead”. As the woman observes this scene, she feels something unpleasant in the area of her abdomen close to her heart (though the most recent English translation has “in the pit of her stomach”, the German original is “Herz-Magengrube”, an ugly word that seems to refer to the ‘epigastrium’ and has a similarly clinical ring). Musil’s language is remote when describing the “indecisive, paralysing feeling”, which the woman thinks herself “justified in regarding as compassion”. Her implied alienation from these uncomfortable emotions dissolves into relief when her companion makes a similarly aloof remark about the inadequate braking capacity of “heavy trucks like these”. The woman has no interest in the technology itself, of course; what matters is that the observation helps “put this ghastly incident into perspective by reducing it to a technicality of no direct personal concern to her.” Order is reasserting itself in the real world, too, and as the ambulance arrives and the body is placed on a stretcher, Musil as narrator gives voice to the onlookers’ satisfaction: “How admirably society was functioning!” What initially seemed like a violent interruption to the generic and law-like unfolding of modernity’s repetitive pattern turns out to be just another part of that pattern. As the couple continue on their way, the man recites a statistic about the number of fatal car crashes that take place in America each year, and they speculate dispassionately about whether in this case the victim was dead or alive, the woman still habouring the “unjustified” feeling “that she had experienced something unusual”. So the chapter ends.
The bracing effect of this incredible gust of chill air is difficult to convey; anyone interested would probably be better off reading the chapter for themselves. Musil never quite recaptures the pitch of alien intensity that he attains here. The standard two-volume Rowohlt edition of The Man Without Qualities runs to almost one and a half thousand pages before it starts to disintegrate into a welter of fragments, alternative drafts and cryptic notes, but although virtually every one of those pages contains something beautiful, profound and odd, the basic fact of clearly defined characters and a glacial but explicit plot keeps them moored in something slightly more solid than the dizzyingly hypothetical substance that makes up those first few pages.
Indeed, it’s hard to think of examples in the history of the novel at large of the pristine impersonality that Musil practises here; to me, it seems like a rather neglected device. There are passages in Samuel Beckett’s Watt, perhaps, that do something similar. The prose of Wyndham Lewis shows a related predilection for reducing modern life to a farrago of vectors and intensities. Muriel Spark may occasionally train an estranging eye on a body part or a building, though always as an isolated technique that stands in the service of atmosphere, character, plot. J.M. Coetzee is an admirer of Musil, but his evocations of the death of affect are often themselves affectless; they err on the side of boredom, rather than Musil’s estranging bite. J.G. Ballard might come closest to replicating the Musil effect. The dubious figures who move through The Atrocity Exhibition are arbitrary incarnations of obscure pathologies, their names and motives blurring and mutating from one chapter to the next. Nevertheless, their media-addled fantasies and their sexual terrors seem to have little in common with the universe of Musil’s opening chapter - thoroughly alienated, complacent, and somehow orderly even in its moments of violence.
The first chapter of Musil’s great novel fascinates me in part for the radicalism of its technique and the panache of its execution, but above all because it feels like an eerily accurate reflection of the world we still inhabit. Much has changed, certainly, since August 1913, but we too live in a world governed by abstract laws and impersonal statistics - a world in which decisions often seem to be made not by any particular individual, but by the system itself. Ours is a world in which the identity of people and places can feel arbitrary or interchangeable, one in which emotions are second-hand and easily manipulated, and our own subjectivity can sometimes seem more like an external object than an experiential fact. Rereading the opening of The Man Without Qualities, and considering its evergreen applicability to our present moment, I sometimes wonder: could an entire novel be written in the chilly style of Musil’s opening chapter? And what might we learn about our world if it were?
Even those who recognise this diagnosis of the status quo may feel that it miscasts the role that the novel ought to play in explaining or responding to these facts of reality. If our world really is dominated by abstract laws and self-governing systems, forces of standardisation and reification that seize hold of our consciousness and remoulding it in their own image, then isn’t the novel form unusually well-suited to defending the precious and irreplaceable aspects of personal experience from the alien influences that would reduce or even destroy them? One way of answering this perfectly reasonable question is to look more closely at what is going on in novels that stage a subjective revolt against these tendencies in modern life. In many cases, it can be argued that they already show a distinct inclination to bend under the pressure of the very forces they aim to resist - forces that threaten to invade and to some extent depersonalise the sovereign subject on which they centre.
Take for example that titanic recent essay in untrammelled self-absorption, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle project. Christian Lorentzen has written that the grand theme of this six-novel series is “the predicament of a man with a Romantic temperament born into a modernized, bureaucratized and banalized world”. Read with this predicament in mind, the books often come to seem like one man’s attempt to vindicate his own special self through a frequently excruciating rehearsal of the petty and sometimes abject incidents that make up his one and only life. Intriguingly enough, however, Knausgaard’s epically egocentric approach does not obviate the possibility that one might nevertheless find the books relatable. In actual fact, many readers whose lives do not in the least resemble that of this eccentric Norwegian author nonetheless see themselves in his actions and his moods - at least some of the time - in a way that is perfectly compatible with the much more glaring differences in objective circumstances and personal outlook. By cataloguing with maniacal granularity the unique (and, presumably, somewhat embroidered) facts of his own unrepeatable life, Knausgaard may well succeed not in trumpeting his own individuality, but rather in revealing how much more alike we are, deep down, than our superficial peculiarities might suggest.
Indeed, it might be the sheer specificity of Knausgaard’s approach that allows this generality to slip in through the back door. Fredric Jameson usefully opines on a related phenomenon in his discussion of the the nouveau roman. This experimental mode of novel-writing, arguably inaugurated by Samuel Beckett and carried forward in the ‘50s and ‘60s by authors such as Nathalie Saurautte and Alain Robbe-Grillet, tests to destruction the basic techniques of the novelist’s repertoire, in a manner that produces curious and revealing effects. One of Jameson’s examples concerns Robbe-Grillet’s application of extreme descriptive focus to an everyday object like a cardboard box, attempting to fix exhaustively in words the exact features of that one distinct entity. As Jameson points out, this process of radical particularisation usually seems to turn, “in a virtually textbook dialectical fashion” into an essay in generalisation: “a single attribute for the box (“brown”, “cardboard”) would not have done us much more good than some more obviously accidental property (a “rip” or “tear”, for example), insofar as all those words also remain general in their very essence.” If you look closely enough, everything can stand for everything else. Vienna could be any other city, Tuzzi and Arnheim any other couple - and Knausgaard’s struggle could be mine, or yours, or anyone’s.
Of course, Knausgaard’s life is as unique to him as all of ours are to ourselves. (Though do you notice the slippage in that ambiguous sentence?) But as he drills down into the specifics - his shame, his longings, his behavioural inconsistencies, his inappropriate thoughts - he becomes just like any other person, an everyman whose existential predicament is all too recognisable even when its outward expression takes a radically different form from that of the sympathetic reader. Add to this his participation in the standardising rituals of the “modernized, bureaucratized, banalized world”, from shopping in the supermarket and going on holiday to getting married and becoming a parent, and My Struggle begins to look like a description of anyone’s life - marked by the same underlying dynamics and emotional oscillations that we all perhaps affirm, even when we try to defy them.
So: if an implacable emphasis on the subjective and the specific does not necessarily safeguard against the intrusion of the objective and the generic, then perhaps the objective and the generic may also serve as a vinculum through which the individual subject can be smuggled? In other words, couldn’t an exaggeratedly impersonal style tell us as much about ourselves as an intimately personal one? Some might still argue that the novel form, which conventionally trades in states of exception involving singular characters and dynamic situations, is poorly suited to representing those aspects of contemporary experience that seem generic, repetitious or fungible. Doesn’t Musil demonstrate the difficulty, perhaps even the futility of this task through his failure to hold his pose of thoroughgoing alienation beyond his first chapter?
Bullshit, say I. The history of the novel is full of convention-bucking exceptions, usually written in acknowledgement of developments in the real world that the good old forms are too inflexible to compass. Ours is a world substantially shaped by the opaque operation of abstract systems, and further depersonalised by habit-forming mechanisms of coercion, alienating technologies of self-surveillance and a volatile culture of incessant hyperconnectivity. As these new and untried potencies of human acid eat away at the substance of our secret souls, our literature may have to deform itself if it wishes to respond with accuracy to the changes taking place within us. Of course, no one style works, as Diane Di Prima didn’t quite say. But Musil’s alternative grammar of automatic gestures and routine emotions seems to me to suggest one way forward. More than one hundred years after T.S. Eliot declared that poetry “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”, it may be time once again for literature to embrace an aesthetic of depersonalisation.
For convenience’s sake, the text I use here is from the latest edition of The Man Without Qualities in English, translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. I have made slight modifications in places where the translation seems to deviate so far from the original that it dilutes the estranging potency of Musil’s approach.