L’Homme sans qualités

An unfinished novel, canonically representing the impossibility of the novelistic form in the twentieth century, The Man Without Qualities carries in the background Pascal’s remark: “no one loves anyone, but only qualities.” Musil intended to expose certain notorious errors of European ideology, for which he saw no remedy, “proceeding from the principle that, certainly, ideas determine the course of history, but the problem is that people fail to conceive new ones.” Praised as “an ambitious attempt to represent the adventures of the human mind in our modern world” (D. Frey), this unfinished novel portrays a man without qualities, that is, without distinguishing features — “a floating being open to all possibilities” — a man endowed with a sense of the possible who, in Musil’s own words, “will not say: here this has happened, will happen, must happen; but he will imagine: here this could, should happen; and when he is told that a thing is as it is, he thinks that it could just as well be otherwise. Thus the sense of the possible could simply be defined as the faculty of thinking everything that could ‘just as well’ be, and of attaching no more importance to what is than to what is not.” Musil thus paints the ironic picture of a “world of qualities without men.”