Musil collected these Bilder into an incisive gallery of allegories and paradoxes titled Posthumous Papers of a Living Author ( Nachlass zu Lebzeiten, 1936). “I am not even an essayist but rather a poet ( Dichter).” The short form that was most congenial to Musil took its impetus from an imaginative picture, or Bild, of a strange, ambiguous situation and resulted in what the critic Andreas Huyssen calls the modernist miniature, considering it a newcomer to writing. His thinking was too figurative, imagistic, and analogical to allow him to be content with analytical or conceptual rhetoric. Musil’s intellect was too mercurial, too expansive and subtle, to remain satisfied by a predominantly ratiocinative treatment of a subject. However, he did not master these occasional essays as well as others writing in his language (like Karl Krauss, Georg Simmel, Arnold Schönberg, or Siegfried Kracauer). Robert Musil (1880–1942) was not only a novelist but was an essayist also in the strict manner of speaking, penning expository pieces about writers, philosophy, and cultural concerns throughout his life. Then, from this form of writing and its ontological foundations, where the world itself is seen as an essay, I will extrapolate its striving, utopian, constructive ethics. Most of my essay will be devoted to the first of Musil’s achievements: his essayistic novel.

The authoritative English translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike runs to nearly two thousand pages. Both acts are played out in the magisterial, unfinished novel that occupied the last twenty years of his life: The Man without Qualities ( Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), its first two parts published in 1930, the third in 1933, and many additional materials posthumously, after 1942. R obert Musil’s importance in the conception and practice of the essay rests on two remarkable achievements: (1) his transformation of that literary genre or mode into a novel, expanding a traditionally short form into a much more encompassing one, and (2) his existentializing of the form, elevating it to a paradigm for ethical action. It was more or less in the way an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it-for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept-that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life.

The man without qualities