Castorp's fate and the ideological duel between two consumptives: Settembrini and Naphta; the one a Freemason and democrat, the other a Jesuit and autocrat, both of them incurably ill. Manns tranquil irony relativizes these two learned mens truths; their dispute has no winner. But the novel's irony goes further and reaches its pinnacle in the scene where, each surrounded by his little audience and intoxicated by his own implacable logic, they both push their arguments to the extreme so that no one can any longer tell who stands for progress and who for tradition, who for reason and who for the irrational, who for the spirit and who for the body. Over several pages we witness an enormous confusion where words lose their meaning, and the debate is all the more violent because the positions are interchangeable. Some two hundred pages later, at the end of the novel (the war is soon to break out), all the patients in the sanatorium fall into a state of irrational irritability, inexplicable hatreds; then Settembrini insults Naphta and the two invalids go off to fight a duel that will end in the suicide of one of them; and suddenly we understand that what sets men against one another is not irreconcilable ideological antagonism but an aggressiv-ity beyond the rational, an obscure, unexplained force for which ideas are merely a screen, a mask, a pretext. Thus this magnificent 'novel of ideas' is at the same time (especially for a reader at the end of our century) a dreadful requestioning of ideas as such, a great farewell to the era that believed in ideas and in their power to run the world.
Mann and Musil. Despite the closeness of their birth dates, their aesthetics belong to two different eras in the novels history. Both are novelists of immense intellectuality. In the Mann novel, the intellectuality shows mainly in the dialogues about ideas carried on before the backdrop of a descriptive novel. In The Man Without Qualities, the intellectuality is manifest at every instant, thoroughgoing; as against Mann's descriptive novel, Musil's is a thinking novel. Here too the events are set in a concrete milieu (Vienna) and in a concrete moment (the same one as in The Magic Mountain: just before the 1914 war), but whereas in Mann Davos is described in detail, in Musil Vienna is barely named, the author not even deigning to evoke the look of its streets, its squares, its parks (it simply disregards that 'apparatus for fabricating the illusion of reality'). We are in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it is systematically called by a derisive sobriquet: Kakania. Kakania: the Empire deconcretized, generalized, reduced to a few basic situations, the Empire transformed into an ironical replica of the Empire. This Kakania is not a background to the novel as Davos is in Thomas Mann, it is one of the novels very themes:, it is not described, it is analyzed and thought through.
Mann explained that the structure of The Magic Mountain is musical, built out of themes that are developed as in a symphony, that return, that intersect, that accompany the novel throughout. This is true, but it should be noted that a theme does not signify quite the same thing in Mann and in Musil. To start with, in Mann the themes (time, the body, illness, death, etc.) are developed in front of a vast nonthematic background (descriptions of place, time, customs, people) more or less as the themes of a sonata are enveloped in music that is other than the theme-the bridges and the transitions. Then also, his themes are strongly 'polyhistorical' (i.e., multidisciplinary) in nature, that is to say: Mann makes use of every means offered by the various branches of knowledge-sociology, political science, medicine, botany, physics, chemistry-to illuminate this or that theme; as though he hoped by this popularization of knowledge to create a solid didactic base for analyzing themes; to my mind, too often and for overlong stretches, this diverts his novel from the essential-for let us remember, the essential for a novel is what only a novel can say.
In Musil, theme analysis is another matter: first, it has nothing multidisciplinary to it; the novelist doesn't set up as a scholar, a doctor, a sociologist, a historian, he analyzes human situations that are not part of some scientific field but are simply part of life. This is how Broch and Musil saw the historical task for the novel after the era of psychological realism: if European philosophy could not think out man's life, think out his 'concrete metaphysics,' then it is the novel that is fated finally to take over this vacant terrain where nothing could ever replace it (existential philosophy has confirmed this by a negative proof; for the analysis of existence cannot become a system; existence cannot be systematized, and Heidegger, a poetry lover, was wrong to disregard the history of the novel, for it contains the greatest treasury of existential wisdom).
Second, as opposed to Mann, in Musil everything becomes theme (existential questioning). If everything becomes theme, the background disappears and, as in a cubist painting, there is nothing but foreground. It is this abolition of the background that I consider to be the structural revolution Musil brought about. Great changes often have an unobtrusive appearance. Indeed, its lengthy reflections, the slow tempo of its sentences, give The Man Without Qualities the feel of 'traditional' writing. No overturning of chronology. No interior monologues a la Joyce. No abolishing of punctuation. No annihilating of character or action. For some two thousand pages, we follow the modest
story of a young intellectual, Ulrich, who visits several mistresses, meets with some friends, and works for an organization as sober as it is grotesque (this is where the novel, almost imperceptibly, moves away from the plausible and turns into play), whose purpose is to arrange the emperors anniversary celebration, a great 'festival of peace' planned (and this is a comic bomb slipped under the book's foundation) for the year 1918. Each little situation is as if frozen in its tracks (this oddly slowed tempo is where Musil occasionally recalls Joyce), to be pierced by a long gaze that considers what it means, how to understand it and think it through.
In The Magic Mountain, Mann transformed the several years before the 1914 war into a magnificent farewell party for the nineteenth century, gone forever. The Man Without Qualities, set in the same years, examines the human situations of the time to come: of that terminal period of the Modern Era that began in 1914 and, it seems, is in the process of ending today before our eyes. Actually, everything is there already in the Musil Kakania: the reign of a runaway technology that turns people into statistics (the novel opens on a street where an accident has occurred; a man is lying on the ground and a couple of passersby comment on the event by citing the annual number of traffic accidents); speed as the supreme value of a world intoxicated by technology; opaque and pervasive bureaucracy (Musil's offices are a great match to Kafka's); the comical sterility of ideologies that understand nothing, that provide no guidance (the glorious age of Settembrini and Naphta is finished); journalism, the heir to what used to be called culture; modernity's collaborationists; solidarity with criminals as the mystical expression of the human rights religion (the characters Clarisse and Moosbrugger); infantophilia and infantoc-racy (Hans Sepp, a fascist before the term was born, whose ideology is based on adoration of the child in us).
When I finished The Farewell Party, at the very start of the 1970s, I considered my career as a writer over. It was under the Russian occupation and my wife and I had other worries. It wasn't until we had been in France a year (and thanks to France) that, after six years of a total interruption, I began without passion to write again. Feeling intimidated, and to regain my footing, I decided to tie into something I had already done: to write a kind of second volume of Laughable Loves. What a regression! Those short stories had started me on my way as a writer twenty years before. Fortunately, after drafting two or three of these 'Laughable Loves II,' I saw that I was writing an entirely different thing: not a story collection but a novel (later entitled The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), a novel in seven parts that were independent yet so closely bound that any one of them read by itself would lose much of its meaning.
At once, whatever mistrust I still harbored toward the art of the novel disappeared: by giving each part the nature of a short story, I made unnecessary the whole seemingly unavoidable technique of large-scale novel composition. In my project I happened upon the old Chopin strategy, the strategy of small-scale com-position that has no need of nonthematic passages. (Does that mean that the story is the small form of the novel? Yes. There is no ontological difference between story and novel, as there is between the novel and poetry or the novel and theater.) How are these seven small, independent compositions related if they have no action in common? All that holds them together, that makes them a novel, is that they treat the same themes. As I worked I thus came across another old strategy: Beethoven's variation strategy, this allowed me to stay in direct, uninterrupted contact with some existential questions that fascinate me and that this novel in variation form explores from multiple angles in sequence.
This sequential exploration of themes has a logic, and it determines the linkage of the parts. For example:
