READIN

Friday, May 6th, 2005

Here is an essay William Gass wrote for the New York Review of books on the occasion of a new and complete translation of The Man Without Qualities -- nice piece but poorly formatted. (Note that I am reading the older, abridged translation -- only even learned today that that's what it is.)

posted evening of May 6th, 2005: Respond
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Note on the below: "treating someone as a means rather than an end" is the same as "objectifying" the person, and the thought I am trying to develop about Ulrich can be rendered as that he "objectifies himself".

posted evening of May 6th, 2005: Respond

🦋 Bland Ambition

For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographical one, a sex one, a conscious, an unconscious, and perhaps even too a private one; he combines them all in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it and drain out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another channel. Hence every dweller on earth also has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled; it permits a man everything, with one exception; he may not take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them, in other words, the very thing that ought to be the filling of him.

-- The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil: Chapter 8, "Kakania"

I have been getting my first inklings of sympathy for Musil's characters, I started to notice it around Chapter 14 -- specifically for Ulrich but also Walter and Clarisse. With Ulrich my thinking has run sort of like this -- that Ulrich, there's something weird about him... I have heard calculating people described as "treating others as means reather than ends" -- could that be applied to Ulrich? Maybe, but (a) I am not concretely sure what the phrase means (NPI), (b) Ulrich hasn't even interacted with that many other people yet (at the time I was thinking this, about Chapter 12, only 2 other characters had been introduced, both very briefly). Aha! But Ulrich has been relating to himself quite a bit in this story. Could it be that he is "treating himself as a means rather than an end"? That sounds promising, though with the caveat that I am still not so sure what I mean by it. But let's pursue...

I am feeling a good deal of sympathy for Ulrich -- could the point of identification be reducible to the (still not-well-defined) attribute of "treating oneself as a means rather than an end"? When I started sympathizing with him it was in connection with his desire to become "an important person" and cluelessness about how to achieve that -- such a vague, shapeless ambition has been characteristic of my Bildung. It is something I am really thinking I need to grapple with in approaching my Master's Degree.

posted evening of May 6th, 2005: Respond

Tuesday, May third, 2005

Okay the current Ulysses attempt is officially over -- it's just not moving me enough to be worth the effort. (Except for that "Calypso" episode, that one's really nice.)

Moving on... I'm flirting with the idea of reading The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I read the first 20 or so pages yesterday and found them funny and engaging. For some reason I am reluctant to commit to that book though.

posted evening of May third, 2005: Respond
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