The Man Without Qualities Confusion

Totally inconsequential article. Needless to say, I don't share his disinclination towards literature in translation. I think the art and craft of translation is seriously undervalued and under-appreciated and on the other hand authorial intention (whatever that means) is often unjustifiably treated as sacrosanct and final but what really got my goat was the way he so completely misunderstands the meaning of the title of Musil's novel:

"At the moment I'm reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I've been meaning to read it for ages, mainly because of the title, which I've always thought a fabulous slap in the face for all those Amazon commentators who complain about disliking novels because the central characters are not exciting, or nice, or interesting enough."

This is such a complete misreading of the title (to his credit he seems to have just begun reading the book but still). Being a man without qualities is actually an admirable thing because it implies freedom and independence of spirit. It means living not by a sense of the real but a sense of the possible. In other words, it is not what you are that is important but what you can be because what you are is defined and imposed from the outside by the society and the institutions and they are almost always arbitrary, without any real foundation. A man with qualities is not a man at all, because by agreeing to define himself by an identity he has also allowed himself to be dehumanised. A character like Ulrich becomes even more admirable in our time when it has become so hard to transcend and live outside our given identities, whether they be of culture, nationality, gender, language or anything else. And even if all this strikes a mumbo-jumbo to some amazon reader, Ulrich is still a hero easy to feel jealous for. All the female characters (all impossibly beautiful, totally hypersexed and a few forbiddingly intellectual too) in the book are crazy about him and are dying to sleep with him!! (Ulrich is actually a satirical self-portrait with elements of wish-fulfillment too, even though Musil was himself quite a ladies' man in his youth.) Ulrich is one of my favourite heroes in all literature, in fact somewhat of a personal role-model.