At first appearance, the newly translated collection of short pieces by Robert Musil, titled Thought Flights by translator Genese Grill (Contra Mundum Press), seems at odds with the writer’s reputation. After all, he is most famous for the massive, unfinished Man Without Qualities. Why would he take time away from that project he was so dedicated to so he could write pieces of fiction only a couple pages long, essays about whether the crawl stroke is an art or a science, and satirical fragments like “War Diary of a Flea”? And considering all that Musil articulated about society, gender, philosophy, art, etc. in Man Without Qualities, is there reason to read this instead of, or after, that? The quickest way to answer both questions is hinted at by Grill in her introduction. The first: for Musil to maintain his sanity by taking breaks. The second: if you admire both the intellect and aesthetics of Musil and the serious play that Walser brought to his feuilleton, this is a chance to see what comes about when those two styles are combined.
An uneven collection, Thought Flights at its strongest displays the thinking of the social, moral, and aesthetic philosopher we know from Man Without Qualities but expressing that in a different way. The weakest pieces are those that are either too fragmented, unfinished, or that are too deeply steeped in their time. The latter problem needs careful attention, not assumption, because some of the works heavy with Musil’s contemporary references are buoyed by insights completely relevant to our own time. As a quick example, “Little (Bad) Mood Picture,” about journalism. Musil writes, “journalists prefer to be defenders of the law,” “incapable of laughing with an anarchist or even learning from him.” For this, he blames their poor reliance on and interpretation of Kant’s categorical imperative, adding “This indeterminate saying – not without greatness – is like a cankered growth.” With no hesitation, observation of modern media leads to a diagnosis of the same illness, though any knowledge of Kant is replaced with a dense understanding of “objectivity.”
As a writer with strong moral convictions, Musil is a leader, but reading Thought Flights simply for edification would be a failure. That many of these pieces have a similar lightness, an aura of strange potential, to Walser’s work is entertaining enough, but the way Musil makes these feuilleton in his own style gives them their grounding. In one of the most Walserian pieces, and the one from which Grill takes her title for the collection, “The Fairytale of the Tailor,” the narrator is busy rolling a large bomb in Parliament, of which he writes “I had worked on it my whole life. I wanted to blow my epoch up into the air with it.” He tells a guard this same thing, who lets him by, observing only “Oh, you are from the newspaper.” The tone is strange and absurd, but beneath it is horror, political and social anger against an era, as a man wants to blow up a symbol of his epoch.
I shouldn’t suggest that Walser is all lightness and no dark, far from it, but Musil is bent towards the sinister, the potential for or occurrence of violence. The opposite caveat is necessary too: Musil has his lightness. Grill’s close relationship to Musil, and the feuilleton, is apparent in how she brings out his various shades. Much of the time, he writes about the rules of society, the boundaries of those rules, which of them are in fact against the humane and so right to break, what manner of boundary-crossing is not tolerable, and the confusion within all this. At times, Musil has faith in his society, at others, condemns it. The movement between these poles can happen in a single passage, opening with expectations for “civilized society, especially one where we still ascribe so much importance to the family,” before angrily turning on a father’s treatment of his daughter, “the consequences of family authority.”
“The Thirsty Ones” features a group of students, their teacher, and a stray dog they take in. Living in a little unnamed city, as outsiders, they spend their time only together, roaming the outskirts. They “believe nothing could have held us back from becoming a robber band and capturing the world, except that we didn’t know how to begin.” There is desire for, even predestination to being a group set against society, while at the same time, the path is uncertain. This move towards, move away from, society’s guidelines runs through many of these stories, and violence, murder, can be the result. Transgressions do not only end so sinisterly, and Musil often cuts through confusion to mourn the consequences.
“Small Journey Through Life” opens with the optimistic, “Life is full of miracles.” The miracle is the joyride of Musil’s day. Two boys find a wagon, horse attached, and with nobody nearby, hop on: “Dogs had to get out of the way, people had to spring to the sides, even the guard at the street crossing had to give them a signal as he would to a real wagon owner.” The miracle must, of course, end, and although a policeman, “as is his duty,” arrests the boys, it is not this stricture of society that brings the miracle back to the mundane. Joy, freedom, fails for the simplest reason: “one of them wanted to sell the horse, and the other wanted to take it home. With that the miracle was over. Naturally all evil enters the world because of left and right.” In a story barely over two pages, Musil celebrates those fleeting times we rise from the little, inescapable conflicts of being human, and find our way outside of them.
Focusing on one aspect of these stories would be a lack of readerly vision. The collection is as varied in style as it is in quality, and some pieces are absolute stand-outs, like “The Toady” or “Shadow Play in the Little City,” while other favorites are bound to come from personal taste. If one is inclined toward horror tales springing from eroticism, then “The Inn on the Outskirts” is a perfect choice. The wonderful, twisted tale of “Shadow Play,” with its unsolved murder, the lurking suggestions of answers, is a dark puzzle, Nabokovian in the tight game it plays, while keeping to Musil’s taste in psychology. “When Papa Learned to Play Tennis” is a short essay about sports, and the way it influences and is influenced by family, culture, and nostalgia. It’s the type of contemporary essay still so popular, and lovers of those would be drawn to Musil’s version.
When Musil is accurate and predicting cultural trends, it’s as if he scored an exciting point, like when he bemoans: “what a great moral problem is heralded in the coming ages of sports by the marriage of business sense and physical agility of pickpockets!” This concession has done nothing but grow in his time, and separating him from many other bemoaners, Musil includes everyone making money from sports, including journalists, instead of just high-salaried athletes. Or, writing about one subject, we see how relevant his contribution is to issues now, such as “Moral Institutions,” with its application to So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and arguments on both sides of the internet’s endless shame cycle.
But he is not always a fortune-teller. At times, culture didn’t go in the direction he sensed it would, and at other, more mundane times, his observations or complaints are a reminder of how little we people change. The latter instances are simultaneously a reassurance, that maybe the degradation of art isn’t as bad as doomsayers preach, and a chance to be grateful for the opportunities and insights Musil provides, his encouragement away from rigidity and ideology and towards nuance, towards a reminder that “History is created in just this way—from the periphery, from accidents, admixtures, etc.”
It doesn’t matter the topic or the relevancy, the best essays are a pleasure. With contemporary essays, the dreaded thinkpiece, you know the stakes, and likely have your opinions or biases. Part of the enjoyment in these is to rail against a stance, to object to or agree with details that you have a connection with. With Thought Flights, unless you are an expert on the period, the context is mostly lost, oftentimes you can’t imagine which side of a controversy you would find yourself on. Grill’s footnotes provide ample background information, clarifying contemporary gossip or controversies, though they aren’t essential. By the end, I wasn’t reading them for facts to help place the stories, but because they show the depth of research Grill, author of a scholarly work on Musil, put into this project, and for me, more importantly, they are often entertaining in their own right.
That contextual knowledge isn’t necessary becomes a bit of freedom, in a world full of thinkpieces, opinions, hot takes, to read freely, for the beauty of the prose, for the movement of thought alone should be appreciated. Musil is a writer of aesthetics, and the fleet-footed short pieces allow him to dazzle. In “Robert Musil to an Unknown Little Girl,” he makes descriptions of colors into a game, “A red patch – it is nothing but the red-painted head of a wooden post – seems like a blooming branch behind a shivering bush; a tilled flower bed: the heart is terrified by it.”
There is much to appreciate in Thought Flights, in meeting Musil outside of his major works. There’s more humor, flippant mockery, and satire. He takes hope along with his cynicism, “one must first have had one’s soul repeatedly broken” to “find one’s way to art.” He engages in the absurd fun that is “War Diary of a Flea,” with a flea-narrator determined to establish the dignity of fleas. Yet he never strays far from serious, giving a lesson in pairing cultural philosophy with play and pleasure. At one point, Musil writes, “In between two or three rainy days there always comes a half-summery one where the puddles stay in the sky and the sun swims in a friendly way between them.” Confusions of Young Torless and Man Without Qualities are books for those rainy days, and Thought Flights for that half-summery one.
*****
P. T. Smith is a writer and reader living in Vermont. His work has appeared in Three Percent, Quarterly Conversation, Quebec Reads, and Music and Literature, among others.