Discovering the Inner Man without Qualities

Capturing the moment in words is never easy. It is especially so when an uncertain moment is upon someone. I am not sure how much difference does it make when this someone is me. This indifferent difference must be due to the impact that the idea behind Musil's book The Man without Qualities has on its attentive reader who cannot but laugh at its occasional estranged descriptions of human foibles, or at occasional tender contourings of the qualities of the place and age it was written in. Not that anyone can vouchsafe how much difference or similarity there is between here and now and then and there. Wherever and whenever the former are. In other words, as Musil apparently takes the notion of qualitieslessness to a degree of theoretical lucidity all the while staying within the confines of novel as a genre, the novel becomes a thing whose qualities gain foothold if only in the field of imagination and attention of its occasional readers. The background to this consideration is, of course, Joyce's Ulysses that with a more or less elitist bent sets the standards of what counts as worldwide recognized literary genius. With the barriers of translations, translatability, and unequal paces of linguistic development, since it seems that English went through far more many transformations and changes than German did, the masterworks from the interwar margins of Europe still seem to be clamouring for attention globally. Even more so is the fate of even more marginal peoples and places. Which makes me think of whether the in-between world of post-Hapsburg literature and memory can be instructive of strategies for overcoming global marginality of language, geography or culture.