Very interesting. I will have to see the film, A few thoughts: The idea of succeeding in committing adultery may be inspired by Musil's story, The Completion [or Perfection] of Love, in Unions. Another thing, while you really lucidly describe the despairing moments in Musil's novel, in my reading, there is another aspect you and maybe Antonioni are not appreciating enough: that is, the positive aspect of the possibility sense, of being open. While on the one hand there is a sense of void and meaninglessness, there is also a countervailing freedom and creative force always present, not to mention repeated moments of mystical wholeness and ecstatic higher experience. Everything is (at least) two sided. The inner Ulrich is not only filled with rage at the shallowness of the world's conforming and coercing patterns, but also with love of life and of experiences. Otherwise how would he see that so many people are living in such dull superficiality? He is earnestly searching for something more meaningful--though not ever solid or final, never fully harmonious or complete--a different way of being in the world, more authentically and more alive. It is to be found through art and ethics. My sense from your lovely essay is that Antonioni is more focused on the dark aspects, on the void, than on this other essential part of Musil's quest.
P.S. There is for Musil a crucial different between whateverism and openness. While whatevereism is indeed empty and worthy of despair, lacking all ethical or aesthetic value, openness is the path to creative possibility and individual agency.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments, and for the suggestions/recommendations (here and in Part 47). I’ll take a look at that short story. I also remember a line from The Man Without Qualities about Agathe ‘not having a talent for adultery’ or words to that effect.
You’re right, I definitely favour the bleak and the pessimistic, and this is a limitation that manifests itself throughout my analysis of Red Desert. As you say, it may be Antonioni’s limitation as well, but as discussed in other posts (most recently Part 51) many critics read his films more optimistically than I do – like clockwork, I always disagree with them!
Regarding Ulrich’s sense of openness and possibilities, in Part 48 I discuss the passage where the narrator says of Ulrich, ‘But even as he thought all this, he was also aware of how this abstraction extended a man’s powers a thousandfold.’ I'm not sure I fully understood this, and would be interested to hear your take on it. My sense is that the expansion of powers comes from the very loss of coherence and narrative order that so troubles Ulrich. I think this feeds into Giuliana’s ‘everything that happens’ speech in Red Desert, which I’ve always found strangely powerful.
One thing I love about art is that it can be a safe space in which to say (to re-work the terms of your comment): ‘On the one hand there is void and meaninglessness, but there is a countervailing freedom and creative force…but that force may not be countervailing after all, it may be weightless and leave us plunging back into the void. Ulrich is not only filled with rage at the shallowness of the world, but also with love of life…but that love also keeps disintegrating back into a state of despair. He sees that others are living in dull superficiality and earnestly searches for something more meaningful…but he also keeps finding that dull superficiality in himself, and even in his seemingly earnest quest for meaning. Eschewing the solid, the final, the harmonious, and the complete is a source of strength for him…but it is also a condition of low-burning existential horror that he has not chosen and cannot escape. That different way of life is to be found through art and ethics…or perhaps it is not to be found at all, and art and ethics are just sophisticated forms of denial.’
All of this may well be rooted more in my own miserable feelings about existence than in Musil’s text, and may be at odds with what he intended – I’m grateful to be challenged on this by someone with your expertise, because I’m wary of engaging in an act of complete ‘projection’ and mis-reading this novel. But I think we often tend to assume that leaning into bleakness and despair (without saying ‘…on the other hand there is hope’) will be limiting, perhaps because in real life despair is generally experienced as a ‘dead end’, an emotion that closes off possibilities. Reading The Man Without Qualities, I felt that the despair – especially the lapse that comes after the moment of hope and confidence – was what gave the novel much of its power, and indeed what made it feel so open and provocative. Broch’s blissed-out fantasies about the future we will transition to (after passing through the ‘absolute zero’ of disintegrated values) seemed, by contrast, oppressive and exhausting.
Very interesting. I will have to see the film, A few thoughts: The idea of succeeding in committing adultery may be inspired by Musil's story, The Completion [or Perfection] of Love, in Unions. Another thing, while you really lucidly describe the despairing moments in Musil's novel, in my reading, there is another aspect you and maybe Antonioni are not appreciating enough: that is, the positive aspect of the possibility sense, of being open. While on the one hand there is a sense of void and meaninglessness, there is also a countervailing freedom and creative force always present, not to mention repeated moments of mystical wholeness and ecstatic higher experience. Everything is (at least) two sided. The inner Ulrich is not only filled with rage at the shallowness of the world's conforming and coercing patterns, but also with love of life and of experiences. Otherwise how would he see that so many people are living in such dull superficiality? He is earnestly searching for something more meaningful--though not ever solid or final, never fully harmonious or complete--a different way of being in the world, more authentically and more alive. It is to be found through art and ethics. My sense from your lovely essay is that Antonioni is more focused on the dark aspects, on the void, than on this other essential part of Musil's quest.
P.S. There is for Musil a crucial different between whateverism and openness. While whatevereism is indeed empty and worthy of despair, lacking all ethical or aesthetic value, openness is the path to creative possibility and individual agency.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments, and for the suggestions/recommendations (here and in Part 47). I’ll take a look at that short story. I also remember a line from The Man Without Qualities about Agathe ‘not having a talent for adultery’ or words to that effect.
You’re right, I definitely favour the bleak and the pessimistic, and this is a limitation that manifests itself throughout my analysis of Red Desert. As you say, it may be Antonioni’s limitation as well, but as discussed in other posts (most recently Part 51) many critics read his films more optimistically than I do – like clockwork, I always disagree with them!
Regarding Ulrich’s sense of openness and possibilities, in Part 48 I discuss the passage where the narrator says of Ulrich, ‘But even as he thought all this, he was also aware of how this abstraction extended a man’s powers a thousandfold.’ I'm not sure I fully understood this, and would be interested to hear your take on it. My sense is that the expansion of powers comes from the very loss of coherence and narrative order that so troubles Ulrich. I think this feeds into Giuliana’s ‘everything that happens’ speech in Red Desert, which I’ve always found strangely powerful.
One thing I love about art is that it can be a safe space in which to say (to re-work the terms of your comment): ‘On the one hand there is void and meaninglessness, but there is a countervailing freedom and creative force…but that force may not be countervailing after all, it may be weightless and leave us plunging back into the void. Ulrich is not only filled with rage at the shallowness of the world, but also with love of life…but that love also keeps disintegrating back into a state of despair. He sees that others are living in dull superficiality and earnestly searches for something more meaningful…but he also keeps finding that dull superficiality in himself, and even in his seemingly earnest quest for meaning. Eschewing the solid, the final, the harmonious, and the complete is a source of strength for him…but it is also a condition of low-burning existential horror that he has not chosen and cannot escape. That different way of life is to be found through art and ethics…or perhaps it is not to be found at all, and art and ethics are just sophisticated forms of denial.’
All of this may well be rooted more in my own miserable feelings about existence than in Musil’s text, and may be at odds with what he intended – I’m grateful to be challenged on this by someone with your expertise, because I’m wary of engaging in an act of complete ‘projection’ and mis-reading this novel. But I think we often tend to assume that leaning into bleakness and despair (without saying ‘…on the other hand there is hope’) will be limiting, perhaps because in real life despair is generally experienced as a ‘dead end’, an emotion that closes off possibilities. Reading The Man Without Qualities, I felt that the despair – especially the lapse that comes after the moment of hope and confidence – was what gave the novel much of its power, and indeed what made it feel so open and provocative. Broch’s blissed-out fantasies about the future we will transition to (after passing through the ‘absolute zero’ of disintegrated values) seemed, by contrast, oppressive and exhausting.