Next year: August 29-30, 2015
Middlemarch by George Eliot
This Year: September 13-14, 2014
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
by Louise DiMattio and Jim Hall
We had
great weather for the weekend to accompany the great discussions of a long,
difficult novel that was very rewarding in the end. Almost uniformly, everyone
wrote that it was an awful novel to read (1 on a scale of 1-5) but a 5 to
discuss. That was pretty much unanimous.
The
story takes place in Austria just prior to the outbreak of World War I and
concerns some upper middle class people who attempt to save Austrian “culture”
and ensure peace into the future, of course this helps set the stage for the
War. "If only we didn’t have to put
up with those damned Prussians."
Ulrich, the main character, to me is a narcissist who cannot come to
terms with himself or anyone else for that matter, remaining detached,
uninvolved on any meaningful level.
The novel is chock full of philosophical and psychological satire while
making innumerable observations about public and personal relationships that
seem somehow familiar.
“In a
community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile goal,
provided one doesn’t hesitate or reflect too long. Targets are short-term, but since life is short too, results
are maximized, which is all people need to be happy, because the soul is formed
by what you accomplish, whereas what you desire without achieving it merely
warps the soul. Happiness depends
very little on what we want, but only on achieving whatever it is. Besides, zoology teaches that a number
of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.” P. 27
“No one
knew exactly what was in the making, nobody could have said whether it was to
be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps a shuffling of
society. So everyone said what he
pleased about it. But everywhere
people were suddenly standing up to struggle against the old order. Everywhere the right man suddenly
appeared in the right place and --- this is so important! --- enterprising men of
action joined forces with enterprising men of intellect. Talents of a kind that had previously
been stifled or had never taken part in public life suddenly came to the
fore. They were as different from
each other as could be, and could not have been more contradictory in their
aims.” P. 53
Ulrich
speaking on his scheme for living the history of ideas instead of the history
of the world: ". . . People make
love because there is love to be made, and they do it in the prevailing mode;
people are proud as the Noble Savage, or as a Spaniard, a virgin, or a lion; in
ninety out of a hundred cases even murder is committed only because it is perceived
as tragic or grandiose. Apart from
the truly notable exceptions, the successful political molders of the world in
particular have a lot in common with the hacks who write for the commercial
theater; the lively scenes they create bore us by their lack of ideas and
novelty, but by the same token they lull us into that sleepy state of lowered
resistance in which we acquiesce in everything put before us. Seen in this light, history arises out
of routine ideas, out of indifference to ideas, so that reality comes primarily
of nothing being done for ideas.
This might be briefly summed up, he claimed, by saying that we care too
little about what is happening and too much about to whom, when, and where it
is happening, so that it is not the essence of what happens that matters to us
but only the plot; not the opening up of some new experience of life but only
the pattern of what we already know, corresponding precisely to the difference
between good plays and merely successful plays. . . ." P. 395
After our second discussion on Saturday we enjoyed a
lecture by Sean Forester, an artist who comes from Sonoma County but has lived
and worked in Florence for many years and now runs the Golden Gate Atelier in
San Francisco. He attended St. John’s, a GB college in Annapolis, Maryland and is
a frequent speaker and Great Books Discussion Leader for Classical Pursuits. He
spoke to the group on Saturday afternoon about artists working in Vienna at the
same time that the novel takes place.
Specifically, he spoke about and showed slides of the work
of Gustav Klimt. He also showed a very different side of life at the time in
rapidly industrializing Europe through the etchings and drawings of Kathe
Kollwitz. Life in the mines and the shipyards was very different from the
palaces of the Parallel Campaign in Musil’s novel, that's for sure! It was an excellent presentation.
After dinner, we enjoyed a talk by Philip Beard, Professor
Emeritus at Sonoma State University in German Studies, Global Studies,
Holocaust Studies and War and Peace Studies. The subject of his PhD. thesis was Musil’s novel A Man
Without Qualities. He offered some
valuable insights, clearing up some factual questions and some possible interpretations of the reading
and read some snippets from the second volume of the work which were interesting or
disturbing depending on your point of view. It was an excellent presentation from a very knowledgeable speaker.
On the weekend:
Sheri Kinsvater wrote on Facebook today that the weekend
flew by and was a great event. She said that Great Bookies know much better how
to organize an event than Diotima!
(D. is a not so competent character in the novel.)
Paula Weinberger said: we've done it again...a great
weekend!
This Long Novel Weekend was an outstanding success. Many
thanks and kudos go to our discussion leaders: Kay White, Paula Weinberger, Claudia O"Callaghan, Rob
Calvert, Jean Circiello, and Wallis Leslie.
They all got rave reviews.
