MUSIL'S KAKANIA is fiction — a caricature that serves both the satirical as well as the utopian intentions of the author. The “dual” monarchy of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire is satirized as a political construction whose historical uniqueness defies representation — both in terms of actual governance as well as in terms of symbolic representation. In fact, the failure of the one cannot be separated from the impossibility of the other. The empire's peculiar construction is described as “a whole and a part” (MWQ 180). The whole is set off from a part that paradoxically both belongs and does not belong to it. Rather than a synecdoche as the classic trope of the absolutistic state, the relationship between whole and parts is one of metonymy. It is thus an entirely contiguous relationship, contingent upon chance delimitations. Because of this irrepressible contiguity of its internal organization, there is always the possibility that the whole might disintegrate, and that the order among its elements might change completely.

Musil's characterization of the dual monarchy as “a whole and a part” suggests that the empire's political identity is founded on the paradox of a whole that is less than the sum of the existing parts. Whether the empire was recognized as a whole depended on one's point of view. Considering, however, that constitutive parts of the empire are described as being situated inside as well as outside of it, no point of view is actually conceivable.