The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic

by Robert Musil

  This was without doubt a powerful view of what it meant to be an engineer. It could serve as the frame for a charming future self-portrait, showing a man with resolute features, a shag pipe clenched between his teeth, a tweed cap on his head, traveling in superb riding boots between Cape Town and Canada on daring missions for his business. Between trips there would always be time to draw on his technical knowledge for advice on world organization and management, or time to formulate aphorisms like the one by Emerson that ought to hang over every workbench: “Mankind walks the earth as a prophecy of the future, and all its deeds are tests and experiments, for every deed can be surpassed by the next.” Actually, Ulrich had written this himself, putting together several of Emerson’s pronouncements.

  It is hard to say why engineers don’t quite live up to this vision. Why, for instance, do they so often wear a watch chain slung on a steep, lopsided curve from the vest pocket to a button higher up, or across the stomach in one high and two low loops, as if it were a metrical foot in a poem? Why do they favor tiepins topped with stag’s teeth or tiny horseshoes? Why do they wear suits constructed like the early stages of the automobile? And why, finally, do they never speak of anything but their profession, or if they do speak of something else, why do they have that peculiar, stiff, remote, superficial manner that never goes deeper inside than the epiglottis? Of course this is not true of all of them, far from it, but it is true of many, and it was true of all those Ulrich met the first time he went to work in a factory office, and it was true of those he met the second time. They all turned out to be men firmly tied to their drawing boards, who loved their profession and were wonderfully efficient at it. But any suggestion that they might apply their daring ideas to themselves instead of to their machines would have taken them aback, much as if they had been asked to use a hammer for the unnatural purpose of killing a man.

  And so Ulrich’s second and more mature attempt to become a man of stature, by way of technology, came quickly to an end.

  11

  THE MOST IMPORTANT ATTEMPT OF ALL

  Thinking over his time up to that point today, Ulrich might shake his head in wonder, as if someone were to tell him about his previous incarnations; but his third effort was different. An engineer may understandably become absorbed in his specialty instead of giving himself up to the freedom and vastness of the world of thought, even though his machines are delivered to the ends of the earth, for he is no more called upon to adapt the daring and innovative soul of his technology to his private soul than a machine can be expected to apply to itself the differential calculus upon which it is based. But the same cannot be said of mathematics, which is the new method of thought itself, the mind itself, the very wellspring of the times and the primal source of an incredible transformation.

  If it is the fulfillment of man’s primordial dreams to be able to fly, travel with the fish, drill our way beneath the bodies of towering mountains, send messages with godlike speed, see the invisible and hear the distant speak, hear the voices of the dead, be miraculously cured while asleep, see with our own eyes how we will look twenty years after our death, learn in flickering nights thousands of things above and below this earth no one ever knew before; if light, warmth, power, pleasure, comforts, are man’s primordial dreams, then present-day research is not only science but sorcery, spells woven from the highest powers of heart and brain, forcing God to open one fold after another of his cloak; a religion whose dogma is permeated and sustained by the hard, courageous, flexible, razor-cold, razor-keen logic of mathematics.

  Of course there is no denying that all these primordial dreams appear, in the opinion of nonmathematicians, to have been suddenly realized in a form quite different from the original fantasy. Baron Münchhausen’s post horn was more beautiful than our canned music, the Seven-League Boots more beautiful than a car, Oberon’s kingdom lovelier than a railway tunnel, the magic root of the mandrake better than a telegraphed image, eating of one’s mother’s heart and then understanding birds more beautiful than an ethologic study of a bird’s vocalizing. We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one’s big and second toes; there’s work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is exactly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it move frantically ever since, unable to shake off that rotten feeling of antlike industry. There is really no need to belabor the point, since it is obvious to most of us these days that mathematics has taken possession, like a demon, of every aspect of our lives. Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one’s soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, historians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference toward the whole, man’s monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money-grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even back when Ulrich first turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had all, typically, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school. This later put them in a position to prove that mathematics, the mother of natural science and grandmother of technology, was also the primordial mother of the spirit that eventually gave rise to poison gas and warplanes.

  The only people who actually lived in ignorance of these dangers were the mathematicians themselves and their disciples the scientists, whose souls were as unaffected by all this as if they were racing cyclists pedaling away for dear life, blind to everything in the world except the back wheel of the rider ahead of them. But one thing, on the other hand, could safely be said about Ulrich: he loved mathematics because of the kind of people who could not endure it. He was in love with science not so much on scientific as on human grounds. He saw that in all the problems that come within its orbit, science thinks differently from the laity. If we translate “scientific outlook” into “view of life,” “hypothesis” into “attempt,” and “truth” into “action,” then there would be no notable scientist or mathematician whose life’s work, in courage and revolutionary impact, did not far outmatch the greatest deeds in history. The man has not yet been born who could say to his followers: “You may steal, kill, fornicate—our teaching is so strong that it will transform the cesspool of your sins into clear, sparkling mountain streams.” But in science it happens every few years that something till then held to be in error suddenly revolutionizes the field, or that some dim and disdained idea becomes the ruler of a new realm of thought. Such events are not merely upheavals but lead us upward like a Jacob’s ladder. The life of science is as strong and carefree and glorious as a fairy tale. And Ulrich felt: People simply don’t realize it, they have no idea how much thinking can be done already; if they could be taught to think a new way, they would change their lives.

  Now, it is a question whether the world is so topsyturvy that it always needs turning around. The world itself has always had a twofold answer to this question. From the beginning of the world most people, in their youth, have been in favor of turning the world around. They have always felt it was ridiculous the way their elders clung to convention and thought with the heart—a lump of flesh—instead of with the brain. To the young, the moral stupidity of their elders has always looked like the same inability to make new connections that constitutes ordinary intellectual stupidity, and their own natural morality has always been one of
achievement, heroism, and change. But they have no sooner reached their years of accomplishment than they no longer remember this, and even less do they want to be reminded of it. Which is why many of those for whom mathematics or science is a true profession are bound to disapprove of anyone taking up science for reasons such as Ulrich’s.

  Nevertheless, experts judged his achievements in this third profession, in the few years since he had taken it up, to have been not inconsiderable.

  12

  THE LADY WHOSE LOVE ULRICH WON AFTER A CONVERSATION ABOUT SPORTS AND MYSTICISM

  It turned out that Bonadea, too, yearned for great ideas.

  Bonadea was the lady who had rescued Ulrich on the night of his illfated boxing match and who had visited him the next morning shrouded in veils. He had baptized her Bonadea, “the Good Goddess,” for the way she had entered his life and also after that goddess of chastity whose ancient temple in Rome had become, by an odd reversal of fate, a center for all the vices. She did not know that story. She was pleased at the euphonious nickname Ulrich had conferred on her, and wore it on her visits to him as if it were a sumptuously embroidered housedress. “Am I really your good goddess,” she asked, “your own bona dea?” And the correct pronunciation of these two words demanded that she throw her arms around his neck and lift her face up to his with a gaze full of feeling.

  She was the wife of a prominent man and the fond mother of two handsome boys. Her favorite phrase was “highly respectable,” applied to people, messengers, shops, and feelings, when she wanted to praise them. She could utter the words “truth, goodness, and beauty” as often and as casually as someone else might say “Thursday.” Her intellectual needs were most deeply satisfied by her concept of a peaceful, idyllic life in the bosom of her family, its radiant happiness toned down to a gentle lamplight by the hovering presence far beneath of the dark realm of “Lead me not into temptation.” She had only one fault: she could become inordinately aroused at the mere sight of a man. She was not lustful; she was sensual, as other people have other afflictions, for instance suffering from sweaty hands or blushing too readily. It was something she had apparently been born with and could never do anything to curb. Meeting Ulrich in circumstances so like a novel, so firing to the imagination, she had been destined from the first moment to fall prey to a passion that began as sympathy, then led, after a brief though intense inner struggle, to forbidden intimacies, and continued as a seesaw between pangs of sinful desire and pangs of remorse.

  But Ulrich was only the most recent of God knows how many men in her life. Once they have caught on, men tend to treat such nymphomaniac women no better than morons for whom the cheapest tricks are good enough and who can be tripped up in the same way time and again. The tenderer feelings of male passion are something like the snarling of a jaguar over fresh meat—he doesn’t like to be disturbed. Consequently, Bonadea often led a double life, like any other respectable citizen who, in the dark interstices of his consciousness, is a train robber. Whenever no one was holding her in his arms, this quiet, regal woman was oppressed by self-hatred for the lies and humiliations she had to risk in order to be held in someone’s arms. When her senses were aroused she was subdued and gentle; her blend of rapture and tears, crude directness shadowed by predictable remorse, mania bolting in panic from the lurking depression that threatened, heightened her attraction, arousing excitement much like a ceaseless tattoo on a drum hung with black crêpe. But between lapses, in her intervals of calm, in the remorse that made her aware of her helplessness, she was full of the claims of respectability, and this made life with her far from simple. A man was expected to be truthful and kind, sympathetic toward every misfortune, devoted to the Imperial House, respectful toward everything respected, and, morally, to conduct himself with all the delicacy of a visitor at a sickbed.

  Not that it made any difference if these expectations were disappointed. To justify her conduct, she had made up a tale of how her husband had caused her unfortunate condition in the innocent early years of their marriage. This husband, considerably older and physically bigger than she, was cast as a ruthless monster in the sad, portentous account she gave to Ulrich during the very first hours of their new love. It was only sometime afterward that he discovered that the man was a well-known and respected judge, of high professional competence, who was also given to the form of hunting that consists in the harmless gunning down of wild game; a welcome figure at various pubs and clubs frequented by hunters and lawyers, where male topics rather than art or love were the subject of conversation. The only failing of this rather unaffected, good-natured, and jovial man was that he was married to his wife, so that he found himself more often than other men engaged with her in what is referred to in the language of the law courts as a casual encounter. The psychological effect of submitting for years to a man she had married from motives of the head rather than the heart had fostered in Bonadea the illusion that she was physically overexcitable, and fantasy made it almost independent of her consciousness. She was chained to this man, so favored by circumstance, by some compulsion she could not fathom; she despised him for her own spinelessness and felt spineless in order to despise him; she was unfaithful to him as a means of escape but always chose the most awkward moments to speak of him or of their children; and she was never able to let go of him completely. Like many unhappy wives, she ended up with an attitude—in an otherwise rather unstable personal environment—determined by resentment of her solidly rooted husband, and she carried her conflict with him into every new experience that was supposed to free her from him.

  What could a man do to silence her lamentations but transport her with all possible speed from the depressive to the manic state? She would promptly charge the doer of this deed with taking advantage of her weakness and with being devoid of all finer sensibilities, but her affliction laid a veil of moist tenderness over her eyes when she, as she put it with scientific detachment, “inclined” to this man.

  13

  A RACEHORSE OF GENIUS CRYSTALLIZES THE RECOGNITION OF BEING A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

  It is not immaterial that Ulrich could say to himself that he had accomplished something in his field. His work had in fact brought him recognition. Admiration would have been too much to ask, for even in the realm of truth, admiration is reserved for older scholars on whom it depends whether or not one gets that professorship or professorial chair. Strictly speaking, he had remained “promising,” which is what, in the Republic of Learning, they call the republicans, that is, those who imagine that they should give all their energies to their work rather than reserve a large part of them for getting ahead. They forget that individual achievement is limited, while on the other hand everybody wants to get ahead, and they neglect the social duty of climbing, which means beginning as a climber so as to become in turn a prop and stay to other climbers on the way up.

  And one day Ulrich stopped wanting to be promising. The time had come when people were starting to speak of genius on the soccer field or in the boxing ring, although there would still be at most only one genius of a halfback or great tennis-court tactician for every ten or so explorers, tenors, or writers of genius who cropped up in the papers. The new spirit was not yet quite sure of itself. But just then Ulrich suddenly read somewhere, like a premonitory breath of ripening summer, the expression “the racehorse of genius.” It stood in the report of a sensational racing success, and the author was probably not aware of the full magnitude of the inspiration his pen owed to the communal spirit. But Ulrich instantly grasped the fateful connection between his entire career and this genius among racehorses. For the horse has, of course, always been sacred to the cavalry, and as a youth Ulrich had hardly ever heard talk in barracks of anything but horses and women. He had fled from this to become a great man, only to find that when as the result of his varied exertions he perhaps could have felt within reach of his goal, the horse had beaten him to it.

  No doubt this has a certain temporal justification, since it is not s
o very long ago that our idea of an admirable masculine spirit was exemplified by a person whose courage was moral courage, whose strength was the strength of a conviction, whose steadfastness was of the heart and of virtue, and who regarded speed as childish, feinting as not permissible, and agility and verve as contrary to dignity. Ultimately no such person could be found alive, except on the faculty of prep schools and in all sorts of literary pronouncements; he had become an ideological phantasm, and life had to seek a new image of manliness. As it looked around, it found that the tricks and dodges of an inventive mind working on logical calculations do not really differ all that much from the fighting moves of a well-trained body. There is a general fighting ability that is made cold and calculating by obstacles and openings, whether one is trained to search out the vulnerable spot in a problem or in a bodily opponent. A psychotechnical analysis of a great thinker and a champion boxer would probably show their cunning, courage, precision and technique, and the speed of their reactions in their respective fields to be the same. It is probably a safe assumption that the qualities and skills by which they succeed do not differ from those of a famous steeplechaser—for one should never underestimate how many major qualities are bought into play in clearing a hedge. But on top of this, a horse and a boxer have an advantage over a great mind in that their performance and rank can be objectively measured, so that the best of them is really acknowledged as the best. This is why sports and strictly objective criteria have deservedly come to the forefront, displacing such obsolete concepts as genius and human greatness.