The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic

by Robert Musil

  It was like the struggle of a shadow with a wall, and in the end Moosbrugger’s shadow was reduced to a lurid flickering. Ulrich was present on the last day of the trial. When the presiding judge read out the psychiatrists’ findings that the accused was responsible for his actions, Moosbrugger rose to his feet and announced to the court: “I am satisfied with this opinion and have achieved my purpose.” The response of scornful incredulity in the eyes around him made him add angrily: “Since it is I who forced the indictment, I declare myself satisfied with the conduct of the case.” The presiding judge, who had now become all strictness and retribution, reprimanded him with the remark that the court was not concerned with giving him satisfaction. Then he read him the death sentence, exactly as if it were now time to answer seriously the nonsense Moosbrugger had been spouting throughout the trial, to the amusement of the spectators. Moosbrugger said nothing to this, so that he would not appear to be frightened. Then the proceedings were concluded and it was all over. His mind reeled; he fell back, helpless against the arrogance of those who failed to understand. Even as the guards were leading him out, he turned around, struggling for words, raised his hands in the air, and cried out, in a voice that shook him free of his guards’ grip: “I am satisfied, even though I must confess to you that you have condemned a madman.”

  That was a non sequitur, but Ulrich sat there breathless. This was clearly madness, and just as clearly it was no more than a distortion of our own elements of being. Cracked and obscure it was; it somehow occurred to Ulrich that if mankind could dream as a whole, that dream would be Moosbrugger. Ulrich came back to reality only when “that miserable clown of a lawyer,” as Moosbrugger ungratefully referred to him during the trial, announced that he would appeal to have the verdict set aside on grounds of some detail or other, while his towering client was led away.

  19

  A LETTER OF ADMONITION AND A CHANCE TO ACQUIRE QUALITIES. RIVALRY OF TWO ACCESSIONS TO THE THRONE

  So the time passed, until one day Ulrich received a letter from his father.

  “My dear son, once again several months have gone by without my being able to deduce from your scanty communications that you have taken the slightest step forward in your career or have made any preparations to do so.

  “I will joyfully acknowledge that in the course of the last few years the satisfaction has been vouchsafed me of hearing your achievements praised in various esteemed quarters, with predictions on that basis of a promising future for you. But on the one hand, the tendency you have inherited, though not from me, to make enthusiastic first strides in some new endeavor that attracts you, only to forget soon afterward, so to speak, what you owe yourself and those who have rested their hopes on you, and on the other hand, my inability to detect in your communications the slightest sign of a plan for your future, fill me with grave concern.

  “It is not only that at your age other men have already secured a solid position in life, but also that I may die at any time, and the property I shall bequeath in equal shares to you and your sister, though not negligible, is not sufficiently ample, under present circumstances, to secure unaided that social position which you will now, at last, have to establish for yourself. What fills me with grave concern is the thought that ever since you took your degree, you have only vaguely talked of plans to be realized in various fields, and which you, in your usual way, may considerably overestimate, but that you never write of taking any interest in a university appointment, nor of any preliminary approach to one or another university with regard to such plans, nor of making any other contact with influential circles. No one can possibly suspect me of denigrating a scholar’s need for independence, considering that it was I who was the first, forty-seven years ago, to break with the other schools of criminal jurisprudence on that point in my book on Samuel Pufendorf’s Theory of the Responsibility for Moral Actions and Its Relation to Modern Jurisprudence, which you know and which is now going into its twelfth edition, where I brought the true context of the problem to light. Just as little can I accept, after the experiences of a hardworking life, that a man rely on himself alone and neglect the academic and social connections that provide the support by means of which alone the individual’s work prospers as part of a fruitful and beneficial whole.

  “I therefore hope and trust that I shall be hearing from you at your earliest convenience, and that the expenditures I have made on behalf of your advancement will be rewarded by your taking up such connections, now that you have returned home, and by your ceasing to neglect them. I have also written in this vein to my old and trusted friend and patron, the former President of the Treasury and present Chairman of the Imperial Family Court Division, Office of the Court Chamberlain, His Excellency Count Stallburg, asking him to give his beneficent attention to the request you will in due course soon present to him. My highly placed friend has already been so kind as to reply by return mail. It is your good fortune that he will not only see you but expresses a warm interest in your personal progress as depicted by myself. This means that your future is assured, insofar as it is in my power and estimation to do so, assuming that you understand how to make a favorable impression on His Excellency, while also strengthening the esteem in which you are held by the leading academic circles.

  “As regards the request I am certain you will be glad to lay before His Excellency, as soon as you know what it is about, its object is the following:

  “There will take place in Germany in 1918, specifically on or about the 15th of June, a great celebration marking the jubilee of Emperor Wilhelm II’s thirtieth year upon the throne, to impress upon the world Germany’s greatness and power. Although that is still several years away, a reliable source informs us that preparations are already being made, though for the time being quite unofficially, of course. Now you are certainly aware that in the same year our own revered Emperor Franz Josef will be celebrating the seventieth jubilee of his accession and that this date falls on December 2nd. Given the modesty which we Austrians display far too much in all questions concerning our own fatherland, there is reason to fear, I must say, that we will experience another Sadowa, meaning that the Germans, with their trained methodical aim for effect, will anticipate us, just as they did in that campaign, when they introduced the needle gun and took us by surprise.

  “Fortunately, the anxiety I have just expressed has already been anticipated by other patriotic personages with good connections, and I can tell you confidentially that there is a campaign under way in Vienna to forestall the eventuality of such a coup and to bring to bear the full weight of a seventy-year reign, so rich in blessings and sorrows, against a jubilee of a mere thirty years. Inasmuch as December 2nd cannot of course possibly be moved ahead of June 15th, someone came up with the splendid idea of declaring the entire year of 1918 as a jubilee year for our Emperor of Peace. I am, however, only insofar apprised of this as the institutions of which I am a member have had occasion to express their views on this proposal. You will learn the details as soon as you present yourself to Count Stallburg, who intends to place you on the Planning Committee in a position of considerable distinction for so young a man as yourself.

  “Let me also prevail upon you not to continue neglecting—as, to my acute embarrassment, you have—the relations I have so long recommended to you with Section Chief Tuzzi of the Imperial Foreign Office, but to call at once upon his wife, who, as you know, is the daughter of a cousin of my late brother’s widow, and hence your cousin. I am told she occupies a prominent position in the project I have just described. My revered friend Count Stallburg has already had the extraordinary kindness to inform her of your intended visit to her, which is why you must not delay it a moment longer.

  “As regards myself, there is nothing much to report; other than my lectures, work on the new edition of my aforementioned book takes up all of my time, as well as the remainder of energy one still has at one’s disposal in old age. One has to make good use of one’s time, for it is short.

&nb
sp; “From your sister I hear only that she is in good health. She has a fine, capable husband, although she will never admit that she is satisfied with her lot and feels happy in it.

  “With my blessing, your loving

  Father.”

  PART II

  PSEUDOREALITY PREVAILS

  20

  A TOUCH OF REALITY. IN SPITE OF THE ABSENCE OF QUALITIES, ULRICH TAKES RESOLUTE AND SPIRITED ACTION

  That Ulrich actually decided to call on Count Stallburg was prompted not least, though not only, by curiosity.

  Count Stallburg had his office in that Imperial and Royal citadel the Hofburg, and the Emperor and King of Kakania was a legendary old gentleman. A great many books have of course been written about him since, and exactly what he did, prevented, or left undone is now known, but then, in the last decade of his and Kakania’s life, the younger people who kept abreast of the arts and sciences sometimes wondered whether he actually existed. The number of his portraits one saw was almost as large as the number of his kingdom’s inhabitants; on his birthday as much food and drink was consumed as on that of the Savior, bonfires blazed on the mountains, and the voices of millions vowed that they loved him as a father; an anthem in his honor was the only work of poetry or music of which every Kakanian knew at least a line. But this popularity and publicity was so superconvincing that believing in his existence was rather like believing in stars that one sees though they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

  The first thing that happened when Ulrich arrived in his cab at the Imperial Hofburg was that the cabbie stopped in the outer courtyard and asked to be paid, claiming that although he was allowed to drive through the inner courtyard, he was not permitted to stop there. Ulrich was annoyed at the cabbie, whom he took for a cheat or a coward, but his protests were powerless against the man’s timid refusal, which suddenly made him sense the aura of a power mightier than he. When he walked into the inner courtyard he was much impressed with the numerous red, blue, white, and yellow coats, trousers, and helmet plumes that stood there stiffly in the sun like birds on a sandbank. Up to that moment he had considered “His Majesty” one of those meaningless terms which had stayed in use, as one may be an atheist and still say “Thank God.” But now his gaze wandered up high walls and he saw an island—gray, self-contained, and armed—lying there while the city’s speed rushed blindly past it.

  After he had presented himself he was led up stairways and along corridors, through rooms large and small. Although he was very well dressed, he felt that his exact measure was being taken by every eye he encountered. It would apparently occur to no one here to confuse intellectual aristocracy with the real thing, and against this Ulrich had no recourse but ironic protest and bourgeois criticism. He ascertained that he was walking through a vast shell with little content; the great public rooms were almost unfurnished, but this empty taste lacked the bitterness of a great style. He passed a casual sequence of individual guardsmen and servants, who formed a guard more haphazard than magnificent; a half dozen well-trained and well-paid private detectives might have served far more effectively. One kind of servant, in a gray uniform and cap like a bank messenger’s, shuttling between the lackeys and the guardsmen, made him think of a lawyer or dentist who does not keep his office and his living quarters sufficiently separate. “One feels clearly through all this how it must have awed the Biedermeier generation with its splendor,” Ulrich thought, “but today it can’t even compete with the attractiveness and comfort of a hotel, so it continues to fall back on being all noble restraint and stiffness.”

  But when he entered Count Stallburg’s presence, Ulrich was received by His Excellency inside a great hollow prism of the best proportions, in the center of which this unpretentious, baldheaded, somewhat stooped man, his knees bent like an orangutan’s, stood facing Ulrich in a manner that could not possibly be the way an eminent Imperial Court functionary of noble birth would naturally look—it had to be an imitation of something. His Excellency’s shoulders were bowed, his underlip drooped, he resembled an aged beagle or a worthy accountant. Suddenly there could be no doubt as to whom he reminded one of; Count Stallburg became transparent, and Ulrich realized that a man who has been for seventy years the All-Highest Center of supreme power must find a certain satisfaction in retreating behind himself and looking like the most subservient of his subjects. Consequently it simply became good manners and a natural form of discretion for those in the vicinity of this All-Highest personage not to look more personal than he did. This seems to be why kings so often like to call themselves the first servants of their country, and a quick glance confirmed for Ulrich that His Excellency indeed wore those short, ice-gray muttonchop whiskers framing a clean-shaven chin that were sported by every clerk and railway porter in Kakania. The belief was that they were emulating the appearance of their Emperor and King, but the deeper need in such cases is reciprocity.

  Ulrich had time for such reflections because he had to wait awhile for His Excellency to speak. The theatrical instinct for disguise and transformation, one of life’s pleasures, could here be seen in all its purity, without the least taint or awareness of a performance; so strongly did it manifest itself here in this unconscious, perennial art of self-representation that by comparison the middle-class custom of building theaters and staging plays as an art that can be rented by the hour struck him as something quite unnatural, decadent, and schizoid. And when His Excellency finally parted his lips and said to him: “Your dear father …,” only to come to a halt, there was something in his voice that made one notice his remarkably beautiful yellowish hands and something like an aura of finely tuned morality surrounding the whole figure, which charmed Ulrich into forgetting himself, as intellectuals are apt to do. For His Excellency now asked him what he did, and when Ulrich said “Mathematics” responded with “Indeed, how interesting, at which school?” When Ulrich assured him that he had nothing to do with schools, His Excellency said, “Indeed, how interesting, I see, research, university.” This seemed to Ulrich so natural and precise, just the way one imagines a fine piece of conversation, that he inadvertently took to behaving as though he were at home here and followed his thoughts instead of the protocol demanded by the situation. He suddenly thought of Moosbrugger. Here was the Power of Clemency close at hand; nothing seemed to him simpler than to make a stab at using it.

  “Your Excellency,” he said, “may I take this favorable opportunity to appeal to you on behalf of a man who has been unjustly condemned to death?”

  The question made Count Stallburg’s eyes open wide.

  “A sex murderer, to be sure,” Ulrich conceded, though he realized at once that he was entirely out of order. “The man’s insane, of course,” he hastily added to save the situation, and was about to add “Your Excellency must be aware that our penal code, dating from the middle of the last century, is outdated on this point,” but he had to swallow and got stuck. It was a blunder to impose on this man a discussion of a kind that people used to intellectual activity engage in, often quite without purpose. Just a few words, adroitly planted, can be as fruitful as rich garden loam, but in this place their effect was closer to that of a little clump of dirt one has inadvertently brought into the room on the sole of one’s shoe. But now Count Stallburg, noticing Ulrich’s embarrassment, showed him his truly great benevolence.

  “Yes, yes, I remember,” he said with a slight effort after Ulrich had given him the man’s name, “and so you say he is insane, and you would like to help him?”

  “He can’t be held responsible for what he does.”

  “Quite so, those are always especially unpleasant cases.”

  Count Stallburg seemed much distressed by the difficulties involved. Looking bleakly at Ulrich, he asked, as if nothing else were to be expected, whether Moosbrugger’s sentence was final. Ulrich had to admit that it was not.

  “Ah, in that case,” he went on, sounding relieved, “there’s still time,” and he began to speak of Ulrich’s “papa,” l
eaving the Moosbrugger case in amiable ambiguity.

  Ulrich’s slip had momentarily made him lose his presence of mind, but oddly enough his mistake seemed not to have made a bad impression on Count Stallburg. His Excellency had been nearly speechless at first, as though someone had taken off his jacket in his presence, but then such spontaneity from a man so well recommended came to seem to him refreshingly resolute and high-spirited. He was pleased to have found these two words, intent as he was on forming a favorable impression. He wrote them immediately (“We hope that we have found a resolute and high-spirited helper”) in his letter of introduction to the chairman of the great patriotic campaign. When Ulrich received this document a few moments later, he felt like a child who is dismissed with a piece of chocolate pressed into its little hand. He now held something between his fingers and received instructions to come again, in a manner that left him uncertain whether it was an order or an invitation, but without giving him an opportunity to protest. “There must be some misunderstanding—I really had no intention whatever…,” he would have liked to say, but by this time he was already on his way out, back along the great corridors and through the vast salons. He suddenly came to a stop, thinking, “That picked me up like a cork and set me down somewhere I never meant to go!” He scrutinized the insidious simplicity of the décor with curiosity, and felt quite certain in deciding that even now he was still unimpressed by it. This was simply a world that had not yet been cleared away. But still, what was that strong, peculiar quality it had made him feel? Damn it all, there was hardly any other way to put it: it was simply amazingly real.