by Robert Musil
But just then someone had made the point that even the General’s dog, howling at the moon some rose-scented night, might if challenged defend himself by saying: “So what, it’s the moon, isn’t it? I am expressing the timeless emotions of my race!” quite like one of those gentlemen so famous for doing the very same. The dog might even add that his emotion was unquestionably a powerful experience, his expression richly moving, and yet so simple that his public could understand him perfectly, and as for his ideas playing second fiddle to his feelings, that was entirely in keeping with prevailing standards and had never yet been regarded as a drawback in literature.
Arnheim, discomfited by this echoing of his thoughts, again held back the cigar smoke between lips that for a moment remained half open, as a token barrier between himself and his surroundings. He had praised some of these especially pure poets on every occasion, because it was the thing to do, and had sometimes even supported them with cash, though in fact, as he now realized, he could not stand them and their inflated verses. “These heraldic figures who can’t even support themselves,” he thought, “really belong in a game preserve, together with the last of the bison and eagles.” And since, as this evening had proved, it was not in keeping with the times to support them, Arnheim’s reflections ended not without some profit for himself.
90
DETHRONING THE IDEOCRACY
It probably makes sense that times dominated by the spirit of the marketplace see as their true counterpart those poets who have nothing at all to do with their time, who do not besmirch themselves with the topical concerns of their day but supply only pure poetry, as it were, addressing their faithful in obsolete idioms on great subjects, as though they were just passing through on earth, coming from eternity, where they live, like the man who went to America three years ago and is already speaking broken German on his first visit home. This is much the same as compensating for a big hole by setting a hollow dome on top of it, and since the higher hollowness only enlarges the ordinary one below, nothing is more natural, after all, than that such a period fostering the cult of personality should be followed by one that turns its back on all this fuss over responsibility and greatness.
Arnheim tried cautiously, experimentally, and with the cozy sense of being personally insured against damage, to feel his way into this conjectured future development. This was certainly no minor undertaking. He had to take into account everything he had seen in recent years in America and Europe: the new dance fanatics, whether they were jazzing up Beethoven or transposing the new sensualism into fresh rhythms; the new painters, who tried to express a maximum of meaning by a minimum of lines and colors; the art of the film, where a gesture universally understood, presented with a new little twist, took the world by storm; and finally he thought of the common man, who already, as a great believer in sports, was kicking like a furious baby in his efforts to take possession of Nature’s bosom. What is so striking about all this is a certain tendency to allegory, if this is understood as an intellectual device to make everything mean more than it has any honest claim to mean. Just as the world of the Baroque saw in a helmet and a pair of crossed swords all the Greek gods and their myths, and it was not Count Harry who kissed Lady Harriet but a god of war kissing the goddess of chastity, so today, when Harry and Harriet are smooching, they are experiencing the temper of our times, or something out of our array of ten dozen contemporary myths, which of course no longer depict an Olympus floating above formal gardens but present the entire modern hodgepodge itself. On screen and on stage, on the dance floor and at concerts, in cars, on planes, on the water and in the sun, at the tailor’s and in the business office, there is constantly in the making an immense new surface consisting of im-and expressions, of gestures, role-playing, and experiences. All these goings-on, each with its distinct outward forms, in the aggregate suggest a body in lively circular motion, with everything inside it thrusting out toward the surface, where it enters into combination with all the rest, while the interior goes on seething and heaving with amorphous life. Had Arnheim been able to see only a few years into the future, he would have seen that 1,920 years of Christian morality, millions of dead men in the wake of a shattering war, and a whole German forest of poetry rustling in homage to the modesty of Woman could not hold back the day when women’s skirts and hair began to grow shorter and the young girls of Europe slipped off eons of taboos to emerge for a while naked, like peeled bananas. He would have seen other changes as well, which he would hardly have believed possible, nor does it matter which of those would last and which would disappear, if we consider what vast and probably wasted efforts would have been needed to effect such revolutions in the way people lived by the slow, responsible, evolutionary road traveled by philosophers, painters, and poets, instead of tailors, fashion, and chance; it enables us to judge just how much creative energy is generated by the surface of things, compared with the barren conceit of the brain.
Such is the dethronement of ideocracy, of the brain, the displacement of the mind to the periphery: the ultimate problem, Arnheim thought. This has always been life’s way with man, of course, restructuring humankind from the surface inward; the only difference is that people used to feel that they in turn should contribute something from their inside to their outside. Even the General’s dog, which Arnheim now kindly remembered, would never have understood any other line of development, for this loyal friend of man’s character had still been formed by the stable, docile man of the previous century, in that man’s image; but its cousin the prairie wolf, or the prairie rooster, would have understood readily enough. When that wild fowl, dancing for hours on end, plumes itself and claws the ground, there is probably more soul generated than by a scholar linking one thought to another at his desk. For in the last analysis, all thoughts come out of the joints, muscles, glands, eyes, and ears, and from the shadowy general impressions that the bag of skin to which they belong has of itself as a whole. Bygone centuries were probably sadly mistaken in attaching too much importance to reason and intelligence, convictions, concepts, and character; like regarding the record office and the archives as the most important part of a government department because they are housed at headquarters, although they are only subordinate functions taking orders from elsewhere.
All at once, Arnheim—stimulated perhaps by a certain dissolving of tensions under the influence of love—found his way to the redeeming idea that would put all these complications in perspective; it was somehow pleasantly associated with the concept of increased turnover. An increased turnover of ideas and experiences was undeniably characteristic of the new era, if only as the natural consequence of bypassing the time-consuming process of intellectual assimilation. He pictured the brain of the age replaced by the mechanism of supply and demand, the painstaking thinker replaced, as the regulating factor, by the businessman, and he could not help enjoying the moving vision of a vast production of experiences freely mingling and parting, a sort of pudding with a nervous life of its own, quivering all over with sensations; or a huge tom-tom booming with immense resonance at even the lightest tap. The fact that these images did not quite jell, as it were, was already owing to the state of reverie they had induced in Arnheim, who felt that it was just such a life that could be compared with a dream in which one finds oneself simultaneously outside, witnessing the strangest events, and quietly inside, at the very center of things, one’s ego rarefied, a vacuum through which all the feelings glow like blue neon tubes. It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect. So it was that Arnheim mused as a man of business, while at the same time electrified to the twenty tips of his fingers and toes by his sense of the free-flowing psychophysical traffic of the dawning age. It seemed to him far from impossible that a great, superrational collectivity was coming to birth and that, abandoning an outworn individualism, we were on our way back, with all the superiority
and ingenuity of the white race, to a Paradise Reformed, bringing a modern program, a rich variety of choices, to the rural backwardness of the Garden of Eden.
There was only one fly in the ointment. Just as in dreams we are able to inject an inexplicable feeling that cuts through the whole personality into some happening or other, we are able to do this while awake—but only at the age of fifteen or sixteen, while still in school. Even at that age, as we all know, we live through great storms of feeling, fierce urgencies, and all kinds of vague experiences; our feelings are powerfully alive but not yet well defined; love and anger, joy and scorn, all the general moral sentiments, in short, go jolting through us like electric impulses, now engulfing the whole world, then again shriveling into nothing; sadness, tenderness, nobility, and generosity of spirit form the vaulting empty skies above us. And then what happens? From outside us, out of the ordered world around us, there appears a ready-made form—a word, a verse, a demonic laugh, a Napoleon, Caesar, Christ, or perhaps only a tear shed at a father’s grave—and the “work” springs into being like a bolt of lightning. This sophomore’s “work” is, as we too easily overlook, line for line the complete expression of what he is feeling, the most precise match of intention and execution, and the perfect blending of a young man’s experience with the life of the great Napoleon. It seems, however, that the movement from the great to the small is somehow not reversible. We experience it in dreams as well as in our youth: we have just given a great speech, with the last words still ringing in our ears as we awaken, when, unfortunately, they do not sound quite as marvelous as we thought they were. At this point we do not see ourself as quite the weightlessly shimmering phenomenon of that dancing prairie cock, but realize instead that we have merely been howling with much emotion at the moon, like the General’s much-cited fox terrier.
So there was something not quite in order here, Arnheim thought, arousing himself from his trance—but in any case, a man must move with the times, he added, now fully alert; for what, after all, should come more naturally to him than to apply this tried-and-true principle of production to the fabrication of life as well?
91
SPECULATIONS ON THE INTELLECTUAL BULL AND BEAR MARKET
The gatherings at the Tuzzis now resumed their regular and crowded course.
At a meeting of the Council, Section Chief Tuzzi turned to the “cousin,” saying: “Do you realize that all this has been done before?”
With a glance, he indicated the seething human contents of the home of which he was currently dispossessed.
“In the early days of Christianity, the centuries around the birth of Christ. In that Christian-Levantine-Hellenistic-Judaic melting pot where innumerable sects crystallized.” He launched on a list: “Adamites, Cainites, Ebionites, Collyridians, Archontians, Euchites, Ophites …” With a funny, hasty deliberateness of tempo that comes of slowing the pace in order to conceal one’s fluency on a subject, he recited a long series of pre-and early-Christian sect names, as if he were trying to give his wife’s cousin to understand that he knew more about what was going on in his house than, for reasons of his own, he usually cared to show.
He then went on to specify that one of the sects named opposed marriage because of the high value it placed on chastity, while another, also prizing chastity above all, had a funny way of attaining this aim by means of ritual debauchery. One sect practiced self-mutilation because they regarded female flesh as an invention of the Devil, while another made its men and women attend services stark naked. There were those who, brooding on their creed and coming to the conclusion that the Serpent who had seduced Eve was a divine person, went in for sodomy, while others tolerated no virgins among their flock because their studies proved that the Mother of God had borne other children besides Jesus, so that virginity was a dangerous heresy. Some were always doing the opposite of what others were doing, for more or less the same reasons and on the same principles.
Tuzzi delivered himself of all this with the gravity appropriate to a historical disquisition, however peculiar the facts, yet with an undertone of what were then called smoking-room stories. They were standing close to the wall; the Section Chief threw his cigarette stub into an ashtray with a grim little smile, still absentmindedly eyeing the throng of guests, as though he had meant to say only enough to last the time it takes to finish a cigarette, and ended with: “It seems to me that the differences of opinion and points of view in those days show a state of affairs not too dissimilar to the controversies among our intellectuals today. They’ll be gone with the wind tomorrow. If various historical circumstances had not given rise at the right moment to an ecclesiastical bureaucracy with the necessary political powers, hardly a trace of the Christian faith would be left today… .”
Ulrich agreed. “Properly paid officials in charge of the faith can be trusted to uphold the regulations with the necessary firmness. In general I feel that we never do justice to the value of our vulgar qualities; if they were not so dependable, no history would be made at all, because our purely intellectual efforts are incurably controversial and shift with every breeze.”
The Section Chief glanced up at him mistrustfully and then immediately shifted his gaze away again. That sort of comment was too unbuttoned for his taste. He nevertheless acted in a noticeably friendly and congenial fashion, even on such short acquaintance, toward this cousin of his wife’s. He came and went and had the air, amid all that was going on in his house, of living in some other, closed world, the loftier significance of which he kept hidden from all eyes; yet there were always times when he could hold out no longer and had to reveal himself to somebody, if only indistinctly, for an instant, and then it was always this cousin with whom he struck up a conversation. It was the natural human consequence of feeling neglected by his wife, despite her occasional fits of tenderness for him. At such times Diotima kissed him like a little girl, a girl of perhaps fourteen, who out of heaven knows what affectation suddenly smothers an even littler boy with kisses. Tuzzi’s upper lip, under its curled mustache, would then instinctively draw back in embarrassment. The new conditions in his household got him and his wife into impossible situations. He had certainly not forgotten Diotima’s complaint about his snoring, and had also, meanwhile, read the works of Arnheim and was prepared to discuss them with her; they contained some things he could accept, a great deal that struck him as all wrong, and a certain amount he did not understand, though serene in the assumption that this was the author’s problem rather than his own. But he had always been accustomed in such matters simply to state the authoritative opinion of a man experienced in these things, and the present likelihood of Diotima’s contradicting him every time, of having to debate with her points he considered to be beneath him, struck him as so unfair a change in his private life that he could not bring himself to have it out with her; he even caught himself in vague fantasies of having it out in a duel with Arnheim instead.
Tuzzi suddenly narrowed his beautiful brown eyes in irritation and told himself that he must keep a sharper watch on his moods. The cousin beside him—not at all the sort of man Tuzzi would normally want to become too closely involved with—only reminded him of his wife through an association of ideas that hardly had any real content, the mere fact of their being blood relatives. He had also noticed for some time that Arnheim seemed, rather cautiously, to be favoring this young man, who for his own part did not conceal his marked antipathy to Arnheim: two observations that did not really amount to much, yet were enough to make Tuzzi aware of his own inexplicable liking for Ulrich. He opened his eyes again and stared briefly like an owl across the room, without really looking at anything.
His wife’s cousin, incidentally, was staring straight ahead just as Tuzzi was, bored but at ease with him, and had not even noticed the pause in their exchange. Tuzzi felt obliged to say something, like a man who fears that his silence might give away his inwardly troubled condition.
“You like to take a cynical view,” he said with a smile, as
if Ulrich’s remark about the bureaucratic administration of religious faith had only just been allowed to come to his attention, “and I daresay my wife is not unjustified in fearing to count on your support, despite her sympathies for you as a cousin. If I may say so, your views on your fellowmen tend to be on the bearish side.”
“What an excellent term for it!” Ulrich said, clearly pleased. “Even though I’m afraid I don’t quite live up to it. It’s really history that has always taken a bearish or a bullish line with all mankind—bearish when it is using trickery or violence, and bullish more or less in your wife’s manner, by trying to have faith in the power of ideas. Dr. Arnheim, too, if you can believe what he says, is a bull. While you, as a professional bear amid this choir of angels, must have feelings I would be interested to hear about.”
He regarded the Section Chief with a sympathetic expression. Tuzzi drew his cigarette case from his pocket and shrugged his shoulders. “What makes you think that my outlook must be different from that of my wife?” he countered. He had meant to discourage the personal turn the conversation had taken, but his retort had only reinforced it. Luckily, Ulrich had not noticed this, and went on: “We’re made of stuff that takes on the shape of every mold it gets into, one way or another.”