by Robert Musil
“Oh,” Ulrich said. “I see the point.” He turned to Agathe, trying to catch her eye.
“No—the point was the resolution!” Stumm reminded him. “There they were, ready to bite each other’s heads off, and then, as if nothing had happened, they agreed to make common cause, and I do mean common!”
With his rounded figure, Stumm gave the impression of unwavering gravity. “The Minister left on the spot,” he reported.
“But what was it they agreed on?” Ulrich and Agathe asked.
“I can’t exactly say,” Stumm replied, “because of course I took off myself before they were finished. Besides, it’s always hard to remember that sort of thing clearly. It’s something in favor of Moosbrugger and against the army.”
“Moosbrugger? How on earth …” Ulrich laughed again.
“How on earth?” the General echoed venomously. “It’s easy for you to laugh, but I’m the one who’s going to be called on the carpet for it! At the very least it’ll mean days of paperwork! How does anyone know ‘how on earth’ with such people? Maybe it was that old professor’s fault, the one who was talking to everyone in favor of hanging and against leniency. Or it could have been because the papers have been making such a fuss again lately about the problem of that monster. Anyway, they were suddenly talking about him. This has got to be undone again!” he declared with unwonted severity.
At this moment the kitchen was invaded in quick succession by Arnheim, Diotima, and even Tuzzi and Count Leinsdorf. Arnheim had heard voices in the foyer. He had been on the point of slipping away quietly, hoping that the disturbance would enable him to escape another heart-to-heart talk with Diotima; and tomorrow he would be leaving town again for some time. But his curiosity made him glance into the kitchen, and since Agathe had seen him, politeness prevented him from withdrawing. Stumm instantly besieged him with questions about how things stood.
“I can even give it to you verbatim,” Arnheim replied with a smile. “Some of it was so quaint that I simply had to write it down on the sly.”
He drew a small card from his wallet and slowly read, deciphering his shorthand, the contents of the proposed manifesto:
“‘The patriotic campaign has passed the following resolution, as proposed by Herr Feuermaul and Herr—’ I didn’t catch the other name. ‘Any man may choose to die for his own ideas, but whoever induces men to die for ideas not their own is a murderer!’ That was the proposal,” he added, “and my impression was that it was final.”
“That’s it!” the General exclaimed. “That’s the way I heard it too! They’re enough to make you sick, these intellectual debates!”
Arnheim said gently: “It’s the desire of young people today for stability and leadership.”
“But it wasn’t only young people,” Stumm said in disgust. “Even baldheads were agreeing!”
“Then it’s a need for leadership in general,” Arnheim said with a friendly nod. “It’s widespread these days. Incidentally, the resolution was borrowed from a recent book, if I remember rightly.”
“Indeed?” Stumm said.
“Yes,” Arnheim said. “And of course we’ll pretend it never happened. But if we could find a way to direct the sentiment it expresses into some useful channel, it would certainly be of help.”
The General appeared somewhat relieved and, turning to Ulrich, asked:
“Do you have any idea what could be done?”
“Of course!” Ulrich said.
Arnheim’s attention was diverted by Diotima.
“In that case,” the General said in a low voice, “fire away! I would prefer it if we could remain in control.”
“You have to focus on what actually happened,” Ulrich said, taking his time. “These people aren’t so far wrong, you know, when one of them accuses the other of wanting to love if he only could, and the other retorts that it’s the same with wanting to hate. It’s true of all the feelings. Hatred today has something companionable about it, and on the other hand, in order to feel what would really be love for another human being—I maintain,” Ulrich said abruptly, “that two such people have never yet existed!”
“That’s certainly most interesting,” the General interrupted quickly, “especially as I completely fail to understand how you can assert such a thing. But I have to write a protocol tomorrow about everything that happened here tonight, and I implore you to bear this in mind! In the army, what counts most is being able to report progress; a certain optimism is indispensable even in defeat—that’s part of the profession. So how can I report what happened here as a step forward?”
“Write,” Ulrich advised him with a wink, “that the moral imagination has taken its revenge!”
“But you can’t write that sort of thing in the military!” Stumm replied indignantly.
“Then let’s put it another way,” Ulrich said seriously, “and write: All creative periods have been serious. There is no profound happiness without a profound ethos. There is no morality that is not derived from a firm basis. There is no happiness that does not rest on a strong belief. Not even animals live without morality. But today human beings no longer know on what—”
Stumm broke in on this calmly flowing dictation too: “My dear friend, I can speak of a troop’s morale, or morale in battle, or a woman’s morals; but always only in specific instances. I cannot discuss morality without such a restriction in a military report, any more than I could imagination or God Almighty. You know that as well as I do!”
Diotima saw Arnheim standing at the window of her kitchen, an oddly domestic sight after they had exchanged only a few circumspect words during the entire evening. Paradoxically, it only made her suddenly wish to continue her unfinished chat with Ulrich. Her mind was dominated by that comforting despair which, breaking in from several directions at once, had almost become sublimated into an amiable and serene state of expectation. The long-foreseen collapse of her Council left her cold. Arnheim’s faithlessness also left her, as she thought, almost equally indifferent. He looked at her as she came in, and for a moment it brought back the old feeling of a living space in which they were united. But she remembered that he had been avoiding her for weeks, and the thought “Sexual coward!” stiffened her knees again so that she could move toward him regally.
Arnheim saw it: her seeing him, her faltering, the distance between them melting; over frozen roads connecting them in innumerable ways hovered an intimation that they might thaw out again. He had moved away from the others, but at the last moment both he and Diotima made a turn that brought them together with Ulrich, General Stumm, and the rest, who were on the other side.
In all its manifestations, from the inspired ideas of original thinkers to the kitsch that unites all peoples, what Ulrich called the moral imagination, or, more simply, feeling, has for centuries been in a state of ferment without turning into wine. Man is a being who cannot survive without enthusiasm. And enthusiasm is that state of mind in which all his feelings and thoughts have the same spirit. You think it is rather the opposite, that it is a condition in which one overpowering feeling—of being carried away!—sweeps all the others along with it? You weren’t going to say anything at all? Anyway, that’s how it is. Or one way it is. But there is nothing to sustain such an enthusiasm. Feelings and thoughts become lasting only with each other’s help, in their totality; they must somehow be aligned with each other and carry each other onward. And by every available means, through drugs, liquor, fantasies, hypnosis, faith, conviction, often even through the simplifying effect of stupidity, man is always trying to achieve a condition like it. He believes in ideas not because they are sometimes true but because he needs to believe; because he has to keep his feelings in order. Because he must have an illusion to stop up the gap between the walls of his life, through which his feelings would otherwise fly off in every direction. The answer is probably at least to seek the conditions of an authentic enthusiasm, instead of giving oneself up to transient delusory states. But although, all in all, the numb
er of choices based on feeling is infinitely greater than those based on clear logic, and every event that moves mankind arises from the imagination, only the purely rational problems have achieved an objective order, while nothing deserving the name of a joint effort, or even hinting at any insight into the desperate need for it, has been done for the world of feeling and imagination.
This was more or less what Ulrich said, interspersed with understandable protests from the General.
All Ulrich saw in the events of the evening, even though they had been impetuous enough and were destined through malicious misrepresentation to have grave consequences, was the example of an infinite disorder. Feuermaul seemed at this moment to matter to him as little as the love of mankind, nationalism as little as Feuermaul, and Stumm was asking him in vain how to distill a sense of some tangible progress out of an attitude so very personal.
“Why don’t you simply report,” Ulrich responded, “that it’s the Millennial War of Religion. And that people have never been as unprepared to fight it as now, when the rubble of ‘ineffectual feelings,’ which every period bequeaths to the next, has grown into mountains without anything being done about it. So the War Ministry can sit back and serenely await the next mass catastrophe.”
Ulrich was foretelling the future, with no inkling of it. His concern was not with real evens at all; he was struggling for his salvation. He was trying to throw in everything that could get in its way, and it was for that reason that he laughed so much and tried to mislead them into thinking he was joking and exaggerating. He was exaggerating for Agathe’s benefit, carrying on his long-standing dialogue with her, not just this most recent one. Actually, he was throwing up a bulwark of ideas against her, knowing that in a certain place there was a little bolt, and that if this bolt were drawn back, everything would be flooded and buried by feeling. In truth he was thinking incessantly of this bolt.
Diotima was standing near him and smiling. She sensed something of Ulrich’s efforts on behalf of his sister, and was sadly moved; she forgot sexual enlightenment, and something in her opened up: it was doubtless the future, but in any case, her lips were slightly open too.
Arnheim asked Ulrich: “And you think … that something might be done about it?” The tone of his question suggested that he had caught the seriousness behind the exaggeration, but that he regarded even the seriousness as an exaggeration.
Tuzzi said to Diotima: “Something must in any case be done to prevent this affair from leaking out.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Ulrich said in reply to Arnheim. “Today we are facing too many possibilities of feeling, too many possible ways of living. But isn’t it like the kind of problem our intellect deals with whenever it is confronted with a vast number of facts and a history of the relevant theories? And for the intellect we have developed an open-ended but precise procedure, which I don’t need to describe to you. Now tell me whether something of the kind isn’t equally possible for the feelings. We certainly need to find out what we’re here for; it’s one of the main sources of all violence in the world. Earlier centuries tried to answer it with their own inadequate means, but the great age of empiricism has done nothing of its own, so far… .”
Arnheim, who caught on quickly and liked to interrupt, laid his hand on Ulrich’s shoulder as if to restrain him. “This implies an increasing relationship with God!” he said in a low tone of warning.
“Would that be so terrible?” Ulrich asked, not without a hint of mockery at such premature alarm. “But I haven’t gone that far yet!”
Arnheim promptly checked himself and smiled. “How delightful after a long absence to find someone unchanged. Such a rarity, these days!” he said. He was genuinely glad, in fact, once he felt safe again behind his defensive front of benevolence. Ulrich might, after all, have very well taken him up on that rash offer of a position, and Arnheim was grateful that Ulrich, in his irresponsible intransigence, disdained touching the earth with his feet. “We must have a talk about this sometime,” he added cordially. “It’s not clear to me how you conceive of applying our theoretical attitude to practical affairs.”
Ulrich knew very well that it was still unclear. What he meant was not a life of “research,” or a life “in the light of science,” but a “quest for feeling” similar to a quest for truth, except that truth was not the issue here. He watched Arnheim moving over to Agathe. Diotima was standing there too; Tuzzi and Count Leinsdorf came and went. Agathe was chatting with everyone and thinking: “Why is he talking with all these people? He ought to have left with me! He’s cheapening what he said to me!” She liked many of the things she heard him say from across the room, and yet they hurt her. Everything that came from Ulrich was hurting her again, and for the second time that day she suddenly felt the need to get away from him. She despaired of ever being able, with her limitations, to be what he wanted, and the prospect that they would soon be going home like any other couple, gossiping about the evening behind them, was intolerable.
Meanwhile Ulrich was thinking: “Arnheim will never understand that.” And he added: “It is precisely in his feelings that the scientist is limited, and the practical man even more so. It’s as necessary as having your legs firmly planted if you intend to lift something with your arms.” In ordinary circumstances he was that way himself; the moment he began thinking about anything, even if it was about feeling itself, he was very cautious about letting any feeling into it. Agathe called this coldness, but he knew that in order to be wholly otherwise one has to be prepared to renounce life, as if on a mortal adventure, for one has no idea what its course will be! He was in the mood for it, and for the moment no longer feared it. He gazed for a long time at his sister: the lively play of conversation on the deeper, untouched face. He was about to ask her to leave with him, but before he could move, Stumm had come back and was intent on talking with him.
The good General was fond of Ulrich. He had already forgiven him his witticisms about the War Ministry, and was actually rather taken with the phrase “religious war”: it had such a festively military air, like oak leaves on a helmet, or shouts of hurrah on the Emperor’s birthday. With his arm pressed to Ulrich’s, he steered him out of earshot of the others. “You know, I like what you said about all events originating in the imagination,” he said. “Of course, that’s more my private opinion than my official attitude,” and he offered Ulrich a cigarette.
“I’ve got to go home,” Ulrich said.
“Your sister is having a fine time; don’t disturb her,” Stumm said. “Arnheim’s outdoing himself to pay court to her. But what I was going to say: the joy seems to have gone out of mankind’s great ideas. You ought to put some life back into them. I mean, there’s a new spirit in the air, and you’re the man to take charge!”
“What gives you that idea?” Ulrich asked guardedly.
“That’s how it strikes me.” Stumm passed over it and went on intently: “You’re for order too; everything you say shows it. And so then I ask myself: which is more to the point—that man is good, or that he needs a firm hand? It’s all tied in with our present-day need to take a stand. I’ve already told you it would put my mind at rest if you would take charge of the campaign again. With all this talk, there’s simply no knowing what may happen otherwise!”
Ulrich laughed. “Do you know what I’m going to do now? I’m not coming here anymore!” he said happily.
“But why?” Stumm protested hotly. “All those people will be right who’ve been saying that you’ve never been a real power!”
“If I told them what I really think, they would really say so.” Ulrich answered, laughing, and disengaged himself from his friend.
Stumm was vexed, but then his good humor prevailed, and he said in parting: “These things are so damned complicated. Sometimes I’ve actually thought it would be best if a real idiot came along to tackle all these insoluble problems—I mean some sort of Joan of Arc. A person like that might be able to help!”
Ulrich’s eyes searched
for his sister but did not find her. While he was asking Diotima about her, Leinsdorf and Tuzzi returned from the salon and announced that everyone was leaving.
“I said all along,” His Grace remarked cheerfully to the lady of the house, “that what those people were saying was not what they really meant. And Frau Drangsal has come up with a really saving idea; we’ve decided to continue this evening’s meeting another time. Feuermaul, or whatever his name is, will read us some long poem he has written, so things will be much quieter. I of course took it upon myself, on account of the urgency, to say I was sure you’d agree!”
It was only then that Ulrich learned that Agathe had suddenly said goodbye and left the house without him. She had left word that she had not wanted to disturb him.
‘I would recommend Sophie Wilkins’ translation as a conscientious attempt to give to the English reader a novel which is compared to The Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses’
The Times
‘There is scarcely a page that does not provoke new thoughts or offer new insights, not a chapter that, even read on its own, does not prove stimulating’
Scotsman
‘At last, at last – the fully fleshed arrival in English of the third member of the trinity in twentieth-century fiction, complementing Ulysses and The Remembrance of Things Past … This last-waltz novel is amazingly contemporary’
Wall Street Journal
‘Immensely rich and therapeutic, bristling with wit and a sly humour’
Sunday Telegraph
‘The Man Without Qualities is one of the towering achievements of the European novel’
Observer
‘A great novel’
Times Literary Supplement
THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
ROBERT MUSIL was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1880. Trained in science and philosophy, he left a career in the military to turn to writing. The publication of his novel Young Törless in 1906 brought him international recognition and remains a classic parable on the misuse of power. After serving in the First World War, Musil lived alternately in Vienna and Berlin, with much of his time being dedicated to the slow writing of his masterwork, The Man Without Qualities. In 1938, when Hitler’s rise to power threatened Musil’s work with being banned in both Austria and Germany, he emigrated to Switzerland, where he and his wife lived until his death in 1942. The first complete German edition of The Man Without Qualities finally appeared in 1978.