by Robert Musil
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.
FROM THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
BURTON PIKE
PREFACE
Musil did not finish The Man Without Qualities, although he often said he intended to. There is no way of telling from either the parts published in his lifetime or his posthumous papers how he would have done so, or indeed whether he could have done so to his own satisfaction. This is because of the novel’s rigorously experimental structure, consisting of an “open architecture” that could be developed in many directions from any given point. The novel does contain coherent individual threads and incidents, but Musil firmly rejected the idea of a plotted narrative whole. Therefore, while the drafts of the twenty chapters in Part 1 of “From the Posthumous Papers” carry on from where “Into the Millennium” left off, the material in Part 2 is not preliminary to a final version in the usual sense, but consists rather of notes, sketches, and drafts that Musil was keeping in suspension for possible use in some form at some place in the ultimate text, a version he never decided upon and that must forever remain the object of tantalizing speculation.
We have a fortuitous, if unhappy, benchmark for this posthumous material: When Musil had to leave Vienna in 1938, he took with him into exile in Switzerland material that he considered most useful for his further work on The Man Without Qualities. Everything left behind in Vienna was destroyed during the war. (A further loss was suffered when two of Musil’s surviving notebooks were stolen from an editors car in Italy in 1970, before they could be transcribed.)
The extent to which Musil regarded this novel as experimental was extraordinary. He had begun work on it in earnest in 1924 and was most reluctant when the urging of publishers and worsening external conditions forced him to publish parts of it in 1931 and 1933 (pages 1-1130 in this edition). From his point of view, the entire text oughtto have remained “open” from the beginning until it had all been written and he could then revise the text as a whole. He complained that partial publication removed those parts of the novel from the possibility of further alteration, as well as distorting the shape (again, a never defined, “open” shape) he had in mind for the whole work. As it was, in 1938, in less than robust health and apparently apprehensive that he would again be forced into premature publication, he withdrew the first twenty chapters that appear in “From the Posthumous Papers” when they were already set in galleys, in order to rework them still further. These chapters were intended not to conclude the novel but to continue “Into the Millennium.” like Goethe, Musil had a strange sense of having infinite time stretching out before him in which to complete his task. One is tempted to see in his solitary and stubborn pursuit of his ideal more than a little of Kafka’s Hunger Artist.
Musil’s purpose in writing The Man Without Qualities was a moral one. He had set out to explore possibilities for the right life in a culture that had lost both its center and its bearings but could not tear itself away from its outworn forms and habits of thought, even while they were dissolving. Musil equated ethics and aesthetics, and was convinced that a union of “precision and soul,” the language and discoveries of science with one’s inner life of perceptions and feelings, could be, and must be, achieved. He meant this novel to be experienced as a moral lever to move the world, as Emerson and Nietzsche intended their writing to be experienced, in such a way that (in Rilke’s words) “you must change your life.” Musil’s anguish becomes palpable as he pursues this search for the right life using the tools of scientific skepticism, while remaining all too aware of the apparently inherent limitations of human societies and, especially, of human nature. Fortunately, this anguish is leavened by a sparkling wit of language and situation, as when a character is described as wearing “a wig of split hairs.”
The search for the right life leads to an increasing inwardness in the novel. Musil intended to have Ulrich and Agathe somehow rejoin the world after the failure of their attempt to achieve a unio mystica, but as the reader will see, this was left completely up in the air among a welter of conflicting possibilities. Much of the material in Part 2 consists of startlingly dramatic or even melodramatic nuclei that Musil weighed using at some point. He frequently inserts identical or slightly varied material in
different places, obviously to try it out in alternative contexts, but without committing himself. Always an analytical thinker and a methodical worker, Musil used an elaborate and cryptic system of referencing and cross-referencing codes and notations, some of them still undeciphered, to remind himself of the many interconnections. These markings are ubiquitous, indicating how thoroughly the different parts of the work were simultaneously present in his mind. These codes are to be found in the German edition but have been suppressed here in the interest of readability.
Among the experiments Musil tries out, for example, are the possibilities of Ulrich having sexual relations, sometimes aggressive and perverse, with his sister, Agathe, his cousin Diotima, and Clarisse, his friend Walters wife. Moosbrugger, the sex murderer who haunts the entire novel, is somehow freed by Clarisse in one version, while Ulrich’s attempt to free him himself, together with some hired criminals, fails in another. Moosbrugger is executed, and Hans Sepp commits suicide (under a train in one place, by gunshot in another). Ulrich’s escape to the idyllic Italian island is now with Agathe, now with Clarisse; the idyll fails with Agathe, fails with Clarisse. Clarisse looms much larger in these drafts than in the main text; here the stages of her growing insanity are carefully detailed. Ulrich appears crueler, more morally indolent, as his successive failures are recorded. (Musil should not be identified with Ulrich; as is made quite clear here, in his role as narrator Musil is usually critical of Ulrich.) These posthumous papers also shed a great deal of light on Musil’s concept of mysticism and the “Other Condition.”
Musil had suffered a stroke in 1936, and the tone of Part 1 of “From the Posthumous Papers,” written after that, is markedly different from the earlier sections of the novel; quieter, strikingly inward, more difficult, the writing often of a rare beauty. In the selection of drafts, notes, and sketches presented in Part 2, which cover the span of time between 1920 and 1942, Musil makes clear how the faults of his characters are intended to mirror the larger faults of the age; as he says, these figures live on an arc without being able to close the circle. As the age comes unglued and spirals toward war, so do the characters spiral more clearly toward failure, helplessness, madness, and suicide, even as they press forward in their firm belief in a better future, if only they could find the key. The Man Without Qualities is not a pessimistic work.
The contents of “From the Posthumous Papers” have riot been previously translated into English. Much of what is presented here became available in German for the first time only with the publication of the 1978 German edition of Musil’s collected works. This new German edition is not definitive, but it completely supersedes the edition of the 1950s on which the first, incomplete, English translation was based. The guiding principle in selecting the material for translation in “From the Posthumous Papers” was to present to the English-speaking public in readable form the major narrative portions of the posthumous material in the 1978 German edition, as well as selections that illuminate Musil’s methods of thinking and working. Scholarly completeness could not be the goal in any case, since the 1978 German edition offers only a major selection from the extant posthumous papers, together with some scholarly apparatus. There exists in manuscript even more material relating to The Man Without Qualities than is in the German edition: The various Musil research centers finished the painstaking process of transcribing these papers only in 1990, and this transcription, 34 megabytes of data (not all of it relating to the novel), has been made available in German on a CD-ROM disk. Omitted in what follows, aside from the cross-referencing codes, are (1) longer repetitive variations of chapters or sections in which the changes are slight—Musil was an obsessive rewriter and polisher; and (2) many brief notes, jottings, and indications that are too sketchy to be informative except to the specialist.
Except for the galley drafts of the first twenty chapters, this material is for the most part not polished or “written up” in final form; some of it is quite sketchy, some merely jotted notes. Over the years, Musil changed the names of some of his characters and switched others, and this can be confusing. The essence of the characters, however, seems to have been fixed from the early stages, so these name changes are purely verbal. Ulrich was originally called “Anders,” then called “Achilles”; the names, but not the characters, of Lindner and Meingast were reversed. Clarisse’s brother is called Siegmund in the main text, Siegfried and Wotan here. In the interest of readability the names, with one or two obvious exceptions, have been changed to be consistent with those used previously in the novel and are spelled out—Musil usually refers to them by their initials—as are most of the numerous other abbreviations. Given the fragmentary nature of the texts in Part 2, and for the sake of readability, elisions have not been indicated; with very minor exceptions they are between selections, not within selections. Items between slashes or in parentheses are Musil’s; material in square brackets is mine. Double and triple ellipsis points in the text reproduce those in the German edition.
The only major departure from the 1978 German edition in how this material appears has to do with the ordering of the contents of Part 2. The German edition presents this material in reverse chronology, beginning with what Musil was working on at his death and proceeding backward to the earliest sketches. It seemed to me that since Musil was thinking about this material experimentally and not chronologically, such an ordering is not necessarily indicated, especially in the absence of the authors ultimate intentions about the work as a whole.
A further problem was that in chronological order, whether forward or backward, the random mixture of elements in Part 2 of “From the Posthumous Papers” would put off the general reader, for whom this edition is intended. That would be unfortunate, since these pages contain some of Musil’s most powerful and evocative writing. Rearranging the contents of Part 2 according to character groupings, narrative sections, and Musil’s notes about the novel makes this material much more accessible, and given the author’s experimental attitude toward these fragments this rearrangement seems not unreasonable. Readers who wish to see this material presented in roughly chronological reverse order—some of it can be dated only approximately—should consult the German edition.
The original choice of material to include here was made in extensive consultation with Professor Philip Payne of the University of Lancaster, England, to whom I would like to express my appreciation. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Professor Adolf Frise, editor of the German edition, for his constant friendly encouragement and advice. Without his work, and without the unflagging patience and skill with which he and the various Musil research teams in Vienna, Klagenfurt, Saarbriicken, and Reading deciphered Musil’s difficult manuscripts, no Musil edition would have been possible. And without the determination, persistence, fine German, and ear and eye for quality of Carol Janeway, Sophie Wilkins’s and my editor at Knopf, this translation would never have come to fruition.
BURTON PIKE
PART 1
Musil had given chapters 39 through 58 to the printer. He revised them in galley proofs in 1937-1938, then withdrew them to work on them further. They were intended to continue “Into the Millennium,” of 1932-1933, but not conclude it.
39
AFTER THE ENCOUNTER
As the man who had entered Agathe’s life at the poet’s grave, Professor August Lindner, climbed down toward the valley, what he saw opening before him were visions of salvation.
If she had looked around at him after they parted she would have been struck by the man’s ramrod-stiff walk dancing down the stony path, for it was a peculiarly cheerful, assertive, and yet nervous walk. Lindner carried his hat in one hand and occasionally passed the other hand through his hair, so free and happy did he feel.
“How few people,” he said to himself, “have a truly empathic soul!” He depicted to himself a soul able to immerse itself completely in a fellow human being, feeling his inmost sorrows and lowering itself to his innermost weaknesses. “What a prospect!”
he exclaimed to himself. “What a miraculous proximity of divine mercy, what consolation, and what a day for celebration!” But then he recalled how few people were even able to listen attentively to their fellow creatures; for he was one of those right-minded people who descend from the unimportant to the trivial without noticing the difference. “How rarely, for instance, is the question ‘How are you?’ meant seriously,” he thought. “You need only answer in detail how you really feel, and soon enough you find yourself looking into a bored and distracted face!”
Well, he had not been guilty of this error! According to his principles the particular and indispensable doctrine of health for the strong was to protect the weak; without such a benevolent, self-imposed limitation, the strong were all too easily susceptible to brutality; and culture, too, needed its acts of charity against the dangers inherent within itself. “Whoever tries to tell us what universal education’ is supposed to be,” he affirmed for himself through inner exclamation, mightily refreshed by a sudden lightning bolt loosed against his fellow pedagogue Hagauer, “should truly first be advised: experience what another person feels like! Knowing through empathy means a thousand times more than knowing through books!” He was evidently giving vent to an old difference of opinion, aimed on the one hand at the liberal concept of education and on the other at the wife of his professional brother, for Lindner’s glasses gazed around like two shields of a doubly potent warrior. He had been selfconscious in Agathe’s presence, but if she were to see him now he would have seemed to her like a commander, but a commander of troops that were by no means frivolous. For a truly manly soul is ready to assist, and it is ready to assist because it is manly. He raised the question whether he had acted correctly toward the lovely woman, and answered himself: “It would be a mistake if the proud demand for subordination to the law were to be left to those who are too weak for it; and it would be a depressing prospect if only mindless pedants were permitted to be the shapers and protectors of manners and morals; that is why the obligation is imposed upon the vital and strong to require discipline and limits from their instincts of energy and health: they must support the weak, shake up the thoughtless, and rein in the licentious!” He had the impression he had done so.