The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “But that is another reality!” Agathe exclaimed.

  “No!” said Ulrich hesitantly. “At least I don’t know. It’s merely the age-old opposition between knowledge and love, which has always been supposed to exist.”

  Agathe gave him a confused but encouraging smile.

  “No!” Ulrich repeated. “That’s still not the right one.”

  Her smile disappeared. “So we have to pick up our business once again, otherwise we won’t get to the end this way either,” Agathe suggested with comic distress, and with a sigh she began anew: “What is love of money?”

  “You said things like that weren’t love at all,” Ulrich interjected.

  “But you said there were transitions,” Agathe countered.

  “Love of beauty?” Ulrich asked, ignoring this.

  “Love is also supposed to make an ugly person beautiful,” Agathe replied, following a sudden inspiration. “Do you love something because it’s beautiful or is it beautiful because it’s loved?”

  Ulrich found this question important but unpleasant. So he responded: “Perhaps beauty is nothing other than having been loved. If something was once loved, its ability to be beautiful is directed outward. And beauty presumably arises in no other way but this: that something pleases a person who also has the power to give other people a land of set of directions for repetition.” Then he added sharply: “Nevertheless, men who, like friend Lindner, waylay beauty are simply funny!”

  “Love one’s enemy?” Agathe asked, smiling.

  “Difficult!” said Ulrich. “Perhaps a leftover from magical-religious cannibalism.”

  “Compared to that, loving life is simple,” Agathe stated. “No idea at all is connected with it; it’s simply a blind instinct.”

  “Passion for hunting?”

  “Love of fatherland? Love of home? Necrophilia? Love of nature? Love of ponies? Idolatry? Puppy love? Hate-love?” Agathe shook them all out together, raising her arms in a circle and letting them fall to her lap with a gesture of discouragement.

  Ulrich answered with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile. “Love becomes real in many ways and in the most varied connections. But what is the common denominator? What in all these loves is the essential fluid and what merely its crystallization? And what, especially, is that ‘love!’ that can also occur spontaneously and fill the whole world?” he asked, showing little hope of an answer. “Even if someone were to compare the various forms more seriously,” he went on, “he would presumably find only as many emotions as there are external conditions and attitudes. Under all these circumstances one can love; but only because one can also despise or remain indifferent: in this way whatever is shared in common surfaces as something vaguely like love.”

  “But doesn’t that just mean that full love doesn’t correspond to experience?” Agathe interrupted. “But who questions that? That’s the decisive point! If love exists, in order to become manifest it will be entirely different from everything it is alloyed with!”

  Now Ulrich interrupted. “What would that prove? As feeling and action, this love would have no limits, and therefore there is no attitude or behavior that would correspond to it.”

  Agathe listened eagerly. She was waiting for a final word. “And what do you do if there is no attitude or behavior?” she asked.

  Ulrich understood her artless question. But he showed himself prepared for these reconnaissance expeditions to last even longer; he merely shrugged his shoulders resignedly and answered with a jest: “It doesn’t seem nearly so simple to love as nature would have us believe, just because she’s provided every bungler with the tools!”

  49

  GENERAL VON STUMM DROPS A BOMB.

  CONGRESS FOR WORLD PEACE

  A soldier must not let anything deter him. So General Stumm von Bordwehr was the only person to push his way through to Ulrich and Agathe; but then he was perhaps the only person for whom they did not make it absolutely impossible, since even refugees from the world can see to it that their mail is forwarded to them periodically. And as he burst in to interrupt their continuing their conversation, he crowed: “It wasn’t easy to penetrate all the perimeter defenses and fight my way into the fortress!”, gallantly kissed Agathe’s hand, and, addressing himself to her in particular, said: “I’ll be a famous man, just because I’ve seen you! Everyone is asking what event could have swallowed up the Inseparables, and is asking after you; and in a certain sense I am the emissary of society, indeed of the Fatherland, sent to discover the cause of your disappearance! Please excuse me if I appear importunate!”

  Agathe bade him a polite welcome, but neither she nor her brother was immediately able to conceal their distractedness from their visitor, who stood before them as the embodiment of the weakness and imperfection of their dreams; and as General Stumm again stepped back from Agathe, a remarkable silence ensued. Agathe was standing on one long side of the desk, Ulrich on the other, and the General, like a suddenly becalmed sailing vessel, was at a point approximately halfway between them. Ulrich meant to come forward to meet his visitor, but could not stir from the spot. Stumm now noticed that he really had butted in, and considered how he might save the situation. The twisted beginnings of a friendly smile lay on all three faces. This stiff silence lasted barely a fraction of a second; it was just then that Stumm’s glance fell on the small papier-mâché horse standing isolated among them, like a monument, in the center of the empty desk.

  Clicking his heels together, he pointed to it solemnly with the flat of his hand and exclaimed with relief: “But what’s this? Do I perceive in this house the great animal idol, the holy animal, the revered deity of the cavalry?”

  At Stumm’s remark, Ulrich’s inhibition, too, dissolved, and moving quickly over to Stumm but at the same time turning toward his sister, he said animatedly: “Admittedly it’s just a coach horse, but you have wonderfully guessed the rest! We were really just talking about idols and how they originate. Now tell me: What is it one loves, which part, what reshaping and transformation does one love, when one loves one’s neighbor without knowing him? In other words, to what extent is love dependent on the world and reality, and to what extent is it the other way round?”

  Stumm von Bordwehr had directed his glance questioningly to Agathe.

  “Ulrich is talking about this little thing,” she assured him, somewhat disconcerted, pointing to the candy horse. “He used to have a passion for it.”

  “That was, I hope, quite a long time ago,” Stumm said in astonishment. “For if I’m not mistaken, it’s a candy jar?”

  “It is not a candy jar! Friend Stumm!” Ulrich implored, seized by the disgraceful desire to chat with him about it. “If you fall in love with a saddle and harness that are too expensive for you, or a uniform or a pair of riding boots you see in a shop window: what are you in love with?”

  “You’re being outrageous! I don’t love things like that!” the General protested.

  “Don’t deny it!” Ulrich replied. “There are people who can dream day and night of a suit fabric or a piece of luggage they have seen in a shop; everyone’s known something like that; and the same thing will have happened to you, at least with your first lieutenant’s uniform! And you’ll have to admit that you might have no use for this material or this suitcase, and that you don’t even have to be in the position of being able to really desire it: so nothing is easier than loving something before you know it and without knowing it. May I, moreover, remind you that you loved Diotima at first sight?”

  This time, the General looked up cunningly. Agathe had in the meantime asked him to sit down and also procured a cigar for him, since her brother had forgotten his duty. Stumm, fringed with blue clouds, said innocently: “Since then she’s become a textbook of love, and I didn’t much like textbooks in school, either. But I still admire and respect this woman,” he added with a dignified composure that was new to him.

  Ulrich, unfortunately, didn’t notice it immediately. “All those things are idols,�
�� he went on, pursuing the questions he had directed at Stumm. “And now you see where they came from. The instincts embedded in our nature need only a minimum of external motivation and justification; they are enormous machines set in motion by a tiny switch. But they equip the object they are applied to with only as many ideas that can bear investigation as perhaps correspond to the flickering of light and shadow in the light of an emergency lamp—”

  “Stop!” Stumm begged from his cloud of smoke. ‘What is object? Are you talking about the boots and that suitcase again?”

  “I’m speaking of passion. Of longing for Diotima, just as much as longing for a forbidden cigarette. I want to make clear to you that every emotional relationship had the groundwork laid for it by preliminary perceptions and ideas that belong to reality; but that such a relationship also immediately conjures up perceptions and ideas that it fits out in its own way. In short, affect sets up the object the way it needs it to be, indeed it creates it so that the affect finally applies to an object that, having come about in such a way, is no longer recognizable. But affect isn’t destined for knowledge, either, but really for passion! This object that is born of passion and hovers in it,” Ulrich concluded, returning to his starting point, “is of course something different from the object on which it is outwardly fastened and which it can reach out to grasp, and this is therefore also true of love. 1 love you’ is mistaken; for ‘you,’ this person who has evoked the passion and whom you can seize in your arms, is the one you think you love; the person evoked by passion, this wildly religious invention, is the one you really love, but it is a different person.”

  “Listening to you”—Agathe interrupted her brother with a reproach that betrayed her inner sympathies—”you might think you don’t really love the real person, but really love an unreal person!”

  “That’s precisely what I meant to say, and I’ve also heard you saying much the same.”

  “But in reality both are ultimately one person!”

  “That’s exactly the major complication, that the hovering image of the person you love has to be represented in every outward connection by the person himself and is indeed one and the same. That’s what leads to all the confusions that give the simple business of love such an excitingly ghostly quality!”

  “But perhaps it’s only love that makes the real person entirely real? Perhaps he’s not complete before then?”

  “But the boot or the suitcase you dream about is in reality none other than the one you could actually buy!”

  “Perhaps the suitcase only becomes completely real if you love it!”

  “In a word, we come to the question of what is real. Love’s old question!” Ulrich exclaimed impatiently, yet somehow satisfied.

  “Oh, let’s forget the suitcase!” To the astonishment of both, it was the General’s voice that interrupted their sparring. Stumm had comfortably squeezed one leg over the other, which, once achieved, lent him great security. “Let’s stay with the person,” he went on, and praised Ulrich: “So far you’ve said some things terrifically well! People always believe that nothing is easier than loving each other, and then you have to remind them every day: ‘Dearest, it’s not as easy as it is for the apple woman!’ “ In explanation of this more military than civilian expression, he turned politely to Agathe. “The ‘apple woman,’ dear lady, is an army expression for when someone thinks something is easier than it is: in higher mathematics, for example, when you’re doing short division so short that, willy-nilly, you come up with a false result! Then the apple woman is held up to you, and it’s applied the same way in other places as well, where an ordinary person might just say: that’s not so simple!” Now he turned back to Ulrich and continued: “Your doctrine of the two persons interests me a good deal, because I’m also always telling people that you can love people only in two parts: in theory, or, as you put it, as a hovering person, is the way you ought to love someone, as I see it; but in practice, you have to treat a person strictly and, in the last analysis, harshly too! That’s the way it is between man and woman, and that’s the way it is in life in general! The pacifists, for instance, with their love that has no soles on its shoes, haven’t the slightest notion of this; a lieutenant knows ten times as much about love as these dilettantes!”

  Through his earnestness, through his carefully weighed manner of speaking, and not least through the boldness with which, despite Agathe’s presence, he had condemned woman to obedience, Stumm von Bordwehr gave the impression of a man to whom something important had happened and who had striven, not without success, to master it. But Ulrich still had not grasped this, and proposed: ‘Well, you decide which person is truly worth loving and which has the walk-on part!”

  “That’s too deep for me!” Stumm stated calmly, and, inhaling from his cigar, added with the same composure: “It’s a pleasure to hear again how well you speak; but on the whole you speak in such a way that one really must ask oneself whether it’s your only occupation. I must confess that after you disappeared I expected to find you, God knows, busy with more important matters!”

  “Stumm, this is important!” Ulrich exclaimed. “Because at least half the history of the world is a love story! Of course you have to take all the varieties of love together!”

  The General nodded his resistance. “That may well be.” He barricaded himself behind the busyness of cutting and lighting a fresh cigar, and grumbled: “But then the other half is a story of anger. And one shouldn’t underestimate anger! I have been a specialist in love for some time, and I know!”

  Now at last Ulrich understood that his friend had changed and, curious, asked him to tell what had befallen him.

  Stumm von Bordwehr looked at him for a while without answering, then looked at Agathe, and finally replied in a way that made it impossible to distinguish whether he was hesitating from irritation or enjoyment: “Oh, it will hardly seem worth mentioning in comparison with your occupations. Just one thing has happened: the Parallel Campaign has found a goal!”

  This news about something to which so much sympathy, even if counterfeit, had been accorded would have broken through even a fully guarded state of seclusion, and when Stumm saw the effect he had achieved he was reconciled with fortune, and found again for quite a while his old, guileless joy in spreading news. “If you’d rather, I could just as well say: the Parallel Campaign has come to an end!” he offered obligingly.

  It had happened quite incidentally: “We all of us had got so used to nothing happening, while thinking that something ought to happen,” Stumm related. “And then all of a sudden, instead of a new proposal, someone brought the news that this coming autumn a Congress for World Peace is to meet, and here in Austria!”

  “That’s odd!” Ulrich said.

  “What’s odd? We didn’t know the least thing about it!”

  “That’s just what I mean.”

  “Well, there you’re not entirely off the track,” Stumm von Bordwehr agreed. “It’s even being asserted that the news was a plant from abroad. Leinsdorf and Tuzzi went so far as to suspect that it might be a Russian plot against our patriotic campaign, if not ultimately even a German plot. For you must consider that we have four years before we have to be ready, so it’s entirely possible that someone wants to rush us into something we hadn’t planned. Beyond that, the different versions part company; but it’s no longer possible to find out what the truth of the matter is, although of course we immediately wrote off everywhere to learn more. Remarkably enough, it seems that people all over already knew about this pacifistic Congress—I assure you: in the whole world! And private individuals as well as newspaper and government offices! But it was assumed, or bandied about, that it emanated from us and was part of our great world campaign, and people were merely surprised because they couldn’t get any kind of rational response from us to their questions and queries. Maybe someone was playing a joke on us; Tuzzi was discreetly able to get hold of a few invitations to this Peace Congress; the signatures were quite naive
forgeries, but the letter paper and the style were good as gold! Of course we then called in the police, who quickly discovered that the whole manner of execution pointed to a domestic origin, and in the course of this it emerged that there really are people here who would like to convene a World Peace Congress here in the autumn— because some woman who has written a pacifist novel is going to celebrate her umpteenth birthday or, in case she’s died, would have: But it quickly became clear that these people quite evidently had not the least connection with disseminating the material that was aimed at us, and so the origin of the affair has remained in the dark,” Stumm said resignedly, but with the satisfaction that every well-told tale provides. The effortful exposition of the difficulties had drawn shadows over his face, but now the sun of his smile burst through this perplexity, and with a trace of scorn that was as unconstrained as it was candid, he added: “What’s most remarkable is that everyone agreed that there should be such a congress, or at least no one wanted to say no! And now I ask you: what are we to do, especially since we have already announced that we are undertaking something meant to serve as a model for the whole world and have constantly been spreading the slogan ‘Action!’ around? For two weeks we’ve simply had to work like savages, so that retroactively at least it looks the way it would have looked prospectively, so to speak, under other circumstances. And so we showed ourselves equal to the organizational superiority of the Prussians—assuming that it was the Prussians! We’re now calling it a preliminary celebration. The government is keeping an eye on the political part, and those of us in the campaign are working more on the ceremonial and cultural-human aspects, because that is simply too burdensome for a ministry—”