by Robert Musil
Of course it is part of the peculiarity of our condition that every new observation assimilates all the earlier ones, so that there is no hierarchy among them; they seem, rather, to be infinitely entangled. I could just as well go on to call our condition magnanimous, which in fact I did some days ago, as I could characterize it as creative, for creating and creation are possible only in an attitude that is positive through and through, and so that, too, would be in accord; ultimately such a life, in which every moment is to be as significant as possible, is also that “life in the sense of the maximal challenge” which I sometimes imagined as the spiritual complement to the laconic resolve of true science. But whether maximal, magnanimous, creative, or significant, essential or whole, how do I account for my feelings for Professor Lindner being what they are? That’s the problem I am drawn back to, the crux of the experiment, the crossroads! It occurs to me that I have deprived him of the possibility of having part of Agathe. Why? Because having part of, indeed even understanding, is never possible through “putting oneself in the place of the other,” but is possible only if both mutually take part in something greater. It’s impossible for me to feel my sister’s headaches; but I find myself transported with her in a state in which there is no pain, or where pain has the hovering wings of bliss!
I have doubts about this, I see the exaggeration in it. But perhaps that’s only because I’m not capable of ecstasy?
Toward Lindner I would have to conduct myself as if I were somehow united with him in God. Even a smaller whole, like “nation” or some other confraternity, would suffice. At least it would suffice to prescribe my conduct. Even an idea in common would be enough. It merely has to be something new and dynamic that is not merely Lindner and I. So the answer to Agathe’s question, what a contradiction signifies between two books both of which one loves, is: it never signifies a calculation or a balance, but signifies a third, dynamic thing, which envelops both aspects in itself. And that’s how the life was that was always before my eyes, even if rarely clearly: the people united, I united with people through something that makes us renounce our hundred dislikes. The contradictions and hostilities that exist between us cannot be denied, but one can also imagine them “suspended,” the way the strong current of a liquid picks up and suspends whatever it encounters in its path. There would then not be certain feelings among people, but there would be others. All impossible feelings could be summarized as neutral and negative; as petty, gnawing, constricting, base, but also as indifferent or merely rooted in connections that were necessary. So what remains would be great, increasing, demanding, encumbered, affirming, rising: in my hurry I can’t describe it adequately, but it lay in the depths of my body like a dream, and isn’t what I ultimately wanted simply to love life and everyone in it? I, with my arms, my muscles, trained to the point of malignity, basically nothing but crazy for love and lacking love? Is this the secret formula of my life?
I can conceive of that when I fantasize and think of the world and people, but not when I think of Lindner, that specific, ridiculous person, the man Agathe will perhaps see again tomorrow in order to discuss with him what she does not discuss with me. So what’s left? That there are two groups of emotions which can be separated to some extent, which I would now again like to characterize only as positive and negative conditions, without placing a value on them, but merely according to a peculiarity of their appearance; although I love one of these two overall conditions from the depths (that also means: well hidden) of my soul. And the reality is left that I now find myself almost constantly in this condition, and Agathe too! Perhaps this is a great experiment that fate intends with me. Perhaps everything I have attempted was there only so that I could experience this. But I also fear that there’s a vicious circle lurking in everything that I think I have understood up to now. For I don’t want—if I now go back to my original motif—to leave the state of “significance,” and if I try to tell myself what significance is, all I come back to again and again is the state I’m in, which is that I don’t want to leave a specific state! So I don’t believe I’m looking at the truth, but what I experience is certainly not simply subjective, either; it reaches out for the truth with a thousand arms. For that reason it could truly seem to me to be a hypnotic suggestion. All my emotions happen to be remarkably homogeneous or harmonized, and the resistive ones are excluded, and such a condition of the emotions, which regulates action in a unified way, is precisely what is regarded as the centerpiece of a hypnosis. But can something be hypnotic whose premonition, whose first traces, I can follow back through almost my entire life?
So there remains…? It isn’t imagination and it isn’t reality; even if it is not hypnotic suggestion, I would almost have to conclude that it is the beginning of supra-reality.
Sketches and Notes About the Novel
1920-1929
Preface:
This novel takes place before 1914, a time that young people will no longer know at all. And the novel does not describe this time the way it really was, so that one could learn about it from this book. But it describes the time as it is mirrored in a person outside the mainstream. Then what does this novel have to do with people of today? Why don’t I write a novel about today instead? This has to be established, as best it can.
But that it concerns an (invented) story should also become part of the manner of its telling. The path of history is to be applied not only in the novel but to it.
From the perspective of the book, the portrayal of the time has to be abridged. But I’m not capable of that. The Parallel Campaign, for instance, ought to connect with the Eucharistic Congress and other things about which I know too little. Absolute necessity of creating the technique from this error!
Preface
Ulrich considers himself a person who has a message to bring the world. Fragments are to be found here.
Later he judges […]: In one’s lifetime one must have presented a good front and the like if one wants to have even a posthumous effect. He is not bad, just gives up.
That is also his development in the novel. He does not write his book but is present in all the events.
The narrator is, in a way, his friend.
Present Ulrich not as the “true-strong” person but as an important statement that has gone astray.
Mood: This is the tragedy of the failed person (more properly: the person who in questions of emotion and understanding is always aware of a further possibility. For he is not simply a failure) who is always alone, in contradiction with everything, and cannot change anything. All the rest is logically consistent.
Preface
People will find the excuse—because they don’t want to explore the idea—that what is offered here is as much essay as novel.
Query: Why is it that people today don’t pay attention to ideas in art, while in other respects they demonstrate an absolutely ridiculous interest in “doctrines”?
1st Section Before Agathe
An athletic young man—very intellectual—attempts normal life—has ideas that don’t seem to fit in—suspicious of the transparent humbug with ideals—tries to find a way out by means of functional morality—is himself morally indifferent—but unhappy about it—is arrogant toward his time but always looking for a way out of his arrogance—and from this an emotion crystallizes: swimming through a space—jagged stage sets loom up—Ulrich was good. As a child. He simply saw that this “good” could not become the desiccated commonly accepted one. If among his ideas there are some that are right, then he is a precursor. But apparently evil develops the way he doesn’t imagine it a la journalism. He is interested in evil and despises the common.
Preface
I dedicate this novel to German youth. Not the youth of today—intellectual vacuum after the war—quite amusing frauds—but the youth that will come after a time and that will have to begin exactly where we stopped before the war, etc. (On this also rests my justification for writing a prewar novel today!)
Preface
“Superfluous,” “wandering” discussions: that’s a reproach that’s often been made against me, in which it was perhaps graciously conceded that I could tell a story. But these discussions are for me the most important thing!
I could have depicted many things more realistically. For instance, Hans Sepp and National Socialist politics. But there is already enough of the ridiculous in the book, and I then would not have been able to counterbalance it, which was what I was trying to do.
Preface
Where one speaks of relative originality: The phenomenon that a relatively or entirely original writer—completely inaccessible to the average critic—who in desperation analyzes him only in isolated, dependent particles—as has happened to me.
Preface
Why Vienna instead of an invented metropolis. Because it would have been more effort to invent one than a “crossed-out” Vienna.
Manner of Representation to be Frequently Used
Assemble a composite person, but with cards faceup! From settled ideas and a few obsessive linkages of ideas, e.g., the way Hagauer is. All the intellectual characters this way: Arnheim, Diotima, etc. Whatever is added that is human and personal, particularly to those characters who are “only people,” is accidental; moreover, from the psychological point of view also characteristic, frequently repellent, like Arnheim’s predilection for the behind, or wishy-washy psychology like Schnitzler’s.
events
depictions *
convewrsations
interweavings
}
are the only bearers of the narration
* Of the nature of the person, of changes in the physical and moral landscape
Theories, half ironic, chiefly in the agitations of
the unsympathetic and half-sympathetic figures
Journey with Agathe
Trip across. Seasickness. Burgeoning awareness of a fearful passion for each other because they see each other in this state, bear it, feel it appropriate, with mouths agape, vomiting. The whole ship an orgy.
Ancona. Exhaustion. Taken for a married couple, room with double bed; they don’t want to reject it; fear almost amounting to a feeling of persecution, sweetness.
Only the terrible things about Rome. The smoothed and polished, the ravinelike streets with green window shutters. The being tortured from before.
That was the first trip. On the second, with Clarisse, he recalls it. In Venice, where Clarisse is confined on the way back, meeting with Gus-tav [the model for Walter—TRANS.]. Rather fat paunch, deep devotion to Clarisse. Forced back to Vienna; meeting with Agathe, beginning of the spy story. The inner city entwined around St. Stephen’s Cathedral like a ball of tangled yarn. Yellow-gray darkness. Air like down.
On the trip: They really don’t do anything at all; they only suffer the fear that they could be accused, and the desire.
Someplace or other, memory from Esslingen. Second floor of the museum. He is sitting at the window; it mirrors nothing, reflects the room. But if one bends closer, then from all sides the blackness plunges in, and then the church, the jagged black houses with their caps of snow.
First trip. It’s boringly different; we’re traveling as man and wife. Nothing else; everything only in the hesitation that they have to overcome inwardly to do so. They are traveling without passports. Morning in Budapest. Conference with a lawyer. The square before the Parliament: something breaks under their feet like thin sheets of ice; gusts of wind sweep the square clean of people, mere existence makes itself palpable as an exertion. Impatience to get on the train. Just ten minutes before departure, resistance against order. Reacting to some land of feeling, they buy second-class tickets; some pleasant thought or other of black leather. Tip, alone. Everywhere they are taken for a young married couple. It’s boring, Agathe lies down to nap. It turns fine; white plain like a sea, forests buried in snow, heavy pillows of snow on the branches of the firs. Achilles [earlier name for Ulrich] wakes Agathe up; this white and black, perhaps a white and mysteriously bottle-green landscape rushes through their eyes—lovely, she says, presses his hand—and melts into sleep; he stares at the strange countryside, sees in the darkness of the compartment Agathe’s shoulders and hips as she lies on her side, like hills, mysterious
Morning near Fiume. Through the opened window damp, warm air. Speckled flanks of the bowl of the valley they are descending into.
In Fiume rain, storm. Somebody in the train says that the steamer left already this morning; someone else: it will still be there. Going across the harbor square the storm turns their umbrella inside out—laughter on the flagstones, the rain soaks their clothes so that they are wading in their shoes.
Walk in the sunshine, palm trees, a street like a ribbon tied in bows.
What is an execution compared to an operation?
He drives back with someone else, who is horrified. When they get to
where the pavement begins, the carriage jolts so that they don’t continue
talking. Trees are torn past, sometimes the glance is flung through a hole
into sand, pines
The man: walks, looks around. Achilles feels an inexpressible link to him. Dostoyevskian. Laughs at it. Yields voluntarily.
At his execution, Moosbrugger is simply embarrassed. Execution like a fire-brigade drill. The solemn flourishes at the end don’t move Ulrich. On his way out he nods vaguely and politely. Feels that it is perhaps out of place. Only when he looks into the face of his driver does he notice a difference of brightness and warmth in the surroundings as opposed to before. This face seems to him quite hard, he sees every single hair of the beard stubble. A man who was there to do a journalistic study, whom he had invited to share his carriage and forgotten, gets in with him. Out of some vague feeling he remains sitting on the right. Country road, then extended city street. Pubs, people in black skirts and shirtsleeves. Ulrich feels a vague, scornful hatred for these people.
Study for Conclusion
Ulrich, to begin with without irony:
Reversal of a feeling about life with hard, bright, challenging…into soft, dark, smeared…What was so important to one a moment ago becomes completely indifferent.
One has the feeling that this passivity is not entirely without activity, but this activity is something quite different from the disputatious passivity of before. Ulrich remembers having felt something similar in [chapter] 30. He was dissatisfied with himself and (1) his house made him shudder. He recalled once more his feeling of the “ahistorical,” the world new with every day. In addition: accidental and essential qualities, possibly being broken in spirit from strength; one’s being is still strength, but the object being seized is always simply larger.
(1) I was born, abandoned into this world; from one protective darkness into another. Mother? Ulrich had not had a mother. The world my mother? He stood up and stretched his muscles.
[Fragment]
I did not answer my father’s letter. An odd destiny had led me into the same aristocratic circles to which he owed his rise in life, the naive lack of dignity of which irritated me; I had resolved to look around in these circles as in a room into which one had stumbled by some secret chance, and if in doing so I would have had to have the least thought of a resemblance, this would have been impossible for me. It was no doubt for this reason that I refrained from giving my father the satisfaction of having his wish fulfilled. He took it amiss, and I received no more letters from him, so that not long after, I was completely surprised by a message reporting his demise. I cannot say I was shaken; we had little fondness for each other. Also, I was totally lacking in the feeling for that continuity which, it is claimed, binds ancestors and posterity; the inheritance of certain dispositions and qualities, while certainly present, did not seem to me any more important than that the most disparate melodies can be constructed from the same notes, and the generally prevailing demand for pious respect is a con game; at least that’s how most unconstrained young people feel it, although later
they deny it. Besides, I was in a great hurry to complete the arrangements for my trip.
I remember that while I was overseeing the packing, the barbaric ideas of patriarchy that are dinned into shrinking children went through my head; the hand that strikes out at the father grows from the grave, the disobedient child is afflicted with its parents’ tears when they are dead, and many such techniques from the wild primitive era of mankind. Primal epochs come to life again in the nursery, where nannies let themselves go. Somewhat later I was overcome by the desolate feeling that the entire atmosphere surrounding the ultimate questions and their philosophy, which I had involuntarily been seeking in my memory, are of a pronounced banality. Just as when you look up at the starry sky for the space of five minutes. We know nothing, and what we feel is warmed-over cabbage. I did not even know whether I ought to give myself over to my distaste or whether I should set it straight; the beginnings of both were in me. Whatever the philosophers may have contributed, no matter how enormous it might be as an intellectual accomplishment, from the human point of view we have remained in these questions undeniably limited and boring. Of course my own ideas shared in this too, except that it suddenly seemed to me incredibly remarkable that one lives with this quite contentedly. The well-known feeling of extraterritoriality rose up in me: even if I do not presume to be able to order things and thoughts any better, in the order that they have found for themselves they are for me immensely alien. And I gradually noticed that I had fallen into a quite specific stream of ideas and emotions that I had almost forgotten.