by Robert Musil
The thought of my father, whom I did not esteem, was unpleasant for me, the way a plant might feel whose roots have been burned by acid. I remembered once having said to someone: The founders of empires have no ancestors! That, too, was now unpleasant to me, because it sounded so childishly arrogant, if I had meant just then that everyone ought to be such a founder of kingdoms. That person was my
Or: I had hardly begun to look around in my new circle when I received a telegram from my father that reported…I was now completely master of my life. When I stepped out onto the square in front of the railroad station…
August 16,1929, evening
THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES THOUGHT THROUGH CONSISTENTLY
First Considerations
Don’t give him a name. Explain briefly in Part I. It’s not hard to say what a man without qualities looks like: like most other people.
There is only at times a shimmer in him, as in a solution that is trying to crystallize but always drops back.
Clarisse says and sees: You look like Satan. Colossal energy, etc.
Walter says: Your appearance is falling apart, etc. More or less what could be said about him.
Arnheim and Diotima are troubled. Arnheim says: The “cousin.”
It’s only for the police that he has qualities. For General Stumm: The old comrade.
For Count Leinsdorf he is something definite (true).
For Bonadea he is splendid, mean, etc.
I say: the or a man without qualities (and this is without overvaluing him, as would be the case with a “hero” Ulrich) is an object to be depicted. I constandy ask myself: what would a man without qualities say, think, do, in such a situation.
The ideas are such as present themselves to any clever person today. They could also be different; it doesn’t amount to the formation of a will or a conviction, beyond a given point or a paranoid system.
By this means one gains relations to the characters, the situative dialogue.
Of course they are all without qualities, but in Ulrich it is somehow visible.
He is tall, etc., sympathetic but also unsympathetic.
The other people, on the other hand, have their stories told properly. Possibly: Everything about the man without qualities in the present tense, everything else that is narrated in the imperfect. Characterize Ulrich as unsympathetically as myself.
Arnheim calls him: The young doctor.
Diotima: My learned cousin (with ironic undertone).
Bring out more strongly the leave from life: resolve to commit suicide (instead of that, then the war); don’t give reasons. They were neither concrete ones nor a disdain for life; on the contrary, although he found life abominable he made an effort to love it, felt himself somehow obligated to.
Ocean trip: the way it was. To hang on to it, grab hold of it as concretely as possible.
For the first time as man and wife beside each other in this weakness afterward. Their bodies are as insubstantial as silk ribbons. Nothing happens. Only afterward the timorous walking among the loud people.
Railroad journey: their muscles are tossed back and forth, back and forth. Their bodies sway. The weak smile that was yesterday s day pales. Here and there a glance. Or a closing of the eyes. Need for the schedule, for a sturdy compartment conversation. But between silence, fatigue, gliding through a strange landscape, and even boredom, still a hanging on to the possession of something different.
First attempt to strip naked. Above rocks on an inaccessible rock terrace. Even undressing has no effect. Here the charming play of clothes in the room has no force. The naked body like a line. If at least it were burned by the sun.
Union, like two one-celled animals. Consciously—in a pause when the moon is gone—sexuality as concentration on a goal and a way. There must be this penetration. (Conversation) The moon is there again and the penetration begins. Until they release each other fatigued and satiated. Lying on their beds like flour dust in human shape. Happy, confused; but all human content was blown away. Can that be repeated? Only if an intellectual system is involved, such as unio mystica or the like. This system might perhaps be possible. Tragedy: an unborn world.
Normal desire in Ulrich. Also in Agathe. But repressed again and again until the longing for ordinary obstacles like rivals etc. comes.
Diotima-Arnheim: Sitting knee-to-knee holding hands. Diotimas knees make a motion to open. She presses them together. She stands up, Arnheim kisses the curled hair on her neck. (He is unaware of this nestling up from behind.) The kiss down her back, through her legs, comes out at her breasts.
Diotima-Ulrich afterward. Diotima just looks at him, upset. Everything in her is destroyed. He has put her feelings back on track again.
Meingast. Is democracy a system that picks out leaders? No.
Does it further the intellectual and spiritual? No.
It drags down whatever is outstanding, while raising the general level only a tiny bit.
***
My view of, or task I would set for, literature: partial solution, contribution to the solution, investigation, or the like. I feel exempted from having to give an unequivocal response. I have, after all, also postulated the morality of individual cases, etc.
A justified objection: That was from the period before the war. There was no way of snaking up the totality. It went further too: everyone had this feeling. Whether one wanted it that way or not, there was a firm system of coordinates. A floating ball, which one pushed and turned every which way. One’s interest exhausted itself in the variations. The tacit assumption was probably not the solidity of the environment but one’s lack of concern for it, without one’s being aware of it.
Disposition to understanding the way I am in, for instance, Martha [Musil’s wife] because she paid no attention to the totality in any event.
This situation has now changed. The whole person has been flung into uncertainty. Discussions are of no use to him, he needs the solidity that has been lost. Hence the desire for resolution, for yes and no. In this sense, a person with as little substance as Brecht is exemplary through the form of his behavior. He moves people because he demonstrates their own experience to them. One has to understand this completely.
Therefore the didactic element in the book must be strengthened. A practical formula must be advanced.
Not further thought out: apparently this gives the practical-theoretical opposition, the original spy concept, new content.
LATE 1920s
a. Loving Fear
It was spring. The air like a net. Behind it something that stretched the weave. But was not able to break through. They [Ulrich and Agathe] both knew it but no longer trusted themselves to talk about it. They knew, in the moment when they would seek words for it…it would be dead. Fear made them tender. Their eyes and hands (often) brushed each other, a trembling around the lips sought its reflection, one second seemed to separate itself from the ranks of the others and sink into the depths.
The second time, such a movement was a massive mountain of bliss.
The third time, very nearly comical.
Then the loving fear came over them.
They looked for a jest, a cynical word; just something unimportant but real; something that is at home in life and has a right to a home. It makes no difference what one talks about. Every word falls into the silence, and the next moment the corpses of other words are shining in a circle around it, the way masses of dead fish rise to the surface when one casts poison into the water. The order of words in a real connection destroys the deep reflective luster with which, unspoken, they lie above the unutterable, and one could just as well speak about lawyers as philosophy.
b.
Agathe is playing the piano.
Ulrich comes in, a book in his hand; it is Emerson, whom he loves. He heard only at the last moment that Agathe was making music. What he hates: music as subterfuge, music as intoxicant deadening the life-forming will. He becomes gloomy, wants to turn around, but nevertheless reads aloud t
o Agathe the place he wanted to show her.
Can be applied to the description of the nature of an idea: “ Tn common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty—knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday—property, climate, breeding, personal beauty, and the like—have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned solid shakes and rattles.
His voice sounds despondently “cold and silent” as he reads with lost confidence. Agathe has interrupted her playing; when the words, too, have died away, her fingers take a few acoustic steps through the boundless land of music, stop, and she listens. “Lovely,” she says, but does not know what she means.
To her surprise Ulrich says: “Yes; it can drive one mad.” Agathe, who knows that Ulrich does not like it when she plays music, abandons the instrument.
—Pay attention! Ulrich says, having stepped back and drawn a pistol from his pocket. He fires at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The bullet cuts through the dry, tender wood and howls across the strings. A second churns up jumping sounds. The keys begin to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drive with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing uproar. He does not know why he is shooting. Certainly not because of anger at the piano, or to express anything at all symbolically. When the magazine is empty Ulrich lets it drop to the carpet, and his cheeks are still hollowed out from tension.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive instrument. She felt no fear, and although the way her brother began must have been quite incomprehensible to her, the thought that he had gone mad did not seem terrifying to her, caught up as she was by the pathos of the shots and the strange wounded cries of the struck instrument.
When her brother then asked whether she was angry at him, she denied it with radiant eyes.—I ought to feel like a fool—Ulrich said, somewhat ashamed—but if I tried to repeat that, it would turn into ordinary target practice, and its never being repeatable was perhaps the stimulus.
—Always, when one has done something, Agathe said.
Ulrich looked at her in astonishment and said nothing.
c.
It was only the next day that Ulrich referred to the incident again. “Now you won’t be able to play the piano for a while,” he tried saying by way of excuse; where the piano had stood there was emptiness in the room. “Why did you say yesterday that these books could drive one mad?” Agathe asked. “Before your mad idea. Are they very beautiful?”
“Just because they’re beautiful. It’s perhaps good that you can’t make music now.” What followed was a long conversation. —It’s all like blowing bubbles, Ulrich said. Beautiful? With his hands he spontaneously formed in the air an iridescent ball—”completely self-contained and round, like a globe, and the next instant vanished without trace. I’ve been working again for a while—”
(But it is also possible to take everything theoretical out of the description of the Other Condition and apply it as fiction in an ironic way as depiction of the age. Then all that would remain here would be those remarks that have the character of events.)
***
Agathe: Depict a deep depression.
It is as if a secret drawer within her had been turned upside down and contents never before seen had come to light. Everything is obscured. Little reflection; really an inability to reflect. The idea: I must kill myself, is present only in the form of this sentence, unspoken, yet its presence eerily known; it fills the dark vacuum more and more completely.
The condition is uncanny. Much less free of the fear of death than were many of the healthy moments in which Agathe had often thought of death. And much less beautiful: dull, colorless. But the idea now has a fearful attraction.
She begins to put her affairs in order: there really aren’t any. Ulrich is right, when he struggles and works, that yields content; he is marvelous the way he is—she thinks.
Then: He’ll get over it. Ira not leaving behind anyone who will weep over me.
Sadness at living. The flowing of the blood is a weeping. Everything done badly, without energy, half; like a small parrot among coarse sparrows. Incapable of the simple emotions. She had been afraid of her father; the same fear that had recurred often in her life: not being able to defend herself, because the defense leads to things that one finds just as meaningless. She never knew love, and the suggestion that this was now the most important thing; this child’s idea, this rapture of so many women, is a matter of indifference to her.
But The sovereignty of the resolve. Whoever is able to do this is free and owes no one an accounting. The world becomes quite calm. In spite of its rush. The strange loneliness! With which one is born.
***
All objects in the room become friends for the first time; have seriously found their place.
A long time ago she had obtained a capsule with cyanide; it was her solace in many hours. Pours it for the first time into a glass; the carafe with water beside it. Describe how it is done. Possibly the confidence that this world, in which Agathe feels herself so imperfect, is not the only one.
At the last moment, Ulrich enters.
Agathe would have had to say farewell, become sentimental, offer explanations. Or jump up and run away from him. She looks at him helplessly, and he notices the disturbance in her face. The spark jumps over to him. —Today you have no courage. He was still trying to jest. —I, at least, shot up a piano. —Let’s kill ourselves…, Agathe said. We are miserable creatures who bear within ourselves the law of another world, without being able to carry it out! We love what is forbidden and will not defend ourselves.
Ulrich threw himself down beside her and embraced her. We will not let ourselves be killed by anything before we have tried it!
What? Agathe looked at him, trembling.
God has…Ulrich smiled…The lost paradise! We don’t need to ask ourselves whether what we propose will stand every test: everything is fleeting and fluid. Whoever is not like us will not understand us. Because one understands nothing of what one sees and does, but only what one is. Do you understand me, my soul?
And if it fails, we’ll kill ourselves?
We’ll kill ourselves! Voices were singing in them like a chorus of heavenly storms: Do what you feel!!
Next chapter
If they had done what they were feeling, in an hour everything would have been over. But as it is, they travel.
1930-1934
Nations Chapter
This chapter, as reminder of the world, inserted in the progression of the extremely personal chapters. Also works as antidote to the other Ufe that Ulrich has devised.
Basic idea: presenting and ironizing “making everyone dance to the same tune/’ (But deeper basic idea: Age of empiricism.)
Extremes appeal more to the average person than does the strict truth.
***
Sketch For Crisis And Decision Chapter
Preceded by: Ulrich-Bonadea
Ulrich stays behind; like a dog that has killed a chicken. Leaves the room briefly; Agathe comes in; she’s had enough of Lindner; Peter preceded her. Her thoughts and their result. This should be followed by a—not written—conversation to the effect that disavowal produced by the result justifies the crisis.
On the real and urgent level, Ulrich has to go on an errand. Agathe’s attempt at suicide. Saved by Ulrich. Final resolve.
What is the resolve based on? What Agathes attempted suicide?
Ulrich really ought to answer—in the sense of Schleiermacher s moral indifference of the religious person—that the Other Condition offers
no precepts for everyday fife. You can marry, live as you wish, etc. Utopias, too, have not produced any practicable results. That’s also something like the race of genius inside the race of stupidity. That also means: against the total solution and system. Against the sense of community. Adventure of rejecting life. But without going into the theory.
After the eruption he concedes: intimation and God, even if dubious. His real justification is fear of the sweetness of the three sisters [Agathe, Ulrich himself, and the Other Condition—TRANS.], and so they decide to go away, and coitus is unarticulated. So, at least for the time being, he half abandons image and the like.
Agathe wants a decision the way youth does.
Ulrich: I have decided. Suicide year.
Agathe: Mysticism that could not ally itself with religion allies itself with Ulrich.
Decision to be: instrument of an unknown goal.
Agathe: There is really no good and evil, but only faith or doubt. Let’s get away from all that.
Lacking faith, leave it to intimations. Ulrich rejects believing but follows intimations.
Agathe’s depression: One main argument: The lawyer proposed she should have herself declared ill. She did the will on account of Ulrich, and now everything threatens to fall on top of her. Lindner, too, she only treated badly.
She is for action (youth), but it also looks like this: Whatever one can object to about others, and also about God and the Other Condition, is a matter of indifference to her; she wants to live with Ulrich, thinks it’s very bad of her but wants to anyway, and if that won’t work, then all that remains is badness and the end.