by Robert Musil
A goal, a striving, determine the emotions, and the emotions the argumentation.
States are intellectually inferior.
A question: How can one lose wars? (Stumm: That’s something we know something about!) Earlier: How could an absolute ruler miscalculate so badly as often happened? False intelligence, also lack of talent, will have played a role. But for the most part it was probably always a not-being-able-to-retreat, and the human quality that it is easier to assume the burden of a great remote danger than a smaller but closer one. Before one discards a city, rather than taking upon oneself a war that can cost one a province. Then the collective boastfulness; so great that no single person could achieve it, and there is no escaping it. Patriotism as affect instead of reason: the state is not conducted like a business but as an ethical “good.” Yet they are also manly affects!
But that doubtless happens as it should. What is striking is only that the moral nature of the state has remained far less developed than that of the individual.
The outstanding personalities of history are criminals: Ulrich’s plans to become a Napoleon. But for the most part, criminal here means: anti-philistine, someone unconstrained. But they really were criminals: murderers, oath breakers, liars, tricksters, in a word: on principle, the historical personality can be credited with any iniquity: the mature person is confronted with this idea. And has less sympathy for it. An effeminacy?
In a criminal, affects outweigh the inhibitions (except when caused by environment or degeneration, weakness and such). But don’t they in a man of action too? Revision of the reflections that are occasionally given to Moosbrugger? Clarisse?
The world calls for strongly affective, strong-willed leaders.
But compare it to the individual person: will and intelligence must be strong. Beginning miscreants later become self-possessed. I must have a note about this (cf. men of action and human deeds).
The valuation of historical personalities and deeds is a functional one.
Here, in distinction to historical and private morality, is an example of functional evaluation. Absolutely the paradigm, for translated into the private sphere the historical is positively disgusting.
1930-1942
Concluding portion
Overall problem: war.
Pseudorealities lead to war. The Parallel Campaign leads to war! War as: How a great event comes about. All lines lead to the war. Everyone welcomes it in his fashion. The religious element in the outbreak of the war. Deed, emotion, and Other Condition join as one. Someone remarks: that was what the Parallel Campaign had always been looking for. It has found its great idea.
Arises (like crime) from all those things that people ordinarily allow to dissipate in small irregularities.
Ulrich recognizes: either real working together (Walters inductive piety) or Other Condition, or from time to time this has to happen.
Agathe says (repeatedly): We were the last romantics of love.
Ulrich possibly: the genius’s needs and way of life are different from those of the masses. Perhaps better:…from the condition of genius and the condition of masses.
Individualist with the awareness of the impossibility of this viewpoint.
Doesn’t go to Switzerland because he has no confidence in any idea at all.
Regards it as his suicide.
The collectivity needs a stable mental attitude. Its first attempt.
Ulrich: It’s the same thing we did: flight (from peace).
Ulrich at the end: knowing, working, being effective without illusions.
Something like a religious shudder.
The fixed and stable is disavowed.
Other Condition—normal condition will never be resolved.
Most profound hostility toward all these people; at the same time one rushes around with them and wants to embrace the first person who comes along.
The individual will sinks, a new age of multipolar relations emerges before the eye of the mind.
Ulrich sees what a fascinating moment it was that never quite happened between himself and Agathe. Ultimate refuge sex and war, but sex lasts for one night, the war evidently for a month, etc.
Arnheim: The individual is the one who is fooled.
Agathe: We go on living as if nothing were happening. Ulrich: Timidity before this robustness.
The priests: God’s Officer Corps.
Overpowered by a ridiculous feeling for his homeland. Strives to regret, do penance, let himself be swept up. At the same time mocked.
Te deum laudamus.
National romanticism, displacement into scapegoats and love-goats.
Nations have no intentions. Good people can make a cruel nation. Nations have a mind that is not legally accountable. More properly: they have no mind at all. Comparison with the insane. They don’t want to. But they have at each other.
Also a solution to: loving a person and not being able to love him.
***
Anarchism couldn’t prove itself even in love! Ulrich stands and acts under this impression.
In general the mob chapters, and within them especially Ulrich, depend on the as yet undetermined outcome of the Utopia of Inductive Thinking. But apparently it will amount to: struggling (mentally) and not despairing. Intimation reduced to belief, belief in an inductive God, unprovable but credible. As an adventure that keeps the affects in motion. Main idea. Circulation of the emotions without mysticism. Discovery of God in Kohler’s fashion [Wolfgang Kohler, founder of gestalt psychology—TRANS.], or on the basis of other ideas: God’s becoming material. Intimation, Other Condition: someone else, who is better suited, might perhaps take these up. How one could force this on people: unimaginable. Either leave what is hated to the age. Or work toward it, that is for it: write a book, therefore suicide, therefore go to war.
Once again the uppermost problem: To be advanced more concretely than both “Pseudorealities,” therefore externalized: collapse of the culture (and of the idea of culture). This is in fact what the summer of 1914 initiated.
Now it turns out that this was the great idea the Parallel Campaign was searching for, and what happens is the unfathomable flight from culture. Stumm might say that he is fleeing. All states claim to stand for something spiritual, which they don’t define and summarily call culture. It turns out to be Utopian in my assessments too. And that’s what people no longer have confidence in.
In a certain sense, the entire problem of reality and morality is also the problem of drives. Of their running their instinctive course without result, their causing mischief; they must be controlled in order to prevent murder, usury, etc. But the counterproblem of being controlled is weakness of the drives, the paling of life, and how this is to be compensated for cannot be clearly imagined.
Studies for Chapters (1932/33-1941)
Study for the closing session, and then Ulrich—Agathe
Beginning: No one wants to host the closing session of the Parallel Campaign. Finally, Count Leinsdorf: it ought to be ceremonial, not simply a leaving in the lurch, decides to host it himself. Again the hall, etc., as at the last meeting; but this time without the secretaries. And he delivers the concluding address.
Beforehand people gather (ceremoniously) in another room. This provides the opportunity (or also short conversations as they hasten away) of having die other characters pass by in review.
Reconciliation scene between Tuzzi and Diotima. Tuzzi: Now reason wins out. Does he mean that against pacifism? He means: Now the situation is clearing up, perhaps: the situation that up to now has unconsciously hidden behind pacifism. And most profoundly: Reason belongs to the realm of evil. Morality and reason are the opposites of goodness. (Ulrich, too, might possibly say that, coming up to them.)
Then what dominates is: We are in the right; according to the rules of reason and morality we are the ones attacked: perhaps Count Leinsdorfs address. Everyone: We are defending what is ours (homeland, culture).
Arnheim: The world is perhaps perishing
or entering a long hell-But perhaps Arnheim is no longer present.
Who?: The world would then perish not through its immoral but through its moral citizens.
Agathe: We go on living as if it were nothing. Ulrich: No. Suicide. I’m going to war. Agathe: If anything happens to you: poison.
The shadowing presence of death suddenly becomes visible. One’s personal death, without one’s having got anything straightened out, and ignoring which life stumbles on and continues unfolding its diversions. In the mob mood, moreover, everyone believes in giving up diversions for a long time. Isn’t the final result for Ulrich something like ascesis? The Other Condition has miscarried, and diversions belong to the mutation of emotions? So that would once again be in opposition to the healthy life. An end of Utopias.
Buildings—breathlike mass, condensation on surfaces that present themselves…
Freed from connections, every impulse momentarily deforms the individual.
The individual, who comes about only through expression, forms himself in the forms of society. He is violated and thus acquires surface.
He is formed by the back-formations of what he has created. If one takes away these back-formations, what remains is something indefinite, unshaped. The walls of the streets radiate ideologies.
General Reflections
(c.1930-1942)
For the beginning
The stories being written today are all very fine, significant, profound, useful distillations and full of spirit. But they have no introductions.
Therefore I have decided to write this story in such a way that in spite of its length it needs an introduction.
It is said that a story needs an introduction only if the writer has not been able to shape it successfully. Splendid! Literature’s progress, which expresses itself today in the absence of introductions, proves that writers are very sure of their subjects and their audience. For of course the audience is involved too; the writer has to open his mouth, and the audience must already know what it is he wants to say; if he then says it a little differently and in an unexpected way, he has legitimized himself as creative. So authors and public are generally on good terms today, and the need for an introduction indicates an exceptional case.
A small variation. I would not, however, want to be understood to mean that in my view the greatness of the genius is expressed in the greatness of the variation. On the contrary—the age of fools.
But we also do not want to overlook the fact that in writing introductions a relationship with the audience can be expressed that is too good; looked at historically, this is even the way it has been most of the time. The author appears in his window in shirtsleeves and smiles down at the street; he is certain that people will obligingly look up to his popular face if he says a few words personally. It is enough for me to say that I have been spoiled far too little by success to hit upon such an idea. My need for an introduction does not indicate a particularly good relation with the public, and although, as is already apparent, I will make abundant use of the custom of talking about myself in this preface, I hope to be speaking not about an individual person but about a public matter.
Preface, first continuation
Many will ask: What viewpoint is the author taking, and with what results? I can’t give a satisfactory account of myself. I take the matter neither from all sides (which in the novel is impossible) nor from one side, but from various congruent sides. But one must not confuse the unfinished state of something with the authors skepticism. I expound my subject even though I know it is only a part of the truth, and I would expound it in just the same way if I knew it was false, because certain errors are way stations of the truth. Given a specific task, I am doing what I can.
This book has a passion that in the area of belles lettres today is somewhat out of place, the passion for rightness/precision. (Polgar [Alfred Polgar, writer and friend of Musil—TRANS.]: Spare us brief stories. In saying that he writes a long one.)
The story of this novel amounts to this, that the story that ought to be told in it is not told.
Possibly: Adduce as well the principle of partial solutions, which is vital to the way I have set up my task. For instance Torless, Unions. The basis of many misunderstandings. The public prefers writers who go for the whole.
The term “essayism” is impossibly chosen if one thinks for instance of Carlyle.
Readers are accustomed to demanding that you tell them about life and not about the reflection of life in the heads of literature and people. But that is justified with certainty only insofar as this reflection is merely an impoverished and conventionalized copy of life. I am trying to offer them originals, so they have to suspend their prejudice too.
Mastering unreality is a program, so point to Volume Two, but as a way of concluding it is almost absurd.
Volume One closes approximately at the high point of an arch; on the other side it has no support. What moves me to publication (aside from Rowohlt [Musil’s pubhsher—TRANS.]) is what I have always done; today the structure of a work of fiction is more important than its course. One must learn to understand that side again, then one will have books.
Behind the problems of the day the constitutive problems, which are not, however, the so-called eternal problems.
This is not a skeptic speaking but a person who considers the problem difficult and who has the impression that it is being worked at unmethodically.
Perhaps a preface at the end? A deferred preface.
A depiction of the time? Yes and no. A representation of constitutive relations. Not current; but one level further down. Not skin, but joints.
The problems don’t have the form in which they appear? No. The problems don’t seem modern. The problems of the present aren’t modern!
In the chapters on surface and precision I have sought to indicate how that works.
At bottom is the way the mind and spirit of an age are constituted. Here the opposition between empirical thinking and thinking with the emotions.
A glance at life teaches us that it is different. I am by neither talent nor inclination a “naturalist.”
There is a lot of talk here about an emotion that today apparently has no place in our lives. If the visitors at a racetrack move in an instant from dissatisfaction with the way the race is conducted to plundering the cash receipts, and a hundred policemen hardly suffice to restore order, what then should…
What would it mean, further, in a time in which new forms of states…with power and older forms…with power.
Here, too, you will find wit and idea somewhat less responsive than they might be, badly informed, not up-to-date, at least three months behind. The significance lies less in the examples than in the teaching (exempla docent).
For example, the democracy of the spirit has already advanced as far as Emil Ludwig, while I am still depicting Arnheim-Rathenau. The schools as far as Minister of Education Grimm (the age of the great individualists is past), while I’m still with Kerschensteiner. The literature industry with looking for Bruckner. Sports at Schafers radiant report that in the list of celebrities in the Bord he was far ahead of Jeritza. [Musil kept up with people and events. He had modelled those in the novel on ones of an earlier day and is ruminating on the possible effect of the march of time on his novel] —All this has not escaped me entirely. But I am slow. And I have intentionally remained with my old examples—here or somewhere ought to come, however, that I do not intend to be historically accurate—because I believe that investigating my examples will necessarily lead to the same result. (By doing this I lose effects but win anatomically, or something similar.)
Nevertheless, in what they yield these examples are not complete either. What ultimately emerges are major lines or only preferred lines, an ideal scaffolding from which the Gobelins hang, if I may call these stories such on account of their flat technique.
Think of Grimm’s speech. This is the way the world is moved, and, moreover, the struggle of power interests becomes ever
purer. But your criticism, your problem, is directed almost exclusively at democracy. How do you defend this? You represent as purely as possible the interests of the spirit and intellect, and can’t help it that democracy, too, has partially taken them up in its program and makes fine phrases out of them. The things you’re saying are prolegomena for every party, except of course for a party that is after fundamental change in a spirit that has remained unchanged for millennia. You are incessandy in motion beneath and behind the parties or, as people used to say, above them. You’re engaged in trying to find what’s independent.
The request that I write an announcement meets with such obstacles in the case of a book with…pages,…chapters,…characters, and thirty-three times as many lines, of which not a single one is intentionally empty, that I prefer to say what this book is not.
It is not the Great Austrian Novel people have been awaiting for ages, although…
It is not a depiction of the time, in which Herr…recognizes his spitting image.
It is just as little a depiction of a society.
It does not contain the problems we’re suffering from, but…
It is not the work of a writer, insofar as has the task (to repeat, what…) but as far as constructive variation.
One might add: Since the latter lies in the spirit of the totality, this book is idealistic, analytic, possibly synthesizing.
It is not a satire, but a positive construal.
It is not a confession, but a satire.
It is not the book of a psychologist.
It is not the book of a thinker (since it places the ideational elements in an order that—)
It is not the book of a singer who…
It is not the book of a successful unsuccessful author.
It is not an easy and not a difficult book, for that depends entirely on the reader.
Without having to go on in this fashion, I think that after this I can say that anyone who wants to know what this book is would do best to read it himself/ not rely on my judgment or that of others, but read it himself.