The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  Ulrich had offered Clarisse a cigarette. What more could he have said, after so brusquely telling her what he thought? The smoke from their cigarettes drifted up the rays of the evening sun and mingled some distance away from them.

  How much does Ulrich know about this? Clarisse wondered on her hummock. Anyway, what can he possibly know about such struggles? She remembered how Walter’s face fell apart with pain, almost to extinction, when the agonies of music and lust beset him and her resistance left him no way out. No, she decided, Ulrich couldn’t know anything of their monstrous love-game on the Himalayas of love, contempt, fear, and the obligations of the heights. She had no great opinion of mathematics and had never considered Ulrich to be as talented as Walter. He was clever, he was logical, he knew a lot—but was that any better than barbarism? She had to admit that his tennis used to be incomparably better than Walter’s, and she could remember sometimes watching his ruthless drives with a passionate feeling of “he’ll get what he wants” such as she had never felt about Walter’s painting, music, or ideas. Now she thought: “What if he knows all about us and just isn’t saying anything?” Only a moment ago he had, after all, distinctly alluded to her heroism. The silence between them had now become strangely exciting.

  But Ulrich was thinking: “How nice Clarisse was ten years ago—half a child, blazing with faith in the future of the three of us.” She had been actually unpleasant to him only once, when she and Walter had just got married and she had displayed that unattractive selfishness-for-two that so often makes young women who are ambitiously in love with their husbands so insufferable to other men. “That’s got a lot better since,” he thought.

  15

  CULTURAL REVOLUTION

  Walter and he had been young in that now-forgotten era just after the turn of the last century, when many people imagined that the century was young too.

  The just-buried century in Austria could not be said to have covered itself with glory during its second half. It had been clever in technology, business, and science, but beyond these focal points of its energy it was stagnant and treacherous as a swamp. It had painted like the Old Masters, written like Goethe and Schiller, and built its houses in the style of the Gothic and the Renaissance. The demands of the ideal ruled like a police headquarters over all expressions of life. But thanks to the unwritten law that allows mankind no imitation without tying it to an exaggeration, everything was produced with a degree of craftsmanship the admired prototypes could never have achieved, traces of which can still be seen today in our streets and museums; and—relevant or not—the women of the period, who were as chaste as they were shy, had to wear dresses that covered them from the ears down to the ground while showing off a billowing bosom and a voluptuous behind. For the rest, there is no part of the past we know so little about, for all sorts of reasons, as the three to five decades between our own twentieth year and the twentieth year of our fathers. So it may be useful to be reminded that in bad periods the most appalling buildings and poems are constructed on principles just as fine as in good periods; that all the people involved in destroying the achievements of a preceding good epoch feel they are improving on them; and that the bloodless youth of such inferior periods take just as much pride in their young blood as do the new generations of all other eras.

  And each time it is like a miracle when after such a shallow, fading period all at once there comes a small upward surge. Suddenly, out of the becalmed mentality of the nineteenth century’s last two decades, an invigorating fever rose all over Europe. No one knew exactly what was in the making; nobody could have said whether it was to be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps a reshuffling of society. So everyone said what he pleased about it. But everywhere people were suddenly standing up to struggle against the old order. Everywhere the right man suddenly appeared in the right place and—this is so important!—enterprising men of action joined forces with enterprising men of intellect. Talents of a kind that had previously been stifled or had never taken part in public life suddenly came to the fore. They were as different from each other as could be, and could not have been more contradictory in their aims. There were those who loved the overman and those who loved the under-man; there were health cults and sun cults and the cults of consumptive maidens; there was enthusiasm for the hero worshipers and for the believers in the Common Man; people were devout and skeptical, naturalistic and mannered, robust and morbid; they dreamed of old tree-lined avenues in palace parks, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, gems, hashish, disease, and demonism, but also of prairies, immense horizons, forges and rolling mills, naked wrestlers, slave uprisings, early man, and the smashing of society. These were certainly opposing and widely varying battle cries, but uttered in the same breath. An analysis of that epoch might produce some such nonsense as a square circle trying to consist of wooden iron, but in reality it all blended into shimmering sense. This illusion, embodied in the magical date of the turn of the century, was so powerful that it made some people hurl themselves with zeal at the new, still-unused century, while others chose one last quick fling in the old one, as one runs riot in a house one absolutely has to move out of, without anyone feeling much of a difference between these two attitudes.

  If one does not want to, there is no need to make too much of this bygone “movement.” It really affected only that thin, unstable layer of humanity, the intellectuals, who are unanimously despised by all those who rejoice in impregnable views, no matter how divergent from one another (the kind of people who are back in the saddle today, thank God); the general population was not involved. Still, even though it did not become a historical event, it was an eventlet, and the two friends, Walter and Ulrich, in their early youth had just caught its afterglow. Something went through the thicket of beliefs in those days like a single wind bending many trees—a spirit of heresy and reform, the blessed sense of an arising and going forth, a mini-renaissance and -reformation, such as only the best of times experience; whoever entered the world then felt, at the first corner, the breath of this spirit on his cheek.

  16

  A MYSTERIOUS MALADY OF THE TIMES

  So they had actually been two young men, not so long ago—Ulrich thought when he was alone again—who, oddly enough, not only had the most profound insights before anyone else did, but even had them simultaneously, for one of them had only to open his mouth to say something new to find that the other had been making the same tremendous discovery. There is something special about youthful friendships: they are like an egg that senses in its yolk its glorious future as a bird, even while it presents to the world only a rather expressionless egg shape indistinguishable from any other. He vividly remembered the boy’s and student’s room where they had met whenever he returned for a few weeks from his first outings into the world: Walter’s desk, covered with drawings, notes, and sheets of music, like the early rays of the glory of a famous man’s future; facing it, the narrow bookcase where Walter sometimes stood in his ardor like Sebastian at the stake, the lamplight on his beautiful hair, which Ulrich had always secretly admired. Nietzsche, Peter Altenberg, Dostoyevsky or whoever they had just been reading had to resign themselves to being left lying on the floor or the bed when they had served their purpose and the flood of talk would not suffer the petty interruption of putting a book tidily back in place. The arrogance of the young, who find the greatest minds just good enough to serve their own occasions, now seemed to Ulrich strangely endearing. He tried to remember these conversations. It was like reaching on awakening for the last vanishing, dreamlike thoughts of sleep. And he thought, in mild astonishment: When we were assertive in those days, the point was not to be right—it was to assert ourselves! A young man needs to shine, far more than he needs to see something in the light. He now felt the memory of the feeling of being young, that hovering on rays of light, as an aching loss.

  It seemed to Ulrich that with the beginning of his adult life a general lull had set in, a gradual running down, in spite of occasio
nal eddies of energy that came and went, to an ever more listless, erratic rhythm. It was very hard to say what this change consisted of. Were there suddenly fewer great men? Far from it! And besides, they don’t matter; the greatness of an era does not depend on them. The intellectually lackluster 1860s and 1880s, for instance, could no more prevent the rise of a Nietzsche or a Hebbel than either of these men could raise the intellectual level of his contemporaries. Had life in general reached a standstill? No, it had become more powerful! Were there more paralyzing contradictions than before? There could hardly be more! Had the past not known any absurdities? Heaps! Just between ourselves: people threw their support to the weak and ignored the strong; sometimes blockheads played leading roles while brilliant men played the part of eccentrics; the good Germanic citizen, untroubled by history’s labor pains, which he dismissed as decadent and morbid excrescences, went on reading his family magazines and visited the crystal palaces and academies in vastly greater numbers than he did the avant-garde exhibitions. Least of all did the political world pay attention to the New Men’s views and publications; and the great public institutions resisted everything new as if surrounded by a cordon sanitaire against the plague. Could one not say, in fact, that things have got better since then? Men who once merely headed minor sects have become aged celebrities; publishers and art dealers have become rich; new movements are constantly being started; everybody attends both the academic and the avant-garde shows, and even the avant-garde of the avant-garde; the family magazines have bobbed their hair; politicians like to sound off on the cultural arts, and newspapers make literary history. So what has been lost?

  Something imponderable. An omen. An illusion. As when a magnet releases iron filings and they fall in confusion again. As when a ball of string comes undone. As when a tension slackens. As when an orchestra begins to play out of tune. No details could be adduced that would not also have been possible before, but all the relationships had shifted a little. Ideas whose currency had once been lean grew fat. Persons who would before never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness mellowed, separations fused, intransigents made concessions to popularity, tastes already formed relapsed into uncertainties. Sharp boundaries everywhere became blurred and some new, indefinable ability to form alliances brought new people and new ideas to the top. Not that these people and ideas were bad, not at all; it was only that a little too much of the bad was mixed with the good, of error with truth, of accommodation with meaning. There even seemed to be a privileged proportion of this mixture that got furthest on in the world; just the right pinch of makeshift to bring out the genius in genius and make talent look like a white hope, as a pinch of chicory, according to some people, brings out the right coffee flavor in coffee. Suddenly all the prominent and important positions in the intellectual world were filled by such people, and all decisions went their way. There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can’t put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysterious disease has eaten away the previous period’s seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has definitively arrived.

  So the times had changed, like a day that begins radiantly blue and then by degrees clouds over, without having the kindness to wait for Ulrich. He evened the score by holding the cause of these mysterious changes that made up the disease eating away genius to be simple, common stupidity. By no means in an insulting sense. For if stupidity, seen from within, did not so much resemble talent as possess the ability to be mistaken for it, and if it did not outwardly resemble progress, genius, hope, and improvement, the chances are that no one would want to be stupid, and so there would be no stupidity. Or fighting it would at least be easy. Unfortunately, stupidity has something uncommonly endearing and natural about it. If one finds that a reproduction, for instance, seems more of an artistic feat than a hand-painted original, well, there is a certain truth in that, and it is easier to prove than that van Gogh was a great artist. It is also easy and profitable to be a more powerful playwright than Shakespeare or a less uneven storyteller than Goethe, and a solid commonplace always contains more humanity than a new discovery. There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can move in all directions, and put on all the guises of truth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

  But after a while Ulrich had a curious notion in this connection. He imagined that the great churchman and thinker Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), after taking infinite pains to put the ideas of his own time in the best possible order, had then continued through history to go even deeper to the bottom of things, and had just finished. Now, still young by special dispensation, he stepped out of his arched doorway with many folios under his arm, and an electric trolley shot right past his nose. Ulrich chuckled at the dumbstruck amazement on the face of the doctor universalis, as the past had called the celebrated Thomas.

  A motorcyclist came up the empty street, thundering up the perspective bow-armed and bow-legged. His face had the solemn self-importance of a howling child. It reminded Ulrich of a photo he had seen a few days ago in a magazine of a famous woman tennis player poised on tiptoe, one leg exposed to above the garter, the other flung up toward her head as she reached for a high ball with her racket, on her face the expression of an English governess. In the same issue there was also a picture of a champion swimmer being massaged after a contest. Two women dressed in street clothes, one at the swimmer’s feet, the other at her head, were solemnly looking down at her as she lay on a bed, naked on her back, one knee drawn up in a posture of sexual abandon, the masseur standing alongside resting his hands on it. He wore a doctor’s gown and gazed out of the picture as though this female flesh had been skinned and hung on a meat hook. Such were the things people were beginning to see at the time, and somehow they had to be acknowledged, as one acknowledges the presence of skyscrapers and electricity. A man can’t be angry at his own time without suffering some damage, Ulrich felt. Ulrich was also always ready to love all these manifestations of life. But he could never bring himself to love them wholeheartedly, as one’s general sense of social well-being requires. For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.

  17

  EFFECT OF A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES ON A MAN WITH QUALITIES

  While Ulrich and Clarisse were talking, they did not notice that the music in the house behind them broke off now and again. At those moments Walter had gone to the window. He could not see them, but felt that they were just beyond his field of vision. Jealousy tormented him. The cheap intoxicant of sluggishly sensual music was luring him back to the piano. It lay behind him, open like a bed rumpled by a sleeper resisting consciousness in order to avoid facing reality. He was racked by the jealousy of a paralyzed man who can sense how the healthy walk, yet he could not bring himself to join them, for his anguish offered no possibility of defending himself against them.

  When Walter got up in the morning and had to rush to the office, when he talked with people during the day and rode home among them in the afternoon, he felt he was an important person, called upon to do great things. He believed then that he saw things differently: he was moved where others passed by unresponsively, and where others reached for a thing without thinking, for him the very act of moving his own arm was fraught with spiritual adventure, or else it was paralyzed in loving contemplation of itself He was sensitive, and
his feelings were constantly agitated by brooding, depressions, billowing ups and downs; he was never indifferent, always seeing joy or misery in everything, so he always had something exciting to think about. Such people exercise an unusual attraction, because the moral flaw in which they incessantly live communicates itself to others. Everything in their conversation takes on a personal significance, and one feels free in their company to be constantly preoccupied with oneself, so that they provide a pleasure otherwise obtainable only from an analyst or therapist for a fee, with the further difference that with the psychiatrist one feels sick, while Walter helped a person to feel very important for reasons that had previously escaped one’s attention. With this talent for encouraging self-preoccupation, he had in fact conquered Clarisse and in time driven all his rivals from the field. Since everything became for him an ethical movement, he could hold forth convincingly on the immorality of ornament, the hygiene of simple forms, and the beery fumes of Wagner’s music, in accord with the new taste in the arts, terrorizing even his future father-in-law, whose painter’s brain was like a peacock’s tail unfurled. So there could be no question that Walter had his successes to look back on.

  And yet, when he got home full of impressions and plans, ripe and new as perhaps never before, a demoralizing change took place in him. Merely putting a canvas on the easel or a sheet of paper on the table was the sign of a terrible flight from his heart. His head remained clear, and the plan inside it hovered as if in a very transparent and distinct atmosphere; indeed, the plan split and became two or more plans, all ready to compete for supremacy—but the connection between his head and the first movements needed to carry it out seemed severed. Walter could not even make up his mind to lift a finger. He simply did not get up from where he happened to be sitting, and his thoughts slid away from the task he had set himself like snow evaporating as it falls. He didn’t know where the time went, but all of a sudden it was evening, and since after several such experiences he had learned to start dreading them on his way home, whole series of weeks began to slip, and passed away like a troubled half-sleep. Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something. Walter was fearful, and the symptoms he recognized in himself not only hampered him in his work but also filled him with anxiety, for they were apparently so far beyond his control that they often gave him the impression of an incipient mental breakdown.