The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  Nothing is more revealing, by the way, than one’s involuntary experience of learned and sensible efforts to interpret such essayists, to turn their living wisdom into knowledge to live by and thus extract some “content” from the motion of those who were moved: but about as much remains of this as of the delicately opalescent body of a jellyfish when one lifts it out of the water and lays it on the sand. The rationality of the uninspired will make the teachings of the inspired crumble into dust, contradiction, and nonsense, and yet one has no right to call them frail and unviable unless one would also call an elephant too frail to survive in an airless environment unsuited to its needs. It would be regrettable if these descriptions were to evoke an impression of mystery, or of a kind of music in which harp notes and sighing glissandi predominate. The opposite is the case, and the underlying problem presented itself to Ulrich not at all intuitively but quite soberly, in the following form: A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between? Examples of what lies in between can be found in every moral precept, such as the well-known and simple: Thou shalt not kill. One sees right off that that is neither a fact nor a subjective experience. We know that we adhere to it strictly in some respects, while allowing for a great many, if sharply defined, exceptions; but in a very large number of cases of a third kind, involving imagination, desires, drama, or the enjoyment of a news story, we vacillate erratically between aversion and attraction. What we cannot classify as either a fact or a subjective experience we sometimes call an imperative. We have attached such imperatives to the dogmas of religion and the law and thereby give them the status of deduced truth. But the novelists tell us about the exceptions, from Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac to the most recent beauty who shot her lover, and dissolve it again into something subjective. We can cling to one of these poles or let ourselves be swept back and forth between them by the tide—but with what feelings? The feeling of most people for this precept is a mixture of wooden obedience (including that of the “wholesome type” that flinches from even thinking of such a thing but, only slightly disoriented by alcohol or passion, promptly does it) and a mindless paddling about in a wave of possibilities. Is there really no other approach to this precept? Ulrich felt that as things stood, a man longing to do something with all his heart does not know whether he should do it or leave it undone. And yet he suspected that it could be done, or not done, wholeheartedly. In themselves, an impulse to act and a taboo were equally meaningless to him. Linking them to a law from above or within aroused his critical intelligence; more than that, the need to ennoble a self-sufficient moment by giving it a noble pedigree diminished its value. All this left his heart silent, while only his head spoke; but he felt that there might be another way to make his choice coincide with his happiness. He might be happy because he didn’t kill, or happy because he killed, but he could never be the indifferent fulfiller of an imperative demanded of him. What he felt at this moment was not a commandment; it was a region he had entered. Here, he realized, everything was already decided, and soothed the mind like mother’s milk. But what gave him this insight was no longer thinking, nor was it feeling in the usual incoherent way: it was a “total insight” and yet again only a message carried to him from far away by the wind, and it seemed to him neither true nor false, neither rational nor irrational; it seized him like a faint, blissful hyperbole dropped into his heart.

  And as little as one can make a truth out of the genuine elements of an essay can one gain a conviction from such a condition—at least not without abandoning the condition, as a lover has to abandon love in order to describe it. The boundless emotion that sometimes stirred Ulrich without activating him contradicted his urge to act, which insisted on limits and forms. Now, it may be only right and natural to want to know before letting one’s feelings speak; he involuntarily imagined that what he wanted to find and someday would, even if it should not be truth, would be no less firm than truth. But in his special case, this made him rather like a man busily getting equipment together while losing interest in what it is meant for. If someone had asked him at any point while he was writing treatises on mathematical problems or mathematical logic, or engaged in some scientific project, what it was he hoped to achieve, he would have answered that there was only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live. But if one holds up an imperative for a long time without anything happening, the brain goes to sleep, just as the arm does that has held something up for too long; our thoughts cannot be expected to stand at attention indefinitely any more than soldiers on parade in summer; standing too long, they will simply fall down in a faint. As Ulrich had settled on his view of life around his twenty-sixth year, it no longer seemed quite genuine in his thirty-second. He had not elaborated his ideas any further, and apart from a vague, tense feeling such as one has when waiting for something with one’s eyes closed, there was not much sign of personal emotion in him, since the days of his tremulous earliest revelations had gone. Yet it was probably an underground movement of this kind that gradually slowed him down in his scientific work and kept him from giving it all he had. This generated a curious conflict in him. One must not forget that basically the scientific cast of mind is more God-oriented than the aesthetic mind, ready to submit to “Him” the moment “He” deigns to show Himself under the conditions it prescribes for recognizing Him, while our aesthetes, confronted with His manifestation, would find only that His talent was not original and that His view of the world was not sufficiently intelligible to rank Him with really God-given talents. Ulrich could not abandon himself to vague intimations as readily as anyone of that species could, but neither could he conceal from himself that in all those years of scientific scrupulosity he had merely been living against his grain. He wished something unforeseen would happen to him, for when he took what he somewhat wryly called his “holiday from life” he had nothing, in one direction or the other, that gave him peace.

  Perhaps one could say on his behalf that at a certain age life begins to run away with incredible speed. But the day when one must begin to live out one’s final will, before leaving the rest behind, lies far ahead and cannot be postponed. This had become menacingly clear to him now that almost six months had gone by and nothing had changed. He was waiting: all the time, he was letting himself be pushed this way and that in the insignificant and silly activity he had taken on, talking, gladly talking too much, living with the desperate tenacity of a fisherman casting his nets into an empty river, while he was doing nothing that had anything to do with the person he after all signified; deliberately doing nothing: he was waiting. He waited hiding behind his person, insofar as this word characterizes that part of a human being formed by the world and the course of life, and his quiet desperation, dammed up behind that façade, rose higher every day. He felt himself to be in the worst crisis of his life and despised himself for what he had left undone. Are great ordeals the privilege of great human beings? He would have liked to believe it, but it isn’t so, since even the dullest neurotics have their crises. So all he really had left in the midst of his deep perturbation was that residue of imperturbability possessed by all heroes and criminals—it isn’t courage, willpower, or confidence, but simply a furious tenacity, as hard to drive out as it is to drive life out of a cat even after it has been completely mangled by dogs.

  If one wants to imagine how such a man lives when he is alone, the most that can be said is that at night his lighted windows afford a view of his room, where his used thoughts sit around like clients in the waiting room of a lawyer with whom they are dissatisfied. Or one could perhaps say that Ulrich once, on such a night, opened the window and looked out at the snake-smooth trunks of the trees, so black and sleekly twisted between the blankets of snow covering their tops and the ground, and suddenly felt an urge to go down into the garden just as he was, in his pajamas; he wanted to feel the cold in his hair. Downstai
rs he turned out the light, so as not to stand framed in the lighted doorway; a canopy of light projected into the shadow only from his study. A path led to the iron gate fronting the street; a second crossed it, darkly outlined. Ulrich walked slowly toward it. And then the darkness towering up between the treetops suddenly, fantastically, reminded him of the huge form of Moosbrugger, and the naked trees looked strangely corporeal, ugly and wet like worms and yet somehow inviting him to embrace them and sink down with them in tears. But he didn’t do it. The sentimentality of the impulse revolted him at the very moment it touched him. Just then some late passersby walked through the milky foam of the mist outside the garden railing, and he may have looked like a lunatic to them, as his figure in red pajamas between black tree trunks now detached itself from the trees. But he stepped firmly onto the path and went back into his house fairly content, feeling that whatever was in store for him would have to be something quite different.

  63

  BONADEA HAS A VISION

  When Ulrich got up on the morning following this night, late and feeling as if he had been badly beaten up, he was told that Bonadea had come to call; it was the first time since their quarrel that they would see each other.

  During the period of their separation, Bonadea had shed many tears. She often felt in this time that she had been ill-treated. She had often resounded like a muffled drum. She had had many adventures and many disappointments. And although the memory of Ulrich sank into a deep well with every adventure, after every disappointment it emerged again, helpless and reproachful as the desolate pain in a child’s face. In her heart, Bonadea had already asked her friend a hundred times to forgive her jealousy, “castigating her wicked pride,” as she put it, until at last she decided to sue for peace.

  She sat before him, charming, melancholy, and beautiful, and feeling sick to her stomach. He stood in front of her “like a youth,” his skin polished like marble from the great events and high diplomacy she believed him engaged in. She had never before noticed how strong and determined his face looked. She would gladly have surrendered herself to him entirely, but she dared not go so far, and he showed no disposition to encourage her. This coldness saddened her beyond words, but had the grandeur of a statue. Unexpectedly, Bonadea seized his dangling hand and kissed it. Ulrich stroked her hair pensively. Her legs turned to water in the most feminine way in the world, and she was about to fall to her knees. But Ulrich gently pushed her back in her chair, brought whiskey and soda, and lit a cigarette.

  “A lady does not drink whiskey in the morning!” Bonadea protested. For an instant she regained enough energy to be offended, and her heart rose to her head with the suspicion that the matter-of-fact offer of such a strong and, as she thought, licentious drink contained a heartless implication.

  But Ulrich said kindly: “It will do you good. All the women who have played a major role in politics have drunk whiskey.” For in order to justify her visit, Bonadea had said how impressed she was with the great patriotic campaign, and that she would like to lend a hand in it.

  That was her plan. She always believed several things at the same time, and half-truths made it easier for her to lie.

  The whiskey was pale gold and warming like the sun in May.

  Bonadea felt like a seventy-year-old woman sitting on a garden bench outside her house. She was getting old. Her children were growing up. The eldest was already twelve. It was certainly disgraceful to follow a man one didn’t even know very well into his house, just because he had eyes that looked at one like a man behind a window. One notices, she thought, little details about this man one doesn’t like and that could be a warning. One could, in fact—if only there were something to hold one back at such times!—break it off, flushed with shame and perhaps even flaming with anger; but because this doesn’t happen, this man grows more and more passionately into his role. And one feels oneself very clearly like a stage set in the glare of artificial light; what one has before one is stage eyes, a stage mustache, the buttons of a costume being unbuttoned, and the whole scene from the first entrance into the room to the first horrible moment of being sober again all takes place inside a consciousness that has stepped outside one’s head and papered the walls with pure hallucination. Bonadea did not use precisely these words—her thought was only partly verbal anyway—but even as she was trying to visualize it she felt herself at the mercy of this change in consciousness. “Whoever could describe it would be a great artist—no, a pornographer!” she thought, looking at Ulrich. She never for an instant lost her good intentions, her determination to hold on to decency, even in this condition; only then they stood outside and waited but had absolutely nothing to say in a world transformed by desire. When Bonadea’s reason returned, this was her worst anguish. The change of consciousness during sexual arousal, which people pass over as something natural, was in her so overpowering in the depth and suddenness not only of her ecstasy but also of her remorse that it frightened her in retrospect as soon as she had returned to the peace of her family circle. She thought she must be going mad. She hardly dared look at her children, for fear of harming them with her corrupt glance. And she winced whenever her husband looked at her with more than his usual warmth, but was afraid of freedom from constraint in being alone. All this led her, in the weeks of separation, to plan that henceforth she would have no other lover beside Ulrich; he would be her mainstay and would save her from excesses with strangers.

  “How could I have allowed myself to find fault with him?” she now thought as she sat facing him for the first time in so long. “He is so much more complete than I am.” She gave him credit for her having been a much improved person during their embraces, and was probably also thinking that he would have to introduce her to his new social circle at the next charity affair. Bonadea inwardly swore an oath of allegiance, and tears of emotion came to her eyes as she turned all this over in her mind.

  Ulrich meanwhile was finishing his whiskey with the deliberateness of a man who has to act on a hard decision. For the time being, he told her, it was not yet possible to introduce her to Diotima.

  Bonadea naturally wanted to know exactly why it was not possible; and then she wanted to know exactly when it would be possible.

  Ulrich had to point out to her that she was not a person of prominence in the arts, nor in the sciences, nor in organized charity, so that it would take a very long time before he could convince Diotima of the need for Bonadea’s assistance.

  Bonadea had in the meantime been filled with curious feelings toward Diotima. She had heard enough about Diotima’s virtues not to be jealous; rather, she envied and admired this woman, who could hold the interest of Bonadea’s beloved without making improper concessions to him. She ascribed the statuesque serenity she thought she saw in Ulrich to this influence. Her term for herself was “passionate,” by which she understood both her dishonorable state and an honorable excuse for it. But she admired cool women with much the same feeling with which unfortunate owners of perpetually damp hands put their hands in a hand that is particularly dry and lovely. “It is her doing!” she thought. “It is she who has changed Ulrich so much!” A hard drill in her heart, a sweet drill in her knees: these two drills whirring simultaneously and in opposite directions made Bonadea feel almost ready to faint as she came up against Ulrich’s resistance. So she played her trump card: Moosbrugger.

  She had realized on agonizing reflection that Ulrich must have a strange liking for this horrible character. She herself simply felt revolted by “the brutal sensuality,” as she saw it, expressed in Moosbrugger’s acts of violence. In this respect her feeling was much the same—though of course she did not know this—as that of the prostitutes who quite single-mindedly, untainted by bourgeois romanticism, see in the sex murderer simply a hazard of their profession. But what she needed, including her unavoidable lapses, was a tidy and credible world, and Moosbrugger would help her to restore it. Since Ulrich had a weakness for him, and she had a husband who was a judge and could sup
ply useful information, the thought had ripened of its own accord in her forlorn state that she might link her weakness to Ulrich’s weakness by way of her husband; this yearning image had the comforting power of sensuality sanctioned by a feeling of justice. But when she approached her spouse on the subject, he was astounded at her juridical fervor, although he knew how easily she got carried away by everything great and good in human nature. But since he was not only a judge but a hunter too, he put her off good-humoredly by saying that the only way to deal with such vermin was to exterminate them wherever one came across them without a lot of sentimental fuss, and he did not respond to further inquiries. On her second try, some time later, all Bonadea could get out of him was the supplementary opinion that childbearing was a woman’s affair while killing was a job for men, and as she did not want to stir up any suspicions by being overzealous on this dangerous subject she was debarred, for the time being, from the path of the law. This left mercy as the only way of pleasing Ulrich by doing something for Moosbrugger, and this way led her—one can hardly call this a surprise, more a kind of attraction—to Diotima.

  In her mind she could see herself as Diotima’s friend, and she granted herself her own wish to be forced to make her admired rival’s acquaintance for the sake of the cause, which brooked no delay, although of course she was too proud to seek it for herself. She was going to win Diotima over to Moosbrugger’s cause—something Ulrich had clearly not succeeded in doing, as she had instantly guessed—and her imagination painted the situation in beautiful scenes. The tall, marmoreal Diotima would put her arm around Bonadea’s warm shoulders, bowed down by sins, and Bonadea expected that her own role would more or less be to anoint that divinely untouched heart with a drop of mortal fallibility. This was the stratagem she proposed to her lost friend.