The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

“Very funny.”

  “Not at all. Why does it seem funny to you to try to put into practice something you take seriously as an intellectual matter? Tell me that.”

  “I’ll be glad to,” Ulrich said, freeing his arm from her hand. “After all, Nietzsche isn’t the issue; it could just as well be Christ or Buddha.”

  “Or you. Why not get to work on an Ulrich Year!” She said this with the same casual air as when she had urged him to free Moosbrugger. This time, however, his attention had not strayed, and he was looking at her face while he listened to her words. All he saw was Clarisse’s usual smile, that funny little grimace that was the unintended result of the mental effort she was making.

  “Oh well,” he thought, “she doesn’t mean any harm.”

  But Clarisse drew closer to him again. “Why don’t you make it You Year? You might just be in a position to do it now. Only don’t say anything to Walter about it—I’ve told you that already—nor about my Moosbrugger letter. Not a word, ever, that I’ve talked to you about it. But I assure you, this murderer is musical, even though he can’t actually compose. Haven’t you ever noticed that every human being is the center of a cosmic sphere? When the person moves, the sphere moves with him. That’s the way to make music, without thinking about it, simple as the cosmic sphere around you. . . .”

  “And you feel that I should work on something of that sort for a year of my own, do you?”

  “No,” Clarisse answered, playing it safe. Her fine lips seemed about to say something but held their peace, and the flame blazed silently from her eyes. It was hard to say what it was that emanated from her at such moments. One felt scorched, as if one had come too close to something red hot. Now she smiled, but it was a smile that curled on her lips like an ash left behind in the wake of the burned-out flare from her eyes.

  “Still, that is the sort of thing I could do, if I had to,” Ulrich went on, “but I’m afraid you think I should make a coup d’état?”

  Clarisse thought it over. “Let’s say a Buddha Year, then,” she said evasively. “I don’t know what Buddha stood for, or only vaguely, but let’s accept it, and if we think it matters, then we should do something about it. It either deserves our faith in it or it doesn’t!”

  “Fine. Now. . . a Nietzsche Year was what you said. But what was it Nietzsche actually wanted?”

  Clarisse reconsidered. “Well, of course I don’t mean a Nietzsche monument or a Nietzsche street,” she said in some embarrassment. “But people should try to live as he—”

  “As he wanted?” he interrupted her. “But what did he want?”

  Clarisse started to answer, hesitated, and finally said: “Oh come on, you know all that yourself. . . .”

  “I don’t know a thing,” he teased her. “But I can tell you this: You can set up a Kaiser Franz Josef Soup Kitchen, and you can meet the needs of a Society for the Protection of the House Cat, but you cannot turn great ideas into reality any more than you can do it with music. Why is that? I don’t know. But that’s how it is.”

  He had finally found refuge on the little sofa behind the little table; it was a position easier to defend than the chair. In the open space in the middle of the room, on the far bank, as it were, of an illusory prolongation of the shining tabletop, Clarisse was still standing and talking. Her whole slender body was involved; she actually felt everything she wanted to say with her whole body first of all, and was always needing to do something with it. Ulrich had always thought of her body as hard and boyish, but now, as it gently swayed on legs pressed close together, he saw Clarisse as a Javanese dancer. Suddenly it occurred to him that he would not be surprised if she fell into a trance. Or was he in a trance himself? He launched into a long speech:

  “You want to organize your life around an idea,” he began. “And you’d like to know how to do that. But an idea is the most paradoxical thing in the world. The flesh in the grip of an idea is like a fetish. Bonded to an idea, it becomes magical. An ordinary slap in the face, bound up with ideas of honor, or of punishment and the like, can kill a man. And yet ideas can never maintain themselves in the state in which they are most powerful; they’re like the kind of substance that, exposed to the air, instantly changes into some other, more lasting, but corrupted form. You’ve been through this often yourself. Because an idea is what you are: an idea in a particular state. You are touched by a breath of something, and it’s like a note suddenly emerging from the humming of strings; in front of you there is something like a mirage; out of the confusion of your soul an endless parade is taking shape, with all the world’s beauty looking on from the roadside. All this can be the effect of a single idea. But after a while it comes to resemble all your previous ideas, it takes its place among them, becomes part of your outlook and your character, your principles or your moods; in the act of taking shape it has lost its wings and its mystery.”

  Clarisse answered: “Walter is jealous of you. Not on my account, I’m sure. It’s because you look as though you could do what he wishes he could do. Do you see what I mean? There is something about you that cuts him down. I wish I knew how to put it.” She scrutinized him.

  Their two speeches intertwined.

  Walter had always been life’s special pet, always held on its lap. He transformed everything that happened to him and gave it a tender vitality. Walter had always been the one whose life had been the richer in experiences. “But having more of a life is one of the earliest and subtlest signs of mediocrity,” Ulrich thought. “Seen in context, an experience loses its personal venom or sweetness.” That was how it was, more or less. Even the assertion that this was the case established a context, and one got no kiss of welcome or good-bye for it. And despite all that, Walter was jealous of him? He was glad to hear it.

  “I told him he ought to kill you,” Clarisse reported.

  “What?”

  “Exterminate him! I said. Suppose you’re not really all you think you are, and suppose Walter is the better man and has no other way to gain his peace of mind: it would make sense, wouldn’t it? Besides, you can always fight back.”

  “No half measures for you, I see,” Ulrich said, somewhat shaken.

  “Well, we were only talking. How do you feel about it, by the way? Walter says it’s wrong even to think such things.”

  “Oh no, thinking is quite in order,” he replied hesitantly, taking a good look at Clarisse. She had a peculiar charm all her own. Was it as though she were somehow standing side by side with herself? She was not quite there, yet all there, both in close proximity.

  “Bah, thinking!” she cut in. Her words were addressed to the wall behind him, as though her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere between. “You’re every bit as passive as Walter.” These words, too, fell somewhere midway between them, keeping their distance like an insult, yet sounding conciliatory, because of the confidential closeness they implied. “What I say is, if you can think something, you should be able to do it too,” she insisted dryly.

  Then she moved off, walked to the window, and stood there with her hands clasped behind her back.

  Ulrich stood up quickly, went over to her, and placed an arm around her shoulders.

  “Dear little Clarisse,” he said, “you’re being a bit strange today, aren’t you? But I must put in a good word for myself; you’re not really concerned with me anyway, are you?”

  Clarisse was staring out the window. But now her gaze sharpened; she was focusing on something specific out there, for support. She felt as if her thoughts had strayed outside and had only just returned. This feeling of being like a room, with the sense of the door just having shut, was nothing new to her. On and off she had days, even weeks, when everything around her was brighter and lighter than usual, as though it would take hardly any effort to slip out of herself and go traipsing about the world unencumbered; then again there were the bad times, when she felt imprisoned, and though these times usually passed quickly, she dreaded them like a punishment, because everything closed in on her and w
as so sad. Just now she was aware of a lucid, sober peacefulness, and it worried her a little; she was not sure what it was she had wanted just a while ago, and this sense of leaden clarity and quiet control was often a prelude to the time of punishment. She pulled herself together with the feeling that if she could keep this conversation going with conviction, she would be back on safe ground.

  “Don’t say ‘dear little’ to me,” she said, pouting, “or I might end up killing you myself.” It came out like a joke, so she felt she had made one. She stole a cautious look at him, to see how he was taking it. “Of course, it was only a way of putting it, but you must realize that I’m serious. Where were we? You said it wasn’t possible to live by an idea. There’s no real energy in you, neither you nor Walter!”

  “You horrified me by calling me a passivist! But there are two kinds. There’s a passive passivism, like Walter’s and then there’s the active kind!”

  “What is active passivism?” Clarisse was intrigued.

  “A prisoner waiting for his chance to break out!”

  “Bah!” said Clarisse. “Excuses.”

  “Well, yes,” he conceded. “Maybe.”

  Clarisse still held her hands clasped behind her back and stood with her legs wide apart, as though in riding boots.

  “You know what Nietzsche says? Wanting to know for sure is like wanting to know where the ground is for your next step, mere cowardice. One has to start somewhere to act on one’s intentions, not just talk about it. And I’ve always expected you of all people to do something special someday!”

  Suddenly she had taken hold of a button on his vest and started twisting it, her face lifted up to his. Instinctively he laid his hand on hers to save the button.

  “I’ve been thinking for a long time,” she went on shyly, “that the really rotten, vile things that go on happen not because someone is doing them but because we are letting them happen. They expand to fill a void!”. After this coup she looked at him expectantly. Then she burst out: “Letting things happen is ten times more dangerous than doing them, don’t you see?” She struggled inwardly for a more exact formulation, but then she only added: “You know exactly what I mean, don’t you? Even though you are always saying that we have to let things go their own way. But I understand what you’re saying. It’s occurred to me more than once that you’re the Devil himself!” These words had slipped out of Clarisse’s mouth like a lizard. They frightened her. All she had been thinking of at the outset was Walter’s begging her to have a child by him. Ulrich caught a flicker in her eyes; she wanted him. Her upturned face was suffused with something—nothing at all lovely, something ugly but touching. Something like a violent outbreak of sweat blurring the features. But it was disembodied, purely imaginary. He felt infected by it against his will and overcome by a slight absentmindedness. He was losing his power to hold out against her craziness, and so he grabbed her hand to make her sit down on the sofa, and sat down beside her.

  “Let me tell you now why I do nothing,” he began, and fell silent.

  Clarisse, who had become herself again the moment she felt his touch, urged him on.

  “There’s nothing a man can do, because . . . but I can’t really expect you to understand this,” he began, then he extracted a cigarette and devoted himself to lighting it.

  “Go on,” Clarisse prompted him. “What are you trying to say?”

  But he kept silent. She pushed her arm behind his back and shook him, like a boy showing how strong he can be. With her, there was no need to say anything; the mere suggestion of something out of the ordinary was enough to set her imagination going. “You’re really evil!” she said, and tried in vain to hurt him. But at this moment they were unpleasantly interrupted by Walter’s return.

  83

  PSEUDOREALITY PREVAILS; OR, WHY DON’T WE MAKE HISTORY UP AS WE GO ALONG?

  What could Ulrich have said to Clarisse anyway?

  He had kept it to himself because she had somehow brought him to the verge of actually saying “God.” He had been about to say, more or less: God does not really mean the world literally; it is a metaphor, an analogy, a figure of speech that He has to resort to for some reason or other, and it never satisfies Him, of course. We are not supposed to take Him at his word, it is we ourselves who must come up with the answer for the riddle He sets us. He wondered whether Clarisse would have agreed to regard the whole thing as a game of Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers. Of course she would. Whoever took the first step, she would stick by him like a she-wolf and keep a sharp lookout.

  But there was something else he had also had on the tip of his tongue, something about mathematical problems that do not admit of a general solution but do allow for particular solutions, which one could combine to come nearer to a general solution. He might have added that he regarded the problem of human life as that kind of problem. What we call an age—without specifying whether we mean centuries, millennia, or the time span between schoolchild and grandparent—that broad unregulated flow of conditions would come to mean a more or less chaotic succession of unsatisfactory and, in themselves, false answers out of which there might emerge the right and whole solution only when mankind had learned to put all the pieces together.

  On his way home in the streetcar, it all came back to him, but he was rather ashamed of such thoughts in the presence of the other passengers riding into town with him. One could tell by looking at them that they were on their way home from definite occupations or setting out toward definite entertainments; even just by looking at their clothes one could tell where they had come from or were going. He studied the woman next to him; clearly a wife and mother, fortyish, probably the wife of an academic, and she had small opera glasses on her lap. Sitting beside her, toying with those ideas, he felt like a little boy at play, and playing something slightly improper, at that.

  For to think without pursuing some practical purpose is surely an improper, furtive occupation; especially those thoughts that take huge strides on stilts, touching experience only with tiny soles, are automatically suspect of having disreputable origins. There was a time when people talked of their thoughts taking wing; in Schiller’s time such intellectual highfliers would have been widely esteemed, but in our own day such a person seems to have something the matter with him, unless it happens to be his profession and source of income. There has obviously been a shift in our priorities. Certain concerns have been taken out of people’s hearts. For high-flown thoughts a kind of poultry farm has been set up, called philosophy, theology, or literature, where they proliferate in their own way beyond anyone’s ability to keep track of them, which is just as well, because in the face of such expansion no one need feel guilty about not bothering with them personally. With his respect for professionalism and expertise, Ulrich was basically determined to go along with any such division of labor. Nevertheless, he still indulged in thinking for himself, even though he was no professional philosopher, and at the moment he could see that to do otherwise was to take the road leading to the beehive state. The queen would lay her eggs, the drones would devote themselves to lust and the life of the mind, and the specialists would toil. It was quite possible to imagine the world so organized; total productivity might even go up as a result. For the present, every human being is still a microcosm of all humanity, as it were, but this has clearly become too much to bear and it no longer works, so that the humane element has become a transparent fraud. For the new division of labor to succeed, it might be necessary to arrange for at least one set of workers to evolve an intellectual synthesis. After all, without mind . . . What Ulrich meant was that it would give him nothing to look forward to. But this was of course a prejudice. No one really knows what life depends on. He shifted in his seat and studied the reflection of his face in the windowpane opposite, looking for something else to think about. But there was his head floating along in the fluid glass, midway between the inside and the outside, becoming remarkably compelling after a while in its insistence on some kind o
f completion.

  Was there a war actually going on in the Balkans or not? Some sort of intervention was undoubtedly going on, but whether it was war was hard to tell. So much was astir in the world. There was another new record for high-altitude flight; something to be proud of. If he was not mistaken, the record now stood at 3,700 meters and the man’s name was Jouhoux. A black boxer had beaten the white champion; the new holder of the world title was Johnson. The President of France was going to Russia; there was talk of world peace being at stake. A newly discovered tenor was garnering fees in South America that had never been equaled even in North America. A terrible earthquake had devastated Japan—the poor Japanese. In short, much was happening, there was great excitement everywhere around the turn of 1913-1914. But two years or five years earlier there had also been much excitement, every day had had its sensations, and yet it was hard, not to say impossible, to remember what it was that had actually happened. A possible synopsis: The new cure for syphilis was making . . . Research into plant metabolism was moving . . . The conquest of the South Pole seemed . . . Professor Steinach’s experiments with monkey glands were arousing . . . Half the details could easily be left out without making much difference. What a strange business history was! We could safely say of this or that event that it had already found its place in history, or certainly would find it; but whether this event had actually taken place was not so sure! Because for anything to happen, it has to happen at a certain date and not at some other date or even not at all; also, the thing itself has to happen and not by chance something merely approximating it or something related. But this is precisely what no one can say of history, unless he happens to have written it down at the time, as the newspapers do, or it’s a matter of one’s professional or financial affairs, since it is of course important to know how many years one has to go till retirement or when one will come into a certain sum of money or when one will have spent it, and in such a context even wars can become memorable occurrences. Examined close up, our history looks rather vague and messy, like a morass only partially made safe for pedestrian traffic, though oddly enough in the end there does seem to be a path across it, that very “path of history” of which nobody knows the starting point. This business of serving as “the stuff of history” infuriated Ulrich. The luminous, swaying box in which he was riding seemed to be a machine in which several hundred kilos of people were being rattled around, by way of being processed into “the future.” A hundred years earlier they had sat in a mail coach with the same look on their faces, and a hundred years hence, whatever was going on, they would be sitting as new people in exactly the same way in their updated transport machines—he was revolted by this lethargic acceptance of changes and conditions, this helpless contemporaneity, this mindlessly submissive, truly demeaning stringing along with the centuries, just as if he were suddenly rebelling against the hat, curious enough in shape, that was sitting on his head.