by Robert Musil
Instinctively he got to his feet and made the rest of his way on foot. In the more generous human confines of the city, in which he now found himself, his uneasiness gave way to good humor again. What a crazy notion of little Clarisse’s, to want a year of the mind. He concentrated his attention on this point. What made it so senseless? One might just as well ask why Diotima’s patriotic campaign was senseless.
Answer Number One: Because world history undoubtedly comes into being like all the other stories. Authors can never think of anything new, and they all copy from each other. This is why all politicians study history instead of biology or whatever. So much for authors.
Answer Number Two: For the most part, however, history is made without authors. It evolves not from some inner center but from the periphery. Set in motion by trifling causes. It probably doesn’t take nearly as much as one would think to turn Gothic man or the ancient Greek into modern civilized man. Human nature is as capable of cannibalism as it is of the Critique of Pure Reason; the same convictions and qualities will serve to turn out either one, depending on circumstances, and very great external differences in the results correspond to very slight internal ones.
Digression One: Ulrich recalled a similar experience dating from his army days. The squadron rides in double file, and “Passing on orders” is the drill; each man in turn whispers the given order to the next man. So if the order given up front is: “Sergeant major move to the head of the column,” it comes out the other end as “Eight troopers to be shot at once,” or something like that. And this is just how world history is made.
Answer Number Three: If, therefore, we were to transplant a generation of present-day Europeans at a tender age into the Egypt of 5000 B.C., world history would begin afresh in the year 5000 B.C., repeat itself for a while, and then, for reasons nobody could fathom, gradually begin to deviate from its established course.
Digression Two: The law of world history—it now occurred to him—was none other than the fundamental principle of government in old Kakania: “muddling through.” Kakania was an incredibly clever state.
Digression Three or Answer Number Four: The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard ball—which, once it is hit, takes a definite line—but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he arrives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain going off course. The present is always like the last house of a town, which somehow no longer counts as a house in town. Each generation wonders “Who am I, and what were my forebears?” It would make more sense to ask “Where am I?” and to assume that one’s predecessors were not different in kind but merely in a different place; that would be a move in the right direction, he thought.
He had been numbering his own answers and digressions as he went along, while glancing now into some passing face, now into a shop window, to keep his thoughts from running away with him entirely, but had nevertheless gone slightly astray and had to stop for a moment to see where he was and find the best way home. Before taking this route, he tried once more to get his question straight in his mind. Crazy little Clarisse was quite right in saying that we should make history, make it up, even though he had argued against it with her. But why didn’t we?
All that occurred to him in answer at the moment was Director Fischel of Lloyd’s Bank, his friend Leo Fischel, with whom years ago he had sometimes sat outside a café in the summer. For if Ulrich had been talking to Fischel instead of to himself, Fischel would typically have said: “I should only have your worries!” Ulrich appreciated this refreshing answer Fischel would have given. “My dear Fischel,” he immediately replied in his mind, “it’s not that simple. When I say history, I mean, if you recall, our life. And I did admit from the start that it’s in very bad taste for me to ask: Why don’t people create history—that is, why do they attack history like so many beasts only when they are wounded, when their shirttails are on fire, in short, only in an emergency? So why is this question in such bad taste? What do we have against it, when all it means is that people shouldn’t let their lives drift as they do?”
“Everybody knows the answer,” Director Fischel would retort. “We’re lucky when the politicians and the clergy and the big shots with nothing to do, and everybody else who runs around with all the answers, keep their hands off our daily lives. Besides which, we’re a civilized people. If only so many people nowadays weren’t so uncivilized!” And of course Director Fischel was right. A man is lucky if he knows his way around stocks and bonds, and other people refrain from dabbling so much in history just because they think they know how it works. We couldn’t live without ideas, God forbid, but we have to aim at a certain equilibrium among them, a balance of power, an armed truce of ideas, so that none of the contending parties can get too much done. Fischel’s sedative was civilization. It was the fundamental sentiment of civilization, in fact. And yet there is also the contrary sentiment, asserting itself more and more, that the times of heroic-political history, made by chance and its champions, have become largely obsolete and must be replaced by a planned solution to all problems, a solution in which all those concerned must participate.
At this point the Ulrich Year came to an end with Ulrich’s arrival on his own doorstep.
84
ASSERTION THAT ORDINARY LIFE, TOO, IS UTOPIAN
At home he found the usual stack of mail forwarded from Count Leinsdorf’s. An industrialist was offering an outsize cash award for the best results in the military training of young civilians. The archbishopric opposed the founding of a great orphanage, on the grounds that it had to be on guard against creeping interdenominationalism. The Committee on Public Worship and Education reported on the progress of the definitive suggestion, tentatively announced, to erect a great Emperor of Peace and Austrian Peoples Monument near the Imperial Residence; after consultation with the Imperial and Royal Office for Public Worship and Education, and after sounding out the leading art, engineering, and architectural associations, the Committee had found the differences of opinion such that it saw itself constrained—without prejudice to eventual future requirements and subject to the Central Executive Committee’s consent—to announce a competition for the best plan for a competition with regard to such an eventual monument. The Chamberlain’s Office, having taken due cognizance of the proposals submitted three weeks earlier, was returning them to the Central Executive Committee with regrets that no decision thereon by His Most Gracious Majesty could be passed on at this time, but that it was in any case desirable for the time being to let public opinion continue to crystallize on these as well as other points. The Imperial and Royal Office for Public Worship and Education stated in response to the Committee’s communication ref. no. so-and-so that it was not in a position to favor any special action in support of the Oehl Shorthand Association. The Block Letter Society for Mental Health announced its foundation and applied for a grant.
And so it went. Ulrich pushed aside this packet of “realities” and brooded on it for a while. Suddenly he got to his feet, called for his hat and coat, left word that he would be back in an hour or so, phoned for a cab, and returned to Clarisse.
Darkness had fallen. A little light fell onto the road from only one window of her house; footprints in the snow had frozen, making holes to stumble over; the outer door was locked and the visitor unexpected, so that his shouts, knocking, and hand clapping went unheard for the longest time. When at last Ulrich was back inside, it did not seem to be the same room he had left such a short time ago but seemed another world, surprised to see him, with a table laid for a simple private meal for two, every chair occupied by something that had settled down on it, and walls that offered the intruder a certain resistance.
Clarisse was wearing a plain woolen bathrobe and laughing. Walter, who had let the latecomer in, blinked his eyes and slipped the huge house key into a
table drawer. Without beating about the bush, Ulrich said, “I’m back because I owe Clarisse an answer.” Then he resumed talking at the point where Walter’s arrival had interrupted their conversation. After a while, the room, the house, and all sense of time had vanished, and the conversation was hanging somewhere up in the blue of space, in the net of the stars.
Ulrich presented them with his scheme for living the history of ideas instead of the history of the world. The difference, he said to begin with, would have less to do with what was happening than with the interpretation one gave it, with the purpose it was meant to serve, with the system of which the individual events were a part. The prevailing system was that of reality, and it was just like a bad play. It’s not for nothing that we speak of a “theater of world events”—the same roles, complications, and plots keep turning up in life. People make love because there is love to be made, and they do it in the prevailing mode; people are proud as the Noble Savage, or as a Spaniard, a virgin, or a lion; in ninety out of a hundred cases even murder is committed only because it is perceived as tragic or grandiose. Apart from the truly notable exceptions, the successful political molders of the world in particular have a lot in common with the hacks who write for the commercial theater; the lively scenes they create bore us by their lack of ideas and novelty, but by the same token they lull us into that sleepy state of lowered resistance in which we acquiesce in everything put before us. Seen in this light, history arises out of routine ideas, out of indifference to ideas, so that reality comes primarily of nothing being done for ideas. This might be briefly summed up, he claimed, by saying that we care too little about what is happening and too much about to whom, when, and where it is happening, so that it is not the essence of what happens that matters to us but only the plot; not the opening up of some new experience of life but only the pattern of what we already know, corresponding precisely to the difference between good plays and merely successful plays. Which means that we must do the opposite of what we do, and first of all give up being possessive about our experiences. We should look upon our experiences less as something personal and real and more as something general and abstract, or with the detachment with which we look at a painting or listen to a song. They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upward and outward. And if this was true on the personal plane, something more would have to be done on the collective plane, something that Ulrich could not quite pin down and that he called a pressing of the grapes, cellaring the wine, concentrating the spiritual juices, and without all of which the individual could not feel other than helpless, of course, abandoned to his own resources. As he talked on in this vein, he remembered the moment when he had told Diotima that reality ought to be done away with.
Almost as a matter of course, Walter began by declaring all this to be an obvious commonplace. As if the whole world, literature, art, science, religion, were not already a “pressing and cellaring” in any case! As if any literate person denied the value of ideas or failed to pay homage to the spirit, to beauty and goodness! As if education were anything other than an initiation into the world of the human spirit!
Ulrich clarified his position by suggesting that education was merely an initiation into the contemporary and prevalent modes and manners, which are random creations, so that those who seek to acquire a mind of their own must first of all realize that they have none as yet. An entirely open mind, poetically creative and morally experimental on a grand scale, was what he called it.
Now Walter said that Ulrich was being impossible. “You paint a charming picture,” he said, “as though we had any choice between living our ideas or living our lives. But you may remember the lines
I am no syllogism nor a fiction—
I am a man, with all his contradiction!
Why not go a step further? Why not demand that we get rid of the belly to make space for the mind? But I say to you: A man is made of common clay! That we stretch out an arm and draw it back again, that we have to decide whether to turn right or left, that we are made of habits, prejudices, and earth, and nevertheless make our way as best we can—that is what makes us fully human. What you are saying, tested even slightly against reality, shows it up as being, at best, mere literature.”
“If you will let me include all the other arts under that heading too,” Ulrich conceded, “all the teachings on how to live, the religions, and so on, then I do mean something like that: namely, that our existence should consist wholly of literature.”
“Really? You call the Savior’s mercy or the life of Napoleon literature?” Walter exclaimed. But then he had a better idea, and he turned to his friend with all the aplomb of the man holding trumps and said: “You are the kind of man who regards canned vegetables as the raison d’être of fresh greens.”
“You’re absolutely right. And you could also say that I am one of those who will only cook with salt,” Ulrich coolly admitted. He was tired of talking about it.
At this point Clarisse joined in, turning to Walter:
“Why do you contradict him? Aren’t you the one who always says, whenever something special happens: Here is something we should be able to put on the stage, for everyone to see and understand?” And turning to Ulrich in agreement, she said: “What we really ought to do is sing! We ought to sing ourselves!”
She had stood up and entered the little circle formed by the chairs. She held herself with a certain awkwardness, as though about to demonstrate her idea by going into a dance. Ulrich, who found such displays of naked emotion distasteful, remembered at this point that most people or, bluntly speaking, the average sort, whose minds are stimulated without their being able to create, long to act out their own selves. These are of course the same people who are so likely to find, going on inside them, something “unutterable”—truly a word that says it all for them and that is the clouded screen upon which whatever they say appears vaguely magnified, so that they can never tell its real value. To put a stop to this, he said: “This was not what I meant, but Clarisse is right; the theater proves that intense personal feelings may serve an impersonal purpose, a complex of meaning and metaphor that makes them more or less transcend the merely personal.”
“I know exactly what Ulrich means,” Clarisse chimed in again. “I can’t remember ever getting a special pleasure out of something because it was happening to me. It was happening, that was the thing! Like music, for instance,” she said, turning to her husband. “You don’t want to own it; the joy of it is that it’s there! We absorb our experiences and expand them into something beyond ourselves in a single movement; we seek to realize ourselves, yes, but not the way a shopkeeper realizes a profit!”
Walter clutched his head, but for Clarisse’s sake he switched to another argument. He did his best to make his words come with the force of a steady, cold jet. “If you value an experience only to the degree that it generates spiritual energy,” he said to Ulrich, “then let me ask you this: Doesn’t that presuppose a life that has no other aim than to produce spiritual energy and power?”
“It is the life that all existing societies claim as their goal,” Ulrich replied.
“In such a world the people would presumably lead their lives under the influence of great passions and ideas, philosophies and novels,” Walter continued. “Let me take it a step further: Would they live so as to make great philosophy and poetry possible, or would their lives be philosophy and poetry in the flesh, as it were? I’m sure I know which you mean, since the first case would be exactly what we mean by a civilization in the first place. But if you mean the second, aren’t you overlooking the fact that such a life-as-art, or whatever you’d call it, unimaginable as it is to begin with, would make philosophy and art quite superfluous; it means one thing only, the end of art!” He flashed this trump card for Clarisse’s benefit.
It took the trick. Even Ulrich needed a while to marshal his forces. Then he laughed and said: “Don’t you know that every perfect life would be the end of art? It seems to me that you yourself ar
e on the way to perfecting your life at the expense of your art.”
He had intended no sarcasm, but Clarisse pricked up her ears.
Ulrich went on: “Every great book breathes this spirit of love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. It leads to decisions that cannot be decided; there is nothing to be done but to give a true account of their lives. Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was.”