The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  Walter had turned pale to the lips. He hated this view of art as a negation of life, of art against life. He regarded it as offensively bohemian, the dregs of an outdated impulse to shock the conventional mind. He caught the irony of the self-evident fact that in a perfect world there would be no more beauty because it would be superfluous, but he did not hear his friend’s unspoken question. For Ulrich was aware of having oversimplified his case. He could just as easily have said the opposite, that art is subversive because art is love; it beautifies its object by loving it, and there may be no other way in this world to beautify a thing or a creature than by loving it. And it is only because even our love consists of mere fragments that beauty works by intensification and contrast. And it is only in the sea of love that the concept of perfection, beyond all intensification, fuses with the concept of beauty, which depends on intensification. Once again Ulrich’s thoughts had brushed against “the realm,” and he stopped short, annoyed with himself. Walter had meanwhile pulled himself together, and after having rejected his friend’s suggestion that people should live more or less as they read, as a commonplace idea as well as an impossible one, he proceeded to prove it evil and vulgar too.

  “If a man,” he began in the same artfully controlled fashion as before, “were to live his life as you suggest, he would have to accept—not to mention other impossible implications—everything that gave him a good idea, in fact everything even capable of doing so. This would of course mean universal decadence, but since you don’t mind that side of it, presumably—unless you are thinking of those vague general arrangements about which you haven’t gone into detail—let me ask you only about the personal consequences. It seems to me that such a man is bound to be, in every case in which he doesn’t happen to be the poet of his own life, worse off than an animal; if he couldn’t come up with an idea, then he couldn’t come to any decision either, so that for a great part of his life he would simply be at the mercy of all his impulses, moods, the usual banal passions—in short, at the mercy of all the most impersonal elements of which a man consists, and for as long as the channel leading upward remained blocked, he would have to let himself be the toy of everything that came into his head!”

  “Then he would have to refuse to do anything,” Clarisse answered in Ulrich’s stead. “This is the active passivism of which a person must be capable in some circumstances.”

  Walter could not make himself look at her. Her capacity for refusal was, after all, a major factor in their life together; Clarisse, looking like a little angel in the long nightgown that covered her feet, had stood on her bed declaiming Nietzschean sentiments, with her teeth flashing: “I toss my question like a plumb line into your soul! You want a child and marriage, but I ask you: Are you the man to have a child? Are you the victorious master of his own powers? Or is it merely the voice of the animal in you, the slave of nature, speaking?” In the twilight of the bedroom this had made a rather gruesome spectacle, while Walter had tried in vain to coax her back down under the bedclothes. And now here she was, armed for the future with a new slogan: active passivism, of which a person had to be capable if need be—a phrase that clearly smacked of a man without qualities. Had she been confiding in Ulrich? Was he encouraging her in her eccentricities? These questions were writhing like worms in Walter’s heart, so that he almost felt sick to his stomach. His face turned ashen and all the tension went out of it, leaving it a mass of helpless wrinkles.

  Ulrich saw this and asked him warmly if anything was wrong?

  With an effort, Walter said no and brightly smiling, invited Ulrich to go on with his nonsense.

  “Oh well,” Ulrich conceded, “you’re not so wrong there. But in a spirit of good sportsmanship we often tolerate actions that are harmful to ourselves, if our opponent performs them in an attractive way; the quality of the performance somehow contends with the quality of the damage done. Very often, too, we have an idea that takes us a step farther along, but all too soon habit, inertia, selfish promptings, and so on take its place, because that’s the way things go. So I may have been describing a condition that can never be carried to its proper conclusion, but there’s no denying that it is wholly the condition of the world in which we live.”

  Walter had regained his equanimity. “If you turn the truth upside down, you can always say something that is just as true as it is topsyturvy,” he said gently, without disguising his reluctance for any further argument. “It’s just like you to call something impossible but real.”

  Clarisse, however, was rubbing her nose hard. “And yet it seems very important to me,” she said, “that there’s something impossible in every one of us. It explains so many things. While I was listening to you both, it seemed to me that if we could be cut open our entire life might look like a ring, just something that goes around something.” She had already, earlier on, pulled off her wedding ring, and now she peered through it at the lamplit wall. “There’s nothing inside, and yet it looks as though that were precisely what matters most. Ulrich can’t be expected to express this perfectly the first time he tries.”

  And so this discussion ended after all, sad to say, with Walter getting hurt once again.

  85

  GENERAL STUMM TRIES TO BRING SOME ORDER INTO THE CIVILIAN MIND

  Ulrich had probably been out an hour longer than he had indicated on leaving, and was told on his return that a military gentleman had been waiting for him for quite some time. Upstairs, to his surprise, he found General Stumm, who greeted him as an old comrade in arms.

  “Do forgive me, old friend,” the General called out to him in welcome, “for barging in on you so late, but I couldn’t get off duty any sooner, so I’ve been sitting here for a good two hours, surrounded by your books—what terrifying heaps of them you’ve got!”

  After an exchange of courtesies, it turned out that Stumm had come for help with an urgent problem. Sitting there with one leg flung jauntily over the other, not an easy posture for a man with his waistline, and holding out his arm with its little hand, he said: “Urgent? When one of my aides comes along with an urgent piece of business I usually tell him there’s nothing urgent in this world except making it in time to a certain closet. But jokes aside, I had to come and see you about something most important. I’ve already told you that I regard your cousin’s house as a special opportunity for me to learn more about the civilian world and its major concerns. Something nonmilitary, for a change, and I can assure you that I am enormously impressed. On the other hand, while we brass hats may have our weaknesses, we’re not nearly as stupid as most people seem to think. I hope you’ll agree that when we get something done, we make a good job of it. You do agree? I knew I could trust you to see that, which is why I can confess to you frankly that even so, I am ashamed of our army mentality. Ashamed, I say! Other than our Chaplain General, I seem to be the man in our army who has most to do with the spiritual and mental side of things. But I don’t mind telling you that if you take a good look at the military mind, outstanding as it is, it seems to me like a morning roll call. You do remember what a morning roll call is like? The duty officer puts down on his report: So many men and horses present, so many men and horses absent, sick or whatever, Uhlan Leitomischl absent without leave, and so on. But why such and such numbers of men and horses are present or sick or whatever, that he never puts down. And it’s precisely the sort of thing you need to know when dealing with a civilian administration. When a soldier has something to say, he keeps it short, simple, and to the point, but I often have to confer with those civilian types from the various ministries, and they always want to know, at every turn, the whys and wherefores of every proposal I make, with reference to considerations and interactions on a higher plane. So what I did—this is just between ourselves, you understand—I proposed to my chief, His Excellency General Frost von Aufbruch, or rather I hope to surprise him with it. . . anyhow, my idea is to use my opportunities at your cousin’s to get the hang of it all, all these higher considerations and s
ignifications, and put them to use, if I may say so without blowing my own horn, to upgrade our military mentality. After all, the army has its doctors, vets, pharmacists, clergy, auditors, commissary officers, engineers, and bandmasters, but what it hasn’t got yet is a Central Liaison for the civilian mind.

  Only now did Ulrich notice that Stumm von Bordwehr had brought along a briefcase, which he had propped against the desk, one of those leather bags with a shoulder strap for carrying official files through the mazes of government corridors and from one government building to another. The General must have come with an orderly who was waiting for him downstairs, although Ulrich had not seen anyone, for it was costing Stumm quite an effort to pull the heavy bag onto his knees, so as to spring the little steel lock with its imposing air of battlefield technology.

  “I haven’t been wasting any time since I started attending your meetings”—he smiled, while the light-blue tunic of his uniform tightened around its gold buttons as he stooped—“but there are things, you see, I’m still not quite sure about.” He fished out of the bag a number of sheets covered with odd-looking notes and lines.

  “Your cousin,” he elucidated, “your cousin and I had a quite exhaustive talk about it, and what she wants, understandably enough, is that her efforts to raise a spiritual monument to our Gracious Sovereign should lead to an idea, an idea outranking, as it were, all of the current ideas. But I’ve noticed already, much as I admire all these people she’s invited to work on it, that it’s a very tall order. The minute one man says something, another will come up with the opposite—haven’t you noticed it?—but what strikes me, for one, as even worse is that the civilian mind seems to be what we call, speaking of a horse, a poor feeder. You remember, don’t you? You can stuff that kind of beast with double rations, but it never gets any fatter! Or if it does,” he qualified, in response to a mild objection from his host, “even if it does gain weight, its bones don’t develop, and its coat stays dull; all it gets is a grass belly. I find that fascinating, you see, and I’ve made up my mind to look into it, to figure out why we can’t get some order into this business.”

  Stumm smiled as he handed his former lieutenant the first of his papers. “They can say what they like about us,” he said, “but we army men have always known how to get things in order. Here’s my outline of the main ideas I got out of those fellows at your cousin’s meetings. As you’ll see, every one of them, when you ask him privately, places top priority on something different.” Ulrich looked at the paper in astonishment. It was drawn up like a registration form or, in fact, a military list, divided by horizontal and vertical lines into sections, with entries in words that somehow resisted the format, for what he read here, written in military calligraphy, were the names of Jesus Christ; Buddha, Gautama, aka Siddhartha; Lao-tzu; Luther, Martin; Goethe, Wolfgang; Ganghofer, Ludwig; Chamberlain, and evidently many more, running on to another page. In a second column he read the words “Christianity,” “Imperialism,” “Century of Interchange,” and so on, with yet more columns of words beyond.

  “I might even call it a page from the Domesday Book of modern culture,” Stumm commented, “because we have expanded it further, and it now contains the names of the ideas, plus their originators, that have moved us in the last twenty-five years. I had no idea what a job it would be!” When Ulrich asked him how he had got this inventory together, he was glad to explain his system.

  “I had to commandeer a captain, two lieutenants, and five non-coms to get it done in such short order. If we’d been able to do it in a really up-to-date fashion, we’d simply have sent around a questionnaire to all the regiments: ‘Who do you think is the greatest man?’ The way it’s done nowadays when the papers take a poll and all that, you know, together with an order to report the results in percentages. But of course you can’t do that sort of thing in the army, because no unit would be allowed to report any answer other than ‘His Majesty the Emperor.’ So then I thought of going into which books are the most widely read and have the biggest printings, but there we soon found out that next to the Bible it’s the Post Office New Year’s booklet, with the new postal rates and the old jokes, which every ‘occupant’ gets free from his postman in return for his annual tip, which again made us realize what a tricky thing the civilian mind is, since those books that appeal to everyone are generally rated the best, or at least, as they tell me, an author in Germany must have an awful lot of like-minded readers before he can pass for an impressive thinker. So we couldn’t take that route either, and how we finally did it I couldn’t tell you right now; it was an idea of Corporal Hirsch’s, together with Lieutenant Melichar, but we did it.”

  General Stumm put the sheet of paper aside and, with an expression eloquent with disappointment, pulled out another. After taking inventory of the Central European stock of ideas, he had not only discovered to his regret that it consisted of nothing but contradictions but also been amazed to find that these contradictions, on closer scrutiny, tended to merge into one another.

  “By now I’m used to being told something different by each of the famous men at your cousin’s when I ask them to enlighten me about something,” he said, “but every time I’ve been talking to them for a while, they still seem to be saying the same thing—that’s what I can’t get into my head, and it could be that my army-issue brain isn’t up to it.” The problem that was worrying General Stumm was no trifle and actually should not have been left in the War Office’s lap, even though it could be shown that it was intimately related to war. Our times rejoice in a number of great ideas, and by a special kindness of fate each idea is paired with its opposite, so that individualism and collectivism, nationalism and internationalism, socialism and capitalism, imperialism and pacifism, rationalism and superstition, are all equally at home in them, together with the unused remnants of countless opposites of an equal or lesser contemporary value. By now this seems as natural as day and night, hot and cold, love and hate, and, for every tensor muscle in the body, the presence of its opposing extensor muscle, nor would it have occurred to General Stumm—or anyone else—to see anything unusual in any of this, had his ambition not taken the plunge into this adventure because of his love for Diotima. Love cannot settle for a unity of Nature based upon opposites; its need for tenderness demands a unity without contradictions, and so the General had tried in every possible way to establish such a unity.

  “Here I have,” he told Ulrich as he showed him the relevant pages of his report, “a list I’ve made up of all the Commanders in Chief of Ideas, i.e., all the names in recent times that have led sizable battalions of ideas to victory. On this other page here you see the battle order; this one is a strategical plan; and this last one is an attempt to establish depots or ordnance bases from which to move further supplies of ideas up to the front. Now, I’m sure you can see—I’ve made certain that the drawing shows this clearly—when looking at any set of ideas in action, that it draws its supplies of additional troops and intellectual matériel not only from its own depots but also from those of its opponents; you see how it keeps shifting positions and how it suddenly turns unaccountably against its own backup forces; you can see ideas constantly crossing over to the other side and back again, so that you will find them now in one line of battle, now in the other. In short, there’s no way to draw up a decent plan of communications or line of demarcation or anything else, and the whole thing is—though I can’t actually believe what I’m saying!—what any one of our commanding officers would be bound to call one hell of a mess!”

  Stumm slipped several dozen pages into Ulrich’s hands. They were covered with strategic plans, railway lines, networks of roads, charts of range and firing power, symbols for different units and for brigade headquarters, circles, squares, crosshatched areas; just like a regular General Staff’s plan of operations, it had red, green, yellow, and blue lines running this way and that, with all sorts of little flags, meaning a variety of things (such as were to become so popular the following year), painted
in all over the place.

  “It’s no use,” Stumm sighed. “I’ve tried doing it differently, by representing the problem from a military-geographical angle instead of a strategic one, in the hope of getting at least a clearly defined field of operations, but that didn’t work either. Have a look at the oro- and hydrographic sketches.” Ulrich saw symbols for mountain peaks branching out and massing together again elsewhere, and for springs, networks of streams, lakes. “I’ve experimented with all sorts of other ways of trying to pull the whole thing together,” the General said, with a gleam of irritation or panic in his normally merry gaze. “But do you know what it’s like? It’s like traveling second class in Galicia and picking up crab lice. I’ve never felt so filthy helpless! When you spend a lot of time with ideas you end up itching all over, and you can scratch till you bleed, without getting any relief.” His vivid description made Ulrich laugh.

  “No, no, don’t laugh!” the General pleaded. “I’ve been thinking that you, now that you’ve become a leading civilian, would understand this stuff and that you’d understand my problem too. So I’ve come to you for help. I have far too much respect for the world of the intellect to believe that I can be right about all this.”

  “You take thinking far too seriously, Colonel,” Ulrich said to comfort him. The “Colonel” had just slipped out, and he apologized: “Sorry, General; for a minute you had me back in the days when you sometimes ordered me to join you in a philosophical chat in the corner of the mess hall. I can only repeat, a man shouldn’t take the art of thinking as seriously as you are doing.”

  “Not take it seriously!” Stumm groaned. “But I can’t go back to just getting along in the mindless way I used to live. Don’t you see that? It makes me shudder to think how long I lived between the parade ground and the barracks, with nothing but my messmates’ dirty jokes and their stories about their sexual exploits.”