The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  Now he thought back to that hope with no more than a pitying smile. He had never managed to find a possible resting point midway between his two extremes. He was fed up. He smiled grandly at oncoming death.

  He had, after all, seen quite a bit of the world. Bavaria and Austria, all the way to Turkey. And a great deal had happened during his lifetime that he had read about in the papers. An eventful time, on the whole. Deep down he was quite proud to have been a part of it all. Thinking it over bit by bit, he had to take it as a troubled and dreary business, but his own track did run right across it; looking back, you could see it clearly, from birth to death. Moosbrugger was far from feeling that he would actually be executed; he was executing himself, with the help of those other people, that was the way he looked at what was coming. It all added up to a whole, of sorts: the highways, the towns, the cops and the birds, the dead and his own death. It wasn’t altogether clear to him, and the others understood it even less, though they could talk more glibly about it.

  He spat and thought of the sky, which looks like a mousetrap covered in blue. “The kind they make in Slovakia, those round, high mousetraps,” he thought.

  88

  ON BEING INVOLVED WITH MATTERS OF CONSEQUENCE

  It is now high time to consider something previously touched upon in various connections, which might be formulated as: There is nothing so hazardous to the mind as its involvement with matters of great consequence.

  A man wanders through a forest, climbs a mountain and sees the world spread out below him, stares at his infant just put into his arms for the first time, or enjoys the good fortune of holding a position in life envied by all. And we ask: What is it like for him? Surely, he thinks, this is all many-layered, deep, important; it’s just that he doesn’t have the presence of mind to take it at its word, so to speak. The marvel that is facing him and outside him, enclosing him like a magnetic casing, drains his mind and leaves it a blank. While his gaze is held fast by a thousand details, he secretly feels as if he had spent all his ammunition. Outwardly the soul-drenched, sun-drenched, deepened or heightened moment glazes the world with a galvanic silver coating, down to the tiniest leaflets and their capillaries, but here inside, at the world’s personal end, a certain lack of inner substance makes itself felt, in the form of a big, vacuous, round O. This condition is the classic symptom of making contact with all that is eternal and great, like dwelling upon the peaks of humanity and nature. Those of us who prefer to live with greatness—first and foremost among whom will be found those great souls for whom little things simply don’t exist—find their inward life drawn out of them involuntarily and stretched into an extended superficiality.

  The danger of having to do with great things may therefore also be regarded as a law of the conservation of spiritual energy, and it seems to be more or less generally valid. The utterances of socially prominent persons of great influence are usually more vacuous than our own. Ideas closely involved with particularly estimable subjects usually look as though it is only their privileged status that saves them from being regarded as not up to snuff. The causes dearest to our hearts—the nation, peace, humanity, character, and similarly sacred objectives—sprout on their backs the cheapest flora of the mind. This would make ours a topsy-turvy world, unless we assume that the more significant the subject, the more inanely it may be discussed, in which case the world is turned right side up again.

  This law, however, helpful as it was toward our understanding of European culture, is not always clearly in evidence, and in times of transition from one group of great causes to another, the mind that seeks to serve some great cause may even seem subversive, although it is only changing its uniform. A transition of this kind was already noticeable when the people we are speaking of were having their anxieties and triumphs. There were already, for instance—to start with a subject of special concern to Arnheim—books enjoying huge sales, though these were not yet the books most respected, even though great respect was reserved only for those books that had impressive sales. Football and lawn tennis had already become influential industries, but there was still some hesitation at the institutes of advanced technology when it came to setting up professorial chairs for teaching them. All in all, whether it was in fact the late lamented rakehell and admiral Drake who introduced the potato from America, heralding the end of recurrent famines throughout Europe, or the less lamented, highly cultivated, and equally pugnacious Admiral Raleigh, or some anonymous Spanish sailors, or even that worthy rascal and slave trader Hawkins, it was a long time before it occurred to anyone to consider these men more important, thanks to the potato, than, say, the physicist Al Shirazi, who is known only for his correct explanation of the rainbow. But with the bourgeois era a revaluation of such achievements began, which in Arnheim’s time was far advanced and hindered only by some residual old-fashioned prejudices. The quantity of the effect, and the effect of quantity, as the new, self-evident object of veneration, still struggled against an aging, blind, aristocratic regard for quality, but in the popular imagination this struggle had already spawned fantastic hybrids, quite like the concept of the “great mind” itself, which, in the form we have come to know it in the last generation, is a blend of its significance-as-such and its potato-significance, for we lived in expectation of a man who would personify the solitary genius and yet be instantly understandable to all and sundry like a nightingale.

  It was hard to tell what to expect along these lines, since the hazardousness of being involved with greatness is usually not perceived until such greatness is halfway past and gone. Nothing is easier than to look down on the flunky who visibly condescends to His Majesty’s guests in His Majesty’s name, but whether the man who treats Today respectfully in the name of Tomorrow is a flunky or not is usually not known until the day after Tomorrow. The hazard of being involved with great things includes the unpleasant certainty that while the things change, the hazard remains the same.

  89

  ONE MUST MOVE WITH THE TIMES

  Dr. phil. Arnheim had received a scheduled visit from two top executives of his firm and had held a long conference with them; in the morning, all the papers and calculations still lay in disorder in his sitting room, for his secretary to deal with. Arnheim had decisions to make before his firm’s emissaries left by the afternoon train, and he always enjoyed this sort of situation for the pleasurable tension it never failed to arouse. In ten years’ time, he reflected, technology will have reached the point when our firm will have its own business planes, and I shall be able to direct my team long distance during a summer vacation in the Himalayas. As he had reached his decisions overnight and had only to go over them and confirm them in the light of day, he was at the moment free. He had ordered his breakfast sent up and was relaxing with his first cigar of the day, mulling over last night’s gathering at Diotima’s, which he had been obliged to leave rather early.

  This time, it had been a most entertaining party, with a large number of the guests under thirty, few over thirty-five, almost still bohemians but already beginning to be famous and noticed in the newspapers: not only native talents but visitors from all over the world attracted by word that in Kakania a lady who moved in the highest circles was blazing a trail for the spirit to penetrate the world. It was, at times, like finding oneself in a literary café, and Arnheim had to smile at the thought of Diotima looking almost intimidated under her own roof; but it had been quite stimulating on the whole and in any case an extraordinary experiment, he felt. His friend Diotima, disappointed with the fruitless meetings of the very eminent, had made a determined effort to give the Parallel Campaign an infusion of the latest trends in thought and had made good use of Arnheim’s contacts for the purpose. He merely shook his head when he remembered the conversations he had been obliged to listen to, crazy enough, in his opinion, but one must give way to youth, he told himself; to simply reject them puts one in an impossible position. So he felt as it were seriously amused by the whole thing, which had been a
bit much all at once.

  They had said to hell with . . . what was it, now? Oh yes, experience. That personal sensory experience the earthy warmth and immediacy of which the Impressionists had apostrophized fifteen years earlier, as though it were some miraculous flower. Flabby and mindless, was their verdict on Impressionism now. They wanted sensuality curbed and a spiritual synthesis.

  Now, synthesis probably meant the opposite of skepticism, psychology, scientific study, and analysis, all the literary tendencies of their fathers’ generation.

  So far as could be gathered, theirs was not so much a philosophical stance as, rather, the craving of young bones and muscles to move freely, to leap and dance, unhampered by criticism. When they felt like it they would not hesitate to consign synthesis to the devil too, along with analysis and all reflection. Then they maintained that the mind needed the sap of immediate experience to make it grow. Usually it was members of some other group who took this position, of course, but sometimes in the heat of argument it could turn out to be the same people.

  What fine slogans they came up with! They called for the intellectual temperament. And lightning thought, ready to leap at the world’s throat! Cosmic man’s sharply honed brain! And what else had he heard?

  A new human race, restyled on the basis of an American world plan for production by mechanized power.

  Lyricism allied to the most intense dramatism of life.

  Technicism—a spirit worthy of the machine age.

  Blériot—one of them had cried out—was at that very moment soaring over the English Channel at thirty-five miles an hour! If we could write this “Thirty-five Mile” poem we would be able to chuck all the rest of our moth-eaten literature into the garbage!

  What was needed was accelerationism, the ultimate speeding up of experience based on the biomechanics learned in sports training and the circus acrobat’s precision of movement!

  Photogenic rejuvenation, by means of film . . .

  Someone pointed out that a man was a mysterious innerspace, who should be helped to find his place in the cosmos by means of the cone, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cube. Whereupon an opposing voice made itself heard, to the effect that the individualistic view of art underlying that statement was on its way out and that a future humanity must be given a new sense of habitation by means of communal housing and settlements. While an individualistic faction and a socialistic one were forming along these lines, a third one began by voicing the opinion that only religious artists were truly social-minded. At this point a group of New Architects was heard from, claiming leadership on the grounds that religion was at the heart of architecture, besides which it promoted love of one’s country and stability, attachment to the soil. The religious faction, reinforced by the geometric one, averred that art was not a peripheral but a central concern, a fulfillment of cosmic laws; but as the discussion went on, the religionists lost the cubists to the architects, whom they joined in insisting that man’s relation to the cosmos was, after all, best expressed through spatial forms that gave validity and character to the individual element. The statement was made that one had to project oneself deep into the human soul and give it a fixed three-dimensional form. Then an angry voice dramatically asked all and sundry what they really thought: What was more important, ten thousand starving human beings or a work of art? Since almost all of them were artists of one kind or another, they did in fact believe that art alone could heal the soul of man; they had merely been unable to agree on the nature of this healing process, or on what claims for it should be put to the Parallel Campaign. But now the original social group came to the fore again, led by fresh voices: the question whether a work of art was more important than the misery of ten thousand people raised the question whether ten thousand works of art could make up for the misery of a single human being. Some rather robust artists proposed that artists should take themselves less seriously, become less narcissistic. Let the artist go hungry and develop some social concern! they demanded. Life was the greatest and the only work of art, someone said. A voice boomed out that it was not art but hunger that brought people together! A mediating voice reminded everyone that the best antidote to the overestimation of the self in art was a thorough grounding in craftsmanship. After this offer of a compromise, someone made use of the pause, born of fatigue and mutual revulsion, to ask serenely whether anyone present really supposed that anything at all could be done before the contact between man and space had even been defined? This became the signal for technologists, accelerationists, and the rest to take the floor again, and the debate flowed on, this way and that, for a good while longer. Eventually an accord was struck, however, because everyone wanted to go home, but not without reaching some kind of conclusion, so they all fell in with a statement to the general effect that while the present time was full of expectation, impatient, wayward, and miserable, the messiah for whom it was hoping and waiting was not yet in sight.

  Arnheim reflected for a moment.

  He had been the center of a circle throughout all this; whenever those on the outer fringe who could not hear or make themselves heard slipped away, others immediately took their place; he had clearly become the center of this gathering too, even when this was not always apparent during the somewhat unmannerly debate. After all, he had for a long time been well up on the subjects discussed. He knew all about the cube and its applications; he had built garden housing for his employees; he knew machines, what made them work, their tempo; he spoke effectively on gaining insight into the self; he had money invested in the burgeoning film industry. Reconstructing the drift of the discussion, he realized besides that it had by no means gone as smoothly as his memory had represented it. Such discussions move in odd ways, as though the contending parties had been assembled blindfolded in a polyhedron, each armed with a stick and ordered to go straight ahead. A confused and wearisome spectacle devoid of logic. But isn’t this an image of the way things generally go in life? Here, too, control is gained not by the restraints and dictates of logic, which at most function like a police force, but only by the untamed dynamic forces of the mind. Such were Arnheim’s reflections as he remembered the attention that had been paid to him, and he decided that the new style in thinking could be likened to the process of free association, when the conscious mind relaxed its controls, all undeniably very stimulating.

  He made an exception and lit a second cigar, though he did not normally give in to such sensual self-indulgence. And even as he was still holding up the match and needed to contract his facial muscles to suck in the first smoke, he could not help smiling as he thought of the little General, who had started a conversation with him at the party the night before. Since the Arnheims owned a cannon and armorplate works and were prepared to turn out vast quantities of munitions, if it came to that, Arnheim was ready to listen when the slightly funny but likable General (who sounded quite different from a Prussian general, far more unbuttoned in his speech but also, one might say, more expressive of an ancient culture—though, one would have to say, a declining culture) turned to him confidentially and—with such a sigh, downright philosophic!—commented on the discussion going on around them, which at least in part, one had to admit, was radically pacifist in tone.

  The General, as the only military officer present, obviously felt a little out of place and bemoaned the fickleness of public opinion, because some comments on the sanctity of human life had just met with general approbation.

  “I don’t understand these people,” were the words with which he turned to Arnheim, seeking enlightenment from a man of internationally recognized intellect. “I simply don’t see why these new men in all their ignorance keep talking about generals drenched in blood! I think I understand quite well the older men who usually come here, even though they’re rather unmilitary in their outlook as well. When, for instance, that famous poet—what’s his name?—that tall older gentleman with the paunch, who’s supposed to have written those verses about the Greek gods, the stars, and ou
r timeless emotions: our hostess told me he’s a real poet in an age that turns out nothing but intellectuals . . . well, as I was saying, I haven’t read any of his works, but I’m sure I’d understand him, if it’s true that he’s noted mainly for not wasting his time on petty stuff, because that’s what we in the army call a strategist. A sergeant—if I may resort to such a humble example—must of course concern himself with the welfare of every single man in his company; the strategist, on the other hand, deals with at least a thousand men at a time and must be prepared to sacrifice ten such units at once if a higher purpose demands it. I see no logic in calling this sort of thing a blood-drenched general in one case and a sense of timeless values in the other! I wish you’d help me understand this if you can.”

  Arnheim’s peculiar position in this city and its society had stung him into a certain, otherwise carefully watched, impulse to mockery. He knew whom the little military gentleman meant, though he did not let on; besides, it didn’t matter, since he himself could have mentioned several other varieties of such eminences who had unmistakably made a poor showing this evening.

  Glumly thinking it over, Arnheim held back the smoke of his cigar between parted lips. His own situation in this circle had also been none too easy. Despite all his prominence, he had overheard quite a number of nasty remarks that could have been aimed at him personally, and what they condemned was often nothing less than what he had loved in his youth, just as these young men now cherished the pet ideas of their own generation. It was a strange feeling, almost spooky, to find himself revered by young men who, almost in the same breath, savagely ridiculed a past in which he had a secret share of his own; it gave him a sense of his own elasticity, adaptability, and enterprising spirit—almost, one might say, the reckless daring of a well-hidden bad conscience. He swiftly pondered what it was that differentiated him from this younger generation. These young men were at odds with one another on every single point at issue; all they unambiguously had in common was their joint assault on objectivity, intellectual responsibility, and the balanced personality.