The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  It would be hard to say whether His Grace was aware that this choice was an affront to the German cause, as his critics later said; the chances are that he thought he was serving the true German interest in this fashion. But the immediate consequence of his move was that the Parallel Campaign was now being intensely attacked in German circles as well, so that it ended up being regarded on the one side as an anti-German plot and being openly resisted as such, while on the other side it had long been regarded as pro-German and had therefore been avoided, with diplomatic excuses, from the outset. The unexpected effect did not escape His Grace’s attention, of course, and was a matter of intense concern everywhere. This further tribulation only stiffened Count Leinsdorf’s resolve, however, and when Diotima and other leading figures anxiously questioned him about it, time after time, he turned an impenetrable but determined face toward such feeble-spirited creatures and said: “This move has not met with immediate success, I know, but you cannot let a great aim depend on whether or not you achieve instant success with any measure along the way; meanwhile we have achieved a more widespread interest in the Parallel Campaign, and the rest will fall into place if we simply hold firm.”

  108

  THE UNREDEEMED NATIONALITIES AND GENERAL STUMM’S REFLECTIONS ABOUT THE TERMINOLOGY OF REDEMPTION

  No matter how many words are spoken at every moment in a great city to express the personal concerns of its inhabitants, there is one word that is never among them: “redeem.” All other words, from the most impassioned to the most discriminating, even those dealing with extreme situations, may be assumed to be heard more than once, whether shouted or whispered, expressions such as, for instance: “You’re the worst crook that ever lived” or “No other woman could be as beautiful as you,” so that these most personal sentiments could in fact be charted in sweeping statistical curves representing their mass distribution throughout the city. But no living man ever says to another: “You can redeem me” or “Be my redeemer.” He can be tied to a tree and left to starve, or marooned on a desert island with the woman he had been courting in vain for months, or rescued from being jailed for forging checks, and every word in the dictionary may come pouring from his lips, but as long as he is experiencing real emotion he will never utter the words “redeem,” “redeemer,” or “redemption,” even though these are perfectly acceptable terms as such.

  And yet the peoples united under the Crown of Kakania called themselves Unredeemed Nations.

  General Stumm von Bordwehr was thinking about it. In his position at the War Office, he had ample knowledge of Kakania’s problems with nationalism, because the military were the first to feel the effects, at the budget hearings, of the seesawing policies resulting from the hundreds of conflicting considerations by which the State was hamstrung. Only a little while ago an urgent money bill had had to be withdrawn, to the War Minister’s white fury, because an Unredeemed Nationality had demanded in return for its support such concessions as the government could not possibly make without dangerously arousing the yearning for redemption of other nationalities. So Kakania was left naked to its enemies, as the budgetary outlay had been proposed to replace the army’s hopelessly obsolete guns—whose range could be compared with the guns of other powers as a knife compares with a spear—with new guns that would be as a spear to a knife compared with those of the other powers. This necessary purchase had now once again been prevented, for who knew how long. To say that this setback made General Stumm consider suicide would be going too far, but a deep depression is sometimes heralded by any number of random, trivial symptoms, and Stumm’s brooding over the redeemed and the unredeemed was certainly connected with Kakania’s defenseless, disarmed state—to which it was condemned by its intolerable domestic squabbles—the more so because in his semi-civilian status at Diotima’s he had been hearing about redemption until he was sick and tired of it.

  His first reaction was that the term was one of those verbal inflations not yet classified by linguistic science. So his common sense as a soldier told him, but apart from the fact that his sound instinct had already been disoriented by Diotima—it was after all from her lips that Stumm had heard the word “redemption” for the first time and had been charmed by it, and even today, in spite of the failed artillery bill, the word when uttered by Diotima was still enveloped in a kind of magic, so that the General’s first reaction could really more properly be described as the second of his life! And there was another reason why the theory of verbal inflation didn’t seem to hold water: it was only necessary to salt the individual units of the word group “redemption” with a small, innocent lack of gravity, and they instantly came trippingly from the tongue. “You’ve just saved my soul!” or some such; who has not said something of the sort at one time or another, provided of course that it refers to nothing more than the relief after a ten-minute wait or some equally slight inconvenience that has been brought to an end. Now the General realized that it was not so much the words that offended a healthy common sense as their absurd claim to being taken literally. When Stumm asked himself where he had ever come across such talk of redemption or salvation, other than at Diotima’s or in politics, he realized that it had been in churches or cafés, in art journals, and in the books of Dr. Arnheim, which he had read with admiration. He now realized that such words refer not to a simple, natural human occurrence but to something abstract, some general complication or other; to redeem and to yearn for redemption is definitely a spiritual transaction.

  The General nodded with amazement at the fascinating insights this special duty of his seemed to be bringing him. He switched on the red light over his office door as a signal that he was in conference, and while his officers who came bearing files in their arms turned back from his door with a sigh, he went on with his speculations. The intellectual types he kept running into nowadays wherever he went were chronically dissatisfied, finding fault because there was either too little or too much being done about this or that; to hear them tell it, nothing ever seemed to go as it should. He was becoming quite fed up with them. They were in a class with those miserable specimens susceptible to cold who always find themselves sitting in a draft. When they were not complaining about the preponderance of scientific attitudes, they were excoriating illiteracy, general boorishness or general overrefinement, fanaticism or indifference: whichever way they turned, they found something wrong. Their minds never came to rest, but were fixated on the ceaseless wanderings of that residual element in things that never finds its proper place anywhere. So they ended up convinced that their era was fated to be a spiritual wasteland that could be redeemed only by some special event or some very special personage. It was among the so-called intellectuals that the word “redemption” and its kin came into vogue at this time. They did not see how things could go on unless à messiah came quickly. Depending on circumstances, he would be a medical messiah who would redeem the art of healing from the specialized research teams that pursued their experiments while human beings sickened and died around them, or a messianic poet capable of writing a drama that would sweep millions of people into the theaters despite its ineffable sublimity; besides the belief that every kind of human endeavor needed a messiah to restore it to its pristine purpose, there was of course also the simple and unadulterated longing for a leader sent to put everything to rights with his strong right arm. The age before the Great War was a messianic age, and the fact that entire nations wanted to be redeemed in a lump was really nothing special or unusual for its time.

  Not that the General regarded this as something to be taken any more literally than anything else people were saying. “If the Redeemer were to come again today,” he said to himself, “they would bring down his Government just like any other.” Judging by his own personal experience, he supposed that this came of too many people writing too many books and newspaper articles. “How wise of the army to forbid officers to write books without special permission,” he thought, and was startled to feel a hot wave of loyalty for the
first time in ages. He was obviously starting to think too much! It all came of keeping company with the civilian mind, which had evidently lost the advantage of having a firm perspective on the world. The General saw this clearly now, and it enabled him to understand all that palaver about redemption from yet another angle. The General’s mind strayed back to distant memories of his classes in religion and history for support along this new line of thought, and if his welter of ideas could have been lifted bodily out of his head and ironed out, it would have looked more or less as follows: To begin briefly with the ecclesiastical aspect of things, as long as one believed in religion, one could defenestrate a good Christian or a pious Jew from any story in the castle of hope or prosperity, and he would always land on his spiritual feet, as it were, because all religions included in their view of life an irrational, incalculable element they called God’s inscrutable will. Whenever a man could not make sense of things, he merely had to remember this rogue element in the equation, and his spirit could rub its hands with satisfaction, as it were. This falling on one’s feet and rubbing one’s hands is called having a working philosophy of life, and this is what modern man has lost. He must either give up thinking about his life altogether, which is what many people are quite content to do, or else he finds himself strangely torn between having to think and yet never quite seeming to arrive at a satisfactory resolution of his problems. This conflict has in the course of history taken on the form of a total skepticism as often as it has that of a renewed subjection to faith, and its most prevalent form today is probably the conviction that without a spiritual dimension there can be no human life worthy of the name, but with too much of it there can be none either. It is on this conviction that our civilization as a whole is based. It takes great care to provide for education and research, but never too well, only enough money to keep education and research properly subordinated to the great sums expended on entertainment, cars, and guns. It clears the way for talent but sees to it that it should be a talent for business. Every idea is given due recognition, after some resistance, but this always works out so as to benefit equally the opposite idea. It looks like some tremendous weakness and carelessness, but it is probably also a quite deliberate effort to put the spiritual dimension in its place, for if any one of the ideas that motivate our lives were ever carried out seriously, so seriously that nothing would be left of its opposite, then our civilization would hardly be our civilization.

  The General had a pudgy little baby fist; he clenched it and whacked the top of his desk with it as if it were a padded glove; a man had to have a strong fist. As an officer, he knew what to think! The irrational element was known as honor, obedience, the Supreme Commander in Chief, Part III of the Service Regulations, and to sum it all up, the conviction that war is nothing but the continuation of peace by stronger measures, a forceful kind of order, without which the world cannot survive. The gesture with which the General had thumped his desk would have been slightly ludicrous if a fist were not as much a spiritual manifestation as an athletic one, a kind of indispensable extension of the mind. Stumm von Bordwehr was a bit fed up with the whole civilian nexus. He had discovered that library attendants were the only people left who had a sound general overview of the civilian mind. He had hit upon the paradox of excessive order, the perfection of which inevitably brought inaction in its train. He had a funny feeling, something like an insight into why it was the army where the greatest order was to be found at the same time as the greatest readiness to lay down one’s life. For some indefinable reason, order seems to bring on bloodshed! This worried him, and he decided that he must not go on working at such pressure. Anyway, he wondered mutinously, what is this spiritual dimension? It doesn’t walk around in a bedsheet at midnight, so what can it be but a certain order we impose on our impressions and experiences? But in that case, he concluded firmly, on a happy inspiration, if the spirit is nothing more than the order of our experience, then in a properly ordered world we don’t need it at all!

  With a sigh of relief, Stumm von Bordwehr switched off the “in conference” light outside his door, stepped up to the mirror, and smoothed his hair down, in order to efface all signs of emotional stress before his subordinates came in.

  109

  BONADEA, KAKANIA; SYSTEMS OF HAPPINESS AND BALANCE

  If there was anyone in Kakania who understood nothing of politics, and was quite happy that way, it was Bonadea; and yet there was a connection between her and the Unredeemed Nationalities. Bonadea—not to be confused with Diotima; Bonadea the Good Goddess, Goddess of Chastity, whose temple by one of those twists of fate ended up as the scene of orgies; Bonadea, wife of a presiding county judge or some such legal eminence, and the frustrated mistress of a man who was neither worthy of her nor sufficiently attached to her—had a system, which was more than could be said of Kakanian politics.

  Bonadea’s system had so far consisted in leading a double life. Her social status was assured in that she belonged to a family of distinction and enjoyed the reputation of a cultivated and notable woman in her own social circle; that she gave way to certain temptations she could ascribe to being constitutionally overexcitable, or having a heart given to folly, since the follies of the heart, like romantic political crimes, enjoy a certain esteem, even when committed under dubious circumstances. Here the heart plays about the same role as honor, obedience, and Service Regulations, Part III, played in the General’s life, or as the irrational element in every well-ordered life that ultimately puts to rights whatever baffles the unaided rational mind.

  But Bonadea’s system had a flaw, in that it split her life into two different conditions, the transition from one to the other of which could not be achieved without paying a heavy price. For however eloquent her heart could be before one of her lapses, it was equally deflated afterward, and she was constantly alternating between a maniacally effervescent state of mind and one that drained away in inky blackness, hardly ever coming into equilibrium. All the same, it was a system, that is, it was no mere play of uncontrolled instincts—the way life used to be seen as the automatic squaring of accounts between pleasure and pain, with a certain profit registered on the side of pleasure, but a system that included quite a number of psychological moves designed to fake these accounts.

  Everyone has some such method of jockeying one’s psychological accounts in one’s own favor, aiming at a minimum balance of pleasure that should ordinarily get one through the day. A person’s pleasure in life can also consist of displeasure; such differences in kind don’t matter much, since as everyone knows there are as many contented melancholies as there are funeral marches that float as lightly in their element as a dance tune does in its own. The opposite is probably equally valid, in that many normally cheerful persons are no whit happier than many habitually sad ones, because happiness is just as much of a strain as unhappiness, more or less like flying on the principle of lighter or heavier than air. But there is another objection to be made. Would the rich not consider themselves justified in their perennial insistence that the poor need not envy them, because the happiness to be got out of money is illusory? Money merely sets a man the problem of working out another system of life, the pleasure surplus of which can at best be no greater than any other. According to this principle, the family without a roof over its head, provided it survives an icy winter night, should theoretically be just as happy with the first rays of the morning sun as the rich man who has to get out of his warm bed. In practice it comes down to this, that everyone bears his burden with the patience of a donkey, since a donkey whose strength slightly exceeds the demands of his burden is happy enough. And this is, in fact, the soundest available definition of personal happiness, as long as we restrict ourselves to donkeys. In reality, however, personal happiness (or equilibrium, contentment, whatever we may choose to call the innermost reflex aim of the personality) is self-contained only as a stone is in a wall, or a drop of water in a river, which are permeated by the forces and tensions of the whole. Wh
at a person does and feels is a negligible part of what he must assume many others normally do and feel with him. A human being never lives only in his own equilibrium but depends on that of the surrounding strata of humanity, so that the individual’s little pleasure factory is affected by a most complicated moral credit system, about which more will have to be said later on, being as much a part of the community’s psychic balance sheet as of the individual’s.

  Since Bonadea’s efforts to win her lover back were unsuccessful, making her think that Diotima’s intellect and energy had robbed her of Ulrich, she was consumed with jealousy; and yet, as is the way with weak personalities, her admiration for her rival provided a certain justification and compensation for her loss, which partially reconciled her to it. In this condition she had managed for some time now to be received by Diotima occasionally, on the pretext of having some modest contribution to offer to the Parallel Campaign, without achieving an entrance into the circles that frequented the house; on this point she imagined there must be a certain understanding between Diotima and Ulrich. So she felt herself to be a victim of their cruelty, and since she also loved them, the illusion of an ineffable purity and selflessness flowered inside her. In the mornings, when her husband had left the house—a moment she could hardly wait for—she often sat down at her mirror like a bird ready to groom its feathers. She tied, curled, and twisted her hair until it took on a form not unlike Diotima’s Grecian knot. She combed out and brushed little curls into place, and if the total effect was a bit silly, she never noticed, because the face that smiled back at her from the mirror did bear a faint resemblance to the goddess. The poise and beauty of her idol, and the latter’s sense of fulfillment, then rippled upward inside her like the tiny, shallow, warm waves of a mysterious if not yet deeply consummated union, much like sitting at the ocean’s rim dabbling one’s feet in the surf. What she did was akin to an act of religious worship—from the times when primitive man crept bodily into the masks of the gods down to the rites and ceremonies of civilization, so carnal a joy of faithful mimicry has never quite lost its power!—and had all the greater hold on Bonadea because of her compulsive love of clothes and adornments. When Bonadea studied her appearance in a new dress in her mirror, she could never have imagined a time to come when leg-of-mutton sleeves, little curls framing the forehead, and long bell-shaped skirts would be replaced by knee-length skirts and hair cut like a boy’s. Nor would she have argued against it; her brain was simply incapable of imagining such a possibility. She had always dressed like a lady and contemplated the latest fashions, every six months, with reverence, as though she were face-to-face with eternity. Even though an appeal to her intelligence could have brought her to admit that such things were transitory, it would in no way have lessened her reverence for them. The tyranny of the mundane entered her bloodstream unnoticed, and the times when one turned down the corner of one’s visiting cards, or sent one’s friends New Year’s greetings, or slipped off one’s gloves at a ball, were so long gone by the time one did not do any of these things that they might as well have been a hundred years in the past: that is, wholly unimaginable, impossible, and outdated. Which is why Bonadea without her clothes on was such a comical sight, stripped as she was of all her ideological protection too, the naked victim of an inexorable compulsion that was sweeping her off her feet with the inhuman force of an earthquake.