by Robert Musil
As his mind rose again to the surface through all these strata of thought, he abruptly found himself gazing at Soliman’s gloomily listening face, like a black punchball on which unintelligible words of wisdom had come raining down like so many blows. What an absurd position I am getting myself into! Arnheim thought.
Soliman looked as if he had fallen asleep on his chair with his eyes wide open; as his master reached the end of that one-sided conversation, the eyes set themselves in motion, while the body refused to stir, as though still waiting for the word to wake up. Arnheim saw it and saw in the black boy’s gaze the craving to hear more about whatever intrigues could have brought a king’s son to be a valet. This gaze, lunging at him like claws outstretched for their prey, momentarily reminded Arnheim of that gardener’s helper who had made off with pieces from his collection, and he said to himself with a sigh that he would probably always be lacking in the natural acquisitive instinct. It suddenly occurred to him that this would also sum up, in a word, his relation to Diotima. Painfully moved, he felt how, at the very summit of his life, a cold shadow separated him from everything he had ever touched. It was not an easy thought for a man who had just stated the principle that a man must think in order to act, and who had always striven to make all greatness his own and to transform whatever was less than great with the stamp of his own distinguished imprint. But the shadow had slipped between him and the objects of his desire, despite the willpower he had never lacked, and Arnheim surprised himself by thinking that he could see a connection between that shadow and those shimmers of awe that had cast their veils over his youth, as if, mishandled in some way, they had turned into an almost imperceptible skin of ice. Why this ice did not melt even when confronted with Diotima’s unworldly heart he could not tell; but, like a most unwelcome jab of a pain that had only been waiting for a touch to awaken it, there came the sudden thought of Ulrich. It came with the realization that the same shadow rested on the other man’s life, but with so different an effect! Within the range of human passions, that of a man jealous of another man’s personality is seldom accorded the recognition its intensity has earned for it, and the discovery that his uncontrollable irritation with Ulrich resembled, on a deeper level, the hostile encounter of two brothers unaware of each other’s identity gave him a rather pleasant jolt. Arnheim compared their two personalities from this angle with a new interest. Ulrich had even less of the crude acquisitive instinct for advantages in life, and his immunity to the sublime acquisitive instinct for status and recognition, whatever it was that mattered, was downright infuriating. This man needed none of the weight and substance of life. His sober zeal, which was undeniable, was not a self-serving passion; it came close to reminding Arnheim of the self-effacing manner in which his own staff did their work, except that Ulrich’s selflessness came with such a flourish of arrogance. One might call him a man possessed who was not interested in possessing anything. Or perhaps a man fighting for a cause who had taken a vow of poverty. He could also be regarded as a man given entirely to theorizing, and yet this, too, fell short, because one could certainly not call him a theorist. Arnheim recalled having pointed out to Ulrich that his intellectual capacities were no match for his practical ones. Yet from a practical point of view, the man was utterly impossible.
So Arnheim’s mind turned this way and that, not for the first time, but despite the day’s mood of self-doubt, he could not possibly grant Ulrich superiority over himself on any one count; the crucial difference must be attributable to some deficiency of Ulrich’s. And yet the man had such an air of freshness and freedom, which, Arnheim reluctantly admitted to himself, reminded him of that “Secret of Integrity” which he knew himself to possess, though this other man somehow shook his faith in it. How else would it have been possible, on a purely rational plane, to attribute, however uneasily, the same “wit” to this rootless phantom of a man as Arnheim had learned to fear in an all-too-expert realist such as his father? “There’s something missing in the man,” Arnheim thought, but as though this were merely the obverse of that truth, it occurred to him at almost the same moment and quite involuntarily that “the man has a soul!”
The man had reserves of soul as yet untapped. As this intuition had taken him by surprise, Arnheim was not ready to say just what he meant by it, but as time goes on, every man, as he knew, finds that his soul, by some irreversible process, has turned into intelligence, morality, and lofty ideas; in his friendly enemy this had not yet run its course, and he still had some of his original store of it, something with an indefinable ambiguous charm, which manifested itself in peculiar combinations with elements from the realm of the soulless, the rational, the mechanical—everything that could not quite be regarded as part of the cultural sphere itself.
While he was turning all this over in his mind and immediately adapting it to the style of his philosophical works, Arnheim had incidentally not had a moment in which to credit any of it to Ulrich’s account, not even as the single solitary credit to be granted to him, so strong was his sense of having made a discovery of his own, something he alone had created; he felt like a maestro spotting a fine voice that had not yet fulfilled its potential. This glow of discovery only began to cool when he caught sight of Soliman’s face; Soliman had obviously been staring at him for quite a while, and now believed the time had come again to be able to ask him more questions. His awareness that it was not given to everyone to organize his own mind with the aid of such a mute little semi-savage enhanced Arnheim’s joy at being the only one to know his enemy’s secret, even if there still were a few points to be cleared up as to their implications for the future. What he felt was the love of the usurer for the victim in whom he has invested his capital. Perhaps it was the sight of Soliman that suddenly inspired him to draw into his own orbit, at any cost, the man whom he had come to see as a different embodiment of the adventure that was his own self, even if he had to adopt him as a son! He smiled at this overhasty enthusiasm for a notion that would take time to mature, and instantly cut short Soliman, whose face was twitching with a tragic need to know more, saying: “That’s all for now. Take the flowers I ordered to Frau Tuzzi. If there’s anything else you want to ask, we can deal with it some other time.”
113
ULRICH CHATS WITH HANS SEPP AND GERDA IN THE JARGON OF THE FRONTIER BETWEEN THE SUPERRATIONAL AND THE SUBRATIONAL
Ulrich had no idea what to do in response to his father’s request that he pave the way for a personal talk with His Grace and other high-ranking patriots as a partisan of the sociopragmatic approach to crime and punishment. So he went to see Gerda, to put it all out of his mind. Hans was with her, and Hans instantly took the offensive.
“So now you’re standing up for Director Fischel?”
Ulrich dodged the question by asking whether Hans had it from Gerda.
Yes, Gerda had told him.
“What about it? Would you like to know why?”
“Do tell me,” Hans demanded.
“That’s not so easy, my dear Hans.”
“Don’t call me your dear Hans.”
“Well then, my dear Gerda,” Ulrich said, turning to her, “it’s far from simple. I’ve talked about it so exhaustively already that I thought you understood.”
“I understand you perfectly, but I don’t believe a word of it,” Gerda answered, trying hard to soften the blow of her siding with Hans against him by the conciliatory way she said it and looked at him.
“We don’t believe you,” Hans said, instantly aborting this turn to amiability in the conversation. “We don’t believe that you can mean it seriously. You picked it up somewhere.”
“What!? I suppose you mean something one can’t really put into words . . .?” Ulrich had instantly realized that Hans’s impertinence had to do with what Ulrich and Gerda had discussed in private.
“Oh, it can be put into words, all right, provided one means it.”
“I don’t seem to have the knack. But let me tell you a story.”
/> “Another story! You seem to go in for telling stories like Great Homer himself!” Hans was taking an even ruder and more arrogant tone. Gerda gave him a pleading look. But Ulrich would not let himself be put off, and went on: “I was very much in love myself once, when I was just about the same age as you are now. Actually, I was in love with being in love, with my changed condition, rather than with the woman in the case, and that was when I found out all about the things you, your friends, and Gerda make such great mysteries of. That’s the story I wanted to tell you.”
They were both startled that it turned out to be so short a story.
“So you were very much in love once . . . ?” Gerda asked haltingly, and hated herself in that instant for having asked the question in front of Hans, with the shivering curiosity of a schoolgirl.
But Hans broke in: “Why are we talking about that sort of thing in the first place? Why don’t you tell us instead what your cousin is really up to, now that she has fallen in with all those cultural bankrupts?”
“She is searching for an idea that will give the whole world a splendid image of what our country stands for,” Ulrich replied. “Wouldn’t you like to help her out with some suggestion of your own? I’d be glad to pass it on to her.”
Hans gave a scornful laugh. “Why do you act as if you didn’t know that we intend to disrupt the whole show?”
“But why on earth are you so much against it?”
“Because it is an incredibly vicious scheme against all that’s German in this country,” Hans said. “Is it possible that you really don’t know what a strong opposition is developing? The Pan-German League has been alerted to your Count Leinsdorf’s machinations. The Physical Culture Clubs have already lodged a protest against this affront to German aspirations. The Federation of Arms-bearing Student Corps throughout our Austrian universities is formulating an appeal against the threat of Slavification, and the League of German Youth, of which I am a member, will not put up with it, even if we have to take to the streets!” Hans had drawn himself up tall and recited this speech with a certain pride. But he could not resist adding: “Not that any of this makes any difference. These people all make too much of externals. What matters is that there’s no way of getting anything done to anyone’s satisfaction in this country!”
Ulrich asked him to explain.
The great races of mankind had all begun by creating their own mythology. Well, was there such a thing as a great myth of Austria? Hans asked. Did Austria have an ancient religion of its own, or a great epic poem? Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant religion had originated here; the art of printing and the Austrian tradition of painting had all come from Germany. The reigning dynasty had come from Switzerland, Spain, Luxembourg; the technology from England and Germany; our most beautiful cities, Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, had been built by Italians or Germans; the army was organized on the Napoleonic model. Such a country had no business trying to take the lead. Its only possible salvation had to be union with Germany. “Satisfied?” Hans concluded.
Gerda was not sure whether to be proud of him or ashamed. Her attraction to Ulrich had been flaring up again of late, even though the natural human need to be someone in her own right was much better served by her younger friend. This young woman was strangely torn between the contradictory inclinations to grow old as a virgin and to give herself to Ulrich. The second of these inclinations was the natural consequence of a love she had felt for years, though it never burst into flame but only smoldered listlessly inside her, and her feelings were like those of someone infatuated with an inferior, in that her soul was humiliated by her body’s contemptible craving for submission to this man. In strange contrast with this, though perhaps tied to it as simply and naturally as a yearning for peace, she suspected that she would never marry but would end up, when all the dreams were over, leading a solitary, quietly busy life of her own. This was not a hope born of conviction, for Gerda had no very clear idea of herself, only a foreboding such as the body may have long before the mind is alerted to it. The influence Hans had on her was part of it. Hans was a colorless young man, bony without being tall or strong, who tended to wipe his hands on his hair or his clothes and peer, whenever possible, into a small round tin-framed pocket mirror because he was always troubled by some new eruption of his muddy skin. But this, with the possible exception of the pocket mirror, was exactly how Gerda pictured the early Roman Christians, forgathering in their underground catacombs in defiance of their persecutors. It was not an exact correspondence of details that she meant, after all, but the basic general feeling of terror shared with the early Christian martyrs, as she saw them. Actually, she found the well-scrubbed and scented pagans more attractive, but taking sides with the Christians was a sacrifice one owed to one’s character. For Gerda the lofty demands of conscience had thereby acquired a moldy, slightly revolting smell, which went perfectly with the mystical outlook Hans had opened up to her.
Ulrich was quite conversant with this outlook. We should perhaps feel indebted to spiritualism for satisfying—with its funny rappings from the Beyond so suggestive of the minds of deceased kitchen maids—that crude metaphysical craving for spooning up, if not God, then at least the spirits, like some food icily slipping down one’s gullet in the dark. In earlier centuries this longing for personal contact with God or His cohorts, said to occur in a state of ecstasy, did, despite the subtle and sometimes marvelous forms it took, make for a mixture of crude earthliness with experiences of an exceptional and ineffable condition of psychic awareness. The metaphysical was thus the physical, embedded in this intuitive state, a mirror image of earthly longings, believed to reveal whatever the concepts of those times encouraged people to expect that they would see. But it is just such concepts that change with the times and lose their credibility. If nowadays anyone told a story of God speaking to him personally, seizing him painfully by the hair to lift him up to Himself, or slipping into his breast in some numinous, intensely sweet way, no one would take any of these details embodying the experience literally, least of all God’s professional functionaries, who, as children of a scientific age, feel an understandable horror of being compromised by hysterical and maniacal adherents. Consequently we must either regard such experiences, of frequent and well-recorded occurrence in the Middle Ages and in classical antiquity, as delusions and pathological phenomena, or face the possibility that there is something to them, something independent of the mythical terms in which it has hitherto been expressed: a pure kernel of experience, in other words, that would have to pass strict empirical tests of credibility, whereupon it would of course become a matter of overriding importance long before anyone could deal with the next question, what conclusions to draw from this with regard to our relationship to the Beyond. And while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of all the traditional, terminological husks of faith, freed from ancient religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.
An absurd splinter of this manifold movement was in fact represented by the social circle or vortex in which Hans Sepp was playing his part. If one were to tabulate the ideas that ebbed and flowed within that company—though this would be against their principles, as they were against numbering and measuring things—the first one would have been a timid and quite Platonic call for trial or companionate marriage, in fact for the sanctioning of polygamy and polyandry; next, when it came to art, they favored the most abstract, aiming at the universal and the timeless, then called Expressionism, which disdained mere appearances or the shell, the banal externals of things, the faithful, “naturalistic” delineation of which had oddly enough been regarded as revolutionary only one gene
ration earlier. Cheek by jowl with this abstract aim of capturing the essential vision of the mind and the world, without bothering about externals, there was also a taste for the down-to-earth and limited kind of art, the so-called regional and folk arts, the promotion of which these young people regarded as a sacred duty to their Pan-Germanic souls; these and others were just some of the choice straws and grasses picked up beside the road of time to be woven into a nest for the human spirit, most particularly the most luxuriant ideas of the rights, duties, and creative promise of the young, which played so great a role that they must be considered in more detail.
The present era, they argued, was blind to the rights of young people; a person had virtually no rights until he or she had come of age. Fathers, mothers, or guardians could dress, house, feed such a person as they liked, reprimand or punish and even, according to Hans Sepp, wreck the child’s life, so long as they did not overstep some far-off provision of the law, which granted to a child no more protection than it did to a domestic animal. The child is owned by its parents as a chattel and is, by virtue of its economic dependence on them, a piece of property, a capitalist object. This “capitalist dehumanization of the child,” which Hans had picked up somewhere in his reading and then elaborated for himself, was the first lesson he taught his astonished disciple, Gerda, who had until then felt quite well taken care of at home. Christianity had somewhat lightened the wife’s yoke, but not that of the daughter, who was condemned to vegetate at home by being forcibly kept away from real life. After this prelude, he indoctrinated her in the child’s right to educate itself according to the laws of its own personality. The child was creative, it was growth personified and constantly engaged in creating itself. The child was regal by nature, born to impose its ideas, feelings, and fantasies on the world; oblivious to the ready-made world of accidentals, it made up its own ideal world. It had its own sexuality. In destroying creative originality by stripping the child of its own world, suffocating it with the dead stuff of traditional learning, and training it for specific utilitarian functions alien to its nature, the adult world committed a barbaric sin. The child was not goal-oriented—it created through play, its work was play and tender growth; when not deliberately interfered with, it took on nothing that was not utterly absorbed into its nature; every object it touched was a living thing; the child was a world, a cosmos unto itself, in touch with the ultimate, the absolute, even though it could not express it. But the child was killed by being taught to serve worldly purposes and being chained to the vulgar routines so falsely called reality! So said Hans Sepp. He was all of twenty-one when he brought his doctrines to the House of Fischel, and Gerda was no younger. In addition, Hans had been fatherless for a long time by then, and felt free at all times to bully his mother, who was supporting him and the rest of her children by keeping a small shop, so that there seemed to be no direct cause for his philosophy of the child as helpless victim of tyranny.