The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  His Grace’s majordomo now arrived with the latest bulletin: the demonstrators were approaching the Palais, and should he arrange to have the gate and shutters locked? His Grace shook his head. “What an idea!” he said kindly. “They’d like nothing better; it would allow them to think we’re afraid of them. Besides, we’ve got all those men down there from the police looking out for us.” Then, turning to Ulrich, he said indignantly: “Let them come and smash our windows! I told you all along that all that intellectual chatter would get us nowhere.” Behind his façade of dignified calm, a deep resentment seemed to be working within him.

  Ulrich had just walked over to the window when the marchers arrived. They were flanked by police, who dispersed the onlookers lining the avenue like a cloud of dust raised by the firm tread of the marchers. A little farther back, vehicles could be seen wedged in the crowd, while its relentless current flowed around them in endless black waves on which the foam of upturned faces seemed to be dancing. When the spearhead of the mob came within sight of Count Leinsdorf’s windows, it looked as though it had been slowed down by some command; an immense ripple ran backward along the column as the advancing ranks jammed up, like a muscle tightening before launching a blow. The next instant this blow came whizzing through the air, in the weird form of a massed shout of indignation made visible by all those wide-open mouths before their roar was heard. In rhythmical succession the rows of faces snapped open as they arrived on the scene, and since the noise of the those in the rear was blotted out by the louder noise of those in the front, the spectacle could be seen repeating itself continually in the distance.

  “The maw of the mob,” Count Leinsdorf said, just behind Ulrich, as solemnly as if it were some familiar phrase like “our daily bread.” “But what is it they’re actually yelling? I can’t make it out, with all that din.”

  Ulrich said he thought they were mostly screaming “Boo!”

  “Yes, but there’s something more, isn’t there?”

  Ulrich did not tell him that among the indistinct dancing sound waves of boos, a clear, long-drawn-out “Down with Leinsdorf!” could often enough be heard. He even thought he had heard several outcries of “Hurray for Germany!” interspersed with “Long live Arnheim!” but could not be absolutely sure, because the thick glass of the windows muffled the sounds.

  Ulrich had come here as soon as Gerda left him, because he felt it was necessary to tell Count Leinsdorf, if no one else, the news that had come to his ears, which exposed Arnheim beyond all expectation. He had not yet had a chance to speak of it. As he looked down at the dark surge of bodies beneath the window, thoughts of his own days in the army made him say to himself: “It would take only one company to make a clean sweep of the square.” He could imagine all those gaping mouths turning into a single frothing maw suddenly succumbing to panic, growing slack and drooping at the edges, lips slowly sinking over teeth; his imagination transformed the menacing black crowd into a flock of hens scattering before a dog rushing into their midst. All his anger had contracted again into a hard knot, but the old satisfaction in watching moral man retreat before brute violent man was, as always, a two-edged feeling.

  “Are you all right?” Count Leinsdorf was asking. He had been pacing the floor behind Ulrich and had actually received the impression from some odd movement of Ulrich’s that he had cut himself, though there was no sharp-edged object anywhere in the vicinity. When he received no answer he stood still, shook his head, and said: “We must not forget, after all, that it is not so very long since His Majesty’s generous decision to let the people have a voice in the conduct of their own affairs; so it is understandable that a degree of universal political maturity that would be worthy of our Sovereign’s magnanimity is still lacking. I believe I said as much at our very first meeting.”

  This little speech made Ulrich drop any notion of telling His Grace or Diotima about Arnheim’s machinations; despite his antagonism to Arnheim he felt closer to him than to the others, and his memory of himself setting upon Gerda, like a big dog on a howling little one, a memory he now realized had been haunting him all along, troubled him less when he thought of Arnheim’s infamous conduct toward Diotima. The episode of the screaming body staging a dramatic scene for a captive audience of two embarrassed souls could also be seen from the farcical side, and the people down there in the street at whom Ulrich was still staring spellbound without taking the slightest notice of Count Leinsdorf were also staging a farce. It was this that fascinated him. They did not really want to attack or rip anyone apart, although they looked as if they did. They made a serious show of being enraged, but it was not the kind of seriousness that drives men into a line of fire, not even that of a fire brigade! They’re only going through some kind of ritual, he thought, some time-hallowed display of righteous indignation, the half-civilized, half-barbaric legacy of ancient communal rites no individual need take wholly seriously. He envied them. How appealing they are, even in this state where they are doing their best to be as unappealing as possible, he thought. The warm defense against loneliness that a crowd provides came radiating up from below, and here he was, fated to stand up here, outside its protective shelter—he felt this vividly, for an instant, as if he were looking up from down there and seeing his own image behind the thick pane of glass set in the wall of the building. It would have been better for him and his fate, he felt, had he been able to fly into a rage at this moment, or, on Count Leinsdorf’s behalf, give the alarm to the guard, or alternatively had he been capable of feeling close to the people as their friend; a man who plays cards with his fellows, bargains with them, quarrels with them, and enjoys the same pleasures they do is free to order them shot, too, when the occasion calls for it, without its seeming to be anything unnatural. There is a way of being on good terms with life that allows a man to go about his business with no second thoughts, in a live-and-let-live fashion, Ulrich was thinking. It may have a peculiarity of its own but is no less dependable than a natural instinct, and it is from this that the intimate scent of a healthy personality emanates, while whoever lacks this gift for compromise with life and is solitary, unyielding, and in dead earnest makes the others feel uneasy and unnerves them, as a caterpillar might, not because it is dangerous but because it is repellent. He felt a depressing aversion for the unnaturalness of the solitary man and his mental games, such as may be aroused by the sight of a turbulent crowd in the grip of natural, shared emotions.

  The demonstration had been growing more intense. Count Leinsdorf was pacing the room in some agitation, with an occasional glance through the second window. He was in distress, though he would not show it; his eyes protruded like two little marbles from among the soft furrows of his face, and he stretched his arms now and then before he crossed them again behind his back. Ulrich suddenly realized that it was he, who had been standing at the window the whole time, who was being taken for the Count. All the eyes down there seemed focused on his face, and sticks were being brandished at him. A few steps beyond, where the street curved from view as though it were slipping into the wings, the performers were already beginning to take off the greasepaint, as it were; there was no point in looking fierce for no one in particular, so they naturally let their faces relax, and some even began to joke and laugh as if they were on a picnic. Ulrich noticed this and laughed too, but the newcomers took him for the Count laughing and their rage rose to a fearsome pitch, which only made Ulrich laugh all the more and without restraint.

  But all at once he broke off in disgust. With his eyes still moving from the threatening open-mouthed faces to the high-spirited ones farther back, and his mind refusing to absorb any more of this spectacle, he was undergoing a strange transformation. I can’t go on with this life, and I can’t keep on rebelling against it any longer, either, was what he felt, while keenly aware of the room behind him with the large paintings on the wall, the long Empire desk, the stiff perpendicular lines of draperies and bell ropes, like another, smaller stage, with him standing up front on
the apron, in the opening between the curtains, facing the drama running its course on the greater stage outside. The two stages had their own way of fusing into one without regard for the fact that he was standing between them. Then his sense of the room behind him contracted and turned inside out, passing through him or flowing past him as if turned to water, making for a strange spatial inversion, Ulrich thought, so that the people were passing behind him. Perhaps he had passed through them and arrived beyond them at some zero point, or else they were moving both before and behind him, lapping against him as the same ever-changing ripples of a stream lap against a stone in their midst. It was an experience beyond his understanding; he was chiefly aware of the glassiness, emptiness, tranquillity of the state in which he found himself. Is it really possible, he wondered, to leave one’s own space for some hidden other space? He felt as though chance had led him through a secret door.

  He shook these dreams off with so violent a motion of his whole body that Count Leinsdorf stood still in surprise. “Whatever is the matter with you today?” His Grace asked. “You’re taking it much too hard. I must stick to my decision: the Germans will have to be won over by way of the non-Germans, whether it hurts or not.” At these words Ulrich was at least able to smile again, and was grateful to see the Count’s face before him, with all its knots and furrows. He was reminded of that special moment just before a plane lands, when the ground rises up again with all its voluptuous contours out of the maplike flatness to which it had been reduced for hours on end, and things revert to their familiar earthly meanings, which seem to be growing out of the ground itself. At the same moment the incredible idea flashed through his mind to commit some crime, or perhaps it was an unfocused passing image, for he was not thinking of anything in particular. It might have had some reference to Moosbrugger, for he would have liked to help that fool whom fate had chanced to bring his way as two people come to occupy the same park bench. But all this “crime” really amounted to for him was the urge to shut himself out, to abandon the life he had been living companionably with others. His “dissident” or even “misanthropic” attitude, his so variously justified and well-earned position, had not “arisen” from anything, there was nothing to justify it, it simply existed, he had held it all his life, though rarely with such intensity. It is probably safe to say that in all the revolutions that have ever taken place in this world, it has always been the thinking men who have come off worst. They always begin with the promise of a new civilization, make a clean sweep of every advance hitherto achieved by the human mind as though it were enemy property, and are overtaken by the next upheaval before they can surpass the heights previously attained. Our so-called periods of civilization are nothing but a long series of detours, one for every failure of a movement forward; the idea of placing himself outside this series was nothing new for Ulrich. The only new element was the increasing force of the signs that his mind was coming to a decision and that he was, in fact, ready to act on it. He did not make the slightest effort to come down to specifics. For some moments he was content to be permeated with the feeling that this time it would not be something general or theoretical, the sort of thing he had grown so tired of, but that he must do something personal, take an action that would involve him as a man of flesh and blood, with arms and legs. He knew that at the instant of committing his undefined “crime” he would no longer be in a position to defy the world openly, but only God knew why this should arouse in him such a sensation of passionate tenderness. It was somehow linked with his strange spatial experience of a while ago, a faint echo of which he could bring back at will, when what was happening on this side and on the other side of the window fused into one to form an obscurely exciting relationship to the world that might have suggested to Ulrich—if he could have taken the time to think about it—the legendary voluptuousness that overcame mythical heroes on the point of being devoured by the goddesses they had wooed.

  Instead, he was interrupted by Count Leinsdorf, who had meanwhile fought his own inner struggle through to a decision.

  “I must stay at my post and face down this insurrection,” His Grace began, “so I can’t leave. But you, my dear fellow, must really go to your cousin as quickly as possible, before she has time to be frightened and possibly moved to say something to some reporter that might not be quite the thing at this moment. You might tell her . . .” He paused to consider his message. “Yes, it will be best if you say to her: Strong remedies produce strong reactions. And tell her, too, that those who set out to make life better must not shrink, in a crisis, from using the stake or the knife.” He stopped again to think, with an almost alarming look of resolution, as his trim little beard rose and then sank to a downward, vertical position every time he was on the verge of saying something but paused to reconsider. In the end, his innate kindliness broke through and he said: “But tell her not to worry, not to be afraid of the troublemakers. The more of a case they have, the more quickly they adjust themselves to the realities when they are given a chance. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this, but there has never yet been an opposition party that didn’t cease to be in opposition when they took over the helm. This is not merely, as you might think, something that goes without saying. It is, rather, a very important point, because it is, if I may say so, the basic reality, the touchstone, the continuity in politics.”

  121

  TALKING MAN-TO-MAN

  When Ulrich arrived at Diotima’s, Rachel, who let him in, told him that Madame was out but that Dr. Arnheim was there, waiting for her. Ulrich said he would wait too, not noticing that his little ally of the other night had blushed scarlet at the sight of him.

  Arnheim, who had been at the window, watching what unrest there still was in the streets, crossed the room to shake hands with Ulrich. His face lit up at seeing Ulrich unexpectedly, for he had wanted to speak with Ulrich but had hesitated to seek him out; however, he did not want to rush into things, and could not immediately think of a good opening. Ulrich was also reluctant to start off with the Galician oil fields, and so both men fell silent after their first words of greeting and ended up walking over to the window together, where they stared mutely at the flurries of movement down below.

  After a while, Arnheim spoke:

  “I really don’t understand you. Isn’t it a thousand times more important to come to grips with life than to write?”

  “But I haven’t been writing,” Ulrich said crisply.

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Arnheim adjusted to the fact. “Writing, like the pearl, is a disease. Look down there. . . .” He pointed two of his beautifully manicured fingers at the street, with a movement that for all its rapidity had the air of a papal blessing about it. “See how they come along, singly and in clusters, and from time to time a mouth is torn open and something inside makes it yell something. The same man under different circumstances would write something; I agree with you on that.”

  “But you are a famous writer yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, that doesn’t mean anything.” But after saying this, gracefully leaving the question open, Arnheim turned to face Ulrich, confronting him as it were broadside, and standing chest-to-chest with him, said, carefully spacing his words:

  “May I ask you something?”

  Ulrich could not say no to that, of course, but as he had instinctively moved back a little, this rhetorical courtesy served to rope him in again.

  “I hope,” Arnheim began, “that you will not hold our recent little difference of opinion against me but rather credit it to my keen interest in your views even when they seem—as they do often enough—to run counter to mine. So let me ask you whether you really meant what you said—to sum it up, if I may: that we must live with a tight rein on our conscience. Is this a good way of putting it?”

  The smile Ulrich gave him in answer said: I don’t know; let me wait and see what more you have to say.

  “You spoke of having to leave life in a free-floating state, like a certain kind of met
aphor that hovers inconclusively between two worlds at once, as it were, did you not? You also said some extremely fascinating things to your cousin. I would be mortified if you were to take me for a Prussian industrial militarist who is unlikely to understand that sort of thing. But you say, for instance, that our reality and our history arise only from those aspects of ourselves that don’t matter. I take this to mean that we must change the forms and patterns of what happens, and that it doesn’t matter much, in your opinion, what happens meanwhile to Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

  “What I mean,” Ulrich interjected warily and reluctantly, “is that our reality is like a fabric being turned out by the thousands of bales, technically flawless in quality but in antiquated patterns no one bothers to bring up-to-date.”

  “In other words,” Arnheim broke in, “I understand you to say that the present state of the world, which is clearly unsatisfactory, arises from our leaders’ concern with making world history instead of turning all our energies to permeating the world of power with new ideas. An even closer analogy to our present state of affairs is the case of the manufacturer who keeps turning out goods in response to the market, instead of regulating it. So you see that your ideas touch me very closely. But just because of this you must see that these ideas at times strike me, a man continually engaged in making decisions that keep vast industries going, as positively monstrous! Such as when you demand that we give up attaching any meaningful reality to our actions! Or propose that we abandon the ‘provisionally definitive’ character of our behavior, as our friend Leinsdorf so gracefully phrases it, when, in fact, we can do no such thing!”

  “I demand nothing at all,” Ulrich said.

  “Oh, you demand a great deal more! You demand that we live our lives in a scientific, experimental way,” Arnheim said with energy and warmth. “You want responsible leaders to regard their job not as making history but as a mandate to draw up reports on experiments as a basis for further experiments. A perfectly delightful idea, of course. But how do wars and revolutions—for instance—fit in with that? Can you raise the dead when your experiment has been carried out and taken off the schedule?”