No More Learning

So it's only what you might call a special-interest proposal, a suggestion, or a minority vote. I shall take the line that we have no official knowledge of it. But you'd better tell your secretary to watch the minutes so none of this gets into the record. Do forgive me," he said to Agathe, "for talking business like this! "
"But what happened? " she urged him on.
Stumm made a wide, sweeping gesture. "Feuermaul . . . if you remember the young man we really only invited because--how shall I put it? -because he is an exponent of the spirit of the times, and because we had to invite the opposing exponents anyway. We had hoped that nevertheless, and with the added stimulus of intellectual debate, we'd be able to get down to talking about the thin_g0hat, unfortunately, really matter. Your brother knows about it, dear lady; the idea was to get the Minister together with Leinsdorf and Arn- heim, to see whether Leinsdorfhas any objections to . . . certain pa-
1120 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
triotic views. And all in all I'm not really dissatisfied. " He turned con- fidentially to Ulrich. "So far so good. But while this was going on, Feuermaul and the others . . . " Here Stumm felt obliged to add for Agathe's benefit: ". . . that is, the exponent of the view that man is basically a good and peace-loving creature who responds best to kindness, and those who expound approximately the opposite view, that it takes a strong hand and all that to keep order in the world. This Feuermaul got into an argument with these others, and before anyone could stop them they had agreed on a joint proposal! "
"A joint proposal? '' Ulrich was incredulous.
"That's right. Perhaps I seem to be making light of it"-Stumm sounded rather pleased with himself at the unintended comic effect of his story-"but nobody could have predicted anything of the sort. And ifI tell you what their resolution was, you won't believe it! Since I was supposed to visit Moosbrugger this afternoon in a semi-official capacity, the whole Ministry will refuse to believe that I wasn't the one who put them up to it! "
Here Ulrich burst out laughing, and he interrupted him the same way from time to time as Stumm went on with his story; only Agathe understood why, while his friend commented somewhat huffily each time that he seemed to be wrought up. But what had happened cor- responded far too much to the pattern Ulrich had just laid out for his sister for him not to find it hilarious.
The Feuermaul group had appeared on the scene at the very last moment to save what could still be saved. In such cases the object tends to be less clear than the intention. The young poet Friedel Feuermaul-who was called Pepi by his intimates, and who went about trying to look like the young Schubert, for he doted on every- thing having to do with Old Vienna, though he had been born in a small provincial town in Hungary-happened to believe in Austria's mission, and he believed besides i. h. mankind. It was obvious that an undertaking like the Parallel Campaign that did not include him would from the beginning have made him uneasy. How could a hu- manitarian project in an Austrian key, or an Austrian project in a hu- manitarian key, flourish without him? It is true that he had said this, with a shrug, only in private to his friend Frau Drangsal, but she, the widow of a celebrity and a credit to her country, as the hostess pre- siding over a spiritual beauty salon overshadowed only during the last
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · z121
year by Diotima's, had repeated it to evel)' influential person with whom she came in contact. Hence a rumor had begun to make the rounds that the Parallel Campaign was in peril, unless . . . This "un- less" and the peril naturally enough remained rather unde:Bned, for first Diotima had to be made to invite Feuermaul, and after that one would see. But the news of some danger apparently connected with the patriotic campaign was noted by those alert politicians who ac- knowledged no fatherland, but only an ethnic motherfolk living in enforced wedlock with the State as an abused wife; they had long suspected that the Parallel Campaign would only produce some new form of oppression. And even though they were civil enough to con- ceal this suspicion, they attached far less importance to the intention of diverting it-for there had always been despairing humanists among the Germans, but as a whole they would always be oppressors and bureaucratic parasites! -than to the useful hint that even Ger- mans admitted how dangerous their people's nationalism was. Con- sequently Frau Drangsal and the poet Feuermaul felt buoyed up by sympathies for their aims, which they accepted without bothering to investigate, and Feuermaul, who was a recognized man of feeling,
, was obsessed with the notion that something compelling about love and peace had to be said to the Minister ofWar in person. Why the Minister ofWar, and what he was expected to do about it, remained unclear; but the idea itself was so dazzlingly original and dramatic that it really needed no additional support. On this point they had even won the approval of Stumm von Bordwehr, the fickle General, whose devotion to culture sometimes took him to Frau Drangsal's salon, unbeknownst to Diotima; it was his doing, moreover, that the original perception of Arnheim the munitions maker as part of the danger gave way to the view of Arnheim the thinker as an important element of everything good.
So far all had gone as befitted the participants, even including the fact that, despite Frau Drangsal's help, the Minister's encounter with Feuermaul unfolded as is usual in the course of human events, pro- ducing nothing more than some flashes of Feuermaulian brilliance, to which His Excellency lent a tolerant ear. But Feuermaul was far from spent, and because the troops he could summon to arms con- sisted ofliterary men young and old, councillors, Hofrate,librarians, and some pacifists, in short, people of all ages and in all sorts of posi-
1122 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
tions, united in their feeling for their old Fatherland and its mission in the world-a sentiment as readily marshaled in the cause ofbring- ing back the historic three-horse omnibus as in that of Viennese porcelain-and because all these faithful had in the course of the evening made many diverse contacts with their opponents, who also did not go around showing their claws, many discussions had sprung up in which opinions crisscrossed wildly in all directions. Such was the temptation facing Feuermaul when the Minister ofWar had fin- ished with him and Frau Drangsal's attention had been distracted for a while through some unknown occurrence. Stumm von Bordwehr could only report that Feuermaul had got into an extremely lively exchange with ayoung man who, from his description, might well have been Hans Sepp. The young man was in any case one of those who find a scapegoat on which to blame all the evils they cannot cope with themselves; nationalist arrogance is only that special case of it in which honest conviction makes one choose a scapegoat not of one's own breed and as unlike oneself as possible. Now, everyone knows what a great relief it is when one is upset to work off one's anger on someone, even if it has nothing to do with him; but it is less well known that this also applies to love. For love, too, must often be worked off in the same way on someone not really involved, for lack of a more suitable outlet. Feuermaul, for instance, was an industri- ous young man who could be quite unpleasant in the struggle for his own advantage, but his lovegoat happened to be "Man," and the mo- ment he thought of Man in general, there was no restraining his un- satisfied benevolence. Hans Sepp, on the other hand, was basically a decent fellow who could not even bring himself to deceive Director Fischel,- and so his scapegoat was "non-German man," on whom he blamed everything beyond his power to change. Lord knows what they had started to talk to each other about; they must have instantly mounted their respective goats and charged at each other, for as Stumm put it:
'Tve really no idea how it happened; suddenly they were sur- rounded, and the next minute there was a real crowd, and finally ev- eryone still here was standing around them. "
"Do you know what they were arguing about? " Ulrich asked him. Stumm shrugged his shoulders. "Feuermaul shouted at the other
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · I 1 2 3
fellow: 'You want to hate, but you can't do it! Because we're all born with love inside! ' or something like that. And the other one shouted back at him: 'And you want to love? But that's something you're even less capable of, you-you-' Well, I can't really say exactly; I had to hold myself a bit apart, because of my uniform. "
"Oh," Ulrich said. "I see the point. " He turned to Agathe, trying to catch her eye.
"No-the point was the resolution! " Stumm reminded him. "There they were, ready to bite each other's heads off, and then, as if nothing had happened, they agreed to make common cause, and I do mean common! "
With his rounded figur~ Stumm gave the impression of unwaver- ing gravity. "The Minister left on the spot," he reported.
"But what was it they agreed on? " Ulrich and Agathe asked.
"I can't exactly say," Stumm replied, "because of course I took off myselfbefore they were finished. Besides, it's always hard to remem- ber that sort of thing clearly. It's something in favor of Moosbrugger and against the army. "
"Moosbrugger? How on earth . . . " Ulrich laughed again.
"How on earth? " the General echoed venomously. "It's easy for you to laugh, but I'm the one who's going to be called on the carpet for it! At the very least it'll mean days of paperwork! How does any- one know 'how on earth' with such people? Maybe it was that old professor's fault, the one who was talking to everyone in favor of hanging and against leniency. Or it could have been because the pa- pers have been making such a fuss again lately about the problem of that monster. Anyway, they were suddenly talking about him. This has got to be undone again! " he declared with unwonted severity.
At this moment the kitchen was invaded in quick succession by Amheim, Diotima, and even Tuzzi and Count Leinsdorf. Amheim had heard voices in the foyer. He had been on the point of slipping away quietly, hoping that the disturbance would enable him to es- cape another heart-to-heart talk with Diotima; and tomorrow he would be leaving town again for some time. But his curiosity made him glance into the kitchen, and since Agathe had seen him, polite- ness prevented him from withdrawing. Stumm instantly besieged him with questions about how things stood.
I124 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
"I can even give it to you verbatim," Amheim replied with a smile. "Some of it was so quaint that I simply had to write it down on the sly. "
He drew a small card from his wallet and slowly read, deciphering his shorthand, the contents of the proposed manifesto:
" 'The patriotic campaign has passed the following resolution, as proposed by Herr Feuermaul and Herr-' I didn't catch the other name. 'Any man may choose to die for his own ideas, but whoever induces men to die for ideas not their own is a murderer! ' That was the proposal," he added, "and my impression was that it was final. "
"That's it! " the General exclaimed. "That's the way I heard it too! They're enough to make you sick, these intellectual debates! "
Amheim said gently: "It's the desire ofyoung people today for sta- bility and leadership. "
"But it wasn't only young people," Stumm said in disgust. "Even baldheads were agreeing! "
"Then it's a need for leadership in general," Amheim said with a friendly nod. "It's widespread these days. Incidentally, the resolution was borrowed from a recent book, if I remember rightly. "
"Indeed? " Stumm said.
"Yes," Arnheim said. "And of course we'll pretend it never hap- pened. But ifwe could find a way to direct the sentiment it expresses into some useful channel, it would certainly be of help. "
The General appeared somewhat relieved and, turning to Ulrich, asked:
"Do you have any idea what could be done? "
"Ofcourse! " Ulrich said.
Arnheim's attention was diverted by Diotima.
"In that case," the General said in a low voice, "fire away! I would
prefer it ifwe could remain in control. "
"You have to focus on what actually happened," Ulrich said, taking
his time. "These people aren't so far wrong, you know, when one of them accuses the other of wanting to love if he only could, and the other retorts that it's the same with wanting to hate. It's true ofall the feelings. Hatred today has something companionable about it, and on the other hand, in order to feel what would really be love for an- other human being-I maintain," Ulrich said abruptly, "that two such people have never yet existed! "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 2 5
"That's certainly most interesting," the General interrupted quickly, "especially as I completely fail to understand how you can assert such a thing. But I have to write a protocol tomorrow about everything that happened here tonight, and I implore you to bear this in mind! In the army, what counts most is being able to report progress; a certain optimism is indispensable even in defeat-that's part of the profession. So how can I report what happened here as a step forward? "
'Write," Ulrich advised him with a wink, "that the moral imagina- tion has taken its revenge! "
"But you can't write that sort of thing in the military! " Stumm re- plied indignantly.
"Then let's put it another way," Ulrich said seriously, "and write: All creative periods have been serious. There is no profound happi- ness without a profound ethos. There is no morality that is not derived from a firm basis. There is no happiness that does not rest on a strong belief. Not even animals live without morality. But today human beings no longer know on what-"
Stumm broke in on this calmly flowing dictation too: "My dear friend, I can speak of a troop's morale, or morale in battle, or a woman's morals; but always only in specific instances. I cannot dis- cuss morality without such a restriction in a military report, any more than I could imagination or God Almighty. You know that as well as I do! "
Diotima saw Amheim standing at the window of her kitchen, an oddly domestic sight after they had exchanged only a few circum- spect words during the entire evening. Paradoxically, it only made her suddenly wish to continue her unfinished chat with Ulrich. Her mind was dominated by that comforting despair which, breaking in from several directions at once, had almost become sublimated into an amiable and serene state of expectation. The long-foreseen col- lapse of her Council left her cold. Amheim's faithlessness also left her, as she thought, almost equally indifferent. He looked at her as she came in, and for a moment it brought back the old feeling of a living space in which they were united. But she remembered that he had been avoiding her for weeks, and the thought "Sexual coward! " stiffened her knees again so that she could move toward him regally.
Arnheim saw it: her seeing him, her faltering, the distance be-
1126 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
tween them melting; over frozen roads connecting them in innumer- able ways hovered an intimation that they might thaw out again. He had moved away from the others, but at the last moment both he and Diotima made a tum that brought them together with Ulrich, Gen- eral Stumm, and the rest, who were on the other side.
In all its manifestations, from the inspired ideas of original think- ers to the kitsch that unites all peoples, what Ulrich called the moral imagination, or, more simply, feeling, has for centuries been in a state of ferment without turning into wine. Man is a being who can- not smvive without enthusiasm. And enthusiasm is that state of mind in which all his feelings and thoughts have the same spirit. You think it is rather the opposite, that it is a condition in which one overpow- ering feeling-of being carried away! -sweeps all the others along with it? You weren't going to say anything at all? Anyway, that's how it is. Or one way it is. But there is nothing to sustain such an enthusi- asm. Feelings and thoughts become lasting only with each other's help, in their totality; they must somehow be aligned with each other and carry each other onward. And by every available means, through drugs, liquor, fantasies, hypnosis, faith, conviction, often even through the simplifying effect of stupidity, man is always trying to achieve a condition like it. He believes in ideas not because they are sometimes true but because he needs to believe; because he has to keep his feelings in order. Because he must have an illusion to stop up the gap between the walls of his life, through which his feelings would otherwise fly off in every direction. The answer is probably at least to seek the conditions of an authentic enthusiasm, instead of giving oneself up to transient delusory states. But although, all in all, the number of choices based on feeling is infinitely greater than those based on clear logic, and every event that moves mankind arises from the imagination, only the purely rational problems have achieved an objective order, while nothing deserving the name of a joint effort, or even hinting at any insight into the desperate need for it, has been done for the world of feeling and imagination.
This was more or less what Ulrich said, interspersed with under- standable protests from the General.
All Ulrich saw in the events of the evening, even though they had been impetuous enough and were destined through malicious mis- representation to have grave consequences, was the example of an
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 2 7
infinite disorder. Feuennaul seemed at this moment to matter to him as little as the love of mankind, nationalism as little as Feuer- maul, and Stumm was asking him in vain how to distill a sense of some tangible progress out of an attitude so very personal.
"Why don't you simply report," Ulrich responded, "that it's the Millennia! War of Religion. And that people have never been as un- prepared to fight it as now, when the rubble of 'ineffectual feelings,' which every period bequeaths to the next, has grown into mountains without anything being done about it. So the War Ministry can sit back and serenely await the next mass catastrophe. "
Ulrich was foretelling the future, with no inkling of it. His concern was not with real events at all; he was struggling for his salvation. He was trying to throw in everything that could get in its way, and it was for that reason that he laughed so much and tried to mislead them into thinking he was joking and exaggerating. He was exaggerating for Agathe's benefit, carrying on his long-standing dialogue with her, not just this most recent one. Actually, he was throwing up a bulwark of ideas against her, knowing that in a certain place there was a little bolt, and that if this bolt were drawn back, everything would be flooded and buried by feeling. In truth he was thinking incessantly of this bolt.
Diotima was standing near him and smiling. She sensed some- thing of Ulrich's efforts on behalf of his sister, and was sadly moved; she forgot sexual enlightenment, and something in her opened up: it was doubtless the future, but in any case, her lips were slightly open too.
Amheim asked Ulrich: "And you think . . . that something might be done about it? " The tone of his question suggested that he had caught the seriousness behind the exaggeration, but that he regarded even the seriousness as an exaggeration.
Tuzzi said to Diotima: "Something must in any case be done to prevent this affair from leaking out. "
"Isn't it obvious? '' Ulrich said in reply to Amheim. "Today we are facing too many possibilities of feeling, too many possible ways of living. But isn't it like the kind of problem our intellect deals with whenever it is confronted with a vast number of facts and a history of the relevant theories?
And for the intellect we have developed an open-ended but precise procedure, which I don't need to describe to
1128 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
you. Now tell me whether something of the kind isn't equally possi- ble for the feelings. We certainly need to find out what we're here for; it's one of the main sources of all violence in the world. Earlier centuries tried to answer it with their own inadequate means, but the great age ofempiricism has done nothing ofits own, so far. . . . "
Arnheim, who caught on quickly and liked to interrupt, laid his hand on Ulrich's shoulder as if to restrain him. "This implies an in- creasing relationship with God! " he said in a low tone of warning.
'Would that be so terrible? " Ulrich asked, not without a hint of mockery at such premature alarm. "But I haven't gone that far yet! " Arnheim promptly checked himself and smiled. "How delightful
after a long absence to find someone unchanged. Such a rarity, these days! " he said. He was genuinely glad, in fact, once he felt safe again behind his defensive front of benevolence. Ulrich might, after all, have very well taken him up on that rash offer of a position, and Arn- heim was grateful that Ulrich, in his irresponsible intransigence, dis- dained touching the earth with his feet. "We must have a talk about this sometime," he added cordially. "It's not clear to me how you conceive of applying our theoretical attitude to practical affairs. "
Ulrich knew very well that it was still unclear. What he meant was not a life of "research," or a life "in the light of science," but a "quest for feeling" similar to a quest for truth, except that truth was not the issue here. He watched Arnheim moving over to Agathe. Diotima was standing there too; Tuzzi and Count Leinsdorf came and went. Agathe was chatting with everyone and thinking: "Why is he talking with all these people? He ought to have left with me! He's cheapen- ing what he said to me! " She liked many of the things she heard him say from across the room, and yet they hurt her. Everything that came from Ulrich was hurting her again, and for the second time that day she suddenly felt the need to get away from him. She despaired of ever being able, with her limitations, to be what he wanted, and the prospect that they would soon be going home like any other cou- ple, gossiping about the evening behind them, was intolerable.
Meanwhile Ulrich was illinking: "Arnheim will never understand that. " And he added: "It is precisely in his feelings that the scientist is limited, and the practical man even more so. It's as necessary as hav- ing your legs finnly planted ifyou intend to lift something with your arms. " In ordinary circumstances he was that way himself; the mo-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 2 9
ment he began thinking about anything, even if it was about feeling itself, he was very cautious about letting any feeling into it. Agathe called this coldness, but he knew that in order to be wholly otherwise one has to be prepared to renounce life, as if on a mortal adventure, for one has no idea what its course will be! He was in the mood for it, and for the moment no longer feared it. He gazed for a long time at his sister: the lively play of conversation on the deeper, untouched face. He was about to ask her to leave with him, but before he could move, Stumm had come back and was intent on talking with him.
The good General was fond of Ulrich. He had already forgiven him his witticisms about the War Ministry, and was actually rather taken with the phrase "religious war": it had such a festively military air, like oak leaves on a helmet, or shouts of hurrah on the Emperor's birthday. With his arm pressed to Ulrich's, he steered him out of ear- shot of the others. "You know, I like what you said about all events originating in the imagination," he said. "Of course, that's more my private opinion than my official attitude," and he offered Ulrich a cigarette.
''I've got to go home," Ulrich said.
"Your sister is having a fine time; don't disturb her," Stumm said. "Arnheim's outdoing himself to pay court to her. But what I was going to say: the joy seems to have gone out of mankind's great ideas. You ought to put some life back into them. I mean, there's a new spirit in the air, and you're the man to take charge! "
"What gives you that idea? '' Ulrich asked guardedly.
"That's how it strikes me. " Stumm passed over it and went on in- tently: "You're for order too; everything you say shows it. And so then I ask myself: which is more to the point-that man is good, or that he needs a firm hand? It's all tied in with our present-day need to take a stand. I've already told you it would put my mind at rest ifyou would take charge of the campaign again. With all this talk, there's simply no knowing what may happen otherwise! "
Ulrich laughed. "Do you know what I'm going to do now? I'm not coming here anymore! " he said happily:
"But why? '' Stumm protested hotly. "All those people will be right who've been saying that you've never been a real power! "
"If I told them what I really think, they would really say so. " Ul- rich answered, laughing, and disengaged himself from his friend.
1130 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Stumm was vexed, but then his good humor prevailed, and he said in parting: "These things are so damned complicated. Sometimes I've actually thought it would be best if a real idiot came along to tackle all these insoluble problems-I mean some sort ofJoan ofArc. A person like that might be able to help! "
Ulrich's eyes searched for his sister but did not find her. While he was asking Diotima about her, Leinsdorf and Tuzzi returned from the salon and announced that everyone was leaving.
"I said all along," His Grace remarked cheerfully to the lady ofthe house, "that what those people were saying was not what they really meant. And Frau Drangsal has come up with a really saving idea; we've decided to continue this evening's meeting another time. Feuermaul, or whatever his name is, will read us some long poem he has written, so things will be much quieter. I of course took it upon myself, on account of the urgency, to say I was sure you'd agree! "
It was only then that Ulrich learned that Agathe had suddenly said good-bye and left the house without him. She had left word that she had not wanted to disturb him.
FROM THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
BURTON PIKE
Preface
xi
CONTENTS
PART 1
Twenty chapters, continuing the previous volume, that Musil withdrew in galleys in 1938, and related drafts
39 Aftertheencounter 40 The do-gooder
Brother and sister the next morning
42 Up Jacob's ladder into a stranger's dwelling
43 The do-gooder and the do-no-gooder; but Agathe
1135 1140 1148 1 1 5 3
41
44 A mighty discussion 1166
45 Beginning of a series of wondrous experiences 1176
46 Moonbeams by sunlight 1182
47 Wanderings among people 1192
48 Love blinds. Or difficulties where they are not
looked for 1202
49 General von Stumm drops a bomb. Congress for
World Peace 1212
so Agathe finds Ulrich's diary 1222
51
historical synopsis of the psychology of the emotions 1239 53 The D and L reports 124fi
too 1158
Great changes 1230 52 To her displeasure, Agathe is confronted with a
viii · Contents
54 Nai've description of how an emotion originates 1258
55 Feeling and behavior. The precariousness of
emotion 1266
s6 The do-gooder sings 1280
57 Truth and ecstasy 1295
58 Ulrich and the two worlds of emotion 1304
Alternate Draft Versions, 1940-1942
49 Conversations on love 1312
50 Difficulties where they are not looked for 1313
51 Loving is not simple 1317
52 Breaths of a summer day 1327
Further Sketches, 1939-1941
48 A mentality directed toward the significant, and the
beginning of a conversation on the subject 1335
49 General von Stumm on genius 1341
50 Genius as a problem 1349
Sketches for a Continuation of the "Galley Chapters," 1938 and Later
59
6. . . 62
Night talk 1353 Early-morning walk 1360 Walter and Clarisse's woodsy armistice 1372 Breaths of a summer day 1381 The constellation of brother and sister; or, the
unseparated and not united
PART 2
Drafts of Character and Incident
Ulrich I Ulrich ar~:dAgathe I Agathe
Ulrich visits the clinic 1413 Late 1920s 1422 V alerie 1442 Ulrich-Agathe journey 1450 OnKakania 1474
On the young Socialist Schmeisser 1490 On Agathe 14g8 Museum pre-chapter: At the lawyer's 1507
52 The three sisters 1513
48 The sun shines on just and unjust 1519
49 Special mission of a garden fence 1526
49 Musings 1532
Clarisse I Walter I Ulrich
Clarisse 1537 After confinement 1577 On Clarisse 1580 Clarisse 1582 The world of ideas in Clarisse's insanity 1583 Late 1920S 1586 193o-1934 On Clarisse-Walter 1618 1936 New ideas about the Clarisse-Walter-Ulrich complex 1623 Clarisse in Rome 1623 Clarisse-Island 1626 Island I 1627 Island II 1628 Visit to the madhouse 1630
Fischel I Gerda I Hans SeppI Ulrich
Late 1gzos
1936 To the complex: Leo Fischel-Gerda-Hans Sepp
Rachel
Narrative Drafts
A dreadful chapter: The dream 1703 49 Ulrich's diary 17o8 50 An entry 1713 51 Endoftheentry 1716
Sketches and Notes About the Novel 1722 Translator's Aftexword 1771
Contents ix
PREFACE
Musil did not finish The Man Without Qualities, although he often said he intended to. There is no way of telling from either the parts published in his lifetime or his posthumous papers how he would have done so, or indeed whether he could have done so to his own satisfaction. This is because of the novel's rigorously experimental structure, consisting of an "open architecture" that could be devel- oped in many directions from any given point. The novel does con- tain coherent individual threads and incidents, but Musil finnly rejected the idea of a plotted narrative whole. Therefore, while the drafts of the twenty chapters in Part 1 of "From the Posthumous Pa- pers" carry on from where "Into the Millennium" left off, the mate- rial in Part 2 is not preliminary to a final version in the usual sense, but consists rather of notes, sketches, and drafts that Musil was keep- ing in suspension for possible use in some form at some place in the ultimate text, a version he never decided upon and that must forever remain the object of tantalizing speculation.
We have a fortuitous, ifunhappy, benchmark for this posthumous material: When Musil had to leave Vienna in 1938, he took with him into exile in Switzerland material that he considered most useful for his further work on The Man Without Qualities. Everything left be- hind in Vienna was destroyed during the war. (A further loss was suf- fered when two of Musil's surviving notebooks were stolen from an editor's car in Italy in 1970, before they could be transcribed. )
The extent to which Musil regarded this novel as experimental was extraordinary. He had begun work on it in earnest in 1924 and was most reluctant when the urging ofpublishers and worsening external conditions forced him to publish parts of it in 1931 and 1933 (pages 1-1130 in this edition). From his point ofview, the entire text ought
xii · Preface
to have remained "open" from the beginning until it had all been written and he could then revise the text as a whole. He complained that partial publication removed those parts of the novel from the possibility of further alteration, as well as distorting the shape (again, a never defined, "open" shape) he had in mind for the whole work. As it was, in 1938, in less than robust health and apparently appre- hensive that he would again be forced into premature publication, he withdrew the first twenty chapters that appear in "From the Posthu- mous Papers" when they were already set in galleys, in order to re- work them still further. These chapters were intended not to conclude the novel but to continue "Into the Millennium. " Like Goethe, Musil had a strange sense of having infinite time stretching out before him in which to complete his task. One is tempted to see in his solitary and stubborn pursuit of his ideal more than a llttle of Kafka's Hunger Artist.
Musil's purpose in writing The Man Without Qualities was a moral one. He had set out to explore possibilities for the right life in a cul- ture that had lost both its center and its bearings but could not tear itself away from its outworn forms and habits of thought, even while they were dissolving. Musil equated ethics and aesthetics, and was convinced that a union of "precision and soul," the language and dis- coveries of science with one's inner life of perceptions and feelings, could be, and must be, achieved. He meant this novel to be experi- enced as a moral lever to move the world, as Emerson and Nietzsche intended their writing to be experienced, in such a way that (in Rilke's words) "you must change your life. " Musil's anguish becomes palpable as he pursues this search for the right life using the tools of scientific skepticism, while remaining all too aware of the apparently inherent limitations ofhuman societies and, especially, ofhuman na- ture. Fortunately, this anguish is leavened by a sparkling wit of lan- guage and situation, as when a character is described as wearing "a wig of split hairs. "
The search for the right life leads to an increasing inwardness in the novel. Musil intended to have Ulrich and Agathe somehow rejoin the world after the failure of their attempt to achieve a unio mystica, but as the reader will see, this was left completely up in the air among a welter of conflicting possibilities. Much of the material in Part z consists of startlingly dramatic or even melodramatic nuclei
that Musil weighed using at some point. He frequently inserts identi- cal or slightly varied material in different places, obviously to try it out in alternative contexts, but without committing himself. Always an analytical thinker and a methodical worker, Musil used an elabo- rate and cryptic system of referencing and cross-referencing codes and notations, some of them still undeciphered, to remind himself of the many interconnections. These markings are ubiquitous, indicat- ing how thoroughly the different parts of the work were simulta- neously present in his mind. These codes are to be found in the German edition but have been suppressed here in the interest of readability.
Among the experiments Musil tries out, for example, are the possi- bilities of Ulrich having sexual relations, sometimes aggressive and perverse, with his sister, Agathe, his cousin Diotima, and Clarisse, his friend Walter's wife. Moosbrugger, the sex murderer who haunts the entire novel, is somehow freed by Clarisse in one version, while Ul- rich's attempt to free him himself, together with some hired crimi- nals, fails in another. Moosbrugger is executed, and Hans Sepp commits suicide (under a train in one place, by gunshot in another). Ulrich's escape to the idyllic Italian island is now with Agathe, now with Clarisse; the idyll fails with Agathe, fails with Clarisse. Clarisse looms much larger in these drafts than in the main text; here the stages of her growing insanity are carefully detailed. Ulrich appears crueler, more morally indolent, as his successive failures are re- corded. (Musil should not be identified with Ulrich; as is made quite clear here, in his role as narrator Musil is usually critical of Ulrich. ) These posthumous papers also shed a great deal of light on Musil's concept of mysticism and the "Other Condition. "
Musil had suffered a stroke in 1936, and the tone of Part 1 of "From the Posthumous Papers," written after that, is markedly dif- ferent from the earlier sections of the novel; quieter, strikingly in- ward, more difficult, the writing often of a rare beauty. In the selection of drafts, notes, and sketches presented in Part 2, which cover the span of time between 1920 and 1942, Musil makes clear how the faults of his characters are intended to mirror the larger faults of the age; as he says, these figures live on an arc without being able to close the circle. As the age comes unglued and spirals toward war, so do the characters spiral more clearly toward failure, helpless-
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ness, madness, and suicide, even as they press forward in their firm belief in a better future, if only they could find the key. The Man Without Qualities is not a pessimistic work
The contents of "From the Posthumous Papers" have not been previously translated into English. Much of what is presented here became available in German for the first time only with the publica- tion of the 1978 German edition of Musil's collected works. This new German edition is not definitive, but it completely supersedes the edition of the 1950s on which the first, incomplete, English transla- tion was based. The guiding principle in selecting the material for translation in "From the Posthumous Papers" was to present to the English-speaking public in readable form the major narrative por- tions ofthe posthumous material in the 1978 German edition, as well as selections that illuminate Musil's methods of thinking and work- ing. Scholarly completeness could not be the goal in any case, since the 1978 German edition offers only a major selection from the ex- tant posthumous papers, together with some scholarly apparatus. There exists in manuscript even more material relating to The Man Without Qualities than is in the German edition: The various Musil research centers finished the painstaking process of transcribing these papers only in 1990, and this transcription, 34 megabytes of data (not all of it relating to the novel), has been made available in German on a CD-ROM disk Omitted in what follows, aside from the cross-referencing codes, are (1) longer repetitive variations of chapters or sections in which the changes are slight-Musil was an obsessive rewriter and polisher; and (z) many brief notes, jottings, and indications that are too sketchy to be informative except to the specialist.
Except for the galley drafts of the first twenty chapters, this mate- rial is for the most part not polished or "written up" in final form; some ofit is quite sketchy, some merelyjotted notes. Over the years, Musil changed the names of some of his characters and switched others, and this can be confusing. The essence of the characters, however, seems to have been fixed from the early stages, so these name changes are purely verbal. Ulrich was originally called "An- ders," then called "Achilles"; the names, but not the characters, of
Lindner and Meingast were reversed. Clarisse's brother is called Siegmund in the main text, Siegfried and Wotan here. In the interest of readability the names, with one or two obvious exceptions, have been changed to be consistent with those used previously in the novel and are spelled out-Musil usually refers to them by their ini- tials-as are most of the numerous other abbreviations. Given the fragmentary nature ofthe texts in Part 2, and for the sake ofreadabil- ity, elisions have not been indicated; with very minor exceptions they are between selections, not within selections. Items between slashes or in parentheses are Musil's; material in square brackets is mine. Double and triple ellipsis points in the text reproduce those in the German edition.
The only major departure from the 1978 German edition in how this material appears has to do with the ordering of the contents of Part 2. The German edition presents this material in reverse chro- nology, beginning with what Musil was working on at his death and proceeding backward to the earliest sketches. It seemed to me that since Musil was thinking about this material experimentally and not chronologically, such an ordering is not necessarily indicated, espe- cially in the absence of the author's ultimate intentions about the work as a whole.
A further problem was that in chronological order, whether for- ward or backward, the random mixture of elements in Part 2 of "From the Posthumous Papers" would put off the general reader, for whom this edition is intended. That would be unfortunate, since these pages contain some of Musil's most powerful and evocative writing. Rearranging the contents of Part 2 according to character groupings, narrative sections, and Musil's notes about the novel makes this material much more accessible, and given the author's experimental attitude toward these fragments this rearrangement seems not unreasonable. Readers who wish to see this material pre- sented in roughly chronological reverse order-some of it can be dated only approximately-should consult the German edition.
The original choice of material to include here was made in exten- sive consultation with Professor Philip Payne of the University of Lancaster, England, to whom I would like to express my apprecia- tion. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Professor Adolf Frise, editor of the German edition, for his constant friendly encourage-
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ment and advice. Without his work, and without the unflagging pa- tience and skill with which he and the various Musil research teams in Vienna, Klagenfurt, Saarbriicken, and Reading deciphered Musil's difficult manuscripts, no Musil edition would have been pos- sible. And without the determination, persistence, fine German, and ear and eye for quality of Carol Janeway, Sophie Wilkins's and my editor at Knopf, this translation would never have come to fruition.
Burton Pike
PART 1
Musil had given chapters 39 through 58 to the printer. He re- vised them in galley proofs in 1937-1938, then withdrew them to work on themfurther. They were intended to continue "Into the Millennium," of 1932-1933, but not conclude it.
39
AFTER THE ENCOUNTER
As the man who had entered Agathe's life at the poet's grave, Profes- sor August Lindner, climbed down toward the valley, what he saw opening before him were visions of salvation.
I f she had looked around at him after they parted she would have been struck by the man's ramrod-stiff walk dancing down the stony path, for it was a peculiarly cheerful, assertive, and yet nervous walk. Lindner carried his hat in one hand and occasionally passed the other hand through his hair, so free and happy did he feel.
"How few people," he said to himself, "have a truly empathic soul! " He depicted to himself a soul able to immerse itself com- pletely in a fellow human being, feeling his inmost sorrows and low- ering itself to his innermost weaknesses. "What a prospect! " he exclaimed to himself. ''What a miraculous proximity of divine mercy, what consolation, and what a day for celebration! " But then he re- called how few people were even able to listen attentively to their fellow creatures; for he was one of those right-minded people who descend from the unimportant to the trivial without noticing the dif- ference. "How rarely, for instance, is the question 'How are you? ' meant seriously," he thought. "You need only answer in detail how you really feel, and soon enough you find yourself looking into a bored and distracted face! "
Well, he had not been guilty of this error! According to his princi- ples the particular and indispensable doctrine of health for the
1136 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
strong was to protect the weak; without such a benevolent, self-im- posed limitation, the strong were all too easily susceptible to brutal- ity; and culture, too, needed its acts of charity against the dangers inherent within itself. "Whoever tries to tell us what 'universal edu- cation' is supposed to be," he affirmed for himself through inner ex- clamation, mightily refreshed by a sudden lightning bolt loosed against his fellow pedagogue Hagauer, "should truly first be advised: experience what another person feels like! Knowing through empa- thy means a thousand times more than knowing through books! " He was evidently giving vent to an old difference of opinion, aimed on the one hand at the liberal concept of education and on the other at the wife of his professional brother, for Undner's glasses gazed around like two shields of a doubly potent warrior. He had been self- conscious in Agathe's presence, but if she were to see him now he would have seemed to her like a commander, but a commander of troops that were by no means frivolous. For a truly manly soul is ready to assist, and it is ready to assist because it is manly. He raised the question whether he had acted correctly toward the lovely woman, and answered himself: "It would be a mistake if the proud demand for subordination to the law were to be left to those who are too weak for it; and it would be a depressing prospect if only mind- less pedants were permitted to be the shapers and protectors ofman- ners and morals; that is why the obligation is imposed upon the vital and strong to require discipline and limits from their instincts of energy and health: they must support the weak, shake up the thoughtless, and rein in the licentious! " He had the impression he had done so.
As the pious soul of the Salvation Army employs military uniform and customs, so had Lindner taken certain soldierly ways of thinking into his service; indeed, he did not even flinch from concessions to the "man of power" Nietzsche, who was for middle-class minds of that time still a stumbling block, but for Lindner a whetstone as well. He was accustomed to say of Nietzsche that it could not be main- tained that he was a bad person, but his doctrines were surely exag- gerated and ill equipped for life, the reason for this being that he rejected empathy; for Nietzsche had not recognized the marvelous counterbalancing gift of the weak person, which was to make the strong person gentle. And opposing to this his own experience, he
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 3 7
thought with joyful purpose: "Truly great people do not pay homage to a sterile cult of the self, but call forth in others the feeling of their sublimity by bending down to them and indeed, if it comes to that, sacrificing themselves for them! " Sure ofvictory and with an expres- sion of amicable censure that was meant to encourage them, he looked into the eyes of a pair of young lovers who, intricately inter- twined, were coming up toward him. But it was a quite ordinary cou- ple, and the young idler who formed its male component squeezed his eyelids shut as he responded to this look of Undner's, abruptly stuck out his tongue, and said: "Nyaa! " Undner, unprepared for this mockery and vulgar menace, was taken aback; but he acted as if he did not notice. He loved action, and his glance sought a policeman, who ought to have been in the vicinity to guarantee honor's public safety; but as he did so his foot struck a stone, and the sudden stum- bling motion scared off a swarm of sparrows that had been regaling themselves at God's table over a pile of horse manure. The explosion of wings was like a warning shot, and he was just able at the last mo- ment, before falling ignominiously, to hop over the double obstacle with a balletically disguised jump. He did not look back, and after a while was quite satisfied with himself. "One must be hard as a dia- mond and tender as a mother! " he thought, using an old precept from the seventeenth century.
Since he also esteemed the virtue of modesty, at no other time would he have asserted anything like this in regard to himself; but there was something in Agathe that so excited his blood! Then again, it formed the negative pole of his emotions that this divinely tender female whom he had found in tears, as the angel had found the maiden in the dew . . . oh, he did not want to be presumptuous, and yet how presumptuous yielding to the spirit ofpoetry does make one! And so he continued in a more restrained manner: that this wretched woman was on the point of breaking an oath placed in the hands of God-for that is how he regarded her desire for a divorce. Unfortu- nately, he had not made this forcefully clear when they had stood face-to-face-God, what nearness again in these words! -unfortu- nately, he had not presented this idea with sufficient firmness; he merely remembered having spoken to her in general about loose morals and ways of protecting oneself against them. Besides, the name of God had certainly not passed his lips, unless as a rhetorical
1138 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
flourish; and the spontaneity, the dispassionate, one might even say the irreverent, seriousness with which Agathe had asked him whether he believed in God offended him even now as he remem- bered it. For the truly pious soul does not permit himself to simply follow a whim and think of God with crude directness. Indeed, the moment Lindner thought ofthis unreasonable question he despised Agathe as ifhe had stepped on a snake. He resolved that ifhe should ever be in the situation of repeating his admonitions to her, he would follow only the dictates of that powerful logic which is in keeping with earthly matters and which has been placed on earth for that pur- pose, because not every ill-bred person can be permitted to ask God to trouble Himself on behalf of his long-established confusions; and so he began to make use of this logic straightaway, and many expres- sions occurred to him that it would be appropriate to use to a person who has stumbled. For instance, that marriage is not a private affair but a public institution; that it has the sublime mission of evolving feelings of responsibility and empathy, and the task (which hardens a people) of exercising mankind in the bearing of difficult burdens; perhaps indeed, although it could only be adduced with the greatest tact, that precisely by lasting over a fairly long period of time, mar- riage constituted the best protection against the excesses of desire. He had an image of the human being, perhaps not wrongly, as a sack full of devils that had to be kept firmly tied shut, and he saw unshaka- ble principles as the tie.
How this dutiful man, whose corporeal part could not be said to project in any direction but height, had acquired the conviction that one had to rein oneself in at every step was indeed a riddle, which could only be solved, though then quite easily, when one knew its benefit. When he had reached the foot of the hill a procession of soldiers crossed his path, and he looked with tender compassion at the sweaty young men, who had shoved their caps back on their heads, and with faces dulled from exhaustion looked like a proces- sion of dusty caterpillars. At the sight of these soldiers, his horror at the frivolity with which Agathe had dealt with the problem ofdivorce was dreamily softened by a joyful feeling that such a thing should be happening to his free-thinking colleague Hagauer; and this stirring in any event served to remind him again of how indispensable it was to mistrust human nature.