51-52 The Emptiness of the Emotional Life

In Chapter 51 we learn about the unhappiness of Director Fischel's personal life: "misfortune had decreed that in the course of this marriage the mood of the times would shift away from the old principles of liberalism that had favored Leo Fischel."

Fischel's wife has drifted away from him, even though "her class consciousness would not permit them separate bedrooms."  The narrator sums up Fischel's angst:

But a shared bedroom, with the lights out, puts a man in a situation of an actor having to play before an invisible house the rewarding but by now worn-out role of a hero impersonating a growling lion. For years now, Leo's dark auditorium had not let slip the faintest hint of applause, nor yet the smallest sign of disapproval, and this was surely enough to shatter the strongest nerves.

Even his grown daughter, Gerda, dismisses Fischel: "You're old-fashion, Papa," she says.  The combination has a decidedly negative effect on the banker:

And so, though it far exceeded his need for philosophy, the aging man, left in the lurch by his life-partner and seeing no grounds for abandoning the rational fashion of his youth, began to sense the profound emptiness of emotional life, its formlessness which is eternally changing forms, its slow but relentless overturning that pulls everything with it. 

Which is why, when his wife and daughter talk so much about Arnheim and the Parallel Campaign, the banker "furtively hoped for an event that would at one blow expose the hollow pretense of it all."

* * *

In Chapter 52 Tuzzi is shocked to discovered "that not a single man was to be found in the whole Foreign Ministry who had read a single book of Arnheim's."  He has his press chief "order Arnheim's complete works for the ministry library" and requests "a detailed report on the man Arnheim from the Austrian Embassy in Berlin."

The chapter ends on an ominous note -- for Arnheim, at least.

He [Tuzzi] recalled Voltaire's saying that people use words only to hide their thoughts and use thoughts only to justify the wrongs they have done. Certainly, that is what diplomacy had always been about. But that a person spoke and wrote as much as Arnheim did, to hide his real intentions behind words, was something new; it made Tuzzi uneasy, and he would get to the bottom of it.

47-50 Arnheim, Diotima, and Count Tuzzi

In these three chapters another triangle unfolds, one that includes Arnheim, Diotima, and her increasing uneasy and suspicious husband - Count Tuzzi.

We begin with the narrator's thoughts on the three sources of Arnheim's fame and the sense he conveyed of being a "whole man" in a world of specialists.  First, Arnheim was a "man of stature" who "knew everything.  When "a man who has know had to do well for himself, " the narrator concludes, "there must be something in it. This was the first source of Arnheim's fame." The second involved "the nature of science and scholarship."  It was a world of specialists, yet they admired Arnheim as a generalist, a universal man, which the narrator slyly points out "amounts to the same thing as when men say to each other of a woman that she is a woman's idea of a beauty."

The final source was his success in the realm of economics, among the "seasoned captains of industry." Again, the narrator makes a sly comparison: Arnheim "won influence over them like a beautiful and cultivated wife who regards her husband's everlasting office work as a bore but is useful to the business because everyone admires her."

Here's is the narrator's summary:

He [Arheim] possessed the gift of never being superior in any specific, provable respect but, owing to some fluid, perpetually self-renewing equilibrium, of still coming out on top of every situation. It was probably the fundamental talent of a politician, but Arnheim was also convinced that it was a profound mystery. He called it "the Mystery of the Whole."

* * *

Count Tuzzi is less preoccupied with Arnheim's "mystery" than the political implications of his involvement in the Parallel Campaign. After all Arnheim is a Prussian -- and the Campaign is supposed to be a celebration of Austria. Sitting with her husband and Arnheim as they politely step around the topic, Diotima is presented with:

. . . two contrasting kinds of urbanity, two national- and two life-styles, not without a touch of sexual rivalry. . . place side by side two highbred and distinct forms of life, and a void will come into being between them; they will cancel each other out, with the effect of a quite malicious, bottomless absurdity.

When her husband asks Arnheim what the Prussian court thinks of the campaign, Diotima gives the conversation another turning by declaring that "she intended to achieve something spiritually great with the Parallel Campaign, and would allow only the needs of truly modern minds to influence its leadership."

Once again we drift off into the higher realms of "greatness," and Arnheim allows himself a bit of pessimism: "It is a mark of a time that has lost the inner certainty of healthier times . . . it is hard for something to crystallize as the greatest and most important thing of all." Arnheim brings forth several suggestions regarding areas in which "greatness" might be recognized: religion, science, culture, art.  "But we know the picture art represents today," he immediately adds. "Fragmentation everywhere; extremes without connections. . . . We who live today have a deep sense that there is nothing left for us to do."

Diotima is constantly coming to Arnheim's defense.  Initially, Tuzzin is sanguine about the situation: "He decided as a man not to struggle against the dialectics of a woman but to bide his time and wait for circumstances to prove him right in the end."

However, one night in bed, he turns around in a half-sleep and sees that Diotima "looked at him angrily, expressed defiance, and had been crying." "You toss about so much in your sleep, no one can sleep next to you!" Diotima had said "harshly and distinctly."

At that point Count Tuzzi "realized that something had changed in her."  He goes back to sleep, but awakens on the morning with "the firm resolve to find out all he could about this disturbing person" -- Arnheim.

45-46 The Mysterious Fire of the Soul

After the first "great session" on the Parallel Campaign, Diotima is left alone with Arnheim:

And suddenly her [Diotima's] chaste mind was troubled by a bizarre notion: her empty apartment, in the absence of even her husband, seemed like a pair of trousers Arnheim had just slipped into. There are such moments, when chastity itself may be visited by such abortive flashes from the pit of darkness, and so the wonderful dream of love in which body and soul are entirely one bloomed in Diotima.

Arnheim, for some reason, "stare[ed] entranced at Diotima." In search of an explanation, our ever-willing narrator begins an essay on the nature of the human soul:

. . . if, in the toils of passion, we do something incomprehensible, that too is, in its own way, understandable. Yet however understandable and self-contained everything seems, this is accompanied by an obscure feeling that it is only half the story. . . . And this horrible feeling of a blind, cutoff space behind the fullness of everything, this half that is always missing even when everything is whole, this is what eventually makes one perceive what one calls the soul.

"Only love," the narrator declares, "has a special position in relation to this condition:

. . . in this exceptional case the missing half grows back: the beloved seems to stand where ordinarily something was always missing. The souls unite "dos-a-dos," as it were, making themselves superfluous in the process. This is why most people, after the one great love in their youth is over, no longer feel the absence of the soul, so that this so-called foolishness fulfills a useful social function.

Note that the narrator says the absence is still there --- we just don't feel it.

The narrator then flatly declares that "Neither Diotima nor Arnheim had ever loved."  They are both caught up in a dangerous moment.  Arnheim is the first to "shake off the spell':

To linger in such a state was, to his way of thinking, impossible, without either sinking into a dull, vacuous, lethargic brooding or else foisting on one's devotion a solid framework of ideas and convictions that could not be distort its nature.

Then the narrator gives full vent to Musil's painfully humorous skepticism:

This method, which admittedly kills the soul but then, so to speak, preserves it for general consumption by canning it in small quantities, has always been its bridge to rational thought, convictions, and practical action . . . God knows, as we have already said, what a soul is anyway. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the burning desire to obey only the call of one's soul leaves infinite scope for action, a true state of anarchy, and there are cases of chemically pure souls actually committing crimes. But the minute a soul has morals, religion, philosophy, a well-grounded middle-class education, ideals in the spheres of duty and beauty, it has been equipped with a system of rules, conditions, and directives that it must obey before it can think of being a respectable soul.

And the summation of all this?

For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.

* * *

Chapter 46 ends with a story about one of Arnheim's servants stealing one of his sculptures.  Arnheim had considered the man to have been in "a pristine state of the soul," but nevertheless has the police take him away.   Yet, Arnheim "envied this man for reasons he could not explain to himself."

The beginning of an explanation might lie in the uneasiness of the relationship between a human being's ideas and the mysterious fire of his or her soul.

41-44 The Great Session

Meissen Figurine

These chapters cover the first meeting of those involved in the planning of the Parallel Campaign.  Chapter 41 gives us more detail about Rachel, Diotima's servant, and we see the immediate preparations through her eyes.

Diotima had said to her the previous evening: "Tomorrow we may be making world history here!" and Rachel's whole body was aglow with happiness at being part of a household where such an event could take place -- a great compliment to the event, since Rachel's body, beneath its black uniform, was as exquisite as Meissen porcelain. 

There is a moment of awkwardness at the beginning when Diotima introduces Arnhein to Leinsdorf.  Leinsdorf didn't know Arnheim (a Prussian!) was coming, and Arnhein didn't realize that Leinsdorf hadn't been told about him.  But cultured manners prevail:

Most of the others present had probably noticed the little scene and wondered about Arnheim's presence insofar as they knew who he was; but among well-bred people it is generally assumed that there is sufficient reason for everything, and it is considered poor taste to ask too many prying questions.

The meeting proper begins with a longish speech by Leinsdorf that begins like this:

"What has brought us together," Count Leinsdorf said, "is the shared conviction that a great testimonial arising from the midst of the people themselves must not be left to chance but needs guidance by an influence that sees far into the future from a place with a broad perspective -- in other words, from the top."

Because of Arnheim's presence, Leinsdorf has to modify his speech by removing some of his prepared digs at Prussia.  Diotima then takes the floor to "clarify" what Leinsdort has said:

"We who are gathered here today for the first time do no feel called upon to define this aim as of now, but we are assembled to create first of all an organization to prepare the way for the framing of suggestions leading toward this aim."

This is followed by a silence.  The narrator explains the situation by way of analogy: "Shut birds of different species and song patterns, none of whom have any idea what is going to happen to them, together in a cage, and they will initially be silent in the same way."

Next, a professor confuses everyone by a speech on the "path of history."  The group is rescued by "representatives of the Imperial Privy Purse" who come up with "a list of foundations and endowments to be be expected, in that jubilee year, from His Majesty's private funds."

During a break in the meeting, Ulrich irritates Arnheim by asking him "whether he really believed that anything would come of this campaign."  Meanwhile, Diotima is trying to convince Leinsdorf of the legitimacy of have a Prussian involved in an Austrian campaign.  In her zeal, she comes up with another idea:

Suddenly she came out with the pronouncement that the True Austria was the whole world. The world, she explained, would find no peace until its nations learned to live together on a higher plane, like the Austrian peoples in their Fatherland. A Greater Austria, a Global Austria --- that was the idea His Grace had inspired in her at this happy moment --- the crowning idea the Parallel Campaign had been missing all along!

* * *

After the break, the meeting staggers on: "everyone had looked confident that something conclusive was about to occur. Nobody had given it any real thought, but they all had that look of waiting for something important to happen."  At this point Diotima reveals her plan:

If those present would therefore agree to set up committees, each headed by a delegate from a government department, with representatives of the respective institutions and sectors of the population at his side, the resulting organization would already embody the major moral forces of the world . . . and serve as an instrument through which these forces could flow in and be filtered.  

As for herself, Dioima reserves "the forming of a special committee for the further elaboration of the campaign's fundamental ideas."  

When someone asks "how the specifically Austrian note would come into the campaign as thus conceived," an army general rises to speak and puts in a plug for the military.  He concludes by saying: "a broadly based popular concern with the problems of the army and its equipment would be a decidedly worthy aim."  

The chapter ends with Rachel, who has been peaking into the room through the key hole, declaring that "Now they're talking about war."

Officially the meeting ends with a resolution, suggested by Leinsdorf, that "the people not take action on their own."  The others don't quite see the importance of the resolution, but they don't object to it either.  Besides, the meeting needs to end with some kind of "resolution":  "it would be an uncanny world if events simply slunk off, if there were not a final ceremony to assure that they had indeed taken place."

39-40 Meditation on Ulrich and His Arrest

Before describing Ulrich's arrest, the narrator gives us a long meditation on Ulrich's condition as a "man without qualities."  The meditation begins in Chapter 39 by acknowledgingUlrich's lack of true self awareness: "If Ulrich had been asked to say what he was really like he would have been at a loss, for like so many people he had never tested himself other than by a task and his relation to it."

Chapter 39 then expands the mediation to the condition of the whole world.  In today's world, the narrator says, "responsibility's center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances."  He then goes on:

A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view . . . has finally arrived at the "I" itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naive. 

In Chapter 40, the narrator comes down to the question of why Ulrich was living in such a "dim and undecided fashion."  Here is what Ulrich himself thinks about it:

Obviously, he said to himself, what has keeping him spellbound in this aloof and nameless way of life was nothing other than the compulsion to that loosening and binding of the world that is known by a word we do not care to encounter by itself: spirit or mind. Without knowing why, Ulrich suddenly felt sad, and thought: "I simply don't love myself."

Ulrich concludes that "the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere. . . " He is ready to dislodge himself from his old belief that "the world would be best governed by a senate of the wisest, the most advanced."   Why does he no longer believe this?

[Because] . . . on longer acquaintance with the smokehouse of the mind, in which the world cures the bacon of its daily affairs, one learned to adapt oneself to reality . . . a trained mind would finally end up limiting itself to his specialty and spend the rest of his life convinced that the whole of life should perhaps be different, but there was no point in thinking about it. This is more or less how people who follow intellectual pursuits maintain their equilibrium. Suddenly Ulrich saw the whole thing in the comical light of the question whether, given that there was certainly an abundance of mind around, the only thing wrong was that the mind itself was devoid of mind."

* * *  

And the circumstances of Ulrich's arrest?

In the second half of Chapter 40 we are given an account of Ulrich's arrest as a result of his trying to be reasonable with a police arresting a man for shouting in the street: "he remarked that the man was in no condition to be held responsible for insulting anyone and should be sent home to sleep it off."

Ergo, Ulrich himself is arrested.  This is fortunate (or perhaps unfortunate), however, because it allows one of Count Leinsdorf's friend to finally locate Ulrich at the police station.  Since he is quickly set free, Ulrich "felt obligated to pay his call [to Leinsdorf] . . . and during this visit was immediately appointed Honorary Secretary to the great patriotic campaign. "

38 Clarisse Thinking (Her Demons)

In this chapter we once again find Clarisse and her husband Walter violently playing the piano. For them, playing the piano is all about giving form to their feelings.  In the course of playing together "these two people's separate feelings were compressed into a single entity."  But there is something missing, as the narrator is quick to point out:

But this union did not have the same dull, overwhelming force of life itself . . . The anger, love, joy, gaiety, and sadness that Clarisse and Walter felt in their flight were not full emotions but little more than physical shells of feelings that had been worked up into a frenzy. . .  the dictate of music united them in highest passion, yet at the same time it left them with something absent, as in the compulsive sleep of hypnosis.

Through their piano playing Walter wants to bring Clarisse back to a "realization . . . from her innermost self and incline her gently to him."  In the simplest terms, he wants her to consent to having a child.  But "his dreams were assuming so much the shape of a small child that he was beginning here and there to strike the notes with a false and too sentimental emphasis."

But Clarisse has "her own way of thinking: "three people were around Clarisse: Walter, Ulrich, and the woman-killer Moosbrugger.  Clarisse, the narrator states, "was gnawing at the root of love."

It is a forked root, with kisses and bites, glances clinging and a tormented last-minute aversion of the gaze. "Does getting along well together lead to hate?" she wondered. "Does a decent life crave brutality? Does peacefulness need cruelty? Does orderliness long to be torn apart"  Such were, and were not, the thoughts provoked by Moosbrugger.

Clarisse then makes a curious connection between playing the piano and Moosbrugger:

"One would have to go on and on plying, till the very end" Clarisse thought. "If one could go on playing uninterruptedly to the end of one's life, what would Moosbrugger be then?" A horror? An idiot? A black bird in the sky?" She did not know.

Like Ulrich and Walter, Clarisse has intimations of her great potential.  Having "awakened from the sleep of childhood," she "found the conviction ready-made that she was called upon to accomplish something . . . perhaps even chosen for some great purpose."  That was the appeal of Walter: "all at once the world was no longer a barren, chaotic, parched plain but a gleaming circle, with Walter at the center, herself at the center, two centers coinciding in one."

As Clarisse continues playing she imagines herself entering Moosbrugger's cell and freeing him.

Moosbrugger had turned into a handsome youth and she stood beside him as an incredibly beautiful woman with a body as sweet as southern wine, not at all recalcitrant, as little Clarisse's body usually was. "This is the form of our innocence," she noted in some deep-down thinking layer of consciousness.

Clarisse wonders "why couldn't Walter be like this" and decides (feels?) that "their marriage was suddenly creating a great embarrassment for their love."  She knows Walter wants to "bind her to himself with a child," but she resists him.  At this point, noticing that Walter's "playing was becoming unsure," Clarisse "leapt up in mid-chord and banged the piano shut."

Walter immediately concludes that Clarisse's feelings for Ulrich have caused her sudden change of mood:

It was Ulrich's coming, the mere news of which was enough to throw her mind into a frenzy! Ulrich was bad for Clarisse in that he callously roused in her something that Walter himself hardly dare touch, that wretched streak of genius in Clarisse.

Walter voices his jealousy, and Clarisse declares she "was definitely not at all in love with Ulrich:

But she did feel kindled by him, like a light. She felt she shone more herself, amounted to more, when he was near; Walter on the other hand always wanted only to close the shutters. Besides, her feelings were nobody else's business, not Ulrich's and not Walter's!

The narrator concludes the chapter by noting that "The silhouettes of two people who loved each other were black." As the last sentence,  he adds:

Regardless of the greatest affairs of state occurring in the world outside, and despite its vexations, this seemed to be one of those moments for which God had created the earth.

35-37 The Principle of Insufficient Cause

Ulrich's train of thought (as erratic as it may be) is once more derailed when he encounters "Bank Director Fischel," who has become flustered by "two little words" repeated several times in a circular he had received from Count Leinsdorf.  Those words being: "the true."

Fischel confronts Ulrich with three short questions: "What is really meant by 'the true patriotism,' 'the true progress,' and 'the true Austria.'" Ulrich's reply reflects his off-the-cuff philosophy regarding "The Principle of Insufficient Cause."  He says: "I give you my solemn word, . . . that neither I nor anyone else knows what 'the true' anything is, but I can assure you that it is on the point of realization."

Chapter 36 and 37 illustrate how the "Principle of Insufficient Cause" applies to the Parallel Campaign and makes it "a tangible reality before anyone knows what it is."

It seems it was all the fault of an "influential journalist:

 . . . who had heard that something was in the wind [and] quickly published two long articles in his paper offering as his own ideas everything he had guessed to be in the works. . . . He was really the inventor of the idea of the "Year of Austria" that he wrote about in his columns, without himself knowing what he meant by it but writing sentence after sentence in which this phrase combined with others as in a dream and took on new forms and unleashed storms of enthusiasm. 

This was in part what Count Leinsdorf had intended: "to let newsmen serve as the mouthpiece for his actual intention [regarding the Parallel Campaign] so as to be able to acknowledge or disavow them as circumstances might dictate."

But there is a problem:  "His Grace [Leinsdorf] had not reckoned with . . . the widespread need to improve the world . . . he had expected a great amount of patriotism but was not prepared for inventions, theories, schemes for world unity, and people demanding that he release them from intellectual prisons."

Once again poor Ulrich is dragged into the fray: "In this situation he [Leinsdorf] felt an increasing desperate need for Ulrich, who had been recommended to him as the very man for the occasion."

Who better to deal with a made up crisis than a man without qualities?

32-34 Lovesickness and the Ready-Made World

In chapter 32, Ulrich's preoccupation with Moosbrugger continues: "For some unknown reason Moosbrugger concerned him more deeply than the life he himself was leading."

As usual, Ulrich's thoughts take him in all sorts of directions -- from Luther ("We never judge an act by that aspect of it which is pleasing or displeasing to God.") and Machiavelli to a quote from Eckhart on Christ ("In Christ too there was an outer and an inner man, and everything he did with regard to outward things he did as the outer man, while his inner man stood by in immovable solitude.") and a sentence from a "parlor philosopher" that Diotima had repeated to him.

But Ulrich's thoughts also bring a memory "of a passion he had felt for a woman considerably older than he." Their mutual love "remained short and unreal throughout its course."  Under the influence of this passion, Ulrich felt he had "penetrated the heart of the world."  The chapter ends with this conclusion:

It was not long before she had turned entirely into that impersonal center of energy, the underground dynamo that kept his lights going, and he wrote a final letter, setting forth that great ideal of living for love actually had nothing to do with physical possession and the wish "Be Mine! that came from the sphere of thrift, appropriation, and gluttony.  This was the only letter he mailed, and approximately the high point of his lovesickness, from which it soon declined and suddenly ended.

* * *

In the next chapter we return to Bonadea, "who could not go on staring continually at the ceiling," and her aggrieved question: "So you are really capable of blaming me for our passion?" Ulrich's response is not directed to her question but related to "what he had been thinking, off and on, all day":

"Every such question has as many answers hanging on it as there are bees in a hive," Ulrich replied, "All human spiritual disorder with its never-resolved problems, hangs on every single one of them in some disgusting way."

Totally misunderstanding Ulrich's train of thought, Bonadea was "humiliated by her helpless and obscene position, half-naked on a sofa, an easy target for insults." Bonadea gets dressed, but "the rustling and switching of the silken chalices into which she was slipping back did not move Ulrich to remorse."

* * *

After Bonadea leaves, Ulrich is also restless and "he went out to the street with the intention of sending a message to Walter and Clarisse that he would come and see them this evening." Being Ulrich, he stops and contemplates his environment.

All these circular lines, intersecting lines, straight lines, curves and wreaths of which a domestic interior is composed and that had piled up around him with neither nature nor inner necessity but bristled, to the last detail with baroque overabundance. . . . "I am only fortuitous," Necessity leered. . . .  a fluid, mysterious equilibrium between feeling and world was upset for the space of a second. Everything we feel and do is somehow oriented "lifeward," and the least deviation away from this direction toward something beyond is difficult or alarming. 

The narrator decclares "It may be a convenience and a comfort for most people to find the world ready-made . . . and there is no disputing that whatever endures is not only conservative but also the foundation of all advances and revolutions."  Yet, "this casts a feeling of deep, shadowy unease on those who live according to their own lights."

Then Ulrich ponders an even more abstract and difficult question:

The goals, the voices, the reality, all this seductiveness that lures and leads us on, that we pursue and plunge into -- is this reality itself or is it no more than a breath of the real, resting intangibly on the surface of the reality the worlds offers us? What sharpens our suspicions are all those prefabricated compartments and forms of life, semblances of reality, the molds set by earlier generations, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of sensations and feelings. 

At little later the narrator steps in and speaks:

Imagine, if you will, what it is to have a heavy world weighing on tongue, hands, and eyes, a chilled moon of earth, houses, mores, pictures, and books, and nothing inside but an unstable, shifting mist; what a joy it must be whenever someone brings out a slogan in which one thinks one can recognize oneself. What is more natural than that every person of intense feeling get hold of this new form before the common run of people does? It offers that moment of self-realization, of balance between inner and outer, between being crushed and exploding.

The "craving for the renovation of life," Ulrich decides:

 "is nothing but the discomfort at the intrusion, between one's own misty self and the alien already petrified carapace of the self of one's predecessors, of a pseudoself, a loosely fitting group soul.  As the chapter concludes, Ulrich thinks of "the friends of his youth . . . all the rebels who wanted to bring new things and new people into the world."  They had "become professors, celebrities, names, recognized participants in the recognized development of progress; they had made it by a more or less direct path from the mist to the petrifact, . . ."

So ends chapter 34, "A Hot Flash and Chilled Walls." 

28-31 Ulrich Thinking (With Bonadea Present)

Chapter 28 has the wonderful title "A Chapter That May Be Skipped by Anyone Not Particularly Impressed by Thinking as an Occupation."  We're back with Ulrich, who is at home "musing."  And what is he musing about?  "Wasn't I telling Clarisse something about water?" he says aloud.

Nothing, the narrator laments, "is so hard to achieve as a literary representation of a man thinking."  Yet the man without qualities is thinking, in a rambling kind of way, about water. And because he "has modern scientific concepts in his head," he comes to this conclusion:

Ultimately it all dissolves into systems of formulas, all somehow interlinked, and there are only a few dozen people in the whole wide world who thought alike about even so simple a thing as water; all the rest talk about it in languages that belong somewhere between today and some thousands of years ago.

Ulrich feels the "healing power of thought," but "unfortunately" it also "diminishes the personal sense of experience."

In the next chapter, Ulrich's thoughts are interrupted by the sudden appearance of a tearful, neglected Bonadea.  Of course, he responses to her "erotically," but he still can't completely stop thinking.

But this erotic transformation of the consciousness seemed only a special instance of something much more general: for an evening at the theater, a concert, a church service, all such manifestations of the inner life today are similar, quickly dissolving islands of a second state of consciousness that is sometimes interpolated into the ordinary one.

He is ready for Bonadea to leave (so he can continue with his thoughts), but "Bonadea did not hurry up, and Ulrich was forced to think of something else."  At first, he thinks about Walter, how he:

 "always had a quite special ability to experience intensely. He never got what he was after because he was swamped by his feelings.  He seemed to have a built-in, highly melodious amplifier of the minor joys and miseries of life."

But Ulrich has yet another idea:

"A young man with an active mind . . . is constantly sending out ideas in every direction. But only those that find a resonance in his environment will be reflected back to him and consolidate, while all the other dispatches are scattered in space and lost!" 

He then makes a leap of thought:

For if, in the course of time, commonplace and impersonal ideas are automatically reinforced while unusual ideas fade away, so that almost everyone, with a mechanical certainty, is bound to become increasingly mediocre, this explains why, despite the thousandfold possibilities available to everyone, the average human being is in fact average.

At this point, Bonadea is thoroughly irritated with him: "She felt it was indelicate of him to be so absentminded when they should be savoring the last drops of their precious time together."

In Chapter 30, which is little more than a page long, Ulrich's thoughts focus, and he suddenly has a vision of Christian Moosbrugger and "his judges."  Moosbrugger is arguing with the judges.  "Injustice" he says, "must be the basis of my brutality. I have stood before the court, a simple man, and thought Your Honors must know everything anyway. But you have let me down!"

So in Chapter 31 Ulrich and Bonadea end up discussing Moosbrugger. Bonadea "reminded of the . . . compassionate partisanship for Moosbrugger as victim," momentarily sweeps "aside any thought of Moosbrugger the criminal."  

"Then you are always for the victim," Ulrich challenges her, "and against the act?"

Bonadea declares that the conversation is not "appropriate" for the aftermath of the (amorous) situation in which they have just participated.  But Ulrich is thinking and has no idea of Bonadea's feelings.  This is how the chapter ends:

    "But if your judgment is so consistent in condemning the act," Ulrich replied, instead of instantly apologizing, "then how can you justify your adulteries, Bonadea?"
      It was the plural that was in such especially bad taste!  Bonadea said nothing but sat down, with a disdainful look, in one of the luxurious armchairs and stared up, insulted, at the dividing line between wall and ceiling. 

It could just as easily have been the "dividing line" between her and Ulrich.

23-27 The Birth of a Great Idea

In these chapters we are introduced to Dr. Paul Arnheim, a rich Prussian who travels with a "little blackamoor," and we learn more about Diotima. In chapter 27 we discover that Arnheim's visit has given Diotima a "great idea."  And what is it?

. . . Diotima's great idea amounted to nothing more than that the Prussian, Arnheim, was the man to assume the spiritual leadership of the great Austrian patriotic endeavor, even though this Parallel Campaign contained a barb of jealousy aimed at Prussia-Germany. 

This idea, of course, advances the plot. But what is more interesting is the narrator's analysis of Diotima and how she came to maintain, with Count Leinsdorf's help, "a 'salon' which enjoyed a reputation as a place where 'society and intellect' met."

One characteristic of Diotima's approach to society is her cultivation of women:

"Life is much too overburdened with knowledge these days," she was accustomed to say, "for us to be able to do without the 'unfragmented woman.'" She was convinced that only the unfragmented woman still possessed the fated power to embrace the intellect with those vital forces that, in her opinion, it obviously sorely needed for its salvation. This concept of the entwining woman and the power of Being, incidentally, redounded greatly to her credit among the young male nobility who attended regularly because it was the thing to do . . .

Another characteristic is her suffering because she has grown tired of the very "Old Austrian culture" she represents:

At this point Diotima had discovered in herself the well-known suffering caused by that familiar malady of contemporary man known as civilization. It is a frustrating condition, full of soap, radio frequencies, the arrogant sign language of mathematical and chemical formulas, economics, experimental research, and the inability of human beings to live together simply but on a high plane. 

Diotima is also unhappy in her marriage, especially in terms of sex which the narrator sums up as "something violent, assaultive, and brusque that was released only once every week . . .  This change in the nature of two people, which always began promptly on time, to be followed, a few minutes later by a short exchange on those events of the day that had not come up before and then a sound sleep."

Here is how the narrator describes the effect this has on her:

On the one hand, it was the cause of that extravagantly swollen ideality --- that officious, outwardly-oriented personality -- whose power of love, whose spiritual longing, reached out for all things great and noble . . . Diotima evoked the impression, so confusing to males, of a mightily blazing yet Platonic sun of love . . . On the other hand, . . . this broad rhythm of marital contact had developed, purely physiologically, into a habit that asserted itself quite independently and without connection to the loftier parts of her being, like the hunger of a farmhand whose meals are infrequent but heavy. 

Enter Dr. Arnheim, "not only a rich man but also a man of notable intellect . . . [who] proclaimed nothing less than the merger of soul and economics, or of ideas and power."  The narrator gives us a wonderful sample of their "intimate" conversation.

   "Yes," he had said, "we no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannizes our lives."
   To which she replied: "I like the company of women. They don't know anything and are unfragmented."
   And Arnheim has said: "Nevertheless, a beautiful woman understands far more than a man, who, for all his logic and psychology knows nothing at all of life." 

As Diotima tells Arnheim about her desire to "bring ideas for the very first time into the domain of power," Arnheim sighs and then, the narrator tells us, says something very important: "No democracy of committees but only strong individual personalities, with experience in both reality and the realm of ideas, would be able to direct such a campaign!"

Thus a great idea is born in Diotima's mind.  And trailing along, almost as an afterthought, is her decision that Ulrich should still be part of the campaign, "where he would have occasion to be much in her and Arnheim's company."

20-22 Two Counts and a Lady of Spiritual Grace

In the opening chapters of Part II, "Pseudoreality Prevails," Ulrich visits Count Stallburg, "the Emperor and King of Kakania." There is a second count, Count Leinsdort, who Ulrich "should have gone to see next, as Count Stallburg wished," but instead he visits his [Ulrich's] "great cousin" Ermelidna Tuzzi.

Here's is Ulrich's first impression of Count Stallburg:

. . . Ulrich was received by his Excellency inside a great hollow prism of the best proportions, in the center of which this unpretentious, bald-headed, somewhat stooped man, his knees bent like an orangutan's, stood facing Ulrich in a manner that could not possibly be the way an eminent Imperial Court functionary of noble birth would naturally look --- it had to be an imitation of something.  His Excellency's shoulders were bowed, his underlip drooped, he resembled an aged beagle or a worthy accountant. 

Since it takes a while for Count Stallburg to speak, Ulrich has time to reflect (always an unpredictable occupation) and he "suddenly thought of Moosbrugger. Here was the Power of Clemency close at hand; nothing seemed to him simpler than to make a stab at it."  The subject makes Stallburg's "eyes open wait" and the narrator sums up the effect.

Just a few words, adroitly planted, can be as fruitful as a rich garden loam, but in this place their effect was closer to that of a little clump of dirt one has inadvertently brought into the room on the soles of one's shoe.

But Count Stallburg politely side-steps the issue and decides to like Ulrich -- "such spontaneity from a man so well recommended came to seem to him refreshingly resolute and high-spirited" -- and gives him a letter of introduction to the chairman of the great patriotic campaign.  As he leaves, Ulrich decides that he is still "unimpressed."

This was simply a world that had not yet been cleared away. But still, what was that strong, peculiar quality it had made him feel? Damn it all, there was hardly any other way to put it: it was simply amazingly real.

* * *

In chapter 21, even though Ulrich doesn't see him, we're allowed a glimpse of Count Leinsdorf, "the real driving force behind the great patriotic campaign -- to be known henceforth as the Parallel Campaign."

Leinsdorf's secretary is reading him a passage from a book by Fichte, a German philosopher. Leinsdorf dismisses it: "the book may be all right, but this Protestant bit about the Church won't do."  What Leinsdorf is looking for is a symbol, a great idea, for the campaign. And he's on the verge of discovering it.  Nothing specific, of course.

But he [Leinsdorf] was certain that he was in the grip of a great idea. Not only did it kindle his passion --- which should have put him on his guard, as a Christian of strict and responsible upbringing -- but with dazzling conclusiveness this idea flowed directly into such sublime and radiant conceptions as that of the Sovereign, the Fatherland, and the Happiness of Mankind.

Leinsdorf has convinced himself "that 'the people' were 'good'." This, despite the fact that:

. . . he had never known "the people" . . .   except on Sundays and holidays, when they poured out from behind the scenery as a cheerful, colorful throng, like an opera chorus. Anything that did not fit in with this image, he attributed to "subversive elements," the work of irresponsible, callow, sensation-seeking individuals.

Musil concludes this introductory sketch by deciding: "It is a safe bet that most of the common people over whose order Count Leinsdorf kept anxious and ceaseless vigil linked his name, when it came up, with nothing but their recollection of . . . [his] doorkeeper."--- a man who "stood in a heavy braided coat, his staff in his hand, gazing through the hole of the archway into the bright fluidity of the day, where pedestrians floated past like goldfish in a bowl."

* * * 

Hermine Tuzzi, who styles herself as "Ermelinda" Tuzzi,  is  the wife of Hans Tuzzi, the Section Chief of "the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs" and "one of the few men who could influence the fate of Europe." Ulrich has been told she is "a woman you must get to know," but he can never get a "detailed description of this lady's qualities." He considers her "a high-minded beauty" and nicknames her "a second Diotima . . . after the celebrated female teacher of love."

But Ulrich was mightily surprised when he made his visit. Diotima received him with the indulgent smile of an eminent lady who knows that she is also beautiful and has to forgive men, superficial creatures that they are, for always thinking of her beauty first. 

Diotima is also obsessed with the great idea of the Parallel Campaign:

Diotima began by calling the Parallel Campaign a unique, never-to-recur opportunity to bring into existence what must be regarded as the greatest most important thing in the world. "We must and will bring to life a truly great idea. We have the opportunity, and we must not fail to use it.

Ulrich, being the naive thinker that he is, asks: "Do you have something specific in mind."  She doesn't, course.  But the narrator kindly explains:

No, Diotima did not have anything specific in mind. How could she? No one who speaks of the greatest and most important thing in the world means anything that really exists.  What peculiar quality of the world would it be equivalent to? 

Diotima is not intimidated by Ulrich's questions.  She considers it "an incredible privilege . . . to call on a whole nation  . . . to awaken it in the midst of its materialistic preoccupations to the life of the spirit."

As Ulrich leaves Diotima he experiences "a semi-comical feeling." His only relief comes from seeing "the little chambermaid with dreamy eyes," yet it is only "when he was out in the street again that he felt what an uncommonly alive and refreshing sight the little maid was after Diotima's presence."

17-19 Walter, Clarisse, Moosbrugger, and a Letter

The last three chapters of Musil's "Sort of Introduction" include a dialogue between Walter and Clarisse, an introduction to the murderer Moosbrugger, and a letter from Ulrich's father.

Chapter 17 begins by explaining how Walter is able to justify his "artist's block" by taking "refuge" in the idea "that the Europe in which he was forced to live was hopelessly decadent." As a result, "instead of his feeling bad and unable to work, it was now the times that were sick, while he was fine."

But his relationship with Clarisse is not fine, and that is revealed in the way she plays the piano:

Clarisse's playing was hard and colorless, prompted by stirrings in her that he did not share, and that frightened him as they reached him when their bodies glowed till the soul burned through. Something indefinable then tore itself loose inside her and threatened to fly away with her spirit. It came out of some secret hollow in her being that had to be anxiously kept shut up tight.

Walter has decided the Ulrich is a bad influence on Clarisse, and a dialogue ensues between he and his wife in which Clarisse argues Ulrich's case while Walter attacks it. He begins by saying that "the strength you marvel at in him [Ulrich] is pure emptiness." He concludes:

What he [Ulrich] thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context --- nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to an superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. . . he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is . . .

"Such a man," Walter declares, "is not really a human being!"

"That's what he says himself!" Clarisse responds and then sums up Ulrich's thinking.

. . . today everything is coming apart. Everything has come a standstill, he says, not just him. . . . He says things have become more complicated meanwhile. Just as we swim in water, we also swim in a sea of fire, a storm of electricity, a firmament of magnetism, a swamp of warmth, and so on. It's just that we can't feel it. All that finally remains is formulas.

"The human brain has happily split things apart," Walter laments, "but things have split the human heart too." He concludes that "the man is a danger for you!" and states his own case.

. . . what every one needs today more than anything else is simplicity, closeness to the earth, health---and yes, . . . a child as well, because a child keeps us anchored to the ground. . . I promise you I have the courage when I come home, simply to have a cup of coffee with you, listen to the birds, take a little walk, chat with a neighbor, and let the day fade out quietly: that's human life!

* * * 

In the next chapter Musil introduces us to Moosbrugger, who "had killed a woman, a prostitute of the lowest type, in a horrifying manner."  Ulrich is preoccupied with Moosbrugger's case, perhaps because Moosbrugger "did not deny what he had done, but simply wanted his deeds understood as the mishaps of an important philosophy of life."  He "even wanted the killing to be regarded as a political crime."

...  even a much cleverer man could not have expressed the strange, shadowy reasoning of his mind. They rose directly out of the confused isolation of his life, and while all other lives exist in hundreds of ways . . . his own true life existed only for him. It was a vapor, always losing and changing shape.

"A vapor, always losing and changing shape": the same might be said of Ulrich.

Ulrich is present at Moosbrugger's trial and is struck by one of his random thoughts: "if mankind could dream as a whole, that dream would be Moosbrugger."

* * *

Chapter 17 consists entirely of a letter Ulrich receives from his father encouraging him to "present yourself to Count Stallburg, who intends to place you on the Planning Committee" for a celebration campaign of 1918 as "a jubilee year for our Emperor"  At this point Part I, "A Sort of Introduction," ends, and Part II, "Pseudoreality Prevails," begins.

Ulrich, the man without qualities, has a purpose thrust upon him by his father.

14-16 Walter and a Malady of the Times

Before I talk about Ulrich's boyhood "friend," Walter, I want to throw out a comparison from Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which Soren Kierkegaard talks about the two ways an "existing individual" can approach truth.

Essentially there is the traditional "subjective" approach and the modern, scientific "objective" approach.  In extreme cases, Kierkegaard says, both lead to madness.  Don Quixote, he adds, "is the prototype for a subjective madness, in which the passion of inwardness embraces a particular fixed idea." But scientific "objectivity" can also become a madness "which consists of the absence of inwardness." He then sums up the difference.

This type of madness [extreme objectivity] is more inhuman than [extreme subjectivity]. One shrinks from looking into the eyes of a madman of [extreme subjectivity] lest one be compelled to plumb there the depths of his delirium; but one dares not look at the madman of [extreme objectivity] from fear of discovering that he has eyes of glass and hair made of carpet-rags; that he is, in short, an artificial product . . . a cunningly contrived walking stick in which a talking machine has been concealed.

The two boyhood friends, Walter and Ulrich, represent these two approaches.  Being familiar with Ulrich's lack of "qualities," the absence of an "inner" sense of his reality, we easily define him as objective.  In chapter 14 we are introduced to Walter, the type of the extremely subjective.

What are his chief characteristics?  He's a passionate lover of art in all it's forms. We first see him with his wife Clarisse "playing the piano together." But it isn't ordinary piano practice.

Something unfathomable was going on: a balloon, wavering in outline as it filled up with hot emotion, was swelling to the bursting point, and from the excited fingertips, the nervously wrinkling foreheads, the twitching bodies, again and again surges of fresh feeling poured into this awesome private tumult. How often they had been through this!

Of course, Ulrich, being scientific, insists that "music represented a failure of the will and a confusion of the mind."

And what else do we learn about Walter? Ulrich sees him as "a gifted young man narrowing himself down into an ordinary young man, not as a result of any blow of fate but through a kind of preordained shrinkage."  Other people, the narrator reports, "were accustomed to say that he lacked will power, but it would have been equally valid to call him a lifelong, many-sided dilettante." But Walter is no ordinary dilettante -- and the contrast between him and Ulrich is made immediately apparent:

. . . it was quite remarkable that there were always authorities in the worlds of music, painting. and literature who expressed enthusiastic views of Walter's future. In Ulrich's life, by contrast, even though he had a few undeniably noteworthy achievements to his credit, it had never happened that someone came up to him and said: "You are a man I have always been looking for, the man my friends are waiting for." In Walter's life this had happened every three months.

Walter is the artist who has overcome all obstacles, but "now that there was no longer anything left to be overcome, the unexpected happened: the works promised for so long by the greatness of his mind failed to materialize. Walter seemed no longer able to work."

I'll leave Walter's tortured relationship with Clarisse for another time. Instead, I'll jump ahead to Chapter 16 -- Ulrich's thoughts (for some reason, I'm reluctant to call them an analysis) on what the chapter title calls "A Mysterious Malady of the Times." What is this malady?  It seems to be the same thing that Walter suffers from, only on a much grander scale.

There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can't put your finger on it . . . a mysterious disease has eaten away the previous period's seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older.

At this point, Ulrich's speculates that the cause of this might be "common stupidity." I won't go into details, but I will quote his conclusion:

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can move in all directions, and put on all the guises of truth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is aways at a disadvantage.

Having summed up the power of human stupidity, Ulrich is distracted by a "curious notion."  Being scientific, he examines his "feelings" and concludes chapter 16 with this observation:

A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage, Ulrich felt. But he could never bring himself to love all these manifestations of life, as one's general sense of social well-being requires. For a long time a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination.

Is that where science leads us: to "an all-encompassing distaste" for life in its totality?

9-13 A Great Man and a Racehorse of Genius

Chapters 9 through 11 summarize Ulrich attempts to become a great man, even though as the narrator explains, "he knew neither how to become one nor what a great man is."  Ulrich initially attempts to achieve greatness as a soldier, but he is soon disillusioned.

He had expected to find himself on a stage of world-shaking adventures with himself as hero, but now saw nothing but a drunken young man shouting on a wide, empty street, answered only by the paving stones.

Then, with characteristic logic, Ulrich decides to become an engineer because he is enamored of their world view.

Looked at from a technical point of view, the world is simply ridiculous; impractical in all that concerns human relations, and extremely uneconomic and imprecise in its methods; anyone accustomed to solving his problems with a slide rule cannot take seriously a good half of the assertions people make. . . . If you had a slide rule and someone comes along with big statements or great emotions, you say: "Just a moment, please -- let's first work out the margin for error and the most-probable values."

But he is soon disillusioned with engineers too, and starts asking questions like why "do they wear suits constructed like the early stages of the automobile?" Or:

 . . . why, finally, do they never speak of anything but their profession, or if they do speak of something else, why do they have that peculiar, stiff, remote, superficial manner that never goes deeper inside them than the epiglottis?

In his third attempt at greatness, Ulrich turns to mathematics, the heart and soul of science.

The life of science is as strong and carefree and glorious as a fairy tale. . . . People simply don't realize it, they have no idea how much thinking can done already; if they could be taught to think a new way, they would change their lives.

Ulrich's work in mathematics brings him "recognition" and he is officially "promising." But all of his convictions regarding his new career are shattered when he reads the phrase "racehorse of genius" and "instantly [grasps] the fateful connection between his entire career and this genius of racehorses."

Ulrich had been attempting greatness through a life of the mind. But when the "spirit of the age" can declare that racehorse is a genius, where does that leave the scientist?

The fact is, science has developed a concept of hard, sober intelligence that makes the old metaphysical and moral ideas of the human race simply intolerable, even though all it has to put in their place is that hope that a distant day will come when a race of intellectual conquerors will descend into the valleys of spiritual fruitfulness.

"Valleys of spiritual fruitfulness?"  The phrase seems overripe.  But that is what Musil intends.  At this point, the narrator declares, Ulrich realizes his image of science "works only so long as the eye is not forced to abandon visionary distances for a present nearness, or made to read a statement that in the meantime a racehorse has become a genius."

In a word, Ulrich is once again disillusioned.  At the end of chapter 13, he reaches this conclusion:

. . . since, now that genius is attributed to soccer players and horses, a man can save himself only by the use he makes of genius, he [Ulrich] resolved to take a year's leave of absence from his life in order to seek an appropriate application of his abilities. 

But when a man doesn't have a sense of his own reality, to what does he apply his abilities?  And to what purpose? If you are so absent from yourself, how can your life have a purpose?

6-8 Leona, Bonadea, and Kakania

Reading these early chapters I feel like I'm in a Marx Brothers movie with the jokes hitting so many points and coming so fast I can't keep up.  Absurdity at its peak.  Of course, Musil comments on this "rush" of modern life.

In a community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile goal, provided one doesn't hesitate or reflect too long. Targets are short-term, but since life is short too, results are maximized, which is all people need to be happy, because the soul is formed by what you accomplish, whereas what you desire without achieving it merely warps the soul. Happiness depends very little on what we want, but only on achieving whatever it is. 

This could have been a speech, delivered rapid-fire, by Groucho Marx's slightly daffy, intellectual older brother -- and I suspect that Ulrich, the "man without qualities" could easily fit in as one of the anarchic comedians.

Ulrich himself reflects on "our sense of incessant movement that carries us along" when he theorizes about the "secret mechanism" behind his recent mugging by a trio of "louts."  He can't just accept the fact that he was mugged and go on with his life. Instead, he presents his theories to Bonadea, the lady "bending over him with an angelic expression" who has come to his aid after the attack and takes him home.

. . .  he now launched into a lively defense of his experience, which was not, as he explained to the surprised motherly beauty, to be judged solely its outcome. The fascination of such a fight, he said, was the rare chance it offered in civilian life to perform so many varied, vigorous, yet precisely coordinated movements in response to barely perceptible signals at a speed that made conscious control quite impossible.

Ulrich then makes another one of his characteristic leaps of logic:

. . . this experience of almost total ecstasy or transcendence of the conscious mind is akin to experiences now lost but known in the past to the mystics of all religions, which makes it a kind of contemporary substitution for an eternal human need.  Even if it is not a very good substitute it is better than nothing, and boxing or similar kinds of sport that organize this principle into a rational system are therefore a species of theology, although one cannot expect this to be generally understood as yet.

When they arrive at Ulrich's house and Bonadea does not come in with him, he reconciles himself by "thinking how unpleasant it would have been if he had had to spend more time on yet another of those love affairs he had long since grown tired of."  But it was not to be, because the next day Bonadea comes back.

 . . . a lady was announced who would not give her name and who now entered his room heavily veiled. It was she herself, who had not wanted to give him her name and address, but had now come in person to carry on the adventure in her own romantically charitable fashion, on the pretext of being concerned about his health.

At this point, Bonadea becomes his mistress, replacing his previous mistress, Leona, who is herself a miniature comic masterpiece.  She is a "chanteuse in a small cabaret" who the narrator describes as "tall, curvaceously slender, provocatively lifeless" who had the "anachronistic quality" of being "an incredible glutton."  Here's just a sample of Musil's analysis of her:

It could not be maintained that she took no interest in sex, but it could be said that she was, in this respect as in every other, downright lazy and hated to work. In her ample body every stimulus took an astonishing long time to reach the brain, and it happened that her eyes began to glaze over for no apparent reason in midafternoon, although the night before they had been fixed on a point on the ceiling as though she were observing a fly. Or else in the midst of a complete silence she might begin to laugh at a joke she just now understood, having listened to it days ago without any sign of understanding it.

Chapter 8 introduces us to Kakania, not a woman, but a "state since vanished that no one understood, in many ways an exemplary state, though unappreciated," in which "there was a tempo too, but not too much tempo."  In other words, a place not as rushed as everywhere else, which Musil (tongue in cheek) declares "the most progressive state of all; a state just barely able to go along with itself."

In this chapter, Musil muses on the "character" of Kakania's citizens and delivers this devastating explanation:

In this country one acted --- sometimes to the highest degree of passion and its consequences --- differently from the way one thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted. Uninitiated observers have mistaken this for charm, or even for a weakness of what they thought to be Austrian character.

In fact, Musil states, that "an inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters" within him.  "He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really not more than a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets. . . "  Musil then suggests "a tenth character":

this is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled.  This permits a person all but one thing: to take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them; in other words, it prevents precisely what should be his true fulfillment.  This interior space . . . [is] an empty, invisible space, with reality standing inside it like a child's toy town deserted by the imagination.

Perhaps this explains the "quality-less" quality of Ulrich character, his ability to turn the experience of being beaten up into an occasion for bizarrely askew philosophizing, askew because he has no real sense of himself as an individual.  He is totally, comically detached; he has no center.

1-5 A Sort of Introduction

Maybe all I'll have to do in this blog is pull in extended quotes and let the reader join in the laughter.  What immediately strikes me about the first few chapters is how droll the narrator is.  Every sentence exudes a satirical intent. Musil seems to be indulging in a "novel as essay" style with heavy commentary by the narrator.  Fortunately, the narrator is funny (even more than Proust's Marcel).

Here is the narrator on the upper classes:

They clearly belonged to a privileged social class, with their distinguished bearing, style of dress, and conversation, the initials of their names embroidered on their underwear, and just as discreetly, which is to say not for outward show but in the find underwear of their minds, they knew who they were and that they belonged in a European capital city and imperial residence. [4]

Here he is on patriotism:

Children are, of course, show-offs, love to play cops and robbers, and are naturally inclined to regard the X family on Y Street as the greatest family in the world if it happens to be their own. So patriotism comes easily to children. But in Austria, the situation was slightly more complicated. For although the Austrians had of course also won all the wars in their history, after most of them they had had to give something up. [13]

But I need to discuss at least one thing amid all the laughter: why Musil calls his hero, a mathematician named Ulrich, a "man without qualities."  Chapter 4, "If There is a Sense of Reality, There Must Also be a Sense of Possibility" is devoted to exactly such an explanation.  Here's the first paragraph:

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor [Ulrich's father] had always lived, is simply a requisite sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility. [10-11]

To further "clarify" the distinction between "a sense of reality" and "a sense of possibility" (if Musil really intends to clarify and not just tease us), the narrator comes up with an analogy:

. . . the man with an ordinary sense of reality is like a fish that nibbles at the hook but is unaware of the line, while the man with that sense of reality which can also be called a sense of possibility trawls a line through the water and has no idea whether there's any bait on it.  His extraordinary indifference to the life snapping at the bait is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. [12]

Musil then ends Chapter 4 with a succinct statement of Ulrich's problem:

And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities. [13]

Ulrich's inability to summon up a sense of his own reality leads him to curious thoughts and actions.  Two examples are initially brought to our attention.  In school "Ulrich wrote in his essay on love of country that anyone who really loved his country must never regard it as the best country in the world." We then get another example of Musil's tone:

Then, in a flash of inspiration that seemed to him especially fine, although he was more dazzled by its splendor than he was clear about its implications, he added to this dubious statement a second, that God Himself probably preferred to speak of His world in the subjunctive of possibility . . . for God creates the world and thinks while He is at it that it could just as well be done differently.  Ulrich gloried in this sentence, but he must not have expressed himself clearly enough, because it caused a great uproar and nearly got him expelled from school, although nothing happened because the authorities could not make up their minds whether to regard his brazen remark as calumny against the Fatherland or as blasphemy against God. [13-14]

The second example has to do with Ulrich's method of renovating his house.  He takes it somewhat seriously because "he felt quite shaken by the responsibility of having the opportunity to renovate a house, what with the threat hovering over his head of "Show me how you live and I will tell you who you are!" --- which he had read repeatedly in art magazines."  In renovating his house, Ulrich, faced with infinite possibilities, was "in that familiar state . . . of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center. . . Finally he dreamed up only impractical rooms, revolving rooms, kaleidoscopic interiors, adjustable scenery for the soul, and his ideas grew steadily more devoid of content." [15]

The so-called "logic" of his thinking, results in the following solution:

For a man's possibilities, plans, and feelings must first be hedged in by prejudices, traditions, obstacles, and barriers of all sorts, like a lunatic in his straitjacket, and only then can whatever he is capable of doing have perhaps some value, substance, and staying power.  Here, in fact, was an idea with incalculable implications.  Now the man without qualities, who had come back to his own country, took the second step toward letting himself be shaped by the outward circumstances of life: at this point in his deliberations he simply left the furnishing of his house to the genius of his suppliers, secure in the knowledge that he could safely leave the traditions, prejudices, and limitations to them. [15-16]

In a way, Ulrich's dilemma reminds me of Hamlet, so I'll end this entry with a quote from the melancholy Dane who also has problems with his individual "sense of reality."

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?