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?