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. "