79-80 Soliman and Strumm

In these two chapters we learn a little bit more, respectively, about Arheim's black servant and a general who suddenly attaches himself to the Parallel Campaign.

In chapter 79 Soliman continues his flirtation with and pseudo-courtship of Rachel, Diotima's servant.  Just as Diotima and Arnheim illustrate the aristocracy in love, Rachel and Soliman represent the lower classes. Here's the narrator's summary of Soliman's condition:

He enjoyed making a dramatic dance of it. He was intent on violence. This youngster, whom women tended to spoil out of curiosity, had never actually had intercourse with a woman but only picked up all the vices of the European boys, and his cravings were as yet so unappeased by experience, so unbridled and flaring in every direction, that his lust did not know whether it was supposed to be quenched by Rachel's blood or her kisses, or else by a freezing up of all the veins in his body the moment he set eyes on his beloved.

Soliman also routinely steals from his master. (And we vaguely remember a story of an earlier servant who stole from Arnheim.)  When he offers Rachel some of Arnheim's shirt studs, calling them "diamonds," she goes through her stock of conventional wisdom, but all she can say in reply is: "I don't steal from my mistress!"

Soliman declares that the "diamonds" are actually his and tries to force them on her. When she hits him, he kneels at her feet, crying.  As the chapter ends, Rachel stands "helpless in the clutch of the kneeling boy . . .  She had never in her life known such a feeling, and gently stroked the soft wiry mop of his hair with her fingers."

* * *

In the next chapter, General Strumm arrives one evening, "thanking Diotima effusively for the honor of her invitation."  Unfortunately, Diotima is very certain that she had not invited him. This chapter gives us background regarding the general.  He has had a successful military career, even though he has repeated "failed to show the intellectual keenness needed to ride a horse."

In the end, he was found neither suited nor definitely unfit for service on the general staff; he was regarded as clumsy and unambitious, but something of a philosopher, so for the next two years he was tentatively assigned to the general staff in command of an infantry division, which ended in his belonging, as captain of cavalry, to the large number of those who, as the general staff's auxiliary reserve, never get away from the line unless something unusual happens.

Even his drinking was somehow unmilitary:

. . . his sense of bodily harmony had soon taught him to drink himself through the riotous state into the sleepy one, which suited him far better than the risks and disappointments of love. It was only later on, after he had married and soon had two children as well as their ambitious mother to support, that he fully appreciated how sensible his habits had been before he succumbed to the temptation to marry, . . .

The narrator also notes that General Strumm is hopelessly infatuated with Diotima.

77-78 The Power of Love

After a brief essay on Arnheim as "the darling of the press," we see the effects on Diotima of her growing love for Arnheim. The narrator begins by making clear that "Diotima's feelings did not develop in quite the same straight ascending line as Arnheim's success."

Diotima compares Arnheim, "the New Man," with her husband and "was deeply impressed with the superiority of a new breed of men over the methods of an obsolete diplomacy." But at the same time she's "plagued by an undefinable, general, indescribable sense of well-being that made her want to do things, do something, anything, though she couldn't imagine what."

The power of love also affects her thinking: "At this point Diotima's striving toward the ideal underwent a significant change."  She begins to suffer from "a noble idealism, a decorous high-mindedness, a disciplined exaltation."  The narrator goes on to explain in detail:

This idealism had nothing to do with realities, because reality always involves working at something, which means getting your hands dirty. It was more like the flower paintings done by the archduchess, for whom flowers were the only seemly choice of life study . . . it was . . . a sound and pure idealism, the kind that distinguishes most carefully between conflicts worthy of its concern and those that aren't, and which . . . does not share the conviction of the saints (along with doctors and engineers) that even moral garbage may contain unused heavenly links.

Under the influence of love Diotima begins to "read responsibly, with a view of extracting from what she called culture whatever might help her in the none too easy social situation in which she found herself."

The complexity of Diotima's new condition inevitably causes problems for her husband:

. . . Diotima's soul, temporarily unsupervised by the higher faculties, behaved like a truant schoolboy boisterously careening around until he is overcome by the sadness of his pointless liberty; and owing to this curious situation something briefly entered into her relations with her husband . . . that bore a strange resemblance, if not to a late springtime of love, then at least to a potpourri of all love's seasons.

Poor Section Chief Tuzzi:

Such unscheduled affection was not to his taste . . . But whenever he felt like taking her in his arms, or had actually done so, which made it even worse, she hotly accused him of never having loved her, of only pouncing on her like an animal. . . . All of a sudden he was supposed to see the difference between Eros, the free spirit of love unburdened by lust, and mechanical sex. It was all, of course, stuff she had read somewhere, and comical at that, but when a woman lectures a man in this fashion as she is undressing in front of him! --- Tuzzi thought --- it becomes downright insulting. For he could not fail to notice that Diotima's underwear had evolved in the direction of certain worldly frivolity.

So Tuzzi also finds himself thinking about Arnheim:

For this was the question to which the main question --- why was Arnheim frequenting his house? --- sometimes reduced itself: Why did Arnheim write? Writing is a particular form of chatter, and Tuzzi couldn't stand men who chatter.

The chapter ends with perhaps some jealousy budding in Tuzzi as he ponders the question, "why a man like Arnheim, who had no need whatsoever to write, should write so much."

75-76 The Poem and the Master

Chapter 75 describes another visit General Stumm pays Diotima.  The subject, quite naturally, is the role the military plays in peacetime. According to Stumm, "the military strength displayed in peacetime wards off war."

Diotima couldn't disagree more:

"General," she said quivering with indignation, "all of life depends upon the forces of peace; even the life of business, rightly regarded, is a form of poetry."

The "little General" has trouble following her logic, but he gamely continues to make his case for the need for "order."

"There are so many people, after all, who don't realize how little order there is in the world of the mind. . . . most people suppose they are seeing some progress in the order of things every day. . . . the modern spirit rest precisely on such a greater order, and . . . the great empires of Ninevah and Rome fell only because somehow they let things slide. . . .  It's why, unfortunately, we can't do without power and the soldier's profession."

But Diotima will have none of that argument:

We will never reach our goal through order, by a sober weighing of pros and cons, comparisons and tests. Our solution must come as a flash of lightening, a fire, an intuition, a synthesis! Looking at the history of mankind, we see no logical development; what it does suggest, with its sudden flashes of inspiration, the meaning of which emerges only later on, is a great poem!"

In the next chapter we learn that Diotima believes her "fear" of the little General has more to do with her uneasiness about Leinsdorf than about the general himself.  As she puts it to herself: "Liensdorf did not seem favorably inclined to the Council."

That is why, every time Diotima wanted to speak with him seriously about something she had gleaned from her Great Minds, Count Leinsdorf was usually holding in his hand,  or pulling out of his pocket, some petition from a club of five simpletons, saying that this paper weighed more in the world of real problems than the bright ideas of some genius. 

She is even more taken aback when she learns that Arnheim agrees with Leinsdorf.

"His Grace believes that we must take our direction from the land and the times," he explained gravely. "Believe me, it comes naturally from owning land. The soil complicates life, just as it purifies water. Even I feel its effect every time I stay on my own very modest country estate."

But isn't all of that "surely part of a vanishing chapter of History?" she asks.

"And so it is," Arnheim replied, "but the simple virtues of courage, chivalry, and self-discipline, which his caste developed to such an exemplary degree, will always keep their value. In a word, the ideal of the Master! I have learned to value the principle of the Master more and more in my business life as well."

At that point, Diotima makes one of her intuitive leaps of thought: "Then the ideal of the Master would, in the end, amount to almost the same thing as that of the Poem?"

Instead of being puzzled, as the Stumm would have been, Arnheim instantly agrees: "That's a wonderful way of putting it! . . . It's the secret of a vigorous life. Reason alone is not enough for a moral or a political life.

But the chapter ends with Arnheim coming back to a point he has been trying to make: that Ulrich's "influence on His Grace [Leinsdorf] was not a wholesome one." Arheim declares that Ulrich has a "mixture of freedom and mental rigidity that may account for his special charm" but also makes him "a dangerous man."

74 Diminished Responsibility Redux

This chapter is almost entirely the contents of a letter Ulrich receives from his father about an argument he is having with a certain Professor Schwung, "whom you may remember from earlier days before I had seen through him, so that for years he could pass as my best friend."

The argument is over the following statement that Ulrich's father had submitted as part of  a "future" Austrian penal code:

No criminal act has been committed if the perpetrator was in a state of unconsciousness or pathological disturbance of his mind at the time he was engaged in the act under consideration --

Schwung had also submitted this addition using exactly the same words.  But Schwung and Ulrich's father differ regarding how the sentence should end:

Professor Schwung submitted a proposal beginning with exactly the same words. But then he continued as follows: "so that he could not exercise his free will," while mine was to read: "so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act.

Ulrich's father proposes a compromise that includes both endings:

No criminal act shall have been committed if the offender was at the time of his act in a state of unconsciousness or a morbid disturbance of his mental activity, so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act and could not exercise his free will.

But Schwung comes back with a counter proposal:

. . . he arrogantly insisted that the "and" in my statement had to be replaced with an "or." You see the point? . . . Schwung was trying to stigmatize me as a superficial thinker by exposing my readiness to find a compromise, using the "and" to unite both formulations, exposing it to the suspicion that I had failed to grasp the real magnitude of the difference to be bridged, with all its implications.

Ulrich's father sees Schwung as representative of:

. . . the present tendency to legal obfuscation, which falsely dubs itself humanitarianism, [which] consists in the effort to extend the concept of mental impairment, for which punishment is not in order, in the vague form of diminished responsibility, even to those numerous individuals who are neither insane nor morally normal: . . .

This revisits the dilemma first presented in greater detail and more seriously in chapter 60 when the narrator describes Moosbrugger as "one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine known . . . as a case of diminished responsibility."

In a world of people who have no sense of themselves, who are "without qualities," how are they to make any clear moral decisions.  That is one of the unanswered questions that arises from the uneasy condition of "modern" man.

73 Leo Fischel's Daughter Gerda

So many characters, so little time. I debated whether to give this chapter it's own entry and decided to err on the side of generosity. After all, since Musil is so generous with his characters, why shouldn't I be.

The chapter begins with Gerda's mother, Clementine, coming to see Ulrich and beg him to talk to her daughter: "--you're the only man who counts for something with her, and Leo thinks the world of you!--couldn't you come over and try to open Gerda's eyes to the callowness of Hans and his cronies."

Gerda had been inviting a "swarm of odd young people" to their house because it "was the most convenient for their get-togethers." Leo Fischel is Jewish, but these young people seem totally oblivious to him:

. . . the way they insisted on parading their mystical anti-Semitism was not only in poor taste, it revealed an inner brutality. Not that she [Clementine] had come to complain about anti-Semitism, she added, which was a sign of the times, one simply had to resign oneself to it -- she was even prepared to admit that in some respects there might be something to it. 

Reluctantly, Ulrich makes his visit, even though his friendship with Gerda "seemed to be a perfectly natural but pointless intimacy, and they both feared it."

Regarding Gerda's attitude toward her parents, the narrator has this to say:

Had Gerda been born some years later than she was . . . She would then probably have taken pride in being of "racially mixed" parentage; but as things stood, she rebelled against her parents and their problems, did not want to be genetically tainted by them, and was blond, free, Germanic, and forceful, as  if she had nothing to do with them. . . . In her home, nationalism and racism were treated as nonexistent, even though they were convulsing half of Europe with hysterical ideas and everything in the Fischel household in particular turned on nothing else. 

Gerda defiantly rejects any advice Ulrich might give her regarding her friends:

"When I talk with my friends," she said, "our thoughts flow from one to the other, and we know that we live and speak as one with our people -- do you have any idea what this means? We stand with countless others of our own kind, we feel their presence, in a sensory, physical way I'm sure you've never . . . In fact, you can't even imagine such a thing, can you? Your desire has always been been for a single individual; you think like a beast of prey!"

The unresolved sexual tension between them leads Ulrich to recount to Gerda a "crackpot theory" about the "capture of the moon."  As he begins the story, Ulrich "drew her closer  with his hand, inside which her wrist disappeared like a child among high crags."

The pressure of the physical on both Gerda's and Ulrich's "thinking" is revealed in this passage:

"Then why did you tell me this story?" Gerda asked, and tried to extricate her hand from his. But her defiance had quite run out of steam, as it always did when she spoke with this man, who was certainly not Han's intellectual inferior and yet managed to keep from going to extremes in his views, to keep his fingernails clean and his hair combed. Ulrich notice the fine black down growing like a contradiction on Gerda's fair skin; the tiny hairs sprouting from her body seemed to bespeak the variously composed nature of poor modern mankind.

Gerda finally gets out of Ulrich's grip, but the chapter concludes with Ulrich's promise to see her again soon, "although this had not been his intention before he came."

71-72 The Evil Behind Matter-of-Factness

In these chapters we return to the Parallel Campaign and reflect on the initial meetings of the committee Diotima "had personally reserved for herself"-- the "Committee to Draft Guidelines in Connection with His Majesty's Seventieth Jubilee Celebration."

Of course there is trouble from the start.

For even at this first gathering one could receive the impression that every great mind feels extremely insecure as soon as it leaves the refuge of its treetop aerie and has to make itself understood on common ground.

Diotima had tried to be gentle with the poets especially: "she made a point of assuring the poets in particular that all life, even the world of business, rested on an inner poetry if one 'regarded it magnanimously.'" That was a mistake.

. . . it turned out that most of those singled out . . . had come on the assumption that they were expected to launch the Parallel Campaign with some brief words of advice -- somewhere between five and forty-five minutes' worth -- which, if heeded, would hat guarantee its success, even if subsequent speakers squandered time with pointless and misguided suggestions.

Diotima senses the problems and is discouraged; as the narrator says, "she felt the wind of the grave over the fields of the spirit." But she remembers Arnheim's pessimism "into which she was drifting, which made it ultimately an almost sensuously pensive and flattering pleasure."

Musing on his prophetic words, she wondered: "Isn't it, deep down, the pessimism people of action are always bound to feel when they come in contact with those who traffic in words?"

In Chapter 72, the narrator provides an essay that begins as a "few necessary words about . . . the smile of the scholars who had accepted Diotima's invitation and were listening to the famous artists."  In these men, the narrator informs us, "a propensity for Evil crackled like a fire under a cauldron."

To explain this, the narrator says, we must "ask ourselves how science has arrived at its present state . . . considering how entirely we are in its power."  He traces it back to "the matter-of-factness that inspired" Galileo Galilei "raged and spread like an infection through Europe."  It has to do with Galileo's excessive pleasure in "facts."

And in truth, before intellectuals discovered their pleasure in "facts," facts were the sole preserve of soldiers, hunters, and traders --- people by nature full of violence and cunning. The struggle for existence makes no allowance for sentimental considerations; it knows only the desire to kill one's opponent in the quickest, most factual ways; here everyone is a positivist.

This is a bad thing. Why?  The narrator goes on to explain:

In other words, we find just those ancient vices of soldiers, hunters, and traders, here merely translated into intellectual terms and interpreted as virtues. This raises them above the pursuit of personal and relatively vulgar advantage, but even in this transformation the element of primal evil is not lost; it is seemingly indestructible and everlasting, at least as everlasting as everything humanly sublime, since it consists of nothing less and nothing else than the urge to trip up that sublimity and watch it fall on its face. 

There is a certain pettiness in the "factual" outlook as practiced by scientists:

Certainly they demonstrate the love of truth. But surrounding this clear, shining love is a predilection for disillusionment, compulsiveness, ruthlessness, cold intimidation, and dry rebuke, a spiteful predilection, or at least an involuntary emanation of some kind. . . . This approach to shaping life is of course in no way nurturing or appeasing. It would regard everything worthy of life not with simple veneration but rather as a line of demarcation being constantly redrawn in the battle for inner truth. . . . It just so happens that the second thought, at the very least, of every person today confronted by an overwhelming phenomenon, even if it should be its beauty that so overwhelms him, is "You can't fool me! I'll cut you down to size!"

That is the unconscious evil expressed in the slightly condescending smile of the intellectuals who are to draw up the guidelines for the great Parallel Campaign.

70 Clarisse's Disturbing Story

This chapter is short, but it needs to be addressed by itself because it brings up the taboo subject of incest. Of course, in the present age (the "digital" age, the "information" age) when we are saturated with a thousands things we don't want to know about, nothing seems to really be taboo.

What is curious is how casually Clarisse brings up the "incident" with her father. The chapter begins:

Redecorating old castles was the specialty of the well-known painter van Helmond, whose masterpiece was his daughter Clarisse, and one day she unexpectedly walked in on Ulrich.

On the surface, her reason for visiting Ulrich couldn't be more middle class: her father's business was slow, and he sent her "to find out whether you couldn't use your splendid aristocratic connections just a little for him." But Clarisse has other reasons behind her visit:

"Anyway, if you can do it, you will. If not, you won't. Of course, I promised him you would. But I came for another reason. His asking me to see you put an idea into my head. It's about a certain problem in my family. I'd like to hear what you think."

The "certain problem" was that Clarisse had as a friend, Lucy Pachhofen, a young woman Clarisse's father was "interested in" in more than a social way. Clarisse explains:

"Lucy's friendship for me was of course mixed up with the feeling that she had a man for a lover whom I still obediently called 'Papa.' She was more than a little proud, but at the same time it made her terribly ashamed to face me."

Ulrich interrupts to say "It strikes me . . . that nothing much had really happened between them," and Clarisse agrees.  Then she goes on to explain how her father called out her name one night when they were visiting with Lucy.

"I had no intention of answering him, but this weird thing happened: from somewhere deep inside me, as though I were a deep space, came a sound like a whimper."

In reaction, her father "almost fell on my bed, and his head was lying on the pillow beside mine." Clarisse seems to take a curious detached pleasure in analyzing the situation:

"Oh, I tell you, if it were possible to tell afterward all one felt at such a moment, it would be something really enormous. I think he was beside himself with fury against the whole world of propriety, because of what it had made him miss. Suddenly I sense that he is himself again, and I know right away, although it's pitch-dark, that he's absolutely convulsed with a ruthless hunger for me."

But Clarisse resists, and her father "instantly sat up":

 "I couldn't see what was going on in his face; embarrassment, I suppose. Maybe gratitude. After all, I had saved him at the last moment. You must understand: an old man, and a young girl has the strength to do that!

Ulrich's reaction is stunned silence, but the narrator steps in to explain that his "silence had sobered her and dissipated the idea that had kept her under its spell."  Once again we're asked to consider the power ideas have over us.

Having told her disturbing story, Clarisse leaves as casually as she entered: "Trim and correct, in a tailored dress she wore only when she came into town, she stood there, ready to leave, and held out her hand to say good-bye.

67-69 A Senseless Craving for Unreality

These three chapters -- the middle chapter an acknowledged "digression" on the question "Must people be in accord with their bodies? -- focus on Diotima's ongoing efforts to understand Ulrich.

As the narrator says, they "had got into the habit of exchanging ideas by speaking about Arnheim."  And even though Diotima is in love with Arnheim (in a strictly undeclared and unrecognized way, of course), she "sometimes preferred Ulrich's company to Arnheim's." The narrator explains it this way:

Her need to feel superior was more gratified by him [Ulrich], she felt more sure of herself, and to regard him as frivolous, eccentric, or immature gave her a certain satisfaction that balanced the idealism, becoming increasingly dangerous from day to day, that she saw taking on incalculable dimensions in her feelings for Arnheim. Soul is a terribly grave affair, and materialism by contrast is lighthearted. 

Ulrich has needs to, and they are often "displayed in his delight in shocking Diotima." But when she asks him "Why does Arnheim call you an activist?" and says "you maintained that nobody, if he had the necessary power, would do what he wants to do. Now I would like to know what you meant by that," Ulrich tries to answer as seriously as he can.

"I'm very much afraid that the only reason Arnheim, as you say, calls me an activist is that he over-estimates my influence with the Tuzzi family," he answered. "You know how little attention you pay to what I say."  

His answer to her second question is more complicated.

" . . . nobody would turn his dreams into realities even if he could . . . Is there anyone who would not be embarrassed if something he had passionately demanded all his life were suddenly to come true? . . . Please don't think . . . that all I mean by this is that everyone wants what is hard to get, and despises the attainable. What I mean is this: Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality." 

When she challenges him -- "And what would you do . . . if you could rule the world for a day?" -- he says, "I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality." Admitting that he wouldn't know how to go about doing that, he tries to explain further:

"We wildly overestimate the present, the sense of the present, the here and now. . . But what really moves us --- me anyway --- is always . . . opposed in a sense to this way of experience things. It is displaced by so much here and now, so much Present. . . . Some thousand of years ago this was a glacier. . . . Even the earth is not altogether what it's pretending to be for the moment. . . . We can't say that it [the earth] has evolved toward perfection, nor what is true condition is. And the same goes for its daughter, mankind. Imagine the clothes in which people have stood her through the ages, right where we are standing now. Expressed in terms of the madhouse, it suggests long-standing obsessions with suddenly erupting manic ideas; after these have run their course, a new concept of life is there. So you see, reality does away with itself!"

Diotima, of course, has "no way of understanding what Ulrich was talking about." But that doesn't matter, because she has other preoccupations:

For the first time, perhaps, she had a hard, clear glimpse of the fact that her relations with Arnheim would force her, sooner or later, to make a choice that could change her life. 

64-66 Death Decked Out in Motley

In Chapter 64, General Stumm von Bordwehr, "the army officer sent by the War Ministry" to observe the Parallel Campaign, pays Diotima a visit and leaves her with a "shadowy fear" and the sense that "a wolf was prowling around her flocks and that it was high time to exorcise it by the power of the Idea." Diotima has a morbid reaction to army officers and considers them "death decked out in motley."

She also believes that Ulrich "favored the vague menaces emanating from the General" and tries to discuss the situation with Arnheim.  But Arnheim has other things he would prefer to discuss, such as "the connection between business and poetry."

"Of course, I mean business in the largest sense, the world's business, such as I have been fated to conduct by the position to which I was born; it is related to poetry, it has irrational, even mystical aspects. . . . Foolish people imagine it's a pleasure to have money. It is in fact a terrible responsibility. I won't speak of the countless lives dependent on me, for whom I represent a sort of fate. . . . Once a business has expanded to the degree reached only by the very few I speak of, there is hardly anything in life it is not somehow involved with.  It is a little cosmos."

About the General, Arnheim is not particularly troubled:

"But there's no need to turn the General away on principle. Personally he may be a man of goodwill, and you know my principle of not missing any opportunity to bring the life of the spirit into a sphere of mere power." 

When Diotima confronts Ulrich about the General -- "Why did you encourage the General about our campaign?" --- Ulrich denies any involvement: "Do you mean that round little general from the first big meeting? Me? I haven't even seen him since, let alone encouraged him!"

As usual, Ulrich has his own preoccupations:

"For quite obvious reasons, every generation treats the life into which it is born as firmly established, except for a few things it is interested in changing. This is practical, but it's wrong. The world can change in all directions at any moment, or at least in any direction it choose; it's the world's nature. Wouldn't it be more original to try to live, not as a definite person in a definite world . . . but rather to behave from the start as someone born to change by a world created to change, roughly like a drop of water inside a cloud?

Apparently, Arnheim had challenged Ulrich about his approach to life: "He told me that the intellect today is the helpless spectator of real developments because it is dodging the great tasks of life."  But Ulrich insists on his own perspective:

It seems to me our history has been that every time we have fulfilled some small part of an idea, we are so pleased that we leave the much greater remainder unfinished. Magnificent institutions are usually the bungled drafts of their ideas; so, incidentally, are magnificent personalities. 

Diotima declares that Arnheim "wants to be helpful!" But Ulrich is dismissive: "I may be only a little pebble, and he is a splendid, puffed-out glass.  But I have the impression he's afraid of me."

Ulrich's attitude toward Arnheim worries Diotima, but she's beginning to have more confidence in Ulrich.  The chapter ends with her asking Ulrich what should be done about General Strumm's interest in the Parallel Campaign.

Ulrich's response is very decisive: "Keep him off!"

63 The Inner Acoustics of Emptiness

As an excuse to meet with Ulrich again, Bonadea decides she needs to talk to him about winning "Diotima over to Moosbruger's cause." But Bonadea is more interested in Diotima than Moosbrugger:

She had heard enough about Diotima's virtues not to be jealous; rather, she envied and admired this woman, who could hold the interest of Bonadea's beloved [Ulrich] without making improper concessions to him. . . . Her term for herself was "passionate," by which she understood both her dishonorable state and an honorable excuse for it. But she admired cool women with much the same feeling with which unfortunate owners of perpetually damp hands put their hands in a hand that is particularly dry and lovely.

But her aim in visiting Ulrich is also to reinstate their affair. So their conversation about the ethics of Moosbrugger's situation is less about him than about them -- something of which Ulrich is all too aware:

His weariness was now the same transparent gold as his drink on the table.  I've been talking nonsense for the last half hour too, he thought. But this diminished state was comfortable enough. The only thing he feared was that it might occur to Bonadea to come and sit down next to him. There was only one way to forestall this: keep talking.

Ulrich, being Ulrich, cannot help being philosophical about the temptation he is going to succumb to:

But this inner freedom consists of being able to think whatever one likes; it means knowing, in every human situation, why one doesn't need to be bound by it, but never knowing what one wants to be bound by!" . . .  that moral ambivalence that marked almost all his contemporaries and was the disposition of his generation, or perhaps their fate.  His connections to the world had become pale, shadowy, and negative. What right did he have to treat Bonadea badly? It was always the same frustrating talk they had, over and over again; it arose from the inner acoustics of emptiness, where a shot resounds twice as loudly and echoes on and on. 

Unfortunately, although Bonadea insists on "intellectual conversation, she "always missed the great idea that was supposed to go along with the great excitement she felt through the nearness of a lover."

Of course, the narrator, in his own ironic way, is sympathetic: "Unfortunately, this can, of course, by said of life itself, which contains a lot of excitement and little sense, but Bonadea did knot know this, and she tried to express some great idea."

Bonadea is saved from having to fully express her "great idea" by the "physical illusion" of "a flea."  As a result, Ulrich must help her search for the flea.  Here the narrator has a great deal of fun: "A flea," he declares, "favors the same regions as a lover; her stocking was searched down to the shoe; her blouse had to be unbuttoned in the front."

The result, with which the chapter concludes, is that "Ulrich smiled with unexpected friendliness" and Bonadea "burst into tears, like a little girl who has misbehaved."

62 Essayism

This chapter in The Man Without Qualities might serve the same purpose as "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter does in The Brothers Karamozov--acting as a distillation of the novel's central preoccupation.  It's appropriate that it should be, not a poem like Ivan's "Grand Inquisitor," but an essay. Because it reflects an approach to life the narrator terms "essayism."

The essay begins by defining the limits of "precision,"  as its applied to the situation embodied by Moosbrugger, and suggesting an alternative:

The one is satisfied to be precise and stick to the facts, while the other is not, but always looks at the whole picture and derives its insights from so-called great and eternal truths. The first achieves success, the other scope and prestige.  Clearly, a pessimist could say that the results in the first case are worth nothing and in the second case are not true.

But the narrator wants to state the case for a viable version of the "other" approach. The dreams of "precision," he declares, "were abandoned to the unwinged use of engineers and scientists, while everyone else reverted to a more worthy and far-reaching frame of mind."

"Uncertainty," he goes on to say, "had made its comeback. Complaints were heard":

 . . . pure knowledge tore apart every sublime achievement of mankind without every being able to put it back together, and they demanded a new humane faith, a return to inner primal values, a spiritual revival, and all sorts of things of that kind. . . . Science had begun to be out-dated, and the unfocused type of person that dominates the present had begun to assert itself.

In his youth, one of Ulrich's "cherished notions" was "living hypothetically":

. . . it showed the desire for grand connections in life and the aura of revocability a young man feels as he hesitantly ventures into life. . . . The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing anything is final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world . . . in the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself. . . . He seeks to understand himself differently, as someone inclined and open to everything that may enrich him inwardly, even if it should be morally or intellectually taboo; he feels like a stride, free to move in any direction, from equilibrium to equilibrium, but always forward. 

He links this form of living with the concept of the "essay."

It was more a less in the way of an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it --- for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept --- that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life. 

There are moral implications to all this, of course:

. . . the significance of all moral events seemed to him to be the function of other events on which they depended. In this way an open-ended system of relationships arises, in which independent meanings, . . . no longer exist at all. . . . Accordingly, Ulrich felt that he was basically capable of every virtue and every baseness; the fact that in a balanced social order virtues as well as vices are tacitly regarded as equally burdensome attested for him to what happens in nature generally, that every play of forces tends in time toward an average value and average condition, toward compromise and inertia.

Shades of Thomas Pynchon's variations on the physics concept of "entropy"!

But the case for "essayism" continues:

. . . an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man's inner life in a decisive thought. Nothing is more foreign to it than the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectivity. Terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable, and yet the essay is subject to laws that are not less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable.

According to Ulrich --- and Musil, I believe --- "there was only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live."

This long chapter on "essayism" attempts to make a case for one approach, the one most suited to Ulrich's nature.  Yet he is left uneasy:

Ulrich could not abandon himself to vague intimations . . . but neither could he conceal from himself that in all those years of scientific scrupulosity he had merely been living against his grain. He wished something unforeseen would happen to him, for when he took what he somewhat wryly called his "holiday from life" he had nothing, in one direction or another, that gave him peace. 

61 A Life Lived With Precision

In this chapter we learn that Ulrich is losing interest in Moosbrugger: "The depressing mixture of brutality and suffering that is the nature of such people was as distasteful to him as the blend of precision and sloppiness that characterized the judgments usually pronounced upon them."

This leads our narrator to discuss the idea of trying to live a life with precision.  What does such a life amount to?

It would more or less come down to keeping silent when one has nothing to say, doing only the necessary where one has nothing special to do, and, most important, remaining indifferent unless one has that ineffable sense of spreading one's arms wide, borne aloft on a wave of creation. One will observe that this would be the end of most of our inner life, but that might not be such a painful loss.

But what about the implications to our "moral life"?

It would be a useful experiment to try to cut down to the minimum the moral expenditure (of whatever kind) that accompanies our actions, to satisfy ourselves with being moral only in those exceptional cases where it really counts, but otherwise not to think differently from the way we do about standardizing pencils or screws.  Perhaps not much good would be done that way, but some things would be done better; there would be no talent left, only genius; the washed-out prints that develop from the pallid resemblance of actions to virtues would disappear from the image of life; in their place we would have these virtues' intoxicating fusion in holiness.

The narrator raises that point that this is a "Utopian" vision, a "utopia of precision."

The logical outcome of this should be a human being full of the paradoxical interplay of exactitude and indefiniteness. He is incorruptibly, deliberately cold, as required by the temperament of precision; but beyond this quality, everything else in him is indefinite.  . . . Ultimately . . . the passions disappear and . . . in there place arises something like a primordial fire of goodness.

This is roughly a description of Ulrich, the man without qualities --- though I question the assumption that what arises in him is like "a primordial fire of goodness."  It is something more like a sense of emptiness.  Here's how the argument ends:

This man, given to taking everything seriously and without bias, is biased to the point of abhorrence against the idea of taking himself seriously, and there is, alas, no doubt that he would regard the utopia of himself as an immoral experiment on persons engaged in serious business.

59-60 A Case of Diminished Responsbility

Secure though somewhat disgruntled in his new prison, Moosbrugger has time to reflect. And what does he reflect on?

Above all, he had to make a dignified exit, for his life had been a battle for his rights. In solitary, Moosbrugger considered what his rights were. He couldn't say. But they were something he had cheated of all his life. . . . Suddenly, he had it: "Right is justice." That was it. His right was his justice! . . . He had been cheated of his justice!

But how had this come about? He decides that "something was going on inside him that separated him by a hairbreadth from the natural order and was not quite steady."  Moosbrugger struggles with the effort to think about his condition.

He thought slowly anyway, the words gave him trouble, he never had enough words, and sometimes, when he was talking to someone, the other man would look at him in surprise: he wouldn't understand how much was being said in the one word Moosbrugger was uttering so slowly.

Moosbrugger hears voices and has visions, but dismisses them as unimportant.  For him, "the important thing was that it is not at all important whether something is inside or outside; in his condition, it was like clear water on both sides of a transparent sheet of glass."  His primary conviction was "that no thing could be singled out by itself, because things hang together."

In Chapter 60 the narrator sums up Moosbrugger's situation by saying he "was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility."

Was Moosbrugger sane or insane? Was he accountable for his actions or not?  Here we are in the situation of psychiatrists being asked to define a person's mental condition in a court of law.

They distinguish between incurable mental conditions, the kind [that] with God's help will improve after a while of their own accord, and the kind that the doctor cannot cure either but that the patient could have avoided . . . These second and third groups . . . the angel of medicine treats as sick people when they come to him in his private practice, but whom he shyly leaves to the angel of law when he encounters them in his forensic practice. 

Everyone in the court was convinced that Moosbrugger was insane, "but it was not in a way that corresponded to the conditions of insanity laid down by the law, so this insanity could not be acknowledged by conscientious minds."

It is about the difficult distinction between a moral being who has sufficient insight and will to be responsible for his actions -- and one who does not.  It is a question of Moosbrugger's insight into the morality of his impulses and what strength of will he has to "control" the impulses society (but not necessarily Moosbrugger) defines as "immoral."

58 In History There is No Turning Back

This chapter is really an extension of the previous chapters except that Liensdorf is now discussing his "qualms" about the Parallel Campaign with Ulrich.  Ulrich, of course, has his own quixotic take on the situation:

"After all, the Parallel Campaign is supposed to raise everyone's spirits, isn't it? Surely that is what Your Grace intended? . . . But the opposite is happening! . . . I have the impression it's make all the best people unusually concerned, even downhearted! . . .  whenever I get into conversation with someone it doesn't take three minutes before he says to me: 'What is it you're really after with this Parallel Campaign? There's no such thing nowadays as great achievements or great men!'" 

But Leinsdorf has his own concerns to express:

"I'm afraid it looks as though each individual may still be satisfied with himself, but collectively, for some universal reason, mankind seems ill at ease inside its own skin, and the Parallel Campaign seems destined to bring this condition to light."

Suddenly Leinsdorf finds himself saying something that "surprised no one more than Count Leinsdort himself": "In the history of mankind there is no voluntary turning back!"  The implications are disorienting to him, to say the least:

For one assumed that if there was indeed no voluntary going back in history, then mankind was like a man driven along by some inexplicable wanderlust, a man who could neither go back nor arrive anywhere, and this was quite a remarkable condition.

The chapter concludes with Leinsdort leaving Ulrich with what he hoped would be "some word of comfort": "A great experiment naturally makes everyone nervous."

* * *

This is a short entry, so I'll add a brief disclaimer regarding these blog entries as a whole.  I realize I've been primarily reduced to summarizing the plot and the ideas brought up as the plot "evolves." (I was going to say "thickens," but that sounds too melodramatic.)

I keep hoping for a lull in either the plot or the ideas, but Musil's novel is so massive and the ideas so tightly woven that I haven't be able to do much else but try to pin down things as they come up.  Perhaps later, I tell myself, I can comment on them.

For now, I'm just going to have to continue to go along for the ride and try to point out bits and pieces of the vast landscape that catch my eye as it flies by. Maybe that's all you can expect from a first reading of something so rich in comedy and thought.

55-57 The Strange Way of Great Ideas

In Chapter 55 we learn of another complication in Arnheim's situation: his servant, Soliman, has hated him ever since "he was promoted from the undefined status of pet kept in luxury to that of a servant with free board and lodging and a small wage." Soliman tells Rachel, Diotima's servant, exotic stories exaggerating his own importance and Arnheim's plans "to sell him back to his father for a staggering sum." Rachel is fooled by Soliman's stories, but she "believed them because nothing connected with the Parallel Campaign could be incredible enough."

In the meantime, as the next chapter's title states, "The Parallel Campaign Committees Seethe with Activity."  Count Leinsdorf, "even if His Grace was not in sympathy with everything they asked for . . . felt that the Parallel Campaign was in good order and clearly on its way."

Regard the flood of letters inundate the ministry we learn of the application of "magic formula: 'Fi.' . . . widely used in the Kakanian civil service," which stands for "Filed for later decision." The reason for this is quite simple: "We can't yes and we can't say no as long as we have no really firm idea what our central goal is."

But Diotima was not as sanguine a as Leinsdorf, especially in regard to her research of the Great Ideas that are to drive the campaign: "Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they turn into their opposites when one tries to live up to them."  Leinsdorf favors the slogan "Emperor of Peace," but Diotima goes for "Year of Austria."  Leinsdorf expresses his concern about Diotima's "idea" in this way:

"A Year of Austria is a fine idea, it seems to me, and I have in fact already told the fellows from the press myself that the public imagination should be steered in that direction. But once we've agreed on that, what d we do in this Austrian Year -- have you thought of that, my dear? That, you see, is the problem!"

But Diotima goes one step further:

"The campaign is no good at all unless it culminates in a great symbol. . . . It must seize the heart of the world, but it also needs some influence from above; there is no denying that. An Austrian Year is a brilliant suggestion, but in my opinion a World Year would be still finer, a World-Austrian Year, in which Europe could recognize Austria as its true spiritual home"

Diotima's "spiritual audacity" startles Leinsdorf, but when he asks her "What have you come up with to do in this World Year?" he is relieved to find out that Diotima doesn't know.

"Count," she said after some hesitation, "that is the hardest question in the world to answer. I intend as soon as possible to invite a circle of the most distinguished men, poets and philosophers, and I will wait to hear what this group has to say before I say anything."

Nothing pleases Leinsdorf more than the idea of a further "postponement" of the working out of the Great Idea.

53-54 An Unbridled Excess of Fantasy

After a brief glimpse into Moosbruger's thoughts as he is transferred to a new prison--"No one loves life who really knows it."--we settle into a three-way conversation between Clarisse, Walter and Ulrich.

Clarrisse begins by telling Ulrich that "Something must be done for Moosbrugger; this murderer is musical" even though she can't explain what she means. The conversation quickly shifts to a discussion of Arnheim and Ulrich's dislike of him:

"I'll tell you what I hold against him," Ulrich persisted. "Scientific man is an entirely inescapable thing these days; we can't not want to know! And at no time has the difference between the expert's experience and that of the layman been as great as it is now. . .  The experts never finish anything. Not only are they not finished today, but they are incapable of conceiving an end to their activities. . . . Can you imagine that man will still have a soul, for instance, once he has learned to understand it and control it biologically and psychologically? Yet this is precisely the condition we are aiming for!"

It curious to hear Ulrich, the man without qualities, talk about the soul as if he humanly cared about it.  When Walter accuses Ulrich of refusing "to be a human being," Ulrich declares: "There's no long a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general culture-medium."

Then it's Walter's turn to present his perspective:

"You're right when you say there's nothing serious, rational, or even intelligible left; . . . Everyone's brain is seized with this craving to become more and more rational, to rationalize and compartmentalize life more than ever, but unable to imagine what's to become of us when we know everything and have it all analyzed, classified, mechanized, standardized.  It can't go on like this." . . . "I have the feeling there will be a reaction of unbridled excess of fantasy."

The narrator steps in and says there "was a hint of cowardice and cunning" in Walter's remark. And when he made them he "was thinking of Clarisse's mysterious irrationality, and as he spoke of reason threatening to drive the irrational to excess he was thinking of Ulrich."

The chapter ends as the men suddenly stop arguing and watch Clarisse "in silence."  She looks back at the two men "amiably" and the narrator declares that they are "like exhibits in a glass cage."