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."