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.