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."