No More Learning

We'll kill ourselves! Voices were singing in them like a chorus ofheav- enly storms: Do what you feel! I
Next chapter
I f they had done what they were feeling, in an hour everything would have been over. But as it is, they travel.
1736 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
1930-1934
Nations chapter
This chapter, as reminder of the world, inserted in the progression of the extremely personal chapters. Also works as antidote to the other life that Ulrich has devised.
Basic idea: presenting and ironizing "making everyone dance to the same tune. " (But deeper basic idea: Age ofempiricism. )
Extremes appeal more to the average person than does the strict truth.
Sketch for crisis and decision chapter
Preceded by: Ulrich-Bonadea
Ulrich stays behind; like a dog that has killed a chicken. Leaves the room briefly; Agathe comes in; she's had enough of Lindner; Peter pre- ceded her. Her thoughts and their result. This should be followed by a-not written-conversation to the effect that disavowal produced by the result justifies the crisis.
On the real and urgent level, Ulrich has to go on an errand. Agathe's attempt at suicide. Saved by Ulrich. Final resolve.
What is the resolve based on? What Agathe's attempted suicide?
Ulrich really ought to answer-in the sense ofSchleiermacher's moral indifference ofthe religious person-that the Other Condition offers no precepts for everyday life. You can marry, live as you wish, etc. Utopias, too, have not produced any practicable results. That's also something like the race of genius inside the race of stupidity. That also means: against the total solution and system. Against the sense of community. Adventure of rejecting life. But without going into the theory.
From the Posthumous Papers · z737
After the eruption he concedes: intimation and God, even if dubious. His real justification is fear ofthe sweetness ofthe three sisters [Agathe, Ulrich himself, and the Other Condition-TRANs. ], and so they decide to go away, and coitus is unarticulated. So, at least for the time being, he half abandons image and the like.
Agathe wants a decision the way youth does.
Ulrich: I have decided. Suicide year.
Agathe: Mysticism that could not ally itself with religion allies itself
with Ulrich.
Decision to be: instrument of an unknown goal.
Agathe: There is really no good and evil, but only faith or doubt. Let's
get away from all that.
Lacking faith, leave it to intimations. Ulrich rejects believing but fol-
lows intimations.
Agathe's depression: One main argument: The lawyer proposed she should have herself declared ill. She did the will on account of Ulrich, and now everything threatens to fall on top ofher. Lindner, too, she only treated badly.
She is for action (youth), but it also looks like this: Whatever one can object to about others, and also about God and the Other Condition, is a matter of indifference to her; she wants to live with Ulrich, thinks it's very bad ofher but wants to anyway, and ifthat won't work, then all that remains is badness and the end.
On Agathe's depression: According to Adler, the person inclined to- ward God is the person deficient in a sense ofcommunity-according to Schleiermacher, the morally indifferent person, therefore evil. Woman, too, is a criminal. True sympathy for no one but Ulrich. I have to love you because I cannot love the others. God and antisocial. Her love for Ulrich has from the beginning mobilized hatred and hostility against the world.
Note: this mood has the quality of magnanimity; she has to (can) re- member what Ulrich has said about it. It contains the continuation into life.
It has to happen with (undescribed) Clarisse! That's why not with Bonadea! Disturbance, interruption at the last minute. Ulrich knows that he has already given in.
I738 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
In this mood, God is the hypostasized need to believe. But it is not given her to see God. The mood is really a fulfillment of the Other Con- dition, but still schematically.
Differently: When Ulrich comes in again she recalls his aversion to defectiveness. Impels her to do it quickly, but also inhibits her.
Ulrich: experimental year. Is there enough for both of them? We will not kill ourselves until we have tried everything.
Addendum: Beliefcan only be an hour old. But then it is an intimation.
Missing: Ulrich's depression and possible grounds for suicide.
49 now so
CRISIS AND DECISION
Main point here: suicide attempt.
Content: Agathe hurt, feminine. Silly weeping, mindless weeping; but a fountain of the body, the body claiming its right. You have hurt me. As excuse: reading poems and newspapers. Insight: What is it then that I should give you? I could perhaps consent to it with a woman I love. In- wardly more than two people can be in love. Ulrich depicts what that would be like and confesses that he is too fainthearted for it. Ulrich de- velops the idea. Suddenly Agathe kisses him, and the kiss becomes sen- sual.
Between this chapter and the preceding there must be a briefsepara- tion, Ulrich's leaving the house or just the room. During this time Agathe's mood suddenly changes.
Description of a deep depression and the happiness ofsuch a resolve. (Clarisse's exaltation in 46 or 47 corresponds to this deep depression. ) Tentative r6sum6: Always did everything badly, beginning with fa-
ther, and one can't defend oneself because the defense is still worse (more stupid).
Ulrich manages to prevent her. Used as nwtives for the resolve:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1739
It is our destiny: perhaps we love what is forbidden. But we will not kill ourselves before we have attempted the utmost. Promise!
The world is fleeting and fluid: Do what you want!
We stand powerless before a perfected imperfected world. Other people also have everything that's in us, but they've shunted it aside without noticing. They remain healthy and idealistic; we skirt the edge of crime.
Loneliness: people who believe quarrel with God, unbelievers are getting to know him for the first time. There is no necessity in this. This world is only one of . . . experiments. God bestows partial solutions, cre- ative people do the same, they contradict one another, out of this the world forms a relative whole that doesn't correspond to any solution. Into the mold of this world I am poured like molten ore: that's why I never entirely am what I do and think: an attempted form within an at- tempted form of the totality. One can't listen to the bad teachers, who according to God's plan have constructed one of His lives for eternity, but must humbly and stubbornly entrust oneself to God himself. Act without reflection, for a man never gets further than when he doesn't know where he's going. (That is Agathe's influence! Ironic, but already anticipated by Count Leinsdorf. ) I narratively: Perhaps Ulrich reflects about this in a pause, so that there are no reflections at the end I
Over all a breath of Stella morality [Goethe's play-TRANs. ]. Other- wise he would have said literally the same things to Stumm and others. To be described more as mood and state than as idea. If they had now carried out what they were feeling, in an hour everything would have been over. But this way . . .
Poison as support. Confidence that this world, in which she feels in- complete, is not the only o n e -
On the suicidal mood: This sadness was like a deep ditch with slippery sides that had her going back and forth, while she heard Ulrich above, invisible and inaccessible, talking with other people.
When Agathe returned home, this took place at twilight, she looked around for Ulrich, but he had (after Bonadea's departure) left the house (for a while) in order to forget what had happened as much as he possi- bly could. She sat down in his study, laid her hat and gloves beside her on the sofa, and abandoned herself to the slow fall of darkness, which suited her mood. It was her intention not to visit Lindner so soon again, and she wanted to ask Ulrich's forgiveness for her ill nature.
1740 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Just then her fingers came in contact among the pillows with a hard, gently cwved, pronged object, and when she held it up to the light she recognized it as a small comb of the kind women wear in their hair. Bonadea had lost it. It quite confused Agathe's hands as they held it. She looked at it with parted lips, and the blood drained from her face. If the word "thunderstruck" means that all thoughts are struck out and the small house of the skull stands empty with opened drawers and doors, then Agathe was thunderstruck. Tears rose to her eyes without brim- ming over.
She waited vacantly-with few thoughts, which hardly tried to stir in her-for her brother. Among them was the thought that now everything was over, and the opposite one, that what she had stumbled upon was only natural and that she ought to have believed in it at any time; she appeared unable to grasp what lay between these thoughts until Ulrich should come.
When he came in, he immediately noticed the presence of someone else in the darkness and went up to his sister, who was the only person it could be, in order to greet her gently and ruefully. But Agathe asked him in such a voice not to come near her, but rather to turn on the light, that he turned on his heel. When light came on she held out the little comb to him with outstretched arm, and he read in her eyes what she did not say. Ulrich could have denied it; it probably would not have been credi- ble to explain her find through disorder, as something left behind from earlier times, and yet it would perhaps have deflected and softened the immediate effect: but he was overcome with remorse and made no at- tempt at denial.
Agathe got hold of herself and listened to him with a dismayed smile.
"Are you jealous of Bonadea? " he asked her, and wanted to stroke her face in order to turn the incident into a jest. But before it touched her, Agathe grabbed his hand and held it fast. "I have no right to be," she said. At the same moment tears began streaming from her eyes. Ulrich's eyes, too, nearly misted over-"You know how such things happen. "
Ulrich stays behind. Satiated like a beast of prey I Better: As he tells himself: like a dog that has torn a chicken to pieces and that on the one hand is oppressed by conscience, on the other contentedly suffused with having satisfied a basic instinct I Possibly: Remorse is nothing other than the collapse of a dominant affect brought about by the one competing with it I So he is predisposed to remorse.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 74 1 Second part
Finally they sat together for a while, held each other by the hands and did not trust themselves to either say or do anything. It had become quite dark. Agathe felt a temptation to undress without saying a word. Perhaps the darkness also enticed Ulrich to creep over to her or do something similar. Both resisted this energy of the sex drive that forms types of actions (or something similar). But Agathe asked herself: Why doesn't anything happen? /Why not . . . ? Something from the paradise conversation, so to speak: why doesn't he try it!
And when nothing happened she asked her brother: Don't you want to tum the light on now?
Ulrich hesitated. But then out of fear he turned on the light.
And then it appeared that he had forgotten something he had to take care of himself. It was evident that he had to take care of it, it would take at most forty-five minutes, and Agathe herself persuaded him to do it. He had promised someone important some information, and it couldn't be done over the phone. Thus even in this hour normal life inteiVened, and normal life was what it was, and after they had separated both be- came melancholy.
Ulrich became so melancholy that he nearly turned around, but con- tinued on; Agathe, on the other hand, became more melancholy than she had ever been in her life. In contrast to all the other times, this mel- ancholy seemed to her positively unnatural; she shrank back and even felt an inquisitive astonishment. Unnaturalness was a special kind of pe- culiarity. As far as this melancholy left any room at all for anything else; as it were like a shimmer at its margin. Profound melancholy, moreover, is not black, but dark green or dark blue, and has the softness ofvelvet; it is not so much annihilation as rather a rare, positive quality. This deep happiness in melancholy, which Agathe felt immediately, apparently has its origin in the relationship of single-mindedness and enthusiasm, that happiness is associated with the exclusive dominance of every individual emotion at being freed from all contradictions and irresolution, not in a cold, pedantic, impersonal way, as through reason, but magnanimously. All great courage and bad temper have the quality of magnanimity. Without having to think for a moment Agathe remembered where she kept her poison and stood up to get it. The possibility of ending life and its ambivalences liberates the joy that dwells within it. Agathe's melan- choly became cheerful in a way she found barely comprehensible as she emptied the poison, as the directions prescribed, into a glass of water I when she put the poison in front of her on a table. She fetched a glass
1742 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
and a bottle ofwater and put them beside it. In the most natural way her future split into the two possibilities of killing herself or attaining the Millennium, and since the latter had not worked, there remained only the former.
It was time to take leave. Agathe was much too young to be able to part from life totally without pathos, and to understand her properly it cannot be passed over in silence that her resolve was not, affectively speaking, sufficiently fixed: her despair was not without remedy, it was not collapse after every attempt had been made, there was always for her, even if at the moment it seemed obscured, still a second way. Ini- tially, her departure from the world was animated, like leaving on a trip. For the first time, all the people she had encountered in the world ap- peared to her as something that was quite in order, now that she was not to have anything more to do with it.
It seemed to her peaceful and lovely to look back at life. And besides, entire generations disappear in a flash. She was not the only person who had not really known what to do with her beauty. She thought ofthe year zooo, would have liked to have known how things would look then. Then she remembered faces from the sixteenth century she must have seen portrayed in some collection. Splendid faces with strong foreheads and far more powerful features than one sees today. One could understand that all these people had once played a role. But for that you doubtless need fellow players: a profession, a task, and an animating life. But this ambition to have a role was completely alien to her. She had never wanted to be any of the things one could be. The world of men had al- ways been foreign to her. She had despised the world of women. At times, she had brought the curiosity of her body, the desire of the flesh, in contact with others the way one eats and drinks. But it had always happened without any deeper responsibility, and so her life had led only from the desert of the nursery where it had started into a vague kind of happening with no borders. Thus everything ended in impotence.
To be sure, this impotence was not without a core: It was not only this world that God . . . World one ofmany possible ones . . . The best in us a breathlike (mass) that flies eternally like a bird from its branch . . . There was always a vision contained within her dislike of the world's authority. Indeed, more than a vision; she had almost got hold of it already: one comes to oneselfwhen . . . vanishes.
It is more than a seizure, this ob- scure twinkling . . . But it seemed to her not to make much sense to go over it again. All these experiences mixed up together echoed along with it, but they were not . . . before. They have something schematic and . . . real. It had not been given to her to see God clearly, as little as anything!
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 743
Without God, all that remained of her was the bad that she had done. She was uselessly besmirched and felt repugnant to herself. Everything, too, that she had just gone over had become clear to her only in Ulrich's company, become more than a nervous playing ofgames. She spontane- ously felt warmly grateful to her brother. At this moment she loved him madly.
And then it occurred to her: everything he had said, everything he still might say, he had debased!
She had to do it before he carne back. She looked at her watch. What a delicate thing its tiny hand was. She pushed the watch away. A gloomi- ness carne over her . . . fear ofdeath . . . dull, horribly painful, repugnant. But the thought that it had to happen-she had no idea how it had come in . . . horrible appeal. She found she had very little reflection left . . . inability . . . nothing but the idea . . . kill, and this only in the form ofthis sentence . . . emptiness.
She wanted to put her affairs in order; she had none. I'm not leaving anyone behind . . . not even Ulrich . . . She pitied herself. The pulse in her wrist flowed like weeping.
Ulrich was to be envied, when he struggled and worked. Possibly: He is marvelous just as he is!
But the sovereignty of her resolve calmed her. She, too, had an advan- tage. Whoever is able to do this . . . She felt the marvelous isolation with which she had been born.
And when she had emptied the powder into the glass the possibility of turning back was gone, for now she had committed her talisman (like the bee, which can sting only once).
Suddenly she heard Ulrich's steps, sooner than expected. She could have quickly downed the glass. But when she heard him she also wanted to see him once more. After that she could have jumped up and . . . downed the glass. She could have said something peremptory and with- drawn from life that way. But she looked at him helplessly, and he saw the devastation in her face. He saw the glass; he did not ask. He did not understand; the spark of excitement jumped over to him instanta- neously. He took the glass and asked: "Is there enough for us both? " Agathe tore it from his hand.
With the exclamation . . . ? . . . ? I've never loved anything besides you! "he clasped her in his arms. "
Or: not a word, [but] an action, an event! He collapses or the like. Horrified at what he has brought about!
Better: Ulrich's aversion against defectiveness. Suicide. But finally:
1744 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
one cannot make amends for anything but can only make them better. That's why remorse is passionate. For both. Suddenly one of them is struck by this idea and laughs.
I have decided. Experimental year . . . kill myself.
That is the resolution that is now impetuously carried. out.
But that would also mean, more or less: journey to God.
Perhaps in place ofthe rejectedjealousy chapter
The period of mobilization. Agathe had, in spite of it, had a carpenter called in. He might be a little under thirty, is tall and really built like a mechanic, that is, slender, with broad shoulders, dry; long, well-formed hands of great strength, and sinewy wrists. His face is open and intelli- gent, his hair dark blond and quite natural. His overalls become him. He speaks dialect but without roughness.
Agathe in the next room with him. Ulrich-lost in thought-has left. He doesn't want to be bothered by anything anymore. But then he turned around and crossed a garden terrace back into the house and into his room, without Agathe noticing.
He eavesdrops on the next room. The expression ofboth voices strikes him. The man's voice is explaining something: articulately, quietly, and with a certain superiority. Ulrich doesn't understand what it's about but guesses from his prior lmowledge and the sound of wood that it has something to do with a rolltop desk of Agathe's. It is opened and closed. The young workman demands Agathe's assent to a more comprehensive repair than she would like, and she makes uncertain objections. Ulrich lmows and understands all that. It must have something to do with a mystery of the old rolltop mechanism.
And suddenly it breaks loose from reality. For the conversation would have run exactly the same course if it had been a love transaction. The persuading, the easy superiority, the positing-as-necessary or it's-not- such-a-big-thing in the man's voice. As if it were for him a sexual im- provisation. And then that beloved voice! Resisting, intimidated, unsure. She would like to and doesn't want to. She yields, but here and there still stands firm. She says in an undertone: "yes . . . yes . . . but . . . " She's lmown for quite a while that she will yield. How Ulrich loves this re- strained, brave voice and the woman who fears everything as she does
From the Posthumous Papers · 1745
darlmess and yet who does everything! He would not have been able to bring himself to rush in with a gun and take revenge, or even call them to account.
Then a sigh of submission even comes over Agathe's lips, and the cracking of wood is deceptively heard.
And in spite of this being-happy-for-Agathe that Ulrich has dreamed through, he goes off to the war. But by no means with conviction.
QUESTIONS FOR VOLUME Two
Exposition of Volume Two of The Man Without Qualities
When I think of the reviews of Volume One [Musil is here referring to Chapters 1-123, which were published in 1930/31; Chapters 1--38 of Part III appeared in 1932i33-TRANs. ], I note again and again as some- thing they have in common the question as to what will or might happen in the second volume. The answer to this is simple: nothing or the begin- ning of the World War. Note the title of the major portion of the first volume: Pseudoreality Prevails. This means that in general today the personal givens of events are definite and delineated, but that what is general about them, or their significance, is indefinite, faded, and equiv- ocal, and repeats itself unintelligibly. The person awakened to aware- ness of the current situation has the feeling that the same things are happening to him over and over again, without there being a light to guide him out of this disorderly circle. I believe that this characterizes a major idea of the first volume, around which large parts of the material could be ordered. Above all, there is a continuity in that volume that permits the present period to be already grasped in the past one, and even the technical problem of the book could be characterized as the
attempt to make a story at all possible in the first place.
I add that what I have just referred to in other terms as the unequivo- cal nature of the event (of life) is by no means a philosophical demand but one that in an animal would already be satisfied, while in a person it
can apparently be lost.
This makes comprehensible that the major problem of the second
volume is the search for what is definitely signified or, to use another
1746 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
expression, the search for the ethically complete action or, as I might call it ironically, the search for 1 0 0 percent being and acting.
The more general investigations of the first volume permit me to con- centrate here more on the moral problems or, according to an old ex- pression, on the question of the right life. I attempt to show what I call "the hole in European morality" (as in billiards, where sooner or later the ball gets stuck in such a hole), because it interferes with right action: it is, in a word, the false treatment that the mystic experience has been subjected to.
But here I would like to stop burdening your desire for information with the impossible problem of philosophical window dressing and con- clude: Ulrich, who has traveled to his father's funeral, encounters in the house cleared out by death his almost unknown and unremembered sis- ter. They fall in love, not so much with each other as with the idea of being siblings. I greatly regret that this problem has a certain higher ba- nality, but on the other hand, this proves that it is the expression of broad currents. My representation is aimed at the needs leading to this expression. I contrast the two theses, one can love only one's Siamese- twin sister, and man is good. This means (the relation of brother and sister to each other is at first purely spiritual) Ulrich returns after a pe- riod filled with their being together in intense intimacy; his sister follows him, and they begin a provisional living together according to principles revealed to them, but they are disturbed by the attention of society, which is deeply touched by this act of brotherly and sisterly devotion. General Stumm reports on the state of the Parallel Campaign, which is fed up with the spirit and longs for deeds. Diotima, whose relation with Arnheim is cooling, busies herself with sexual science and again devotes more attention to her husband, Section Chief Tuzzi.
Feeling has never had freedom of association.
Fundamental idea: The first part turns out to be too overloaded, even ifconsideration did have to be given to the problems brought up in Vol- ume One. On the other hand, there was no way around them. What had been analyzed must somehow be summarized. Cf. , e. g. , the desire for a solution (Brecht) noted as justified in [a cross-reference-TRANs. ]. This coincides with Ulrich having in any event to build his life anew after the journey with Agathe, during which the "res~e idea" of his life has col- lapsed. So the connection to the ideas of VOlume One and their new
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 747 context is indicated from his point ofview also. This, whatever may hap-
pen in between, is the content of the second half.
Fundamental idea: The coinciding of the contemporary intellectual situation with the situation at the time of Aristotle. Then people wanted to unite understanding of nature with religious feeling, causal- ity with love. In Aristotle there was a split; that's when analytical inves- tigation arose. However much of a model the fourth century B. C. has been, this problem has not been admitted. In a certain sense, all philosophies, from scholasticism to Kant, have been, with their sys- tems, interludes.
That is the historical situation.
What prevails today is what Ulrich wants: every age must have a guid- ing idea about what it's here for, a balance between theory and ethics, God, etc. The age ofempiricism still does not have this. Hence Walter's inconsistent demands.
Fundamental idea: This furnishes Ulrich's relationship to the social sphere. Criminality out of a sense of opposition follows from this. Aims at the period after Bolshevism. Against total solutions.
Ulrich is, finally, one who desires community while rejecting the given possibilities.
Fundamental idea: War. All lines lead to the war.
Fundamental idea: Ulrich has sought to isolate: feeling-Other Con- dition. Now tries: deed-Moosbrugger. (An idea: he arranges things but is then drawn as a spectator only out of curiosity. ) Corresponding to the way he thinks. Finally, orgy of the contemporary horrible blending of qualities into the cultural type.