No More Learning

Agathe: If anything happens to you: poison.
The shadowing presence of death suddenly becomes visible. One's
personal death, without one's having got anything straightened out, and ignoring which life stumbles on and continues unfolding its diversions. In the mob mood, moreover, everyone believes in giving up diversions for a long time. Isn't the final result for Ulrich something like ascesis? The Other Condition has miscarried, and diversions belong to the muta- tion of emotions? So that would once again be in opposition to the healthy life. An end of utopias.
Buildings-breathlike mass, condensation on surfaces that present themselves . . .
Freed from connections, every impulse momentarily deforms the in- dividual.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1759
The individual, who comes about only through expression, forms him- self in the forms of society. He is violated and thus acquires surface.
He is formed by the back-formations of what he has created. If one takes away these back-formations, what remains is something indefinite, unshaped. The walls of the streets radiate ideologies.
GENERAL REFLECTIONS (c. 1930-1942)
For the beginning
The stories being written today are all very fine, significant, profound, useful distillations and full of spirit. But they have no introductions.
Therefore I have decided to write this story in such a way that in spite of its length it needs an introduction.
It is said that a story needs an introduction only if the writer has not been able to shape it successfully. Splendid! Literature's progress, which expresses itselftoday in the absence ofintroductions, proves that writers are very sure oftheir subjects and their audience. For ofcourse the au- dience is involved too; the writer has to open his mouth, and the audi- ence must already know what it is he wants to say; if he then says it a little differently and in an unexpected way, he has legitimized himself as creative. So authors and public are generally on good terms today, and the need for an introduction indicates an exceptional case.
A small variation. I would not, however, want to be understood to mean that in my view the greatness of the genius is expressed in the greatness of the variation. On the contrary-the age of fools.
But we also do not want to overlook the fact that in writing introduc- tions a relationship with the audience can be expressed that is too good; looked at historically, this is even the way it has been most of the time. The author appears in his window in shirtsleeves and smiles down at the street; he is certain that people will obligingly look up to his popular face if he says a few words personally. It is enough for me to say that I have
1760 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
been spoiled far too little by success to hit upon such an idea. My need for an introduction does not indicate a particularly good relation with the public, and although, as is already apparent, I will make abundant use of the custom of talking about myself in this preface, I hope to be speaking not about an individual person but about a public matter.
Preface, first continuation
Many will ask: What viewpoint is the author taking, and with what results? I can't give a satisfactory account of myself. I take the matter neither from all sides (which in the novel is impossible) nor from one side, but from various congruent sides. But one must not confuse the unfinished state of something with the author's skepticism. I expound my subject even though I know it is only a part of the truth, and I would expound it in just the same way if I knew it was false, because certain errors are way stations of the truth. Given a specific task, I am doing what I can.
This book has a passion that in the area of belles lettres today is some- what out of place, the passion for rightness/precision. (Polgar [Alfred Polgar, writer and friend of Musil-TRANs. ]: Spare us brief stories. In saying that he writes a long one. )
The story of this novel amounts to this, that the story that ought to be told in it is not told.
Possibly: Adduce as well the principle of partial solutions, which is vital to the way I have set up my task. For instance Torless, Unions. The basis of many misunderstandings. The public prefers writers who go for the whole.
The term "essayism" is impossibly chosen ifone thinks for instance of Carlyle.
Readers are accustomed to demanding that you tell them about life and not about the reflection oflife in the heads ofliterature and people. But that is justified with certainty only insofar as this reflection is merely
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1761 an impoverished and conventionalized copy of life. I am trying to offer
them originals, so they have to suspend their prejudice too.
Mastering unreality is a program, so point to Volume Two, but as a way of concluding it is almost absurd.
Volume One closes approximately at the high point of an arch; on the other side it has no support. What moves me to publication (aside from Rowohlt [Musil's publisher-TRANs. ]) is what I have always done; today the structure of a work of fiction is more important than its course. One must learn to understand that side again, then one will have books.
Behind the problems of the day the constitutive problems, which are not, however, the so-called eternal problems.
This is not a skeptic speaking but a person who considers the problem difficult and who has the impression that it is being worked at unme- thodically.
Perhaps a preface at the end? A deferred preface.
A depiction of the time? Yes and no. A representation of constitutive relations. Not current; but one level further down. Not skin, but joints.
The problems don't have the form in which they appear? No. The problems don't seem modern. The problems of the present aren't mod- ern!
In the chapters on surface and precision I have sought to indicate how that works.
At bottom is the way the mind and spirit of an age are constituted. Here the opposition between empirical thinking and thinking with the emotions.
A glance at life teaches us that it is different. I am by neither talent nor inclination a "naturalist. "
There is a lot of talk here about an emotion that today apparently has no place in our lives. Ifthe visitors at a racetrack move in an instant from dissatisfaction with the way the race is conducted to plundering the cash receipts, and a hundred policemen hardly suffice to restore order, what then should . . .
1762 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
What would it mean, further, in a time in which new forms of states
. . . with power and older forms . . . with power.
Here, too, you will find wit and idea somewhat less responsive than they might be, badly informed, not up-to-date, at least three months be- hind. The significance lies less in the examples than in the teaching (ex- empla docent).
For example, the democracy of the spirit has already advanced as far as Emil Ludwig, while I am still depicting Arnheim-Rathenau. The schools as far as Minister of Education Grimm (the age of the great in- dividualists is past), while rm still with Kerschensteiner. The literature industry with looking for Bruckner. Sports at Schafer's radiant report that in the list of celebrities in the Borel he was far ahead of Jeritza. • -All this has not escaped me entirely. But I am slow. And I have inten- tionally remained with my old examples-here or somewhere ought to come, however, that I do not intend to be historically accurate-because I believe that investigating my examples will necessarily lead to the same result: (By doing this I lose effects but win anatomically, or something similar. )
Nevertheless, in what they yield these examples are not complete ei- ther. What ultimately emerges are major lines or only preferred lines, an ideal scaffolding from which the Gobelins hang, if I may call these sto- ries such on account of their flat technique.
Think of Grimm's speech. This is the way the world is moved, and, moreover, the struggle ofpower interests becomes ever purer. But your criticism, your problem, is directed almost exclusively at democracy. How do you defend this? You represent as purely as possible the inter- ests of the spirit and intellect, and can't help it that democracy, too, has partially taken them up in its program and makes fine phrases out of them. The things you're saying are prolegomena for every party, except of course for a party that is after fundamental change in a spirit that has remained unchanged for millennia. You are incessantly in motion be-
"Musil kept up with people and events. He had modeled those in the novel on ones of an earlier day and is ruminating on the possible effect ofthe march oftime on his noveL- TRANs.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1763 neath and behind the parties or, as people used to say, above them.
You're engaged in trying to find what's independent.
The request that I write an announcement meets with such obstacles in the case of a book with . . . pages, . . . chapters, . . . characters, and thirty-three times as many lines, ofwhich not a single one is intentionally empty, that I prefer to say what this book is not.
It is not the Great Austrian Novel people have been awaiting for ages, although . . .
It is not a depiction of the time, in which Herr . . . recognizes his spitting image.
It is just as little a depiction of a society.
It does not contain the problems we're suffering from, but . . .
It is not the work of a writer, insofar as · has the task (to repeat,
what . . . ) but as far as constructive variation.
One might add: Since the latter lies in the spirit of the totality, this book is idealistic, analytic, possibly synthesizing.
It is not a satire, but a positive construal.
It is not a confession, but a satire.
It is not the book of a psychologist.
It is not the book of a thinker (since it places the ideational elements
in an order that-)
It is not the book of a singer who . . . It is not the book of a successful
unsuccessful author.
It is not an easy and not a difficult book, for that depends entirely on the reader.
Without having to go on in this fashion, I think that after this I can say that anyone who wants to know what this book is would do best to read it himselfI not rely on my judgment or that of others, but read it himself.
1764 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES 1'esta~t. 1Votes
The unnecessary expansiveness. A function of the understanding.
Irony is: presenting a cleric in such a way that along with him you have also captured a Bolshevist. Presenting a blockhead so that the author suddenly feels: that's partly me too. This kind of irony, constructive irony, is fairly unknown in Germany today. It is the connection among things, a connection from which it emerges naked. One thinks of irony as ridicule and jeering.
Mysticism: One can only advise every reader: lie down in the woods on a lovely or even a windy day, then you'll know it all yourself. It is not to be assumed that I have never lain in the woods.
The hardest thing to bear: the current misery. But I have to do my work, which has no currency, I must at least carry on with it, after having begun it beforehand.
People expect that in the second volume Ulrich will do something. People know what's to be done. How to do it: I won't give the German Communist Party, etc. , any tips. Active spirit and spirit of action.
Why the problem is not an out-of-the-way one.
The practical (political-social) usefulness of such a book. (Avant garde. )
Wilhelm Meister was also well-to-do.
People want Ulrich to do something. But I'm concerned with the meaning of the action. Today these are confused with each other. Of course Bolshevism, for example, has to occur; but (a) not through books, (b) books have other tasks. Similarity with the war situation and the Min- istry ofWar Information.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 765 Quotes from Kerschenstein are used too. Arnheim. Lazarsfeld.
Forster.
Psychoanalysis!
Frame of mind directed against the present. Therefore, too, against narration, action . . .
That I conclude unfavorably, and precisely in this volume make the greatest demands on the reader, without making it easier for him by means of recapitulation in what happens later.
Also unfavorable structurally.
(There must be something about well-to-do people that lets them ad- mire Thomas Mann. And about my readers that they are people without influence. )
The religious today "represses" (that must be some kind of historical process). This book is religious with the assumptions of the unbeliever.
Always: An intellectual adventure, an intellectual expedition and voy- age of exploration. Partial solutions are only one way of expressing this. Here really and truly in a different condition of life. That's not why I'm describing it, but because it touches on a basic phenomenon of our mo- rality. Perhaps a writer can't say "basic phenomenon," but it has to be deeper than the superficial phenomenon. Then it is independent of de- velopments.
One tells a story for the sake oftelling, for the significance ofthe story, for the sake ofthe significance: three steps.
Aftenvord: This book had to be broken off before its climax because oflack of money, and it is uncertain whether it will be continued.
1766 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES For the afterword (and interim preface)
"An affect can induce a violent external action, and internally too the person involved can appear to be quite agitated, and yet it can be a mat- ter of a very superficial affect with little energy" (Kurt Lewin, "Re- searches on the Psychology of Actions and Affects 1," Psychologische Forschung VII, no. liz [1941-TRANs. ], p. 309). A sentence such as this has been made possible only by psychology's having become literary. But do we writers have a preliminary activity to fulfill? If we did, then in external nature our messiah would have been something like the geogra- pher or botanist! The problem first arises, of course, with the novel. In the epic, and also in the truly epic novel, the character derives from the action.
That is, the characters were embedded far more immovably in the action because the action, too, was far more of a piece. So how do I come to insert even a digression on psychology? In ten years it can be superseded and thereby outdated. But the weightiness of the step, the responsibility ofthe turning toward God, compels the greatest conscien- tiousness. As does the nature ofthe adventure in the inductive picture of the world. And that of the "final" love story. And that of the hesitation.
Kitsch: Inadmissibly simplifying the task of life in every situation. (Hence, too, the affiliation of certain kinds of politics with kitsch. )
Quite presumptuously: I ask to be read twice, in parts and as a whole.
One of my principles: it does not matter what, but how, one depicts. In the psychology chapters that's taken to the point of abuse.
Hence the observation belongs (where? ) that today one does not de-
scribe the automobile as a miracle but says: car, brandY, type X.
Moreover, in art one can also do the opposite of everything.
What is brief in relation to the whole, because the appropriate length becomes evident, can be considered long, indeed perhaps endless, if presented by itself. And the tempo is determined only as the sequence unfolds.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1767
About the chapters on the psychology of the emotions: this is not psy- chology (in its ultimate intention), but description ofthe world.
During my work on it and under my hand this book has become a historical novel; it takes place twenty-five years ago! It has always been a contemporary novel developed out of the past, but now the span and tension are very great; but still, what lies beneath the surface, which is one of the chief objects of representation, does not need to be laid sig- nificantly deeper.
If I should be reproached with going in for too much reflection, then-without my wanting to go into the relationship between thinking and narrating-today there is too little reflection.
There are too many people in the world who say exactly what must be thought and done for me not to be seduced by the opposite. Strict freedom.
It appears that much is superfluous, present only for its own sake, in the first volume. It is my view that narrated episodes can be superfluous and present only for their own sake, but not ideas. In a composition I place unpretentiousness above the so-called wealth of ideas, and-in"the case of this book there should be nothing superfluous. The statements about the joining together of emotions and ideas which this partial vol- ume contains permit me to establish that like this: The chief effect of a novel ought to be directed at the emotions. Ideas are not to be included in a novel for their own sake. And, a particular difficulty, they cannot be developed in the novel the way a thinker would develop them; they are "components" of a gestalt. And ifthis book succeeds, it will be a gestalt, and the objections that it resembles a treatise, etc. , will then be incom- prehensible. The wealth ofideas is a part ofthe wealth ofemotions.
Noted to be mentioned:
Anachronisms in general, and particularly that the representation of the psychology of the emotions stands between that time and today.
1768 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
Satire getting ahead of itself, procession, possibly Lindner. Excuse for theory: today we have to explain what we describe. Where?
Too heavy. Unsolved task ofmediating inStances.
For an expert, on the other hand, too unfocused!
H. F. Arnie! quotes von Csokor: "There is no rest for the spirit except in the absolute, no rest for the feeling except in the infinite, no rest for the soul other than in the divine! " This book is just as opposed to such responses as it is to materialism.
From a book that was a world success (S. Salminen, Katrina, from the Swedish, Insel Verlag S. 334-335): ". . . She pulled away from him to the wall, but when he folded her in his arms she did not resist. Only her soft, timid giggling sounded through the dark room. When Gustave saw Serafia with the other village girls on the street, he looked at her full of disquiet. No, no, it had all been ~ a dream, it had never ever happened. The whole night had been unreal. Yet a few days later, when, late at night, he was passing by Larsson's farm, the unreal came to life again and everything real became strange. He left the road, went across the yard, opened the door and stepped into the room. " (A rather idiotic, misshapen creature with lovely eyes, exciting mouth, and voluptuous breast. )
If I could just accustom myself to this a little, I could write such pas- sages too. It's the inception of a double world, of a double person-nar- rated. But I don't want to. Any talented person can carry on this tradition. And so I have rather attempted the unenjoyable. Someone, sometime, must tie the final knot in this endless thread.
This is, provisionally, still a matter ofanalyzing peaceful times, but the analysis of pathological times has its foundation here (and some aspects of this will come out in what follows).
What is boring for one person goes by too quickly for another; the expanse of a book is a relation between its actual fullness of detail and the interests of the time.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1769
Because a specific section, an adventure, needs to be narrated exten- sively should not make one forget that Ulrich was by nature energetic and a man with fighting instincts.
[Quoted by Musil in French-TRANs. ]: "This feeling is regarded by the Germans as a virtue, as an emanation of the godhead, as something mystical. It is not vibrant, impetuous, jealous, tyrannical, as in the heart of an Italian girl: it is deep and resembles illuminism. " Stendhal, De I'a- mour (p. 149)(chapter ,. . S), quoting an author of 18og (Voyage en Au- triche par M. Cadet-Gassicourl). (Invented? I don't know. ): So this book of mine is a little German?
That I cannot say what this book is, but rather what it is not . . .
A novel's major effect should be on the emotions. Ideas can't be pres- ent in it for their own sake. Nor can they-this is a particular difficulty- be developed the way a thinker would; they are "parts" of a Gestalt. And ifthis book sucCeeds, it will be Gestalt, and the objections that it resem- bles a treatise and the like will then be foolish. The richness of ideas is part of the richness of feelings.
Ulrich's afterword, conclusion
Idea from mid-January 1942.
Thought about the world's political situation. The great yellow-white problem. The coming new epoch in cultural history. China's possible role. On a smaller scale, the quarrel between Russia and the West. Hexner's question, how do you imagine it happening in reality, can't be put off. Even the man without qualities can't ignore it. But that would be a volume of historical, philosophical, etc. , essays, or the last of the volumes of aphorisms.
Moreover, influenced by my renewed interest in Dostoyevsky. Hastily noted the impression in a note for my style. I would like to write an essay about his "journalism. " About its interpretation by Zdanow, about Pan- Slavism, the Pushkin speech, etc. Before the current background it yields ideas about Russia that I have not even attempted to think through.
1770 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
This is not to be taken up in the second part ofVolume Two, although it is quite pertinent to it.
In this fashion concluding somehow and (instead of or after "A Kind of Conclusion") write an Afterword, concluding word, of Ulrich's.
The Ulrich of today grown older, who experiences the Second World War, and on the basis ofthese experiences writes an epilogue to his story and my book. This makes possible the union of my plans concerning the aphorisms with this book. It also makes it possible to consider the story and its value for current and future reality.
To be harmonized: the romantic or even Pirandellesque irony of the character above the author.
The story of the characters, considered historically.
Important: the argument with Lao-tsu, which makes Ulrich, but also my task, comprehensible, carried out afterward by Ulrich. Abdul Hasan Summun and Sufism. The story of Agathe and Ulrich would have been more impressive told as a story about him!
TRANSLATOR's AFTERWORD
Mustl's idiosyncratic prose style is unique in German. It is a me- dium intended to directly engage the reader's emotions as well as his thoughts in a search for the right life in the midst of a crumbling social order. Mustl's use oflanguage is virtuosic, and language itselfis one of his subjects: it is our vehicle for relating to ourselves and the world and for shaping and expressing both our moral sense and our culture. But language is unstable: "No word means the same thing twice," Agathe says in one place and the author in another.
Language, then, is much more than the vehicle ofThe Man Without Qualities; it is the lever that has the potential to raise up new worlds. This view of language has its roots in Nietzsche, who broke up the classical German sentence along with the attitudes behind it, and close parallels in Mustl's Austrian contemporaries Wittgenstein, Freud, Rilke, Kafka, and Karl Kraus. Mustl's language is radically experimen- tal: analytical and essayistic, but at the same time permeated with powerful feelings, it is a vividly metaphorical language designed to fuse "precision and soul" and to make the reader feel the fusion. It is a unique achievement. This translator often found himself comparing the style of the novel with the ways in which color, form, and light are variously used in Impressionistic, Expressionistic, and Abstract paint- ing in an attempt to create in the viewer an actual sense impression (including the medium ofthe paint itself), which is seen as somehow closer to truth than a writer simply "telling a story" would be.
Mustl's writing is striking and challenging, not comfortable, and in the Modernist vein makes few concessions to the reader, who is ex- pected to do some work. A translator usually looks around in his own language for a model on which to base his translation, so that readers will be able to relate the foreign work to something they are familiar with. Leishman and Spender did this in modeling the translation of
1 7 7 2 · Translator's Afterword
Rilke's Duino Elegies on the august tradition of the English elegy, with the result that Rilke's great cycle was domesticated (in every sense) in English. Unfortunately, Rilke, Musil's favorite poet, was doing something far more radical, disruptive, and astonishing with language than the Leishman-Spender model could encompass. But with Musil-all of Musil-one looks in vain in English for any equiv- alent. Lacking a model, the translator has to stick more closely than he otherwise might to the original, every nuance of which was weighed with great precision by the author. The translator's inten- tion was to have the writing startle the reader in English in the same way it startles a reader in German.
Musil was an experimental writer who was trained as a scientist (behavioral psychologist, mathematician, and engineer) and widely read in psychology and philosophy, so that his impressive literary style is not based on a literary formation. He often writes on a level of semi-abstraction that is meaningful and focused in German but that only produces indigestion in English, the most ruthlessly concrete of languages.
While the novel is analytic and largely essayistic, Musil devoted enormous attention to his characters. He puts himself into their minds: what would this person see in this particular situation, how would he feel, she respond, how would they talk at this moment? These characters speak in their individual voices ofbackground, social class, and profession as well as of personality and mood, and all their perceptions are encapsulated within their individual languages, their idiolects, without the characters themselves being aware ofit (as Musil makes the reader aware). Stumm talks like a general in the Austrian army he struggles to transcend; Fischel talks like a self-made business- man; Rachel talks like an uneducated servant girl with delicate feel- ings who yearns for "higher things. " Count Leinsdorf, the feudal aristocrat as influential politician, looks at the modem world through medieval eyes. The sex murderer Moosbrugger has a quite astonishing relation to language, one ofthe most subtle ventriloquistic effects in the entire novel. This is a function of his entire presentation, but for example the spin on Moosbrugger's ingenious distinction between Wetb (a loose woman) and Frau (a woman one can respect) is beyond translation, rooted as it is in both his sick imagination and the cultural
Translator's Afterword · 1 773
values of his time; and when he refers to Rachel's breasts as Dinger (those things), he is indicating his own inability-which also has cul- tural overtones-to confront the female body.
The narrator's essayistic language (that is, when he is speaking in his own voice), again differs from the characters', as the characters' language differs from individual to individual. The conflicts and mis- understandings on the level of language render vividly the ways in which the conflicted and dying culture of the old Austrian Empire, "Kakania," had become in every sense a Babel.
As a writer, Musil was an obsessive perfectionist and polisher, and his words have a poetic concision and a freight ofnuances that must be the despair of any translator. His sentences are rhythmic but often syntactically convoluted, reflecting the old Austrian culture, itself a huge catalog ofinfinitely nuanced gradations, that this novel memori- alizes with wit and wonder. It is simply not possible to render all these subtleties in English. There is also the problem of anachronism: al- though the novel opens in 1913, Musil began working on it in earnest only after World War I, and he was still writing when he died, in exile, in the middle ofWorld War II. So The Man Without Qualities is only ostensibly limited by its given year of 1913-1914. Writing after the collapse ofthe Austrian Empire in 1918 and through the Nazi period and World War II, Musil took subtle but full advantage of anachro- nisms of reference and language in order to broaden his canvas.
A grearhelp in translating was the discovery that Musil read his writing over aloud. Once the complex rhythms ofthis prose were un- derstood as spoken rhythms, in spite of the analytic and metaphoric incisiveness, it was possible to more closely approximate the original, whose hallmark in the polished sections is the cadence of clauses set offby semicolons. (Musil is the master ofthe semicolon! ) Paying close attention to the rhythm of Musil's German helped capture. _both the music and the unremitting sense of urgency that mark the original.
The material in Part z of "From the Posthumous Papers" presented different problems. It consists largely of unpolished drafts and fragments encompassing a wide range, from Musil's cryptic notes to himself to fairly worked out scenes. Care had to be taken not to "brush up" inadequacies and inconsistencies but to keep a sense of the relative finish of the different passages, while at
1 774 · Translator's Afterword
the same time making these fragments comprehensible to the reader. There were the mundane and not quite minor problems that al- ways bedevil the translator, exemplified in Musil's extraordinarily plasticuseofthepronounes (it),whichdartsinallsortsofdirections, often in flagrant disregard of the rules governing its use. Musil is fond of the term unheimlich, which is difficult to render in English; something that gives you a shiver is unheimlich, hence uncanny, haunted, haunting. spooky, weird-none ofwhich, however, capture the immediacy of the German word in its literary use. (It also has a casual and vague colloquial usage. ) Musil's most noticeable tic is the overuse of the phrase in diesem Augenblick (at this moment)', al- though it follows logically from his insistence on presenting his char- acters as living in a succession of particular moments, and this succession of moments consequently becomes at least the de facto organizing principle ofthe novel. There is also his use ofthe pronoun man, which was carefully kept, for the most part, as "one" in English, although its usual translation would be "you" or "we" or a passive construction. Musil uses man as a distancing device, to keep his nar- rator detached from the plane of the characters. This narrator re- mains as the experimental moralist above the characters, including
his protagonist, Ulrich.
I am grateful to many people for their assistance with the swarm of questions that arose in the course of my work. I would like to thank Dagmar Leupold for her patience in helping disentangle many im- penetrabilities of Musil's language. I also owe a debt to the cordial and tireless faculty and staff of the Musil Research Institute at the UDiversity of Saarbriicken for their help with textual cruxes, as well as to Musil's German editor, Professor Adolf Frise, for elucidating some places in the German edition that were not clear to me. Not least, I would like to thank my colleagues in the German, psychology, and philosophy departments at the Graduate School of the City UDi- versity of New York, whom I have often pestered in tracking down a word, terminology, or notion in their disciplines that Musil had ap- propriated for his purposes.