No More Learning

A question: How can one lose wars? (Stumm: That's something we lmow something about! ) Earlier: How could an absolute ruler miscalcu- late so badly as often happened? False intelligence, also lack of talent, will have played a role. But for the most part it was probably always a not-being-able-to-retreat, and the human quality that it is easier to as- sume the burden of a great remote danger than a smaller but closer one. Before one discards a city, rather than taking upon oneself a war that can cost one a province. Then the collective boastfulness; so great that no single person could achieve it, and there is no escaping it. Patriotism as affect instead of reason: the state is not conducted like a business but as an ethical "good. " Yet they are also manly affects!
But that doubtless happens as it should. What is striking is only that
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 755 the moral nature of the state has remained far less developed than that
of the individual.
The outstanding personalities of history are criminals: Ulrich's plans to become a Napoleon. But for the most part, criminal here means: anti- philistine, someone unconstrained. But they really were criminals: mur- derers, oath breakers, liars, tricksters, in a word: on principle, the historical personality can be credited with any iniquity: the mature per- son is confronted with this idea. And has less sympathy for it. An ef- feminacy?
In a criminal, affects outweigh the inhibitions (except when caused by environment or degeneration, weakness and such). But don't they in a man ofaction too? Revision ofthe reflections that are occasionally given to Moosbrugger? Clarisse?
The world calls for strongly affective, strong-willed leaders.
But compare it to the individual person: will and intelligence must be strong. Beginning miscreants later become self-possessed. I must have a note about this (cf. men of action and human deeds).
The valuation of historical personalities and deeds is a functional one.
Here, in distinction to historical and private morality, is an example of functional evaluation. Absolutely the paradigm, for translated into the private sphere the historical is positively disgusting.
1930-1942
Concluding portion
Overall problem: war.
Pseudorealities lead to war. The Parallel Campaign leads to war! War as: How a great event comes about.
All lines lead to the war. Everyone welcomes it in his fashion.
The religious element in the outbreak of the war.
Deed, emotion, and Other Condition join as one.
Someone remarks: that was what the Parallel Campaign had always
been looking for. It has found its great idea.
1756 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Arises (like crime) from all those things that people ordinarily allow to dissipate in small irregularities.
Ulrich recognizes: either real working together (Walter's inductive piety) or Other Condition, or from time to time this has to happen.
Agathe says (repeatedly): We were the last romantics oflove.
Ulrich possibly: the genius's needs and way of life are different from those ofthe masses. Perhaps better: . . . from the condition of genius and the condition of masses.
Individualist with the awareness of the impossibility of this viewpoint.
Doesn't go to Switzerland because he has no confidence in any idea at all.
Regards it as his suicide.
The collectivity needs a stable mental attitude. Its first attempt. Ulrich: It's the same thing we did: flight (from peace).
Ulrich at the end: knowing, working, being effective without illusions.
Something like a religious shudder.
The fixed and stable is disavowed.
Other Condition-normal condition will never be resolved.
Most profound hostility toward all these people; at the same time one
rushes around with them and wants to embrace the first person who comes along.
The individual will sinks, a new age of multipolar relations emerges before the eye of the mind.
Ulrich sees what a fascinating moment it was that never quite hap- pened between himself and Agathe. Ultimate refuge sex and war, but sex lasts for one night, the war evidently for a month, etc.
Amheim: The individual is the one who is fooled.
Agathe: We go on living as ifnothing were happening. Ulrich: Timid- ity before this robustness.
The priests: God's Officer Corps.
Overpowered by a ridiculous feeling for his homeland. Strives to re- gret, do penance, let himself be swept up. At the same time mocked.
Te deum laudamus.
National romanticism, displacement into scapegoats and love-goats. Nations have no intentions. Good people can make a cruel nation. Na-
tions have a mind that is not legally accountable. More properly: they have no mind at all. Comparison with the insane. They don't want to. But they have at each other.
Also a solution to: loving a person and not being able to love him.
From the Posthu1TWUS Papers · 1757
Anarchism couldn't prove itself even in love! Ulrich stands and acts under this impression.
In general the mob chapters, and within them especially Ulrich, de- pend on the as yet undetermined outcome of the Utopia of Inductive Thinking. But apparently it will amount to: struggling (mentally) and not despairing. Intimation reduced to belief, belief in an inductive God, un- provable but credible. As an adventure that keeps the affects in motion. Main idea. Circulation of the emotions without mysticism. Discovery of God in Kohler's fashion [Wolfgang Kohler, founder of gestalt psychol- ogy-TRANs. ], or on the basis of other ideas: God's becoming material. Intimation, Other Condition: someone else, who is better suited, might perhaps take these up. How one could force this on people: unimagin- able. Either leave what is hated to the age. Or work toward it, that is for it: write a book, therefore suicide, therefore go to war.
Once again the uppermost problem: To be advanced more concretely than both "Pseudorealities," therefore externalized: collapse of the cul- ture (and of the idea of culture). This is in fact what the summer of 1914 initiated.
Now it turns out that this was the great idea the Parallel Campaign was searching for, and what happens is the unfathomable flight from culture. Stumm might say that he is fleeing. All states claim to stand for something spiritual, which they don't define and summarily call culture. It turns out to be utopian in my assessments too. And that's what people no longer have confidence in.
In a certain sense, the entire problem of reality and morality is also the problem of drives. Of their running their instinctive course without result, their causing mischief; they must be controlled in order to pre- vent murder, usury, etc. But the counterproblem of being controlled is weakness of the drives, the paling of life, and how this is to be compen- sated for cannot be clearly imagined.
STUDIES FOR CHAPTERS (1932/33-1941)
Study for the closing session, and then Ulrich-Agathe
Beginning: No one wants to host the closing session of the Parallel Campaign. Finally, Count Leinsdorf: it ought to be ceremonial, not sim- ply a leaving in the lurch, decides to host it himself. Again the hall, etc. , as at the last meeting; but this time without the secretaries. And he
delivers the concluding address.
Beforehand people gather (ceremoniously) in another room. This
provides the opportunity (or also short conversations as they hasten away) of having the other characters pass by in review.
Reconciliation scene between Tuzzi and Diotima. Tuzzi: Now reason wins out. Does he mean that against pacifism? He means: Now the situ- ation is clearing up, perhaps: the situation that up to now has uncon- sciously hidden behind pacifism. And most profoundly: Reason belongs to the realm of evil. Morality and reason are the opposites of goodness. (Ulrich, too, might possibly say that, coming up to them. )
Then what dominates is: We are in the right; according to the rules of reason and morality we are the ones attacked: perhaps Count Leins- dorf's address. Everyone: We are defending what is ours (homeland, culture).
Arnheim: The world is perhaps perishing or entering a long hell- But perhaps Arnheim is no longer present.
Who? : The world would then perish not through its immoral but through its moral citizens.
Agathe: We go on living as ifit were nothing.
Ulrich: No. Suicide. I'm going to war.
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?