Ulrich Redux: Musils Design for His Man Without Qualities

Catharine Rising
American Imago, Volume 65, Number 4, Winter 2008, pp. 523-545 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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523 CaTHaRiNe RisiNg

Ulrich Redux: Musils Design for His Man Without Qualities

Critics have widely held that the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (18801942) would never have chosen an ending for his magnum opus The Man Without Qualities if he had lived. This paper argues that, on the contrary, he had a passion for one ending, the oedipal victory of his protagonist Ulrich von R over a pair of possible fathers, but that Musils own oedipal conflict worked against any such resolution. The attempt to depict either a sexual or a nonsexual triumph for the fictional son resulted in superego censure and work blockages. Musil clung nevertheless to the idea of a nonsexual coup, which had a powerfully topical resonance. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 ushered in a republican government with universal male suffrage; the change would have enabled his thirtyish hero to achieve a political career for which an older generation had run out of time. Sons, not fathers, were left to exemplify to the fullest the dictum of Cornelius Castoriadis that participation in democracy is essential to personal maturation. Musil died in the midst of a Sisyphean labor to bring his novel to this ripening. in The D. Case: The Truth about the Mystery of Edwin Drood (1992), by Charles Dickens, Carlo Fruttero, and Franco Lucentini, the Drood Case becomes the Dickens case when an international conference at Rome, having set out to complete Drood, becomes sidetracked into a finding that its author was murdered by Wilkie Collins. But the delegates focus long enough on Dickenss unfinished last novel to provoke demonstrations for the right of other aborted worksincluding Robert Musils large, loose The Man Without Qualitiesto completion. in 1942 the austrian novelist suddenly died, leaving his magnum opus (1930; 1933) unfinished after nearly forty years tinkering. a consensus of literary critics has, for a variety of reasons, ruled out the possibility of an ending if Musil had lived
American Imago, Vol. 65, No. 4, 523545. 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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indefinitely (Rogowski 1994).1 One influential reading traces a scotch in his creativity to an allegedly possibilitarian or essayistic mentality, an unwillingness to forgo alternatives (Musil 1930, 1013; Pike 1961, 7; Reiss 1982, 48; McBride 2006, 7274). The implication is that various tentative endings, shifting kaleidoscopically in his head, were more or less interchangeable. i will argue that, on the contrary, he had a passion for one ending, an oedipal victory shaped by the times in which he lived, and that his struggle to reach it ceased only with his death. Musil was a Freudian contemporary who declined to admit that he had an Oedipus complex, a neurosis popularized in his lifetime; like his hero Ulrich von R, he endeavored to pass as a feckless Man without Qualities. stefan Jonsson has cited him as a precursor of postmodernist and poststructuralist theories of identity as intrinsically lacking (2000, 23). Musil had asserted: if we attempt to subtract from ourselves those conventions conditioned by our time, what remains is something completely unshaped. . . . a person exists only in forms given to him from the outside. . . . it is social organization which through its forms gives the individual the possibility of expressing himself at all, and it is only through expression that he becomes a human being (1967, 165). Musil accordingly reduced Oedipus, whom Freud had described as the heritage of every human being born (1920, 226n1), to a short-lived fad. The novelists ostensibly lighthearted feuilleton Oedipus endangered doomed the complex to disappear in another generation or two as womens fashions ceased to give them the lap or womb from which the father was thought to have displaced the resentful infant (1931, 325). The basic experiences of psychoanalysis, wrote Musil, derive from the voluminous skirts of the 1870s and 1880s, not from modern ski togs and bathing suits. i dont see why the next generation should not just as happily want to return to the fathers womb. and then what? Will we get an Orestes instead of an Oedipus? (325).2 although Freud had long believed in the concept, his first published use of the term Oedipus complex did not occur until 1910. During Musils childhood, classical psychoanalysis was in its own infancy; thus Musil, born in 1880, could claim to have grown up without its core illness (1931, 323). indeed,

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he doubly denied the guilt of wishing to remove his father and possess his mother: (1) he had escaped the Oedipus complex altogether; and (2) if he had had one, the fault would have been societys, not his. even so, he appears on biographical evidence to have been a classically oedipal son. His diary entries show varying degrees of awareness that he is in fact sexually drawn to his mother. One note reflects an erotic response, only partly repressed, to her chinchilla fur: a smell like snow in the air mingled with a little camphor. i believe that there is a sexual element in this memory although i cannot call to mind anything at all that might bear on this . . . it must have been some kind of desire (1955a, 187). another entry, recording his response at the age of eighteen or nineteen to the sight of Hermine Musil on a diving board, is less inhibited: she was in her bathing-robe and had already finished her swim. she had not noticed how close i was. Without being aware of the movement at all she opened her robe in order to wrap it around her in a different way, and for a moment i saw her standing naked. she must have been at that time a little over 40 years of age and she was very white and full and beautifully made. although, to this day, it fills me with a certain appreciation, far more vivid is the shame-ridden and, i believe, angry horror that transfixed me then. (18788) a second memory from about the same agebetween 18 and 20 (396)reverses the foregoing impression of Hermine, thus negating Musils guilt. Here, the fortyish mother, now marked by an asexual physicality, a voluminous, non-transfigured shape, is incapable of producing oedipal longing (397). The sad and healthy truth is the opposite of ps[ychoanalysis]: the mother, physically repelling her son while she makes claims on his soul, is not an object of desire but a mood-barrier, a stripping away of . . . every desire for a woman (397). Nevertheless, Musil, who did not know which of two men was his fatherhis mothers husband or her live-in companion Heinrich Reitershowed a keen jealousy of Reiter, the bad or masculine half of a split father figure (Musil 1955a, 60, 456; Jones 1949, 13643). in a family photograph of 1888, husband

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and wife stand separated by Reiter, seated in the foreground as the centerpiece, while a sullen-looking Robert, placed farthest of three males from the mother, holds up an uncommonly long phallic staff (Corino 1973, 149). For the child in the photograph, an adult oedipal pattern would soon crystallize. His choice of mistressHerma Dietz, a working-class woman with the same first name as his mother but lower in social stationsuggests a Freudian need to degrade the love object in order to enjoy the sexual ease impossible with higher types resembling the mother (Freud 1912, 17887; Corino 1973, 16669). His selection of his wife Martha, a divorce six years his senior and one whose prior men had given him cause for jealousy, evokes Freuds special object choice: the inconstancy of a mother-substitute permits a fantasy of the actual mothers betrayal of the father, and thus her availability to the son (Freud 1910, 16472; Corino 1973, 16971). a major motif of The Man Without Qualities came to be oedipal conflict surrounding the mythical marriage of Osiris and his sister-mother isis, a union that Musil had said contained the novel in nucleo; unfortunately, its presence led to an intermittent but crippling work blockage (Musil 1955a, 423; Corino 2003, 987). The mother Musil remembered as seductive when she was middle-aged had been the most powerful person in his life when he was eighteen or twenty (Corino 1973, 163). Her replacement by the fictional sister agathe (Rank 1912, 36369) involved Musil in a choice he declined to make, between incest as idea and incest as reality (Corino 2003, 98687, 1086). On the evidence of the published portions of the novel, together with experiments preserved in the jumble of his posthumous papers (Nachlass),3 he tried to substitute for incest a second oedipal motif, that of triumphant nonsexual rivalry with the father(s). Of this ambition too his biography gives ample evidence. i will propose that the shift of theme entailed the plan of a political career for the novels hero, Musils persona Ulrich. Unhappily, as we shall see, the new plot also encountered superego resistance. Nonsexual competition with father figures had pervaded Musils stormy childhood. The boys fear of horses recalls Freuds Little Hans (1909, 3147); for Musil to become a ridergerman Reiter, the surname of his conscious paternal

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rivalwould signify impingement on a prerogative of adult males (Corino 1973, 14144). Within a few years, his branch of service would be the infantry; later still, however, he made his alter ego Ulrich a cavalry officer (1930, 3132). Through art, the Freudian compensation for an unsatisfactory reality (Freud 1911, 224; Musil 1930, 453), Musil in middle age reached back to equate himself with Reiter, the hated paternal component of his childhood. in contrast, alfred Musil in diary passages dated from 1937 to 1941 is the affectionately if patronizingly remembered good half of the split progenitor. Robert portrays him as a timid, disappointed man with a disinclination for, indeed [an] incomprehension of, politics (1955a, 476)an ineptitude that allowed the career of a state-appointed professor of engineering to become permanently stalled in the provincial dead end of Brnn. so much for the man through the eyes of his legal son. One must turn to biography for an appreciation of alfred Musil as a successful and highly respected pedagogue, commended, decorated, and later ennobled by the emperor Franz Joseph (Corino 2003, 88, 90, 576). Biographer Karl Corino identifies alfred as the original of Ulrichs father (2003, 403), an establishment lawyer propelling his son toward important contacts, who may consent to advance a thirtyish dilettante in the profession he does not yet have. The lawyer, undeniably a man with qualities, fires off a blast: The tendency you have inherited, though not from me, to make enthusiastic first strides in some new endeavor that attracts you, only to forget soon afterward, so to speak, what you owe yourself and those who have rested their hopes on you, and on the other hand, my inability to detect in your communications the slightest sign of a plan for your future, fill me with grave concern (Musil 1930, 77). There follows a warning that Ulrichs inheritance will not suffice to assure his position in society; he must make his own way. in the same vein of paternal rebuke, alfred Musil went farther. in 1910 he used his influence to secure for his son, whose writing had proved unpopular since the success of Young Trless (1906), a librarians post in the Vienna Technical University. Unaware or unconcerned that Robert detested librarianship, he rejoiced that an adult dependent consuming a third of the senior Musils income had at last achieved financial independence (Corino 2003, 317, 406, 418, 421).

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From parental oversight Robert was soon distanced by the First World War, in which he would ultimately be decorated for his editing of a military paper, the Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung. This honor, however, came after his dismissal from a company command, an episode of which he made light but that alfred elevated to a family disgrace (Corino 2003, 50613). Robert countered by offering himself as alfreds eventual superior. in a democratic society, a nonsexual prerogative of the adult males would have been political activity; but in Habsburg austria, the grown men in the Musil family photograph existed on much the same political footing as the child. From the beginning of his reign in 1848, the paternalistic Franz Joseph convened an austrian parliament only at his pleasure, and from 1914 to his death in 1916 not at all. The fall of the monarchy gave Robert Musil a displaced opportunity, through political leadership by Ulrich, to become in effect the parent of his elders. One remembers the social Democrat Karl Renner, a visible figure in the formation of an austrian republic after each of two world wars; the second of these creations still survives. according to a fragment of the Nachlass, Ulrich was to have survived the First World War and experienced the second before writing an afterword to The Man Without Qualities (1978, 176970). He has lived through the transition from the absolutist Habsburg regime to the First Republic (19181938), which universally enfranchised austrias male citizens. Musil neglected to detail his interwar activity; indeed, a novel originally slated to end with the outbreak of the first war, the conflict that brought down the dynasty, never reached the guns of august 1914. The triumph of sons in gaining the vote was still several years away. But when it came, they enjoyed a distinct advantage. The dictum of the revolutionary / economist / psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis presumably applied: participation in democracy is essential to personal maturation (1997, 13233). Castoriadis defines an infantile situation as one in which life is given to you for nothing; and the Law is given to you without anything else, without anything more, without any possible discussion. . . . someone who lives in society without any will concerning the Law, without any political will, has merely replaced the private father with the anonymous social father (196465, 16869). among those who have been newly enfranchised, a

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younger generation has more time than its elders in which, by Castoriadiss tenets, it can achieve maturity. When the Habsburg monarchy collapses in 1918, Ulrich von R / Robert Musil is still less than forty years old. Musils stated beliefs imply a defensive denial that he could be seeking self-realization through politics, for he refused his unequivocal support to any existing form of government. Typically, he admired the Russian revolutionary experiment but also dismissed Marxism as simplistic: it credited the bourgeoisie with a monopoly of all material and spiritual goods and pitted exploited against exploiters, while in fact between these two groups lay the gigantic layer of the bureaucracy (1955a, 264)including, during austrias transition from monarchy to First Republic, Musil himself as an adviser in the ministries of foreign affairs and defense. He attacked Nazism for its brutality and its abrogation of fundamental human liberties but praised Hitler for having united people, albeit on a low level (1955a, 37879, 381, 38283, 434). The attraction of unity for Musil wears at times a look of apollonian deliberation. The fractious austro-Hungarian empire was, after all, virtually ungovernable; the grinding defeat of the Central Powers in the First World War made power and solidarity appear imperative; the failure of Western democracies, Britain and France, to join in protecting Czechoslovakia against Hitler (48283) led into the second World War. Musils essay, Helpless europe (1922), makes order and discipline, expressed in a coherent overview of life, the Wests chief desiderata (133). But in his personal conflict of precision and soul (1930, 651), apollo and Dionysus, it is difficult to follow his drive for unity without noticing that the latter deity has sometimes routed the former. Perhaps only a man whose ideal was the seamless unity of a mystic vision could cite a mad overproduction of books and journals in postwar europe as a symptom of degeneracy, resulting from an inability to give the times any uniformity (1955a, 208). in much of the diary material, Musil appears temperamentally remote from a democratic norm in which citizens pursue their separate interests except when they join, at intervals, to vote on their government. One of his stranger monistic effusions is the following diary passage on sectarianism in capitalistic liberalism:

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Ulrich Redux it is essential either to dissolve, or to break the recalcitrant and usually narrow-minded stubbornness [of all these sophic cliques and Christian sects or even of the free spirit] (but democracy makes no moves whatsoever in this direction). This is the nature of N[ational] s[ocialism]. National socialism is right to take the crudest kind of action hereor at least partly right. if one wishes to criticize the movement for that, one must know some other solution! (1955a, 392)

Despite Musils self-image as a man without qualities, his friend Oscar Maurus Fontana found him a person of reliably firm character: he was by nature der Herr, the master (Corino 2003, 1290). His affinity for fascism has the look of a reaction to the same perception, which betrayed his need for oedipal supremacy. self-effacement was a ready defense against reproach by the superego. in a professed passion for oneness, he redefined himself as an other person since birth (1955a, 262). in his carefully analyzed other condition (anderer Zustand), one of ecstatic union, the i dissolves as something unnatural (319), intellectualized, voluntarized (320). For Musil, the individuals dissolution into an impersonal happening had actually occurred at the outbreak of the 191418 war, the mass effect of which he likens to religious experience. He attests to a general sense of something irrational but gigantic . . . alien, not of the accustomed earth (332), producing an ecstasy of altruismthis feeling of having, for the first time, something in common with ones fellow germans (271). in a primal (333) intoxication, people throw themselves in front of trains because they are not allowed to serve in the field (173).4 Musil himself is swept up for a time: The War came over me like a sickness, or rather like the accompanying fever (470), in which a near miss by a piece of metal signified baptism into a community of believers (184). as hostilities dragged on, mystic altruism tended to fade; heroes all too readily metamorphosed into war profiteers. But in afteryears, Musil asserted that Hitler, with a shrewd grasp of the times, had effected a continuation of the wars ideal of collective bravery through self-abnegation (1955a, 415)that Nazism was better able than democracy to satisfy the human

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need for a degree of emotional stability under the guidance of some idea (395). To test the results for the superego of merger with others, however, this writer who had a Jewish wife and who fled Vienna in 1938, the year his books were banned in austria, did not attempt to join the Nazis. instead he tried an ostensibly apolitical substitute, a private experiment to determine whether fusion could reliably yield the superior ethic he wanted to attribute to the Nazi movement. if, as David s. Luft believes (1984, 286), Musils marriage was transmuted into a love affair of his characters, Robert and Martha in their refugees garden in geneva become Ulrich and his sister, questing for the right attitude toward persons who walk past their garden fence in Vienna (Musil 1978, 139098). Their failure to transcend their ordinary, discrete selves anticipates the collapse in The Man Without Qualities of the mystical ideal, in both its personal and its political implications. as a political pis aller, there remained democracy, which Musil deprecated as based on mans ordinary condition, selfinterest. Nevertheless, he had written, however unenthusiastically, in his Political Confessions of 1913 that the future was democracy (33). Though flawed by a serious weakness, the decay of discipline, it was relatively human and civilized (1955a, 416, 488). Ulrichs creator himself physically opted for these qualities in 1938, the year of Anschluss, when he exiled himself from Hitler. in the Confessions of 1913, he had centered on democracy, unencumbered by a class system, as an enabling mechanism for the advance of science and for the implementation of an economic program to guarantee him a better life materially (33, 35); later he was faced with democracys essential contribution to his bare survival. Yet his public response to it remained as tepid as before. in Vienna in 1934 and again in Paris the following year, before the international Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture, he had argued for a separation of culture from all forms of politics. in the first address, he listed the preconditions of serious artistic activity as humanity, internationalism, freedom, and objectivity (1955b, 256). in the second, he refused to equate these desiderata with parliamentary democracy (1955c, 266). C. e. Williams sees a fallacy in Musils plea for artistic autonomy,

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coupled with a denial that such a position would imply support for a democratic political system (1974, 169). i suggest that Musil was well aware of the oedipal resonance of an emergence from absolutism to citizen participation in government, that he sought both to enjoy a vicarious victory over paternity and to placate an internal censor by shifting the onus of democratic activity to his creature Ulrichwho is, and is not, himself. Both men came from the dependent middle-class (mandarin) service group of the austro-Hungarian empire. Both had fathers who fitted into the imperial edifice; both despised paternal accommodation to a regime dominated by the aristocracy (1955a, 47374, 476; 1930, 810). Neither Musil (army officer-engineer-academic psychologist-writer) nor Ulrich (army officer-engineer-mathematician-?) settled easily into a career in the society that had rewarded, to a limited extent, his more adaptable parent. Musil needed a persona who was free to act, and who could bury the ignominy of the middle-class fathers. His diaries of the prewar period distinguish between himself and a hero named achilles, who was to do all those things from which reason and conviction hold me back (1955a, 226). achilles became Ulrich, who is not a writer or likely to become one (i was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell [1930, 535]).5 He thus exempts himself from Musils requirement that the creative artist remain politically disengaged. a quite different calling for this hero, his fourth vocation to date, looms in the Vienna of 1913 when Musil moves him into a farcical street arrest ending in police custody. He escapes only by heeding the summons of graf Leinsdorf, the elderly monarchist who has created the novels Parallel Campaign, to be its Honorary secretary6 and perhaps aid in the salvation of the foundering austro-Hungarian empire. From this point, what we have of The Man Without Qualities is overtly or covertly a consistently political novel. an imperial and Royal imperial-Royal Dual Monarchy resembling the Trinity in its mysteries (an austrian emperor reigns only as King in Hungary), this odd coupling is doomed to perish from its inexpressibility (1930, 490, 181, 491). Cutting across a historic austrian problem of militant nationalities is a newer dilemma: the political status of urban masses created by industrialization. Lamenting a lost Catholic and feudal solidarity,

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real or imagined, Leinsdorf seeks a unifying, modernizing idea to revivify the polyglot dinosaur he reveres as fatherland. as Honorary secretary, Ulrichs task is to hear and sift proposals from the peoplethat is, anyone who, like himself, ranks socially and politically below a still-dominant landed nobility. Following his appointment to this post, what we have of The Man Without Qualities in text and fragments offers a coherent, plausible line of psychopolitical development, culminating in a choice of democracy over fascism and the assumption by Musils hero of the active public role for which his birth and training have equipped him. This outcome for the novel would require the abandonment at some point of a major motif: a mystical utopia, the thirst for which has helped keep the protagonist on the fringes of actual living. i will argue that his failure to realize a private eden at last frees him to work in the real world. First, however, Ulrich as secretary must deal with the people as Habsburg absolutism, however moribund, has left them by the year 1913. Their typical member, once sounded by the Parallel Campaigners for an idea, reveals within himself a hitherto unsuspected crank. an opinionated man-within-theman goes with him to the office every morning and has absolutely no way to air his protest against the way things are done in the world; so instead he keeps his eyes glued to a lifelong secret point of his own that everyone else refuses to see, even though this cruxsay, the mental-health peril innate in certain combinations of block letters in shop signs, or the physical menace of open, tuberculosis-friendly salt cellars in restaurants, or the waste of life by an unreformed system of shorthandis obviously the source of all the misery in a world that will not recognize its savior (1930, 147). These contributions suggest a second thesis of Castoriadiss: democracy, which requires deliberating and self-reflective individuals for its functioning, tends over time to produce them; other systems do not (1997, 132). But the responses to the Campaign suffice to convince Leinsdorf that a great [democratic] force has been set in motion (Musil 1930, 242); it is one he hopes to contain but cannot ignore. given his superiors dash of reluctant populism, Ulrichs future as the peoples contact in the Parallel Campaign seems open-ended if on exposure to a source of energy new to him

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he decides to go in for politics. at thirty-two, Musils once detached hero is now exposed to malcontents whose reaction to political underrepresentation differs sharply from his own. He is cerebral, passive; in the examples given, they are passionate. in the juxtaposition of these traits, we are reminded of Musils or Ulrichs own program for the improvement of the world: a union of precision and soul, intellect and feeling, ratiod and non-ratiod (1930, 651; 1955a, 313). Ulrich has regretted (1930, 64647) that he could not achieve a synthesis of intellect and feeling in himself; he might, however, achieve a balance with others in some form of political action as a precursor of the peoples actual rule within five years, following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918. But he fails to offer his well-honed intellect to help channel any of their discontents into more propitious outlets than they have found for themselves. although he has defined himself as a prisoner waiting for his chance to break out (386) and has keenly resented the subordination of his bourgeois father, an intellectual aristocrat, to the aristocracy of horses, fields, and traditions (9), he has no conscious aspiration to become a popular leader. as he explains to the socialist son of his gardener, he has waited for changethe reorganization of mankind according to socialist principles in some form . . . the final chance that god has left to itto arrive without his personal intervention (1978, 1491). Despite his apparent disengagement, however, Ulrich once moved into the political arena never extricates himself by resigning his secretaryship. On the contrary, as the Parallel Campaign winds down for lack of its long-sought transcendent idea, he feels that he has never in his life really decided anything, that the time has come to do so, and that his crisis involves staying, or not staying, with its leaders (1930, 650). He suddenly proposes that Leinsdorf found, in His Majestys name, a World secretariat for Precision and soul (651). More accessibly titled, and stretched to mean popular participation in government without regard to nationality, this scheme, however ironically offered, might have provided a sufficiently unifying idea for the Campaign to underwrite. Musils intellect, playing upon the emotion of patriotism, had convinced him that nation was a fantasy (1921, 112).

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Ulrich, if he knows what he means, makes little attempt to explain it or to define his own possible role in such an undertaking. His treatment of his proposal as a throwaway is nevertheless conflicted. in his service to the Campaign, he has imagined himself to be simply toying with a gaggle of talkers; and yet, on the verge of a moment of truth, his will suddenly clung to them, kicking and screaming (1930, 654, 650). He has held to an endeavor both he and an osmotic narrating consciousness, neither wholly within nor wholly outside the characters, have treated as ludicrous. in muted form, a similar shift from detachment to concern occurred in Musil himself, once a finde-sicle dilettante. in his 1913 Confessions, he identified a spectator position as his own starting point: i never used to be interested in politics. The politician, whether a deputy in parliament or a cabinet minister, seemed to me like a servant in my house, whose job is to attend to the indifferent matters of life (32). But in diary entries from the period 191921, he expressed bitter regret that Woodrow Wilsons Fourteen Points had failed to secure unity: an other world almost came into existence (1955a, 273). Ulrichs parallel change from isolation to involvement is telescoped into a conversion experience both sudden and jolting to the subject. its urgency is compatible with the eruption of an oedipal self, breaking through superego resistance to a political ambition. The superegos aversion to oedipal rivalry is not, however, to be altogether mastered. Like Musil, who hesitated between democracy and fascism in the 1920s and 30s, Ulrich hovers between protodemocracy and protofascism in the doomed monarchical austria of 191314that is, between political action and political passivity. in Part 2 of The Man Without Qualities, he is drawn to both the comparative rationalism of the Campaign and the irrationalism of its opponent, Hans sepps mystic nationalism, which demands a Community of the Purely selfless (1930, 605). although Ulrich prefers keeping to himself, he cannot help being moved by sepps talk of a communal soul, a deep, immense source of vital energy, and of the dark warmth of the mass, its dynamism, the invisible molecular process of its unconscious cohesion, reminding [sensitive people] with every breath they take that the greatest and the least among them are not alone. Ulrich felt the same (607).

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ambivalent himself, Musil offers the Ulrich of 191314 three political choices, each represented by a female double.7 in a grammar of gender Luft (2003, 47, 18389) describes as pervasive in their society, rationalism is masculine; irrationalismin The Man Without Qualities, often manifest in the form of idealsis feminine.8 Hence the three women offer Ulrich three different ways of accepting a feminine component of himself, and thus of approaching more nearly the synthesis of intellect and feeling that he seeks. His influential cousin Diotima, of about his own height (Musil 1930, 299), embodies the world of his father with its confident expectation of progress under Habsburg rule. His siamese twin agathe, the other half of a Platonic divided being (1933, 985, 98082), represents in apolitical guise the mysticism that Musil saw as underlying Nazism. Ulrichs guilt-ridden friend Clarisse, whom he does not resemble physically but with whom he has a vague feeling of oneness (1930, 117), stands in demented form for the individuals assumption of responsibility, the basis of democracy. The first of these options need not detain us long. amid the pageantry of his fathers funerala rite attended by the emperors representative, the governor of the province, members of the austrian Upper House, to which the father had belonged, and the Rector and senate of the university at which he had taughtUlrich at the head of the procession can briefly imagine himself as the older mans replacement in service to the regime; the ceremony then becomes a coming of age for him who now took up the sword (1933, 771). But the solemn oedipal moment is almost immediately dissipated: Ulrich notes the incongruity of the Jewish undertaker who presides over a Catholic funeral; wonders if the dead man, who had put his body at the disposal of science, was cobbled back together with his medals in place; ponders the reaction of the examining medical students to agathes silk garter, hidden in the pocket of a closet pornophile. Ulrichs invitation to enter and compete in his fathers world is foreclosed by his sense that austria-Hungary and its rituals, however amazingly real they may at times appearand however pleasantly they enable him, now and then, to get off the train of timeare only historical debris not yet . . . cleared away (1930, 87, 28, 87).

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The short shrift given Ulrichs first option, service to the regime, contrasts with an extended treatment of the second in Part 3, into the Millennium. The death of Ulrichs father, who had expected him to find something useful to do, has freed this man of inherited wealth to put the Parallel Campaign on hold while he essays a private life. in the other human condition, he and agathe seek an answer to the one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live (1930, 275). in othernesscontrasted with mans ordinary condition of rationalizing, calculating, goal-oriented activity, estimating, pressure, craving, and base anxietythe boundary between self and world is relaxed, so that goodness and spiritual love can in theory enter (Musil 1967, 18586). Their presence is expected to yield an individual standard distinct from, and superior to, morality, which Ulrich, like Musil, treats as an arbitrary social construct (1933, 1112; 1955a, 31113), the mere expression of a particular time and place. But even under optimal conditionsa loving couple, a cosmic connection with nature in bloom, an affluent freedom from distractionthe mystical road to altruism becomes a culde-sac for Ulrich and agathe. it does not lead to the desired new ethic of love for mankind; unitary experience proves too fleeting to supply a sure guide to conduct.9 Practicing on a repulsive regular outside the fence, agathe hopefully quotes: Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. . . . if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off. But Ulrich, lapsed into the ordinary human mode, professing himself everyman, reverses the sermon: if his hand offend thee, cut it off, and if you smite someone on the cheek, give him a hook to the heart too, just to make sure (1978, 139798). as it turns out, mystical connection cannot be guaranteed even between Ulrich and agathe, two dedicated seekers of selftranscendence and an unreasoned ethic that cannot err. On an escape to a Mediterranean island, the experience of lost boundaries, lost identity, in an immensity of sea and sky produces exhaustion and fear, together with a need for ordinary chatter (1978, 145558, 146370). Ulrichs reaction is to redefine love as an act of defiance, an exclusion that depends on the existence of human society to be excludedor at least on the presence

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of a third person to observe and pass judgment. Love, he now maintains, cannot exist between two persons alone (1471). The failure of the Mediterranean idyll ends Ulrichs affair with his sister, whom he curtly advises to marry or take a lover of the ordinary, possessive, unmystical sort. For him, the wrench in the loss of paradise comes with the need to rebuild his life once his otherworldly reserve idea (1978, 1746) has collapsed. But since all the difficulties of ordering that life have revolved around the search for an irresistible love to bring him to the heart of the world (1535), the way now lies open to the masculine activitieswar, science, the conquest of nature, the shaping of historythat he had once imagined as his future, and that an authentic part of him has always craved. He has linked der andere Zustand to fixity, loss of power, sleep, and death (1387). He has daydreamed of agathe as a castrating queen; he has gleefully shot her piano to death (1514, 143536).10 We come now to the third anima, Clarisse, who is neither a yea-sayer like Diotima nor an escapist like agathe. Bolder than either, Clarisse has taken on herself a mission to end the worlds drift, its blundering into evil by simply letting things happen (1930, 386). in her progress from tolerated eccentricity to confinement in a sanatorium, her specific projects have included the freeing of the sex murderer Moosbrugger, soon to be executed by a legal system that lacks a scientific definition of insanity; the liberation of genius from the repression the world imposes on any person who displays it; and the rescue of humanity from the schism of love (1978, 1569) by the offer of herself and an unwilling greek acquaintance as hermaphroditic redeemers. Clarisse, having been molested as a girl by her father, might well be averse to sex; but as Philip Payne points out (1988, 192), she is probably also influenced by Nietzsches idea that sexual energy unused can be stored and redirected in this instance, to bring about social reform. Clarisse, as her husband Walter acknowledges, is better than we are for insisting that we all ought to change and have a more active conscience, the kind with no limit to it, ever (1933, 994). at the same time, her Nietzschean zeal is a reproach to menin particular, Walter and Ulrich, to whom she has looked for works of genius and who have not produced them. Musils narrator blames this dearth not so much on the laggards as on

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the sterility of the times they live in; Clarisse is less indulgent. Centering on Ulrich, with whom she intends to wrestle . . . for his soul, she complains: Theres no real energy in you (1930, 484, 386). Nettled, he puts up a defense: he practices, he says, active passivism (386). Clarisse tries another tack: he must father a child of hers who will redeem the world (1930, 720). Ulrich declines, leaving her the option of becoming the redeemer herselfin one draft, her eventual plan, with Ulrich as her apostle (1978, 154950, 1563). When he resists that solution alsoalong with an alternative, suicideshe tries to slit his throat for him (1566). Here he sends for her obliging husband to come and take her away. an elliptical note reads: Walter sees [Ulrich] lying on the ground. Wrecked person (1978, 1567). Ulrich in detaching himself from each of three political women shows apparent remorse only for Clarisse. Conceivably he feels some responsibility for her mental deterioration; it was his wedding gift, after all, that introduced her to the works of Nietzsche. sin, sacrifice, vicarious atonement, and redemption have figured ominously in her rhetoric and the narrators analyses. she regards Nietzsche as a second Christ and Christian Moosbrugger the homicidal carpenter as a third, sacrificing himself for the sexual sins of Walter and Ulrich (1933, 904; 1978, 1584, 1603, 161314). in trying to give herself to Ulrich, in order to be able to live with him and exorcize one more devil (presumably of autism) in him, she seeks the excitement of a tremendous sacrificial act (1560, 1548). Madness in Clarisse, lying like a forest Christ with her arms outstretched (1978, 1612), appears as the price of his assumption of an active life. if so, he might make restitution by becoming what she wants him to be, a responsible social being. By now, however, he has more than shame as an impetus to action. Of the twin trees or poles of his personality elaborated in The Man Without Qualities (1930, 64548), violence and love, the active mode and the mystical, he has tried and failed with agathe to make of the second a reliable means to either ecstatic union or ecstatic altruism. He appears to be left for the most part as Musil described him in notes for the unfinished second volume: by nature energetic and a man with fighting instincts (1978, 1769). appropriately, the utopia of the Other Condition has been replaced by an ideal of inductive thinking (1749).

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For Coleridge (1817, 452), the test of artistic power lay in the number of disparate elements a given work could synthesize. in the overdetermined direction i have indicated for The Man Without Qualities, democratic leadership as an outlet for Ulrichs energies would meet his fathers demand that he make a contribution to public life. at the same time, it would assure him of oedipal superiority in the novels family romance; moreover, it would enable him to make reparation to one of his female victims, Clarisse, who tried to imbue him with the severity of her own conscience. it might also, if he wants to implement her ideal of social justice, to realize what can be realized, assist him in reconciling his opposites: in the language of his time and place, intellect and feeling, male and female. To judge by his conversations with the proletarian socialist schmeisser (1978, 149093), Ulrichs allegiance as a politician would have been to the social Democratic party, which survived both austrian and german fascism to take power after the second World War (Brook-shepherd 1998, 25294, 311, 37781). Musil, though critical of socialist leadership, had supported the partys economic goals (Corino 2003, 898). He had also believed that schmeisser represented the only class capable of spiritually altering the human lot. stat[ic] morality, he wrote in his diary, can be derived from the economic order, from possessions. Workers, the only group of people who could break with this morality (1955a, 275). according to Martha Musil, her husbands first plan had been to make schmeisser, a popular front in miniature, Ulrichs replacement as secretary to the Parallel Campaign (Corino 2003, 896, 899900). The retention of Ulrich in this post suggests both the personas continuing interest in moral evolution and his continuing ability to stomach politics, which Musil had defined as the absolute opposite of idealism (1922, 125). Despite his distance in propria persona from political action and his reservations about democracy, Musil described himself as a fighter within dem[ocracy] for its future (1955a, 482). as such, his own effectiveness would relate to what he showed a fictional politician-hero as able to do. Clearly, he left room for Ulrich to make a difference. Like Castoriadis, Musil conceived of a creative social instituting imaginary (Castoriadis 1997, 131) that the individual creative imagination might be able

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to sway. and again like Castoriadis, he rejected any theory of historical necessity; rather, he anticipated late-twentieth-century chaos theory by attributing vast results to small causes. However, he went beyond the chaos of chaos theory, which seeks order in seeming disorder; he proposed that historical events, though not accidental, follow no particular law (1922, 122). He has Ulrich propound a Principle of insufficient Cause: everything that happens, happens for no good or sufficient reason (1930, 140). even so, Musil considered himself an optimist. instead of inexorable laws of history, attesting to the existence of an aristotelian First Cause, he saw only chains of circumstance, each link of which might just as well have been something else (1922, 118). and if it turns out that our innermost being does not dangle from the puppet strings of some hobgoblin of fate, but on the contrary that we are draped with a multitude of small, haphazardly linked weights, then we ourselves can tip the scales (122). History is set in motion by trifling causes (1930, 391). in fiction, one of these was to have been Ulrich himself, finally knowing, working, being effective without illusions,11 composing for The Man Without Qualities an afterword on global politics. in it we have Musils anticipations of a postwar world he did not live to see: east-West hostility, the changing course of cultural history, the Cold War (1978, 1756, 176970). This epilogue was to clarify the storys value for present and future generations (1770). But Musil at the end proved unable to write Ulrich, its supposed author, into history. To some extent, the novelist had endeavored to combat the famous work inhibition that made him the procrastinator of modern literature (Corino 1973, 214). He had sought relief by consulting first the eclectic analyst Otto Ptzl and then Hugo Lukcs, an adherent of adlers individual Psychology, which stressed rational self-help and self-analysis by the patient. Depth psychology was eschewed. Depite Musils lingering suspicion that his blockage required psychoanalytic treatment, he justified a more cursory approach by declaring that he had repressed nothing; hence he could not be suffering from the operation of unconscious mechanisms (Corino 2003, 98586). He thus rejected what Freud had seen as the greatest

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of scientific affronts to human self-love: the attempt to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind (1917, 285). specifically, Musil refused to possess an Oedipus complex, which by Freudian theory would have been intrinsically his, part of a developmental phasenot a creation of society.12 in these circumstances, for one reason or another, his writers block remained intact, or was lost only to be regained. still, he did not commit himself to a professional relationship with any Freudian analysteven his astute friend Ren spitz, who had startled him by predicting exactly how the second volume of The Man Without Qualities would begin (Corino 1973, 21112). Musils final, fatal stroke followed a period of depression over the novels prospects for completion but also an apparently satisfactory mornings work on the last day of his life, april 15, 1942 (Corino 2003, 1427, 1438). Corino surmises that his abrupt end left all the novels possibilities open, even that of dropping the vigorous Journey into Paradise draft (1978, 145073) from the 1920s. The last chapter on which Musil is known to have worked is the contemplative Breaths of a summer Day. as we have noted in its political connotation, mysticism overrides the self. in its oedipal connotation, it negates both avenues, the sexual and the asexual, to victory over the father; usual human concerns are eclipsed. But Musils ecstatic mergers were of brief duration. We may reasonably conclude that if he had lived, he would have returned to an old struggle with the veto power of the superego. He had already persevered, decade after decade, in writing and rewriting his masterwork, a sisyphean labor under threat of foreclosure by the unconscious mind whose existence he had denied. P.O. Box 1541 Lucerne CA 95458 Notes
1. The lack of an ending fostered a revival of interest in the long-neglected Musil. Once dismissed by the german academy as too intelligent to be a true creative writer (Musil 1955a, 444; Corino 2003, 798), he had died virtually unknown. But adolf Friss 1952 edition of his last novel, which acquired in Friss hands an ending in incest and war in 1914, fortunately raised a storm of protest from critics who believed Musil had intended a mystical outcome (Rogowski 1994, 2629).

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Other social changes were supposedly to assist the Orestes complex in driving out the Oedipus complex: freer education, the emancipation of women, etc. (Corino 1973, 225). 3. For an account of these addenda and their vicissitudes, the reader is referred to Pike (1996, xixvi). a comprehensive edition of surviving chapters, notes, drafts, and sketches relevant to The Man Without Qualities is available in CD-ROM form in german (Musil 1992). 4. The historian Hew strachan offers a more sober assessment on the reasons why men went to the First World War: the common denominator was passive acceptance, a willingness to do ones duty; enthusiasm was the conspicuous froth, the surface element only (2001, 162). 5. in amusing himself with the diplomat Tuzzi, Ulrich announces that if he does not soon feel the urge to write, he will kill himself for being abnormal (Musil 1930, 454). But he does not feel the urge to write, and does not kill himself. On the contrary, according to one sketch, he has also promised an uneasy cousin Tzi that he would kill himself before he yielded to the temptation to produce a book (1978, 1356). 6. The fictitious austrian campaign, in honor of Franz Josephs forthcoming seventyyear jubilee in 1918, was to insure that this event overshadowed a thirty-year jubilee, also due in 1918, for Franz Josephs upstart junior Kaiser Wilhelm ii. a jubilee may be defined as the celebration of an anniversary considered a milestone. Franz Joseph, who died in 1916, failed to reach his seventieth year as emperor. Wilhelm attained his thirtieth, but not amid much jubilation. Deposed within months by a popular uprising against the First World War, he abandoned his defeated country and fled to Holland. 7. in terms of sexual rivalry, each of the three, married to another man, offers the possibility of an injured-father figure (Freud 1910, 166); Hermine Tuzzi (Diotima) even bears the name of Musils mother. erotically Ulrich rejects each woman in turn. But i suggest that Musil meant him to borrow the activism of one as a basis for nonsexual competition with the father. 8. Luft does not comment on the difficulty of applying this generalization to the mystic nationalist Hans sepp. 9. Musil conceded that his own transports had been so short he could hardly remember them (1955a, 320). 10. The fictional agathe has reawakened a preoedipal fear of the mothera wariness that probably owes something to the violent temper of Musils own, whom he had dreamed of murdering (Musil 1955a, 456, 47576; Corino 2003, 28, 718). Yet his arrival at a stage of development in which he could have an Oedipus complex suggests that he had received good-enough preoedipal mothering from someone, perhaps a family servant (Winnicott 1956, 3005; 1958, 11617). 11. This uninspiring program, together with Musils definition of politics as the antithesis of idealism (1922, 125), may point to the master compromiser Karl Renner (Brook-shepherd 1998, 377; Loewenberg 1995, 11941), leader of the dominant or moderate wing of austrian social Democracy, as a model for the political Ulrich. For Renners lack of appeal to party idealists and revolutionaries, see Loewenberg (1985, 15152, 188). Musil, however, described himself as evolutionary, not revolutionary, in politics (1955a, 271). 12. He claimed to hold a position of stabilized ambivalence toward psychoanalysis, which he credited with one colossal civilizing achievement: it had enabled sex to be talked about (Corino 1973, 228, 229). But he consciously resisted all theories with claims to absolute truth; he also resented an infringement by the literate case histories of analytic pseudo poets on the turf of creative writers such as himself (230, 180).

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