R & I met up at Kerttuli to discuss the next three chapters of The Man without qualities, that is, chapter 15 to 17, in which the spirit of early 20th century Austria is analyzed. As usually, the depiction of contemporary life is a contradictory affair, the only common denominator of which is very banal: either modernity appears as the big blessing or it appears to be a degeneration in relation to the purity and vigour of older times. What is most clear hear is that the concept of "a cultural revolution" (one of the chapters bears that title) is primarily an expression of an attitude, rather than an objective characterization. But Musil gives a few outlines of a description, anyway. "Talents of a kind that had previously been stifled [because the earlier era could not stand "eccentrics"] or had never taken place in public life suddenly came to the fore." But this is a bit later on counterposed with the assertion that modern society had embraced the avant-gard and that the avant-gard therefore could not be trusted as anything other than an expression of folksy taste.
The modern Austria has nothing to offer Ulrich. His talents (whatever they are) do not seem to have a function. "There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything; though you can't put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air..." Ulrich bemoans the mutation of stupidity into the reasonable (how stupidity nestles its way into the accepted). He believes in truth. "The truth [....] has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage." Ulrich, it seems, feels overpowered by the blandness of the times and in some undefined way (that is much harder to grasp than Walter's outlooks) he feels an aversion to modernity (Tennis playing ladies! motorcycles! racing horses bestowed with the quality of genius!).
For Walter, Ulrich's boyhood friend (whom he now feels distant from) the 20:th century has brought with it a destruction of purity and a destruction of "greatness". As we remember, both Walter & Ulrich are obsessed with greatness. None of them thinks they have achieved greatness, however, so both feel like losers, and both hold the other to be a lazy loser, too. For both, the lack of (meaningful) activity is intolerable. According to Walter, Ulrich is an expression of the modern times. Ulrich does not look like anything. In earlier times, Walter explains, there were different professions, all of them recognizable in their bearers' appearance. A doctor was a doctor and a painter was a painter. Today, only the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church has kept its traditional look while the matemathicians, who have gained such an important position, have no distinguished external marks. In other words, modern society is imbudie with a form of intelligence that has no distinguished marks, that floats around cloaked in different appearances. Society is cold and mechanized; "I came to the conclusion that in the old days, instead of death and mechanization, blood and wisdom reigned." Poor Walter. [How typical is it not that the degeneration of "modernity" is brought forward with an argument about the decline of professions, the decline of "honest work"!]
Walter is a sensitive spirit, for whom "the very act of moving his arm was fraught with spiritual adventure". He regards himself as a man of qualities, if only he would not have ended up in such a catatonic state, stiffened by anxious ambition. Ulrich, he says to his wife Clarisse, has no qualities, even though he "knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect and - yet he has none of them!" Walter considers himself to be an honest man, a man with a deep interest in art, while Ulrich's every action is set in contradiction. But, at this point of the novel, it seems as if Walter's self-consciousness is as riddled with illusions as Ulrich's. (In passing, I think about Kierkegaard & how he analyzes "wanting to be the person one is", "wanting to be a different person than what one is" in Sickness unto death) While the illusion of Ulrich is the twisted, grandiose belief in detachment, becoming a non-person, Walter's illusion consists in his idea that his emotional sensitivity is a guarantor of reality and of something genuine. He brags about his undivided mind (to allude to Kierkegaard again) - every mundane thing is granted the status of ethical movement - but Musil's depiciton of him indicates that his understanding of himself is dependent on the deeply deluded way in which he perceives the relationship between himself and society. He is fine, but society is depraved and decadent.
What Musil gets at here - it seems - is that there is a societal dimension of the way we are deluded in relation to ourselves, and that this will have a bearing for our perception of society & our place or lack of place in it. Is Musil a cynic? I must say I am not too sure yet.
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