Chpt. 38. In lots of places, Musil voices his critical stance towards all things "exstatic", "blissfully sensual" and "spiritual". This theme is given an especially forceful expression in Clarisse' and Walter's relation to music. Musil delivers lengthy descriptions of their perceived unity in music. "Clarisse and Walter were off like two locomotives racing side by side. The piece they were playing came rushing at their eyes like flashing rails, vanished under the thundering engine, and spread out behind them as a ringing, resonant, marvellously present landscape." Their feelings coalesce into one musical whole, but Musil twists this depiction around by questioning the authenticity of their feelings. As a matter of fact, their minds were both drifting in differing directions; the force of music influenced them in a hypnotic, rather than invigorating, way. It is all too evident that Walter enjoys the bliss of music as this seems to be the only way in which he can reach out to Clarisse. "She was firmly bound to him." Musil goes on to describe Walter's attachment to music as his escape to a cozy little womb in which the affairs of the world has no bearing on him.
Clarisse, for her part, is stuck with two ideas of herself. She wants to be the Florence Nightingale figure - for Walter, for Ulrich - and even for Moosebrugger the sex criminal. But Clarisse also aspires towards something Great. She has always imagined herself as aiming towards Greatness. But even though her playing has improved, and despite the heap of books she ploughed through, she is worried that all her knowledge and skills will somehow evaporate. Just like Moosebrugger, Clarisse is trapped: the marriage traps her. Walter is scared that she will break loose; her sense of intimacy with Ulrich frightens him.
In Chpt. 39, Ulrich once again mulls over the elusive notion of "quality" in a person. Every project undertaken by him is as it were pursued for no inner reasons whatsoever. He wants to act and every possibility to act should be seized but that does not mean that he cares about what he is doing. He cares about doing. He lives his life as if he himself comprises as set of qualities, which in turn he sees as external circumstances, a result of the situations he has found himself acting in. The only thing that matters to Ulrich is that his belief in his own strength is intact. Musil muses about the various attitudes we adopt towards "impersonal thinking". In a surgeon, detachment is a professional virtue, but a murderer who commits his crime in a particularly emotionless way is perceived to be all the more brutal. What is so disturbing about Ulrich is that in his mind, "personal" and "impersonal" have become super-concepts, signifying one thing in one context, another thing in another. But Musil wants to say that Ulrich's lack of personal responsibility or sense of self is not a personal problem characteristic of a specific psychological situation. He is, of course, having larger questions about the modern, Austrian/western culture in mind. "Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it that he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen..." Musil depict as dissolving "I". But the contrast he/Ulrich makes to people in earlier times who are like "cornstalks in a field" is both tired and contrived. Ulrich really thinks a lot about himself - an interesting fact about a man with a self-proclaimed Naked Intellect.
No comments:
Post a Comment