Robert Musil’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The Man Without Qualities - Part II. Pseudoreality Prevails

The second part of a review of The Man Without Qualities

Part II follows the progress of what becomes known as the Parallel Campaign to organise the jubilee celebrations and introduces characters associated with the campaign. Ulrich is appointed secretary to the campaign led by Count Leinsdorf, a nobleman and patriot. Ulrich’s cousin Diotima, married to Section Chief Tuzzi, the only commoner in the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs, organises an influential salon attended by the wealthy and cultivated Prussian German businessman Dr. Paul Arnheim, closely modelled on the German politician and businessman Walther Rathenau (1867-1922), who was assassinated by right-wing extremists in 1922.

At the end of Part II, Ulrich experiences a number of unsettling sexual encounters. The first is with Gerda the unmarried daughter of the banker Leo Fischel, who has had a close but platonic friendship with Ulrich. Their relationship spirals out of control when she arrives at his house to inform him of Arnheim’s plan to use the parallel campaign to acquire Galician oil fields. Ulrich, sensing her desire to shed her virginity, sets about seducing her with little enthusiasm but at the critical moment, when he has undressed her and they are lying naked in bed, she panics.

… Gerda suddenly heard herself screaming. Like a little cloud, a soap bubble, a scream hung in the air, and others followed, little screams expelled from her chest as though she was wrestling with something, a whimpering from which high-pitched cries of ee-ee bubbled and floated off, from lips that grimaced and twisted and were wet as if with deadly lust. (679)

Abandoning any further sexual advances, Ulrich helps Gerda dress.  “She did not feel angry at him. She simply wanted never again to hear him say anything whatsoever. When he offered to get her a cab she only shook her head, pulled her hat over her ruffled hair, and left him without a glance” (681). Ulrich informs Count Leinsdorf of Arnheim’s true motives for supporting the Parallel Campaign and, as a street demonstration unfolds, the Count tells him to warn Diotima. At her house, Ulrich finds Arnheim waiting and both men use the opportunity to set out their competing philosophies of life. 

“I demand nothing at all,” Ulrich said. “Oh, you demand a great deal more! You demand that we live our lives in a scientific, experimental way,” Arnheim said with energy and warmth. “You want responsible leaders to regard their job not as making history but as a mandate to draw up reports on experiments as a basis for further experiments. A perfectly delightful idea, of course. But how do wars and revolutions – for instance – fit in with that? Can you raise the dead when your experiment has been carried out and taken off the schedule?” Ulrich now succumbed after all to the temptation to talk, which is not so very different from the temptation to go on smoking, and conceded that one probably had to tackle everything one wanted to do effectively with the utmost seriousness, even when one knew that in fifty years every experiment would turn out not to have been worthwhile. But such a “punctured seriousness” was nothing so very unusual, after all; people risked their lives every day in sport and for nothing at all. Psychologically, there was nothing impossible about a life conducted as an experiment; all that was needed was the determination to assume a certain unlimited responsibility. (693-94)

When Arnheim offers him a job in his firm, Ulrich is tempted. “’You certainly pique my curiosity,” Ulrich remarked. “Very seldom am I told I represent a gain of any kind. I might perhaps have developed into a minor asset in my special subject, but even there, as you know, I have been a disappointment”’ (700). Ulrich challenges Arnheim as to whether the true motivation for his involvement in the Parallel Campaign is the acquisition of Galician oil fields and his romantic interest in Diotima. 

Such is the key to the chapter “Die Aussprache.” Ulrich, the “Möglichkeitsmensch,” the experimenter, is tempted. An empire is offered to him, but it is an empire of evil; it is a world where ends justify means, where the buttons are always white; where human blood and sweat do not count as long as the purpose of the industrial dictator has been served. It is an empire which Ulrich must and does renounce in order to go on – in the remaining two volumes – to new, heightened emotional experiences. And it is in Ulrich’s rejection of Arnheim’s false unity, in the rejection of unbridled, rational experimentation supported by fraudulent mystical insights, that we recognize Musil’s main concern in the novel. This concern is the creation of a truly unified man in the twentieth century. Musil was shocked by the triumphs of the logical precise thinking that dominates our time and equally deeply concerned about spurious claims of so called “mystics.” He deplored the abyss between intellectual and emotional life in modern man. He felt that emotional life had been cramped: not only did it not keep pace with our scientific and intellectual achievements; on the contrary, it contracted and withered away under the burden of the machine age. (Braun 36-37)

Realising he will reject Arnheim’s offer, Ulrich walks home.

He had now reached one of those green spaces bordered by trees, a break in the Ringstrasse, which follows the line of the ancient city walls, and he might have crossed it in a few strides, but the broad strip of sky above the trees made him turn aside and follow where it was leading, seeming to come closer and closer to the festoons of lights so intent upon their privacy in the distant sky above that wintry park, without actually getting any nearer to them. (Musil, The Man Without Qualities 707)   

Ulrich then experiences a second unsettling encounter. He is propositioned by a young prostitute in a scene resembling that in Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (1926), turned into the film Eyes Wide Shut (1999) by Stanley Kubrick, when Doctor Fridolin visits the room of Mizzi, a young prostitute he had met on the street.

She spoke to him, using the threadbare words commonly thrown out as bait, which are like the dirty leavings of other men. She had a child’s sloping shoulders, blond hair was showing under her hat, and her face looked pale, even indefinably appealing under the lamplight; beneath her nighttime makeup there was the suggestion of a young girl’s freckled skin. She was much shorter than Ulrich and had to look up into his face, yet she said “baby” to him again, too numb to see anything out of place in this sound she uttered hundreds of times in a night. (Musil, The Man Without Qualities 710)

Momentarily tempted, Ulrich rejects her advances but pays her, whereas Fridolin’s offer of money is refused by Mizzi.  This incident triggers in Ulrich’s mind an imagining of the scene of Moosbrugger’s murder of a young prostitute.

When the housefronts on that street had stopped swaying like stage scenery for a moment, Moosebrugger had bumped into the unknown creature who had awaited him by the bridge the night of the murder. What a shock of recognition it must have been, going through him from head to toe: for an instant, Ulrich thought he could feel it himself. Something was lifting him off the ground like a wave; he lost his balance but didn’t need it, the movement itself carried him along. His heart contracted, but his imaginings became confused and overran all bounds, until they dissolved in an almost enervating voluptuousness. He made an effort to calm down. He had apparently been living so long without some central purpose that he was actually envying a psychopath his obsessions and his faith in the part he was playing! But Moosbrugger was fascinating, after all, not just to himself but to everyone else as well. (711)

Disturbed, Ulrich determines to take unspecified action.

“All of that has to be settled, once and for all!” Never mind what “all of that” was in detail; it was everything he had been preoccupied with, tormented by, sometimes even delighted with, ever since he had taken his “sabbatical” – everything that had tied him up in knots, like a dreamer for whom all things are possible except getting up and moving about; all that had led him from one impossible thing to another, from the very beginning until those last minutes of his homeward walk. Ulrich felt that he would now at long last have to either live like everybody else for some attainable goal, or come to grips with one of his impossible possibilities. (712)

On his return home, Ulrich unexpectedly finds Clarisse, who has just had a violent row with Walter over her refusal to have a child. Earlier in the novel, Clarisse had recalled a number of traumatic sexual events in her adolescence.

She put down the mirror and looked around warily, touching everything with her eyes to assure herself that she was alone. Then she felt with her fingertips through her robe, searching for that velvety-black birthmark that had so strange a power. There it was, in the hollow of her groin, half-hidden on the inside of the thigh and close to where the pubic hairs somewhat raggedly made room for it; she let her hand rest on it, made her mind a blank, and waited for the sensation she remembered. She felt it at once. It was not the gentle streaming of lust, but her arm grew stiff and taut like a man’s arm; she felt that if she could just lift it high enough she would be able to smash everything with it!  She called this spot on her body the Devil’s Eye. It was the spot at which her father had stopped and turned back. The Devil’s Eye had a gaze that pierced through any clothing, and “caught” men’s eyes and drew them to her, spellbound but unable to move as long as Clarisse willed it. (475)

She recalls the night, when she was around fifteen, that George Gröschl, a student of the famous philosopher Meingast, who was on holiday with her family, had sexually abused her younger sister Marion and herself.

After George had let her go he disappeared without a word, and neither of the two sisters could be sure that the other had experienced the same thing as herself; they had not called to each other for help or asked for sympathy, and years went by before they exchanged a word about the incident. (477)

During that summer, Meingast had taken to kissing Clarisse’s teenage girlfriends and then turned his attention to Clarisse.

In Walter’s absence – and in his jealous presence too, cutting Walter out and driving him to outdo himself – she and Meingast went through emotional storms and even crazier times, in those hours before a storm that can drive a man and a woman out of their minds, followed by the hours after the storm, all passion spent, that are like green meadows after a rain, in the pure air of friendship. Clarisse had let a lot of things be done to her, not unwillingly, but, eager as she was to know everything, the child had fought back in her own way afterward, by telling her licentious friend exactly what she thought of him. (480)

In a later chapter, Clarisse tells Ulrich that a year later her father, while staying with Clarisse and her mother at a castle he was decorating, became besotted with the owner’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Lucy, although Clarisse never discovered how far the affair developed. When Lucy abruptly left for Spain with her father, Clarisse’s father was distraught. One night he attempted to molest Clarisse, sleeping alone in a tower of the castle.

“With one hand he kept stroking my face; the other wandered around. Trembling, pretending it wasn’t up to anything, passing over my breast like a kiss, then as if waiting, listening for some response. Then finally it moved – well, you know, and at the same time his face sought mine. But at that point I pulled myself away with all my strength and turned on my side; and again that sound came out of my chest, a sound I didn’t know, something half-way between pleading and moaning. You see I have a birthmark, a black medallion—” “And what did your father do?” interrupted Ulrich coolly. But Clarisse refused to be interrupted. “Right her,” she said with a tense smile, pointing through her dress to a spot from her hip. “This is how far he got, to the medaillon. This medaillon has a magic power, or anyway, there’s something special about it.”  Suddenly the blood rushed to her face. Ulrich’s silence had sobered her and dissipated the idea that had kept her under its spell. With an embarrassed smile she quickly finished. “My father? He instantly sat up. I couldn’t see what was going on in his face; embarrassment, I suppose. Maybe gratitude. After all, I had saved him at the last moment. You must understand: an old man, and a young girl has had the strength to do that! He must have thought I was strange somehow, because he pressed my hand quite tenderly, and stroked my head twice with his other hand. Then he went away, without a word”. (318-19)

Clarisse recalls further acts of sexual abuse involving her younger sister Marion.

When she was four years old, Marion’s hands had to be tied at night, to keep them from slipping, in all innocence, under the covers, only because they were drawn towards a pleasing sensation like two baby bears drawn to a honeycomb in a hollow tree. And some time later Clarisse had once to tear Walter away from Marion. Her family was possessed by sensuality as vintners are by wine. It was fated, a heavy burden she had to bear. (475-76)

In the final chapter of Part II, Clarisse only offers formal condolences upon Ulrich reading a telegram announcing the death of his father, before informing him she wants to have a child with him. She then attempts to seduce him. Ulrich is tempted but restrains himself as he strokes her hair tenderly.  

But the opposite of what he intended happened, for Clarisse suddenly made a physical assault on him. She flung an arm around his neck and pressed her lips to his so quickly that it took him completely by surprise and he had no time to resist, as she pulled her legs up under her body and slid over to him so that she ended up kneeling in his lap, and he could feel the little hard ball of one breast pressing against his shoulder. … But at this instant he thought of Gerda, as though it was only now that he was facing the challenge to come to terms with himself. “I don’t want to, Clarisse,” he said, and let her go. “I need to be by myself now, and I have things to do before I leave.” (720-21)

After telling Ulrich that Meingast is coming to stay with her and Walter, Clarisse leaves.

Almost half of the year he had taken off to think was gone, without his having solved any of his problems. It flashed through his mind that Gerda had urged him to write a book about it. But he wanted to live without splitting himself into a real and a shadow self. He remembered speaking to Section Chief Tuzzi about writing. He saw himself and Tuzzi standing in Diotima’s drawing room, and there was something theatrical, something stagy, about the scene. He remembered saying casually that he would probably have to either write a book or kill himself. But the thought of death, thinking it over at close range, so to speak, did not in the least correspond to his present state of mind either; when he explored it a little and toyed with the notion of killing himself before morning instead of taking the train, it struck himself as an improper conjunction at the moment he had received the news of his father’s death! (722)

Works Cited

Braun, W. “The Temptation of Ulrich: The Problem of True and False Unity in Musil’s Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften.” The German Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1, 1956, pp. 29-37.  JSTOR, doi:10.2307/401166.

Musil, Robert. Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Qualities]. Translated by Sophie Wilkins, Picador Classic, 2017.