I. BEGINNINGS

As Virginia Woolf's Orlando drives out of London toward her country estate—at eleven a.m. on 11 October 1928, we are told—her view from the speeding car is a kaleidoscopic succession of fragmentary images: half-words of shop signs, red flashes of meat in butchers' windows, women passed so quickly “they almost had their heels sliced off.” Immediately, however, the description becomes a metaphor for an ultimate truth about the self:

This passage represents the first serious use of the word “identity” that I have found in its now prevalent sense of the self as a continuous something.Footnote ² Woolf's metaphor implies a complex understanding. The scene brings together in brilliant compression three distinct spheres: the psychological experience of self-fragmentation; the ontological condition of the self's insubstantiality that underlies its possibility, hinted at in Woolf's evocation of the sense of nothingness provoked by impending death; and the historical situation, the personal technology of speed widely available only after the Great War, that provides an occasion for the breakthrough of nothingness into everyday consciousness.Footnote ³

If the explicit language of identity was uniquely Woolf's in the 1920s, however, a deep-lying sense of the self's lack of substantial being was not. Other writers may not have used the word, but both the experience that Woolf describes and parallel analyses of its meaning and historical occasion are at the core of much European fiction, drama and philosophy in the decade. Woolf herself had probed identity more deeply three years earlier in Mrs Dalloway without using the word. She and André Gide, Marcel Proust, Luigi Pirandello, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Martin Heidegger stand as the discoverers of the modern idea of identity as fixed self-definition in their works of the 1920s. And the paradox which will haunt identity from then on is that it was discovered in the negation of its very possibility. In this essay I will examine that paradox in some detail for Woolf, Pirandello, Hesse, Kafka, Musil and Broch.

II. DEFINING IDENTITY

Nothing about the self would seem more obvious than the idea that people have, or seek, identity. Humans seem to need to define themselves as something, to be able to know and to say “who (or what) they are.” The term has so permeated popular and academic discourse that it seems always to have been a fixture of both. We speak readily in the university, the media and the marketplace of “identity crisis,” “identity politics,” “identity theft.” It would be impossible to count the number of recent scholarly monographs with the word “identity” in their titles. In fact, however, this sense of the word is relatively new. It came into common usage as a term of individual psychology only with the work of Erik Erikson in the 1950s, when he coined the term “ego identity” to describe an internal structure fundamental to psychological equilibrium, and the more famous “identity crisis” to denote the disturbances that disrupt the sense of self when that structure is not well established. And while American sociology had used the word in the 1950s to refer to an individual's social role, it was only in the later 1960s that social, political and literary theorists began extending Erikson's psychological conception to collective identities (though it had a crucial group component for him)—to gender, ethnicity, nation, race and religion—a process that not only encompassed ever more parameters of group identity but greatly expanded claims for its retroactive explanatory importance.

To claim its newness is to say that identity is not congruent with the idea of self that has become an object of reflection and investigation in Western thought since the Renaissance. It is also to say that identity as self-definition is different from the notion of “personal identity” that John Locke introduced in the seventeenth century and is today a much-debated topic in Anglo-American philosophy.Footnote ⁴

In his recent history of the Western idea of the self, Jerrold Seigel suggests that self and identity are “closely related” terms.Footnote ⁵ In an earlier work, Charles Taylor ties them more tightly together by making identity the necessary foundation of selfhood. Human beings, he claims, can only act within a set of (explicit or implicit) commitments and identifications. These provide the frame within which we determine from case to case what we endorse or oppose. Such frameworks make up our identity: “To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad . . . what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary.”Footnote ⁶

Taylor acknowledges that talking about “orientation” in terms of identity is historically recent. He attributes the innovation to the creeping relativism of Western consciousness. Our post-Romantic commitment to the value of individual uniqueness has meant that questions of moral orientation can no longer always be solved by appeal to universal values; important components of modern selfhood are particular to each self. But for Taylor there is also a supra-historical reason for thinking of fundamental orientation in terms of the question “Who am I?” Only seeing myself as a particular “who” enables me to place myself as an interlocutor among others with a particular standpoint or role, without which we could not act or communicate. Thus the space which our frameworks seek to define—that is, our identity—is “ontologically basic.”Footnote ⁷

There are problems with both of Taylor's explanations, historical and philosophical. His claim that the newness of the term “identity” points to the rise of relativism is partly true, though in fact those who first analyzed identity criticized precisely its apparent timelessness and absoluteness. In any case, however, the historical argument seems to undermine the philosophical claim of a necessary connection between identity and moral orientation. It can certainly be agreed that we necessarily exist in a space of questions about what to endorse or what to do whose answers depend on the context supplied by value frameworks. But that does not mean that we need see any particular framework as ontologically grounded. Taylor's argument slips from the idea of the ontological necessity of some framework to the objectivity or universality of particular frameworks. Thus his philosophical view of identity begs the very question that its first discoverers were consumed by: what is the status of those frameworks, and therefore of the self which employs them? What do we mean, what can we mean, when we say, we are this, or that? In Katherine Mansfield's metaphor, Hotel Self has no proprietor to give the residence a fixed identity. Its only permanent resident is a faceless underling who hands out keys to its many guests, a continuous but otherwise empty consciousness which exists only to acknowledge that an indeterminate set of different, equally importunate and transient, selves has legitimate claims on it. As Paul Ricoeur bluntly put it, “Selfhood . . . is not sameness.”Footnote ⁸

It is precisely the insubstantiality of the continuous self which marks the modern concept of identity off from that of John Locke. Locke had taken up the topic in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694) because his radical empiricism threatened to deconstruct the self into a discontinuous succession of transient sensory states. His famous solution to the problem was two-fold: self-consciousness, which always accompanies experience, and memory, which extends back to the consciousness of previous experiences; together these constitute “personal identity.” In Amélie Rorty's conceptual distinction, Locke was concerned with the problem of individual reidentification as distinct from the problem of individual identification. Reidentification denotes how one recognizes oneself as the same self in different contexts and at different times. Individual identification denotes the sorts of characteristics that identify someone as “essentially” the person she is, such that if those characteristics were changed, she would be a significantly different person to herself and to others, though she might still be reidentified by herself and others as the same human being.Footnote ⁹ Ricoeur makes a parallel distinction between identity as sameness or idem—stable character guaranteed by the permanent structures of habit and identification—and identity as selfhood or ipse—which does not depend on the continuity of any specific character traits.Footnote ¹⁰

Having rejected substance metaphysics, Locke would seem not to have any truck with the notion that the self could be “essentially” anything, but he was not engaging the psychological and historical concerns that give currency and significance to Rorty's category of individual identification. He could be content with a solution to personal identity that became the problem for writers of the 1920s because he was concerned with issues of his time, not theirs. His empiricism posed a serious problem for the self for legal, moral and religious reasons. If the self were not continuous, it could disavow responsibility for what it had done in the past; such a situation rendered morality, legal responsibility and sin nugatory. Thus Locke insisted that in his version of personal identity as continuous memory “is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment”; person “is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their needs, and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness and misery.”Footnote ¹¹ But it was the precisely the certainty of continuity without content that tormented the skeptics of identity in the 1920s.

III. IDENTITY BEFORE THE WAR

For a properly historical sense of what the insubstantiality of the self meant to the 1920s, however, it should be compared not with Locke but with the forms of identity that writers of the 1920s experienced as preceding them. Two vignettes from novels of the decade can give an initial sense of what their authors felt had been lost, for good or ill.

The first is from Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities (1930). Written during the late 1920s, it is set in Vienna in the last, still blindly un-self-aware year of Austro-Hungarian innocence before the deluge that destroyed the empire. An early chapter nicely titled “Even a Man without Qualities Has a Father with Qualities,” introduces readers to the protagonist Ulrich's father, his anti-type. He is a middle-class Viennese law professor who by dint of assiduous service as tutor in the houses of the high aristocracy had risen to become their legal adviser. Though now a retired member of the intellectual elite, professionally respected and independently wealthy, he remains fawningly subservient to “the owners of horses, fields and traditions.” They, for their part, while happy to use his services, “never regarded him as anything but the personified spirit of the rising middle class.”Footnote ¹² Yet despite the aristocracy's ineradicable condescension, Ulrich's father is completely at one with himself, never doubting the legitimacy of the existing social and political order or the appropriateness of his own place within it. Musil here sketches a picture of the quintessential European upper bourgeoisie which will reappear in later historical accounts of the “persistence of the Old Regime” in nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote ¹³ But he has also described the quintessential man of identity: Ulrich's father “sincerely venerated the state of affairs that had served him so well, not because it was to his advantage, but because he was in harmony and coexistent with it, and on general principles” (10). What matters to him, pace Marx and Weber, is not the material interest or social status his class position and belief system serve, but the self-definition they afford him. Ulrich's father is a solid and undivided self because he has a definite place in the Austro-Hungarian imperial and social structure sanctioned by history and God; more precisely, he is that place. It is against the ontological density of his father's identity that the ironic Ulrich, with no vocation, no reverence, and a sense of the utter unreality of Austria–Hungary, is indeed “The Man without Qualities.”

The second vignette, from Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927), involves an equally alienated protagonist in the postwar years who measures his new self-awareness against a quite different prewar reality. In a first rebellion against his bourgeois self, Harry Haller had come to think of himself as divided into two distinct and antagonistic parts, man and wolf. The “man” is decent, humane, cultured and orderly, the embodiment of all the nineteenth-century bourgeois virtues; the wolf is a wild creature of impulse, passion and destructive anger longing to tear up the fabric of society out of hatred for its very decency and lawfulness. Haller's irremediably bourgeois side can neither deny the wolf nor come to terms with it, and sees no way out but suicide.Footnote ¹⁴

The “Treatise on the Steppenwolf” thrust on Haller one night by a mysterious stranger articulates his putative man–wolf division more precisely than he had ever done for himself, then seeks to disabuse him of it. It ascribes the dualistic way of thinking primarily to artists, alluding to the “two souls” warring within Goethe's Faust, an integral conceit of the nineteenth-century cultivated German's self-image. But Faust's two souls evoke a Romantic conflict between the wish to embrace earthly finitude and the desire to transcend it. The division between rational human and instinctual animal that bedevils Haller was the more common trope of a prewar Europe-wide reaction against bourgeois rationalism. The nonrational might indeed be higher spiritual yearning, or “low” sexual and aggressive drives—or a confused intertwining of both—but its polarizing essence for the intellectual avant-garde was its unavailability to the conscious experiential range of the normative middle-class personality. Artist versus bourgeois, moralist versus immoralist, conscious versus unconscious, charisma versus bureaucracy, “life” against “intellect,” Apollo and Dionysus, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—over and over, in different but parallel formulations, art and thought in prewar Europe drew a dualistic portrait of humanity to subvert the false unity of the Victorian self-image. Whether enthusiastically embraced, vehemently rejected or, most often, regarded with deep ambivalence, the irrational was omnipresent in prewar avant-garde culture as the suppressed other of the bourgeois self.

To the “author” of the Steppenwolf treatise, however, this prewar dualism is false. It is but a paradoxical instance of the universal human need to create an illusory unity within the self. Even dualism is too fixed and bounded a formulation, though so pressing is the need for the illusion of unity that one who arrives at dualism is “almost a genius,” a rare exception to the normal way of self-deception. But however much a breakthrough, “two souls” is still an unacceptably limited account of the self. Man is not an enduring form but an infinity of possibilities. Not all that bites is wolf, and “man” is not exhausted by the bourgeois. The artist who dichotomizes fails to see that “this whole world, this Eden and its manifestations of beauty and terror, of greatness and meanness, of strength and tenderness is crushed and imprisoned by the wolf legend just as the real man in him is crushed and imprisoned by that sham existence, the bourgeois” (65).

* * *

In correcting Haller, Hesse was correcting himself. His own prewar novels had been constructed around the very dualism the treatise condemns. There is no better evidence for the radical novelty of the analytic of self in Steppenwolf and The Man without Qualities than the artistic trajectories of their authors. Both Hesse and Musil had written novels before the war which had brought them considerable recognition and whose fundamental premise was dualistic.

Hesse had actually used the wolf image to describe one side of the “split within myself” in his most popular prewar novel, Peter Camenzind (1903), but the animal there is more benign than the beast of Steppenwolf. Camenzind is a self-described “poet, wanderer, drunkard, lone wolf,”Footnote ¹⁵ a soulful melancholic from a village in the Alps who experiences early in life the infinite grandeur of nature. His talent for writing wrenches him out of his mountain idyll and sends him to the city, to higher education and the world of commercial publishing. He yearns to translate his “dispassionate” love for nature into great literature to convey to humanity the message of the oneness of all life, but is stymied by both personal shortcomings and the corruptions of modernity. The two are in fact one: the ambitious Camenzind, so consumed by his own individuality that he can surrender to nature only intermittently, has become the exemplar of modern commercial man. In the end, he returns to his village to look after his dying father, his magnum opus lying unfinished in a drawer. Peter Camenzind was part of the late upsurge of nostalgic nature-Romanticism in Germany in the early twentieth century in the face of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing society; at its core is the self divided between country and city, rural economy and capitalist industrialism, the modern striving ego and the timeless unity of the All.

The divided self in Musil's early work is darker, less vaporous than Hesse's sentimentalist, more like his wolf of the steppes; where Peter Camenzind gestures vaguely toward the higher regions, Young Törless probes the nether with a scalpel. The ambitious scion of an Austrian upper-middle-class imperial bureaucrat, Törless is sent to a prestigious military boarding school to prepare for a career in state service. In his unsavory friends, however, and within the psyche that drew him to them, he discovers shocking currents of sexuality, gender confusion and sadism for which the conventional life of his parents had not prepared him, which seem completely incompatible with it, yet are nonetheless part of him:

This is one of the most succinct evocations of the prewar dualism which for a later generation would be epitomized in Freud's topography of conscious and unconscious selves.

There is a jarring interpolation in the novel which suggests how disturbing this dualism was even to its discoverers. Well before the climax of Törless's descent into the world of “darkness, mystery and blood,” Musil breaks into the narrative to relate how, as an adult, Törless was able to integrate these “adolescent experiences” in a process of self-development whereby he came to understand their usefulness in reaching a higher level of maturity. Törless discovered that externally correct behavior, without any deeper interest “in the actual workings of law and morality,” preserved him from spiritual coarseness while allowing him a degree of irony towards both. He was able to gloss over the problems that agnosticism about moral truth presents because morality was not important to him; the only real interest that “aesthetically inclined intellectuals” feel, Musil editorialized, “is concentrated on the growth of their own soul” through absorption of new experiences (137). This variant of Bildung was modernist in its skepticism about morality and its subordination of ethics to aesthetics. By the early twentieth century the traditional concept of the ethical personality no longer seemed adequate to human reality. Nonetheless, by deploying the notion of Bildung at all, Musil offered the clearest demonstration of that human desire to unify the self that Hesse would expose in Steppenwolf, and Musil himself proclaim impossible in The Man without Qualities. From the perspective of the 1920s, the prewar exposé of the false solidity of bourgeois identity did not surrender the ideal of identity; not only did it preserve identity in a determinate dualism that would have been a comfort to the fragmented self of the 1920s, but it often aspired to overcome even that dualism.

Peter Camenzind and Young Törless belie the implication that to speak of prewar dualism implies a conflict of one-dimensional opposites. The other side of “the bourgeois”—who was indeed often stereotypically oversimplified for polemical purposes—was a diverse set of counter-selves whose only principle of unity was that each was the opposite of some presumed essential bourgeois characteristic. The irrational had many faces, dark and light. It could be the sexual, the perverse, the occult, the quest for transcendence, the primitive, the charismatic, the demonic—whatever was the opposite of positivism, materialism, self-interest and rigid moralism. Some of its versions did point in the direction of an utterly indeterminate self, but few if any drew the most radical inferences from such pointers. One way or another, the attempt to reconcile opposites under the banner of form, rational or aesthetic, was the prewar identity order of the day.

IV. THE ATTACK ON IDENTITY

The ontological language of this passage is one crux of Woolf's novel, the word “now” another. Once, Clarissa Dalloway would have taken for granted that everyone was “this or that.” The pivot on which time has turned into “now” is the Great War. This is true for all of the writers discussed here. But before examining why the war had this effect, I want to further explore their landscapes of non-being.

The recovered madman “Henry IV,” the eponymous “hero” of Luigi Pirandello's 1921 play, is a useful guide to the terrain. Pirandello learned much about the self's lack of stability from the paranoid delusions of his psychotic wife, but it was in his postwar masterpieces, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV, written in a hectic six-week period long after the onset of his wife's illness, that he generalized the special case of madness into a philosophy of identity. “Henry IV” is an Italian aristocrat who while playing the role of that medieval German emperor in a pageant was knocked unconscious and woke up believing that he was his dress-up character. For years he has been supported in his delusion by servants and friends; in his presence they dress in period costumes and play roles from the historical drama of Henry's conflict with Pope Gregory VII. But Henry has not been mad for much of this time. Long before the action of the play he awoke from his delusion.

The explanation he offers for continuing the masquerade is an analysis of the disorienting temporality of the self and the consolations of history. Though we are all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves, Henry says, we are always faced with the possibility of acting out of character. It is because of the chaos that lurks beneath the costume that we cling so tightly to it. But an estranging glance from someone whose recognition we crave—as Henry experienced from his beloved before the pageant—is enough to shake our sense of who we are. Henry took refuge in history, where the script has already been written and no improvisation is required. Though the historical Henry IV had been defeated and humiliated by Gregory at Canossa, the role provided “Henry” with the kind of certainty life denies. “And sad as is my lot,” he tells his servants on revealing his deception, “hideous as some of the events . . . still all history! All history that cannot change, understand? All fixed forever!”Footnote ¹⁷ Of course, Henry knew on awakening that he was playacting. But, he claims later, when he reveals his deception to the visitors who have come to cure him, he is saner than they because he at least plays his role with the lucid consciousness that it is a role, while they continue to live their madness, the illusory fixity of their roles, agitatedly, without knowing it (204–6).

Henry IV and Six Characters, in which fictional characters claim the same fixed identities as historical figures, present many of the essential features of the self without identity that are rehearsed throughout the literature of the 1920s. Identity is immutable; the self is forever changing. Identity is a unity; the self is a heap of fragments, a metaphor made flesh by the musician–magus Pablo in Steppenwolf's Magic Theater when he takes materialized pieces of Harry Haller's life and shows how they can be arranged and rearranged in an infinite number of configurations like the pieces in a game of chess. And the radical mutability of the self underlies the ever-present possibility of uncanny self-estrangement. “Nothing could be more different from myself than me,” says Edward in André Gide's The Counterfeiters.Footnote ¹⁸ The horror of self-estrangement is partly moral—Edward worries about the disintegration of his sense of responsibility that seems to go along with the “decentralization” of his self—but more fundamentally it is the horror of the “nobody” someone becomes to himself when he realizes that nothing he believed essential to his identity is so in fact. For Proust's Marcel, by contrast, as for Locke, the continuity of memory may indeed guarantee moral responsibility, but that is not enough to rescue us from the effects of the discontinuities that most powerfully fashion us, our loves, whose end means the end of “the selves which successively die within us.”Footnote ¹⁹

Even Pablo concedes that a human being cannot live in a fragmented state, that psychiatry, which labels self-fragmentation schizophrenia, is right to hold that the multiplicity of possible selves can only be dealt with in the framework of a coherent self-structure. But it is wrong in holding that only one binding lifelong structure is possible (192). The ordered self is a construction like the possible configurations of pieces on a game board, each yielding a different game. In a different spirit, but with similar self-awareness, Clarissa Dalloway sits before her mirror preparing for her party:

Clarissa's desire is to appear the perfect hostess; to that end she is the self-consciously deliberate performer of her identity.

Those who seek permanence, however, value social roles for their predeterminateness. Henry IV was drawn to historical role-playing because of the seductiveness of the notion that what happened in the past had to happen. The past is ineluctably there, like a thing; it must be the necessary effect of preceding causes. To act one's role, then, is simply to obey the law of cause and effect without having to make decisions: “You could have admired,” as Henry said about his behavior as emperor, “how every effect followed obediently its cause with perfect logic” (195). The Man without Qualities, however, has discovered another, opposite, law of history and identity, the principle of insufficient cause: “in our . . . personal lives, and in our public-historical lives, everything that happens happens for no good or sufficient reason” (140). Young people may plead inner necessity to justify their acts, but when they reach middle age they do not really know how they got to be what they are, how they came by their pastimes, their outlook, their wife, their character or their profession: “nowhere is a sufficient reason to be found why everything should have turned out the way it did; it could just as well have turned out differently” (137). Life is ruled by empirical accident and metaphysical contingency.

* * *

Alone of the works considered here, Kafka's The Castle (1924) took as its task to challenge the contingency of identity; the challenge's failure served only to confirm it. The Castle takes two existential steps beyond The Trial. At stake there was the law, and while everything about its instantiation in legal system and church was discredited by corruption or human fallibility, Kafka seemed in no doubt that a transcendent Law existed, however unreachable, and unreadable, by man. Both the proximate and ultimate proof of its existence is not its revelation but its effects—Joseph K.'s sense of guilt and his quest for justice. In The Castle the stakes are higher: the possibility of a transcendental foundation for human identity. And while the castle which presumably hired K. as a land surveyor also exists (and is also impenetrable), there are serious questions as to whether it really did hire him, whether it is inhabited by anyone with authority to do so, or whether indeed it is inhabited at all. Finally the only evidence is K.'s desire that it be so.

The metaphor of land surveyor is almost too obvious. K. wants to know “the lay of the land,” to define final and legitimate boundaries, and he wants sanction for his task from a higher authority. His first exchange with the castle, by telephone, is unpropitious. He hesitates to say who he “really” is because he is too easily intimidated on the phone, and announces himself instead as his old assistant. The voice on the other end initially rejects that self-definition, but when K. responds “Who am I, then?” the voice answers definitively that K. is indeed the old assistant. K. is only whoever he says he is.Footnote ²¹

That is not what he wants, of course, but he can get no other satisfaction. There is a letter, ostensibly from the castle, apparently confirming his appointment though without saying as what, signed only by an anonymous bureaucrat and delivered by a mere messenger. The letter is full of contradictions, and it is clear to K. that it has been left up to him to decide what to make of them, “whether he wanted to be a village worker with a distinctive but merely apparent connection to the Castle, or an apparent village worker who in reality allowed the messages brought by Barnabas to define the terms of his position” (24). Should he, that is, accept a real, socially defined identity as school janitor while continuing to allege some transcendental connection, or should he insist on his true identity as transcendentally sanctioned “land surveyor” while allowing it to be defined in reality by a villager whose only evidence that he represents a higher world is his own assertion?

K. never chooses between these equally unsatisfactory options. Instead he functions as janitor while continuing his endless battle for recognition as land surveyor directly from the castle. “What I want from the Castle is . . . my rights,” he insists (74). But this proves impossible. He can obtain no direct access to the authorities. The chairman of the village council, who has the executive power of appointment, judges the purported letter from the castle authorities to be a private rather than an official communication and refuses to appoint K. In fact, he informs him, K. has never really come into contact with the authorities; all his contacts have been merely apparent. In any case the wording of the letter implies that K. may not have been appointed at all, that he has been trying to foist himself on the castle, and that therefore “the burden of proving that you've been taken on rests with you” (70).

K. is not relieved of it throughout the novel, which ends inconclusively or rather, since it was never completed, appropriately does not end at all. K. never meets with Klamm, the castle official supposedly in charge of his case. The only promise of official connection with him is in the deposition that Momus, Klamm's village secretary, demands of K. But it will be filed in the village registry and Klamm himself will never read it—Kafka's droll hint that the only concretely tangible identity in this world is the bureaucratic. K. refuses to be interrogated. He remains suspended between castle and village. But that has dire implications for his sense of who he is. “You're not from the Castle, you're not from the village,” his landlady tells him early on, “you are nothing. Unfortunately, though, you are something, a stranger, one who is superfluous and gets in the way everywhere. . .” (48). Deliberate or not, the translation uses terms that have become familiar to readers of Camus and Sartre. Without transcendental recognition, one is ontologically superfluous, a stranger, at home neither within himself nor with others.

* * *

What complicates the sense of nothingness, however—because in life, unlike in a vacuum, the void is complex—is that, as Musil puts it in another of his playful–serious chapter titles, “A Man without Qualities Consists of Qualities without a Man.” Even as K. quests for transcendental recognition he has acquired a home, a position, real work and a fiancée in the village. The problem of not having a sanctioned identity is worse than just being empty; it is being empty and full at the same time. “One is,” Ulrich acknowledges, “undoubtedly conditioned by one's qualities and is made up of them, even if one is not identical with them” (157). As much as one may feel metaphysically nothing, contingently one is inescapably something, indeed many things. Living inexorably plunges us into situations in which we make choices and become emotionally attached. However we came to be constituted as we are, we are de facto instinctual bodies and social beings. Ulrich himself enumerates our contingent identities in what is probably the most detailed list to be found even in psychology or social theory today, after decades of theoretical identity-consciousness: “the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot” (30). (At least nine: Musil strangely omitted religion, though he had written extensively about it.) But however many identities a person might add, they do not add up to a whole. For as Musil says,

That tenth “identity” is the space between consciousness and all the others; it is what prevents us from ever fully identifying with any of our “characters.” The horror is that we can feel all the impulsions of desire and belonging while at the same time standing back detachedly observing our own passions, knowing that they are, in the ultimate sense, insufficiently compelling. But the reverse can also happen. When Henry IV sees his former lover's daughter, who resembles her mother, dressed as she was on the fateful day when she rejected him, his vaunted lucidity flees him. Caught up again in the passion that once gave his life meaning, he falls back into the very madness of identity he has just exposed to those who would cure him.

The space between consciousness and identity is our freedom, though a purely “negative freedom” (31, 35) which can be liberating but never fulfilling. This “inner freedom,” Ulrich reflects bitterly, “means knowing, in every human situation, what one doesn't need to be bound by, but never knowing what one wants to be bound by!” (285). A decade later Sartre will describe this freedom as the sentence to which we humans are condemned, catching the sense of Ulrich's despair at his inability to be motivated deterministically enough to overcome the necessary detachment of non-identity. Its ultimate emotional tragedy is the impossibility of wholeheartedness.

V. WAR AND THE UNMAKING OF IDENTITY

Musil's analysis was certainly intended as an exposé of the universal human condition, but unlike Sartre later he did not make it in a historical vacuum. On the contrary, he thought that the “empty invisible space” within the self had become apparent for the first time only under particular historical conditions. “Insofar as this can become visible to all eyes,” Ulrich claims, “it had happened in Kakania,” Musil's playfully obscene nickname for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the absurd contradictions in the structure of Kakania and the impossible self-definitions it demanded of its subjects that exposed them to the utter insubstantiality of their identities:

Who's on first? Given the manifest sham of Austro-Hungarian “identity,” it was little wonder that the introspective “Austro-Hungarian” could not believe in the reality of what he was told he was. That Musil and Kafka (and Hermann Broch, though his crucial novel is set in Germany) were Austro-Hungarian suggests how marked a site the empire was for the death of identity.

Nevertheless, Musil was only partly right. The breakdown of the link between particular national context and ontological identity went beyond Austria. And while it is true that Musil was already questioning what the empire stood for before the war, it was only after its postwar disappearance that he could fully see into the contradictions that had destroyed it, and expose what the novel called its “pseudo-reality.” In virtually every work examined here, the turning point with regard to identity, often explicitly evoked in the text, is World War One, whose fallout affected identity for “vanquished” and “victor” alike.

* * *

A sharp debate over the proposition that World War One gave birth to the characteristic spirit of the twentieth century followed on the publication of Paul Fussell's seminal The Great War and Modern Memory, which makes the claim that contemporary irony about fundamental beliefs originated in the disabused reaction to the traditionalist pieties which had sustained the war and its horrors.Footnote ²² While Fussell's materials are narrowly English, Modriss Eksteins makes a similarly large claim for Europe as a whole in his Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, though his modern spirit is not irony but Fascism's irrationalist vitalism and aestheticization of violence, offspring of the union between artistic modernism and total war.Footnote ²³ The other side in the debate includes biographers of modernist writers, who document in their subjects a deepening sense of crisis in European culture before the war and interpret their authors' reaction to the postwar disaster as confirmation of their earlier predictions.Footnote ²⁴ More recently the idea that the war was a seismic cultural event has been challenged from the opposite direction by Jay Winter, who argues in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History that Europeans mourned the war within traditional prewar tropes and frames of reference.Footnote ²⁵

The literary works examined here, however, and the authorial trajectories that led to them, clearly support the notion of radical change with regard to identity. Though Broch and others did share deep forebodings about the fate of European culture before 1914—as well as, in cases like Musil's, optimistic hopes for its renewal—the war's traumatic psychological and intellectual impact did more than simply accelerate the cultural decline they previously described. Just as some in the years before 1914 anticipated war but not the war which came, writers and intellectuals who lamented cultural decline did not foresee the qualitative change war would bring about in their diagnosis of the cultural problem of the self. The war desacralized a whole range of abstract collective identities—national or imperial citizen, cultured European, gebildete bourgeois, manly male, “eternal feminine”—which had served to furnish individual identities before the war.

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The war figures not just as background in Mrs Dalloway but as its other protagonist, directly in the figure of the shell-shocked veteran Warren Septimus Smith, obliquely in the novel's discrediting of the sacred symbols of Englishness. It is because Woolf did not believe in them that Clarissa can no longer believe in the reality of fixed identities. The disillusion of war had extended itself to the ideals used to legitimize it. As Nietzsche had once claimed about the inevitability of nihilism after the death of the Christian God, the untenability of one interpretation of the world upon which a tremendous amount of energy had been lavished awakens the suspicion that no ultimate interpretation of the world is true.Footnote ²⁶

Clarissa herself is not quite aware that she no longer believes in the icons of Englishness; she is still impressed enough with an official-looking closed car that possibly carries “the majesty of England . . . the enduring symbol of the state” to put on “a look of extreme dignity” when it passes her in the street (16–17). But she despises all ideologies and passions that can take one over so completely that they extinguish the capacity to be open and generous, to respond to and connect with “life” in its infinite, unclassifiable variety. Clarissa's specific aversions are personal: they are against those enthusiasms which threaten to make totalitarian demands on her or to seduce her daughter away from her. But they are also universal: “Love and religion! . . . How detestable, how detestable they are! . . . The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous . . .” (126).

Woolf goes beyond Clarissa. She is merciless at the expense of a range of essential English types: the fatuous aristocrat Lady Bruton who, needing a cause in middle age to replace the self-adulation of lost youth, has fixed on solving England's economic problems by getting young people to emigrate; the odiously smug psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw, for whom the therapeutic ideology of “proportion” is nothing but class-based disgust at the “irrationality” of the psychically ill, a device to isolate the disturbers of good society out of sight in country asylums while getting rich and famous into the bargain. But what takes these character sketches beyond Wildean satire to bitter revulsion is the implication of English identity in the moral, psychological, and ultimately physical destruction of Septimus Smith.

Observing a group of young boys in uniform, Peter Walsh, Clarissa's erstwhile suitor, admires the expressions on their faces that seem to read “duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England.” Earlier, passing the statue of a young duke, he had remarked to himself that the future of civilization lay in the hands of young men like that, “of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles” and books sent to them while serving their country abroad (50). It was that very love of abstraction that had made Clarissa reject him. And it was those same abstract principles, mediated through the eager improver of the lower classes Miss Isabel Pole, which had transformed Septimus from vaguely ambitious lower-middle-class youth to passionate lover of England's cultural heritage. As Fussell points out, the Great War occurred at a moment when the appeal of popular education was at its peak in England because it was imagined that the study of great literature would actively assist those of modest origins to rise in the class system.Footnote ²⁷ When the war broke out, Septimus was one of the first to volunteer, to “save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole.” He became the ideal British soldier, manly, dutiful, stoic. So perfect of type was he that when the only friend he had ever made, his commanding officer Evans, was killed, Septimus prided himself on feeling “very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime” (86).

The war was indeed a sublime teacher, but Septimus mistook its lesson. Irrepressible grief, however, and the war's revelation of the lie of Englishness have broken through his desperate effort to sustain his refusal to mourn. The nation was as much a lie as the official version of its culture. Shakespeare was not about “great language”; like all great writers, he revealed the loathsome truth about humanity, the truth that Septimus had discovered for himself, and about himself, in the war, but had fought to deny in order to be a good soldier. The truth was “that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs . . . They desert the fallen. They are plastered over with grimaces” (88–9). He was guilty like everyone else, foremost of not caring enough to mourn Evans; the death of one man could not be allowed to unman him for duty.

When she hears of Septimus's suicide at her party Clarissa must fight off a similar temptation. Her attraction to death seems quite different from his, but is actually quite similar. Septimus killed himself to avoid being locked away by Bradshaw's hypocritical ideals, which denied the legitimacy of his suffering and his message. Knowing nothing of Septimus, Clarissa nonetheless scents, projecting her own self-knowledge, that his death was an act of defiance in the name of an obscure truth: “Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death” (184). Clarissa does not kill herself—though Woolf later wrote that she had originally intended to have her either do so or die after the party.Footnote ²⁸ Instead, Woolf had Clarissa find a counter to death in the party itself, in the communicative sociability, the connectedness, which is for her the deeper reality of its superficial frivolity. But the truth that makes death tempting to her in the first place, the realization that because of the absence of a common center one is ultimately alone, is the result of the collapse of that center in the war. If the center “mystically” evades people, it is because it no longer exists in a believable form. Since it was the center, its collapse makes it impossible to believe in any center, any common identity which could unite people in the “imagined community” of those who are not in physical proximity. The party, the ephemeral but physically real coming together of isolated, unique selves, is for Clarissa the substitute for the false imaginary of collective national identity.

The case of Hermann Broch is especially telling for the significance of the war, both because he had been a sharp critic of European culture before it, and because The Sleepwalkers (1931–2)Footnote ²⁹ offers a long-term philosophical–theological perspective on the collapse of identity in the 1920s that begins with the Middle Ages. A full analysis of Broch's complex account demands more space than is available here, but the crux of the argument is that Broch came to—and by the terms of his own explanation could only have come to—his ultimate philosophy of history as a result of the war.

His prewar essays exemplify the widespread sense of cultural pessimism of those years. The arts were atrophying from an overly rationalist penchant for mere realistic description. They had lost touch with their true vocation, beauty, because they had abandoned beauty's roots in the instinctual. “Art was the sexuality of culture,” he proclaimed; “Now it is dying from psychic impotence.”Footnote ³⁰ In a vitalist effusion typical of the times, Broch complained that modern dance, originally the art nearest sex and thus the most basic one, had rigidified into lifeless formalism. The only genuine form of dance left was—battle.Footnote ³¹

It was only after the outbreak of war that Broch turned from a concern with high culture to the problem of Western civilization as a whole. The opening words of “The Disintegration of Values,” a ten-part essay in the last volume of The Sleepwalkers, are taken directly from the first of four wartime essays collected under the rubric “Towards an Understanding of Our Era.”Footnote ³² They mostly read like academic exercises in philosophy of history; the war was not over when they were begun and its outcome was unknown. But those first words are a raw cry of rage:

Clearly, “battle” has changed its valence; the realities of the Great War make it impossible to aestheticize. Broch now also characterizes prewar European culture more benignly than he had before. Before the war, he writes, Europe harbored “a disinterested striving for truth, a disinterested will towards art . . . a definite social feeling” (374). That progressive spirit has perished. The atrophy of instinct is no longer, if it ever was, Europe's worst problem. It is rather that instinct has been torn loose from any possibility of sublimation to reveal something wholly new, something mystifying and horrible in human capacity. The cultural–philosophical history of Europe Broch developed more fully in the last volume of The Sleepwalkers was a retrospective effort to ground this unanticipated reality in a comprehensive theory of the self.

It is through one of his minor characters in that last volume that Broch makes the connection between the war and the loss of identity explicit. Gödicke, a bricklayer in the Territorial Guard, had been buried under the rubble of a trench destroyed during a bombardment. Barely alive when unearthed, he survives against all expectations but remains terribly injured and in such pain that he lies on rubber air cushions to make it bearable. Worse, however, is the damage to his “soul.” The simplest action like lifting a spoon to his mouth is made difficult by the fact that he is not clear in his mind who it is that is being fed. It is not that he does not remember his past; on the contrary, he remembers quite clearly all the previous phases of his life:

The translator is correct to render Broch's Existenz as “identity”; it is the continuity of his person, not of his physical existence or his memory, that Gödicke can no longer experience. In part it is of course his physical disability that makes it impossible for him to be the man he was, the man who slept and still wants to sleep with the carpenter's bride; he is so angry at the body which has betrayed him that he can manage only by splitting himself psychically and trying to starve the self he can no longer be. But his near death has also detached him reflectively from himself, made him aware of the different selves he can be, and of the impossibility of subsuming them all into one unified personality named “Gödicke.” The war is that “sudden interruption” which has cut him off from his whole previous biography, not just by the physical changes in him but through them by his traumatic awakening into consciousness of the discontinuous nature of self.

But even the ultimate survivor, the main protagonist Huguenau, a wholly amoral deserter who cons and murders his way to wealth during the war, cannot return to “normal” life after it. Though now an apparently ideological capitalist as well as a successful businessman, he is often, to his own bewilderment, psychically alienated from himself, unable not to question the meaning even of money and success. The war's craziness has exposed even to him the fatuousness of all goals, beliefs and identities, through “the curse of the casual, the fortuitous, that spreads itself over things and their relation to each other, making it impossible to think of any arrangement that would not be equally arbitrary and fortuitous” (642).

In The Sleepwalkers the war undermines the props of identity even in an opportunist supposedly without character. In Steppenwolf, Harry Haller's shock at the revanchist nationalism of the German educated elite destroys all vestiges of faith in the gebildete Mensch. His breaking point comes at a dinner at the home of a young professor of Eastern mythology, a paragon of bourgeois Bildung: “He believes in the studies whose servant he is; he believes in the value of mere knowledge and its acquisition, because he believes in progress and evolution” (78). But he is also a violent jingoist who hates Jews and communists, and rails against “traitors” who blame Germany equally with the Entente for the outbreak of the war. Appropriately, Haller finally snaps not over politics but over a portrait of Goethe in his host's drawing room, which he dismisses contemptuously as the image of a conceited sentimentalist who radiates a false sense of superiority. When the offended professor protests, Haller, unable to restrain his rage, bursts out that he himself is the traitor whom the professor had condemned, that it would be better for Germany and the world if at least a few people capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession into a new war. With that, he rushes out, aware that his outburst is a “leave-taking from the respectable, moral and learned world,” a complete break not only with his past identity, but with the very possibility of identity. He is rescued from suicidal despair only by his meeting with Hermine, the mysterious young woman who will show him how to live the truth he had read about in the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” the life without identity.

Neither war nor postwar make their appearance in The Man without Qualities, yet it is a novel of the war which destroyed Austria–Hungary. As Stefan Jonsson rightly points out, it was only when the material and institutional support of the imperial apparatus had vanished that the values and traditions that had anchored the Austrian subject's idea of himself in the imperial order were revealed in all their contingency.Footnote ³⁴

In “Political Confession of a Young Man. A Fragment,” published in 1913, Musil admitted that he had been little interested in politics before then.Footnote ³⁵ And even in the flurry of essays he published around that time only the brief “Politics in Austria” addressed the political failings that were to be at the heart of his later exploration of the illusion of identity. That essay does anticipate the causal connection between nation and identity in The Man without Qualities, but with a crucial difference:

Here self as essential identity is still a possibility for Musil. The self aspires to the universal and derives an identity from identification with a universal idea. Austria–Hungary, however, which could have been the world's first truly multinational polity, is all passion without ideas: the conflicts among its nationalities and classes have no moral grandeur, only selfish aims. But, as the parenthesis suggests, Musil believed that Austria might in principle have been a universal idea that could produce a true self. It was the collapse of the Austrian empire that enabled him to see that the “identityless self” of prewar Austria was not merely the consequence of a politically remediable failure but the human condition.

In the novel the absence of an Austrian “idea” becomes the symbol of ontological nothingness. Musil brings it to hilarious life in the novel's anti-plot, the fruitless effort to find a theme for a mooted celebration of the seventieth jubilee year of Emperor Franz Josef in 1918. The jubilee project is the novel's central “action,” and its very name proclaims its nullity. It is called the Parallel Campaign [Aktion] because it is not even an original idea; it was generated in imitation of and rivalry with the thirtieth jubilee of the German kaiser Wilhelm planned for the same year. The Parallel Campaign remains a phrase in search of content. Ulrich becomes secretary of the campaign's planning committee through family connection—its convener is his cousin, the Viennese cultural doyenne he ironically names “Diotima”—and it is from Ulrich's absurdist perspective that we see the campaign's follies.

Many jubilee themes are proposed, each representing a basic Austrian (and European) identity, each exposed as contradictory, ridiculous or insubstantial. The hollowness of all of them taken together explains in retrospect why the empire could not survive the war, but it also speaks to the impossibility of sustaining those identities in the postwar world. They were only pseudo-reality before, and with the end of the political structure that propped them up, they are exposed as beyond redemption.

The driving political force behind the campaign is Count Leinsdorf, representative of the old Austrian aristocracy. But his four slogans for the jubilee—“Emperor of Peace, European Milestone, True Austria, Property and Culture”—signify nothing because their author is himself a tissue of contradictions. Though he hates the modern age as a “whirlpool of materialist democracy” and wishes to return to the past era of faith, hierarchical authority and noblesse oblige, he runs his estates like an opportunistic capitalist who “could not imagine how industry . . . or a stock-exchange deal in wheat or sugar could be conducted on religious principles” (101). Since he at least understands that one cannot rely on aristocratic tradition to give a veneer of moral legitimacy to a modern commercial state, he has entrusted the campaign to Diotima, veritable embodiment of the idea that a link between the “eternal verities” and business can be found “in the profundities of middle-class culture.”

If Musil treats Diotima with somewhat more ambivalence than he does Leinsdorf, it is because in her rhetoric there lurks the ghost of a faith he once shared. But Musil lampoons her notion of culture—it cannot be called an idea—as vapid and egocentric. Culture is concerned with the “soul,” which in Diotima's case “was probably nothing more than a small amount of capital in love she possessed at the time of her marriage.” Unfortunately, her husband, an indomitably prosaic middle-class bureaucrat, “was not the right business opportunity” in which to invest her passion (107). In quest of a more adequate object, she has turned to literature, the repository of “the Good, the True and the Beautiful,” which, however, are only names for her own trite belief that spirit is “a force analogous to the power of love” (359). This insipid definition nonetheless explains why Diotima also believes that woman is the necessary carrier of culture, a common prewar artistic trope.Footnote ³⁷ Because men in the modern world one-sidedly developed their rational intellects, “only the unfragmented woman still possessed the fated power to embrace the intellect with those vital forces that, in her opinion, it obviously sorely needed for its salvation” (103).

Except that, having no ideas of her own, she turns to a man for help. Not only is her choice of the Prussian industrialist Paul Arnheim the most ironic of Musil's novelistic moves, Arnheim is also the most important of Musil's targets. If Leinsdorf is the man of the past, and Diotima the emblem of a cultural ideal she discredits by representing, Arnheim is ostensibly both the man of the present and the hope of the future. A businessman and intellectual who has made commercial fortunes and published philosophical works, he embodies the unity of “capital and culture,” materialism and spirit. Some of Ulrich's spleen toward him is jealousy of a man capable of acting successfully in the modern world, but Arnheim is also unmistakably a charlatan. The supposed union between “the soul and the price of coal” symbolized in Arnheim's equally publicized intellectual and commercial ventures is a self-deceiving “con game” that serves to keep separate “what Arnheim did with his eyes wide open and what he said and wrote in his cloud of intuition” (304). Its social purpose is to cloak the modern takeover of political and social power by money with the veneer of traditional values which had once legitimized the aristocracy's preeminence. In truth, the “soulful” German middle class “look down upon art and literature, which they once regarded as the ultimate fulfillment, as upon an earlier stage of development” (420–21). But Arnheim recognizes that the power of business has to be elevated and concealed by the ideology of soul to pacify the contemporary social rebellion against money, science and calculation. The fact is that “keeping the world in order was perhaps his truest and fiercest passion, a craving for power far surpassing everything even a man in his position could afford” (423).

The aristocrat, “feminine” spirit, the soulful capitalist—these identities of the prewar world, contradictory and self-serving then, lost any semblance of plausibility for the postwar world, their hypocrisy exposed by the outpouring of bloody-minded patriotic enthusiasm when war broke out. The displays of nationalist fervor woke Musil into shocked awareness of humanity's ineradicable propensity to collective irrationality. In a bitterly trenchant postwar essay, “The Nation as Ideal and Reality,” Musil wrote that the modern nation could never be the genuine expression of ethical universalism, hence never a valid foundation for self-identity; modern nationalism was either a cover for racism, the contemporary incarnation of the old authoritarian state, or the illusory idealization of particular material interests.Footnote ³⁸ But none of the age's putative universal ideologies could make good their claim to totality either. As Ulrich gently needles General Stumm von Bordwehr, the cheerfully unimaginative military mind hopelessly infatuated with Diotima and her quest for the great “Austrian idea,”

It is thus appropriate that Musil's last word on the possibility of a totalizing ideology goes to Bordwehr: “When you spend a lot of time with ideas you end up itching all over, and you can scratch till you bleed, without getting any relief” (406).

The problem went beyond the deficiencies of any particular ideology; it was inherent in the quest for ideological closure. Values, in the sense of what we should live for, are a matter of feeling and enthusiasm, the “state of mind in which all . . . feelings and thoughts have the same spirit . . . But there is nothing [objective] to sustain such an enthusiasm” because its galvanizing goal is precisely a matter of feeling, not of knowledge. Man “believes in ideas not because they are sometimes true but because he needs to believe.” Since this is the case, the forms of rationality which solve scientific and mathematical questions are of no help. For

With this insight, which came to the mathematically and technologically trained Musil with the force of revelation when the war broke out, all possibility of objectively grounded identity was gone.

VI. INSTEAD OF IDENTITY

The deconstruction of identity was, however, only a first step for many of our authors, a necessary ground-clearing for alternatives. (The two obvious exceptions are Pirandello and Broch, whose works end in apparent nihilism, though in life they took political paths out of the identity chaos they depicted: Fascism in the case of Pirandello, anti-Fascism in the case of Broch.) While the alternatives they offer cannot be examined in detail here, a brief mention may amplify our sense of what our authors were dismantling through contrast with what they believed to be other than identity.

Clarissa Dalloway's parties are the institutionalization of the quasi-pantheistic ruminations earlier in the novel in which she feels herself part of all things; to know her, or anyone, therefore, one must know everyone who completes them (152–3). For Woolf the counter-ethic that parties embody is expressly linked to femininity. The war as glorified in the press was for Woolf a “preposterous masculine fiction”;Footnote ³⁹ idealism itself—fealty to abstractions—was masculine. In the person of a “shallow” socialite and party-giver Woolf provocatively created a feminine counterimage to traditional masculine identity as the negation of identity itself. Parties, in their evanescence, proclaim the ultimate impossibility of permanent collective identity, but their messy, lively heterogeneity, their sheer communal “thereness,” concretely images our sought-for feeling of totality. The quality for which Peter never stopped loving Clarissa, despite his disdain for her “frivolity,” was that she had “that extraordinary . . . woman's gift of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be” (76).

A belief about woman's gift also lies behind the final lesson the Steppenwolf must learn to complete his reeducation, though here it is a false belief. Pablo's lecture on life's infinite configurations is not enough to convert Harry. It must be driven home by brutal enactment precisely because the emotional pull of the eternal feminine is stronger than theory. Harry has fallen in love with Hermine, the young woman who midwifed his rebirth into a new life of sensual possibility. Despite Pablo's warning against fetishizing any one life game, he is wholly invested in his love for her. “I belonged to her not just as this one piece in my game of chess,” he reflects, going to meet her at the end of his sentimental education in the Magic Theater in expectation of sexual consummation, “I belonged to her wholly” (203). His words prove how incompletely he has understood his lesson, as does his action, when he finds her sexually sated in the arms of Pablo; overwhelmed by rage, he stabs her to death. The murder, however, proves to be yet another scene in the Magic Theater. Hermine is the lesson he has not yet learned. Belonging to anyone or anything “wholly” is exactly what the Magic Theater meant to unteach. No person is infinite, such that one could become finished and whole by belonging to her.

And what Harry must learn with regard to Hermine he must also learn about music, which for him has always been the purest expression of sublimity. He must modulate his horror at hearing Mozart's “divine” music mutilated by the tinny reproductions of radio. Radio's miserably inadequate rendering makes manifest a universal truth. The perfection of the greatest music is an unreachable ideal; the best performances are only aspirations toward it. “When you listen to the radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and divine,” Pablo tells him at his “trial” for killing Hermine (who, this being a magic theater, is of course not really dead—or alive either.) “[E]xactly as [radio] strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches . . . it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world . . .” (213). Since nothing in the world can live up to the Idea, one's only recourse is to laugh. This is Friedrich Schlegel's Romantic irony a hundred years on, chastened, lacking the buoyant optimism of the Romantic celebration of creative destruction. For Hesse, humor is gallows humor, laughter in the face of death. Mozart can never be played perfectly. For that matter, Mozart's music itself is not perfect. Pablo the modern jazz saxophonist is as “good” as Mozart; in fact he is Mozart, in the metamorphic play of the Magic Theater.

Harry seems finally to understand. When Mozart offers to resurrect Hermine so Harry might marry her, he refuses. He will try instead to live the sentence Mozart ultimately pronounces on him: “You are to learn to listen to the cursed radio music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions” (216). This, perhaps, is a prescription for art, not life; only art can permit the thorough-bass accompaniment of gallows humor without causing real hurt to others, or to oneself.

Musil, in contrast, did canvass a solution for the man without qualities within life, in the very sphere which served as Hesse's final lesson in self-deception—love. The second volume of The Man without Qualities (1933) has an entirely new subject, the relationship between Ulrich and his sister Agathe.Footnote ⁴⁰ Volume 2 is purportedly the positive to volume 1's negative, but the love between brother and sister defies easy characterization—not least Musil's own. The term “mystical” is uninformative, even if Ulrich sometimes uses it himself (837) The attraction between Ulrich and Agathe is obviously erotic, though never consummated. That consummation would violate the ultimate taboo is true but superficial. Sex would destroy the relationship by reducing it to a finite act in space and time and erasing the permanently tense force field between the siblings created by unsatisfied desire. Consummation would destroy it as well by reducing it to simple physical gratification or, worse, self-centered possession. Musil's incestuous pair is partly a late version of the Romantic trope of incest, which figured the brother–sister relationship as the ideal love because the lovers were both the same and opposite.Footnote ⁴¹ As Ulrich puts it,

But it is also more.

Non-consummation plays the same negative role for Ulrich's imagination of the infinite as it does for Hesse's; it protects desire from disappointment. But what is unique to Ulrich's understanding of the permanent tension between himself and Agathe is its ability to keep in play what Ulrich calls “true morality.” True morality is more than “a sort of police regulations for keeping life in order”; it is the faculty of “imagination,” which makes possible “living the infinite fullness of possibilities” (1116–17). In breaking down boundaries, incestuous desire allows something positive: infinite receptiveness.

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All these positive prescriptions demand of their characters the ability to live consciously, even hopefully, with the contradictions of their solutions to non-identity: the simultaneous aspiration to totality and openness. But common to optimists and nihilists alike in this strain of 1920s modernism is the challenge to what they all understood as the ontological beliefs implicit in the contemporary sense of identity: identity as timeless Being. What they revealed dramatically, Martin Heidegger in the same decade systematized and dismantled philosophically. In this paradoxical way, their work inaugurated the later twentieth century's complex, and ambivalent, obsession with identity.