PETER BERGER
643
big hole that one calls soul." The implication, of course, is that it
matters little
which
ideas or
which
morality are employed to this end.
Early on in his participation in the patriotic project, Ulrich sug–
gests that there ought to be "a general secretariat for exactitude and
soul," to provide guidance for people in the quandary of combining
these two ideas. One surmises that this suggestion for a sort of min–
istry of general psychotherapy is only half-facetious. The intellec–
tuals associated with the project discuss the Marxist and psycho–
analytical theories about the true foundation of human action, that
substructure
(
Unterbau)
which, if one only knew what it was, would
explain everything. But, of course, they all disagree, leading Leins–
dorf to complain about the unreliability of the people in the super–
structure- a statement wonderfully summarizing his disdain for the
intellectuals, his misunderstanding of the theories at issue, and his
unshakable confidence in the reliability of the old order. Clearly, it
would not be easy to carry out Ulrich's suggestion.
The novel is full of ruminations about the problem of
order-or, more accurately, the problem of ordering. The patriotic
project is to legitimate the order of the state. Moosbrugger under–
stands his acts of violence as desperate attempts to restore order to
his world (at one point he himself is described as "an escaped parable
of order"). The only order that Clarisse knows is that of music, and
Ulrich finds solace in the cool order of mathematics. In one con–
versation Ulrich, only half-ironically, explains to General Stumm
that the military is the most spiritual of all institutions, because spirit
is order, and who can deny that the military is the most orderly in–
stitution, down to the exact spaces between the buttons on an
officer's tunic? In the same way, there are various ways of trying to
order the self, to somehow fixate it in a way that makes sense. The
law (to which Ulrich's father has devoted his life) is the most im–
portant "official" agency for this ordering of the self. In one episode
Ulrich is caught in a political altercation on the street and is briefly
arrested. During his interrogation at a police station, where he is
asked about his age, profession, and the like, with no regard for all
the allegedly "finer" aspects of his existence, Ulrich experiences a
"statistical disenchantment" of his person- and, strangely (or, in
Musil's perspective, not so strangely), finds a certain satisfaction in
this experience. Psychiatry, using categories different from, even
contradictory to, those of the law, also seeks to impose some sort of
order on the self. All these efforts, though, are ultimately illusionary.
They are, in Musil's term, "utopian" -literally nowhere. The self is
