by Robert Musil
And the lighter it got outside, the more implausible it seemed that Johannes might be dead, it was now nothing more than a lingering impression from which she sought to break free. It was – again, with only a very distant, inconceivable connection to him – as if a last divide inserted itself between them. She felt a voluptuous softness and an inconceivable closensss. More than a physical closeness, one of the soul; it was as if she looked at herself through his eyes, and with each touch felt not only him, but also in some indescribable way felt his feeling for her, it all seemed to her like a mysterious, spiritual, intimate tie. Sometimes she thought he was her guardian angel, he came and went, after she fathomed who he was, and would henceforth always stand by her, he would watch when she undressed, and when she went out she would carry him under her skirt; his looks would be as delicate as a steady, quiet cloak of fatigue. She didn’t think him up to it, didn’t feel he had it in him, not this distant Johannes; rather, it was something pale gray in her, and when the thoughts faded they purled like dark figures against a wintry sky. It was like a hemline at the edge of consciousness. A fumbling burst of gentleness. Dredging from her depths…getting stronger while not being there…a nothing and yet everything…
She sat in complete silence and played with her thoughts. There is a world, some remote state, another world or just a place of sadness…its walls brushed over with fever and fantasies, to which the words of sound minds have no access and just drop down senselessly, as if covered with carpets upon which such ponderous sentiments are loathe to tred; a thin, echoing world through which she walked with him, silence following in the wake of her every gesture, and all her thoughts flowed endlessly like whispers in underground corridors.
And when it got very light and pale outside and day broke, the letter arrived, a letter of the kind that was bound to come, Veronica immediately fathomed: of the kind that was bound to come. It rapped against the house and tore through the silence the way a boulder smashes through a thin lip of snow; wind and brightness blew in through the open door. In the letter it said: I didn’t kill myself, so what’s it to you? I feel like someone who found his way out into the street. I’m outside and can’t go back. Held fast by the bread I eat, the black-brown rowboat on the beach begging to carry me out, the less clear, lukewarm, not too hastily concluded, tumultuous life force all around. We’ll talk about it later. Everything outside is so simple and incoherent and piled like a heap of garbage, but like a pole firmly planted in the ground I feel grasped and rammed and entrenched by it all…
There were other things in the letter, but she only saw this one: I found myself outside on the street. There was, inevitably, a hardly noticeable hint of something snide in this heedlessly liberating leap away from her. It was nothing, nothing at all, just like a cooling breeze at dawn when somebody bursts out in a booming voice to hail the new day. So this whole business ultimately revolved around someone who looked on with a sober shrug of disenchantment. From this moment on and for a long time thereafter no thoughts revolved around Veronica’s mind, but there was a feeling; just the flicker of a prodigious silence broken by no wave, pale and lifeless as a pond lying mute in the early light.
Later when she awakened and started thinking again, it once again seemed as if she were lying under a heavy blanket that kept her from moving, and her thoughts were confused like benumbed hands under a shroud they can’t shake off. She could not grasp the simple reality. It wasn’t the fact that he hadn’t killed himself, that he was still alive, but there was rather something inside her, a lapsing into silence, a sinking back into a morass; something went silent inside and sank back into that muttering polyphony from which she had hardly managed to raise the sound of self. All of a sudden she heard it again striking her ears from all directions. It was that narrow passageway through which she once ran and then crawled, and then came all that followed, that silent lifting and raising herself upright, and then everything came to a halt. It seemed to her, despite the silence, as if people stood around her and kept speaking in a whisper. She could not understand what they were saying to each other. It was wonderfully mysterious not to catch the drift of their conversation. Her senses were stretched thin and the voices rustled against her flimsy surface like the branches of a bush waving in the wind.
Strange faces appeared. They were all strange faces, her aunt, girlfriends, acquaintances, Demeter, Johannes – she knew who they were, but still they remained strange to her. She suddenly flinched at the sight of them, like someone who fears abuse. She took pains to think about Johannes, even though she could no longer picture what he looked like a few hours ago, his person melded with the others; it crossed her mind that he had gone away from her, far far away, like he’d dissolved in a crowd; it was as if his sly and hidden eyes were somehow compelled to peer at her out of the multitude. She stretched herself thin before that furtive gaze, wanting to close herself off from the world, but she still managed to muster a quietly dissolving clarity as to who and what she was.
And little by little she lost the sense of things ever having been any other way. She could hardly still differentiate herself from the others, and she could hardly distinguish one face from another, they appeared and promptly dissolved into one another, the whole lot of them repulsive to her like unkempt hair, and still she enmeshed herself in the mix, replied to their incomprehensible questions, retaining only that one need to do something, riddled by an unrest that wanted out, like thousands of minuscule creatures crawling under her skin, and ever and anew the same old faces appeared, the entire house was filled with that unrest.
She leaped up and took a few steps. And suddenly everything went silent. She called out and there was no reply; she called out again and hardly heard herself. She scoured the room with a searching look, everything stood still in its assigned place. And still she felt herself.
What came then was initially a brief floundering over the next few days. At times, a desperate straining to remember just what it was she perceived that once as the real thing and what she might have done to bring it about. Veronica walked restlessly through the house; it happened that she awakened at night and wandered through the house. But all she felt was the bare, whitewashed walls that reared up around her in candlelight, walls to which rags of darkness still clung; she felt it like a screaming ecstasy that stood, still and tall, against the walls. She could stand still for minutes on end and meditate, just picturing how the floor ran under her naked feet, as if wanting to fix her gaze on a certain spot on the surface of the water flowing beneath her; whereupon a dizziness took hold, an imbalance brought on by those thoughts that she could no longer fathom, and only when her toes lodged in the gaps between the floorboards, rubbing up against the fine soft deposits of dust, or the soles of her feet brushed up against the little irregularities of the floor, did she feel stunned into a sense of relief, as if she’d just received a blow to her naked body. But in time all she felt was the imminent grip of the present, and the fading memory of that night was nothing she might still anticipate reawakening, but rather just a shadow of that hidden pleasure in herself she had gained interacting with the stuff of life. She sometimes tiptoed to the front door and listened till she heard a man walking by. The sense that she was standing there practically naked, in nothing but a nightgown that hung open at the bottom while someone walked by, so close and separated from her only by a slab of wood, made her almost double over with pleasure. But the most elusive feeling was that there was something of her outside too, as a frisson of her being slipped through the tiny keyhole and the trembling of her hand must have flitted through and stroked the clothes of the passerby.
And once in the course of her absent minded meanderings through the house it suddenly struck her that she was now alone with Demeter, that mad degenerate. She cringed at the thought of it, and since then it often happened that they passed each other on the stairs. They greeted each other too, but with altogether empty words. Only once he remained standing close to her and bot
h searched for something else to say. Veronica noticed his knees enveloped in tight riding pants, and his lips that looked like a short, wide, bloody cut in his face, and she mused on what Johannes would look like, since he was bound to come back; at that moment the point of Demeter’s beard appeared to her as something enormous looming against the sallow surface of the window. And after a while they walked on, each in his own direction, without exchanging a word.
Preserving the Imprint of the Ineffable in Musil’s Prose,
(A Translator’s Afterword)
NOT TO TELL A STORY PER SE, but to evoke the hollow husk of mind and mood in which a story is conceived, born, and incubated; not to deploy the impregnating battering ram of reason, but to embrace the nurturing womb of impressions – this is what the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942), best known for his unfinished magnum opus Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), strove for in the two-and-a-half-year-long literary ordeal and crisis of consciousness begun in 1908 that ultimately culminated in his second book, Vereinigungen, here translated as Intimate Ties. What started out as an attempt to quickly whip off a text to placate an eager publisher stretched into a soul-searching experiment in the course of which, as he wrote in his journal, “I almost drove myself out of my mind.” Published in 1911, this loose assemblage of two novellas, both focusing on the woes of troubled female protagonists, defies in form and content any heretofore established notions of literary license.
Written in the wake of the stunning critical and popular success of his debut novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless), this second book, by which Musil hoped to establish his reputation, proved a complete flop. While heralded by a few early Expressionist writers as a path-breaking work, it was savaged by critics as “chapter after chapter of abstract psychoanalyses” of two “hysterical” women presented in “thick patches of fog.” Musil himself retained a lifelong fondness for what he ultimately considered a worthy, albeit failed, experiment. “It is the only one of my books I sometimes return to. I can’t stand extended passages. But I’ll gladly dip into one to two pages anytime,” he recalled in a journal notation in 1935. Recognizing that it was far outside the accepted norms of European art, he thought of it rather as a verbal collage, a kind of medieval illuminated manuscript. Today’s reader might well view it as hypertext before its time. Its primary fault, Musil allowed half-tongue-in-cheek, was
that it had a binding, back cover, pagination. A few pages at a time should be spread out and displayed between glass plates, the selection to be changed every now and then. Then you would see what it is.
Ostensibly, at least on the narrative surface, the first novella, “Die Vollendung der Liebe,” here translated as The Consummation of Love, is about the protracted emotional tug of war leading up to a married woman’s infidelity, and the second, “Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika” (“The Temptation of Silent Veronica”) taps a sexually repressed young woman’s traumatic childhood memory of a near tangle with bestiality, her rejection of a would-be lover, and her struggle to formulate a coherent notion of deity. With a psychic Geiger counter Musil goes prospecting in the hearts and minds of his imagined female protagonists conjured up like jinns from his wife Martha Marcovaldi’s early bottled-up recollections.
Read at your own risk. Those expecting a traditional narrative thread may well be frustrated by the near total absence of signposts and touchstones.
The first novella, “The Culmination of Love,” offers at least a recognizable emotional build-up. A woman whose husband is too busy to join her reluctantly sets out on a winter journey, first by train, then by horse-drawn carriage, to visit her daughter from an earlier marriage at a boarding school in the country. Along the way she recalls and alternately savors and disdains the insidious lure of past infidelities in her former marriage, all the while becoming enticed as much by the flavor of memory as by any actual attraction for the pompous windbag who happens to be seated opposite her in the train. Musil captures the inherent eros of travel, when life flies by through the picture window of a speeding train, the traveler, herself lost in reverie, in a constant state of flux, basks in the passivity of looking and letting the world whisk past, responding to stimuli more by tropism than reason, and all is illusion. Later upon arrival at her destination and finding herself snowed in, she crawls naked on the floor of her hotel room, sniffing the scent of myriad feet on the rug, sensing the stranger waiting outside her door. Before succumbing to his crude advances, or rather to the remembered lure of past advances channeled through him, she previews and savors her disgust, watching him mutter inanities:
and soon she saw nothing but the never-ending rise and fall of his beard, the bobbing beard of a repulsive billy goat ceaselessly chewing, spitting out a whispered soporific stream of words.
Tina Turner’s hit tune “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” leaps to mind. But the novella is more about the limitations of language.
…her own words sounded strange swimming among strange syllables, like fish flouncing against the cold damp bodies of other fish in the indecipherable whirlpool of opinions. […] Again she felt that it did not so much matter what people say of themselves, what they manage to put into words, but rather that any real revelation was conveyed in altogether different ways – a smile, a lapse into silence, an ear turned inward to the secret murmurings of self.
This, the reader must remember, was written by a man committed heart and soul to words as his primum mobile and literature as his life’s work. But in acknowledging the limitations of language, Musil sounds its bottomless depths as few writers have done before or since:
For a moment, the great painstakingly plated emotional braid of her being became apparent, fluttering in the distance, like a pallid, practically worthless backdrop to reality. She thought to herself, you draw a line in the sand, any old unbroken line, just to have something to hold onto in the swarm of silently looming things; that is the stuff of our life; like when you keep speaking nonstop, pretending that each word is somehow ineluctably linked to the one before and automatically generates the next, because you fear the moment you allow silence to strip off the pretense of continuity the flimsy construct of self will falter in some unimaginable way and be dissolved by silence; but it is only your fear, your frailty before the terrible, gaping randomness of it all…
The second novella, “The Temptation of Silent Veronica,” offers far fewer footholds for the reader as psychic rock climber. The heroine, Veronica, lives in a big house with her ageless maiden aunt and two young men, the introvert Johannes, who once contemplated becoming a priest, and the extrovert Demeter, a man of actions not words, both of whom seek a romantic liason. Traumatized by lingering childhood memories of an encounter with an aroused Saint Bernard dog and the shocking sight of a rooster going at it with hens in the pen, Veronica remains sexually repressed and rejects both suitors. Longing for love, yet fearful of the pain of consummation, she retreats into a state of troubled reverie bordering on madness:
Soul is something of the sort, a vehicle for an uncertain pursuit. Throughout her long dark life Veronica dreaded and yet longed for love, only in dreams did it sometimes turn out as she wished. Powerful and plodding as they are, actual occurrences slip away and yet seem to seep inside; they hurt, but like something you do to yourself; they mortify, but just barely: mortification flies off like a restless cloud and nobody else notices; mortification dissipates like the rapture of a dark cloud…She kept wavering between Johannes and Demeter…And dreams do not reside inside the self, nor are they fragments of reality, they carve out their own nook in a burst of complete feeling, and that’s where they reside, hovering, weightless, like a liquid seeping out. That’s how you give yourself to a beloved in dreams, like a liquid seeping out; with an altered sense of space; for the waking soul is a bottomless hollow, for the waking soul is a bottom less hollow, billowing up against reality in undulating bubbles of ice.<
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This is as much as we are told, or rather let to surmise from a highly refracted narrative.
But like the first novella, this one, too, serves Musil as a lush platform for a meditation on the limitations of language:
but once uttered every word was viewed from a distance, as if from a broad perspective and accompanied by that remarkably resonant understanding that everyday doings attain crowded together on the stage of life and piled up helter-skelter on the gravel-strewn ground, suddenly looming as signposts on an otherwise invisible pathway. Like a gossamer silken mask, it draped everything in a light, silver-gray mist, and shifted about as if in anticipation of being ripped apart; straining her eyes, the dark realization flickered before her, as if shaken by “invisible blows.”
The silken mask in question is, of course, a reference to the legend of the Veil of Veronica, the apocryphal saint who, encountering Christ along the Via Dolorosa to the cross, mercifully proffers a cloth to wipe his blood, sweat and tears, retaining an imprint of his face. An alleged copy of the veil that Musil may well have seen and been inspired by hangs in the Schatzkammer of Sacred and Secular Treasures in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna.
