by Robert Musil
(4) But the major topic of their conversations was, as is also the rule in love, recollections of their common great experience, the visit to the insane asylum, and so this time Clarisse began to confide to the General that she had since been back a second time.
‘With whom?” the General inquired, relieved to have escaped a horrible mission.
“Alone,” Clarisse said.
“Good God!” Stumm exclaimed, and stopped, although they had only taken a few steps. “Really alone? You don’t let anything give you the creeps! And did you see anything special?” he asked, curious.
“The murderers’ house,” Clarisse responded with a smile.
This was the designation that Dr. Friedenthal, a good stage director, had used as they had walked across the soundless moss under the trees of the old garden toward a group of small buildings from which horrible cries came echoing toward them with remarkable regularity. Friedenthal, too, had smiled, and had told Clarisse, as Clarisse now told the General, that every inmate of this group of houses had killed at least one person, sometimes a number of people.
“And now they’re screaming when it’s too late!” Stumm said in a tone of reproachful acquiescence in the way of the world.
But Clarisse did not appreciate his response. She recalled that she, too, had asked what the cries meant. And Friedenthal had told her that they were manic fits; but he said this quite softly and cautiously, as if they were not to intrude. And just at that moment the gigantic guards had suddenly materialized around them and opened the reinforced doors; and Clarisse, repeating this and falling back into the mood, like being at an exciting play, softly whispered the term “manic fits” while looking meaningfully into the General’s eyes.
She turned away and walked on a few paces ahead, so that Stumm almost had to run to catch up with her. When he was at her side again, she asked him what he thought about modern painting, but before he could gather his impressions, she surprised him with the information that there was an astonishing correspondence between this painting and an architecture born from the spirit of the madhouse: “The buildings are dice, and the patients live in hollowed-out concrete dice,” she explained. “There is a corridor through the middle, and cube-shaped cells left and right, and in each cell there is nothing but one person and the space around him. Even the bench he’s sitting on is part of the wall. Of course all edges have been carefully rounded off so he can’t hurt himself,” she added with precision, for she had observed everything with the greatest attention.
She found no words for what she really wanted to say. Since she had been surrounded by art all her life and had listened to the concerns expressed about art, this island had remained relatively resistant to the changes that had been slowly growing in other areas of her thinking; and especially since her own artistic activity did not spring directly from passion but was merely an appendix of her ambition and a consequence of the circumstances in which she lived, her judgment in this area, despite the illness that had recently made new inroads on her personality, was no more perverse than is common, from time to time, in the development of art. She could, therefore, deal quite comfortably with an idea like “purpose-oriented architecture” or “a manner of building deriving from the mission of an insane asylum,” and it was only the peopling of these up-to-date dwellings with the insane that surprised her as a new concept and tickled her like a scent kindled in the nose.
But Stumm von Bordwehr interrupted her with the modest observation that he had always imagined that cells for maniacs had to be padded.
Clarisse became uncertain, for perhaps the cells had been made of light-colored rubber, and so she cut off his objection. “Maybe in the old days,” she said firmly. “In the days of upholstered furniture and tasseled drapes, maybe the cells were upholstered too. But today, when people think objectively and spatially, it’s quite impossible. Cultural progress doesn’t stop, even in insane asylums!”
But Stumm would rather have heard something about the manics themselves than be diverted by the problem of what connections there might be between them and painting and architecture, so he replied: “Most interesting! But now I’m really anxious to hear what happened in these modern spaces!”
“You’ll be surprised,” Clarisse said. “As quiet as a cemetery.”
“Interesting! I recall that in the courtyard of murderers that we saw, it was that still for a few moments too.”
“But this time only a single man had on a striped linen smock,” Clarisse went on. “A weak, little old man with blinking eyes.” And suddenly she gave a loud laugh. “He dreamed that his wife had deceived him, and when he woke up in the morning he beat her to death with the bootjack!”
Stumm laughed too. “Right when he woke up? That’s capital!” he agreed. “He was evidently in a hurry! And the others? Why do you say that he was the only one who had on a smock?”
“Because the others were in black. They were quieter than the dead,” Clarisse replied, overcome with seriousness.
“Murderers really don’t seem to be merry people,” Stumm hazarded.
“Oh, you’re thinking of the nutcracker!” Clarisse said.
For a moment the General did not know whom she meant.
“The one with nutcracker teeth who said to me that Vienna is a beautiful city!”
“And what did this lot say to you?” the General asked with a smile.
“But I told you, they were as silent as ghosts!”
“But, my dear lady,” Stumm excused himself, “you can’t call that manic!”
“They were waiting for their attacks!”
“What do you mean, waiting? It’s strange to wait for an attack of mania the way you wait for an inspiring corps commander. And you say that they were dressed in black: ready to be reviewed, in a way? I’m afraid, dear lady, that you must have been mistaken in what you were seeing just then. I most humbly beg your pardon, but I am accustomed to imagining such things with the greatest precision!”
Clarisse, who found it not at all disagreeable that Stumm insisted on precision, for something was weighing her down that was not clear to her either, replied: “Dr. Friedenthal explained it to me that way, and I can only repeat, General, that that’s the way it was. There were three men waiting there; all three had on black suits, and their hair and beards were black. One was a doctor, the second a lawyer, and the third a wealthy businessman. They looked like political martyrs about to be shot.”
“Why did they look that way?” asked the incredulous Stumm.
“Because they were wearing neither collar nor tie.”
“Perhaps they had just arrived?”
“No! Friedenthal said they had been in the asylum a long time,” Clarisse asserted warmly. “And yet that’s the way they looked, as if they could stand up at any moment and go to the office or visit a patient. That’s what was so strange.”
“Well, it’s all the same to me,” Stumm responded, to turn the conversation, and yet with a nobility that was new to him, while at the same time he struck his boots aggressively with his riding crop. “I’ve seen fools in uniform, and consider more people crazy than one might think I would. But I imagined ‘manic’ as something more vivid, even if I concede that you can’t ask of a person that he be manic all the time. But that all three were so quiet…I’m sorry I wasn’t there myself, for I think this Dr. Friedenthal is capable of pulling the wool over a person’s eyes!”
“When he was speaking they listened quite mutely,” Clarisse reported. “You wouldn’t have noticed that they were ill at all if you hadn’t happened to meet them there. And imagine, as we were leaving, the one who was a doctor stood up and motioned me, with a truly chivalrous gesture, to go first, saying to Friedenthal: ‘Doctor, you often bring visitors. You are always showing guests around. Today for a change I’ll come with you too/ “
“And then of course those bullies, those toadies of guards, immediately—” the General began heatedly, even though he might have been more touched by the tragedienn
e than the tragedy.
“No, they didn’t grab him,” Clarisse interrupted. “It was really with the greatest respect that they kept him from following me. And I assure you, it was all so moving in this polite and silent fashion. As if the world were hung with heavy, precious fabrics, and the words one would like to say have no resonance. It’s hard to understand these people. You’d have to live in an asylum yourself for a long time to be able to enter their world!”
“What an exquisite idea! But God preserve us from it!” Stumm responded quickly. “You know, dear lady, that I am indebted to you for a pretty good insight into the value of shaking up the bourgeois spirit by means of illness and murder: but still, there are certain limits!”
With these words they had arrived at the hill that was their goal, and the General paused for breath before undertaking the pathless climb. Clarisse surveyed him with an expression of grateful solicitude and a tender mockery that she rarely showed. “But one of them did have a fit!” she informed him roguishly, the way one hauls out a present that had been concealed.
“Well, so there!” Stumm exclaimed. He could not think of anything else to say. But his mouth remained open as he mindlessly groped around for a word; suddenly he beat against his boots again with his crop. “But of course, the shouts!” he added. “Right at the beginning you spoke of the shouting you heard, and I overlooked that when you were talking about the deathly stillness. You tell a story so magnificently that one forgets everything!”
“As we stood in front of the door from which shouts and a strange moaning alternated,” Clarisse began, “Friedenthal asked me once more whether I really wanted to go in. I was so excited I could hardly answer, but the guards paid no attention and began opening the doors. You may imagine, General, that at that moment I was terribly afraid, for I’m really only a woman. I had the feeling: when the door opens, the maniac is going to jump me!”
“One always hears that such mentally ill people have incredible strength,” the General said by way of encouragement.
“Yes; but when the door was open and we all stood at the entrance, he paid absolutely no attention to us!”
“Paid no attention?” Stumm asked.
“None at all! He was almost as tall as Ulrich, and perhaps my age. He was standing in the middle of the cell, with his head bent forward and his legs apart. Like this!” Clarisse imitated it.
General: Was he dressed in black too?
Clarisse: No, stark naked.
General: Looks at Clarisse from head to toe.
“Thick strands of saliva were spread all over his young man’s brownish-blond beard; the muscles literally jumped out of his scrawniness; he was naked, and his hair, I mean specific hairs—”
“You present everything so vividly one understands it all!” Stumm intervened soothingly.
“—were dully bright, shamelessly bright; he fixed us with them as if they were an eye that looks at you without noticing anything about you!”
Clarisse had reached the top, the General sat at her feet. From the “ski jump” one looked down on vineyards and meadows sloping away, on large and small houses that for a short distance rose in a jumble up the slope from below, and in one place the glance escaped into the charming depth of the hilly plateau that on the far horizon bordered high mountains. But if, like Stumm, you were sitting on a low tree stump, all you saw was an accidental hump of forest arching its back toward the sky, white clouds in the familiar, fatly drifting balls, and Clarisse. She stood with her legs apart in front of the General and mimicked a manic fit. She held one arm bent out at a right angle and stiffly locked to her body; with her head bent forward, she was executing with her torso in an unvarying sequence a jerky motion that formed a shallow forward circle, while she bent one finger after another as if she were counting. And she allowed each of these motions to be accompanied by a pantingly uttered cry, whose force, however, she considerately restrained. “You can’t imitate the essential part,” she explained. “That’s the incredible strain with every motion, which gives an impression as if each time the person is tearing his body from a vise….”
“But that’s mora!” the General exclaimed. “You know, that game of chance? Whoever guesses the right number of fingers wins. Except that you can’t bend one finger after another but have to show as many as you think of on the spur of the moment. All our peasants on the Italian border play it.”
“It really is mora,” said Clarisse, who had seen it on her travels. “And he also did it the way you described!”
“Well then, mora,” Stumm repeated with satisfaction. “But I*d like to know where these insane people get their ideas,** he added, and here commenced the strenuous part of the conversation.
Clarisse sat down on the tree stump beside the General, a little apart from him so that she could, if need be, “cast an eye” on him, and each time this happened he had a ridiculous horrible feeling, as if he were being pinched by a stag beetle. She was prepared to explain for his benefit the emotional life of the insane as she herself understood it after much reflection. One of its most important elements—because she connected everything with herself—was the idea that the so-called mentally ill were some kind of geniuses who were spirited away and deprived of their rights, and for some reason that Clarisse had not yet discovered, this was something they were not able to defend themselves against. It was only natural that the General could not concur in this opinion, but this did not surprise either of them. “I am willing to concede that such an idiot might occasionally guess something that the likes of us don’t know,’* he protested. “That’s the way you imagine them being: they have a certain aura; but that they should think more than we healthy people— no, please, I beg to differ!**
Clarisse insisted seriously that people who were mentally healthy thought less than those who were mentally unhealthy. “Have you ever strayed off a point, General, from A to B?** she asked Stumm, and he was forced to agree that he had. “Have you ever, then, done it the other way round, from B to A?” she asked further, and Stumm had even less desire to deny it, after considering for a while what it meant, for it is part of a man’s pride to think through for himself to the single thing called truth. But Clarisse reasoned: “You see, and that’s nothing but cowardice, this neat and orderly reflecting about things. On account of their cowardice men will never amount to anything!”
“I’ve never heard that before,” Stumm asserted dismissively. But he thought it over. Wouldn’t that mean…?”
Clarisse moved closer to him with her eyes. “Surely some woman has whispered in your ear: ‘You god-man’?”
Stumm could not recall this happening, but he didn’t want to admit it, so he merely made a gesture that could just as well mean “unfortunately not” as “I’m sick and tired of hearing it!” In words, he replied: “Many women are very high-strung! But what does that have to do with our conversation? Something of that sort is simply an exaggerated compliment!”
“Do you remember the painter whose sketches the doctor showed us?” Clarisse asked.
“Yes, of course. What he had painted was really magnificent.”
“He was dissatisfied with Friedenthal because the doctor doesn’t understand anything about art. ‘Show it to this gentleman!’ he said, pointing to me,” Clarisse went on, again suddenly casting her eye on the General. “Do you believe it was merely a compliment that he addressed me as a man?”
“It’s just one of those ideas,” Stumm said. “Honestly, I’ve never thought about it. I would assume it’s what’s called an association, or an analogy, or something like that. He just had some reason or other to take you for a man!”
But does it give you pleasure to be taken for a man? Pleasure? No. But…
Although Stumm was convinced that with these last words he had explained something to Clarisse, he was still surprised by the warmth with which she exclaimed: “Terrific! Then I only need tell you that it has the same cause as in love when there’s whispering about god-man! For the world is
full of double beings!”
One should not of course believe that it was agreeable to Stumm when Clarisse talked this way, shooting a cleft glance from eyes narrowed to slits; he was thinking, rather, whether it would not be more proper not to conduct such conversations in uniform, but to appear for the next walk in mufti. But on the other hand the good Stumm, who admired Clarisse with great caution, if not concealed terror, had the ambitious desire to understand this young woman who was so passionate, and also to be understood by her, for which reason he quickly discovered a good side to her assertion. He put it this way, that most things involving the world and people were indeed ambivalent, which accorded well with his newly acquired pessimism. He assuaged himself further by assuming that what was meant by god-man and man-woman was no different from what could be said about anybody: that he was a bit of a noble person and a bit of a rascal. Still, he preferred to steer the conversation back to the more natural view, and began to spin out his knowledge of analogies, comparisons, symbolic forms of expression, and the like.
“Please excuse me and permit me, dear lady, to adopt your excitement for a moment and accept the idea that you really are a man,” he began, advised by the guardian angel of intuition, and went on in the same fashion: “because then you would be able to imagine what it means for a lady to wear a heavy veil and show only a small part of her face; or, which is almost the same thing, for a ball gown to swirl up from the floor in a dance and expose an ankle: that’s how it was just a few years ago, about the time I was a major; and such hints strike one much more strongly, I might almost say more passionately, than if one were to see the lady up to her knee with no obstacle in the way—yes, obstacle is precisely the right word! Because that’s how I would also describe what analogies or comparisons or symbols consist of. They present an obstacle to thinking, and in doing so arouse it more strongly than is usually the case. I believe that’s what you mean when you say that there’s something cowardly about ordinary reflection.”
