The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  But when she once said this to Lindner, thinking to be nice to him, it immediately made him miss a quarter of an hour, and the next day he was quite indignant with himself.

  In these circumstances he was a strict teacher for Agathe.

  But Agathe was an odd pupil. This man, who wanted to do something to help her, although most recently he was having difficulties himself, still gave her confidence and even consolation whenever she was on the point of despairing of making any progress with Ulrich. She then sought Lindner out, and not only because, for whatever external reasons, he was Ulrich’s adversary, but also and even more because he revealed as clearly as he did involuntarily the jealousy that came over him at the mere mention of Ulrich’s name. It was obviously not personal rivalry, for Agathe was aware that the two men hardly knew each other, but rather a rivalry between intellectual species, the way species of animals have their particular enemies, whom they already recognize when they meet them for the first time and whose slightest approach makes them agitated. And remarkably, she could understand Lindner; for something that might be called jealousy was also among her feelings toward Ulrich, a not being able to keep up, or an offended fatigue, perhaps too, simply put, a feminine jealousy of his masculine pleasure in ideas, and this made her happy to listen, shivering with pleasure, whenever Lindner contested some opinion or other that could be Ulrich’s, and this he especially loved to do. She could go along with this the more safely in that she felt closer to Lindners level than to her brothers, for however militant Lindner appeared, indeed even though he might intimidate her, there always remained working within her a secret mistrust, which was really / sometimes of the kind that women feel against the endeavors of other women.

  Agathe still felt her heart beating whenever she sat alone for a moment in Lindners surroundings, as if she were exposed to the rising of vapors that enchanted her mind. The temptation, the unease she felt at making herself feel at ease, the illusive possibility that it might happen, always evoked in her the story of an abducted girl who, educated among strangers, changed places as it were within herself and became a different woman: this was one of the stories that, reaching back to her childhood and without being especially important to her, had sometimes played a role in the temptations of her life and their excuses. But Ulrich had given her a particular interpretation of these stories, from which otherwise it would be easy to deduce merely a deficient spiritual constitution, and she believed more passionately in his interpretation than he did himself. For in the length and breadth of time, God has created more than this one life that we happen to be leading; it is in no way the true one, it is one of His many hopefully systematic experiments, into which He has placed no compulsion of necessity for those of us who are not blinded by the light of the passing moment, and Ulrich, talking this way about God and the imperfection of the world and the aimless, meaningless facticity of its course, stripping away its false order to reveal the true vision of God that represented the most promising approach to Him, also taught her the meaning of the tentative claim of this way of understanding how one could, in a shadowy figuration alongside oneself, also be another.

  So as she attentively observed Lindners walls, which were equipped (hung) with pictures of divine subjects, Agathe felt that Ulrich was hovering in the vicinity. It occurred to her that she found Raphael, Murillo, and Bernini in individual engravings on the walls, but not Titian, and nothing at all from the Gothic period; on the other hand, there predominated in many of the pictures present-day imitations of that style a la Jesuit Baroque that had sucked up vast quantities of sugar like a puffy omelet. If one followed only these pictures around the walls, the piling up of billowing robes and vacant, uplifted oval faces and sweetish naked bodies was disquieting. Agathe said: There is so much soul in them that the total effect is of a monstrous despiritualization. And look: the heavenward gaze has become such a convention that all the irrepressible human vitality has taken refuge in the less prominent details and hidden itself there. Don’t you find these garment hems, shoes, leg positions, arms, robe folds, and clouds loaded down by all the sexuality that isn’t openly recognized? This isn’t too far removed from fetishism!

  Well, Agathe ought to know about this phenomenon of being loaded down. This yearningly leaning out from a balcony into the void. Or it’s really the other way around: an infinite pressing inward. With horror, one could see it right here on the borderline between pathological crotchet and exaltation.

  Lindner had no inkling of this. But the reproach dismayed him, and he first tried speaking of this beauty in a belittling way. The artist must make use of the material and the fleshly, and clings to it; this leads to a lower order of art. Agathe overestimated it. Art might well propagate the great experiences of mankind but could not turn them into experience.

  Agathe then angrily accused him of having too many such pictures. The freedoms that, according to what he said, had to be conceded to the lower humanity in the artist still seemed by that measure to have some meaning even for him. —What? Agathe asked.

  Cornered, Lindner gave his views on art. True art is spiritualization of matter. It can represent nakedness only when the superiority of soul over matter speaks from the representation.

  Agathe objected that he was mistaken, for it was the superiority not of soul that was speaking, but of convention.

  Suddenly he burst out: Or did she think that could justify to a serious person painters’ and sculptors’ cult of nakedness? —Is the naked human really such a beautiful thing? Something so scandalous! Aren’t the transports of aesthetes simply ridiculous, even if one doesn’t even try to apply serious moral concepts (to them)?

  Agathe: —The naked body is beautiful!…This was a he, for heaven’s sake, whose only purpose was to enrage her partner. Agathe had never paid any attention to the beauty of male bodies; women today regard a man’s body for the most part only as an armature to support the head. Men are accustomed to pay somewhat more attention to beauty. But let one gather all the naked bodies with which our museums and exhibitions are filled and put them in a single place, and then seek out from among this confusion of white maggots those that are truly beautiful. The first thing one would notice is that the naked body is usually merely naked: naked like a face that for decades has worn a beard and is suddenly shaven. But beautiful? That the world stops in its tracks whenever a truly beautiful person appears reveals beauty to be a mystery; because beauty-love and love are a mystery, it is true for the whole. Likewise that the concept of beauty has been lost (assembly-line art). So she sits there, and Ulrich speaks through her mouth.

  But Lindner immediately jumps at the challenge. —Well! he exclaimed. —Oh, of course, the modern cult of the body! It excites the imagination in just one direction and inflames it with claims that life can’t fulfill! Even the exaggerated concern with physical culture that the Americans have wished on us is a great danger!

  —You’re seeing ghosts, Agathe said indifferently.

  Lindner to this: —Many pure women, who welcome and participate in such things without a deeper knowledge of life, don’t consider that in doing so they are conjuring up spirits that might perhaps destroy their own lives and the lives of those closest to them!

  Agathe retorted sharply: —Should one bathe only once every two weeks? Bite off one’s nails? Wear flannel and smell of chilblain ointment?…It was an attack on these surroundings, but at the same time she felt imprisoned and ridiculously punished for having to argue over such platitudes.

  Their conversations often took the form of Agathe’s mocking and irritating him so that he would lose his temper and “bark.” This was how she was acting now, and Lindner took on the adversary.

  —A truly manly soul will regard not only the plastic arts but also the whole institution of the theater with the greatest reservation, and calmly suffer the scorn and mockery of those who are too effeminate to rigorously forbid themselves every tickling of the senses! he asserted, immediately adding novels with the remark th
at most novels, too, unmistakably breathe the sensual enslavement and overstimulation of their authors and stimulate the readers lower aspects precisely through the poetic illusion with which they gloss over and cover up everything!

  He seemed to assume that Agathe despised him for being inartistic, and was anxious to show his superiority. “It is after all dogma,” he exclaimed, “that one must have heard and seen everything in order to be able to talk about it! But how much better it would be if one would be proud of one’s lack of culture and let others prattle! One shouldn’t convince oneself that it’s part of culture to look at filth under electric light.”

  Agathe looked at him, smiling, without answering. His observations were so dismally obtuse that her eyes misted over. This moist, mocking glance left him uncertain.

  —All these observations are not, of course, directed at great and true art! Lindner qualified / assured her / he retreated.

  Since Agathe continued her silence, he yielded another step.

  “It’s not prudery,” he defended himself. “Prudery would itself be only a sign of corrupted imagination. But naked beauty evokes the tragic in the inner person and, at the same time, spiritual powers, which the tragic strives to absolve and unbind: do you understand what I’m feeling?” He stopped before her. He was again captivated by her. He looked at her. “That’s why one must either conceal nakedness or so associate it with man’s higher longings that it isn’t enslaving and arousing but calming and liberating.” This was what had always been attempted at the high points of art, in the figures of the frieze on the Parthenon, in Raphael’s transcendent figures—Michelangelo associates transfigured bodies with the supra-sensual world, Titian binds covetousness through a facial expression that does not stem from the world of natural drives.

  Agathe stood up. “Just a minute!” she said. “You have a thread in your beard,” and she reached up rapidly and seemed to remove something; Lindner could not make out whether it was real or pretended, since he spontaneously and with signs of chaste horror fell back, while she immediately sat down again. He was extremely upset at his clumsy lack of self-control, and attempted to mask it through a blustering tone. He rode around like a Sunday rider on the word “tragic,” which suited him so badly. He had said that naked beauty evokes the tragic in the inner man, and now supplemented this by saying that this tragic sense repeats itself in art, whose powers in spite of everything did not suffice for complete spiritualization. This was not very illuminating, but it quite clearly amounted to saying that the soul of man is not a protection against the senses but their powerful echo! Indeed, sensuality acquired its power only in that its false pretenses conquered and usurped man’s soul!

  “Is that a confession?” Agathe asked dryly, unabashed.

  “How so, a confession?” Lindner exclaimed. And he added: “What an arrogant way of looking at things you have! What megalomania! And besides: What do you think of me?” But he fled, quit the field, he actually physically retreated before Agathe.

  One discovers nothing so quickly as another’s inner insecurity, and pounces on it like a cat on a grubbing beetle: it was really the capricious technique of the girls’ boarding school, with its passions between the admired “big ones” and adoring smaller ones, the eternal basic form of spiritual dependency, which Agathe was using against Lindner by appearing to respond understandingly and ardently to his words as often as she fell upon him coldly and frightened him just when he thought he was secure in a shared feeling.

  From the corner of the room his voice now boomed like an organ, with an artificially fearless bass; he acted as if he were the aggressor by proposing: “Let’s talk about this, for once, freely and frankly. Realize how inadequate and unsatisfying the entire process of procreation is as a mere natural process. Even motherhood! Is its physiological mechanism really so indescribably marvelous and perfect? How much horrible suffering it involves, how much senseless and unbearable contingency! So let’s just leave the deification of nature to those who don’t know what life is, and open our eyes to reality: the process of procreation is ennobled and raised above apathetic servitude only by being endowed with loyalty and responsibility, and subordinated to spiritual ideals!”

  Agathe seemed to be reflecting silently. Then she asked relentlessly: “Why are you talking to me about the process of procreation?”

  Lindner had to take a deep breath: “Because I am your friend! Schopenhauer has shown us that what we would like to think of as our most intimate experience is the most impersonal of arousals. But the higher emotions are exempted from this deception of the drive to procreate: loyalty, for instance, pure, selfless love, admiration and serving/’

  “Why?” Agathe asked. “Certain feelings that suit you are supposed to have some supernatural origin, and others to be mere nature?”

  Lindner hesitated; he struggled. “I can’t marry again,” he said softly and hoarsely. “I owe that to my son Peter.”

  “But who’s asking that of you? Now I don’t understand you,” Agathe replied.

  Lindner shrank back. “I meant to say that even if I could do it, I wouldn’t,” he said defensively. “Moreover, in my opinion friendship between man and wife demands an even more elevated frame of mind than love!” He made another try: “You know my principles, so you must also understand that in accord with them I would like nothing better than to offer to serve you as a brother, even to awaken, so to speak, in the woman the counterweight to the woman: I’d like to reinforce the Mary in the Eve!” He was close to breaking out in a sweat, so strenuous was it to pursue the strict line of his reasoning.

  “So you’re offering me a kind of eternal friendship,” Agathe said quietly. “That’s lovely of you. And you surely know that your present was accepted in advance.”

  She seized his hand, as is appropriate at such a moment, and was a little taken aback at this epidermal piece of strange person that lay in the lap of her hand. Lindner was not able to withdraw his fingers either: it seemed to him that he should, and yet also that he didn’t have to. Even Ulrich’s lack of resolution sometimes exercised this natural impulse to flirt with her, but Agathe also despaired if she saw that she was doing it successfully herself, for the power of flirtation is united with the notion of bribery, cunning, and compulsion, and no longer with love; and while she was reminded of Ulrich, she looked at this unsteady creature, who was now bobbing up and down inwardly like a cork, in a mood, shot through with evil thoughts, that was close to tears.

  “I would like you to open your refractory and taciturn heart to me,” Lindner said timorously, warmly, and comically. “Don’t think of me as a man. You’ve missed having a mother!”

  “Fine,” Agathe responded. “But can you stand it? Would you be prepared to entrust me with your friendship”—she withdrew her hand— “even if I were to tell you that I had stolen and that I had incest on my conscience?” therefore (or) something on account of which one is ruthlessly expelled from the community of others?

  Lindner forced himself to smile. “What you’re saying is strong, of course; it’s even extremely unfeminine to venture such a jest,” he scolded. “Honestly! Do you know what you remind me of at such moments? Of a child who’s made up its mind to annoy a grownup! But this isn’t the moment for that,” he added, offended because he was just now reminding himself of it.

  But suddenly Agathe had something in her voice that cut through the conversation to the bottom when she asked: “You believe in God; reveal to me: In what way does He answer when you ask Him for advice and a decision about a heavy sin?”

  Lindner rejected this question with the appalled severity that a decorous palace employee shows / puts on when asked about the married life of the Royal Couple.

  Agathe: God in association with crime, specifically the Augustinian God, the abyss. Maybe really as Augustinian as possible: I see no possibility of being good on my own. I don’t understand when I am doing good or evil. Only His grace can tear me away, or something similar. Seems to assume that s
he had recently been worrying about this. For the moment remains open.

  Lindner did feel something of the passion of her words, therefore his answer gentle and father-confessorial: I don’t know your life, you’ve only given me a few hints. But I consider it possible that you could act in a way similar to the way a bad person would act. You haven’t learned in the small things to take life seriously, and therefore you perhaps won’t hit it right when it comes to big decisions. You’re probably capable of doing evil and disregarding all standards for no other reason than that it’s a matter of indifference to you what the other person feels, but that only because, while you feel the impulse to the good, you don’t know how much wisdom and obedience it involves. He seized her hand and asked: “Tell me the truth.”

  “The truth is more or less what I’ve already told you,” Agathe repeated soberly and emphatically.

  “No!”

  “Yes.” There was something in this simple “yes” that made Lindner suddenly push away her hand.

  Agathe said: “You wanted to make me better, didn’t you? If I’m like a gold piece twisted out of shape that you’d like to bend back, I’m still a gold piece, aren’t I? But you’re losing your courage. The challenge (from God?) presented to you in my person collides with your conventional division of actions into light and darkness. And I say to you: to identify God with a human morality is blasphemy!”

  The voice in which she exclaimed this had, at least for Lindner, the sound of trumpets, something oddly arousing; he also felt Agathe’s wild youthful beauty, and suffered enough as it was, whenever he reproached her, from an unutterable anxiety and insinuation. For his principles, where were his principles? They were round about him, but far off. And in the empty space whose innermost vacuum was now his breast, something stirred that was despicable but as alive as a basket full of puppies. Certainly, the only reason he wanted to strike to the heart of this obdurate young woman was in order to do her a service, but the heart he was aiming at looked like a piece of flower flesh. Since Lindner had become a widower he had lived ascetically and avoided prostitutes and frivolous women on principle, but, to say it straight out, the more ardent he was about saving Agathe, the more grounded his fear became that in the process he would one day experience himself in a state of impermissible arousal. For this reason he often rapidly counted to fifty inwardly, in moments of anger as well as love. But his success was a remarkable one: the more this enabled him to drive his arousal from the point of threatened breach, the more it gathered in his whole body, until his body seemed to shine inside. He chose words of blame, but inwardly they were, ultimately, as soft as dying candles. He himself simply no longer believed what he was saying, for while externally he separated good from evil, inwardly everything was as mixed up together as it had been in Paradise before the Fall. And with a horrifying clarity for which there are no words, he was reminded of that grimly edifying experience which, in his adolescence, had warned him once and for all against the power of the emotions. Lindner felt punished by a bitter self-contempt when he had to think that what at that time had clothed itself with devilish cunning in the appearance of God was now emerging in his mature years as common lust of the flesh, precisely in the way that the Enlighteners shallow view had said it would.