The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  Agathe said: “That must somehow be possible.”

  “Can you imagine sharing a lover with another woman?” Ulrich asked.

  “I could,” Agathe asserted. “I can even imagine it being quite beautiful! I just can’t imagine the other woman.”

  Ulrich laughed.

  Agathe made a parrying gesture. “I have a particular personal dislike of women,” she said.

  “Of course, of course! And I don’t like men!”

  Agathe felt his mockery was somewhat insulting because she felt that it was not unjustified, and she did not go on to say what she had intended.

  In the resulting pause Ulrich, to encourage her, began to relate something he had recently dreamed up in the distracted condition of shaving. “You know that there were times when aristocratic women,” he said, “if a slave pleased them, could have him castrated so that they might have their pleasure of him without endangering the aristocracy of their progeny.”

  Agathe did not know it, but she gave no sign. On the other hand, she now recalled having once read that among some uncivilized tribes every woman married all her husband’s brothers along with him and had to serve them all, and every time she imagined such servile humiliation, an involuntary and yet not quite unwelcome shudder made her shrink. But she did not reveal any of this to her brother either.

  “…whether something like that happened often, or only exceptionally, I don’t know, nor does it matter,” Ulrich had meanwhile been saying. “For, as I must confess, I was thinking only of the slave. More precisely, I was thinking of the moment when he left his sickbed for the first time and encountered the world again. At first, of course, the will to resist and defend himself, which had been paralyzed at the start of what happened, rouses and thaws out again. But then the awareness must set in that it’s too late. Anger wants to rebel, but there follow one after the other the memory of the pain suffered, the cowardly awakening of a fear from which only consciousness was removed, and finally that humility signifying a now irrevocable humiliation, and these emotions now hold down the anger, the way the slave himself was held down while the operation was being performed.” Ulrich interrupted this odd recital and searched for words; his eyelids were lowered in meditation. “Physically, he could doubtless still pull himself together,” he continued, “but a strange feeling of shame will keep him from doing so, for he must recognize its futility in a way that embraces everything; he is no longer a man, he has been debased to a girl-like existence, to the existence of a towel, a handkerchief, a cup, of some kind of being that, not without affection, is allowed to serve. I would like to know the moment when he is then called for the first time before the lady who tortured him and reads in her eyes what she proposes to do with him….”

  Agathe laughed mockingly. “You’ve been thinking some really strange thoughts, Ulo! And when I think that before he was castrated your slave was perhaps a butcher or a stylish domestic…”

  Ulrich laughed innocently along with her. “Then I myself would probably find my depiction of the awakening of his soul disturbingly comical,” he admitted. He himself was happy that this disreputable emotional report was brought to an end. For without his noticing, various things must have come into his mind that didn’t belong there: as if something of the mythological goddesses who consume their devotees, or the Siamese twins, up to masochism or the castration complex, had been drawn with fingernails across the dubious keyboard of contemporary psychology! When he had stopped laughing he immediately made an embittered face.

  Agathe laid her hand on his arm. The tiny shadows of a concealed excitement twitched in her gray eyes. “But why did you tell me that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ulrich said.

  “I believe you were thinking of me,” she asserted.

  “Nonsense!” Ulrich retorted, but after a while he asked: “Do you know that another letter from Hagauer came today?” and so apparently began talking about something else.

  The letters from Hagauer that were then arriving became more threatening from one to the next. “I don’t understand why, under these circumstances, he doesn’t get on the train and come here to confront us,” Ulrich went on.

  “He won’t find the time,” Agathe said.

  And that was indeed how it was. At the beginning Hagauer had resolved several times to do just that, but every time something intervened, and then he had become rather accustomed to being alone. It seemed to him not a bad thing to live for a while without his wife: man ought not to be too happy or too comfortable—that is a heroic conception of life. So Hagauer confronted his misfortune energetically, and was able to note the compensation that not only time can heal wounds, but lack of time as well. Of course this did not prevent him from continuing to insist that Agathe return; indeed, he could dedicate himself to this question of order with the unruffled mind of a man who has shipped the children of his emotions off to bed. Once again he thoroughly reviewed all the documents, which he preserved in careful order, and evening after evening read through all the personal papers of his deceased father-in-law without finding in a single one any indication of the surprise that had been visited upon him. That a man whom he had always revered as a model could have changed his mind at the last minute, or out of negligence not adapted his will to changed circumstances over the years, seemed the more improbable to Hagauer the more often he untied the ribbons and removed the labeled covers with which he kept his correspondence and other papers in order. He avoided thinking about how, then, the result had come about that finally had come about, and reconciled himself by saying that some error, some carelessness, some guilty or innocent negligence, some lawyers stratagem, must lie behind it. In this opinion, which permitted him to spare his feelings without wasting his time over it, he contented himself with demanding precise statements and documents, and, when these did not come, calling upon a lawyer for advice; for as an order-loving person, he assumed that in their spiteful endeavor Agathe and Ulrich must obviously have done the same, and he did not want to lag behind them. The lawyer now took over the writing of letters and repeated the demand for an explanation, combining with it the demand that Agathe return: in part because that was the preference of Hagauer, who imputed his wife’s conduct to her brother’s influence, and in part because it seemed a requisite in this obscure and perhaps shady affair that one should first stick to the established factual basis of “malicious abandonment”; the rest was to be left to the future, and to cautious evaluation of whatever points of attack might develop. From then on Ulrich started reading the antagonistic letters again and did not burn them. But no matter how often since then he had argued with his sister that arming themselves likewise for the legal struggle could not be put off, she would hear nothing of it; indeed, she did not even want to listen to his reports, and finally he had had to undertake the first steps without her, until at last his own lawyer insisted on hearing Agathe himself and receiving his power of attorney from her. This was what Ulrich now informed her of all at once, adding that what he had first, out of consideration, called merely a “communication from Hagauer” was actually a singularly unpleasant legal letter. “It’s apparently unavoidable, and without our realizing it it’s become high time that we confide to our lawyer, as cautiously and with as much reserve as we can, something about the dangerous business with the will,” he finished.

  Agathe looked at him for a long time and irresolutely, with a look hooded from within, before she softly answered him with the words: “I did not want that!”

  Ulrich made a gesture of excuse and smiled. It was possible to live in the fire of goodness without the necessity of arson, and the criminal trick they had carried out on their father’s will had long since become superfluous: but it had happened, and nothing could be done about it without their being exposed. Ulrich understood the connection between resistance and despondency in his sisters answer. Agathe had meanwhile stood up and was moving back and forth among the objects in the room without speaking; she sat down on a chair so
me distance off and went on looking at her brother in silence. Ulrich knew that she wanted to draw him back into the silence, which was like a bed of rest consisting of tiny points of flame, and a sweet martyrdom demanded his heart back.

  As in music or in a poem, by a sickbed or in a church, the circle of what could be uttered was oddly circumscribed, and in their dealings with each other a clear distinction had formed between those conversations that were permissible and those they could not have. But this did not happen through solemnity or any other kind of elevated expectation, but appeared to have its origin outside the personal. They both hesitated. What should the next word be, what should they do? The uncertainty resembled a net in which all unspoken words had been caught: the web was stretched taut, but they were not able to break through it, and in this want of words glances and movements seemed to reach further than usual, and outlines, colors, and surfaces to have an unstoppable weight: A secret inhibition, which usually resides in the arrangement of the world and sets limits to the depth of the senses, had become weaker, or from time to time disappeared entirely. And inevitably the moment came when the house they were in resembled a ship gliding outward on an infinite waste reflecting only this ship: the sounds of the shore grow fainter and fainter, and finally all motion ceases; objects become completely mute and lose the inaudible voices with which they speak to man; before they are even thought, words fall like sick birds from the air and die; life no longer has even the energy to produce the small, nimble resolutions that are as important as they are insignificant: getting up, picking up a hat, opening a door, or saying something. Between the house and the street lay a nothingness that neither Agathe nor Ulrich could cross, but in the room space was polished to an utmost luster, which was intensified and fragile like all highly perfected things, even if the eye did not directly perceive it. This was the anxiety of the lovers, who at the height of their emotion no longer knew which direction led upward and which downward. If they looked at each other, their eyes, in sweet torment, could not draw back from the sight they saw, and sank as in a wall of flowers without striking bottom. “What might the clocks be doing now?” suddenly occurred to Agathe; and reminded her of the small, idiotic second hand of Ulrich’s watch, with its precise forward motions along its narrow circle; the watch was in the pocket under the bottommost rib, as if that were where reason’s last place of salvation lay, and Agathe yearned to draw it out. Her glance loosened itself from her brother’s: a painful retreat! They both felt that it bordered on the comic, this shared silence under the pressure of a heavy mountain of bliss or powerlessness.

  And suddenly Ulrich said, without having previously thought of saying exactly this: “Polonius’s cloud, which sometimes appears as a ship, sometimes as a camel, is not the weakness of a servile courtier but characterizes completely the way God has created us!”

  Agathe could not know what he meant; but does one always know what a poem means? When it pleases us it opens its lips and causes a smile, and Agathe smiled. She was lovely with her bowed lips, but this gave Ulrich time, and he gradually recalled what it was he had been thinking before he had broken the silence. He had imagined as an example that Agathe was wearing glasses. At that time, a woman with glasses was still regarded as comical and looked quite risible, or pitiable; but a time was already coming when a woman wearing glasses, as is still true today, looked enterprising, indeed positively young. There are firmly inherited habits of consciousness behind this, which change but which in some connection or another are always present and form the pattern through which all perceptions pass before they arrive at consciousness, so that in a certain sense the whole that one thinks one is experiencing is always the cause of what it is that one experiences. And one rarely imagines to oneself how far this extends, that it extends from ugly and beautiful, good and evil, where it still seems natural that one man’s morning cloud should be another man’s camel, through bitter and sweet or fragrant and noisome, which still have something material about them, to the things themselves with their precise and impersonally attributed qualities, the perception of which is apparently quite independent of intellectual prejudices but in truth is so only in the main. In reality, the relation of the outer to the inner world is not that of a die which impresses its image on a receptive material, but that of a matrix which is deformed in the process, so that its diagram, without its coherence being destroyed, can produce remarkably diverse images. So that Ulrich too, if he was able to think that he was seeing Agathe before him wearing glasses, could think just as well that she loved Lindner or Hagauer, that she was his “sister” or “the being half united with him in twinlike fashion,” and it was not a different Agathe each time that was sitting before him but a different sitting there, a different world surrounding her, like a transparent ball dipping into an indescribable light. And it seemed to them both that here lay the deepest sense of the support which they sought in each other and which one person always seeks in another.

  They were like two people who, hand in hand, have stepped out of the circle that had firmly enclosed them, without being at home in another one. There was in this something that could not be accounted for in ordinary notions of living together.

  C. 1934

  48

  THE SUN SHINES ON JUST AND UNJUST

  The sun shines with one and the same merciful glance on just and unjust; for some reason Ulrich would have found it more comprehensible if it did so with two: one after the other, first on the just and then on the unjust, or vice versa. “Sequentially, man too is living and dead, child and adult, he punishes and pardons; indeed this ability of only being able to do contradictory things in sequence could really be used to define the essence of the individual, for supra-individual entities, like humanity or a people or the population of a village, are able to commit their contradictions not only one after the other, but also simultaneously and all mixed up with each other. So the higher a being stands on the scale of capabilities, the lower he stands on the scale of morality? In any case: you can rely on a tiger, but not on mankind!” This was what Ulrich said. If his friendship with Stumm had been flourishing, how fruitful such conversations might have been! With Agathe they always ended in a plea to excuse their superfluity and led to new and vain resistance. “There’s no sense in talking that way,” he conceded, and began from the beginning. “For there are many problems,” he instructed, “that make no sense, and they ought always to be suspected of being important ones. There are questions of the kind: Why do I have two ears but only one tongue? Or: Why is man symmetrical only frontally and not hexagonally? Sometimes these questions come straight from the nursery or the madhouse, but sometimes, too, they later achieve scientific respectability.” It’s different, and yet basically the same, with the problem: Why do people die? We already find in textbooks of logic this model of a reasoned conclusion: “All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal/’ But one can also give a scientific answer, and all such answers would leave such a problem in exceptionally rational condition: and yet the irrational way we stare at this problem, Ulrich maintained, an irrational, indeed entirely shameless way of refusing to understand nature, is itself almost morality, philosophy, and literature!

  Agathe, by nature easygoing, tolerant, and averse to cloud castles of thought, responded: “Nature has no morality!”

  Ulrich said: “Nature has two moralities!”

  Agathe said: “I don’t care how many it has. It’s not a problem. You’re only trying to needle and upset me!”

  “But it’s all the same!” Ulrich answered. “Because since we surely call that good which pleases us and to which we give preference—that’s not morality, but it is the beginning and end of morality!—wouldn’t evil then have to die out in due course, the way snakes or diseases are more or less stamped out and the jungle dies? Why does it survive and thrive so mightily?”

  “That’s no concern of mine!” Agathe declared, thereby defending her intention of not taking the conversation seriously when
it was conducted in this fashion.

  But Ulrich replied: “We simply can’t do without evil. And what does concern you is even more absurd and profound! For mustn’t something exist that is worse than the rest, if only for the reason that we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if one of our feelings were just as beautiful as any other one, or even if each of our actions were better than its predecessors?”

  Agathe looked up, for this was serious. This was the way it often happened now; they were uncertain about where their adventuresome plans were leading them, and avoided talking about it because they did not know how to begin; but suddenly they were to some extent in the midst of it. At that time Ulrich was receiving letters from Professor Schwung, his deceased father’s old enemy, entreating him on the head of the revered departed to engage himself in bringing about greater accountability in the world; and he was receiving letters from Professor Hagauer, his embittered brother-in-law, in which his sister and he were sternly suspected of being guilty of profoundly dubious conduct. At first he had answered these letters evasively, then not at all; finally, Agathe even asked him to burn them without opening them. She explained this by saying that it was impossible to read such letters, and in the condition in which they found themselves, that was the truth. But to burn them unread, and not even to listen to what other people were complaining about: how did it happen that this did not move her conscience, although at that time it was so sensitive in every other respect?

  That was the time when they were beginning to comprehend what an equivocal role other people played in their feelings. They knew that they were not in accord with the general public; in the thousand kinds of busyness that filled up night and day there was not a single activity in which they could have participated wholeheartedly, and whatever they might venture upon themselves would most certainly have been met with contempt and disdain. There was a remarkable peace in this. Apparently one can (probably) say that a bad conscience, if it is big enough, provides almost a better pillow than a good one: the mind’s incidental activity, incessantly expanding with a view to ultimately deriving a good individual conscience from all the wrong that surrounds it and in which it is implicated, is then shut down, leaving a boundless independence in the emotions. At times this caused a tender loneliness, a limitless arrogance, to pour its splendor on the pairs excursions through the world. Alongside their ideas the world could just as easily appear clumsily bloated, like a captive balloon circled by swallows, as it could be humbled to a background as tiny as a forest at the rim of the sky by the intensification of the solipsistic condition of their egos. Their social obligations sounded like a shouting that was reaching them, sometimes rude, sometimes from far away; they were trivial, if not unreal. An enormous arrangement, which is finally nothing but a monstrous absurdity: that was the world. On the other hand, everything they encountered on the plane of ideas had the tensed, tightrope-walking nature of the once-and-never-again, and whenever they talked about it they did so in the awareness that no single word could be used twice without changing its meaning. Likewise, everything that happened to them was connected with the impression of being a discovery that permitted of no repetition, or it happened on precisely the right occasion, as if it had been conjured up by magic.