The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  —Then I know what we can do, Ulrich said: —We’ll invent some charitable motivation. If the lady is not permitted to see the patients, she can at least visit the prisoner. It’s no trouble for me to get her the legitimation of a charitable organization and permission of the district court.

  —That would be fine. Come here to my official residence; the best time would be after the Chief Physician’s rounds. As long as you’re in my company nobody would, of course, think of asking to see your credentials. But naturally I have to have a cover for my conscience.

  Clarisse, excited by the difficulties that had to be overcome, beamed, and Dr. Fried spoke of his conscience at the last in a highly patronizing way, rather in the tone of a prince giving an order to the lowest of his subjects.

  About a week passed.

  Clarisse was as excited as a nervous child in the week before Christmas. It gave the impression that she was imparting a symbolic importance to her encounter with Moosbrugger, Hke the meeting of two rulers.

  —I believe I have the strength to help him when I see him, she asserted.

  Why don’t you take him a sausage instead—Ulrich answered—and cigarettes.

  Wotan laughed and proffered a medical joke; but afterward he again gave the impression of being grateful for the greater energy that radiated into his darkness from Clarisse’s ideas, like a thunderstorm below the horizon.

  Clarisse was tinglingly strengthened when she felt her influence over him.

  —If you had first met him a hundred years ago, you would have fallen weeping on his breast, Ulrich remarked.

  Wotan of course added that at that time the emotions were not as disturbed as they are today.

  —Quite the contrary, Ulrich maintained. —All the weeping and embracing was a sign that people never really possessed these emotions; that’s why they were forced. Isn’t it true—he turned to Wotan—that this is the same mechanism as in hysteria?

  Wotan made a joke about his wife, who he said was hysterical, and all the medical theories he had no idea what to do with. He already had three children.

  —When she’s playing the piano fortissimo—Walter defended Clarisse—when she’s excited and has tears in her eyes: isn’t she absolutely right in refusing to get on the streetcar, travel to the clinic, and behave there as if it had been ‘just music’ and not real tears?

  He had, incidentally, excluded himself and did not go along to the clinic.

  —She’s completely wrong, Ulrich responded.—For Moosbrugger’s sentiments toward a sausage are unaffected and healthy, while on the other hand, Clarisse’s importunate behavior will only make him regret not being able to plunge a knife into her belly.

  —You really think so? Clarisse liked that. She thought it over and said: —It was only the substitute women he was angry at; that’s what it was.

  —He’s an idiot, Ulrich said clearly and calmly. Struggling around Clarisse’s mouth were a laugh, a difficulty, and the desire to let Ulrich know that she was reaching an understanding with him. —You’re a pessimist! she finally said; and nothing else, except: Nietzsche! Would Ulrich understand this? Would Walter intuit what had just taken place? Her thoughts had squeezed into a very small package, into a sentence and into a word, inserted into the smallest space as miraculously as the burglar’s tool that nothing can resist; she was strangely excited. Every evening now she took a volume of Nietzsche to bed with her. “Is there a pessimism of strength?” That was the sentence that had occurred to her; it continues: “… an intellectual predilection for what is hard, gruesome, evil, and problematical in existence?” She did not remember it exactly anymore, but an unarticulated essence of these qualities hovered before her, associated with Ulrich, who from—indeed, now this expression popped up—”depths of anti-moral inclination,” while she constantly had to struggle against the moral inclination to feel sympathy for Walter, made everything look ridiculous and therefore strangely allied with her. She was half fainting as these connections crackled like lightning, half philosophy and half adultery, and all squeezed into a single word as into a hiding place. And like a new avalanche, a sentence rolled down and engulfed her, “the desire for the horrible as the worthy enemy,” and fragments from a long quotation swirled around her: “Is insanity perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degeneration? Are there perhaps neuroses of health? What does the synthesis of god and he-goat in the satyr indicate? Out of what experience of the self did the Greeks have to think of the enthusiast and primitive person as satyr?…” All that lay in a laugh, a word, and a twisting of the mouth. Walter noticed nothing. Ulrich looked at her with calm merriment—what hardness lay in this unconcern!—and said they should hurry up.

  As they were walking to the terminus of the streetcar, she asked Ulrich: “If he’s only an idiot/ why are you going?” “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he replied, “I always do what I don’t believe in.” He was surprised because Clarisse did not look at him but stared radiantly straight ahead and gave his hand a strong squeeze.

  ***

  [Clarisse drags Ulrich to a concert of avant-garde music in the studio of some painter friends of hers. This scene is sketched out more fully later.] From the study of law Walter was driven to music; from music to the theater; from the theater to an art gallery; from the art gallery back to art; from art… ? Now he is stuck, no longer has the energy to make another change, is contentedly unhappy, curses us all, and goes punctually to his office. And while he is in his office something may perhaps happen between Clarisse and Ulrich, but if he were to find out about it, it would put him in an enormous uproar, as if the whole ocean of world history were surging. He’s as blind as the moon about what goes on behind his back. To Ulrich, on the other hand, all this was far more a matter of indifference. Or: He almost envied him. Clarisse, sitting there hunched over and holding her fingers clenched while the other sounds sifted and shook, he found almost as unpleasant as a caricature of the sensibility of genius, of the revolutionary, the activist; that no emotion, no idea, is worth being the ultimate one, that one should not linger over anything because the sky leads endlessly upward. He is sleepy, but she will not let him rest. But there is something surrounding her! She always has to be doing something. Simply from tension, to get rid of something, to get past the last minute. And Walter? He is the born talented mediocrity; unhappy, but lucky, and everyone likes him; everyone invites him to stick around; with titanic effort he is constantly pulling his feet out of soil where they could take root so beautifully. Ulrich smiled maliciously. —He’s really not a weak character at all. It’s unbelievably difficult to achieve nothing if you don’t have any talent!

  And finally he will be happy.

  Clarisse would be making a bad exchange.

  During the intermission Clarisse sat down beside Ulrich. —I can’t take any more, she said. —When I hear music I’d like to either laugh or cry or run away.

  —With Meingast? Ulrich asked.

  —That was only an experiment. She seized his hand and held it fast. —No, with someone who could make music. Without conscience. A world. I hear that world sometimes.

  Ulrich said angrily: “You’re primitive, you musicians. What kind of subtle, unheard-of motivation does it take to produce a raging outburst after sinking into oneself in silence! You do it with five notes!

  —It’s something you don’t understand, Uli. Clarisse laughed.

  —And it doesn’t bother you? Ulrich challenged her scornfully.

  —You don’t understand it—Clarisse said tenderly—that’s just why you’re so hard. You don’t have a soft conscience. You were never sick.

  —I’d cheat on you, Ulrich said.

  —Being cheated is meaningless to us. We have to give everything we’ve got. We can only cheat ourselves. Her fingers snaked around his hand. —Music either is or it isn’t.

  —You’ll run out on me with somebody from the circus, Ulrich said pensively. He stared gloomily into the confusing tangle of people. —You’ll be disappointed. For me
it’s all a tissue of contradictions among which there is no resolution. But perhaps you’re right. A few blasts on the trumpet. Fantasized ones. Run to them.

  Evening was coming on. Wandering dark-blue clouds were in the sky beyond the studio windows. The tips of a tree reached up from below— houses stood with the backs of their roofs turned upward. —How should they stand otherwise? Ulrich thought, and yet there are moments when the small sorrow that one feels falls into the world as if onto a muffled giant drum. He thought of Agathe and was unspeakably sad. This small creature at his side was rushing forward at an unnatural speed. As if under the pressure of some kind of program. That wasn’t the natural way for love to develop. And anyway, there could be no talk of love. He was quite clear about that. And yet he yielded without resistance. He was consoled by a vague thought; something like this: a person is insulted and makes a great invention; that’s how die real deeds of the human will come about. Never in a straight line. I love Agathe and am letting myself be seduced by Clarisse. Clarisse believes that the small stir she makes is her will, but mine lies motionless beneath it like the water beneath the waves.

  The music, which kindled people’s eyes like lights in the darkening room and blew their bodies through each other like smoke, had started up again.

  The cleaning woman had already left; Walter was in the middle of his day in the office; Ulrich now chose such hours for his visits, without thinking about the significance of his choice. Yet until a particular Sunday, nothing happened. Walter had received an invitation that called him into town until evening, and half an hour before, after lunch, Ulrich had shown up without suspecting anything and in a bad mood, for the prospect of an afternoon in the presence of his friend had enticed him so little that he really only started out from habit. But when Walter immediately began to say goodbye, Ulrich felt it as a signal. Clarisse had the same thought. They both knew it.

  She would play for him, Clarisse said. Clarisse began. From the window Ulrich waved to Walter, who waved back. Keeping his eyes in the room, he leaned farther and farther out, after the vanishing figure. Clarisse suddenly broke off and came to the window too: Walter was no longer to be seen. Clarisse returned to playing. Ulrich now turned his back to her, as if it did not concern him; leaning into the window frame. Clarisse again stopped playing, ran into the hall; Ulrich heard her putting the chain on the door. When she came back he slowly turned around; said nothing; swayed for a moment. She played on. He went up to her and laid his hand on her shoulder. Without turning her head, she pushed his hand away with her shoulder. —Scoundrel! she said; played on. —Strange? he thought. —Does she want to feel force? The idea that urged itself upon him, that he ought to seize her by both shoulders and pull her down off the piano stool, seemed to him as comical as rocking a loose tooth. This constrained him. He went into the middle of the room. Alerted his hearing and sought an opening. But before anything occurred to him his mouth said: “Clarisse!” That had cut loose, detached itself gurgling from his throat, had grown out of his throat like a strange creature. Clarisse obediently stood up and came over to him. Her eyes were wide open. At this moment he understood for the first time that Clarisse was trying artificially, perhaps without knowing it, to evoke the excitement of a tremendous sacrificial act. Since she was standing beside him, the decision had to be made in an instant, but Ulrich was overcome by all the force of these inhibitions; his legs would no longer support him, he could not utter a word, and threw himself on the sofa.

  This excitement infecting him really ought to be made more appealing.

  At the same instant, Clarisse threw herself on his lap. Her lizard arms slung themselves around his head and neck. She seemed to be tearing at her arms, but without being able to loosen them from the embrace. Heated air came from her mouth and burned words into his face that he could not understand. There were tears in her eyes. Then everything of which he was normally constituted collapsed. He, too, uttered something that had no meaning, but before the eyes of them both; veins shivered and stood out like bars on a cage, their souls went at each other like bulls, and this riot was accompanied by the feeling of a tremendous moral decision. Now neither of them restrained words, faces, hands any longer. Their faces pressed themselves on each other, wet with tears and sweat, as pure flesh; all the words of love that were to be rehearsed tumbled over each other, as if the contents of a marriage had been shaken out upside down; the lascivious, hardened words that come only with long intimacy came first, unmediated, inciting, and yet bringing horror with them. Ulrich had half sat up; everything was so slippery (from their faces to their words) that their gliding into each other no longer made a sound.

  Clarisse tore her hat from the hook and stormed out. He with her. Wordless. Where to? This question was ridiculously lonely in his brain, swept clean by the storm.

  Clarisse rushed over paths, across meadows, through hedges, through woods. She was not one of those women who are broken softly, but became hard and angry after the fall. They finally found themselves in a quiet remote corner of the zoo that adjoined the woods. A small rococo summerhouse stood there. Empty. Here she presented herself to him once again. This time with many words and confessions. Driven by the impatience of desire and the fear that people might come by. It was horrible. This time Ulrich became quite cold and hard with remorse. Ulrich left her there. He did not care how she would get home, but rushed off.

  ***

  When Ulrich got back to the house later, he found Walter there. Clarisse was still angry, and making a gentle show of marital concord. But with a single pouting look she made Ulrich feel that the two of them still belonged together. Only afterward did it occur to him how strange the expression of her eyes had been twice that afternoon: delirious and mad.

  ***

  In the excitement, Ulrich had agreed to participate in freeing Moosbrugger. Now he fell in with this idea because it had already gone so far. He did not believe in it, and made the preparations convinced that it would not be possible to carry them out.

  ***

  Attending physician: Stay in a sanatorium advised; a little rest-and-diet cure. It’s not good for the nerves to lie there without any fat—after he had observed Clarisse’s body, which had become totally boyish.

  To Walters joyful surprise, Clarisse offered no resistance. (She felt: None of them amount to much: Walter, Ulrich, Meingast.) I have to take it upon myself alone. Her head felt like the peak of a mountain around which clouds gather; she felt a longing for the horizontal, to stretch out, lie down, in a more bracing air than that of the city. Greenness, vine-twistingness, light-dapplingness hovered before her; countryside, like a strong hand compelling sleep.

  ***

  She has come through the first phase; now it is a good idea for her to rest and strengthen herself. Moreover, she had the feeling: “I have to do everything by myself.”

  ***

  Wotan had offered to take her; Walter couldn’t get away from work; suffered as under a knife when he saw the two of them leave. Suffered as if his heart had been put through a meat grinder / stone crusher.

  ***

  When Clarisse entered the sanatorium, she inspected it like a general. A feeling of mission and divinity was already mingling again with her depression; she confidently tested the arrangements and the doctors on the question of whether they would be able to shelter and protect the revolution in world ideas that would now be emanating from this place.

  ***

  So it was also the need to collect herself that had led her there.

  ***

  The diagnosis put forward for her was general exhaustion and neurasthenia; Clarisse lived quiedy and was solicitously cared for. The persistent blows that had shaken her body like a railway journey ceased; she suddenly came to realize that she had been ill, while the ground beneath her feet was becoming firmer and more elastic again; she felt tenderness for her healing body, which was also now “solicitously caring for” her mind, as she ascertained, delighted at this unity of events
.

  ***

  Previously lack of appetite, diarrhea, etc.

  But the most recent events suddenly appeared problematical to her.

  She got hold of writing materials and proceeded to write down her experiences.

  She wrote for a whole day, almost from morning to evening. Without the need for fresh air or food; it struck her that her bodily activities receded almost entirely, and only a certain timidity about the strict house rules of the sanatorium moved her to go to the dining hall. Some time earlier she had read somewhere an article on Francis of Assisi; he showed up again in the notebook she was working on, in whole paragraphs that were repeated with trivial individual changes without this bothering her. The originality of intellectual achievements is judged falsely even today. The traditional idea of the hero still battles for priority with every new idea and new invention, although we have long known from the history of these controversies that every new idea arises in several minds at the same time, but that for some reason the heroic sense finds it more fitting to imagine genius as a bubbling spring instead of a broad current made up of many tributaries and combinations, although the greatest ideas of genius are nothing more than modifications of other ideas of genius, with minor additions. That is why on the one hand “we no longer have any geniuses”—because we think we see the point of origin all too clearly and will not abandon ourselves to believing in the genius of an accomplishment composed of nothing but ideas, emotions, and other elements that, taken singly, we must have unavoidably already encountered here and there. On the other hand, we exaggerate our imaginings about the nature of genius’s originality—especially where the testing by facts and by success is lacking; in short, wherever it is a question of nothing less than our soul—in such a senseless and perverted way that we have a great many geniuses whose heads have no more content than the page of a newspaper, but a flashy and original makeup byway of compensation. This makeup—allied with the false belief in the inescapable originality of genius, at odds with the obscure feeling of there being nothing behind it, which climaxes in a total incapacity to take the countless elements of an age and create structures of intellectual life that are nothing more than experiments, yet have the full seriousness of impartiality—belongs to that tepid mood full of doubts about the possibility of genius and the adoration of many ersatz geniuses that prevails today.