The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  Ulrich ended by taking back all the ambition of his life. What are even theories, other than wheedling? Discussions. And at the conclusion of such hours Ulrich was no longer thinking of anything but Agathe, the distant, inseparable sister, of whom he did not even know what she was doing. And he sadly recalled her favorite expression: “What can I do for my soul, which lives in me like an unsolved riddle? Which leaves visible man free to make any kind of choice because it cannot govern him in any way?”

  Here a settlement of accounts about Ulrich’s mood in regard to heroism.

  The dog, which after long association with man involuntarily caricatures him so splendidly in many ways.

  The feeling of never being allowed to leave here again.

  Clarisse meanwhile was playing out her game of signs; sometimes he saw her scurrying over the dunes like a fluttering cloth. “We are playing our story here,” she claimed, “on the stage of this island.” Basically it was only the exaggerated form of this having to imprint oneself on uncertainty. Formerly, when Clarisse had still been going to the opera with Walter, she had often said: “What is all art! If we could act out our stories!” She was now doing this as well. All lovers ought to do it. All lovers have the feeling that what we are experiencing is something miraculous, we are chosen people; but they ought to play it before a large orchestra and a dark hall—real lovers on the stage, and not people who are paid: not only a new theater would arise but also an entirely new kind of love, which would spread, lighting up human gestures like a fine network of branches, instead of, like today, creeping into the child’s darkness. That was what Clarisse said. Please, no child! Instead of accomplishing something, people have children! Sometimes she called the small keepsakes she put in the sand for Ulrich her secret children, or so she called every impression she received, for the impression melted into her like fruit. Between her and things there existed a continual exchanging of signs and understandings, a conspiracy, a heightened thinking heightened correspondence a burning, spirited life process. Sometimes this became so intense that Clarisse thought she was being torn out of her slender body and flying like a veil over the island, without rest, until her eyes were transfixed by a small stone or a shell and a credulous astonishment rooted her to the spot, because she had already been here once and always, and had lain quietly as a trace in the sand, while a second Clarisse had flown over the island like a witch.

  At times, her person seemed to her only an obstacle, unnaturally inserted in the dynamic exchange between the world that affected her and the world she affected. In its most intense moments, this self seemed to tear apart and disintegrate. Cf. piano scene. Beethoven—Nietzsche quotation. Even then Clarisse was serious about tearing apart. Even if she was unfaithful to Walter with this body and this “soul fastened to her skin,” it did not mean anything: there were many hours in which the frigid, rejecting Clarisse transformed herself into a vampire, insatiable, as if an obstacle had fallen away and for the first time she could yield to this heretofore forbidden pleasure. She sometimes seemed to plan things to suck Ulrich dry: “There’s still one more devil in you I have to exorcise!” she said. He owned a red sport jacket, and she sometimes made him put it on in the middle of the night and did not let up until he turned pale under his tanned skin. Her passion for him, and in general all the emotions she expressed, were not deep—Ulrich felt that distinctly—but somehow at times passed by depth on their precipitous fall into the abyss.

  Nor did she entirely trust Ulrich. He did not completely understand the greatness of what she was experiencing. During these days she had of course recognized and seen through everything that had previously been inaccessible to her. Formerly, she had experienced infinite heaviness, the enterprising spirit’s fall from almost-attained heights of greatness to the deepest anxiety and anguish. It seems that a person can be driven out from the ordinary real world we all know by processes that take place not in her but above or below the earth, and in the same way the person can intensify them into the incommensurable. On the island she explained it to Ulrich like this: One day everything around Clarisse had been enhanced: colors, smells, straight and crooked lines, noises, her emotions or thoughts, and the ones she aroused in others; what was taking place might have been causal, necessary, mechanical, and psychological, but aside from that it was moved by a secret driving force; it might have happened precisely that way the day before, but today, in some indescribable and fortunate way, it was different. —Oh—Clarisse immediately said to herself—I am freed from the law of necessity, where every thing depends on some other thing. For things depended on her emotions. Or rather, what was at work was a continual activity of the self and of things penetrating and yielding to each other, as if they were on opposite sides of the same elastic membrane. Clarisse discovered that what she was acting from was a veil of emotions, with things on the other side. A little later she received the most terrible confirmation: she perceived everything going on around her just as correctly as before, but it had become totally dissociated and alienated. Her own emotions seemed foreign to her, as if someone else were feeling them, or as if they were drifting around in the world. It was as if she and things were badly fitted to each other. She no longer found any support in the world, did not find the necessary minimum of satisfaction and self-moderation, was no longer able to maintain through inner action the equilibrium with the events of the world, and felt with unspeakable anguish how she was being inexorably squeezed out of the world and could no longer escape suicide (or perhaps madness). Again she was exempted from ordinary necessity and subjected to a secret law; but then she discovered, at the last moment when she could possibly be saved, the law that no one before her had noticed:

  We—that is, people lacking Clarisse’s insight—imagine that the world is unambiguous, whatever the relationship between the things out there and inner processes may be; and what we call an emotion is a personal matter that is added to our own pleasure or uneasiness but does not otherwise change anything in the world. Not just the way we see red when we get angry—that too, moreover; it is only erroneously that one considers it something that is an occasional exception, without suspecting what deep and general law one has touched upon!—but rather like this: things swim in emotions the way water lilies consist not only of leaves and flowers and white and green but also of “gently lying there.” Ordinarily, they are so quiet about this that one does not notice the totality; the emotions have to be calm for the world to be orderly and for merely rational associations to be dominant in it.

  But assuming for instance that a person suffers some really serious and annihilating humiliation that would have to lead to his destruction, it does happen that instead of this shame a surpassing pleasure in the humiliation sets in, a holy or smiling feeling about the world, and this is then not merely an emotion like any other or a deliberation, not even the reflection that we might perchance console ourselves that humility is virtuous, but a sinking or rising of the whole person on another level, a “sinking on the rise,” and all things change in harmony with this; one might say they remain the same but now find themselves in some other space, or that everything is tinged with another sense. At such moments one recognizes that aside from everyone’s world, that solid world that can be investigated and managed by reason, there is a second world, dynamic, singular, visionary, irrational, which is only apparently congruent with the first and which we do not, as people think, merely carry in our hearts or our minds, but which exists externally with precisely the same reality as the prevailing world. It is an uncanny mystery, and like everything mysterious it becomes, whenever one tries to articulate it, easily confused with what is most banal. Clarisse herself had experienced— when she was unfaithful to Walter, and although she had to be, on which account she did not recognize any remorse—how the world became black; however, it was not a real color but a quite indescribable one, and later this “sense color” of the world, as Clarisse called it, became a hard, burnt brown.

  Clarisse was ver
y happy on the day when she grasped that her new understanding was the continuation of her efforts on the subject of genius. For what distinguishes the genius from the healthy, ordinary person, other than the secret involvement of the emotions in everything that happens, which in the healthy person is stable and unnoticed but in the genius, on the other hand, is subject to incessant irritations? Moreover, Ulrich too said that there are many possible worlds. Rational, reasonable people adapt themselves to the world, but strong people adapt the world to themselves. As long as the “sense color” of the world, as Clarisse called it, remained stable, equilibrium in the world also had something stable. Its unnoticed stability might even be considered healthy and ordinarily indispensable, the way the body, too, is not permitted to feel all the organs that maintain its equilibrium. Also unhealthy is a labile equilibrium, which tips over at the first chance and falls into the inferior position. Those are the mentally ill, Clarisse told herself, of whom she was afraid. But on top, conquerors in the realm of humanity, are those whose equilibrium is just as vulnerable but full of strength and, constantly disturbed, is constantly inventing new forms of equilibrium.

  It is an uncanny balance, and Clarisse had never felt herself as much a creature perched on the razors edge between annihilation and health as she did now. But whoever has followed the development of Clarisse’s thoughts up to this point will already know that she had now come upon the traces of the “secret of redemption.” This had entered her life as the mission to liberate the genius that was inhibited by all sorts of relations in herself, Walter, and their surroundings, and it is easy to see that this inhibition comes about because one is forced to yield to the repression the world practices against every person of genius, and is submerged in obscurity; but here, on the other side, it throws the world into relief in a new color. This was for her the significance of the soul color dark red, a marvelous, indescribable, and transparent shade in which air, sand, and vegetation were immersed, so that she moved everywhere as in a red chamber of light.

  She once called this the “darkroom,” herself surprised by its similarity to a room in which in the midst of acrid vapors one bends tense and excited over the delicate, barely recognizable images that appear on the negative. It was her task to prefigure the redemption, and Ulrich seemed to her to be her apostle, who would after a while leave her and go out into the world, and whose first task would be to liberate Walter and Meingast. From this point on, her progress was much more rapid.

  The blows of confused and anarchic ideas that Ulrich received every day, and the movement of these thoughts in an imprudent but clearly palpable direction, had in fact gradually swept him up, and the only thing that still differentiated his life from that of the insane was a consciousness of his situation, which he could interrupt by an effort. But for a long time he did not do so. For while he had always felt only like a guest among rational people and those effectively engaged in life, at least with one part of his being, and as alien or meaningless as a poem would be were he suddenly to start reciting one at the general meeting of a corporation, he felt here in this nothingness of certainty an enhanced security, and lived with precisely this part of his being among the structures of absurdity in the air, but as securely as on solid ground. Happiness is in truth not something rational, which depends once and for all on a specific action or the possession of specific things, but much more a mood of the nerves through which everything becomes happiness or doesn’t; to this extent Clarisse was right. And the beauty, goodness, and quality of genius in a woman, the fire she kindles and sustains, is not to be settled by any legal determination of truth but is a mutual delirium. One could maintain, Ulrich told himself, that our entire being—which we basically cannot find a basis for but complacently accept on the whole as God, while, acting from this assumption, it is easy for us to deduce the details—is nothing but the delirium of many; but if order is reason, then every simple fact, if we observe it outside of any order, is already the germ of a madness. For what do facts have to do with our mind? The mind governs itself by them, but they stand there, responsible to no one, like mountain peaks or clouds or the nose on a person’s face; there were times when it would have been a pleasure to crush the nose on the face of the lovely Diotima with two fingers; Clarisse’s nose sniffed, alert, like the nose of a pointer, and was able to impart all the excitement of the invisible.

  But soon he was no longer able to follow Clarisse’s idea of order. You scratch a sign in a stone at the spot where you happen to be: that this is art, just as the greatest is, was a feeling one could sympathize with. And Clarisse did not want to possess Ulrich, but—each time in a new leap— live with him. —I don’t perceive truly—she said—but I perceive fruitfully. Her ideas scintillated, things scintillated. One does not gather up one’s insights in order to form a self out of them, like a cold snowman, when like her one is growing into ever-new catastrophes; her ideas grew “in the open”; one weakens oneself by scattering everything, but spurs oneself on to new, strange growth. Clarisse began to express her life in poems; on the Island of Health Ulrich found this quite natural. In our poems there is too much rigid reason; the words are burned-out notions, the syntax holds out sticks and ropes as if for the blind, the meaning never gets off the ground everyone has trampled; the awakened soul cannot walk in such iron garments. Clarisse discovered that one would have to choose words that are not ideas; but since there don’t seem to be any, she chose instead the word pair. If she said “I,” this word was never able to shoot up as vertically as she felt it; but “I-red” is not yet imprisoned by anything, and flew upward. Just as beneficial is freeing words from their grammatical bonds, which are quite impoverished. For example, Clarisse gave Ulrich three words and asked him to read them in any order he chose. If they were “God,” “red,” and “goes,” he read “God goes red,” or “God, red, goes”—that is, his brain immediately either understood them as a sentence or separated them by commas in order to underline that it was not making them into a sentence. Clarisse called this the chemistry of words, that they always cohere in groups, and showed how to counter this. Her favorite bit of information was that she worked with exclamation points or underlining. God!! red!!! goes! Such accumulations slow one down, and the word dams up behind them to its full meaning. She also underlined words from one to ten times, and at times a page she had written this way looked like a cryptic musical score. Another means, but one she used less frequently, was repetition; through it the weight of the repeated word became greater than the power of the syntactic bond, and the word began to sink without end. God goes green green green. It was an incredibly difficult problem to ascertain correctly the number of repetitions so that they would express exactly what was meant.

  One day, Ulrich showed up with a volume of Goethe’s poems, which he happened to have brought along, and proposed taking several words out of each of a number of poems and putting them together, to see what came out. Poems like this came out:

  — — — —

  — — — — —

  It cannot be overlooked that an obscure, incoherent charm emanates from these constellations, something with the glowing fire of a volcano, as if one were looking into the bowels of the earth. And a few years after Clarisse, a similar play with words actually did become an ominous fashion among the healthy.

  Clarisse anticipated remarkable conclusions. Flakes of fire were stolen by poets from the volcano of madness: at some point in primeval times and later, every time a genius revisited earth; these glowing connections of words, not yet constricted to specific meanings, were planted in the soil of ordinary language to form its fertility, “which as we know comes from its volcanic origins.” But—so Clarisse concluded—it follows from this that the mind must decay to primal elements again and again in order for life to remain fruitful. This placed in Clarisse’s hands the responsibility for a monstrous irresponsibility; she knew that she was really uneducated, but now she was filled with a heroic lack of respect for everything that had been
created before her.

  Ulrich was able to follow Clarisse’s games this far, and youth’s lack of respect made it easier for him to dream into the shattered mind these new structures that could be formed: a process that has repeated itself among us several times, around 1900, when people loved the suggestive and sketchy, as after 1910, where in painting people succumbed to the charm of the simplest constructive elements and bid the secrets of the visible world echo by reciting a kind of optical alphabet.

  But Clarisse’s decline progressed more rapidly than Ulrich could follow. One day, she came with a new discovery. —Life withdraws powers from nature once and for all, forever—she began, making a connection with poems that tear words out of nature in order slowly to make it barren—while life transforms these powers withdrawn from nature into a new condition, “consciousness,” from which there is no return. It seemed obvious, and Clarisse was surprised that no one before her had noticed it. This was because people’s morality prevented them from noticing certain things. —All physical, chemical, and other such stimuli that strike me—she declared—I transform into consciousness; but never has the reverse been achieved, otherwise I could raise this stone with my will. So consciousness is constantly interfering with the system of nature’s powers. Consciousness is the cause of all insignificant, superficial movement, and “redemption” demands that it be destroyed.