by Robert Musil
Suddenly the light was turned on. The final notes of the music were still swinging back and forth like a branch someone has just jumped off; eyes sparkled; and the silence before everyone started talking set in. Clarisse had promptly moved away from Ulrich, but now new groups formed, and she pulled him into a corner and had something to tell him.
—What is the extreme opposite of letting something prevail? she asked him. And since Ulrich did not respond, she herself gave the answer. —To impose oneself! The tiny figure stood elastically before him, her hands behind her back. But she tried to keep her eyes fixed on Ulrich’s, for the words she now had to look for were so difficult that they made her small body stagger. —Inscribe yourself onto something! I say. I thought of that before while we were sitting next to each other. Impressions are nothing; they press you in! Or a heap of earthworms. But when do you understand a piece of music? When you yourself create it inwardly! And when do you understand a person? When you do as he does. You see—with her hand she described an acute angle lying horizontally, which involuntarily reminded Ulrich of a phallus—our entire life is expression! In art, in love, in politics, we seek the active, the pointed form; I’ve already told you that it’s the bear’s muzzle! No, I didn’t mean that impressions don’t mean anything: they’re the half of it; it’s marvelously in the word “redeem,” the active “re” and the “deem”; she became quite excited by the effort of making herself comprehensible to Ulrich.
But just then the music making started up again—it had been only a short intermission—and Ulrich turned away from Clarisse. He looked out at the evening through the large studio window. The eye first had to adjust to the darkness again. Then wandering blue clouds appeared in the sky. The tips of a tree reached up from below. Houses stood with their backs upward. —How should they stand otherwise? Ulrich thought with a smile, and yet there are minutes when everything appears topsy-turvy. He thought of Agathe and was unspeakably depressed. This new, small creature, Clarisse, at his side, was rushing forward at an unnatural speed. That was not a natural process, he was quite clear about that. He considered her crazy. There could be no talk of love. But while behind his back the music seemed to him like a circus, it pleased him to imagine running alongside a circling horse jumping hurdles, with Clarisse standing on it erect and shouting “Aie-ya” and cracking her whip.
1930-1934
ON CLARISSE—WALTER
She comes upon Walter in the “studio”; bare, chilly space. He is half-dressed and has a dressing gown on. The brushes are dry, he is sitting over some sketches. He really should have been at the office already.
He is irritated that Meingast went off without saying goodbye, and Clarisse is secretly excited. Possibly here: He really wanted… as long as Meingast was in the house …
Already from the doorway Clarisse called out to him: Come, come! We’re going to Dr. Friedenthal to ask him to entrust Moosbrugger’s care to us.
Walter can’t turn his head away from her and looks at her.
Don’t ask! Clarisse commands.
Could Walter have any more doubts at this moment that her mind was disturbed? The answer to this question will always be quite dependent on the circumstances. Clarisse looked impetuous and beautiful. The fire in her eyes looked exactly like that of a healthy will. And so what her brother Siegmund had said of her, and had recently repeated when Walter again asked him about it, took hold of Walter: She is excessively nervous, you just have to grab her vigorously.
But for the moment it was Clarisse who was doing the vigorous grabbing: She hopped around Walter incessantly, repeating: Come, come, come! Don’t make me have to ask you!
The words seemed to fly around Walter’s ears, they confused him. One might have said that he was laying back his ears and digging his feet into the ground the way a horse, a donkey, a calf does, with the obstinacy that is the weak creature’s strength of will: but to him it represented itself in the form: Now you’ll show her who’s master!
“Just come along,” Clarisse said, “then you’ll see why!”
“No,” exclaimed Walter. “You’ll tell me right this instant what you’re up to!”
‘What I’m up to? I’m up to something weird.” She had meanwhile begun to gather up in the neighboring room what she needed to go out; now she pulled off her gardening gloves, held them in her hand for a moment, and with a sudden heave flung them among her husband’s paint and brush jars. Something fell over, something rolled, something clattered. Clarisse observed the effect on Walter and burst out laughing. Walter got red in the face; he had no desire to hit her but was ashamed of this very lack. Clarisse went on laughing and said: You’ve been crouching over these jars for a year and a day and haven’t produced a thing. I’ll show you how it’s done. I’ve told you I’ll bring out your genius. I’ll make you restless, impatient, daring!” Suddenly she was quiet and said seriously: “It’s weird, putting oneself on the same level as the insane, but it’s resolving for genius! Do you believe that we’ll ever amount to anything the way we’ve been going along? Among these jars that are all so nicely round and picture frames that are so nicely rectangular? And with music after supper! Why, then, were all gods and goddesses antisocial?”
Antisocial? Walter asked in astonishment.
If you must be precise: uncriminally antisocial. Because they weren’t thieves or murderers. But humility, voluntary poverty, and chastity are also the expression of an antisocial mentality. And how otherwise could they have taught mankind how the world is to be improved but have denied the world for themselves?
Now Walter was so constituted that in spite of his initial astonishment he was capable of finding this assertion correct. It reminded him of the question: “Can you imagine Jesus as director of a mine?” A question that would obviously have to be answered simply and naturally “no,” if one could not just as well say “official of the Bureau for Monuments” in place of “mine director,” and if one didn’t feel the accompanying flash of a ridiculously warm spark of ambition. Obviously there was hot only a contradiction but a more profound incompatibility separating two world systems between nurturing the middle class and nurturing the divine, but Walter, despite his already long-determined inclination to the middle class, wanted both, or wanted, what is even worse, to renounce neither, and Clarisse possessed what he had once already felt as “calling upon God,” the decisiveness of a resolve that shows no consideration for anything. And so it happened that after she had spoken, he felt exactly as she had said, as if he were jammed up to his knees into the life he had created for himself, like a wedge in a block of wood, while she flitted about in front of him as the restless, impatient, daring one who was experimenting with him. As a man of many talents, he knew that genius lay not so much in talent as in willpower. To the person being overtaken by paralysis, which he intuitively understood himself to be, it seemed related to the fermenting, the must, indeed even to the mere foam. He enviously recognized in her the improbable, the zigzag dots of variations around the mean, the creature that at the edge of the crowd half goes along ahead of it and is half lost within it, which lies in the notion of genius. Clarisse was the only person in whom he loved this, who still linked him to it, and because her association with genius was pathological, his fear for her was also a fear for himself. This was how the desire not to listen to her, indeed to show her “the man,” as Siegmund, the brother and physician, had advised him to do, arose out of his assent to the words with which she was persuading him and explaining her intention, and out of her powerful charm in pleasing him, which she exercised in an apparently natural way and without any awareness of contradiction.
***
So after a short pause Walter said rather roughly: “But now be reasonable, Clarisse, stop that nonsense and come over here!” Clarisse had meanwhile taken off her clothes and was in the process of drawing a cold bath. In her short panties and with her thin arms, she looked like a boy. She felt the stale warmth of Walters body close behind her and immediately under
stood what he was after. She turned around and put her hand on his chest. But Walter reached out to grab her. With one hand he held her arm, and sought with the other to grasp her by the crotch and pull her to him. Clarisse tore at the embrace, and when that didn’t help shoved her free hand into Walters face, into his nose and mouth. His face turned red and the blood trembled in his eyes while he struggled with Clarisse, but he did not want to let her see that she was hurting him. And when he threatened to suffocate, he had to strike her hand from his face. Quick as lightning she went at it again, and this time her nails tore two bleeding furrows in his skin. Clarisse was free.
They stood this way opposite each other. Neither of them tried to speak. Clarisse was startled by her cruelty, but she was beside herself. Some intervention from above had torn her out of herself; she was totally turned to the outside, a bush full of thorns. She was in ecstasy. None of the thoughts that had preoccupied her for weeks was any longer in her mind; she had even forgotten what she had just been talking about and what it was she wanted. Her whole self was gone, with the exception of what she needed to defend herself. She felt incredibly strong. Just then Walter again snatched at her, this time with all his strength. He had become angry and feared nothing in the whole world so much as becoming rational again. Clarisse struck at him. She was instantly ready to scratch again, to bite, to knee him in the groin or shove her elbow in his mouth, and it was not even anger or dislike that determined this, let alone any rational consideration; rather, in some wild way, this struggle made her like him, even though she was ready to kill him. She wanted to bathe in his blood. She did so with her nails and with the short glances, which, shocked, followed his efforts and the small red gutters that opened up on his face and hands. Walter cursed. He swore at her. Vulgar words, which had no relation to his usual self, came from his mouth. Their pure, undiluted masculinity smelled like brandy, and the need for common, insulting speech suddenly revealed itself to be just as primeval as the need for tenderness. Apparently what was coming out was nothing but a grudge against all the higher ambition that had tortured and humiliated him for decades and was finally raising its head against him once more in Clarisse. Of course he had no time to think about this. But he still felt distinctly that he was not merely on the point of breaking her will because Siegmund had advised him that way, but was also doing it on account of the breaking and snapping itself. In some fashion the ridiculously beautiful motions of a flamingo went through his mind. ‘We’ll see what’s left after a bulldog gets hold of it!” was his thought about the flamingo mind, but what he muttered half aloud between his teeth was: “Stupid goose!”
And Clarisse, too, was inspired by the one idea: “He can’t be allowed to have his way!” She felt her strength still growing. Her clothes tore, Walter seized the shreds, she seized hold of the neck in front of her. Half naked, slippery as a wriggling fish, she struggled in her husband’s arms. Walter, whose strength was not sufficient simply to overpower her, flung her to and fro and painfully sought to block her attacks. She had lost her shoe and kicked at him with her bare foot. They fell. They both appeared to have forgotten the goal of their struggle and its sexual origin, and were fighting only to assert their will. In this utmost, convulsive gathering of their selves they really disappeared. Their perceptions and thoughts gradually took on a totally indefinable texture, as in a blinding light. They almost felt amazement at still being alive / that their selves were still there.
Clarisse especially was worked up to such a pitch that she felt insensitive to the pain inflicted on her, and when she came to herself again this intoxicated her in the conviction that the same spirits that had recently illuminated her were now standing by her in her mission and fighting on her side. So she was all the more horrified when she was forced to notice that with time she was growing fatigued. Walter was stronger and heavier than she; her muscles became numb and lax. There were pauses where his weight pressed her to the ground and she could not defend herself, and the succession of defensive maneuvers and ruthless attacks against sensitive face and body parts, during which she caught her breath, were succeeded more and more frequently by powerlessness and suffocating poundings of her heart. So that what Walter had anticipated happened: nature conquered, Clarisse’s body left her mind in the lurch and defended its will no longer. It seemed to her as if she were hearing within herself the cocks crowing on the Mount of Olives: incredibly, God was abandoning her world, something was about to happen that she could not divine. And at moments Walter was already ashamed of himself. Like a bolt of lightning, remorse struck him. It also seemed to him that Clarisse looked horribly distorted. But he had already risked so much that he no longer wanted to stop. To continue anesthetizing himself, he used the excuse that the brutality he was exercising was his right as a husband. Suddenly Clarisse screamed. She made an effort to utter a long, shrill, monotone cry as she saw her will escaping, and in this final, desperate defense it was in her mind that with this cry and what remained of her will she could perhaps slip out of her body. But she no longer had much breath left; the cry did not last long and brought no one rushing in. She was left alone. Walter was alarmed at her cry but then angrily intensified his efforts. She felt nothing. She despised him. Finally, she thought of an expedient: she counted as quickly and as loudly as she could: “One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five,” over and over. Walter found it horrible, but it did not stop him.
And when they separated and straightened up, in a daze she said: “Just wait. I’ll have my revenge!”
1936
NEW IDEAS ABOUT THE
CLARISSE-WALTER-ULRICH COMPLEX
To make Clarisse human, use the problem of genius. Or instead of genius, one can also say: the will to greatness, to goodness. A miserable Prometheus. Genius in that case about the same thing: a person who is an exception. The person who sees the errors, sees what is out of joint in the world, and has the will not to let the matter drop. In her case she doesn’t have the strength.
This defines part of Walters problem: what has to happen if the
strength is lacking? —island, discussion.
The fact already that she always clung to older men!
The relation to her parents: here she learned to see the world as exception to her. —[Part] I, or wherever her early history is recounted.
The whole development of her insanity would then fall—which makes Clarisse more human and motivates the conclusion—under the tide: Struggle for Walter as struggle for genius.
In order not to have to speak of Ulrich: she gave him a name, from the beginning. The leader? The Buddha? The Great One? The Eternal One? The Mysterious One? The Redeemer? — Or several names? The Beloved? The Healthy One? The Great Friend?
Clarisse in Rome
Clarisse, however, could not bear to stay in Rome long. Even the square in front of the railway station, with its palm trees, its shops, and the proximity of big hotels, repelled her.
Nevertheless, she walked to the center of the city and checked into a small albergo. In the meantime her impression had changed. The evening sky was orange almost to the zenith; the trees stood black and feathered before it. The air in the Ludovisi quarter, that unique, deliciously light mixture of sea and mountain air, refreshed her. She inhaled the acquaintance of a new strength. Prophecy of fascism. She began to notice the pretentious splendor of the elevated private gardens that rested on walls five to eight yards high above the heads of ordinary pedestrians, and the giant gates and high windows, which in this neighborhood were a feature even of the apartment buildings. Behind a park wall a donkey brayed. —How the donkeys bray here! Clarisse thought. —Differently from home. They don’t go “hee-haw,” they go “ya”! It was a metallic, persisting trumpet call. She thought she could tell at first glance that there were no philistines in this city. Or there were, but a whirling energy threatened them. As she approached the center, everything was full of energy, rush, and noise: cars raced unexpectedly around corners and crossed the plaz
as on unpredictable paths; bicyclists cheerfully and at risk of their lives teemed their way through between them; from the bursting trams clusters of young men who were trying to ride hung like grapes, clinging to each other in bold and impossible positions. Clarisse felt that this was a city after her own temperament, she was experiencing such a place for the first time. At night she could not sleep because a small bar had placed its tables in the narrow alley under her windows; people sang popular songs into the early morning and after every verse screamed a cheerfully dissonant refrain. This completely electrified Clarisse. Although it was still relatively early in the year, it was already quite warm, and Clarisse got diarrhea from the heat; it was an enchanting state, as light as elder pith, fledged, and fatiguingly exciting.
Clarisse ordered all the impressions Rome made on her under the color red. When she thought back to her experiences in the sanatorium they had changed from a watery green, a color belonging to the present, the color of the German woods, into this red, which had been the red of the processions in her imagination; but it must be said that Clarisse did not clearly remember the experiences that had driven her to make this journey, but had the clear feeling of running from a green state into one that was glowing red. Unfortunately, it was quite impossible for Clarisse to hit upon the idea that she was suffering from mad delusions. For green states even have their composers, who set them to music; these days sounds are painted, poems form sensory spaces, thoughts are danced: this is a vague kind of associating that has become popular because thinking has lost its authority; it’s about one eighth sensible and seven eighths nonsensical, and Clarisse could still regard herself as being very cautious and deliberate. So it was with calm, anticipatory attentiveness that she found herself on the way from a green state into a red one.
