Clarisse, on the other hand, who from the beginning regarded her desire as fulfilled, was charging ahead too impetuously, and as
clinical
assistant and instructor, Dr.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
For a while he painfully recalled his earlier in- dustriousness, and especially that frame of mind that came to him so naturally that it had once even earned him the derisive appellation of "activist.
" Was he then no longer the person constantly haunted by the idea that one must work toward the "ordering of the whole"?
Had he not, with a certain stubbornness, compared the world to a "laboratory," an "experimental community"; had he never spoken of"mankind's neg- ligent condition ofconsciousness," which needed to be transformed into will; demanded that one had to "make" history; had he not, finally, even ifit had been only ironically, actually called for a "General Secretariat of Precision and Soul"?
That was not forgotten, for one cannot suddenly
From the Posthumous Papers · 1535
change oneself; it was merely suspended for the moment! There was also no mistaking where the reason lay. Ulrich had never kept accounts on his ideas; but even if he had been able to remember them all at the same time, he knew that it would have been impossible for him to simply take them up, compare them, test them for possible explanations, and so, ultimately, bring forth from the vapors the little tissue-thin metal leaf oftruth. It was a peculiarity ofthis way ofthinking that it did not contain any progress toward truth; and although Ulrich basically assumed that such progress might sometime, through a slow and infinite process, be brought about in the totality, this did not console him, for he no longer had the patience to let himself be outlived by whatever it was to which he was contributing something, like an ant. For the longest time his ideas had not stood on the best footing with truth, and this now seemed to him again the question most urgently in need of illumination.
But this brought him back once again to the opposition between truth and love, which for him was nothing new. It occurred to him how often in recent weeks Agathe had laughed at his, for her taste much too pe- dantic, love of truth; and sometimes it must also have caused her grief! And suddenly he found himself thinking that there is really no more contradictory term than "love oftruth. " "For one can raise truth up high in God knows how many ways, but love it you can't, because truth dis- solves in love," he thought. And this assertion, by no means the same as the fainthearted one that love cannot bear the truth, was for him as fa- miliar and unachievable as everything else. The moment a person en- counters love not as an experience but as life itself, or at least as a kind of life, he knows several truths. The person who judges without love calls this opinions, personal views, subjectivity, caprice; but the person who loves knows that he is not insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himselfin a kind ofenthusiasm ofthinking, where the words open them- selves up to their very core. Ofcourse that can be an illusion, the natural consequence of an all too excitedly involved emotion, and Ulrich took that into account. Truth arises when the blood is cold; emotion is to be deducted from it; and to expect to find truth where something is "a mat- ter offeeling" is, according to all experience, just as perverse as demand- ing justice from wrath. Nevertheless, there was incontestably some general content, a participation in being and truth, that distinguished love "as life itself" from love as individual experience. And Ulrich now reflected on how clearly the difficulties that ordering his life presented to him were always connected with this notion of a superpowerful love that, so to speak, overstepped its bounds. From the lieutenant who sank into the heart of the world to the Ulrich of this past year, with his more or less assertive conviction that there are two fundamentally distinct and
1536 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
badly integrated conditions oflife, conditions ofthe self, indeed perhaps even conditions of the world, the fragments of recollection, so far as he was able to call them to mind, were all in some form connected with the desire for love, tenderness, and gardenlike, struggle-free fields of the soul. In these expanses lay, too, the idea of the "right life"; as empty as it might be in the bright light of reason, it was richly filled by the emotions with half-hom shadows.
It was not at all pleasant for him to encounter so unequivocally this preference for love in his thinking; he had really expected that there were more and different things his thinking would have absorbed, and that shocks such as those of the past year would have carried their vibra- tions in different directions; indeed, it seemed to him really strange that the conqueror, then the engineer of morality, that he had expected him- selfto be in his energetic years should have finally matured into a moon- ing seeker of love.
CLARISSE I WALTER I ULRICH MID 1920S
CL A RISSE
Ulrich did not think about Walter and Clarisse. Then one morning he was urgently called to the telephone: Walter. Why didn't he come out to see them; they knew he was back. A lot had changed, they were waiting for his visit.
Ulrich declined with the curt excuse that after his long absence he had a lot ofwork to do.
To his surprise, Walter appeared soon afterward; he had taken off from work. The manner in which he inquired after Agathe and the expe- riences of the trip gave the impression of uncertainty or embarrassment; he seemed to know more than he wanted to let on. Finally, the words came out. He had only now realized that it is insanity to doubt the faith- fulness of a woman one loves. One has to be able to let oneself be de- ceived but know how to be deceived in a fruitful way; for example: he had been wrong to be jealous of Ulrich-
- A h , so he's talking about Clarisse, Ulrich said to himself, suddenly breathing easier.
-W rong-W alter went on---even if of course he had never thought of it in any terms other than as mental unfaithfulness; but it hurt so much to have to admit the simple bodily empathy.
- O f course, of course. Ulrich nodded.
-Meingast has left, Walter added.
Ulrich looked up; it really didn't interest him, but he had the feeling
that this was something new. "Why? "
Simply, it had been time. But for several days afterward Clarisse had
been out of sorts in a way that gave grounds for anxiety. A real depres- sion. But that was just it; that was what first made him grasp the whole business. Imagine--Walter said-that you love a woman, and you meet
1538 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
a man you admire, and you see that your wife loves and admires him too; and both ofyou feel that this man is far superior to you, unreachable-
-That I can't imagine. Ulrich raised his shoulders with a laugh. Wal- ter looked at him with annoyance; both friends felt that they were simu- lating an old game they had often played with each other.
-Don't pretend, Walter said. -You're not so swellheaded to the point of insensitivity that you believe no one is better than you!
-A ll right. The formulation is false. Who is objectively superior? En- gineer A or Aesthetician B, a master wrestler or a sprinter? Let's drop that. So you're saying that a person becomes emotionally dependent on someone and the beloved does too: then what happens? You would have to play along with her role as well as your own. The man plays the man's role and the woman's role; the woman has womanly feelings for the su- perior man and a more manly inclination for her earlier and still-loved lover. So this gives rise to something hermaphroditic, doesn't it? Assum- ing that no jealousy is involved. A spiritual intertwining of three people, which appears mysterious, and at times almost mystic? God on six legs.
Ulrich had improvised this reflection and was himself astonished at the conclusion it had involuntarily reached. Walter looked at him in sur- prise. He did not agree-again there was too much intellect in it-but Ulrich had come surprisingly close to the truth, and Walter admired the rightness of Clarisse's instinct when she had asked that Ulrich be let in on what was going on. He now began to talk a little. -Y es, Clarisse had been swept away by Meingast, and quite rightly, since only a new com- munity of wills and hearts that embraced more than just one couple would be capable of again forging a humanity out of chaos. These ideas had had a powerful effect on her. After Meingast had left she had con- fessed to Walter: the whole time he had been there-he had really changed in a strange way-she had continually been bothered by the idea that he had taken her and Walter's sins upon himself and overcome them; it only sounds crazy, Walter said defensively, but it isn't at all, for he and Clarisse . . . behind their conflicts one finds everywhere a patho- logical disorder of the age. She would now like to speak to Ulrich on Moosbrugger's account.
Ulrich was astonished. What brings the two ofyou to Moosbrugger?
Well. Moosbrugger is of course only a chance encounter. But when one has once come into contact with something like that one can't at the same time just ignore it.
Look, you talked with Clarisse about it yourself a couple of times. Before. How can you forget something like that?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders, but the next morning went to see Clarisse.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1539
He felt that one of the two things was not to his taste. He had not thought of Moosbrugger for weeks; yet earlier Moosbrugger had for a time been a point of orientation in his thinking! And after he had thought this over for a while he noticed that once again Clarisse had suddenly managed to fasten onto him with this delicate claw, although he had already become indifferent to her, indeed even found her repul- sive. He was curious about what it was Clarisse wanted. \Vhen he saw her, he knew that he would do something for Moosbrugger in order to get out of the anxious, reproachful, and unsettled state he was in on ac- count of Agathe. \Vhen Ulrich came in she was standing at the window, her hands crossed in front ofher hips, legs spread apart as ifplaying ball. It was a habitual stance ofhers, from which her smile emerged with par- adoxical charm.
-Our destinies are interwoven-she said-yours and mine. Did Walter tell you? she began. Ulrich replied that he had not quite under- stood what Walter was after. I must see Moosbrugger! Clarisse said. After greeting him she held his hand in hers, moving his index finger downward, as if unintentionally. - I can influence such destinies, she added vaguely.
In the intervening time some quite specific constellation ofideas must have formed in her; one felt it by the way the walls pulsated. With no other person Ulrich knew did everything internal become so physical as with Clarisse, and this, too, doubtless explained her extraordinary ability to impart her excitement to others.
Her brother had already been won over to the idea, Clarisse related. He was a physician. Ulrich could not stand him. Because as a child of the Wagner craze he had been baptized "Wotan" [Siegfried], he be- lieved everyone would think he was Jewish, and emphasized in equal measure his distaste for Jews and music. He had another peculiarity. Since he had grown up among their other friends, he had found him- self when young compelled to read Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Huys- mans, and Peter Altenberg, to whom at that time the spiritual expressiveness of youth was attuned, and when in later years this style eroded and his own nature came to the fore, there arose a quite pecu- liar mishmash ofjleurs du TTUZl and provincial hymns to the Alps. He had come to visit his sister today too, and Clarisse said that he was working somewhere in the garden or in the (adjoining) vineyards. Since even his proximity was enough to put Ulrich out of sorts, he re- sponded with some disappointment. But Clarisse seemed to have been expecting this. "We need him," she said, and tried to give this sen- tence an emphasis from the back of her eyes, as if to mean: it's really too bad he's bothering us, even if we're lucky that Walter isn't here
1540 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
(but it has to be! ) -Be reasonable, Ulrich said: -Why do you want to see Moosbrugger?
Clarisse went and shut the door, which was open. Then she asked a question: Do you understand railway accidents? (One never happens because a locomotive engineer deliberately rams his engine into another train. ) Well, they all happen because in the confusing network of tracks, switches, signals, and commands, fatigue makes a person lose the power of conscience. He would only have needed to check one more time whether he was doing the right thing . . . isn't that right?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders.
- S o the accident comes about because one allows something to hap- pen, Clarisse went on. She cautiously closed her fangs around Ulrich's hand, smiled in embarrassment, and drilled her glance into his the way one drives a thumbtack into wood. -That's right, Ulrich, I see it in Wal- ter! (You already know what. ) (Every time I've yielded we were de- stroyed. We just didn't know that in doing it we were drinking a drop of the greatest poison in the world. )
- O h ? Ulrich said. - S o it's like that again between you?
Clarisse flashed at him from her eyes, pulled out the thumbtack again, and nodded.
- I t is and it isn't; I'm already a lot further. What's the extreme oppo- site ofletting things happen; that one yields to . . . impressing? You un- derstand, he wants to impress; nothing else! She did not wait for a response. - T o make a mark! she said. Her tiny figure had been striding up and down the room with supple energy, her hands at her back; now she stopped and sought with her eyes to hold fast to Ulrich's, for the words she was now searching for made her mind somewhat unsteady. - T o inscribe himself, I'm saying. Lately I've discovered something else that's really uncanny, it sounds so simple: Half our life is expression. (The) impressions are nothing. A heap of earthworms! When do you un- derstand a piece of music? When you yourself create it inwardly! When do you understand a person? When for a moment you make yourselfjust like him! In art, in politics, but also in love, we're trying painfully to ex- press ourselves. We re-deem ourselves to the outside. You see-with her hand she described an acute angle lying horizontally, which involun- tarily reminded Ulrich of a phallus-like this. That is the expression; the active form ofour existence, the pointed form, the- She became quite excited by the effort to make herself understandable to Ulrich. Ulrich must have been rather taken aback, for Clarisse went on to declare: -That's already in the words re-deem and redemption, both, the "deeming" and the active "re-" Now you understand, of course one has to practice it, but ultimately everything will be like an arrow.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1541
-Dear Clarisse-Ulrich pleaded-please speak so that I can under- standyou.
/Continuation: The Dionysiac. The murderer/
At this moment Siegfried came in. Ulrich had not interrupted Cla- risse. She had nonetheless retreated and was standing excitedly, as if he were crowding her, against the wall. Ulrich was accustomed to how hard it was for her to find the right words and how she often tried to seize them with her whole body, so that the meaning for which the words were lacking lay in the movement. But this time he was a little aston- ished. Clarisse, however, was not yet satisfied, there was still something she had to say. -Y ou know, if I'm unfaithful to him-or let's assume anyway that he is to me--then it's like digging into one's own raw flesh. Then you can't do anything that doesn't cut deep. Then you can't talk about that table over there without there being a feeling of bleeding. A smile forced its way through her excitement because Siegfried was lis- tening, but Siegfried was watching her calmly, as if it were a gymnastics exercise. He had taken off his jacket while working, and his hands and shoes were full of dirt. He had been accustomed since Clarisse's mar- riage to be the confidant of surprising secrets, and used a glance at his watch to urge haste in a businesslike way. Ulrich felt that this last gesture was directed very much at him.
Clarisse quickly changed her dress. The door remained open, and it hardly seemed accidental that he could see her, standing among her skirts like a boy. Siegfried was saying: - T h e assistant at the clinic was a fellow student. - Y o u don't say, Ulrich said. - W h a t do you really want ofhim? Siegfried shrugged his shoulders. -Either this Moosbrugger is mentally ill or he's a criminal. That's correct. But if Clarisse imagines that she can help him . . . ? I'm a doctor, and I also have to let the hospi- tal chaplain imagine the same thing. Redeem! she says. Well, why shouldn't she at least see him there? Siegfried went through his calm routine, brushed off his pants and shoes, and washed his hands. Looking at him, it was hard to believe his broad, modishly trimmed mustache. Then they drove to the clinic. Ulrich was in a state in which he would, without resisting, have let far crazier things happen to him.
1542 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
The physician to whom Wotan conducted them was an artist in his profession.
This is something that exists in every profession that depends on working with one's head and consists of unsatisfied emotions.
In earlier decades there were photographers who placed the leg of the person to be immortalized on a cardboard boulder; today they strip him naked and have him emote at the sunset; at that time they were wearing curled beards and flowing neckties, today they are clean-shaven and un- derline their art's organ of procreation-in precisely the same way a naked African emphasizes her pudenda with a loincloth of mussel shells-by means of glasses. But there were also such artists in the sciences, on the General Staff, and in industry. In such professions they are considered interesting not-just-experts and often, too, as liberators from the narrowness of the craft. In, for instance, the biology of the gen- eral doctrine oflife, it has been discovered that mechanical, dead, causal explanations and functional laws are inadequate, and that life has to be explained by life or, as they call it, the life force; and in the War they sacrificed entire divisions, or had the population of whole regions shot, because they were generous I thought they owed something to a certain heroic generosity.
With doctors, this romanticism often takes only the harmless form of the family adviser who prescribes marriage, automobile trips, and thea- ter tickets, or advises a neurasthenic who is deeply depressed by his fail- ing business not to pay any attention to the business for a period of two months. It was only psychiatry that occupied a special position, for in science the slighter the success in precision, the greater, generally speaking, is the artistic component, and up until a few years ago psychia- try was by far the most artistic of all modem sciences, with a literature as ingenious as that of theology and a success rate that could not be dis- cerned in the earthly realm here below I was to be as little discerned here below as theology's. Its representatives were therefore often I fre- quently I, and today to some extent still are, great artists, and Dr. Fried, Wotan's university friend, was one of these. If one asked him about the prospects for a cure he would dismiss it with an ironic or a fatigued ges- ture, while on the other hand there was always lying on his desk a cleanly prepared and beautifully dyed section of brain on a slide, beside the mi- croscope through which he would look into the incomprehensible astral world of cell tissue, and on his face there was the expression of a man practicing a black art, a notorious but admired craft that brings him into daily contact with the incomprehensible and with depraved desires. His black hair was plastered down demoniacally, as if it would otherwise
From the Posthumous Papers · 1543
stand on end; his movements were soft and unnatural, and his eyes those of a cardsharp, hypnotist, master detective, gravedigger, or hangman.
Of the three visitors, he devoted himself from the beginning exclu- sively to Clarisse. He showed Ulrich the least possible politeness. Since this left Ulrich free to obsetve him in peace and with annoyance, he soon discovered the man's major points.
Clarisse, on the other hand, who from the beginning regarded her desire as fulfilled, was charging ahead too impetuously, and as clinical assistant and instructor, Dr. Fried saw himself compelled to raise obstacles. Clarisse was a woman and not a doctor, and science demands strictly circumscribed limits. Wotan wanted to assume the responsibility of having his sister let in with false documents. But since this was stated openly, the assistant could only smile wearily. -Since we aren't doctors-Ulrich asked-couldn't we be a pair ofwriters, who for research purposes . . . ? The doctor dismissed this with a gesture: - I f you were Zola and Selma Lagerlof I would be charmed by your visit, which ofcourse I am anyway, but here only scien- tific interests are recognized. Unless-he made a smiling gesture of yielding-the ambassadors of your countries had made application for you to the administration of the clinic.
-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 creden- tials. 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 neiVOus child in the week before Christ- mas. It gave the impression that she was imparting a symbolic impor- tance to her encounter with Moosbrugger, like the meeting of two rulers.
- I believe I have the strength to help him when I see him, she as- serted.
1544 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Why don't you take him a sausage instead-Ulrich answered-and cigarettes.
Wotan laughed and proffered a medical joke; but afteiWard he again gave the impression of being grateful for the greater energy that ra- diated into his darkness from Clarisse's ideas, like a thunderstorm below the horizon.
Clarisse was tinglingly strengthened when she felt her influence over him.
- I f 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 em- bracing was a sign that people never really possessed these emotions; that'swhytheywereforced. Isn'tittrue-heturnedtoWotan-thatthis 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 Cla- risse-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.
- Y o u really think so? Clarisse liked that. She thought it over and said: - I t was only the substitute women he was angry at; that's what it was.
- H e ' s an idiot, Ulrich said clearly and calmly. Struggling around Cla- risse's mouth were a laugh, a difficulty, and the desire to let Ulrich know that she was reaching an understanding with him'. -Y ou're a pessimist! she finally said; and nothing else, except: Nietzsche! Would Ulrich un- derstand 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 bur- glar's tool that nothing can resist; she was strangely excited. Every eve- ning 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,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1545
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 antimoral 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 per- haps 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 ofwhat experience of the self did the Greeks have to think ofthe enthusiast and primitive person as satyr? . . . " All that lay in a laugh, a word, and a twisting of the mouth. Walter noticed nothing. Ul- rich looked at her with calm merriment-what hardness lay in this un- concem! -and said they should hurry up.
As they were walking to the terminus of the streetcar, she asked Ul- rich: "Ifhe'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 be- cause 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 punctu- ally to his office. And while he is in his office something may perhaps happen between Clarisse and Ulrich, but if he were to flnd 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 be- hind his back. To Ulrich, on the other hand, all this was far more a mat- ter of indifference. Or: He almost envied him. Clarisse, sitting there hunched over and holding her fingers clenched while the other sounds
1546 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
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 ofsomething, to get past the last minute. And Walter? He is the born talented medioc- rity; unhappy, but lucky, and everyone likes him; everyone invites him to stick around; with titanic effort he is constantly pulling his feet out ofsoil 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 ifyou 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. -W hen I hear music I'd like to either laugh or cry or run away.
- W i t h Meingast? Ulrich asked.
- T h a t 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!
- I t ' s something you don't understand, Uli. Clarisse laughed.
- A n d 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. -Y ou'll be disappointed. For me it's all a tissue ofcontradictions among
From the Posthumous Papers · 1547
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 ofa tree reached up from below- houses stood with the backs of their roofs turned upward. - H o w should they stand otherwise? Ulrich thought, and yet there are moments when the small sorrow that one feels falls into the world as ifonto 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 ofsome kind ofprogram. That wasn't the natural way for love to develop. And anyway, there could be no talk oflove. 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 the 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 Sun- day, 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 imme- diately began to say good-bye, 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 win- dow Ulrich waved to Walter, who waved back. Keeping his eyes in the room, he leaned farther and farther out, after the vanishing figure. Cla- risse 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 put- ting the chain on the door. When she came back he slowly turned
1548 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
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 oc- curred 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 ofa 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 herselfon 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 some- thing that had no meaning, but before the eyes ofthem both; veins shiv- ered 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 ofthem restrained words, faces, hands any longer. Their faces pressed themselves on ea~ other, wet with tears and sweat, as pure flesh; all the words oflove that were to be rehearsed tum- bled 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.
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1549
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 be- came hard and angry after the fall. They finally found themselves in a quiet remote comer of the zoo that adjoined the woods. A small rococo summerhouse stood there. Empty. Here she presented herself to him once again.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1535
change oneself; it was merely suspended for the moment! There was also no mistaking where the reason lay. Ulrich had never kept accounts on his ideas; but even if he had been able to remember them all at the same time, he knew that it would have been impossible for him to simply take them up, compare them, test them for possible explanations, and so, ultimately, bring forth from the vapors the little tissue-thin metal leaf oftruth. It was a peculiarity ofthis way ofthinking that it did not contain any progress toward truth; and although Ulrich basically assumed that such progress might sometime, through a slow and infinite process, be brought about in the totality, this did not console him, for he no longer had the patience to let himself be outlived by whatever it was to which he was contributing something, like an ant. For the longest time his ideas had not stood on the best footing with truth, and this now seemed to him again the question most urgently in need of illumination.
But this brought him back once again to the opposition between truth and love, which for him was nothing new. It occurred to him how often in recent weeks Agathe had laughed at his, for her taste much too pe- dantic, love of truth; and sometimes it must also have caused her grief! And suddenly he found himself thinking that there is really no more contradictory term than "love oftruth. " "For one can raise truth up high in God knows how many ways, but love it you can't, because truth dis- solves in love," he thought. And this assertion, by no means the same as the fainthearted one that love cannot bear the truth, was for him as fa- miliar and unachievable as everything else. The moment a person en- counters love not as an experience but as life itself, or at least as a kind of life, he knows several truths. The person who judges without love calls this opinions, personal views, subjectivity, caprice; but the person who loves knows that he is not insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himselfin a kind ofenthusiasm ofthinking, where the words open them- selves up to their very core. Ofcourse that can be an illusion, the natural consequence of an all too excitedly involved emotion, and Ulrich took that into account. Truth arises when the blood is cold; emotion is to be deducted from it; and to expect to find truth where something is "a mat- ter offeeling" is, according to all experience, just as perverse as demand- ing justice from wrath. Nevertheless, there was incontestably some general content, a participation in being and truth, that distinguished love "as life itself" from love as individual experience. And Ulrich now reflected on how clearly the difficulties that ordering his life presented to him were always connected with this notion of a superpowerful love that, so to speak, overstepped its bounds. From the lieutenant who sank into the heart of the world to the Ulrich of this past year, with his more or less assertive conviction that there are two fundamentally distinct and
1536 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
badly integrated conditions oflife, conditions ofthe self, indeed perhaps even conditions of the world, the fragments of recollection, so far as he was able to call them to mind, were all in some form connected with the desire for love, tenderness, and gardenlike, struggle-free fields of the soul. In these expanses lay, too, the idea of the "right life"; as empty as it might be in the bright light of reason, it was richly filled by the emotions with half-hom shadows.
It was not at all pleasant for him to encounter so unequivocally this preference for love in his thinking; he had really expected that there were more and different things his thinking would have absorbed, and that shocks such as those of the past year would have carried their vibra- tions in different directions; indeed, it seemed to him really strange that the conqueror, then the engineer of morality, that he had expected him- selfto be in his energetic years should have finally matured into a moon- ing seeker of love.
CLARISSE I WALTER I ULRICH MID 1920S
CL A RISSE
Ulrich did not think about Walter and Clarisse. Then one morning he was urgently called to the telephone: Walter. Why didn't he come out to see them; they knew he was back. A lot had changed, they were waiting for his visit.
Ulrich declined with the curt excuse that after his long absence he had a lot ofwork to do.
To his surprise, Walter appeared soon afterward; he had taken off from work. The manner in which he inquired after Agathe and the expe- riences of the trip gave the impression of uncertainty or embarrassment; he seemed to know more than he wanted to let on. Finally, the words came out. He had only now realized that it is insanity to doubt the faith- fulness of a woman one loves. One has to be able to let oneself be de- ceived but know how to be deceived in a fruitful way; for example: he had been wrong to be jealous of Ulrich-
- A h , so he's talking about Clarisse, Ulrich said to himself, suddenly breathing easier.
-W rong-W alter went on---even if of course he had never thought of it in any terms other than as mental unfaithfulness; but it hurt so much to have to admit the simple bodily empathy.
- O f course, of course. Ulrich nodded.
-Meingast has left, Walter added.
Ulrich looked up; it really didn't interest him, but he had the feeling
that this was something new. "Why? "
Simply, it had been time. But for several days afterward Clarisse had
been out of sorts in a way that gave grounds for anxiety. A real depres- sion. But that was just it; that was what first made him grasp the whole business. Imagine--Walter said-that you love a woman, and you meet
1538 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
a man you admire, and you see that your wife loves and admires him too; and both ofyou feel that this man is far superior to you, unreachable-
-That I can't imagine. Ulrich raised his shoulders with a laugh. Wal- ter looked at him with annoyance; both friends felt that they were simu- lating an old game they had often played with each other.
-Don't pretend, Walter said. -You're not so swellheaded to the point of insensitivity that you believe no one is better than you!
-A ll right. The formulation is false. Who is objectively superior? En- gineer A or Aesthetician B, a master wrestler or a sprinter? Let's drop that. So you're saying that a person becomes emotionally dependent on someone and the beloved does too: then what happens? You would have to play along with her role as well as your own. The man plays the man's role and the woman's role; the woman has womanly feelings for the su- perior man and a more manly inclination for her earlier and still-loved lover. So this gives rise to something hermaphroditic, doesn't it? Assum- ing that no jealousy is involved. A spiritual intertwining of three people, which appears mysterious, and at times almost mystic? God on six legs.
Ulrich had improvised this reflection and was himself astonished at the conclusion it had involuntarily reached. Walter looked at him in sur- prise. He did not agree-again there was too much intellect in it-but Ulrich had come surprisingly close to the truth, and Walter admired the rightness of Clarisse's instinct when she had asked that Ulrich be let in on what was going on. He now began to talk a little. -Y es, Clarisse had been swept away by Meingast, and quite rightly, since only a new com- munity of wills and hearts that embraced more than just one couple would be capable of again forging a humanity out of chaos. These ideas had had a powerful effect on her. After Meingast had left she had con- fessed to Walter: the whole time he had been there-he had really changed in a strange way-she had continually been bothered by the idea that he had taken her and Walter's sins upon himself and overcome them; it only sounds crazy, Walter said defensively, but it isn't at all, for he and Clarisse . . . behind their conflicts one finds everywhere a patho- logical disorder of the age. She would now like to speak to Ulrich on Moosbrugger's account.
Ulrich was astonished. What brings the two ofyou to Moosbrugger?
Well. Moosbrugger is of course only a chance encounter. But when one has once come into contact with something like that one can't at the same time just ignore it.
Look, you talked with Clarisse about it yourself a couple of times. Before. How can you forget something like that?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders, but the next morning went to see Clarisse.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1539
He felt that one of the two things was not to his taste. He had not thought of Moosbrugger for weeks; yet earlier Moosbrugger had for a time been a point of orientation in his thinking! And after he had thought this over for a while he noticed that once again Clarisse had suddenly managed to fasten onto him with this delicate claw, although he had already become indifferent to her, indeed even found her repul- sive. He was curious about what it was Clarisse wanted. \Vhen he saw her, he knew that he would do something for Moosbrugger in order to get out of the anxious, reproachful, and unsettled state he was in on ac- count of Agathe. \Vhen Ulrich came in she was standing at the window, her hands crossed in front ofher hips, legs spread apart as ifplaying ball. It was a habitual stance ofhers, from which her smile emerged with par- adoxical charm.
-Our destinies are interwoven-she said-yours and mine. Did Walter tell you? she began. Ulrich replied that he had not quite under- stood what Walter was after. I must see Moosbrugger! Clarisse said. After greeting him she held his hand in hers, moving his index finger downward, as if unintentionally. - I can influence such destinies, she added vaguely.
In the intervening time some quite specific constellation ofideas must have formed in her; one felt it by the way the walls pulsated. With no other person Ulrich knew did everything internal become so physical as with Clarisse, and this, too, doubtless explained her extraordinary ability to impart her excitement to others.
Her brother had already been won over to the idea, Clarisse related. He was a physician. Ulrich could not stand him. Because as a child of the Wagner craze he had been baptized "Wotan" [Siegfried], he be- lieved everyone would think he was Jewish, and emphasized in equal measure his distaste for Jews and music. He had another peculiarity. Since he had grown up among their other friends, he had found him- self when young compelled to read Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Huys- mans, and Peter Altenberg, to whom at that time the spiritual expressiveness of youth was attuned, and when in later years this style eroded and his own nature came to the fore, there arose a quite pecu- liar mishmash ofjleurs du TTUZl and provincial hymns to the Alps. He had come to visit his sister today too, and Clarisse said that he was working somewhere in the garden or in the (adjoining) vineyards. Since even his proximity was enough to put Ulrich out of sorts, he re- sponded with some disappointment. But Clarisse seemed to have been expecting this. "We need him," she said, and tried to give this sen- tence an emphasis from the back of her eyes, as if to mean: it's really too bad he's bothering us, even if we're lucky that Walter isn't here
1540 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
(but it has to be! ) -Be reasonable, Ulrich said: -Why do you want to see Moosbrugger?
Clarisse went and shut the door, which was open. Then she asked a question: Do you understand railway accidents? (One never happens because a locomotive engineer deliberately rams his engine into another train. ) Well, they all happen because in the confusing network of tracks, switches, signals, and commands, fatigue makes a person lose the power of conscience. He would only have needed to check one more time whether he was doing the right thing . . . isn't that right?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders.
- S o the accident comes about because one allows something to hap- pen, Clarisse went on. She cautiously closed her fangs around Ulrich's hand, smiled in embarrassment, and drilled her glance into his the way one drives a thumbtack into wood. -That's right, Ulrich, I see it in Wal- ter! (You already know what. ) (Every time I've yielded we were de- stroyed. We just didn't know that in doing it we were drinking a drop of the greatest poison in the world. )
- O h ? Ulrich said. - S o it's like that again between you?
Clarisse flashed at him from her eyes, pulled out the thumbtack again, and nodded.
- I t is and it isn't; I'm already a lot further. What's the extreme oppo- site ofletting things happen; that one yields to . . . impressing? You un- derstand, he wants to impress; nothing else! She did not wait for a response. - T o make a mark! she said. Her tiny figure had been striding up and down the room with supple energy, her hands at her back; now she stopped and sought with her eyes to hold fast to Ulrich's, for the words she was now searching for made her mind somewhat unsteady. - T o inscribe himself, I'm saying. Lately I've discovered something else that's really uncanny, it sounds so simple: Half our life is expression. (The) impressions are nothing. A heap of earthworms! When do you un- derstand a piece of music? When you yourself create it inwardly! When do you understand a person? When for a moment you make yourselfjust like him! In art, in politics, but also in love, we're trying painfully to ex- press ourselves. We re-deem ourselves to the outside. You see-with her hand she described an acute angle lying horizontally, which involun- tarily reminded Ulrich of a phallus-like this. That is the expression; the active form ofour existence, the pointed form, the- She became quite excited by the effort to make herself understandable to Ulrich. Ulrich must have been rather taken aback, for Clarisse went on to declare: -That's already in the words re-deem and redemption, both, the "deeming" and the active "re-" Now you understand, of course one has to practice it, but ultimately everything will be like an arrow.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1541
-Dear Clarisse-Ulrich pleaded-please speak so that I can under- standyou.
/Continuation: The Dionysiac. The murderer/
At this moment Siegfried came in. Ulrich had not interrupted Cla- risse. She had nonetheless retreated and was standing excitedly, as if he were crowding her, against the wall. Ulrich was accustomed to how hard it was for her to find the right words and how she often tried to seize them with her whole body, so that the meaning for which the words were lacking lay in the movement. But this time he was a little aston- ished. Clarisse, however, was not yet satisfied, there was still something she had to say. -Y ou know, if I'm unfaithful to him-or let's assume anyway that he is to me--then it's like digging into one's own raw flesh. Then you can't do anything that doesn't cut deep. Then you can't talk about that table over there without there being a feeling of bleeding. A smile forced its way through her excitement because Siegfried was lis- tening, but Siegfried was watching her calmly, as if it were a gymnastics exercise. He had taken off his jacket while working, and his hands and shoes were full of dirt. He had been accustomed since Clarisse's mar- riage to be the confidant of surprising secrets, and used a glance at his watch to urge haste in a businesslike way. Ulrich felt that this last gesture was directed very much at him.
Clarisse quickly changed her dress. The door remained open, and it hardly seemed accidental that he could see her, standing among her skirts like a boy. Siegfried was saying: - T h e assistant at the clinic was a fellow student. - Y o u don't say, Ulrich said. - W h a t do you really want ofhim? Siegfried shrugged his shoulders. -Either this Moosbrugger is mentally ill or he's a criminal. That's correct. But if Clarisse imagines that she can help him . . . ? I'm a doctor, and I also have to let the hospi- tal chaplain imagine the same thing. Redeem! she says. Well, why shouldn't she at least see him there? Siegfried went through his calm routine, brushed off his pants and shoes, and washed his hands. Looking at him, it was hard to believe his broad, modishly trimmed mustache. Then they drove to the clinic. Ulrich was in a state in which he would, without resisting, have let far crazier things happen to him.
1542 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
The physician to whom Wotan conducted them was an artist in his profession.
This is something that exists in every profession that depends on working with one's head and consists of unsatisfied emotions.
In earlier decades there were photographers who placed the leg of the person to be immortalized on a cardboard boulder; today they strip him naked and have him emote at the sunset; at that time they were wearing curled beards and flowing neckties, today they are clean-shaven and un- derline their art's organ of procreation-in precisely the same way a naked African emphasizes her pudenda with a loincloth of mussel shells-by means of glasses. But there were also such artists in the sciences, on the General Staff, and in industry. In such professions they are considered interesting not-just-experts and often, too, as liberators from the narrowness of the craft. In, for instance, the biology of the gen- eral doctrine oflife, it has been discovered that mechanical, dead, causal explanations and functional laws are inadequate, and that life has to be explained by life or, as they call it, the life force; and in the War they sacrificed entire divisions, or had the population of whole regions shot, because they were generous I thought they owed something to a certain heroic generosity.
With doctors, this romanticism often takes only the harmless form of the family adviser who prescribes marriage, automobile trips, and thea- ter tickets, or advises a neurasthenic who is deeply depressed by his fail- ing business not to pay any attention to the business for a period of two months. It was only psychiatry that occupied a special position, for in science the slighter the success in precision, the greater, generally speaking, is the artistic component, and up until a few years ago psychia- try was by far the most artistic of all modem sciences, with a literature as ingenious as that of theology and a success rate that could not be dis- cerned in the earthly realm here below I was to be as little discerned here below as theology's. Its representatives were therefore often I fre- quently I, and today to some extent still are, great artists, and Dr. Fried, Wotan's university friend, was one of these. If one asked him about the prospects for a cure he would dismiss it with an ironic or a fatigued ges- ture, while on the other hand there was always lying on his desk a cleanly prepared and beautifully dyed section of brain on a slide, beside the mi- croscope through which he would look into the incomprehensible astral world of cell tissue, and on his face there was the expression of a man practicing a black art, a notorious but admired craft that brings him into daily contact with the incomprehensible and with depraved desires. His black hair was plastered down demoniacally, as if it would otherwise
From the Posthumous Papers · 1543
stand on end; his movements were soft and unnatural, and his eyes those of a cardsharp, hypnotist, master detective, gravedigger, or hangman.
Of the three visitors, he devoted himself from the beginning exclu- sively to Clarisse. He showed Ulrich the least possible politeness. Since this left Ulrich free to obsetve him in peace and with annoyance, he soon discovered the man's major points.
Clarisse, on the other hand, who from the beginning regarded her desire as fulfilled, was charging ahead too impetuously, and as clinical assistant and instructor, Dr. Fried saw himself compelled to raise obstacles. Clarisse was a woman and not a doctor, and science demands strictly circumscribed limits. Wotan wanted to assume the responsibility of having his sister let in with false documents. But since this was stated openly, the assistant could only smile wearily. -Since we aren't doctors-Ulrich asked-couldn't we be a pair ofwriters, who for research purposes . . . ? The doctor dismissed this with a gesture: - I f you were Zola and Selma Lagerlof I would be charmed by your visit, which ofcourse I am anyway, but here only scien- tific interests are recognized. Unless-he made a smiling gesture of yielding-the ambassadors of your countries had made application for you to the administration of the clinic.
-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 creden- tials. 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 neiVOus child in the week before Christ- mas. It gave the impression that she was imparting a symbolic impor- tance to her encounter with Moosbrugger, like the meeting of two rulers.
- I believe I have the strength to help him when I see him, she as- serted.
1544 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Why don't you take him a sausage instead-Ulrich answered-and cigarettes.
Wotan laughed and proffered a medical joke; but afteiWard he again gave the impression of being grateful for the greater energy that ra- diated into his darkness from Clarisse's ideas, like a thunderstorm below the horizon.
Clarisse was tinglingly strengthened when she felt her influence over him.
- I f 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 em- bracing was a sign that people never really possessed these emotions; that'swhytheywereforced. Isn'tittrue-heturnedtoWotan-thatthis 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 Cla- risse-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.
- Y o u really think so? Clarisse liked that. She thought it over and said: - I t was only the substitute women he was angry at; that's what it was.
- H e ' s an idiot, Ulrich said clearly and calmly. Struggling around Cla- risse's mouth were a laugh, a difficulty, and the desire to let Ulrich know that she was reaching an understanding with him'. -Y ou're a pessimist! she finally said; and nothing else, except: Nietzsche! Would Ulrich un- derstand 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 bur- glar's tool that nothing can resist; she was strangely excited. Every eve- ning 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,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1545
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 antimoral 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 per- haps 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 ofwhat experience of the self did the Greeks have to think ofthe enthusiast and primitive person as satyr? . . . " All that lay in a laugh, a word, and a twisting of the mouth. Walter noticed nothing. Ul- rich looked at her with calm merriment-what hardness lay in this un- concem! -and said they should hurry up.
As they were walking to the terminus of the streetcar, she asked Ul- rich: "Ifhe'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 be- cause 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 punctu- ally to his office. And while he is in his office something may perhaps happen between Clarisse and Ulrich, but if he were to flnd 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 be- hind his back. To Ulrich, on the other hand, all this was far more a mat- ter of indifference. Or: He almost envied him. Clarisse, sitting there hunched over and holding her fingers clenched while the other sounds
1546 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
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 ofsomething, to get past the last minute. And Walter? He is the born talented medioc- rity; unhappy, but lucky, and everyone likes him; everyone invites him to stick around; with titanic effort he is constantly pulling his feet out ofsoil 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 ifyou 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. -W hen I hear music I'd like to either laugh or cry or run away.
- W i t h Meingast? Ulrich asked.
- T h a t 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!
- I t ' s something you don't understand, Uli. Clarisse laughed.
- A n d 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. -Y ou'll be disappointed. For me it's all a tissue ofcontradictions among
From the Posthumous Papers · 1547
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 ofa tree reached up from below- houses stood with the backs of their roofs turned upward. - H o w should they stand otherwise? Ulrich thought, and yet there are moments when the small sorrow that one feels falls into the world as ifonto 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 ofsome kind ofprogram. That wasn't the natural way for love to develop. And anyway, there could be no talk oflove. 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 the 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 Sun- day, 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 imme- diately began to say good-bye, 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 win- dow Ulrich waved to Walter, who waved back. Keeping his eyes in the room, he leaned farther and farther out, after the vanishing figure. Cla- risse 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 put- ting the chain on the door. When she came back he slowly turned
1548 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
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 oc- curred 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 ofa 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 herselfon 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 some- thing that had no meaning, but before the eyes ofthem both; veins shiv- ered 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 ofthem restrained words, faces, hands any longer. Their faces pressed themselves on ea~ other, wet with tears and sweat, as pure flesh; all the words oflove that were to be rehearsed tum- bled 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.
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1549
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 be- came hard and angry after the fall. They finally found themselves in a quiet remote comer of the zoo that adjoined the woods. A small rococo summerhouse stood there. Empty. Here she presented herself to him once again.
