"
1370 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"Do you remember the painter whose sketches the doctor showed us?
1370 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"Do you remember the painter whose sketches the doctor showed us?
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
" Stumm asked cheerfully.
The "ski jump" was a small quarry in the hills, and had nothing whatever to do with its name.
But Stumm found this name, one that Clarisse had cho- sen, "exquisite and dynamic.
" "As if it were winter!
" he exclaimed.
"It makes me laugh every time.
And you would doubtless, my dear lady, call a snowbank a 'summer hill'?
"
Clarisse liked being called "my dear lady" and immediately agreed to turn around with him, because once she had become accustomed to the general's company she found it quite agreeable. First, because he was, after all, a general; not "nothing," like Ulrich and Meingast and Walter. She now loved everything that was important in the world. Then, be- cause it had occurred to her that it was really a quite peculiar circum- stance to be always carrying a sword around, an odd relation to the world that corresponded to the great and fearful feelings that at times I often preoccupied her. Further, she esteemed the voluble von Stumm be- cause she unconsciously recognized that he did not, like the others, de- sire her in a way that, when she was not in the mood herself, demeaned her. "There's something strangely pure about him! " she had explained to her jealous husband. But as a final reason, she also needed a person with whom she could talk, for she was oppressed by myriad swarms of inner promptings that she had to keep to herself. And when the General was listening to her, she felt that everything she said and did was good. "You have, my dear lady," the General would often assure her, "some-
1364 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
thing that sets you apart from all women I have had the honor of getting to know. You positively teach me energy, martial courage, and the con- quering of Austrian negligence! " He smiled as if it were a joke, but she clearly noticed that he meant some of it seriously.
(4) But the major topic oftheir conversations was, as is also the rule in love, recollections of their common great experience, the visit to the in- sane asylum, and so this time Clarisse began to confide to the General that she had since been back a second time.
"With whom? " the General inquired, relieved to have escaped a hor- rible mission.
"Alone," Clarisse said.
"Good God! " Stumm exclaimed, and stopped, although they had only taken a few steps. "Really alone? You don't let anything give you the creeps! And did you see anything special? " he asked, curious.
"The murderers' house," Clarisse responded with a smile.
This was the designation that Dr. Friedenthal, a good stage director, had used as they had walked across the soundless moss under the trees of the old garden toward a group of small buildings from which horrible cries came echoing toward them with remarkable regularity. Frieden- thal, too, had smiled, and had told Clarisse, as Clarisse now told the General, that every inmate of this group of houses had killed at least one person, sometimes a number of people.
"And now they're screaming when it's too late! " Stumm said in a tone of reproachful acquiescence in the way of the world.
But Clarisse did not appreciate his response. She recalled that she, too, had asked what the cries meant. And Friedenthal had told her that they were manic fits; but he said this quite softly and cautiously, as if they were not to intrude. And just at that moment the gigantic guards had suddenly materialized around them and opened the reinforced doors; and Clarisse, repeating this and falling back into the mood, like being at an exciting play, softly whispered the term "manic fits" while looking meaningfully into the General's eyes.
She turned away and walked on a few paces ahead, so that Stumm almost had to run to catch up with her. When he was at her side again, she asked him what he thought about modern painting, but before he could gather his impressions, she surprised him with the information that there was an astonishing correspondence between this painting and an architecture born from the spirit ofthe madhouse: "The buildings are dice, and the patients live in hollowed-out concrete dice," she explained. "There is a corridor through the middle, and cube-shaped cells left and right, and in each cell there is nothing but one person and the space around him. Even the bench he's sittingon is part ofthe wall. Ofcourse
From the Posthumous Papers · 1365
all edges have been carefully rounded off so he can't hurt himself," she added with precision, for she had observed everything with the greatest attention.
She found no words for what she really wanted to say. Since she had been surrounded by art all her life and had listened to the concerns ex- pressed about art, this island had remained relatively resistant to the changes that had been slowly growing in other areas of her thinking; and especially since her own artistic activity did not spring directly from pas- sion but was merely an appendix of her ambition and a consequence of the circumstances in which she lived, her judgment in this area, despite the illness that had recently made new inroads on her personality, was no more perverse than is common, from time to time, in the develop- ment of art. She could, therefore, deal quite comfortably with an idea like "purpose-oriented architecture" or "a manner of building deriving from the mission of an insane asylum," and it was only the peopling of these up-to-date dwellings with the insane that surprised her as a new concept and tickled her like a scent kindled in the nose.
But Stumm von Bordwehr interrupted her with the modest observa- tion that he had always imagined that cells for manics had to be padded. Clarisse became uncertain, for perhaps the cells had been made of light-colored rubber, and so she cut offhis objection. "Maybe in the old days," she said finnly. "In the days ofupholstered furniture and tasseled drapes, maybe the cells were upholstered too. But today, when people think objectively and spatially, it's quite impossible. Cultural progress
doesn't stop, even in insane asylums! "
But Stumm would rather have heard something about the manics
themselves than be diverted by the problem of what connections there might be between them and painting and architecture, so he replied: "Most interesting! But now I'm really anxious to hear what happened in these modem spaces! "
"You'll be surprised," Clarisse said. "As quiet as a cemetery. "
"Interesting! I recall that in the courtyard of murderers that we saw, it was that still for a few moments too. "
"But this time only a single man had on a striped linen smock," Clarisse went on. "A weak, little old man with blinking eyes. " And suddenly she gave a loud laugh. "He dreamed that his wife had deceived him, and when he woke up in the morning he beat her to death with the bootjack! "
Stumm laughed too. "Right when he woke up? That's capital! " he agreed. "He was evidently in a hurry! And the others? Why do you say that he was the only one who had on a smock? "
"Because the others were in black. They were quieter than the dead," Clarisse replied, overcome with seriousness.
1366 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
"Murderers really don't seem to be merry people," Stumm hazarded. "Oh, you're thinking of the nutcracker! " Clarisse said.
For a moment the General did not know whom she meant.
"The one with nutcracker teeth who said to me that Vienna is a beau-
tiful city! "
"And what did this lot say to you? " the General asked with a smile. "But I told you, they were as silent as ghosts! "
"But, my dear lady," Stumm excused himself, "you can't call that
manic! "
"They were waiting for their attacks! "
"What do you mean, waiting? It's strange to wait for an attack of
mania the way you wait for an inspiring corps commander. And you say that they were dressed in black: ready to be reviewed, in a way? I'm afraid, dear lady, that you must have been mistaken in what you were seeing just then. I most humbly beg your pardon, but I am accustomed to imagining such things with the greatest precision! "
Clarisse, who found it not at all disagreeable that Stumm insisted on precision, for something was weighing her down that was not clear to her either, replied: "Dr. Friedenthal explained it to me that way, and I can only repeat, General, that that's the way it was. There were three men waiting there; all three had on black suits, and their hair and beards were black. One was a doctor, the second a lawyer, and the third a wealthy businessman. They looked like political martyrs about to be shot. "
"Why did they look that way? '' asked the incredulous Stumm. "Because they were wearing neither collar nor tie. "
"Perhaps they had just arrived? ''
"No! Friedenthal said they had been in the asylum a long time," Cla-
risse asserted warmly. "And yet that's the way they looked, as if they could stand up at any moment and go to the office or visit a patient. That's what was so strange. "
"Well, it's all the same to me," Stumm responded, to tum the conver- sation, and yet with a nobility that was new to him, while at the same time he struck his boots aggressively with his riding crop. ''I've seen fools in uniform, and consider more people crazy than one might think I would. But I imagined 'manic' as something more vivid, even if I con- cede that you can't ask ofa person that he be manic all the time. But that all three were so quiet . . . I'm sorry I wasn't there myself, for I think this Dr. Friedenthal is capable of pulling the wool over a person's eyes! "
"When he was speaking they listened quite mutely," Clarisse re- ported. "You wouldn't have noticed that they were ill at all ifyou hadn't happened to meet them there. And imagine, as we were leaving, the one
From the Posthumous Papers · 1367
who was a doctor stood up and motioned me, with a truly chivalrous gesture, to go first, saying to Friedenthal: 'Doctor, you often bring visi- tors. You are always showing guests around. Today for a change I'll come with you too. ' "
"And then of course those bullies, those toadies of guards, immedi- ately-" the General began heatedly, even though he might have been more touched by the tragedienne than the tragedy.
"No, they didn't grab him," Clarisse interrupted. "It was really with the greatest respect that they kept him from following me. And I assure you, it was all so moving in this polite and silent fashion. As if the world were hung with heavy, precious fabrics, and the words one would like to say have no resonance. It's hard to understand these people. You'd have to live in an asylum yourself for a long time to be able to enter their world! "
"What an exquisite idea! But God preserve us from it! " Stumm re- sponded quickly. "You know, dear lady, that I am indebted to you for a pretty good insight into the value of shaking up the bourgeois spirit by means ofillness and murder: but still, there are certain limits! "
With these words they had arrived at the hill that was their goal, and the General paused for breath before undertaking the pathless climb. Clarisse surveyed him with an expression of grateful solicitude and a tender mockery that she rarely showed. "But one ofthem did have a fit! " she informed him roguishly, the way one hauls out a present that had been concealed.
"Well, so there! " Stumm exclaimed. He could not think of anything else to say. But his mouth remained open as he mindlessly groped around for a word; suddenly he beat against his boots again with his crop. "But of course, the shouts! " he added. "Right at the beginning you spoke of the shouting you heard, and I overlooked that when you were talking about the deathly stillness. You tell a story so magnificently that one forgets everything! "
"As we stood in front of the door from which shouts and a strange moaning alternated," Clarisse began, "Friedenthal asked me once more whether I really wanted to go in. I was so excited I could hardly answer, but the guards paid no attention and began opening the doors. You may imagine, General, that at that moment I was terribly afraid, for I'm really only a woman. I had the feeling: when the door opens, the maniac is going to jump mel"
"One always hears that such mentally ill people have incredible strength," the General said by way of encouragement.
"Yes; but when the door was open and we all stood at the entrance, he paid absolutely no attention to us! "
1368 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
"Paid no attention? " Stumm asked.
"None at all! He was almost as tall as Ulrich, and perhaps my age. He was standing in the middle of the cell, with his head bent forward and his legs apart. Like this! " Clarisse imitated it.
General: Was he dressed in black too? Clarisse: No, stark naked.
General: Looks at Clarisse from head to toe.
''Thick strands of saliva were spread all over his young man's brown- ish-blond beard; the muscles literally jumped out of his scrawniness; he was naked, and his hair, I mean specific hairs-"
''You present everything so vividly one understands it all! " Stumm in- teiVened soothingly.
"-were dully bright, shamelessly bright; he fixed us with them as if they were an eye that looks at you without noticing anything about you! " Clarisse had reached the top, the General sat at her feet. From the "ski jump" one looked down on vineyards and meadows sloping away, on large and small houses that for a short distance rose in a jumble up the slope from below, and in one place the glance escaped into the charming depth of the hilly plateau that on the far horizon bordered high moun- tains. But if, like Stumm, you were sitting on a low tree stump, all you saw was an accidental hump of forest arching its back toward the sky, white clouds in the familiar, fatly drifting balls, and Clarisse. She stood with her legs apart in front of the General and mimicked a manic fit. She held one arm bent out at a right angle and stiffiy locked to her body; with her head bent forward, she was executing with her torso in an unvarying sequence a jerky motion that formed a shallow forward circle, while she bent one finger after another as if she were counting. And she allowed each of these motions to be accompanied by a pantingly uttered cry, whose force, however, she considerately restrained. ''You can't imitate the essential part," she explained. "'Ib. at's the incredible strain with every motion, which gives an impression as if each time the person is
tearing his body from a vise. . . . "
"But that's moral" the General exclaimed. ''You ! mow, that game of
chance? Whoever guesses the right number of fingers wins. Except that you can't bend one finger after another but have to show as many as you think of on the spur of the moment. All our peasants on the Italian bor- der play it. "
From the Posthu'TIWUs Papers · 1369
"It really is mora," said Clarisse, who had seen it on her travels. "And he also did it the way you described! "
"Well then, mora," Stumm repeated with satisfaction. "But I'd like to lmow where these insane people get their ideas," he added, and here commenced the strenuous part of the conversation.
Clarisse sat down on the tree stump beside the General, a little apart from him so that she could, if need be, "cast an eye" on him, and each time this happened he had a ridiculous horrible feeling, as if he were being pinched by a stag beetle. She was prepared to explain for his bene- fit the emotional life of the insane as she herself understood it after much reflection. One ofits most important elements-because she con- nected everything with herself-was the idea that the so-called mentally ill were some kind of geniuses who were spirited away and deprived of their rights, and for some reason that Clarisse had not yet discovered, this was something they were not able to defend themselves against. It was only natural that the General could not concur in this opinion, but this did not surprise either of them. "I am willing to concede that such an idiot might occasionally guess something that the likes of us don't lmow," he protested. "That's the way you imagine them being: they have a certain aura; but that they should think more than we healthy people- no, please, I beg to differ! "
Clarisse insisted seriously that people who were mentally healthy thought less than those who were mentally unhealthy. "Have you ever strayed off a point, General, from A to B? " she asked Stumm, and he was forced to agree that he had. "Have you ever, then, done it the other way round, from B to A? " she asked further, and Stumm had even less desire to deny it, after considering for a while what it meant, for it is part of a man's pride to think through for himself to the single thing called truth. But Clarisse reasoned: ''You see, and that's nothing but cowardice, this neat and orderly reflecting about things. On account of their cowardice men will never amount to anything! "
'Tve never heard that before," Stumm asserted dismissively. But he thought it over. Wouldn't that mean . . . ? "
Clarisse moved closer to him with her eyes. "Surely some woman has whispered in your ear: 'You god-man'? "
Stumm could not recall this happening, but he didn't want to admit it, so he merely made a gesture that could just as well mean "unfortunately not" as 'Tm sick and tired of hearing itl" In words, he replied: "Many women are very high-strung! But what does that have to do with our conversation? Something of that sort is simply an exaggerated compli- ment!
"
1370 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"Do you remember the painter whose sketches the doctor showed us? " Clarisse asked.
''Yes, of course. What he had painted was really magnificent. "
"He was dissatisfied with Friedenthal because the doctor doesn't un- derstand anything about art. 'Show it to this gentleman! ' he said, point- ing to me," Clarisse went on, again suddenly casting her eye on the General. "Do you believe it was merely a compliment that he addressed me as a man? "
"It's just one of those ideas," Stumm said. "Honestly, I've never thought about it. I would assume it's what's called an association, or an analogy, or something like that. He just had some reason or other to take you for a man! "
But does it give you pleasure to be taken for a man? Pleasure? No. But . . .
Although Stumm was convinced that with these last words he had ex- plained something to Clarisse, he was still surprised by the wannth with which she exclaimed: "Terrific! Then I only need tell you that it has the same cause as in love when there's whispering about god-man! For the world is full of double beings! "
One should not of course believe that it was agreeable to Stumm when Clarisse talked this way, shooting a cleft glance from eyes nar- rowed to slits; he was thinking, rather, whether it would not be more proper not to conduct such conversations in uniform, but to appear for the next walk in mufti. But on the other hand the good Stumm, who admired Clarisse with great caution, ifnot concealed terror, had the am- bitious desire to understand this young woman who was so passionate, and also to be understood by her, for which reason he quickly discovered a good side to her assertion. He put it this way, that most things involv- ing the world and people were indeed ambivalent, which accorded well with his newly acquired pessimism. He assuaged himself further by as- suming that what was meant by god-man and man-woman was no differ- ent from what could be said about anybody: that he was a bit of a noble person and a bit of a rascal. Still, he preferred to steer the conversation back to the more natural view, and began to spin out his knowledge of analogies, comparisons, symbolic forms ofexpression, and the like.
"Please excuse me and permit me, dear lady, to adopt your excite- ment for a moment and accept the idea that you really are a man," he began, advised by the guardian angel of intuition, and went on in the
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1371
same fashion: "because then you would be able to imagine what it means for a lady to wear a heavy veil and show only a small part of her face; or, which is almost the same thing, for a ball gown to swirl up from the floor in a dance and expose an ankle: that's how it was just a few years ago, about the time I was a major; and such hints strike one much more strongly, I might almost say more passionately, than if one were to see the lady up to her knee with no obstacle in the way-yes, obstacle is precisely the right word! Because that's how I would also describe what analogies or comparisons or symbols consist of. They present an obstacle to thinking, and in doing so arouse it more strongly than is usually the case. I believe that's what you mean when you say that there's something cowardly about ordinary reflection. "
But Clarisse meant nothing of the sort. "People have an obligation to get beyond mere hints! " she asserted.
"Quite remarkable! " Stumm exclaimed, honestly moved. "Old Count Leinsdorf says the same thing you do! Just recently I had a most pro- found discussion with that distinguished gentleman about metaphors and symbols, and in connection with the patriotic campaign he ex- pressed precisely the opinion you did: that all of us have the obligation to reach out beyond the condition of metaphor to reality! "
"I once wrote him a letter in which I asked him to do something about freeing Moosbrugger," Clarisse said.
You see, even then we already had two acquaintances in common with- out knowing it!
"And what was his response? For of course he couldn't do it. I mean, even if he could, he couldn't, because he's much too conservative and legalistic a gentleman. "
"But you could? " Clarisse asked.
"No; whatever's in the madhouse can stay there. No matter how am- biguous it is. Caution, you know, is the mother ofwisdom. "
"But what's this? " Clarisse asked, smiling, for she had discovered on the scabbard of the General's sword the woven double eagle, the em- blem of the Imperial and Royal Monarchy. "What's this double eagle? "
"What do you mean? What should the double eagle be? It's the dou- ble eagle! "
"But what is a double eagle? An eagle with two heads? Only one- headed eagles fly around in the real world! So I'm pointing out to you that you're carrying on your saber the symbol of a double being! I re-
1372 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
peat, General, enchanting things are all based, it would appear, on prim- itive nonsense! "
General: Pst! I shouldn't be listening to such things! (smiling)
W AL TER AND CLARISSE'S WOODSY ARMISTICE
As they approached her house, she was accompanied by the theatrical illusion of being a person returning from a distant land. She had given up her dance but for some reason or other was humming in her head the melody "There my father Parsifal wore the crown, I his knight, Lohen- grin my name. " When she walked through the door and felt the violent transition from the morning, whose brightness had already become hard and warm, into the sleeping twilight of the vestibule, she thought she was caught in a trap. Under her light weight the steps she climbed emit- ted a barely audible sound; it echoed like the breath of a sigh, but noth- ing in the entire house responded. Clarisse cautiously turned the doorlmob of the bedroom: Walter was still sleeping! She was greeted by light the color of milky coffee penetrating the curtains, and the nursery odor of the ending night. Walter's lips were sulky like a boy's, and warm; at the same time his face was simple, indeed impoverished. Much less was to be seen in it than was normally one's impression. Only a lustful need for power, otherwise not evident, was now visible. Standing mo- tionless by his bed, Clarisse looked at her husband; he felt his sleep dis- turbed by her entrance and rolled over on his other side. She lingeringly enjoyed the superiority of the waking over the sleeping person; she felt the desire to kiss him or stroke him, or indeed to scare him, but could not make up her mind. She also did not want to expose herself to the danger associated with the bedroom, and finding Walter still sleeping had obviously found her unprepared. She tore off a piece from some wrapping paper from a purchase, which had been left lying on the table, and wrote on it in large letters: "I have paid a visit to the sleeper and await him in the woods. "
When Walter awoke shortly afterward and discovered the empty bed next to his, he dully remembered that something had gone on in the room while he was sleeping, looked at the clock, discovered the note, and quickly wiped away the cobwebs of sleep, for he had intended on this particular day to get up especially early and do some work. Since this was now no longer possible, he thought it proper, after thinking it over a bit, to put off the work; and although he saw himself forced to scrape his own breakfast together, he was soon standing in the best of spirits under
From the Posthumous Papers · 1373
the rays of the morning sun. He assumed that Clarisse was lurking in a hiding place and would materialize from ambush as soon as he entered the woods. He took the usual route, a wide dirt wheelbarrow path, which took about halfan hour. ltwas a halfholiday, which is to say one ofthose days between holidays that do not officially count as holidays; on which account, remarkably enough, precisely those official agencies and the noble professions connected with them took the whole day off, while less responsible private people and businesses worked half the day. Things like this are said to have been sanctioned by history, and the con- sequence was that on this day Walter was permitted to walk like a pri- vate individual in an almost private nature, in which apart from him only a few unsupervised hens were running around. He stretched to see whether he might discover a bright-colored dress either at the edge of the woods or perhaps even coming toward him, but there was nothing to be seen, and although the walk had been lovely at the start, his pleasure in the exercise sank with the increasing heat. His rapid walking soaked his collar and the pores of his face until that unpleasant feeling of damp warmth set in which degrades the human body to a piece of laundry. Walter resolved to get into better shape for the outdoors again; allowed himself the excuse that perhaps he was merely dressed too warmly; was also doubtless anxious lest he might be coming down with something: and his thoughts, which had initially been quite animated, became in this fashion gradually incoherent and finally flopped, as it were, in time with his steps, while the path seemed never to end.
At some point he thought: "As a so-called normal person, one's thoughts are truly hardly less incoherent than a madman's! " And then it occurred to him: "Moreover, one does say that it's insanely hot! " And he smiled weakly that this turn of phrase was apparently not without foun- dation, since for example the changes a feverish temperature brings about in one's head are really somewhere between the symptoms of or- dinary heat and those of mental disturbance. And so, without taking it entirely seriously, it might perhaps also be said of Clarisse that she had always been what one calls a crazy person without her having to be a sick one. Walter would very much have liked to know the answer to this question. Her brother and doctor claimed that there was not the slight- est danger. But Walter believed he had known for a long time that Cla- risse was already on the other side of a certain boundary. He sometimes had the feeling that she was merely still hovering around him as do de- parted souls, of whom it is said that they cannot immediately separate themselves from what they had loved. This idea was not unsuited to in- flating his pride, for there were not many other people who would have been up to such a ghastly yet beautiful-as he now called it-struggle
1374 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
between love and horror. There were, to be sure, times when he felt irresolute. A sudden push or collapse could cany his wife away into the domain of the completely repellent and ugly, and that would still have been the least of it, for what if, in that case, she did not repel him! No, Walter assumed that she would have to repel him, for the debased mind was ugly! And Clarisse would then have to be put in an institution, for which there was not enough money. That was all quite depressing. Still, there had been times, when her soul was already, so to speak, fluttering in front of the windowpanes, when he had felt himself so bold that he had no desire to think whether he should pull her in to him or rush out to her.
Such thoughts made him forget the sunny, strenuous path, but finally also caused him to leave off thinking altogether, so that while he re- mained in animated motion he really had no content, or was filled with terribly ordinary contents, which he solemnly pondered; he walked along like a rhythm without notes, and when he bumped into Clarisse he almost stumbled over her. She, too, had at first followed the broad path, and had found at the edge of the woods a small indentation where the spilled sunlight licked the shadows at every breath of wind, like a god- dess licking an animal. Here the ground rose gently, and since she was lying on her back, she saw the world within a strange gimlet. Through some kind ofkinship ofshapes, the uncanny mood that on this day mixed particularly easilywith her cheerfulness had again taken hold ofher spir- its, and gazing long and steadily into the horizontally perverse landscape she began to feel sadness, as if she had to assume the burden of a sorrow or a sin or a destiny. There was an enormous sense of abandonment, of anticipation, and an expectancy of sacrifice abroad in the world, of the kind she had found the first time she had gone out, when the day just "reached her ankles. " Her eyes involuntarily sought the place where, behind more distant slopes and not visible to her, the extensive buildings of the asylum for the insane must lie; and when she thought she had located them it calmed her, as it calms the lover to know the direction in which his thoughts can find his beloved. Her thoughts "flew," but not in that direction. "They're now crouching, having fallen quite silent, like huge black birds beside me in the sun," she thought, and the splendid yet melancholy feeliD. g associated with this lasted until Clarisse caught sight of Walter in the distance. Then she had suddenly had enough of her sorrow, hid behind the trees, held her hand in front of her mouth like a funnel, and shouted, as loudly as she could: "Cuckoo! " She then straightened up and ran deeper into the woods, but immediately changed her mind again and threw herself down in the warm forest
From the Posthumous Papers · 1375
weeds beside the path Walter would have to use. His countenance then did come along, thinking itself unobserved, expressing nothing but an unconscious, gently animated attentiveness to the obstacles on the path, and this made his face very strange, indeed quite resolutely masculine, to look at. When he was unsuspectingly close, Clarisse stretched out her arm and reached for his foot, and this was the moment when Walter nearly fell and first caught sight of his wife, lying almost under his eyes and directing her smiling glance up at him. Despite some of his con- cerns, she did not look in the least ugly.
Clarisse laughed. Walter sat down beside her on a tree stump and dried his neck with his handkerchief. "Clarisse . . . ! " he began, and con- tinued only after a pause: "I really meant to work today. . . . "
"Meant? " Clarisse mocked. But for once it did not sting. The word whizzed from her tongue and mingled with the cheerful whirring of the flies that zoomed past their ears through the sun like small metal arrows.
Walter replied: 'Til admit that lately I haven't thought working was the right thing to do ifyou could just as well sniff the new flowers. Work is one-sided; it goes against one's duty to wholeness! "
Since he paused briefly, Clarisse threw a small pine cone that had come to hand up in the air a few times and caught it again.
"Of course I'm also aware of the objections that could be raised against that," Walter asserted.
Clarisse let the pine cone fall to the ground and asked animatedly: "So you're going to begin working again? Today we need an art that has brush strokes and musical intervals this big! " She stretched her arms out three feet.
"I don't have to begin that way right off," Walter objected. "Anyway, I still find the whole problematic of the individual artist off-putting. Today we need a problematic of the totality-" But hardly had he ut- tered the word "problematic" than it seemed to him quite overexcited in the stillness of the woods. He therefore added something new: "But ba- sically it's in no way a demand inimical to life that a person should paint something he loves; in the case of the landscape painter, nature! "
"But a painter also paints his beloved," Clarisse threw in. "One part of the painter loves, the other paints! "
Walter saw his beautiful new idea shrivel up. He was not in the mood to breathe new life into it, but he was still convinced that the idea was important and merely needed careful working out. And the singing of finches, the woodpecker's drumming, the humming of small insects: it didn't move him to work but rather dragged him down into an infinite abyss of indolence.
1376 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
'We're very much alike, you and 1," he said with gratification. "There's hardly another couple like us! Others paint, make music, or write, and I refuse to: basically that's as radical as your eagerness! "
Clarisse turned on her side, raised herself on her elbow, and opened her mouth for a furious response. "I'll set you free yet, all the way! " she said quickly.
Walter looked down at her tenderly. "What do you mean, really, when you say that we have to be saved from our sinful form? " he asked eagerly.
This time Clarisse did not answer. She had the impression that if she were to speak now it would run away too quickly, and although she in- tended to say something, the woods confused her; for the woods were on her side: that was something that couldn't be expressed properly, al- though it was clear to see.
Walter probed in the delicious wound. "Did you really talk about that again with Meingast? " he asked in a way that demanded a response, yet hesitantly, indeed fearful that she might have done so although he had forbidden it.
Clarisse lied, for she shook her head; but at the same time she smiled.
"Can you still remember the time we took Meingast's 'sins' on our- selves? " he pursued further. He took her hand. But Clarisse only let him have a finger. It is a remarkable condition when a man has to remind himselfwith as much reluctance as willingness that nearly everything his beloved bestows on him has previously belonged to another; it may be the sign of a love that is all too strong, or perhaps the sign of a feeble soul, and sometimes Walter actually sought out this condition. He loved the fifteen-to-sixteen-year-old Clarisse, who had never been taken with him completely and unreservedly; loved her almost more than the pres- ent Clarisse, and the memory of her caresses, which were perhaps the reflection of Meingast's indecency, stirred him in a peculiar way more profoundly than, by comparison, the cool, unhampered quality of mar- riage. He found it almost agreeable knowing that Clarisse had a favoring side glance to spare for Ulrich and now entirely once again for the mag- nificently altered Meingast, and the way in which these men had an un- favorable impact on her imagination magnified his longing for his wife the way the shadows of debauchery and desire under an eye make it appear larger. Of course men in whom jealousy will suffer nothing be- side themselves, he-men, will not experience this, but his jealousy was full of love, and when that is the case, then the torture is so precise, so distinct, so alive, that it is almost the vicarious experiencing of desire. Whenever Walter imagined his wife in the act of giving herself to an- other man he felt more strongly than when he held her in his own arms,
From the Posthu'11WUs Papers · 1 3 7 7
and, somewhat disconcerted, he thought by way of excuse: ''When I'm painting and I need to see the most subtle curvature of the lines of a face, I don't look at it directly but in a mirror! " It really stung him that he was yielding to such thoughts in the woods, in the healthy world of na- ture, and the hand that held Clarisse's finger began to tremble. He had to say something, but it could not be what he was thinking. He joked in a strained way: "So now you want to take my sins upon yourself, but how are you going to do that? " He smiled; but Clarisse noticed a slight trem- bling spreading over his lips. This did not suit her just now; although it is always a marvelous spur to laughter, this image of the way a man who is dragging a much too large bale of useless thoughts along with him tries to stride through the small door to which he is drawn. She sat completely upright, looked at Walter with a mockingly serious glance, shook her head several times, and began reflectively:
"Don't you believe that periods of depression alternate with periods of mania in the world? Urgent, disturbed, fruitful periods of upswing that bring in the new, alternating with sinful periods, despondent, de- pressed, bad centuries or decades? " Periods in which the world ap- proaches its bright ideal shape and periods where it sinks into its sinful form. Walter looked at her with alarm. "That's how it is; I just can't tell you which years," she continued, adding: "The upswing doesn't have to be beautiful; in fact, it has to shuck off a good deal, which may of course be beautiful. It can look like a disease: I'm convinced that from time to time humanity has to become mentally ill in order to attain the synthesis of a new and higher health! "
Walter refused to understand.
Clarisse talked on: "People who are sensitive, like you and me, feel that! We're now living in a period of decline, and that's why you can't work either. In addition there are sensual ages, and ages that turn away from sensuality. You must prepare yourself for suffering. . . . "
Remarkably, it moved Walter that Clarisse had said "you and me. " She had not said that for a long time.
"And of course there are periods of transition," Clarisse went on. "And figures like Saint John, precursors; we may be two precursors. "
Now Walter responded: "But you had your way and went to the in- sane asylum; now we really ought to be of one mind again! "
"You mean that I ought not to go again? " Clarisse interjected, and smiled.
"Don't go again! " Walter pleaded. But he did so without conviction: he felt it himself; his plea was merely meant to cover him.
Clarisse replied: "All 'precursors' complain about the spirit's lack of resolution because they don't yet have complete faith, but no one dares
1378 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
put an end to the irresolution! Even Meingast doesn't dare," she added. Walter asked: "What is it you'd have to dare? "
"You see, a whole people can't be insane," Clarisse said in an even
softer voice. "There is only individual insanity. When everyone is insane, then they are the healthy ones. Isn't that right?
Clarisse liked being called "my dear lady" and immediately agreed to turn around with him, because once she had become accustomed to the general's company she found it quite agreeable. First, because he was, after all, a general; not "nothing," like Ulrich and Meingast and Walter. She now loved everything that was important in the world. Then, be- cause it had occurred to her that it was really a quite peculiar circum- stance to be always carrying a sword around, an odd relation to the world that corresponded to the great and fearful feelings that at times I often preoccupied her. Further, she esteemed the voluble von Stumm be- cause she unconsciously recognized that he did not, like the others, de- sire her in a way that, when she was not in the mood herself, demeaned her. "There's something strangely pure about him! " she had explained to her jealous husband. But as a final reason, she also needed a person with whom she could talk, for she was oppressed by myriad swarms of inner promptings that she had to keep to herself. And when the General was listening to her, she felt that everything she said and did was good. "You have, my dear lady," the General would often assure her, "some-
1364 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
thing that sets you apart from all women I have had the honor of getting to know. You positively teach me energy, martial courage, and the con- quering of Austrian negligence! " He smiled as if it were a joke, but she clearly noticed that he meant some of it seriously.
(4) But the major topic oftheir conversations was, as is also the rule in love, recollections of their common great experience, the visit to the in- sane asylum, and so this time Clarisse began to confide to the General that she had since been back a second time.
"With whom? " the General inquired, relieved to have escaped a hor- rible mission.
"Alone," Clarisse said.
"Good God! " Stumm exclaimed, and stopped, although they had only taken a few steps. "Really alone? You don't let anything give you the creeps! And did you see anything special? " he asked, curious.
"The murderers' house," Clarisse responded with a smile.
This was the designation that Dr. Friedenthal, a good stage director, had used as they had walked across the soundless moss under the trees of the old garden toward a group of small buildings from which horrible cries came echoing toward them with remarkable regularity. Frieden- thal, too, had smiled, and had told Clarisse, as Clarisse now told the General, that every inmate of this group of houses had killed at least one person, sometimes a number of people.
"And now they're screaming when it's too late! " Stumm said in a tone of reproachful acquiescence in the way of the world.
But Clarisse did not appreciate his response. She recalled that she, too, had asked what the cries meant. And Friedenthal had told her that they were manic fits; but he said this quite softly and cautiously, as if they were not to intrude. And just at that moment the gigantic guards had suddenly materialized around them and opened the reinforced doors; and Clarisse, repeating this and falling back into the mood, like being at an exciting play, softly whispered the term "manic fits" while looking meaningfully into the General's eyes.
She turned away and walked on a few paces ahead, so that Stumm almost had to run to catch up with her. When he was at her side again, she asked him what he thought about modern painting, but before he could gather his impressions, she surprised him with the information that there was an astonishing correspondence between this painting and an architecture born from the spirit ofthe madhouse: "The buildings are dice, and the patients live in hollowed-out concrete dice," she explained. "There is a corridor through the middle, and cube-shaped cells left and right, and in each cell there is nothing but one person and the space around him. Even the bench he's sittingon is part ofthe wall. Ofcourse
From the Posthumous Papers · 1365
all edges have been carefully rounded off so he can't hurt himself," she added with precision, for she had observed everything with the greatest attention.
She found no words for what she really wanted to say. Since she had been surrounded by art all her life and had listened to the concerns ex- pressed about art, this island had remained relatively resistant to the changes that had been slowly growing in other areas of her thinking; and especially since her own artistic activity did not spring directly from pas- sion but was merely an appendix of her ambition and a consequence of the circumstances in which she lived, her judgment in this area, despite the illness that had recently made new inroads on her personality, was no more perverse than is common, from time to time, in the develop- ment of art. She could, therefore, deal quite comfortably with an idea like "purpose-oriented architecture" or "a manner of building deriving from the mission of an insane asylum," and it was only the peopling of these up-to-date dwellings with the insane that surprised her as a new concept and tickled her like a scent kindled in the nose.
But Stumm von Bordwehr interrupted her with the modest observa- tion that he had always imagined that cells for manics had to be padded. Clarisse became uncertain, for perhaps the cells had been made of light-colored rubber, and so she cut offhis objection. "Maybe in the old days," she said finnly. "In the days ofupholstered furniture and tasseled drapes, maybe the cells were upholstered too. But today, when people think objectively and spatially, it's quite impossible. Cultural progress
doesn't stop, even in insane asylums! "
But Stumm would rather have heard something about the manics
themselves than be diverted by the problem of what connections there might be between them and painting and architecture, so he replied: "Most interesting! But now I'm really anxious to hear what happened in these modem spaces! "
"You'll be surprised," Clarisse said. "As quiet as a cemetery. "
"Interesting! I recall that in the courtyard of murderers that we saw, it was that still for a few moments too. "
"But this time only a single man had on a striped linen smock," Clarisse went on. "A weak, little old man with blinking eyes. " And suddenly she gave a loud laugh. "He dreamed that his wife had deceived him, and when he woke up in the morning he beat her to death with the bootjack! "
Stumm laughed too. "Right when he woke up? That's capital! " he agreed. "He was evidently in a hurry! And the others? Why do you say that he was the only one who had on a smock? "
"Because the others were in black. They were quieter than the dead," Clarisse replied, overcome with seriousness.
1366 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
"Murderers really don't seem to be merry people," Stumm hazarded. "Oh, you're thinking of the nutcracker! " Clarisse said.
For a moment the General did not know whom she meant.
"The one with nutcracker teeth who said to me that Vienna is a beau-
tiful city! "
"And what did this lot say to you? " the General asked with a smile. "But I told you, they were as silent as ghosts! "
"But, my dear lady," Stumm excused himself, "you can't call that
manic! "
"They were waiting for their attacks! "
"What do you mean, waiting? It's strange to wait for an attack of
mania the way you wait for an inspiring corps commander. And you say that they were dressed in black: ready to be reviewed, in a way? I'm afraid, dear lady, that you must have been mistaken in what you were seeing just then. I most humbly beg your pardon, but I am accustomed to imagining such things with the greatest precision! "
Clarisse, who found it not at all disagreeable that Stumm insisted on precision, for something was weighing her down that was not clear to her either, replied: "Dr. Friedenthal explained it to me that way, and I can only repeat, General, that that's the way it was. There were three men waiting there; all three had on black suits, and their hair and beards were black. One was a doctor, the second a lawyer, and the third a wealthy businessman. They looked like political martyrs about to be shot. "
"Why did they look that way? '' asked the incredulous Stumm. "Because they were wearing neither collar nor tie. "
"Perhaps they had just arrived? ''
"No! Friedenthal said they had been in the asylum a long time," Cla-
risse asserted warmly. "And yet that's the way they looked, as if they could stand up at any moment and go to the office or visit a patient. That's what was so strange. "
"Well, it's all the same to me," Stumm responded, to tum the conver- sation, and yet with a nobility that was new to him, while at the same time he struck his boots aggressively with his riding crop. ''I've seen fools in uniform, and consider more people crazy than one might think I would. But I imagined 'manic' as something more vivid, even if I con- cede that you can't ask ofa person that he be manic all the time. But that all three were so quiet . . . I'm sorry I wasn't there myself, for I think this Dr. Friedenthal is capable of pulling the wool over a person's eyes! "
"When he was speaking they listened quite mutely," Clarisse re- ported. "You wouldn't have noticed that they were ill at all ifyou hadn't happened to meet them there. And imagine, as we were leaving, the one
From the Posthumous Papers · 1367
who was a doctor stood up and motioned me, with a truly chivalrous gesture, to go first, saying to Friedenthal: 'Doctor, you often bring visi- tors. You are always showing guests around. Today for a change I'll come with you too. ' "
"And then of course those bullies, those toadies of guards, immedi- ately-" the General began heatedly, even though he might have been more touched by the tragedienne than the tragedy.
"No, they didn't grab him," Clarisse interrupted. "It was really with the greatest respect that they kept him from following me. And I assure you, it was all so moving in this polite and silent fashion. As if the world were hung with heavy, precious fabrics, and the words one would like to say have no resonance. It's hard to understand these people. You'd have to live in an asylum yourself for a long time to be able to enter their world! "
"What an exquisite idea! But God preserve us from it! " Stumm re- sponded quickly. "You know, dear lady, that I am indebted to you for a pretty good insight into the value of shaking up the bourgeois spirit by means ofillness and murder: but still, there are certain limits! "
With these words they had arrived at the hill that was their goal, and the General paused for breath before undertaking the pathless climb. Clarisse surveyed him with an expression of grateful solicitude and a tender mockery that she rarely showed. "But one ofthem did have a fit! " she informed him roguishly, the way one hauls out a present that had been concealed.
"Well, so there! " Stumm exclaimed. He could not think of anything else to say. But his mouth remained open as he mindlessly groped around for a word; suddenly he beat against his boots again with his crop. "But of course, the shouts! " he added. "Right at the beginning you spoke of the shouting you heard, and I overlooked that when you were talking about the deathly stillness. You tell a story so magnificently that one forgets everything! "
"As we stood in front of the door from which shouts and a strange moaning alternated," Clarisse began, "Friedenthal asked me once more whether I really wanted to go in. I was so excited I could hardly answer, but the guards paid no attention and began opening the doors. You may imagine, General, that at that moment I was terribly afraid, for I'm really only a woman. I had the feeling: when the door opens, the maniac is going to jump mel"
"One always hears that such mentally ill people have incredible strength," the General said by way of encouragement.
"Yes; but when the door was open and we all stood at the entrance, he paid absolutely no attention to us! "
1368 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
"Paid no attention? " Stumm asked.
"None at all! He was almost as tall as Ulrich, and perhaps my age. He was standing in the middle of the cell, with his head bent forward and his legs apart. Like this! " Clarisse imitated it.
General: Was he dressed in black too? Clarisse: No, stark naked.
General: Looks at Clarisse from head to toe.
''Thick strands of saliva were spread all over his young man's brown- ish-blond beard; the muscles literally jumped out of his scrawniness; he was naked, and his hair, I mean specific hairs-"
''You present everything so vividly one understands it all! " Stumm in- teiVened soothingly.
"-were dully bright, shamelessly bright; he fixed us with them as if they were an eye that looks at you without noticing anything about you! " Clarisse had reached the top, the General sat at her feet. From the "ski jump" one looked down on vineyards and meadows sloping away, on large and small houses that for a short distance rose in a jumble up the slope from below, and in one place the glance escaped into the charming depth of the hilly plateau that on the far horizon bordered high moun- tains. But if, like Stumm, you were sitting on a low tree stump, all you saw was an accidental hump of forest arching its back toward the sky, white clouds in the familiar, fatly drifting balls, and Clarisse. She stood with her legs apart in front of the General and mimicked a manic fit. She held one arm bent out at a right angle and stiffiy locked to her body; with her head bent forward, she was executing with her torso in an unvarying sequence a jerky motion that formed a shallow forward circle, while she bent one finger after another as if she were counting. And she allowed each of these motions to be accompanied by a pantingly uttered cry, whose force, however, she considerately restrained. ''You can't imitate the essential part," she explained. "'Ib. at's the incredible strain with every motion, which gives an impression as if each time the person is
tearing his body from a vise. . . . "
"But that's moral" the General exclaimed. ''You ! mow, that game of
chance? Whoever guesses the right number of fingers wins. Except that you can't bend one finger after another but have to show as many as you think of on the spur of the moment. All our peasants on the Italian bor- der play it. "
From the Posthu'TIWUs Papers · 1369
"It really is mora," said Clarisse, who had seen it on her travels. "And he also did it the way you described! "
"Well then, mora," Stumm repeated with satisfaction. "But I'd like to lmow where these insane people get their ideas," he added, and here commenced the strenuous part of the conversation.
Clarisse sat down on the tree stump beside the General, a little apart from him so that she could, if need be, "cast an eye" on him, and each time this happened he had a ridiculous horrible feeling, as if he were being pinched by a stag beetle. She was prepared to explain for his bene- fit the emotional life of the insane as she herself understood it after much reflection. One ofits most important elements-because she con- nected everything with herself-was the idea that the so-called mentally ill were some kind of geniuses who were spirited away and deprived of their rights, and for some reason that Clarisse had not yet discovered, this was something they were not able to defend themselves against. It was only natural that the General could not concur in this opinion, but this did not surprise either of them. "I am willing to concede that such an idiot might occasionally guess something that the likes of us don't lmow," he protested. "That's the way you imagine them being: they have a certain aura; but that they should think more than we healthy people- no, please, I beg to differ! "
Clarisse insisted seriously that people who were mentally healthy thought less than those who were mentally unhealthy. "Have you ever strayed off a point, General, from A to B? " she asked Stumm, and he was forced to agree that he had. "Have you ever, then, done it the other way round, from B to A? " she asked further, and Stumm had even less desire to deny it, after considering for a while what it meant, for it is part of a man's pride to think through for himself to the single thing called truth. But Clarisse reasoned: ''You see, and that's nothing but cowardice, this neat and orderly reflecting about things. On account of their cowardice men will never amount to anything! "
'Tve never heard that before," Stumm asserted dismissively. But he thought it over. Wouldn't that mean . . . ? "
Clarisse moved closer to him with her eyes. "Surely some woman has whispered in your ear: 'You god-man'? "
Stumm could not recall this happening, but he didn't want to admit it, so he merely made a gesture that could just as well mean "unfortunately not" as 'Tm sick and tired of hearing itl" In words, he replied: "Many women are very high-strung! But what does that have to do with our conversation? Something of that sort is simply an exaggerated compli- ment!
"
1370 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"Do you remember the painter whose sketches the doctor showed us? " Clarisse asked.
''Yes, of course. What he had painted was really magnificent. "
"He was dissatisfied with Friedenthal because the doctor doesn't un- derstand anything about art. 'Show it to this gentleman! ' he said, point- ing to me," Clarisse went on, again suddenly casting her eye on the General. "Do you believe it was merely a compliment that he addressed me as a man? "
"It's just one of those ideas," Stumm said. "Honestly, I've never thought about it. I would assume it's what's called an association, or an analogy, or something like that. He just had some reason or other to take you for a man! "
But does it give you pleasure to be taken for a man? Pleasure? No. But . . .
Although Stumm was convinced that with these last words he had ex- plained something to Clarisse, he was still surprised by the wannth with which she exclaimed: "Terrific! Then I only need tell you that it has the same cause as in love when there's whispering about god-man! For the world is full of double beings! "
One should not of course believe that it was agreeable to Stumm when Clarisse talked this way, shooting a cleft glance from eyes nar- rowed to slits; he was thinking, rather, whether it would not be more proper not to conduct such conversations in uniform, but to appear for the next walk in mufti. But on the other hand the good Stumm, who admired Clarisse with great caution, ifnot concealed terror, had the am- bitious desire to understand this young woman who was so passionate, and also to be understood by her, for which reason he quickly discovered a good side to her assertion. He put it this way, that most things involv- ing the world and people were indeed ambivalent, which accorded well with his newly acquired pessimism. He assuaged himself further by as- suming that what was meant by god-man and man-woman was no differ- ent from what could be said about anybody: that he was a bit of a noble person and a bit of a rascal. Still, he preferred to steer the conversation back to the more natural view, and began to spin out his knowledge of analogies, comparisons, symbolic forms ofexpression, and the like.
"Please excuse me and permit me, dear lady, to adopt your excite- ment for a moment and accept the idea that you really are a man," he began, advised by the guardian angel of intuition, and went on in the
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1371
same fashion: "because then you would be able to imagine what it means for a lady to wear a heavy veil and show only a small part of her face; or, which is almost the same thing, for a ball gown to swirl up from the floor in a dance and expose an ankle: that's how it was just a few years ago, about the time I was a major; and such hints strike one much more strongly, I might almost say more passionately, than if one were to see the lady up to her knee with no obstacle in the way-yes, obstacle is precisely the right word! Because that's how I would also describe what analogies or comparisons or symbols consist of. They present an obstacle to thinking, and in doing so arouse it more strongly than is usually the case. I believe that's what you mean when you say that there's something cowardly about ordinary reflection. "
But Clarisse meant nothing of the sort. "People have an obligation to get beyond mere hints! " she asserted.
"Quite remarkable! " Stumm exclaimed, honestly moved. "Old Count Leinsdorf says the same thing you do! Just recently I had a most pro- found discussion with that distinguished gentleman about metaphors and symbols, and in connection with the patriotic campaign he ex- pressed precisely the opinion you did: that all of us have the obligation to reach out beyond the condition of metaphor to reality! "
"I once wrote him a letter in which I asked him to do something about freeing Moosbrugger," Clarisse said.
You see, even then we already had two acquaintances in common with- out knowing it!
"And what was his response? For of course he couldn't do it. I mean, even if he could, he couldn't, because he's much too conservative and legalistic a gentleman. "
"But you could? " Clarisse asked.
"No; whatever's in the madhouse can stay there. No matter how am- biguous it is. Caution, you know, is the mother ofwisdom. "
"But what's this? " Clarisse asked, smiling, for she had discovered on the scabbard of the General's sword the woven double eagle, the em- blem of the Imperial and Royal Monarchy. "What's this double eagle? "
"What do you mean? What should the double eagle be? It's the dou- ble eagle! "
"But what is a double eagle? An eagle with two heads? Only one- headed eagles fly around in the real world! So I'm pointing out to you that you're carrying on your saber the symbol of a double being! I re-
1372 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
peat, General, enchanting things are all based, it would appear, on prim- itive nonsense! "
General: Pst! I shouldn't be listening to such things! (smiling)
W AL TER AND CLARISSE'S WOODSY ARMISTICE
As they approached her house, she was accompanied by the theatrical illusion of being a person returning from a distant land. She had given up her dance but for some reason or other was humming in her head the melody "There my father Parsifal wore the crown, I his knight, Lohen- grin my name. " When she walked through the door and felt the violent transition from the morning, whose brightness had already become hard and warm, into the sleeping twilight of the vestibule, she thought she was caught in a trap. Under her light weight the steps she climbed emit- ted a barely audible sound; it echoed like the breath of a sigh, but noth- ing in the entire house responded. Clarisse cautiously turned the doorlmob of the bedroom: Walter was still sleeping! She was greeted by light the color of milky coffee penetrating the curtains, and the nursery odor of the ending night. Walter's lips were sulky like a boy's, and warm; at the same time his face was simple, indeed impoverished. Much less was to be seen in it than was normally one's impression. Only a lustful need for power, otherwise not evident, was now visible. Standing mo- tionless by his bed, Clarisse looked at her husband; he felt his sleep dis- turbed by her entrance and rolled over on his other side. She lingeringly enjoyed the superiority of the waking over the sleeping person; she felt the desire to kiss him or stroke him, or indeed to scare him, but could not make up her mind. She also did not want to expose herself to the danger associated with the bedroom, and finding Walter still sleeping had obviously found her unprepared. She tore off a piece from some wrapping paper from a purchase, which had been left lying on the table, and wrote on it in large letters: "I have paid a visit to the sleeper and await him in the woods. "
When Walter awoke shortly afterward and discovered the empty bed next to his, he dully remembered that something had gone on in the room while he was sleeping, looked at the clock, discovered the note, and quickly wiped away the cobwebs of sleep, for he had intended on this particular day to get up especially early and do some work. Since this was now no longer possible, he thought it proper, after thinking it over a bit, to put off the work; and although he saw himself forced to scrape his own breakfast together, he was soon standing in the best of spirits under
From the Posthumous Papers · 1373
the rays of the morning sun. He assumed that Clarisse was lurking in a hiding place and would materialize from ambush as soon as he entered the woods. He took the usual route, a wide dirt wheelbarrow path, which took about halfan hour. ltwas a halfholiday, which is to say one ofthose days between holidays that do not officially count as holidays; on which account, remarkably enough, precisely those official agencies and the noble professions connected with them took the whole day off, while less responsible private people and businesses worked half the day. Things like this are said to have been sanctioned by history, and the con- sequence was that on this day Walter was permitted to walk like a pri- vate individual in an almost private nature, in which apart from him only a few unsupervised hens were running around. He stretched to see whether he might discover a bright-colored dress either at the edge of the woods or perhaps even coming toward him, but there was nothing to be seen, and although the walk had been lovely at the start, his pleasure in the exercise sank with the increasing heat. His rapid walking soaked his collar and the pores of his face until that unpleasant feeling of damp warmth set in which degrades the human body to a piece of laundry. Walter resolved to get into better shape for the outdoors again; allowed himself the excuse that perhaps he was merely dressed too warmly; was also doubtless anxious lest he might be coming down with something: and his thoughts, which had initially been quite animated, became in this fashion gradually incoherent and finally flopped, as it were, in time with his steps, while the path seemed never to end.
At some point he thought: "As a so-called normal person, one's thoughts are truly hardly less incoherent than a madman's! " And then it occurred to him: "Moreover, one does say that it's insanely hot! " And he smiled weakly that this turn of phrase was apparently not without foun- dation, since for example the changes a feverish temperature brings about in one's head are really somewhere between the symptoms of or- dinary heat and those of mental disturbance. And so, without taking it entirely seriously, it might perhaps also be said of Clarisse that she had always been what one calls a crazy person without her having to be a sick one. Walter would very much have liked to know the answer to this question. Her brother and doctor claimed that there was not the slight- est danger. But Walter believed he had known for a long time that Cla- risse was already on the other side of a certain boundary. He sometimes had the feeling that she was merely still hovering around him as do de- parted souls, of whom it is said that they cannot immediately separate themselves from what they had loved. This idea was not unsuited to in- flating his pride, for there were not many other people who would have been up to such a ghastly yet beautiful-as he now called it-struggle
1374 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
between love and horror. There were, to be sure, times when he felt irresolute. A sudden push or collapse could cany his wife away into the domain of the completely repellent and ugly, and that would still have been the least of it, for what if, in that case, she did not repel him! No, Walter assumed that she would have to repel him, for the debased mind was ugly! And Clarisse would then have to be put in an institution, for which there was not enough money. That was all quite depressing. Still, there had been times, when her soul was already, so to speak, fluttering in front of the windowpanes, when he had felt himself so bold that he had no desire to think whether he should pull her in to him or rush out to her.
Such thoughts made him forget the sunny, strenuous path, but finally also caused him to leave off thinking altogether, so that while he re- mained in animated motion he really had no content, or was filled with terribly ordinary contents, which he solemnly pondered; he walked along like a rhythm without notes, and when he bumped into Clarisse he almost stumbled over her. She, too, had at first followed the broad path, and had found at the edge of the woods a small indentation where the spilled sunlight licked the shadows at every breath of wind, like a god- dess licking an animal. Here the ground rose gently, and since she was lying on her back, she saw the world within a strange gimlet. Through some kind ofkinship ofshapes, the uncanny mood that on this day mixed particularly easilywith her cheerfulness had again taken hold ofher spir- its, and gazing long and steadily into the horizontally perverse landscape she began to feel sadness, as if she had to assume the burden of a sorrow or a sin or a destiny. There was an enormous sense of abandonment, of anticipation, and an expectancy of sacrifice abroad in the world, of the kind she had found the first time she had gone out, when the day just "reached her ankles. " Her eyes involuntarily sought the place where, behind more distant slopes and not visible to her, the extensive buildings of the asylum for the insane must lie; and when she thought she had located them it calmed her, as it calms the lover to know the direction in which his thoughts can find his beloved. Her thoughts "flew," but not in that direction. "They're now crouching, having fallen quite silent, like huge black birds beside me in the sun," she thought, and the splendid yet melancholy feeliD. g associated with this lasted until Clarisse caught sight of Walter in the distance. Then she had suddenly had enough of her sorrow, hid behind the trees, held her hand in front of her mouth like a funnel, and shouted, as loudly as she could: "Cuckoo! " She then straightened up and ran deeper into the woods, but immediately changed her mind again and threw herself down in the warm forest
From the Posthumous Papers · 1375
weeds beside the path Walter would have to use. His countenance then did come along, thinking itself unobserved, expressing nothing but an unconscious, gently animated attentiveness to the obstacles on the path, and this made his face very strange, indeed quite resolutely masculine, to look at. When he was unsuspectingly close, Clarisse stretched out her arm and reached for his foot, and this was the moment when Walter nearly fell and first caught sight of his wife, lying almost under his eyes and directing her smiling glance up at him. Despite some of his con- cerns, she did not look in the least ugly.
Clarisse laughed. Walter sat down beside her on a tree stump and dried his neck with his handkerchief. "Clarisse . . . ! " he began, and con- tinued only after a pause: "I really meant to work today. . . . "
"Meant? " Clarisse mocked. But for once it did not sting. The word whizzed from her tongue and mingled with the cheerful whirring of the flies that zoomed past their ears through the sun like small metal arrows.
Walter replied: 'Til admit that lately I haven't thought working was the right thing to do ifyou could just as well sniff the new flowers. Work is one-sided; it goes against one's duty to wholeness! "
Since he paused briefly, Clarisse threw a small pine cone that had come to hand up in the air a few times and caught it again.
"Of course I'm also aware of the objections that could be raised against that," Walter asserted.
Clarisse let the pine cone fall to the ground and asked animatedly: "So you're going to begin working again? Today we need an art that has brush strokes and musical intervals this big! " She stretched her arms out three feet.
"I don't have to begin that way right off," Walter objected. "Anyway, I still find the whole problematic of the individual artist off-putting. Today we need a problematic of the totality-" But hardly had he ut- tered the word "problematic" than it seemed to him quite overexcited in the stillness of the woods. He therefore added something new: "But ba- sically it's in no way a demand inimical to life that a person should paint something he loves; in the case of the landscape painter, nature! "
"But a painter also paints his beloved," Clarisse threw in. "One part of the painter loves, the other paints! "
Walter saw his beautiful new idea shrivel up. He was not in the mood to breathe new life into it, but he was still convinced that the idea was important and merely needed careful working out. And the singing of finches, the woodpecker's drumming, the humming of small insects: it didn't move him to work but rather dragged him down into an infinite abyss of indolence.
1376 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
'We're very much alike, you and 1," he said with gratification. "There's hardly another couple like us! Others paint, make music, or write, and I refuse to: basically that's as radical as your eagerness! "
Clarisse turned on her side, raised herself on her elbow, and opened her mouth for a furious response. "I'll set you free yet, all the way! " she said quickly.
Walter looked down at her tenderly. "What do you mean, really, when you say that we have to be saved from our sinful form? " he asked eagerly.
This time Clarisse did not answer. She had the impression that if she were to speak now it would run away too quickly, and although she in- tended to say something, the woods confused her; for the woods were on her side: that was something that couldn't be expressed properly, al- though it was clear to see.
Walter probed in the delicious wound. "Did you really talk about that again with Meingast? " he asked in a way that demanded a response, yet hesitantly, indeed fearful that she might have done so although he had forbidden it.
Clarisse lied, for she shook her head; but at the same time she smiled.
"Can you still remember the time we took Meingast's 'sins' on our- selves? " he pursued further. He took her hand. But Clarisse only let him have a finger. It is a remarkable condition when a man has to remind himselfwith as much reluctance as willingness that nearly everything his beloved bestows on him has previously belonged to another; it may be the sign of a love that is all too strong, or perhaps the sign of a feeble soul, and sometimes Walter actually sought out this condition. He loved the fifteen-to-sixteen-year-old Clarisse, who had never been taken with him completely and unreservedly; loved her almost more than the pres- ent Clarisse, and the memory of her caresses, which were perhaps the reflection of Meingast's indecency, stirred him in a peculiar way more profoundly than, by comparison, the cool, unhampered quality of mar- riage. He found it almost agreeable knowing that Clarisse had a favoring side glance to spare for Ulrich and now entirely once again for the mag- nificently altered Meingast, and the way in which these men had an un- favorable impact on her imagination magnified his longing for his wife the way the shadows of debauchery and desire under an eye make it appear larger. Of course men in whom jealousy will suffer nothing be- side themselves, he-men, will not experience this, but his jealousy was full of love, and when that is the case, then the torture is so precise, so distinct, so alive, that it is almost the vicarious experiencing of desire. Whenever Walter imagined his wife in the act of giving herself to an- other man he felt more strongly than when he held her in his own arms,
From the Posthu'11WUs Papers · 1 3 7 7
and, somewhat disconcerted, he thought by way of excuse: ''When I'm painting and I need to see the most subtle curvature of the lines of a face, I don't look at it directly but in a mirror! " It really stung him that he was yielding to such thoughts in the woods, in the healthy world of na- ture, and the hand that held Clarisse's finger began to tremble. He had to say something, but it could not be what he was thinking. He joked in a strained way: "So now you want to take my sins upon yourself, but how are you going to do that? " He smiled; but Clarisse noticed a slight trem- bling spreading over his lips. This did not suit her just now; although it is always a marvelous spur to laughter, this image of the way a man who is dragging a much too large bale of useless thoughts along with him tries to stride through the small door to which he is drawn. She sat completely upright, looked at Walter with a mockingly serious glance, shook her head several times, and began reflectively:
"Don't you believe that periods of depression alternate with periods of mania in the world? Urgent, disturbed, fruitful periods of upswing that bring in the new, alternating with sinful periods, despondent, de- pressed, bad centuries or decades? " Periods in which the world ap- proaches its bright ideal shape and periods where it sinks into its sinful form. Walter looked at her with alarm. "That's how it is; I just can't tell you which years," she continued, adding: "The upswing doesn't have to be beautiful; in fact, it has to shuck off a good deal, which may of course be beautiful. It can look like a disease: I'm convinced that from time to time humanity has to become mentally ill in order to attain the synthesis of a new and higher health! "
Walter refused to understand.
Clarisse talked on: "People who are sensitive, like you and me, feel that! We're now living in a period of decline, and that's why you can't work either. In addition there are sensual ages, and ages that turn away from sensuality. You must prepare yourself for suffering. . . . "
Remarkably, it moved Walter that Clarisse had said "you and me. " She had not said that for a long time.
"And of course there are periods of transition," Clarisse went on. "And figures like Saint John, precursors; we may be two precursors. "
Now Walter responded: "But you had your way and went to the in- sane asylum; now we really ought to be of one mind again! "
"You mean that I ought not to go again? " Clarisse interjected, and smiled.
"Don't go again! " Walter pleaded. But he did so without conviction: he felt it himself; his plea was merely meant to cover him.
Clarisse replied: "All 'precursors' complain about the spirit's lack of resolution because they don't yet have complete faith, but no one dares
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put an end to the irresolution! Even Meingast doesn't dare," she added. Walter asked: "What is it you'd have to dare? "
"You see, a whole people can't be insane," Clarisse said in an even
softer voice. "There is only individual insanity. When everyone is insane, then they are the healthy ones. Isn't that right?
