After the
conversation
with Walter, Ulrich had set out and had indeed found the note.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
And he said to Clarisse: -Please, Clarisse, be reasonable!
Clarisse had just got home, had called out: You layabout! to Walter, filled the bath with cold water, and slipped out of her thin dress, when she felt Walter behind her. He was standing there the way he had got out of bed, in a long nightshirt that fell down to his bare feet, and had warm cheeks like a girl's, while Clarisse, in her brief panties and with her skinny arms, looked like a boy. She put her hand on his chest and shoved him back. But Walter reached out for her. With one hand he seized her arm, and with the other sought to grasp her by the crotch and pull her to him. Clarisse tore at the embrace, and when that didn't help shoved her free hand into Walter's face, into his nose and mouth. His face turned red and the blood trembled in his eyes while he struggled with Clarisse. He did not want to let her see that she was hurting him, but when he was in danger of suffocating he had to strike her hand from his face. Quick as lightning, she went at it again, and this time her nails tore two bleeding furrows in his skin. Clarisse was free. Just then Walter again snatched at her, this time with all his strength. He had become angry, and feared nothing in the whole world so much as becoming rational again. Clarisse struck at him. She had lost her shoe and kicked at him. She understood that this time it was for real. Walter was gasping out meaningless sen- tences. The voices of loneliness, as if a robber had jumped on them. She felt she had the strength of giants. Her clothing tore; Walter seized the shreds; she reached for his neck. She would have liked to kill him. She did not know what she was doing. Naked, slippery, she struggled like a wriggling fish in his arms. She bit Walter, whose strength was not suffi- cient to overpower her calmly; he swung her this way and that, and pain- fully sought to block her attacks. Clarisse got tired. Her muscles became numb and slack. There were pauses where she was pressed by Walter's weight against the wall or the floor and could no longer defend herself. Then again there would come a series of defensive movements and ruth- less attacks against sensitive parts ofthe body and face. Then suffocation again, powerlessness, and the heart's beating. Walter was intermittently ashamed. The pain hit him like a ray of light: Reasonable people don't act this way! He thought that Clarisse looked as ugly as a madwoman.
1606 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But it had taken so much to get himself this far that the acting man ran on by himself, paying no attention to the feeling man. Clarisse, too, no longer had the feeling that she was being raped by Walter; she had only the feeling that she was not able to insist on her will, and when she was forced to yield she uttered a long, shrill, wild cry, like a locomotive. She herself found this inspiration quite strange. Perhaps her will was escap- ing in this cry, now that it was of no more use to her. Walter was scared. And while she had to endure his will she had the consolation: Just wait, I'll get my revenge!
The moment this repulsive scene was over, shame crashed down on Walter. Clarisse sat in a comer, naked as she was, with a thunderous face and made no response to his pleas for forgiveness. He had to get dressed; blood and tears flowed through his shaving foam. He had to leave in a hurry. He felt that he could not leave the beloved of all the days since his youth in this condition. He sought to at least move her to get dressed. Clarisse countered that she could just as well remain sitting this way until Judgment Day. In his despair and helplessness, his whole life as a man shrank back; he threw himself on his knees and with hands raised begged her to forgive him, as he had once prayed against blows; he could not think of anything else to do.
-I'll tell Ulrich everything! Clarisse said, slightly reconciled.
Walter begged her to forget it. There was something in his lack of dignity that called for reconciliation: he loved Clarisse; the shame was like a wound from which real, warm blood was flowing. But Clarisse did not forgive him. She could forgive him as little as an emperor who bears the responsibility for a kingdom can forgive; such people are something other than private individuals. She made him swear never to touch her again before she gave him permission. Walter was expected at a meet- ing; he gave his oath quickly, with the clock in his heart. Then Clarisse gave him the additional task of sending Ulrich over; she agreed to keep silent, but she needed the calming presence of a person she could trust.
During a break at work Walter took a taxi to Ulrich's, to get there as quickly as possible.
Ulrich was at home. His life wearied him. He did not know where Agathe was. Since she had separated herself from him he had had no news of her; he was tortured by worries about what might be happening to her. Everything reminded him of her. How short a time ago he had
From the Posthumous Papers · 1607
restrained her from a rash decision. Yet he did not believe she would do it without speaking to him once more.
Perhaps for that very reason: for the intoxication-a real intoxication, an enchantment! -was over. The experiment they had undertaken to shape their relationship had failed irrevocably. Vast regions of emotions and fancies that had endowed many things with a perennial splendor of unknown origin, like an opalizing sky, were now desolate. Ulrich's mind had dried out like soil beneath which the layers that conduct the mois- ture that nourishes all green things had disappeared. If what he had been forced to wish for was folly-and the exhaustion with which he thought of it admitted of no doubts about that! -then what had been best in his life had always been folly: the shimmer of thinking, the breath of presumption, those tender messengers of a better home that flutter among the things of the world. Nothing remained but to become reason- able; he had to do violence to his nature and apparently submit it to a school that was not only hard but also by definition boring. He did not want to think himself born to be an idler, but would now be one if he did not soon begin to make order out of the consequences of this failure. But when he checked them over, his whole being rebelled against them, and when his being rebelled against them, he longed for Agathe; that hap- pened without exuberance, but still as one yearns for a fellow sufferer when he is the only one with whom one can be intimate.
With distracted politeness, Walter inquired about Ulrich's absence; Ulrich waited with embarrassment for him to ask about Agathe, but for- tunately Walter forgot to. He had recently come to realize that it is in- sanity to doubt the love of a woman whom one loves oneself, he began. Even if one should be disappointed, it was only a matter of letting one- self be disappointed fruitfully, in such a way that the inner lives of all concerned be raised a degree. All feelings that are only negative are un- fruitful; on the other hand, there was nothing in which one could not find a core of fruitfulness if one peeled off the layers of world commu- nity. For instance: He had often committed the wrong of being jealous of Ulrich.
-W ere you really jealous of me? Ulrich asked.
-Yes, Walter confessed, and for an instant, in an unconsciously sig- nificant but ridiculously chilling fashion, he bared two teeth. -Of course I never thought of it in any other way than intellectually. Clarisse feels a certain sensual kinship with your body. You understand: it's not that your body attracts her body, or your mind her mind, but your body attracts her mind; you'll have to admit that's not so simple, and that it wasn't always easy for me to behave properly toward you.
1608 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
-And Meingast?
-Meingast has left-Walter began by saying-but that was different. I admire Meingast myself. Nobody today can compare with him, all in all. There's no way I could forbid Clarisse to love him.
-Y es, you could. First you would have to tell her that Meingast is a woolgatherer-
- C u t it out! Today I need your friendship, not a quarrel!
-Then you could always say to Clarisse that it's not the mission of a great man to draw the nails out of every marriage like a giant magnet; therefore, on the side of the marriage, there has to be something that can't be changed by the superiority of this third person. You're conserva- tive, you'll no doubt be able to work that out. Moreover, it's an absorbing question. Just consider: Today every writer, musician, philosopher, leader, and boss finds people who think he's the greatest thing on earth. The natural consequence, especially for women who are more easily moved, would be that they flock to him as a whole person. Their own personal, bodily philosopher or writer! These words have a right to be taken literally; for where else should one wish to go with soul and body if not to this ultimate refuge? But it's just as certain that this doesn't hap- pen. Today only hysterical women run after great minds. And why?
Walter answered reluctantly. -Y ou said yourself that there are other reasons for living together. Children, the need for a solid place; and then there's a suitability of two people for each other that's greater than the meeting of their minds!
-Those are just excuses! The agreement you're talking about is noth- ing more than trusting opinions even less than a life of habit that has turned out to be not entirely unbearable. It's just lucky that one doesn't quite trust the person one admires. The confusion through which one is always robbed of vitality by the other has obviously become a means of preserving life. The inclination for each other holds together through a delicate remnant of disinclination against the third person. And alto- gether, of course, it's nothing but the soul of the pharisee, which, once it's got inside a body, imagines that every other body has secret defects!
- I started out by saying-Walter exclaimed indignantly-that ifCla- risse really loved Meingast I could not forbid it.
- T h e n why don't you permit her to love me? Ulrich asked, laughing. -Because you don't like me. And you don't like me because when we were children I beat you up a couple of times. As if I had never run into stronger boys who beat me up! That's so absurd, so narrow-minded and petty. I'm not reproaching you; we all have this weakness of not being able to shake off such things, indeed that such idiotic chance happenings actually form the inner building blocks of our personalities, while our
From the Posthumous Papers · 16og
knowledge is no more than the breeze that blows around them. Who's stronger, then: you or I? Engineer Short or Art Historian Long? A mas- ter wrestler or a sprinter? I think that (the individual) this business has lost a lot of its meaning today. None of us are isolated or individual. To speak in your language: We're instrumentalists who have come together in expectation of playing a marvelous piece, the score for which has not yet been located. So what would happen if Clarisse were to fall in love with me? The idea that one can love only one other person is nothing but a legal (civil law) prejudice that has totally overrun us. She would love you, too, and in those circumstances precisely in the way that suits you best, because she would be free of the gnawing anger that you don't have certain qualities which she also considers important. The only con- dition would be that you would really have to behave toward me as a friend; that doesn't mean you have to understand me, for I don't under- stand the cells in my brain either, although something far more intimate exists between us than understanding! . . . And you could contradict me with all your emotions and thoughts, but only in a certain way: for there are contradictions that are continuations, for example those within our- selves; we love ourselves along with them.
This seemed to Walter like a bucket being emptied down a flight of steps. What Ulrich said spread out and at some point had to stop; he, meanwhile, paced back and forth in the room but couldn't wait for that to happen. He stopped and said: - I must interrupt you. I don't want to either contradict you or agree with you. I have no idea why you're saying these things; it seems to me that you're talking into the air. Both of us are some thirty years old, everything isn't hovering in the air the way it was when we were nineteen, one is something, one has something, and ev- erything you're saying is infinitely humdrum. But what's horrible is that I've had to promise Clarisse to send you out to see her today. Promise me that you'll speak less unreasonably with her than with me!
- B u t for that I'd have to first promise that I'll go. Today I don't have the slightest desire to! Excuse me, I don't feel well either.
-But you must say yes! It doesn't matter to you, you can put up with it; but for days Clarisse has been in an alarming state. And on top of that I've let myself be guilty of a great mistake, repulsive, I assure you; one is sometimes like an animal. I'm worried about her! For a moment the memory overwhelmed him. He had tears in his eyes and looked at Ul- rich angrily through the tears. Ulrich placated him and promised to go.
-G o right now, Walter begged. - I had to leave her all upset. And he hurriedly told Ulrich that Meingast's unexpected departure, which had strangely affected him too, had obviously shaken Clarisse, because since then she was strikingly changed. -You know what she's like-Walter
1610 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
said, a veil of tears again and again running over his eyes-her whole nature keeps her from allowing something she doesn't think right to pre- vail; letting things happen, which our whole civilization is full of, is for her a cardinal sin! He reported the incident with the newspaper, which he himself suddenly saw in a new light. Then he added softly that after Meingast's departure, Clarisse had confessed to him that while he had been there she had often suffered from obsessive ideas, which all added up to her regarding the entire peculiar progression to greatness that Meingast had gone through, since he had left them long ago as an ordi- nary young Lothario, as having their basis in his taking upon himself the sins ofall the people with whom he came into contact and, it turned out, also the sins of Clarisse and Walter himself.
Ulrich must have looked involuntarily at his childhood friend in in- quiry, for Walter instantaneously added a defense. -That only sounds unsettling, he asserted, but it hasn't by any means gone too far. Every- one rises by taking on other people's mistakes and improving them in himself. It was only that Clarisse had an unusually vehement intensity when such problems suddenly got hold of her, and a way of expressing t h e m w i t h o u t m a k i n g a n y c o n c e s s i o n s . - B u t i f y o u k n e w h e r as w e l l as I do, you would find that behind everything that seems strange in her there is an incomparable feeling for the deepest questions of life! Love made him blind, while it made Clarisse transparent for him, all the way to the bottom, where one's thoughts lie, while all distinctions between bright and stupid, healthy and sick minds take place in the shallower layers of what one says and does.
After the scene with her husband, Clarisse had washed her whole body and run out of the house. The blue line of the edge of the woods attracted her; she wanted to crawl in. And while she was running, the sparkling, shining, drop-spraying of the white water was around her, like a hedgehog with outward-pointing needles. She was pursued by an obsessively irritating need for cleanliness. But when she had reached the woods, she plopped down between the first tree trunks behind the bushes at the edge. From there she looked straight into the small, dark, nostril-like open windows of her house, and this already made her feel much better. The smell of herbs burned in the morning sun; growths tickled her; she was comforted by nature's sticking, hard, hot inconsider- ateness. She felt removed from the restrictiveness of her personal
From the Posthumous Papers · I 6 I I
bonds. She could think. It had become obvious that Walter was being destroyed by the attraction she radiated; he hardly needed to sink much further than he had today. So it was up to her to make the sacrifice! (Clarisse got up and walked deeper into the woods. ) What was it, this sacrifice? Such words pop up like a poem (but she wished to conceal herself with this word, in order to get behind it). The word "sacrifice" followed (first) the same way it followed that she bore within herself the soul ofa murderer, and, especially after the scene with her husband, she had to assume that she also concealed in herself the soul of a satyr, a he-goat. Uke is, after all, only attracted by like. But whoever sees must sacrifice himself: that is the merciless law by which greatness lives. Cla- risse began to understand; but at the same time that she realized that she bore within herself the soul of a he-goat, the fright that had rolled into her like a block of ice began to melt, and the excitement caused by the body and inhibited by the soul thawed out in her limbs. It was a marvel- ous condition. The contact with the bushes pressed deep into her nerves through her skin; the swelling of the moss under her soles, the twittering of the birds, became sensual and covered the interior of the world with something like the flesh ofa fruit. -Y ou will all deny me when you rec- ognize me! Clarisse thought. As soon as that was thought, it also came to her that Walter would really have to learn to deny her, for that was the only way he could be freed from her. At this thought she was overcome by an immense sadness. -Everyone will deny me, she said once again. - A n d only when you have all denied me will you be grown up. Only when you have all grown up will I return to you! she added. That was like the beginnings ofsplendid poems, whose second lines were already lost in an excess of excitement and beauty. Golgotha Song, she called it. A tension as ifshe would have to break out in a stream oftears at any mo- ment accompanied this incredible achievement. What she admired most deeply was the incredible compulsion in this storm of freedom. - I f I were only a little superstitious and not so hardy- she thought-I would really have to be afraid ofmyself! Her thoughts went now one way-as if she were only an instrument on which a strange and higher being were playing, her beautiful idol that gave her answers before she had managed to ask the questions, and built up ideas that came to her like the outlines of whole cities, so that she stopped in astonishment-and now another way, so that Clarisse herself seemed quite empty, a feath- ery light something that had to restrain its steps with effort, for every- thing upon which her eye fell, or every recollection the ray of memory illuminated, led her hurriedly forward and handed her on to the next thing and the next idea, so that Clarisse's thoughts seemed at times to be
1612 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
running alongside her, and a wild race with her body began, until the young woman in her mental alienation was forced to stop and, ex- hausted, throw herself into some beny bushes.
She had found a clearing into which the sun shone, and while she felt the warm earth on which she lay, she stretched herself out as if on a cross, and the nails of the sun's rays penetrated her upward-turned hands.
She had left a note for Ulrich in the house, which said nothing but that she was waiting for him in the woods.
After the conversation with Walter, Ulrich had set out and had indeed found the note. He automatically assumed that Clarisse was hiding somewhere and would make her presence known when he entered the woods. Oppressed by the hot morning, he set out (listlessly) on the path that they were accustomed to taking when they went to the woods, and when he did not find Clarisse, he pushed on at random farther into the forest. From everything Walter had said, what most stuck in his mind was the news that Clarisse was preoccupied with Moosbrugger. As far as he was concerned, Moosbrugger could have been long dead and hanged, for he had not thought about him for weeks, which was quite remarkable when he thought that not all that long ago the image of this crude figure of fantasy had been one of the focal points in his life. - O n e truly feels, as a so-called normal person-he told himself-just as inco- herent as someone who is insane. The heat relaxed his collar and the pores of his face, and slowly entered and emerged from his softened skin. Meeting Clarisse aroused no particularly pleasant expectations. What could he say to her? She had always been what one calls crazy without meaning it seriously; if she were now really to become so, she might perhaps be ugly and repellent, that would be simplest; but what if she was not repellent to him? No; Ulrich assumed that she would have to be. The deranged mind is ugly. In this way he suddenly almost tripped over her, for they both had spontaneously followed the direction of a broad path that was the continuation of the one that had led them to the woods. Clarisse, a patch of color among the colorful weeds and con- cealed from his glance, had seen him coming. She had quickly crawled out into his path and lay there. The many unconscious, manly, and reso- lute shifts in his face, which believed itself unobserved and was living in no more than vegetative rapport with the obstacles through which it was coming toward her, gave her a marvelous sensation. Ulrich only stopped, surprised, when he discovered her lying almost directly beneath him, her smiling glance lifted up to him. She was not in the least ugly.
-W e have to free Moosbrugger, Clarisse declared, after Ulrich had asked her to explain the sudden inspirations he had heard about. -If
From the Posthumous Papers · 1613
there's no other way, we have to help him escape! Of course I know you'll help me!
Ulrich shook his head.
-Then come! Clarisse said. -Let's go deeper into the woods, where we'll be alone. She had jumped up. The senselessly raging will that ema- nated from this small being was like clouds of unfamiliar insects buzzing and swarming among blackberry shoots exhaling their odors in the sun, inhuman but pleasant. -But you're all hot! Clarisse exclaimed. -You'll catch cold among the trees! She took a kerchieffrom her warm body and swiftly threw it over his head; then she climbed up him, disappearing likewise under the kerchief, and, before he could throw her off, kissed him like a high-spirited little girl. Clarisse stumbled, and fell to a sitting position. - I haven't forgiven you-Ulrich threatened grumblingly- that during the time you were in love with this muddlehead Meingast I simply didn't exist for youi-Oh? Clarisse answered. -Y ou don't un- derstand. Meingast is homosexual. So you didn't understand me at all!
-But what's this chatter about redeeming all about? Ulrich asked severely. -That only blossomed because ofhim, didn't it?
- O h , I'll explain that to you. Come! Clarisse assured him.
Ulrich started with what Walter had already told him.
-All right. But that's not the main point. The main point is the bear. -The bear?
-Yes; the pointed muzzle with the teeth that tear everything to
pieces. I arouse the bear in all of you! Clarisse showed with a gesture what she meant, and smiled innocently. - B u t , Clarisse! - O f course! Clarisse said. -Y ou deny me when I'm being honest! But even Walter believes that every person has an animal in him whom he resembles. From which he has to be redeemed. Nietzsche had his eagle, Walter and Moosbrugger have the bear.
- A n d I ? Ulrich asked, curious.
- I don't know yet.
- A n d you?
- I ' m a he-goat with eagle's wings.
So they wandered through the woods, eating berries now and then,
heat and hunger making them as dry as violin wood. Sometimes Clarisse broke off a small dry twig and handed it to Ulrich; he didn't know whether to throw it away or keep it in his hand; as with children, when they do such things, there was something else behind it, for which there was no articulated notion. Now Clarisse stopped in the wilderness, and the light in her eyes shone. She declared: -Moosbrugger has commit- ted a sexual murder, hasn't he? What's that? Desire separated in him from what's human! But isn't that the same in Walter too? And in you?
1614 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Moosbrugger has had to pay for it. Isn't one obliged to help him? What do you say to that? From the foot of the trees came the smell of dark- ness, mushrooms, and decay, from above of sunlit fir twigs.
-W ill you do that for me? Clarisse asked.
Ulrich again said no, and asked Clarisse to come back to the house. She meandered along beside him and let her head droop. They had
gone quite far from the path. -W e're hungry, Clarisse said, and pulled out a piece of old bread she was carrying in her pocket. She gave Ulrich some of it too. It produced a remarkably pleasant-unpleasant feeling, which quieted hunger and tortured thirst. -The mills of time grind dryly---Clarisse poetized-you feel grain after grain falling.
And it occurred to Ulrich without thinking about it much that among these totally meaningless annoyances he felt better than he had in a long time.
Clarisse set about once more to win him over. She would do it herself. She had a plan. She only needed a little money. And he would have to speak to Moosbrugger in her stead, because she wasn't allowed in the clinic anymore.
Ulrich promised. This derring-do fantasy filled up the time. He guarded himself against all consequences. Clarisse laughed.
As they were on the way home, chance had it that they caught up with a man leading a tame bear. Ulrich joked about it, but Clarisse grew seri- ous and seemed to seek protection in the closeness of his body, and her face became deeply absorbed. As they passed the man and the bear, she suddenly called out: -I'll tame every bear! It sounded like an awkward joke. But she suddenly reached for the bear's muzzle, and Ulrich had difficulty pulling her back quickly enough from the startled, growling beast.
The next time, Ulrich met Clarisse at the painter's studio offriends of hers, where a circle of people had gathered and was making music. Cla- risse did not stand out in these surroundings; the role ofodd man out fell to Ulrich instead. He had come reluctantly and felt repugnance among these people, who, contorted, were listening ecstatically. The transitions from charming, gentle, and soft to gloomy, heroic, and tumultuous, which the music went through several times within the space of a quar- ter hour, musicians don't notice, because for them this progression is synonymous with music and therefore with something of the highest dis- tinctionl-but to Ulrich, who at the moment was not at all under the
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1 615
sway of the prejudice that music was something that had to be, this music seemed as badly motivated and unmediated in its progression as the carryings-on of a company of drunks that alternates periodically be- tween sentimentality and fistfights. He had no intention of imagining what the soul of a great musician might be like and passing judgment on it, but what was usually considered great music seemed to him much like a chest with a beautifully carved exterior and full of the contents of the soul, from which one has pulled out all the drawers, so that the contents lie all jumbled together inside. He usually could not understand music as an amalgam of soul and form, because he saw too clearly that the soul of music, aside from rarely encountered pure music, is nothing but the conventional soul of Jack and Jill whipped to a frenzy.
He was, notwithstanding, supporting his head in both hands like the others; he just did not know whether it was because he was thinking of Walter or closing his ears a little. In truth, he was neither keeping his ears entirely closed nor thinking of Walter. He merely wanted to be alone. He did not often reflect about other people; apparently because he also rarely thought about himself as "a person. " He usually acted on the opinion that what one thinks, feels, wants, imagines, and creates could, in certain circumstances, signify an enrichment of life; but what one is signifies under no circumstances more than a by-product of the process of this production. Musical people, on the other hand, are quite often of the opposite opinion. They do produce something, to which they apply the impersonal name of music, but what they produce con- sists for the most part, or at least for the part that is most important to them, of themselves, their sensations, emotions, and their shared experi- ence. There is more momentary being and less lasting duration in their music, which among all intellectual activities is closest to that of the actor. This intensification, which he was being forced to witness, aroused Ulrich's antipathy; he sat among these people like an owl among songbirds.
And of course Walter was his exact opposite. Walter thought passion- ately and a great deal about himself. He took everything he encountered seriously. Because he encountered it; as if that were a merit that can make one thing into another. He was at every moment a complete indi- vidual and a complete human being, and because he was, he became nothing. Everybody had found him captivating, brought him happiness, and invited him to remain with them, with the end result that he had become an archivist or curator, had run aground, no longer has the strength to change, curses everyone, is contentedly unhappy, and goes off punctually to his office. And while he is in his office something will perhaps happen between Clarisse and Ulrich that could arouse in the
1616 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
person he is, if he should find out about it, an agitation as if the entire ocean of world history were pouring into it; while Ulrich, on the other hand, was far less agitated. But Clarisse, immediately after she had come in-Walter was not there-had sat down beside Ulrich; with her back bent forward, her knees drawn up, in the darkness, for the lights had not yet been turned on, right after the first beats they heard she had spread her hand over his, as ifthey belonged together in the most intimate fash- ion. Ulrich had cautiously freed himself, and that was also a reason for supporting his head with both hands; but Clarisse, when she saw what he was up to, and saw him from the side sitting there just as moved as ev- eryone else, had gently leaned against him, and she had been sitting that way for half an hour now. He was not happy either.
He knew that what he committed over and over was nothing but the opposite error from Walter's. This error gave rise to a dissolution with- out a center; the person was subsumed in an aura; he ceased to be a thing, with all its limitations, as precious as they were accidental; at the highest degree of intensification he became so indifferent toward him- self that the human, as opposed to the suprahuman, had no more signifi- cance than the little piece of cork to which is attached a magnet that draws it back and forth through a network of forces. At the last it had been like that for him with Agathe. And now-no, it was a calumny to put these things next to each other-but even between himself and Cla- risse something was now "going on," was under way, he had blundered into a realm of effects in which he and Clarisse were being moved to- ward each other by forces, forces that showed no consideration for whether, on the whole, they felt an inclination for each other or not.
And while Clarisse was leaning on him, Ulrich was thinking about Walter. He saw him before him in a particular way, as he often secretly saw him. Walter was lying at the edge of some woods, wearing short pants and unbecoming black socks, and in these socks had neither the muscular nor the skinny legs of a man, but those of a girl, of a not very pretty girl, with smooth, unlovely legs. His hands crossed behind his head, he was looking at the landscape over which, one day, his immortal works would roll, and he radiated the feeling that talking to him would be an interruption. Ulrich really loved this image. In his youth, Walter had actually looked that way. And Ulrich thought: What has separated us is not the musio-for he could quite well imagine a music rising as im- personally and beyond things and each-time-once-only as a trail of smoke that loses itself in the sky-but the difference in the attitude of the individual to music; it is this image that I love because it is left over, a remainder, while he surely loves it for the opposite reason, because it swallows up within itself everything that he might have become, until
From the Posthumous Papers · I 6 I 7
finally it became precisely Walter. - A n d really-he thought-all that is nothing but a sign of the times. Today socialism is trying to declare the beloved private self to be a worthless illusion, which should be replaced by social causes and duties. But in this it had long since been preceded by the natural sciences, which dissolved precious private things into nothing but impersonal processes such as warmth, light, weight, and so forth. The object as a matter of importance to private individuals, as a stone that falls on their head or one they can buy in a gold setting, or a flower they smell, does not interest up-to-date people in the least; they treat it as a contingency or even as a "thing in itself," that is, as some- thing that is not there and yet is there, a quite foolish and ghostly person- ality of a thing. One might well predict that this will change, the way a man who deals daily with millions happens to take with great astonish- ment a single banknote in his hand; but then object and personality will have become something different. But meanwhile there exists a quite comical juxtaposition. Morally, for instance, one still looks at oneself somewhat as physics looked at bodies three hundred years ago; they "fall" because they have the "quality" of avoiding heights, or they become warm because they contain a fluid: moralists are still attributing such good or bad qualities and fluids to people. Psychologically, on the other hand, one has already gone so far as to dissolve the person into typical bundles of typical averages of behavior. Sociologically, he is treated no differently. But musically, he is again made whole.
Suddenly the light was turned on. The final notes of the music were still swinging back and forth like a branch someone has just jumped off; eyes sparkled; and the silence before everyone started talking set in. Cla- risse had promptly moved away from Ulrich, but now new groups formed, and she pulled him into a comer and had something to tell him.
-What is the extreme opposite of letting something prevail? she asked him. And since Ulrich did not respond, she herself gave the an- swer. - T o impose oneself! The tiny figure stood elastically before him, her hands behind her back. But she tried to keep her eyes fixed on Ul- rich's, for the words she now had to look for were so difficult that they made her small body stagger. -Inscribe yourself onto something! I say. I thought of that before while we were sitting next to each other. Im- pressions are nothing; they press you in! Or a heap of earthworms. But when do you understand a piece of music? When you yourself create it inwardly! And when do you understand a person? When you do as he does. You see-with her hand she described an acute angle lying hori- zontally, which involuntarily reminded Ulrich of a phallus-our entire life is expression! In art, in love, in politics, we seek the active, the pointed form; I've already told you that it's the bear's muzzle! No, I
1618 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
didn't mean that impressions don't mean anything: they're the half of it; it's marvelously in the word "redeem," the active "re" and the "deem"; she became quite excited by the effort of making herself comprehensi- ble to Ulrich.
But just then the music making started up again-it had been only a short intermission-and Ulrich turned away from Clarisse. He looked out at the evening through the large studio window. The eye first had to adjust to the darkness again. Then wandering blue clouds appeared in the sky. The tips of a tree reached up from below. Houses stood with their backs upward. - H o w should they stand otherwise? Ulrich thought with a smile, and yet there are minutes when everything ap- pears topsy-turvy. He thought of Agathe and was unspeakably de- pressed. This new, small creature, Clarisse, at his side, was rushing forward at an unnatural speed. That was not a natural process, he was quite clear about that. He considered her crazy. There could be no talk of love. But while behind his back the music seemed to him like a circus, it pleased him to imagine running alongside a circling horse jumping hurdles, with Clarisse standing on it erect and shouting "Aie-ya" and cracking her whip.
1930-1934
ON CLARISSE-WALTER
She comes upon Walter in the "studio"; bare, chilly space. He is half- dressed and has a dressing gown on. The brushes are chy, he is sitting over some sketches. He really should have been at the office already.
He is irritated that Meingast went off without saying good-bye, and Clarisse is secretly excited. Possibly here: He really wanted . . . as long as Meingast was in the house . . .
Already from the doorway Clarisse called out to him: Come, come! We're going to Dr. Friedenthal to ask him to entrust Moosbrugger's care to us.
Walter can't tum his head away from her and looks at her.
Don't ask! Clarisse commands.
Could Walter have any more doubts at this moment that her mind was
disturbed? The answer to this question will always be quite dependent on the circumstances. Clarisse looked impetuous and beautiful. The fire
From the Posthumous Papers · z6zg
in her eyes looked exactly like that of a healthy will.
Clarisse had just got home, had called out: You layabout! to Walter, filled the bath with cold water, and slipped out of her thin dress, when she felt Walter behind her. He was standing there the way he had got out of bed, in a long nightshirt that fell down to his bare feet, and had warm cheeks like a girl's, while Clarisse, in her brief panties and with her skinny arms, looked like a boy. She put her hand on his chest and shoved him back. But Walter reached out for her. With one hand he seized her arm, and with the other sought to grasp her by the crotch and pull her to him. Clarisse tore at the embrace, and when that didn't help shoved her free hand into Walter's face, into his nose and mouth. His face turned red and the blood trembled in his eyes while he struggled with Clarisse. He did not want to let her see that she was hurting him, but when he was in danger of suffocating he had to strike her hand from his face. Quick as lightning, she went at it again, and this time her nails tore two bleeding furrows in his skin. Clarisse was free. Just then Walter again snatched at her, this time with all his strength. He had become angry, and feared nothing in the whole world so much as becoming rational again. Clarisse struck at him. She had lost her shoe and kicked at him. She understood that this time it was for real. Walter was gasping out meaningless sen- tences. The voices of loneliness, as if a robber had jumped on them. She felt she had the strength of giants. Her clothing tore; Walter seized the shreds; she reached for his neck. She would have liked to kill him. She did not know what she was doing. Naked, slippery, she struggled like a wriggling fish in his arms. She bit Walter, whose strength was not suffi- cient to overpower her calmly; he swung her this way and that, and pain- fully sought to block her attacks. Clarisse got tired. Her muscles became numb and slack. There were pauses where she was pressed by Walter's weight against the wall or the floor and could no longer defend herself. Then again there would come a series of defensive movements and ruth- less attacks against sensitive parts ofthe body and face. Then suffocation again, powerlessness, and the heart's beating. Walter was intermittently ashamed. The pain hit him like a ray of light: Reasonable people don't act this way! He thought that Clarisse looked as ugly as a madwoman.
1606 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But it had taken so much to get himself this far that the acting man ran on by himself, paying no attention to the feeling man. Clarisse, too, no longer had the feeling that she was being raped by Walter; she had only the feeling that she was not able to insist on her will, and when she was forced to yield she uttered a long, shrill, wild cry, like a locomotive. She herself found this inspiration quite strange. Perhaps her will was escap- ing in this cry, now that it was of no more use to her. Walter was scared. And while she had to endure his will she had the consolation: Just wait, I'll get my revenge!
The moment this repulsive scene was over, shame crashed down on Walter. Clarisse sat in a comer, naked as she was, with a thunderous face and made no response to his pleas for forgiveness. He had to get dressed; blood and tears flowed through his shaving foam. He had to leave in a hurry. He felt that he could not leave the beloved of all the days since his youth in this condition. He sought to at least move her to get dressed. Clarisse countered that she could just as well remain sitting this way until Judgment Day. In his despair and helplessness, his whole life as a man shrank back; he threw himself on his knees and with hands raised begged her to forgive him, as he had once prayed against blows; he could not think of anything else to do.
-I'll tell Ulrich everything! Clarisse said, slightly reconciled.
Walter begged her to forget it. There was something in his lack of dignity that called for reconciliation: he loved Clarisse; the shame was like a wound from which real, warm blood was flowing. But Clarisse did not forgive him. She could forgive him as little as an emperor who bears the responsibility for a kingdom can forgive; such people are something other than private individuals. She made him swear never to touch her again before she gave him permission. Walter was expected at a meet- ing; he gave his oath quickly, with the clock in his heart. Then Clarisse gave him the additional task of sending Ulrich over; she agreed to keep silent, but she needed the calming presence of a person she could trust.
During a break at work Walter took a taxi to Ulrich's, to get there as quickly as possible.
Ulrich was at home. His life wearied him. He did not know where Agathe was. Since she had separated herself from him he had had no news of her; he was tortured by worries about what might be happening to her. Everything reminded him of her. How short a time ago he had
From the Posthumous Papers · 1607
restrained her from a rash decision. Yet he did not believe she would do it without speaking to him once more.
Perhaps for that very reason: for the intoxication-a real intoxication, an enchantment! -was over. The experiment they had undertaken to shape their relationship had failed irrevocably. Vast regions of emotions and fancies that had endowed many things with a perennial splendor of unknown origin, like an opalizing sky, were now desolate. Ulrich's mind had dried out like soil beneath which the layers that conduct the mois- ture that nourishes all green things had disappeared. If what he had been forced to wish for was folly-and the exhaustion with which he thought of it admitted of no doubts about that! -then what had been best in his life had always been folly: the shimmer of thinking, the breath of presumption, those tender messengers of a better home that flutter among the things of the world. Nothing remained but to become reason- able; he had to do violence to his nature and apparently submit it to a school that was not only hard but also by definition boring. He did not want to think himself born to be an idler, but would now be one if he did not soon begin to make order out of the consequences of this failure. But when he checked them over, his whole being rebelled against them, and when his being rebelled against them, he longed for Agathe; that hap- pened without exuberance, but still as one yearns for a fellow sufferer when he is the only one with whom one can be intimate.
With distracted politeness, Walter inquired about Ulrich's absence; Ulrich waited with embarrassment for him to ask about Agathe, but for- tunately Walter forgot to. He had recently come to realize that it is in- sanity to doubt the love of a woman whom one loves oneself, he began. Even if one should be disappointed, it was only a matter of letting one- self be disappointed fruitfully, in such a way that the inner lives of all concerned be raised a degree. All feelings that are only negative are un- fruitful; on the other hand, there was nothing in which one could not find a core of fruitfulness if one peeled off the layers of world commu- nity. For instance: He had often committed the wrong of being jealous of Ulrich.
-W ere you really jealous of me? Ulrich asked.
-Yes, Walter confessed, and for an instant, in an unconsciously sig- nificant but ridiculously chilling fashion, he bared two teeth. -Of course I never thought of it in any other way than intellectually. Clarisse feels a certain sensual kinship with your body. You understand: it's not that your body attracts her body, or your mind her mind, but your body attracts her mind; you'll have to admit that's not so simple, and that it wasn't always easy for me to behave properly toward you.
1608 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
-And Meingast?
-Meingast has left-Walter began by saying-but that was different. I admire Meingast myself. Nobody today can compare with him, all in all. There's no way I could forbid Clarisse to love him.
-Y es, you could. First you would have to tell her that Meingast is a woolgatherer-
- C u t it out! Today I need your friendship, not a quarrel!
-Then you could always say to Clarisse that it's not the mission of a great man to draw the nails out of every marriage like a giant magnet; therefore, on the side of the marriage, there has to be something that can't be changed by the superiority of this third person. You're conserva- tive, you'll no doubt be able to work that out. Moreover, it's an absorbing question. Just consider: Today every writer, musician, philosopher, leader, and boss finds people who think he's the greatest thing on earth. The natural consequence, especially for women who are more easily moved, would be that they flock to him as a whole person. Their own personal, bodily philosopher or writer! These words have a right to be taken literally; for where else should one wish to go with soul and body if not to this ultimate refuge? But it's just as certain that this doesn't hap- pen. Today only hysterical women run after great minds. And why?
Walter answered reluctantly. -Y ou said yourself that there are other reasons for living together. Children, the need for a solid place; and then there's a suitability of two people for each other that's greater than the meeting of their minds!
-Those are just excuses! The agreement you're talking about is noth- ing more than trusting opinions even less than a life of habit that has turned out to be not entirely unbearable. It's just lucky that one doesn't quite trust the person one admires. The confusion through which one is always robbed of vitality by the other has obviously become a means of preserving life. The inclination for each other holds together through a delicate remnant of disinclination against the third person. And alto- gether, of course, it's nothing but the soul of the pharisee, which, once it's got inside a body, imagines that every other body has secret defects!
- I started out by saying-Walter exclaimed indignantly-that ifCla- risse really loved Meingast I could not forbid it.
- T h e n why don't you permit her to love me? Ulrich asked, laughing. -Because you don't like me. And you don't like me because when we were children I beat you up a couple of times. As if I had never run into stronger boys who beat me up! That's so absurd, so narrow-minded and petty. I'm not reproaching you; we all have this weakness of not being able to shake off such things, indeed that such idiotic chance happenings actually form the inner building blocks of our personalities, while our
From the Posthumous Papers · 16og
knowledge is no more than the breeze that blows around them. Who's stronger, then: you or I? Engineer Short or Art Historian Long? A mas- ter wrestler or a sprinter? I think that (the individual) this business has lost a lot of its meaning today. None of us are isolated or individual. To speak in your language: We're instrumentalists who have come together in expectation of playing a marvelous piece, the score for which has not yet been located. So what would happen if Clarisse were to fall in love with me? The idea that one can love only one other person is nothing but a legal (civil law) prejudice that has totally overrun us. She would love you, too, and in those circumstances precisely in the way that suits you best, because she would be free of the gnawing anger that you don't have certain qualities which she also considers important. The only con- dition would be that you would really have to behave toward me as a friend; that doesn't mean you have to understand me, for I don't under- stand the cells in my brain either, although something far more intimate exists between us than understanding! . . . And you could contradict me with all your emotions and thoughts, but only in a certain way: for there are contradictions that are continuations, for example those within our- selves; we love ourselves along with them.
This seemed to Walter like a bucket being emptied down a flight of steps. What Ulrich said spread out and at some point had to stop; he, meanwhile, paced back and forth in the room but couldn't wait for that to happen. He stopped and said: - I must interrupt you. I don't want to either contradict you or agree with you. I have no idea why you're saying these things; it seems to me that you're talking into the air. Both of us are some thirty years old, everything isn't hovering in the air the way it was when we were nineteen, one is something, one has something, and ev- erything you're saying is infinitely humdrum. But what's horrible is that I've had to promise Clarisse to send you out to see her today. Promise me that you'll speak less unreasonably with her than with me!
- B u t for that I'd have to first promise that I'll go. Today I don't have the slightest desire to! Excuse me, I don't feel well either.
-But you must say yes! It doesn't matter to you, you can put up with it; but for days Clarisse has been in an alarming state. And on top of that I've let myself be guilty of a great mistake, repulsive, I assure you; one is sometimes like an animal. I'm worried about her! For a moment the memory overwhelmed him. He had tears in his eyes and looked at Ul- rich angrily through the tears. Ulrich placated him and promised to go.
-G o right now, Walter begged. - I had to leave her all upset. And he hurriedly told Ulrich that Meingast's unexpected departure, which had strangely affected him too, had obviously shaken Clarisse, because since then she was strikingly changed. -You know what she's like-Walter
1610 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
said, a veil of tears again and again running over his eyes-her whole nature keeps her from allowing something she doesn't think right to pre- vail; letting things happen, which our whole civilization is full of, is for her a cardinal sin! He reported the incident with the newspaper, which he himself suddenly saw in a new light. Then he added softly that after Meingast's departure, Clarisse had confessed to him that while he had been there she had often suffered from obsessive ideas, which all added up to her regarding the entire peculiar progression to greatness that Meingast had gone through, since he had left them long ago as an ordi- nary young Lothario, as having their basis in his taking upon himself the sins ofall the people with whom he came into contact and, it turned out, also the sins of Clarisse and Walter himself.
Ulrich must have looked involuntarily at his childhood friend in in- quiry, for Walter instantaneously added a defense. -That only sounds unsettling, he asserted, but it hasn't by any means gone too far. Every- one rises by taking on other people's mistakes and improving them in himself. It was only that Clarisse had an unusually vehement intensity when such problems suddenly got hold of her, and a way of expressing t h e m w i t h o u t m a k i n g a n y c o n c e s s i o n s . - B u t i f y o u k n e w h e r as w e l l as I do, you would find that behind everything that seems strange in her there is an incomparable feeling for the deepest questions of life! Love made him blind, while it made Clarisse transparent for him, all the way to the bottom, where one's thoughts lie, while all distinctions between bright and stupid, healthy and sick minds take place in the shallower layers of what one says and does.
After the scene with her husband, Clarisse had washed her whole body and run out of the house. The blue line of the edge of the woods attracted her; she wanted to crawl in. And while she was running, the sparkling, shining, drop-spraying of the white water was around her, like a hedgehog with outward-pointing needles. She was pursued by an obsessively irritating need for cleanliness. But when she had reached the woods, she plopped down between the first tree trunks behind the bushes at the edge. From there she looked straight into the small, dark, nostril-like open windows of her house, and this already made her feel much better. The smell of herbs burned in the morning sun; growths tickled her; she was comforted by nature's sticking, hard, hot inconsider- ateness. She felt removed from the restrictiveness of her personal
From the Posthumous Papers · I 6 I I
bonds. She could think. It had become obvious that Walter was being destroyed by the attraction she radiated; he hardly needed to sink much further than he had today. So it was up to her to make the sacrifice! (Clarisse got up and walked deeper into the woods. ) What was it, this sacrifice? Such words pop up like a poem (but she wished to conceal herself with this word, in order to get behind it). The word "sacrifice" followed (first) the same way it followed that she bore within herself the soul ofa murderer, and, especially after the scene with her husband, she had to assume that she also concealed in herself the soul of a satyr, a he-goat. Uke is, after all, only attracted by like. But whoever sees must sacrifice himself: that is the merciless law by which greatness lives. Cla- risse began to understand; but at the same time that she realized that she bore within herself the soul of a he-goat, the fright that had rolled into her like a block of ice began to melt, and the excitement caused by the body and inhibited by the soul thawed out in her limbs. It was a marvel- ous condition. The contact with the bushes pressed deep into her nerves through her skin; the swelling of the moss under her soles, the twittering of the birds, became sensual and covered the interior of the world with something like the flesh ofa fruit. -Y ou will all deny me when you rec- ognize me! Clarisse thought. As soon as that was thought, it also came to her that Walter would really have to learn to deny her, for that was the only way he could be freed from her. At this thought she was overcome by an immense sadness. -Everyone will deny me, she said once again. - A n d only when you have all denied me will you be grown up. Only when you have all grown up will I return to you! she added. That was like the beginnings ofsplendid poems, whose second lines were already lost in an excess of excitement and beauty. Golgotha Song, she called it. A tension as ifshe would have to break out in a stream oftears at any mo- ment accompanied this incredible achievement. What she admired most deeply was the incredible compulsion in this storm of freedom. - I f I were only a little superstitious and not so hardy- she thought-I would really have to be afraid ofmyself! Her thoughts went now one way-as if she were only an instrument on which a strange and higher being were playing, her beautiful idol that gave her answers before she had managed to ask the questions, and built up ideas that came to her like the outlines of whole cities, so that she stopped in astonishment-and now another way, so that Clarisse herself seemed quite empty, a feath- ery light something that had to restrain its steps with effort, for every- thing upon which her eye fell, or every recollection the ray of memory illuminated, led her hurriedly forward and handed her on to the next thing and the next idea, so that Clarisse's thoughts seemed at times to be
1612 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
running alongside her, and a wild race with her body began, until the young woman in her mental alienation was forced to stop and, ex- hausted, throw herself into some beny bushes.
She had found a clearing into which the sun shone, and while she felt the warm earth on which she lay, she stretched herself out as if on a cross, and the nails of the sun's rays penetrated her upward-turned hands.
She had left a note for Ulrich in the house, which said nothing but that she was waiting for him in the woods.
After the conversation with Walter, Ulrich had set out and had indeed found the note. He automatically assumed that Clarisse was hiding somewhere and would make her presence known when he entered the woods. Oppressed by the hot morning, he set out (listlessly) on the path that they were accustomed to taking when they went to the woods, and when he did not find Clarisse, he pushed on at random farther into the forest. From everything Walter had said, what most stuck in his mind was the news that Clarisse was preoccupied with Moosbrugger. As far as he was concerned, Moosbrugger could have been long dead and hanged, for he had not thought about him for weeks, which was quite remarkable when he thought that not all that long ago the image of this crude figure of fantasy had been one of the focal points in his life. - O n e truly feels, as a so-called normal person-he told himself-just as inco- herent as someone who is insane. The heat relaxed his collar and the pores of his face, and slowly entered and emerged from his softened skin. Meeting Clarisse aroused no particularly pleasant expectations. What could he say to her? She had always been what one calls crazy without meaning it seriously; if she were now really to become so, she might perhaps be ugly and repellent, that would be simplest; but what if she was not repellent to him? No; Ulrich assumed that she would have to be. The deranged mind is ugly. In this way he suddenly almost tripped over her, for they both had spontaneously followed the direction of a broad path that was the continuation of the one that had led them to the woods. Clarisse, a patch of color among the colorful weeds and con- cealed from his glance, had seen him coming. She had quickly crawled out into his path and lay there. The many unconscious, manly, and reso- lute shifts in his face, which believed itself unobserved and was living in no more than vegetative rapport with the obstacles through which it was coming toward her, gave her a marvelous sensation. Ulrich only stopped, surprised, when he discovered her lying almost directly beneath him, her smiling glance lifted up to him. She was not in the least ugly.
-W e have to free Moosbrugger, Clarisse declared, after Ulrich had asked her to explain the sudden inspirations he had heard about. -If
From the Posthumous Papers · 1613
there's no other way, we have to help him escape! Of course I know you'll help me!
Ulrich shook his head.
-Then come! Clarisse said. -Let's go deeper into the woods, where we'll be alone. She had jumped up. The senselessly raging will that ema- nated from this small being was like clouds of unfamiliar insects buzzing and swarming among blackberry shoots exhaling their odors in the sun, inhuman but pleasant. -But you're all hot! Clarisse exclaimed. -You'll catch cold among the trees! She took a kerchieffrom her warm body and swiftly threw it over his head; then she climbed up him, disappearing likewise under the kerchief, and, before he could throw her off, kissed him like a high-spirited little girl. Clarisse stumbled, and fell to a sitting position. - I haven't forgiven you-Ulrich threatened grumblingly- that during the time you were in love with this muddlehead Meingast I simply didn't exist for youi-Oh? Clarisse answered. -Y ou don't un- derstand. Meingast is homosexual. So you didn't understand me at all!
-But what's this chatter about redeeming all about? Ulrich asked severely. -That only blossomed because ofhim, didn't it?
- O h , I'll explain that to you. Come! Clarisse assured him.
Ulrich started with what Walter had already told him.
-All right. But that's not the main point. The main point is the bear. -The bear?
-Yes; the pointed muzzle with the teeth that tear everything to
pieces. I arouse the bear in all of you! Clarisse showed with a gesture what she meant, and smiled innocently. - B u t , Clarisse! - O f course! Clarisse said. -Y ou deny me when I'm being honest! But even Walter believes that every person has an animal in him whom he resembles. From which he has to be redeemed. Nietzsche had his eagle, Walter and Moosbrugger have the bear.
- A n d I ? Ulrich asked, curious.
- I don't know yet.
- A n d you?
- I ' m a he-goat with eagle's wings.
So they wandered through the woods, eating berries now and then,
heat and hunger making them as dry as violin wood. Sometimes Clarisse broke off a small dry twig and handed it to Ulrich; he didn't know whether to throw it away or keep it in his hand; as with children, when they do such things, there was something else behind it, for which there was no articulated notion. Now Clarisse stopped in the wilderness, and the light in her eyes shone. She declared: -Moosbrugger has commit- ted a sexual murder, hasn't he? What's that? Desire separated in him from what's human! But isn't that the same in Walter too? And in you?
1614 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Moosbrugger has had to pay for it. Isn't one obliged to help him? What do you say to that? From the foot of the trees came the smell of dark- ness, mushrooms, and decay, from above of sunlit fir twigs.
-W ill you do that for me? Clarisse asked.
Ulrich again said no, and asked Clarisse to come back to the house. She meandered along beside him and let her head droop. They had
gone quite far from the path. -W e're hungry, Clarisse said, and pulled out a piece of old bread she was carrying in her pocket. She gave Ulrich some of it too. It produced a remarkably pleasant-unpleasant feeling, which quieted hunger and tortured thirst. -The mills of time grind dryly---Clarisse poetized-you feel grain after grain falling.
And it occurred to Ulrich without thinking about it much that among these totally meaningless annoyances he felt better than he had in a long time.
Clarisse set about once more to win him over. She would do it herself. She had a plan. She only needed a little money. And he would have to speak to Moosbrugger in her stead, because she wasn't allowed in the clinic anymore.
Ulrich promised. This derring-do fantasy filled up the time. He guarded himself against all consequences. Clarisse laughed.
As they were on the way home, chance had it that they caught up with a man leading a tame bear. Ulrich joked about it, but Clarisse grew seri- ous and seemed to seek protection in the closeness of his body, and her face became deeply absorbed. As they passed the man and the bear, she suddenly called out: -I'll tame every bear! It sounded like an awkward joke. But she suddenly reached for the bear's muzzle, and Ulrich had difficulty pulling her back quickly enough from the startled, growling beast.
The next time, Ulrich met Clarisse at the painter's studio offriends of hers, where a circle of people had gathered and was making music. Cla- risse did not stand out in these surroundings; the role ofodd man out fell to Ulrich instead. He had come reluctantly and felt repugnance among these people, who, contorted, were listening ecstatically. The transitions from charming, gentle, and soft to gloomy, heroic, and tumultuous, which the music went through several times within the space of a quar- ter hour, musicians don't notice, because for them this progression is synonymous with music and therefore with something of the highest dis- tinctionl-but to Ulrich, who at the moment was not at all under the
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1 615
sway of the prejudice that music was something that had to be, this music seemed as badly motivated and unmediated in its progression as the carryings-on of a company of drunks that alternates periodically be- tween sentimentality and fistfights. He had no intention of imagining what the soul of a great musician might be like and passing judgment on it, but what was usually considered great music seemed to him much like a chest with a beautifully carved exterior and full of the contents of the soul, from which one has pulled out all the drawers, so that the contents lie all jumbled together inside. He usually could not understand music as an amalgam of soul and form, because he saw too clearly that the soul of music, aside from rarely encountered pure music, is nothing but the conventional soul of Jack and Jill whipped to a frenzy.
He was, notwithstanding, supporting his head in both hands like the others; he just did not know whether it was because he was thinking of Walter or closing his ears a little. In truth, he was neither keeping his ears entirely closed nor thinking of Walter. He merely wanted to be alone. He did not often reflect about other people; apparently because he also rarely thought about himself as "a person. " He usually acted on the opinion that what one thinks, feels, wants, imagines, and creates could, in certain circumstances, signify an enrichment of life; but what one is signifies under no circumstances more than a by-product of the process of this production. Musical people, on the other hand, are quite often of the opposite opinion. They do produce something, to which they apply the impersonal name of music, but what they produce con- sists for the most part, or at least for the part that is most important to them, of themselves, their sensations, emotions, and their shared experi- ence. There is more momentary being and less lasting duration in their music, which among all intellectual activities is closest to that of the actor. This intensification, which he was being forced to witness, aroused Ulrich's antipathy; he sat among these people like an owl among songbirds.
And of course Walter was his exact opposite. Walter thought passion- ately and a great deal about himself. He took everything he encountered seriously. Because he encountered it; as if that were a merit that can make one thing into another. He was at every moment a complete indi- vidual and a complete human being, and because he was, he became nothing. Everybody had found him captivating, brought him happiness, and invited him to remain with them, with the end result that he had become an archivist or curator, had run aground, no longer has the strength to change, curses everyone, is contentedly unhappy, and goes off punctually to his office. And while he is in his office something will perhaps happen between Clarisse and Ulrich that could arouse in the
1616 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
person he is, if he should find out about it, an agitation as if the entire ocean of world history were pouring into it; while Ulrich, on the other hand, was far less agitated. But Clarisse, immediately after she had come in-Walter was not there-had sat down beside Ulrich; with her back bent forward, her knees drawn up, in the darkness, for the lights had not yet been turned on, right after the first beats they heard she had spread her hand over his, as ifthey belonged together in the most intimate fash- ion. Ulrich had cautiously freed himself, and that was also a reason for supporting his head with both hands; but Clarisse, when she saw what he was up to, and saw him from the side sitting there just as moved as ev- eryone else, had gently leaned against him, and she had been sitting that way for half an hour now. He was not happy either.
He knew that what he committed over and over was nothing but the opposite error from Walter's. This error gave rise to a dissolution with- out a center; the person was subsumed in an aura; he ceased to be a thing, with all its limitations, as precious as they were accidental; at the highest degree of intensification he became so indifferent toward him- self that the human, as opposed to the suprahuman, had no more signifi- cance than the little piece of cork to which is attached a magnet that draws it back and forth through a network of forces. At the last it had been like that for him with Agathe. And now-no, it was a calumny to put these things next to each other-but even between himself and Cla- risse something was now "going on," was under way, he had blundered into a realm of effects in which he and Clarisse were being moved to- ward each other by forces, forces that showed no consideration for whether, on the whole, they felt an inclination for each other or not.
And while Clarisse was leaning on him, Ulrich was thinking about Walter. He saw him before him in a particular way, as he often secretly saw him. Walter was lying at the edge of some woods, wearing short pants and unbecoming black socks, and in these socks had neither the muscular nor the skinny legs of a man, but those of a girl, of a not very pretty girl, with smooth, unlovely legs. His hands crossed behind his head, he was looking at the landscape over which, one day, his immortal works would roll, and he radiated the feeling that talking to him would be an interruption. Ulrich really loved this image. In his youth, Walter had actually looked that way. And Ulrich thought: What has separated us is not the musio-for he could quite well imagine a music rising as im- personally and beyond things and each-time-once-only as a trail of smoke that loses itself in the sky-but the difference in the attitude of the individual to music; it is this image that I love because it is left over, a remainder, while he surely loves it for the opposite reason, because it swallows up within itself everything that he might have become, until
From the Posthumous Papers · I 6 I 7
finally it became precisely Walter. - A n d really-he thought-all that is nothing but a sign of the times. Today socialism is trying to declare the beloved private self to be a worthless illusion, which should be replaced by social causes and duties. But in this it had long since been preceded by the natural sciences, which dissolved precious private things into nothing but impersonal processes such as warmth, light, weight, and so forth. The object as a matter of importance to private individuals, as a stone that falls on their head or one they can buy in a gold setting, or a flower they smell, does not interest up-to-date people in the least; they treat it as a contingency or even as a "thing in itself," that is, as some- thing that is not there and yet is there, a quite foolish and ghostly person- ality of a thing. One might well predict that this will change, the way a man who deals daily with millions happens to take with great astonish- ment a single banknote in his hand; but then object and personality will have become something different. But meanwhile there exists a quite comical juxtaposition. Morally, for instance, one still looks at oneself somewhat as physics looked at bodies three hundred years ago; they "fall" because they have the "quality" of avoiding heights, or they become warm because they contain a fluid: moralists are still attributing such good or bad qualities and fluids to people. Psychologically, on the other hand, one has already gone so far as to dissolve the person into typical bundles of typical averages of behavior. Sociologically, he is treated no differently. But musically, he is again made whole.
Suddenly the light was turned on. The final notes of the music were still swinging back and forth like a branch someone has just jumped off; eyes sparkled; and the silence before everyone started talking set in. Cla- risse had promptly moved away from Ulrich, but now new groups formed, and she pulled him into a comer and had something to tell him.
-What is the extreme opposite of letting something prevail? she asked him. And since Ulrich did not respond, she herself gave the an- swer. - T o impose oneself! The tiny figure stood elastically before him, her hands behind her back. But she tried to keep her eyes fixed on Ul- rich's, for the words she now had to look for were so difficult that they made her small body stagger. -Inscribe yourself onto something! I say. I thought of that before while we were sitting next to each other. Im- pressions are nothing; they press you in! Or a heap of earthworms. But when do you understand a piece of music? When you yourself create it inwardly! And when do you understand a person? When you do as he does. You see-with her hand she described an acute angle lying hori- zontally, which involuntarily reminded Ulrich of a phallus-our entire life is expression! In art, in love, in politics, we seek the active, the pointed form; I've already told you that it's the bear's muzzle! No, I
1618 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
didn't mean that impressions don't mean anything: they're the half of it; it's marvelously in the word "redeem," the active "re" and the "deem"; she became quite excited by the effort of making herself comprehensi- ble to Ulrich.
But just then the music making started up again-it had been only a short intermission-and Ulrich turned away from Clarisse. He looked out at the evening through the large studio window. The eye first had to adjust to the darkness again. Then wandering blue clouds appeared in the sky. The tips of a tree reached up from below. Houses stood with their backs upward. - H o w should they stand otherwise? Ulrich thought with a smile, and yet there are minutes when everything ap- pears topsy-turvy. He thought of Agathe and was unspeakably de- pressed. This new, small creature, Clarisse, at his side, was rushing forward at an unnatural speed. That was not a natural process, he was quite clear about that. He considered her crazy. There could be no talk of love. But while behind his back the music seemed to him like a circus, it pleased him to imagine running alongside a circling horse jumping hurdles, with Clarisse standing on it erect and shouting "Aie-ya" and cracking her whip.
1930-1934
ON CLARISSE-WALTER
She comes upon Walter in the "studio"; bare, chilly space. He is half- dressed and has a dressing gown on. The brushes are chy, he is sitting over some sketches. He really should have been at the office already.
He is irritated that Meingast went off without saying good-bye, and Clarisse is secretly excited. Possibly here: He really wanted . . . as long as Meingast was in the house . . .
Already from the doorway Clarisse called out to him: Come, come! We're going to Dr. Friedenthal to ask him to entrust Moosbrugger's care to us.
Walter can't tum his head away from her and looks at her.
Don't ask! Clarisse commands.
Could Walter have any more doubts at this moment that her mind was
disturbed? The answer to this question will always be quite dependent on the circumstances. Clarisse looked impetuous and beautiful. The fire
From the Posthumous Papers · z6zg
in her eyes looked exactly like that of a healthy will.
