''I'm only living on my own credit," she told herself, "no one
believes
in me.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
I In the travail of their souls, all people yearn for expression.
The dog sprays a stone with himself and sniffs his excre- ment: to leave a trace in the world, to erect in the world a monument to oneself, a deed that will still be celebrated after hundreds of years, is the meaning of all heroism.
I have done something: that is a trace, a dis- similar but immortal portrait.
"I have done something" binds parts of the material world to myself.
Even just expressing something already means having one sense more with which to appropriate the world.
Even wheedling someone into something the way Walter does has this sense.
Ulrich laughed, because it occurred to him that Walter would walk around in despair with the thought: Oh, I could say a thing or two about that .
.
.
!
It is the profound basic feeling ofthe bourgeois, a feeling that is steadily being silenced and pacified.
But on the Island of Health
From the Posthumous Papers · 1559
Ulrich ended by taking back all the ambition of his life. What are even theories, other than wheedling? Discussions. And at the conclusion of such hours Ulrich was no longer thinking of anything but Agathe, the distant, inseparable sister, of whom he did not even know what she was doing. And he sadly recalled her favorite expression: ''What can I do for my soul, which lives in me like an unsolved riddle? Which leaves visible man free to make any kind ofchoice because it cannot govern him in any way? "
Here a settlement ofaccounts about Ulrich's mood in regard to heroism.
The dog, which after long association with man involuntarily caricatures him so splendidly in many ways.
The feeling of never being allowed to leave here again.
Clarisse meanwhile was playing out her game of signs; sometimes he saw her scurrying over the dunes like a fluttering cloth. . . We are playing our story here," she claimed, . . on the stage of this island. " Basically it was only the exaggerated form of this having to imprint oneself on un- certainty. Formerly, when Clarisse had still been going to the opera with Walter, she had often said: ''What is all art! Ifwe could act out our sto- ries! " She was now doing this as well. All lovers ought to do it. All lovers have the feeling that what we are experiencing is something miraculous, we are chosen people; but they ought to play it before a large orchestra and a dark hall-real lovers on the stage, and not people who are paid: not only a new theater would arise but also an entirely new kind of love, which would spread, lighting up human gestures like a fine network of branches, instead of, like today, creeping into the child's darkness. That was what Clarisse said. Please, no child! Instead of accomplishing some- thing, people have children! Sometimes she called the small keepsakes she put in the sand for Ulrich her secret children, or so she called every impression she received, for the impression melted into her like fruit. Between her and things there existed a continual exchanging of signs and understandings, a conspiracy, a heightened thinking I heightened correspondence I a burning, spirited life process. Sometimes this be- came so intense that Clarisse thought she was being tom out of her slen- der body and flying like a veil over the island, without rest, until her eyes
1560 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
were transfixed by a small stone or a shell and a credulous astonishment rooted her to the spot, because she had already been here once and al- ways, and had lain quietly as a trace in the sand, while a second Clarisse had flown over the island like a witch.
At times, her person seemed to her only an obstacle, unnaturally in- serted in the dynamic exchange between the world that affected her and the world she affected. In its most intense moments, this selfseemed to tear apart and disintegrate. I Cf. piano scene. Beethoven-Nietzsche quotation. Even then Clarisse was serious about tearing apart. I Even if she was unfaithful to Walter with this body and this . . soul fastened to her skin," it did not mean anything: there were many hours in which the frigid, rejecting Clarisse transformed herself into a vampire, insatiable, as if an obstacle had fallen away and for the first time she could yield to this heretofore forbidden pleasure. She sometimes seemed to plan things to suck Ulrich dry: . . There's still one more devil in you I have to exorcise! " she said. He owned a red sport jacket, and she sometimes made him put it on in the middle ofthe night and did not let up until he turned pale under his tanned skin. Her passion for him, and in general all the emotions she expressed, were not deep--Ulrich felt that dis- tinctly-but somehow at times passed by depth on their precipitous fall into the abyss.
Nor did she entirely trust Ulrich. He did not completely understand the greatness of what she was experiencing. During these days she had of course recognized and seen through everything that had previously been inaccessible to her. Formerly, she had experienced infinite heavi- ness, the enterprising spirit's fall from almost-attained heights of great- ness to the deepest anxiety and anguish. It seems that a person can be driven out from the ordinary real world we all know by processes that take place not in her but above or below the earth, and in the same way the person can intensify them into the incommensurable. On the island she explained it to Ulrich like this: One day everything around Clarisse had been enhanced: colors, smells, straight and crooked lines, noises, her emotions or thoughts, and the ones she aroused in others; what was taking place might have been causal, necessary, mechanical, and psycho- logical, but aside from that it was moved by a secret driving force; it might have happened precisely that way the day before, but today, in some indescribable and fortunate way, it was different. -Oh---Clarisse immediately said to herself-! am freed from the law of necessity,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1561
where every thing depends on some other thing. For things depended on her emotions. Or rather, what was at work was a continual activity of the self and of things penetrating and yielding to each other, as if they were on opposite sides of the same elastic membrane. Clarisse discov- ered that what she was acting from was a veil of emotions, with things on the other side. A little later she received the most terrible confirmation: she perceived everything going on around her just as correctly as before, but it had become totally dissociated and alienated. Her own emotions seemed foreign to her, as ifsomeone else were feeling them, or as ifthey were drifting around in the world. It was as ifshe and things were badly fitted to each other. She no longer found any support in the world, did not find the necessary minimum of satisfaction and self-moderation, was no longer able to maintain through inner action the equilibrium with the events of the world, and felt with unspeakable anguish how she was being inexorably squeezed out of the world and could no longer escape suicide (or perhaps madness). Again she was exempted from ordinary necessity and subjected to a secret law; but then she discovered, at the last moment when she could possibly be saved, the law that no one before her had noticed:
W e-that is, people lacking Clarisse's insight-imagine that the world is unambiguous, whatever the relationship between the things out there and inner processes may be; and what we call an emotion is a personal matter that is added to our own pleasure or uneasiness but does not oth- erwise change anything in the world. Not just the way we see red when we get angry-that too, moreover; it is only erroneously that one consid- ers it something that is an occasional exception, without suspecting what deep and general law one has touched upon! -but rather like this: things swim in emotions the way water lilies consist not only of leaves and flowers and white and green but also of "gently lying there. " Ordi- narily, they are so quiet about this that one does not notice the totality; the emotions have to be calm for the world to be orderly and for merely rational associations to be dominant in it.
But assuming for instance that a person suffers some really serious and annihilating humiliation that would have to lead to his destruction, it does happen that instead of this shame a surpassing pleasure in the hu- miliation sets in, a holy or smiling feeling about the world, and this is then not merely an emotion like any other or a deliberation, not even the reflection that we might perchance console ourselves that humility is vir- tuous, but a sinking or rising of the whole person on another level, a "sinking on the rise," and all things change in harmony with this; one might say they remain the same but now find themselves in some other space, or that everything is tinged with another sense. At such moments
1562 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
one recognizes that aside from everyone's world, that solid world that can be investigated and managed by reason, there is a second world, dy- namic, singular, visionary, irrational, which is only apparently congruent with the first and which we do not, as people think, merely cany in our hearts or our minds, but which exists externally with precisely the same reality as the prevailing world. It is an uncanny mystery, and like every- thing mysterious it becomes, whenever one tries to articulate it, easily confused with what is most banal. Clarisse herself had experienced- when she was unfaithful to Walter, and although she had to be, on which account she did not recognize any remorse--how the world became black; however, it was not a real color but a quite indescribable one, and later this "sense color" of the world, as Clarisse called it, became a hard, burnt brown.
Clarisse was very happy on the day when she grasped that her new understanding was the continuation of her efforts on the subject of ge- nius. For what distinguishes the genius from the healthy, ordinary per- son, other than the secret involvement of the emotions in everything that happens, which in the healthy person is stable and unnoticed but in the genius, on the other hand, is subject to incessant irritations? More- over, Ulrich too said that there are many possible worlds. Rational, rea- sonable people adapt themselves to the world, but strong people adapt the world to themselves. As long as the "sense color" of the world, as Clarisse called it, remained stable, equilibrium in the world also had something stable. Its unnoticed stability might even be considered healthy and ordinarily indispensable, the way the body, too, is not per- mitted to feel all the organs that maintain its equilibrium. Also un- healthy is a labile equilibrium, which tips over at the first chance and falls into the inferior position. Those are the mentally ill, Clarisse told herself, of whom she was afraid. But on top, conquerors in the realm of humanity, are those whose equilibrium is just as vulnerable but full of strength and, constantly disturbed, is constantly inventing new forms of equilibrium.
Itisanuncannybalance,andClarissehadneverfeltherselfas mucha creature perched on the razor's edge between annihilation and health as she did now. But whoever has followed the development of Clarisse's thoughts up to this point will already know that she had now come upon the traces of the "secret of redemption. " This had entered her life as the mission to liberate the genius that was inhibited by all sorts of relations in herself, Walter, and their surroundings, and it is easy to see that this inhibition comes about because one is forced to yield to the repression the world practices against every person of genius, and is submerged in obscurity; but here, on the other side, it throws the world into relief in a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1563
new color. This was for her the significance of the soul color dark red, a marvelous, indescribable, and transparent shade in which air, sand, and vegetation were immersed, so that she moved everywhere as in a red chamher of light.
She once called this the "darkroom," herself surprised by its similarity to a room in which in the midst of acrid vapors one bends tense and excited over the delicate, barely recognizable images that appear on the negative. It was her task to prefigure the redemption, and Ulrich seemed to her to be her apostle, who would after a while leave her and go out into the world, and whose first task would be to liberate Walter and Meingast. From this point on, her progress was much more rapid.
The blows of confused and anarchic ideas that Ulrich received every day, and the movement of these thoughts in an imprudent but clearly palpable direction, had in fact gradually swept him up, and the only thing that still differentiated his life from that of the insane was a consciousness of his situation, which he could interrupt by an effort. But for a long time he did not do so. For while he had always felt only like a guest among rational people and those effectively engaged in life, at least with one part of his being, and as alien or meaningless as a poem would be were he suddenly to start reciting one at the general meeting ofa corporation, he felt here in this nothingness ofcertainty an enhanced security, and lived with precisely this part of his being among the structures of absurdity in the air, but as securely as on solid ground. Happiness is in truth not some- thing rational, which depends once and for all on a specific action or the possession of specific things, but much more a mood of the nerves through which everything becomes happiness or doesn't; to this extent Clarisse was right. And the beauty, goodness, and quality of genius in a woman, the fire she kindles and sustains, is not to be settled by any legal determination of truth but is a mutual delirium. One could maintain, Ulrich told himself, that our entire being-which we basically cannot find a basis for but complacently accept on the whole as God, while, acting from this assumption, it is easy for us to deduce the details-is nothing but the delirium of many; but if order is reason, then every sim- ple fact, if we observe it outside of any order, is already the germ of a madness. For what do facts have to do with our mind? The mind governs itself by them, but they stand there, responsible to no one, like mountain peaks or clouds or the nose on a person's face; there were times when it would have been a pleasure to crush the nose on the face of the lovely Diotima with two fingers; Clarisse's nose sniffed, alert, like the nose of a pointer, and was able to impart all the excitement of the invisible.
1564 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
But soon he was no longer able to follow Clarisse's idea of order. You scratch a sign in a stone at the spot where you happen to be: that this is art, just as the greatest is, was a feeling one could sympathize with. And Clarisse did not want to possess Ulrich, but-each time in a new leap- live with him. - I don't perceive truly-she said-but I perceive fruit- fully. Her ideas scintillated, things scintillated. One does not gather up one's insights in order to form a self out of them, like a cold snowman, when like her one is growing into ever-new catastrophes; her ideas grew "in the open"; one weakens oneself by scattering everything, but spurs oneself on to new, strange growth. Clarisse began to express her life in poems; on the Island of Health Ulrich found this quite natural. In our poems there is too much rigid reason; the words are burned-out notions, the syntax holds out sticks and ropes as if for the blind, the meaning never gets off the ground everyone has trampled; the awakened soul cannot walk in such iron garments. Clarisse discovered that one would have to choose words that are not ideas; but since there don't seem to be any, she chose instead the word pair. Ifshe said "I," this word was never able to shoot up as vertically as she felt it; but "I-red" is not yet impris- oned by anything, and flew upward. Just as beneficial is freeing words from their grammatical bonds, which are quite impoverished. For exam- ple, Clarisse gave Ulrich three words and asked him to read them in any order he chose. If they were "God," "red," and "goes," he read "God goes red," or "God, red, goes"-that is, his brain immediately either un- derstood them as a sentence or separated them by commas in order to underline that it was not making them into a sentence. Clarisse called this the chemistry of words, that they always cohere in groups, and showed how to counter this. Her favorite bit of information was that she worked with exclamation points or underlining. God! ! red! ! ! goes! Such accumulations slow one down, and the word dams up behind them to its full meaning. She also underlined words from one to ten times, and at times a page she had written this way looked like a cryptic musical score. Another means, but one she used less frequently, was repetition; through it the weight of the repeated word became greater than the power of the syntactic bond, and the word began to sink without end. God goes green green green. It was an incredibly difficult problem to ascertain correctly the number of repetitions so that they would express exactly what was meant.
One day, Ulrich showed up with a volume of Goethe's poems, which he happened to have brought along, and proposed taking several words out of each of a number of poems and putting them together, to see what came out. Poems like this came out:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1565
It cannot be overlooked that an obscure, incoherent charm emanates from these constellations, something with the glowing fire of a volcano, as if one were looking into the bowels of the earth. And a few years after Clarisse, a similar play with words actually did become an ominous fash- ion among the healthy.
Clarisse anticipated remarkable conclusions. Flakes of fire were sto- len by poets from the volcano of madness: at some point in primeval times and later, every time a genius revisited earth; these glowing con- nections ofwords, not yet constricted to specific meanings, were planted in the soil of ordinary language to form its fertility, "which as we know comes from its volcanic origins. " But-so Clarisse concluded-it follows from this that the mind must decay to primal elements again and again in order for life to remain fruitful. This placed in Clarisse's hands the responsibility for a monstrous irresponsibility; she knew that she was re- ally uneducated, but now she was filled with a heroic lack of respect for everything that had been created before her.
Ulrich was able to follow Clarisse's games this far, and youth's lack of respect made it easier for him to dream into the shattered mind these new structures that could be formed: a process that has repeated itself among us several times, around 1900, when people loved the suggestive and sketchy, as after 1910, where in painting people succumbed to the charm of the simplest constructive elements and bid the secrets of the visible world echo by reciting a kind of optical alphabet.
But Clarisse's decline progressed more rapidly than Ulrich could follow. One day, she came with a new discovery. -Life withdraws powers from nature once and for all, forever-she began, making a connection with poems that tear words out of nature in order slowly to make it barren-while life transforms these powers withdrawn from nature into a new condition, "consciousness," from which there is no return. It seemed obvious, and Clarisse was surprised that no one before her had noticed it. This was because people's morality pre- vented them from noticing certain things. -All physical, chemical, and other such stimuli that strike me-she declared-! transform into consciousness; but never has the reverse been achieved, otherwise I could raise this stone with my will. So consciousness is constantly in- terfering with the system of nature's powers. Consciousness is the cause of all insignificant, superficial movement, and "redemption" de- mands that it be destroyed.
1566 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Leo Tolstoy: Consciousness is the greatest moral misfortune that a man can attain.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: "All consciousness is a disease. "
From Gorky's diary.
Clarisse immediately made a further discovery. The vanished forests of the carboniferous era, bubbling, rampant, gigantic, fantastic, are being freed again today under the influence of the sun as psychic forces, and it is through the exploitation of the energy that perished in that ear- lier time that the enormous spiritual energy of the present age arises.
She says: Before, it was only a game, now it has to get serious; here she becomes uncanny to him.
It was evening. To cool off she and Ulrich went for a walk in the dark. Hundreds of frogs were drumming in a small pond, and the crickets were rasping shrilly, so that the night was as animated as an African vil- lage starting a ritual dance. Clarisse asked Ulrich to go into the pond with her and kill himself so that their consciousness would gradually become swamp, coal, and pure energy.
Kill him!
This was a little too much. Ulrich was in danger, ifher ideas ran on in this fashion, of having Clarisse slit his throat one of these nights.
Another chapter: she really tries it!
He telegraphed Walter to come immediately, since his attempts to calm Clarisse had failed and he could no longer assume the respon- sibility.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1567
A kind of settling of accounts takes place between Walter and Ulrich. Walter reproaches him: You fell in with this "redemption"; do you want to be a redeemer? (Instead of subjecting Clarisse to being cured by means of society. ) Ulrich to this: If I myself really had the redeeming ideas, no one would believe them. IfChrist were to return, he wouldn't
get through today.
Rather paunchy belly, profound solidarity with Clarisse.
Ulrich: Aren't you jealous?
Walter: If I were, it would be a serious mistake (crime). I can't have that to complain about too; there are deeper values between people (husband and wife) than faithfulness.
Ulrich-who was thinking of Agathe---is depressed, seems ordinary to himself. But sensitive personal reactions while conforming to public norms belong to the uncreative person. Tells himself with a venomous clarity.
Walter sees him lying on the ground. Wrecked person. Takes revenge.
A weak person who sees a strong person on the ground loves him. Not because he now has him in his power. Nor because the envied person is now just as weak as he is. But loving himself in the other. He feels through him an enhancement of his self-love and tortures him from a kind of masochism.
This weak egotist, who has pushed his life hither and yon in trivial arrangements, is in this instance, where everything is the way he wants it to be and has often dreamed it, filled with soft beauty.
It was decided to bring Clarisse back to a new sanatorium; she ac- cepted this without resistance and almost in silence. She was terribly disappointed in Ulrich and realized that she would have to go back into a clinic--"in order to try to get the circulation working once more"; it was so sluggish that even she had not been able to do it the first time.
She settled into her new abode with the confidence of a person re- turning to a hotel where he is a familiar guest. Walter stayed with her for four days. He felt the blessing of Ulrich's not being along and of being
1568 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
able to control Clarisse alone, but did not admit this to himself. The manner he had adopted toward Ulrich had, he thought, great loftiness, and he also believed he had succeeded in that; but now that it was over, something quite unpleasant made its presence known: that he had been afraid of Ulrich the whole time. His body desired manly satisfaction. He ignored Clarisse's condition and convinced himself that she was not sick but would recover most quickly if, aside from the physical care, she were treated psychologically as an ordinary woman as much as possible. But still he knew that he was only telling himselfthis. To his astonishment, he found less resistance in Clarisse than he was accustomed to. He suf- fered. He felt disgusted with himself. In the first night he had got a small cut that hurt: in his pain, and shuddering at his brutality, he thought he was scourging both her and himself. Then his leave was over. It did not occur to him to desert his office. He had to pack his soul with watch in hand.
Clarisse underwent a diet cure that had been prescribed for her, since her nervous overexcitement was regarded as the consequence of her physical deterioration. She was emaciated and as unkempt as a dog that has been wandering around free for weeks. The unaccustomed nourish- ment, whose effect she began to feel, impressed her. She even put up with Walter, gently, as she did with the cure that forced strange bodies on her and compelled her to gulp down coarse things. Dejectedly she put up with everything in order to acquire in her own mind the attesta- tion of health.
''I'm only living on my own credit," she told herself, "no one believes in me. Perhaps it's only a prejudice that I'm alive? " It calmed her, while Walter was there, to fill herself up with matter and take on earthly ballast, as she called it.
But the day Walter left, the Greek was there. He was staying at the sanatorium, perhaps he had been there longer than Clarisse, but now he crossed her path. As Clarisse passed by he was saying to a lady: "A per- son who has traveled as much as I have finds it absolutely impossible to love a woman. " It might even be that he had said: "A person who comes from as far away as I do . . . "; Clarisse immediately understood it as a sign meant for her that this man had been led onto her path. The same eve- ning she wrote him a letter. Its contents ran: I am the only woman you will love. She went into detail. You are a good height for a man-she wrote--but you have a figure like a woman's and feminine hands. You have a "vulture's beak," an aquiline nose from which the useless excess of energy has been drained; it is more beautiful than an aquiline nose. You have large, dark, deep eye sockets, painful caves of vice. You know the world, the overworld, and the underworld. I noticed right away that
From the Posthumous Papers · 1569
you wanted to hypnotize me, although your glance was really tired and timid. You guessed that I am your destiny.
I am not here because I am ill. But because, instinctively, I always choose the right means. My blood courses slowly. No one has ever been able to find a fever in me. At worst, some undetectable local contamina- tion; no organically caused stomach illness, however much I suffer the greatest weakness as the result of complete exhaustion of my gasbic sys- tem. Whatever our doctor may tell you, moreover, I am on the whole healthy, even though I myself might be ill in part. Proof: precisely that energy for absolute isolation and detachment that brought me here. I guessed with unerring accuracy what is needed at the moment, while a typically sick creature cannot become healthy at all, much less make it- self healthy. Pay attention to me. This has also made me guess with unerring accuracy what it is you need.
You are the great hermaphrodite everyone is waiting for. Upon you the gods have bestowed male and female in equal measure. You will re- deem the radiant world from the dark, unutterable schism of love. Oh, how I understood when you exclaimed that no woman was able to claim you! But I am the great feminine hermaphrodite. Whom no man can satisfy. In solitude I bear being split into two. Which you possess only in your mind, and therefore still only as a longing that we must over- come. With a black shield before it. A divine encounter has brought us here. We cannot evade our destiny and make the world wait a hundred years . . . !
The next day the Greek brought her letter back. Out of discretion he brought it himself. He told her he did not want to give her any occasion to write such things to him. His rejection was noble but firm. His hypno- tist's face, cinematically demonic, masculine, would, placed in any ran- dom crowd ofpeople, immediately have become the center ofattention. But his hands were weak like a woman's; the skin of his head twitched involuntarily at times beneath his thick, carefully parted blue-black hair, and his eyes trembled slightly while Clarisse observed them. Under the influence of the diet cure and new moods, Clarisse had indeed changed physically in the last few days; she had become heavier and coarser, and her piano hands, rough from work, which she was clenching and un- clenching in her excitement, aroused in the Levantine a peculiar fear; he was constantly drawn to look at them, felt the impulse to flee, but could not stand up.
Clarisse repeated to him that he could not evade his destiny, and reached out to grab him. He saw the horrible hand coming at him and could not stir. Only when her mouth slid past his eyes to his own did he
1570 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
find the strength to jump up and flee. Clarisse held on to his pants and tried to embrace him. He uttered a soft cry of disgust and fear and reached the door.
Clarisse was overjoyed. She was left with the feeling that this was a man ofincredible, rare, and absolutely demonic purity; but the indecen- cies that she herself had committed also seemed to her tinged with this feeling. Her breathing became broad and free; the satisfaction at follow- ing the command of her inner voice past the ultimate constraints stretched her breasts like metal springs. For twenty-four hours she actu- ally forgot everything that had brought her here, mission and suffering; her heart no longer shot arrows at the sky; all those she had fired off previously came back one after the other and drilled through it. Proudly she suffered horrible pains of desire. For the space of twenty-four hours. This frigid young woman, who as long as she had been healthy had never learned the frenzy of sex, received this delirium like an agony that raged through her body with such force that it could not hold still for an in- stant, but was driven back and forth by the terrible hunger of her nerves, while her delighted mind determined by this violence that the boundless power of all sexual desire, from which she had to redeem the world, had entered into her. The sweetness ofthis torture, the restless impotence, a need to throw herself in front of this man and weep with gratitude, the happiness she could not forbid herself, were for her a demonstration of how monstrous the demon was with whom she had to take up the strug- gle. This mentally ill woman who had not yet loved now loved with ev- erything that had been spared in her, like a healthy woman but with desperate intensity, as if, with the utmost possible strength of which this emotion was capable, she wanted to tear it away from the shadows that surrounded and irresistibly reinterpreted it.
Like all women, she waited for the return of the man who had spurned her. Twenty-four hours passed, and then-approximately at the same hour as previously-the Greek actually did knock at Clarisse's door. A power he could not understand led this weak-willed man with the feminine sensibility to return to the situation in which the brutal at- tack on him had been inconclusively broken off. He came impeccably attired and coiffed, pleading carefully rehearsed excuses, and inwardly reinforced by the reflection that one had to fully enjoy this interesting woman; but when he looked at Clarisse his pupils trembled like the breasts of a girl being fondled for the first time. Clarisse did not beat around the bush. She repeated to him that he was not allowed to duck out, God too had suffered on the Mount of Olives, and went for him. His knees trembled and his hands went up against hers as helplessly as hand- kerchiefs to fend her off, but Clarisse slung her legs and arms around
From the Posthumous Papers · 1571
him and sealed his mouth with the hot phosphate breath of her own. In the extremity of his fear the Greek defended himself by confessing that he was homosexual. The unfortunate man had no idea what to do when she declared that that was precisely why he had to love her.
He was one of those half-sick, half-sociable people who wander through sanatoriums like hotels in which one meets more interesting people than in the ordinary kind. He spoke several languages and had read the books that were on everyone's tongue. A southeastern Euro- pean elegance, black hair, and indolent dark eyes made him the focus of admiration of all those women who love intellect and the demonic in a man. The story of his life was like a lottery of the numbers of the hotel rooms to which he had been invited. He had never worked in his life, had been set up by his wealthy merchant family, and was in accord with the idea that after the death of his father his younger brother would take charge of their affairs. He did not love women but became their prey out of vanity, and was not resolute enough to follow his preference for men other than occasionally in the circles of big-city prostitution, where they disgusted him. He was really a big fat boy in whom the predilection of that indeterminate age for all vices had never given way to anything sub- sequent, and who had merely wrapped himself in the protection of a melancholy indolence and irresolution.
This wretched man had never experienced from a woman an attack of the kind Clarisse was now subjecting him to. Without his being able to grasp it from anything specific, she addressed herself to his vanity. "Great hermaphrodite," she said again and again, and there shone from her eyes something that was like the King of the Mountain, for him play- ful and yet frenzied. -Remarkable woman, the Greek said. -Y ou are the great hermaphrodite-she said-who is not able to love either women or men! And that's just why you've been called to redeem them from the original sin that weakens them!
Of the three men who influenced Clarisse's life, Walter, Meingast, and Ulrich, Meingast, without its ever having become clear to her, was the one who had through his manner made the greatest impression on her by most powerfully stimulating her ambition-if one may so charac- terize the desire for wings of the uncreative mind banished to an ordi- nary life. His league of men, from which she was excluded, clanking in her imagination like archangels, had transformed themselves into the idea that the strong and redeemed person (and along with this: re- deemed from marriage and love) was homosexual. "God himself is ho- mosexual," she told the Greek. "He penetrates the believer, overpowers him, impregnates him, weakens him, rapes him, treats him like a woman, and demands submission from him, while excluding women
1572 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
from the Church. Impregnated by his God, the believer walks among women as among petty, silly elements he doesn't notice. Love is unfaith- fulness to God, adultery; it robs the spirit of its human dignity. The mad- ness of sin and the madness of bliss entice human action into the marriage bed (bed of adultery). 0 my female king. assume along with me the sins of humanity in order to redeem it by committing them, al- though we already see through them. "
"Crazy-crazy," the Greek murmured, but at the same time Clarisse's ideas made unresisting sense to him and touched a point in his life that had never been treated with such seriousness or such passion. Clarisse roused his indolent soul like a dream raging in deepest darkness but, in doing so, treated him the way an older boy in puberty gets hold of a younger one and fondles him in order to carry out on him the most in- sane sacrifices ofthe cult offirst love. The Greek's dignity as an interest- ing man was most violently compromised by this role being forced upon him, but at the same time this role hit upon fantasies buried deep within him, and Clarisse's ruthless visits aroused in him a trembling condition of bondage. Nowhere did he any longer feel safe from her; she invited him on outings in a carriage, during which she molested him behind the driver's back, and his greatest fear was that one day she would do it in the sanatorium in front of everybody, without his being able to defend himself. Finally, he began to tremble as soon as she came near him, but let her do whatever she wanted. Cettefemme estfoUe-he said this sen- tence softly, plaintively, incessantly, in three languages·, like a magic charm.
But at last-this peculiar, half-transparent relationship was attracting attention, and he imagined people were already making fun of him-his vanity tore him out of it; weeping almost from weakness, he gathered all his strength to shake this woman off. When they got into the carriage he said, averting his face, that it was the last time. As they were riding. he pointed out a policeman to her, claimed that he was having a relation- ship with him and that the policeman wanted him to have nothing more to do with Clarisse; he slung his glances around this massive man stand- ing in the street as if he were a rock, but was tom away by the rolling carriage, feeling nevertheless strengthened by his lie, as if someone had sent him some kind of help. But it had the opposite effect on Clarisse. To see the lover of her "female king" affected her as a surprising con- cretization. In poems she had already characterized herself as a her- maphrodite, and now thought she could distinguish hermaphroditic qualities in her body for the first time. She could hardly expect them to break through to the surface. It's a divine constellation oflove, she said.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1573
The Greek was concerned about the coachman and pushed her away. He breathed into her face that this was their last trip. Without looking around, the coachman, apparently sensing that something was going on behind him, whipped the horses on. Suddenly a thunderstorm came up from three sides and surprised them. The air was heavy and filled with an uncanny tension; lightning flashed and thunder came crashing down. "This evening I'm receiving a visit from my lover," the Greek said. "You may not come to me! " "We're leaving tonight! " Clarisse answered. "For Berlin, the city of tremendous energies! " Just then, with a shattering crash, a bolt struck the fields not far from them, and the horses strained in a gallop against the traces. "No! " the Greek shouted, and involuntarily hid himself against Clarisse, who embraced him. "I deem myself a Thes- salian witch! " she screamed into the uproar that now broke loose from all sides. lightning blazes roared, mingled water and earth flew up from the ground, terror shook the air. The Greek was trembling like some poor animal body jolted by an electric charge. Clarisse was jubilant, em- braced him with "lightning arms," and enveloped him. That was when he jumped out of the carriage.
When Clarisse got back, long after he did-she had forced the coach- man to drive slowly through the storm, and slowly on after the sun had come out again and fields, horses, and the leather of the coach were steaming, while she sang mysterious things--she found in her room a note from the Greek informing her once again that the policeman was in his room, forbidding her to visit, and declaring that he was leaving in the morning. At dinner, Clarisse discovered that his departure was the truth. She wanted to rush to him, but became aware that all the women were observing her. The restlessness in the corridors seemed never to end. Women were passing by every time Clarisse stuck her head out of the door in order to scurry to the Greek's room. These stupid people looked mockingly at Clarisse, instead of comprehending that the policeman was scorning all of them. And for some reason Clarisse suddenly no longer trusted herself to walk upright and innocently to the Greek's door. Fi- nally, it was quiet, and she slipped out barefoot. She scratched softly at the door, but no one answered, although light was coming through the keyhole. Clarisse pressed her lips to the wood and whispered. It re- mained quiet inside; someone was listening but not answering. The Greek was lying in bed with his "protector" and despised her. I Or: a strange man angrily opens the door. The Greek already gone? I Then she, who had never loved, was overcome by the nameless torment of submissive jealousy. - I am not worthy of him-she whispered-he thinks I'm sick, and, whispering, her lips slid down the door to the dust.
1574 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
She was befuddled by a heartrending rapture; moaning softly, she pushed against the door in order to crawl to him and kiss his hand, and did not understand that her rapture had been thwarted.
When she awoke in her bed and rang for the chambermaid, she dis- covered that the Greek had left. She nodded, as if it had been agreed upon between them. -I'm leaving too, Clarisse said. -I'll have to tell the doctor-the girl. Hardly had the girl left the room when Clarisse sprang out of bed and, in a frenzy, dumped her belongings into a suit- case; what did not fit, and the rest of her baggage, she left behind. The girl thought the gentleman had taken the train for Munich. Clarisse fled. "Error is not blindness," she murmured, "error is cowardice! He recog- nized his mission but did not have enough courage for it. " As she slunk out of the building, past his abandoned room, she again encountered the pain and shame of the past night. "He thought I was sick! " Tears streamed down her cheeks. She even did justice to the prison that she was escaping from; she took leave of the walls and the benches outside the door with compassion. People had meant to help her here, the best they could. -They wanted to cure me---Clarisse smiled-but curing is destroying! And when she was sitting in the express, the energy ofwhose storming bounds permeated her, her resolves became clear.
How can one be mistaken? Only by not seeing. But how can one not see what is there to be seen? By not trusting oneself to see. Clarisse rec- ognized, like a broad field without a boundary, the general law of human progress: Error is cowardice; if people were to stop being cowardly the earth would make a leap forward. I In an analogous way, Ulrich recog- nizes why there is no radical progress. I Good, the way the train sped on with her without stopping. She knew that she had to catch up with the Greek.
They had all been against her, the sick ones too.
Clarisse took a sleeping compartment. When she got into the carriage she immediately told the conductor: Three gentlemen must be on this train, go and look for them, I absolutely must speak with them! It seemed to her that all her fellow passengers fell under the strong per- sonal influence that emanated from her and were obeying her com- mands. The waiters in the dining car as well. But nevertheless the conductor had to report that he had not found the Greek, Walter, and Ulrich. After that, with a completely clear sensory impression, she rec-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1575
ognized herself in the mirror now as a white she-devil, now as a blood- red madonna.
When she got off the train in Munich the next morning, she went to an elegant hotel, took a room, smoked the whole day, drank brandy and black coffee, and wrote letters and telegrams. Some circumstance or other had led her to assume that the Greek had traveled to Venice, and she issued instructions to him, the hotels, consular offices, and govern- ment bureaus. She displayed enormous industriousness. -Hurry up! she said to the page boys, who galloped around for her the whole day. It was a mood like at a fire when the fire trucks rattle up and the sirens wail, or like a mobilization, where horses trot and endless processions of resolute, helmet-enclosed faces march through the streets as if dream- ing, the air filled with thrown flowers and heavy with gray tension.
That evening she herself went on to Venice.
In Venice, she registered at a pension frequented by Germans, where she had stayed on her honeymoon; people there dimly recalled the young woman. The same life as in Munich began, with abuse of alcohol and alkaloids, but now she no longer sent off any telegrams or messen- gers. From the moment she had got to Venice, perhaps because the offi- cial emissaries were not already waiting for her at the station with their reports, she had been convinced that the Greek had slipped through her net and fled to his homeland. The task now was to stem the flood and prepare a final assault, without haste and with the strictest measures to- ward oneself.
It was clear that she would sail to Greece, but first the frenzied desire for the man, a desire that had pushed her almost too far, had to be re- strained. Besides coffee and brandy, Clarisse took no meals; she stripped naked and barricaded herself in her room, into which she did not allow even the hotel personnel. Hunger and something else, which she was not able to make out, put her in a state of feverlike confusion that lasted for days, in which impatient sexual arousal gradually faded to a vibrating mood in which all sorts of delusions of the senses were min- gled. The abuse of strong substances had undermined her body; she felt it beginning to collapse under her. Constant diarrhea; a cavity appeared in a tooth and bothered her night and day; a small ugly wart began to form on her hand. But all this drove her to exert her mind more and more passionately, like the moment just before the end of a race, when one has to lift one's legs at every step by willpower. She had got hold of brush and paint pots, and from the arm of a chair, the edge of the bed,
1576 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
and an ironing board that she had found outside her door she built her- self a scaffolding that she pushed along the wall, and began to paint the walls of her room with large designs. What she crisscrossed on the bare walls was the story of her life; so great was this process of inner purifica- tion that Clarisse was convinced that in a hundred years humanity would make a pilgrimage to these sketches and inscriptions in order to see the tremendous works of art with which the greatest of souls had covered her cell.
Perhaps they really were great works for someone who would have had to be in a position to disentangle the wealth of associations that had become tangled up in them. Clarisse created them with enormous ten- sion. She felt herself great and hovering. She was beyond the articulated expression of life that creates words and forms, which are a compromise arranged for everyone, and had again arrived at that magic first encoun- ter with herself, the madness of her first astonishment at those gifts of the gods, word and image. What she created was distorted, was piled up in confusion and yet impoverished, was unrestrained and yet obeyed a rigid compulsion; externally.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1559
Ulrich ended by taking back all the ambition of his life. What are even theories, other than wheedling? Discussions. And at the conclusion of such hours Ulrich was no longer thinking of anything but Agathe, the distant, inseparable sister, of whom he did not even know what she was doing. And he sadly recalled her favorite expression: ''What can I do for my soul, which lives in me like an unsolved riddle? Which leaves visible man free to make any kind ofchoice because it cannot govern him in any way? "
Here a settlement ofaccounts about Ulrich's mood in regard to heroism.
The dog, which after long association with man involuntarily caricatures him so splendidly in many ways.
The feeling of never being allowed to leave here again.
Clarisse meanwhile was playing out her game of signs; sometimes he saw her scurrying over the dunes like a fluttering cloth. . . We are playing our story here," she claimed, . . on the stage of this island. " Basically it was only the exaggerated form of this having to imprint oneself on un- certainty. Formerly, when Clarisse had still been going to the opera with Walter, she had often said: ''What is all art! Ifwe could act out our sto- ries! " She was now doing this as well. All lovers ought to do it. All lovers have the feeling that what we are experiencing is something miraculous, we are chosen people; but they ought to play it before a large orchestra and a dark hall-real lovers on the stage, and not people who are paid: not only a new theater would arise but also an entirely new kind of love, which would spread, lighting up human gestures like a fine network of branches, instead of, like today, creeping into the child's darkness. That was what Clarisse said. Please, no child! Instead of accomplishing some- thing, people have children! Sometimes she called the small keepsakes she put in the sand for Ulrich her secret children, or so she called every impression she received, for the impression melted into her like fruit. Between her and things there existed a continual exchanging of signs and understandings, a conspiracy, a heightened thinking I heightened correspondence I a burning, spirited life process. Sometimes this be- came so intense that Clarisse thought she was being tom out of her slen- der body and flying like a veil over the island, without rest, until her eyes
1560 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
were transfixed by a small stone or a shell and a credulous astonishment rooted her to the spot, because she had already been here once and al- ways, and had lain quietly as a trace in the sand, while a second Clarisse had flown over the island like a witch.
At times, her person seemed to her only an obstacle, unnaturally in- serted in the dynamic exchange between the world that affected her and the world she affected. In its most intense moments, this selfseemed to tear apart and disintegrate. I Cf. piano scene. Beethoven-Nietzsche quotation. Even then Clarisse was serious about tearing apart. I Even if she was unfaithful to Walter with this body and this . . soul fastened to her skin," it did not mean anything: there were many hours in which the frigid, rejecting Clarisse transformed herself into a vampire, insatiable, as if an obstacle had fallen away and for the first time she could yield to this heretofore forbidden pleasure. She sometimes seemed to plan things to suck Ulrich dry: . . There's still one more devil in you I have to exorcise! " she said. He owned a red sport jacket, and she sometimes made him put it on in the middle ofthe night and did not let up until he turned pale under his tanned skin. Her passion for him, and in general all the emotions she expressed, were not deep--Ulrich felt that dis- tinctly-but somehow at times passed by depth on their precipitous fall into the abyss.
Nor did she entirely trust Ulrich. He did not completely understand the greatness of what she was experiencing. During these days she had of course recognized and seen through everything that had previously been inaccessible to her. Formerly, she had experienced infinite heavi- ness, the enterprising spirit's fall from almost-attained heights of great- ness to the deepest anxiety and anguish. It seems that a person can be driven out from the ordinary real world we all know by processes that take place not in her but above or below the earth, and in the same way the person can intensify them into the incommensurable. On the island she explained it to Ulrich like this: One day everything around Clarisse had been enhanced: colors, smells, straight and crooked lines, noises, her emotions or thoughts, and the ones she aroused in others; what was taking place might have been causal, necessary, mechanical, and psycho- logical, but aside from that it was moved by a secret driving force; it might have happened precisely that way the day before, but today, in some indescribable and fortunate way, it was different. -Oh---Clarisse immediately said to herself-! am freed from the law of necessity,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1561
where every thing depends on some other thing. For things depended on her emotions. Or rather, what was at work was a continual activity of the self and of things penetrating and yielding to each other, as if they were on opposite sides of the same elastic membrane. Clarisse discov- ered that what she was acting from was a veil of emotions, with things on the other side. A little later she received the most terrible confirmation: she perceived everything going on around her just as correctly as before, but it had become totally dissociated and alienated. Her own emotions seemed foreign to her, as ifsomeone else were feeling them, or as ifthey were drifting around in the world. It was as ifshe and things were badly fitted to each other. She no longer found any support in the world, did not find the necessary minimum of satisfaction and self-moderation, was no longer able to maintain through inner action the equilibrium with the events of the world, and felt with unspeakable anguish how she was being inexorably squeezed out of the world and could no longer escape suicide (or perhaps madness). Again she was exempted from ordinary necessity and subjected to a secret law; but then she discovered, at the last moment when she could possibly be saved, the law that no one before her had noticed:
W e-that is, people lacking Clarisse's insight-imagine that the world is unambiguous, whatever the relationship between the things out there and inner processes may be; and what we call an emotion is a personal matter that is added to our own pleasure or uneasiness but does not oth- erwise change anything in the world. Not just the way we see red when we get angry-that too, moreover; it is only erroneously that one consid- ers it something that is an occasional exception, without suspecting what deep and general law one has touched upon! -but rather like this: things swim in emotions the way water lilies consist not only of leaves and flowers and white and green but also of "gently lying there. " Ordi- narily, they are so quiet about this that one does not notice the totality; the emotions have to be calm for the world to be orderly and for merely rational associations to be dominant in it.
But assuming for instance that a person suffers some really serious and annihilating humiliation that would have to lead to his destruction, it does happen that instead of this shame a surpassing pleasure in the hu- miliation sets in, a holy or smiling feeling about the world, and this is then not merely an emotion like any other or a deliberation, not even the reflection that we might perchance console ourselves that humility is vir- tuous, but a sinking or rising of the whole person on another level, a "sinking on the rise," and all things change in harmony with this; one might say they remain the same but now find themselves in some other space, or that everything is tinged with another sense. At such moments
1562 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
one recognizes that aside from everyone's world, that solid world that can be investigated and managed by reason, there is a second world, dy- namic, singular, visionary, irrational, which is only apparently congruent with the first and which we do not, as people think, merely cany in our hearts or our minds, but which exists externally with precisely the same reality as the prevailing world. It is an uncanny mystery, and like every- thing mysterious it becomes, whenever one tries to articulate it, easily confused with what is most banal. Clarisse herself had experienced- when she was unfaithful to Walter, and although she had to be, on which account she did not recognize any remorse--how the world became black; however, it was not a real color but a quite indescribable one, and later this "sense color" of the world, as Clarisse called it, became a hard, burnt brown.
Clarisse was very happy on the day when she grasped that her new understanding was the continuation of her efforts on the subject of ge- nius. For what distinguishes the genius from the healthy, ordinary per- son, other than the secret involvement of the emotions in everything that happens, which in the healthy person is stable and unnoticed but in the genius, on the other hand, is subject to incessant irritations? More- over, Ulrich too said that there are many possible worlds. Rational, rea- sonable people adapt themselves to the world, but strong people adapt the world to themselves. As long as the "sense color" of the world, as Clarisse called it, remained stable, equilibrium in the world also had something stable. Its unnoticed stability might even be considered healthy and ordinarily indispensable, the way the body, too, is not per- mitted to feel all the organs that maintain its equilibrium. Also un- healthy is a labile equilibrium, which tips over at the first chance and falls into the inferior position. Those are the mentally ill, Clarisse told herself, of whom she was afraid. But on top, conquerors in the realm of humanity, are those whose equilibrium is just as vulnerable but full of strength and, constantly disturbed, is constantly inventing new forms of equilibrium.
Itisanuncannybalance,andClarissehadneverfeltherselfas mucha creature perched on the razor's edge between annihilation and health as she did now. But whoever has followed the development of Clarisse's thoughts up to this point will already know that she had now come upon the traces of the "secret of redemption. " This had entered her life as the mission to liberate the genius that was inhibited by all sorts of relations in herself, Walter, and their surroundings, and it is easy to see that this inhibition comes about because one is forced to yield to the repression the world practices against every person of genius, and is submerged in obscurity; but here, on the other side, it throws the world into relief in a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1563
new color. This was for her the significance of the soul color dark red, a marvelous, indescribable, and transparent shade in which air, sand, and vegetation were immersed, so that she moved everywhere as in a red chamher of light.
She once called this the "darkroom," herself surprised by its similarity to a room in which in the midst of acrid vapors one bends tense and excited over the delicate, barely recognizable images that appear on the negative. It was her task to prefigure the redemption, and Ulrich seemed to her to be her apostle, who would after a while leave her and go out into the world, and whose first task would be to liberate Walter and Meingast. From this point on, her progress was much more rapid.
The blows of confused and anarchic ideas that Ulrich received every day, and the movement of these thoughts in an imprudent but clearly palpable direction, had in fact gradually swept him up, and the only thing that still differentiated his life from that of the insane was a consciousness of his situation, which he could interrupt by an effort. But for a long time he did not do so. For while he had always felt only like a guest among rational people and those effectively engaged in life, at least with one part of his being, and as alien or meaningless as a poem would be were he suddenly to start reciting one at the general meeting ofa corporation, he felt here in this nothingness ofcertainty an enhanced security, and lived with precisely this part of his being among the structures of absurdity in the air, but as securely as on solid ground. Happiness is in truth not some- thing rational, which depends once and for all on a specific action or the possession of specific things, but much more a mood of the nerves through which everything becomes happiness or doesn't; to this extent Clarisse was right. And the beauty, goodness, and quality of genius in a woman, the fire she kindles and sustains, is not to be settled by any legal determination of truth but is a mutual delirium. One could maintain, Ulrich told himself, that our entire being-which we basically cannot find a basis for but complacently accept on the whole as God, while, acting from this assumption, it is easy for us to deduce the details-is nothing but the delirium of many; but if order is reason, then every sim- ple fact, if we observe it outside of any order, is already the germ of a madness. For what do facts have to do with our mind? The mind governs itself by them, but they stand there, responsible to no one, like mountain peaks or clouds or the nose on a person's face; there were times when it would have been a pleasure to crush the nose on the face of the lovely Diotima with two fingers; Clarisse's nose sniffed, alert, like the nose of a pointer, and was able to impart all the excitement of the invisible.
1564 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
But soon he was no longer able to follow Clarisse's idea of order. You scratch a sign in a stone at the spot where you happen to be: that this is art, just as the greatest is, was a feeling one could sympathize with. And Clarisse did not want to possess Ulrich, but-each time in a new leap- live with him. - I don't perceive truly-she said-but I perceive fruit- fully. Her ideas scintillated, things scintillated. One does not gather up one's insights in order to form a self out of them, like a cold snowman, when like her one is growing into ever-new catastrophes; her ideas grew "in the open"; one weakens oneself by scattering everything, but spurs oneself on to new, strange growth. Clarisse began to express her life in poems; on the Island of Health Ulrich found this quite natural. In our poems there is too much rigid reason; the words are burned-out notions, the syntax holds out sticks and ropes as if for the blind, the meaning never gets off the ground everyone has trampled; the awakened soul cannot walk in such iron garments. Clarisse discovered that one would have to choose words that are not ideas; but since there don't seem to be any, she chose instead the word pair. Ifshe said "I," this word was never able to shoot up as vertically as she felt it; but "I-red" is not yet impris- oned by anything, and flew upward. Just as beneficial is freeing words from their grammatical bonds, which are quite impoverished. For exam- ple, Clarisse gave Ulrich three words and asked him to read them in any order he chose. If they were "God," "red," and "goes," he read "God goes red," or "God, red, goes"-that is, his brain immediately either un- derstood them as a sentence or separated them by commas in order to underline that it was not making them into a sentence. Clarisse called this the chemistry of words, that they always cohere in groups, and showed how to counter this. Her favorite bit of information was that she worked with exclamation points or underlining. God! ! red! ! ! goes! Such accumulations slow one down, and the word dams up behind them to its full meaning. She also underlined words from one to ten times, and at times a page she had written this way looked like a cryptic musical score. Another means, but one she used less frequently, was repetition; through it the weight of the repeated word became greater than the power of the syntactic bond, and the word began to sink without end. God goes green green green. It was an incredibly difficult problem to ascertain correctly the number of repetitions so that they would express exactly what was meant.
One day, Ulrich showed up with a volume of Goethe's poems, which he happened to have brought along, and proposed taking several words out of each of a number of poems and putting them together, to see what came out. Poems like this came out:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1565
It cannot be overlooked that an obscure, incoherent charm emanates from these constellations, something with the glowing fire of a volcano, as if one were looking into the bowels of the earth. And a few years after Clarisse, a similar play with words actually did become an ominous fash- ion among the healthy.
Clarisse anticipated remarkable conclusions. Flakes of fire were sto- len by poets from the volcano of madness: at some point in primeval times and later, every time a genius revisited earth; these glowing con- nections ofwords, not yet constricted to specific meanings, were planted in the soil of ordinary language to form its fertility, "which as we know comes from its volcanic origins. " But-so Clarisse concluded-it follows from this that the mind must decay to primal elements again and again in order for life to remain fruitful. This placed in Clarisse's hands the responsibility for a monstrous irresponsibility; she knew that she was re- ally uneducated, but now she was filled with a heroic lack of respect for everything that had been created before her.
Ulrich was able to follow Clarisse's games this far, and youth's lack of respect made it easier for him to dream into the shattered mind these new structures that could be formed: a process that has repeated itself among us several times, around 1900, when people loved the suggestive and sketchy, as after 1910, where in painting people succumbed to the charm of the simplest constructive elements and bid the secrets of the visible world echo by reciting a kind of optical alphabet.
But Clarisse's decline progressed more rapidly than Ulrich could follow. One day, she came with a new discovery. -Life withdraws powers from nature once and for all, forever-she began, making a connection with poems that tear words out of nature in order slowly to make it barren-while life transforms these powers withdrawn from nature into a new condition, "consciousness," from which there is no return. It seemed obvious, and Clarisse was surprised that no one before her had noticed it. This was because people's morality pre- vented them from noticing certain things. -All physical, chemical, and other such stimuli that strike me-she declared-! transform into consciousness; but never has the reverse been achieved, otherwise I could raise this stone with my will. So consciousness is constantly in- terfering with the system of nature's powers. Consciousness is the cause of all insignificant, superficial movement, and "redemption" de- mands that it be destroyed.
1566 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Leo Tolstoy: Consciousness is the greatest moral misfortune that a man can attain.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: "All consciousness is a disease. "
From Gorky's diary.
Clarisse immediately made a further discovery. The vanished forests of the carboniferous era, bubbling, rampant, gigantic, fantastic, are being freed again today under the influence of the sun as psychic forces, and it is through the exploitation of the energy that perished in that ear- lier time that the enormous spiritual energy of the present age arises.
She says: Before, it was only a game, now it has to get serious; here she becomes uncanny to him.
It was evening. To cool off she and Ulrich went for a walk in the dark. Hundreds of frogs were drumming in a small pond, and the crickets were rasping shrilly, so that the night was as animated as an African vil- lage starting a ritual dance. Clarisse asked Ulrich to go into the pond with her and kill himself so that their consciousness would gradually become swamp, coal, and pure energy.
Kill him!
This was a little too much. Ulrich was in danger, ifher ideas ran on in this fashion, of having Clarisse slit his throat one of these nights.
Another chapter: she really tries it!
He telegraphed Walter to come immediately, since his attempts to calm Clarisse had failed and he could no longer assume the respon- sibility.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1567
A kind of settling of accounts takes place between Walter and Ulrich. Walter reproaches him: You fell in with this "redemption"; do you want to be a redeemer? (Instead of subjecting Clarisse to being cured by means of society. ) Ulrich to this: If I myself really had the redeeming ideas, no one would believe them. IfChrist were to return, he wouldn't
get through today.
Rather paunchy belly, profound solidarity with Clarisse.
Ulrich: Aren't you jealous?
Walter: If I were, it would be a serious mistake (crime). I can't have that to complain about too; there are deeper values between people (husband and wife) than faithfulness.
Ulrich-who was thinking of Agathe---is depressed, seems ordinary to himself. But sensitive personal reactions while conforming to public norms belong to the uncreative person. Tells himself with a venomous clarity.
Walter sees him lying on the ground. Wrecked person. Takes revenge.
A weak person who sees a strong person on the ground loves him. Not because he now has him in his power. Nor because the envied person is now just as weak as he is. But loving himself in the other. He feels through him an enhancement of his self-love and tortures him from a kind of masochism.
This weak egotist, who has pushed his life hither and yon in trivial arrangements, is in this instance, where everything is the way he wants it to be and has often dreamed it, filled with soft beauty.
It was decided to bring Clarisse back to a new sanatorium; she ac- cepted this without resistance and almost in silence. She was terribly disappointed in Ulrich and realized that she would have to go back into a clinic--"in order to try to get the circulation working once more"; it was so sluggish that even she had not been able to do it the first time.
She settled into her new abode with the confidence of a person re- turning to a hotel where he is a familiar guest. Walter stayed with her for four days. He felt the blessing of Ulrich's not being along and of being
1568 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
able to control Clarisse alone, but did not admit this to himself. The manner he had adopted toward Ulrich had, he thought, great loftiness, and he also believed he had succeeded in that; but now that it was over, something quite unpleasant made its presence known: that he had been afraid of Ulrich the whole time. His body desired manly satisfaction. He ignored Clarisse's condition and convinced himself that she was not sick but would recover most quickly if, aside from the physical care, she were treated psychologically as an ordinary woman as much as possible. But still he knew that he was only telling himselfthis. To his astonishment, he found less resistance in Clarisse than he was accustomed to. He suf- fered. He felt disgusted with himself. In the first night he had got a small cut that hurt: in his pain, and shuddering at his brutality, he thought he was scourging both her and himself. Then his leave was over. It did not occur to him to desert his office. He had to pack his soul with watch in hand.
Clarisse underwent a diet cure that had been prescribed for her, since her nervous overexcitement was regarded as the consequence of her physical deterioration. She was emaciated and as unkempt as a dog that has been wandering around free for weeks. The unaccustomed nourish- ment, whose effect she began to feel, impressed her. She even put up with Walter, gently, as she did with the cure that forced strange bodies on her and compelled her to gulp down coarse things. Dejectedly she put up with everything in order to acquire in her own mind the attesta- tion of health.
''I'm only living on my own credit," she told herself, "no one believes in me. Perhaps it's only a prejudice that I'm alive? " It calmed her, while Walter was there, to fill herself up with matter and take on earthly ballast, as she called it.
But the day Walter left, the Greek was there. He was staying at the sanatorium, perhaps he had been there longer than Clarisse, but now he crossed her path. As Clarisse passed by he was saying to a lady: "A per- son who has traveled as much as I have finds it absolutely impossible to love a woman. " It might even be that he had said: "A person who comes from as far away as I do . . . "; Clarisse immediately understood it as a sign meant for her that this man had been led onto her path. The same eve- ning she wrote him a letter. Its contents ran: I am the only woman you will love. She went into detail. You are a good height for a man-she wrote--but you have a figure like a woman's and feminine hands. You have a "vulture's beak," an aquiline nose from which the useless excess of energy has been drained; it is more beautiful than an aquiline nose. You have large, dark, deep eye sockets, painful caves of vice. You know the world, the overworld, and the underworld. I noticed right away that
From the Posthumous Papers · 1569
you wanted to hypnotize me, although your glance was really tired and timid. You guessed that I am your destiny.
I am not here because I am ill. But because, instinctively, I always choose the right means. My blood courses slowly. No one has ever been able to find a fever in me. At worst, some undetectable local contamina- tion; no organically caused stomach illness, however much I suffer the greatest weakness as the result of complete exhaustion of my gasbic sys- tem. Whatever our doctor may tell you, moreover, I am on the whole healthy, even though I myself might be ill in part. Proof: precisely that energy for absolute isolation and detachment that brought me here. I guessed with unerring accuracy what is needed at the moment, while a typically sick creature cannot become healthy at all, much less make it- self healthy. Pay attention to me. This has also made me guess with unerring accuracy what it is you need.
You are the great hermaphrodite everyone is waiting for. Upon you the gods have bestowed male and female in equal measure. You will re- deem the radiant world from the dark, unutterable schism of love. Oh, how I understood when you exclaimed that no woman was able to claim you! But I am the great feminine hermaphrodite. Whom no man can satisfy. In solitude I bear being split into two. Which you possess only in your mind, and therefore still only as a longing that we must over- come. With a black shield before it. A divine encounter has brought us here. We cannot evade our destiny and make the world wait a hundred years . . . !
The next day the Greek brought her letter back. Out of discretion he brought it himself. He told her he did not want to give her any occasion to write such things to him. His rejection was noble but firm. His hypno- tist's face, cinematically demonic, masculine, would, placed in any ran- dom crowd ofpeople, immediately have become the center ofattention. But his hands were weak like a woman's; the skin of his head twitched involuntarily at times beneath his thick, carefully parted blue-black hair, and his eyes trembled slightly while Clarisse observed them. Under the influence of the diet cure and new moods, Clarisse had indeed changed physically in the last few days; she had become heavier and coarser, and her piano hands, rough from work, which she was clenching and un- clenching in her excitement, aroused in the Levantine a peculiar fear; he was constantly drawn to look at them, felt the impulse to flee, but could not stand up.
Clarisse repeated to him that he could not evade his destiny, and reached out to grab him. He saw the horrible hand coming at him and could not stir. Only when her mouth slid past his eyes to his own did he
1570 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
find the strength to jump up and flee. Clarisse held on to his pants and tried to embrace him. He uttered a soft cry of disgust and fear and reached the door.
Clarisse was overjoyed. She was left with the feeling that this was a man ofincredible, rare, and absolutely demonic purity; but the indecen- cies that she herself had committed also seemed to her tinged with this feeling. Her breathing became broad and free; the satisfaction at follow- ing the command of her inner voice past the ultimate constraints stretched her breasts like metal springs. For twenty-four hours she actu- ally forgot everything that had brought her here, mission and suffering; her heart no longer shot arrows at the sky; all those she had fired off previously came back one after the other and drilled through it. Proudly she suffered horrible pains of desire. For the space of twenty-four hours. This frigid young woman, who as long as she had been healthy had never learned the frenzy of sex, received this delirium like an agony that raged through her body with such force that it could not hold still for an in- stant, but was driven back and forth by the terrible hunger of her nerves, while her delighted mind determined by this violence that the boundless power of all sexual desire, from which she had to redeem the world, had entered into her. The sweetness ofthis torture, the restless impotence, a need to throw herself in front of this man and weep with gratitude, the happiness she could not forbid herself, were for her a demonstration of how monstrous the demon was with whom she had to take up the strug- gle. This mentally ill woman who had not yet loved now loved with ev- erything that had been spared in her, like a healthy woman but with desperate intensity, as if, with the utmost possible strength of which this emotion was capable, she wanted to tear it away from the shadows that surrounded and irresistibly reinterpreted it.
Like all women, she waited for the return of the man who had spurned her. Twenty-four hours passed, and then-approximately at the same hour as previously-the Greek actually did knock at Clarisse's door. A power he could not understand led this weak-willed man with the feminine sensibility to return to the situation in which the brutal at- tack on him had been inconclusively broken off. He came impeccably attired and coiffed, pleading carefully rehearsed excuses, and inwardly reinforced by the reflection that one had to fully enjoy this interesting woman; but when he looked at Clarisse his pupils trembled like the breasts of a girl being fondled for the first time. Clarisse did not beat around the bush. She repeated to him that he was not allowed to duck out, God too had suffered on the Mount of Olives, and went for him. His knees trembled and his hands went up against hers as helplessly as hand- kerchiefs to fend her off, but Clarisse slung her legs and arms around
From the Posthumous Papers · 1571
him and sealed his mouth with the hot phosphate breath of her own. In the extremity of his fear the Greek defended himself by confessing that he was homosexual. The unfortunate man had no idea what to do when she declared that that was precisely why he had to love her.
He was one of those half-sick, half-sociable people who wander through sanatoriums like hotels in which one meets more interesting people than in the ordinary kind. He spoke several languages and had read the books that were on everyone's tongue. A southeastern Euro- pean elegance, black hair, and indolent dark eyes made him the focus of admiration of all those women who love intellect and the demonic in a man. The story of his life was like a lottery of the numbers of the hotel rooms to which he had been invited. He had never worked in his life, had been set up by his wealthy merchant family, and was in accord with the idea that after the death of his father his younger brother would take charge of their affairs. He did not love women but became their prey out of vanity, and was not resolute enough to follow his preference for men other than occasionally in the circles of big-city prostitution, where they disgusted him. He was really a big fat boy in whom the predilection of that indeterminate age for all vices had never given way to anything sub- sequent, and who had merely wrapped himself in the protection of a melancholy indolence and irresolution.
This wretched man had never experienced from a woman an attack of the kind Clarisse was now subjecting him to. Without his being able to grasp it from anything specific, she addressed herself to his vanity. "Great hermaphrodite," she said again and again, and there shone from her eyes something that was like the King of the Mountain, for him play- ful and yet frenzied. -Remarkable woman, the Greek said. -Y ou are the great hermaphrodite-she said-who is not able to love either women or men! And that's just why you've been called to redeem them from the original sin that weakens them!
Of the three men who influenced Clarisse's life, Walter, Meingast, and Ulrich, Meingast, without its ever having become clear to her, was the one who had through his manner made the greatest impression on her by most powerfully stimulating her ambition-if one may so charac- terize the desire for wings of the uncreative mind banished to an ordi- nary life. His league of men, from which she was excluded, clanking in her imagination like archangels, had transformed themselves into the idea that the strong and redeemed person (and along with this: re- deemed from marriage and love) was homosexual. "God himself is ho- mosexual," she told the Greek. "He penetrates the believer, overpowers him, impregnates him, weakens him, rapes him, treats him like a woman, and demands submission from him, while excluding women
1572 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
from the Church. Impregnated by his God, the believer walks among women as among petty, silly elements he doesn't notice. Love is unfaith- fulness to God, adultery; it robs the spirit of its human dignity. The mad- ness of sin and the madness of bliss entice human action into the marriage bed (bed of adultery). 0 my female king. assume along with me the sins of humanity in order to redeem it by committing them, al- though we already see through them. "
"Crazy-crazy," the Greek murmured, but at the same time Clarisse's ideas made unresisting sense to him and touched a point in his life that had never been treated with such seriousness or such passion. Clarisse roused his indolent soul like a dream raging in deepest darkness but, in doing so, treated him the way an older boy in puberty gets hold of a younger one and fondles him in order to carry out on him the most in- sane sacrifices ofthe cult offirst love. The Greek's dignity as an interest- ing man was most violently compromised by this role being forced upon him, but at the same time this role hit upon fantasies buried deep within him, and Clarisse's ruthless visits aroused in him a trembling condition of bondage. Nowhere did he any longer feel safe from her; she invited him on outings in a carriage, during which she molested him behind the driver's back, and his greatest fear was that one day she would do it in the sanatorium in front of everybody, without his being able to defend himself. Finally, he began to tremble as soon as she came near him, but let her do whatever she wanted. Cettefemme estfoUe-he said this sen- tence softly, plaintively, incessantly, in three languages·, like a magic charm.
But at last-this peculiar, half-transparent relationship was attracting attention, and he imagined people were already making fun of him-his vanity tore him out of it; weeping almost from weakness, he gathered all his strength to shake this woman off. When they got into the carriage he said, averting his face, that it was the last time. As they were riding. he pointed out a policeman to her, claimed that he was having a relation- ship with him and that the policeman wanted him to have nothing more to do with Clarisse; he slung his glances around this massive man stand- ing in the street as if he were a rock, but was tom away by the rolling carriage, feeling nevertheless strengthened by his lie, as if someone had sent him some kind of help. But it had the opposite effect on Clarisse. To see the lover of her "female king" affected her as a surprising con- cretization. In poems she had already characterized herself as a her- maphrodite, and now thought she could distinguish hermaphroditic qualities in her body for the first time. She could hardly expect them to break through to the surface. It's a divine constellation oflove, she said.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1573
The Greek was concerned about the coachman and pushed her away. He breathed into her face that this was their last trip. Without looking around, the coachman, apparently sensing that something was going on behind him, whipped the horses on. Suddenly a thunderstorm came up from three sides and surprised them. The air was heavy and filled with an uncanny tension; lightning flashed and thunder came crashing down. "This evening I'm receiving a visit from my lover," the Greek said. "You may not come to me! " "We're leaving tonight! " Clarisse answered. "For Berlin, the city of tremendous energies! " Just then, with a shattering crash, a bolt struck the fields not far from them, and the horses strained in a gallop against the traces. "No! " the Greek shouted, and involuntarily hid himself against Clarisse, who embraced him. "I deem myself a Thes- salian witch! " she screamed into the uproar that now broke loose from all sides. lightning blazes roared, mingled water and earth flew up from the ground, terror shook the air. The Greek was trembling like some poor animal body jolted by an electric charge. Clarisse was jubilant, em- braced him with "lightning arms," and enveloped him. That was when he jumped out of the carriage.
When Clarisse got back, long after he did-she had forced the coach- man to drive slowly through the storm, and slowly on after the sun had come out again and fields, horses, and the leather of the coach were steaming, while she sang mysterious things--she found in her room a note from the Greek informing her once again that the policeman was in his room, forbidding her to visit, and declaring that he was leaving in the morning. At dinner, Clarisse discovered that his departure was the truth. She wanted to rush to him, but became aware that all the women were observing her. The restlessness in the corridors seemed never to end. Women were passing by every time Clarisse stuck her head out of the door in order to scurry to the Greek's room. These stupid people looked mockingly at Clarisse, instead of comprehending that the policeman was scorning all of them. And for some reason Clarisse suddenly no longer trusted herself to walk upright and innocently to the Greek's door. Fi- nally, it was quiet, and she slipped out barefoot. She scratched softly at the door, but no one answered, although light was coming through the keyhole. Clarisse pressed her lips to the wood and whispered. It re- mained quiet inside; someone was listening but not answering. The Greek was lying in bed with his "protector" and despised her. I Or: a strange man angrily opens the door. The Greek already gone? I Then she, who had never loved, was overcome by the nameless torment of submissive jealousy. - I am not worthy of him-she whispered-he thinks I'm sick, and, whispering, her lips slid down the door to the dust.
1574 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
She was befuddled by a heartrending rapture; moaning softly, she pushed against the door in order to crawl to him and kiss his hand, and did not understand that her rapture had been thwarted.
When she awoke in her bed and rang for the chambermaid, she dis- covered that the Greek had left. She nodded, as if it had been agreed upon between them. -I'm leaving too, Clarisse said. -I'll have to tell the doctor-the girl. Hardly had the girl left the room when Clarisse sprang out of bed and, in a frenzy, dumped her belongings into a suit- case; what did not fit, and the rest of her baggage, she left behind. The girl thought the gentleman had taken the train for Munich. Clarisse fled. "Error is not blindness," she murmured, "error is cowardice! He recog- nized his mission but did not have enough courage for it. " As she slunk out of the building, past his abandoned room, she again encountered the pain and shame of the past night. "He thought I was sick! " Tears streamed down her cheeks. She even did justice to the prison that she was escaping from; she took leave of the walls and the benches outside the door with compassion. People had meant to help her here, the best they could. -They wanted to cure me---Clarisse smiled-but curing is destroying! And when she was sitting in the express, the energy ofwhose storming bounds permeated her, her resolves became clear.
How can one be mistaken? Only by not seeing. But how can one not see what is there to be seen? By not trusting oneself to see. Clarisse rec- ognized, like a broad field without a boundary, the general law of human progress: Error is cowardice; if people were to stop being cowardly the earth would make a leap forward. I In an analogous way, Ulrich recog- nizes why there is no radical progress. I Good, the way the train sped on with her without stopping. She knew that she had to catch up with the Greek.
They had all been against her, the sick ones too.
Clarisse took a sleeping compartment. When she got into the carriage she immediately told the conductor: Three gentlemen must be on this train, go and look for them, I absolutely must speak with them! It seemed to her that all her fellow passengers fell under the strong per- sonal influence that emanated from her and were obeying her com- mands. The waiters in the dining car as well. But nevertheless the conductor had to report that he had not found the Greek, Walter, and Ulrich. After that, with a completely clear sensory impression, she rec-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1575
ognized herself in the mirror now as a white she-devil, now as a blood- red madonna.
When she got off the train in Munich the next morning, she went to an elegant hotel, took a room, smoked the whole day, drank brandy and black coffee, and wrote letters and telegrams. Some circumstance or other had led her to assume that the Greek had traveled to Venice, and she issued instructions to him, the hotels, consular offices, and govern- ment bureaus. She displayed enormous industriousness. -Hurry up! she said to the page boys, who galloped around for her the whole day. It was a mood like at a fire when the fire trucks rattle up and the sirens wail, or like a mobilization, where horses trot and endless processions of resolute, helmet-enclosed faces march through the streets as if dream- ing, the air filled with thrown flowers and heavy with gray tension.
That evening she herself went on to Venice.
In Venice, she registered at a pension frequented by Germans, where she had stayed on her honeymoon; people there dimly recalled the young woman. The same life as in Munich began, with abuse of alcohol and alkaloids, but now she no longer sent off any telegrams or messen- gers. From the moment she had got to Venice, perhaps because the offi- cial emissaries were not already waiting for her at the station with their reports, she had been convinced that the Greek had slipped through her net and fled to his homeland. The task now was to stem the flood and prepare a final assault, without haste and with the strictest measures to- ward oneself.
It was clear that she would sail to Greece, but first the frenzied desire for the man, a desire that had pushed her almost too far, had to be re- strained. Besides coffee and brandy, Clarisse took no meals; she stripped naked and barricaded herself in her room, into which she did not allow even the hotel personnel. Hunger and something else, which she was not able to make out, put her in a state of feverlike confusion that lasted for days, in which impatient sexual arousal gradually faded to a vibrating mood in which all sorts of delusions of the senses were min- gled. The abuse of strong substances had undermined her body; she felt it beginning to collapse under her. Constant diarrhea; a cavity appeared in a tooth and bothered her night and day; a small ugly wart began to form on her hand. But all this drove her to exert her mind more and more passionately, like the moment just before the end of a race, when one has to lift one's legs at every step by willpower. She had got hold of brush and paint pots, and from the arm of a chair, the edge of the bed,
1576 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
and an ironing board that she had found outside her door she built her- self a scaffolding that she pushed along the wall, and began to paint the walls of her room with large designs. What she crisscrossed on the bare walls was the story of her life; so great was this process of inner purifica- tion that Clarisse was convinced that in a hundred years humanity would make a pilgrimage to these sketches and inscriptions in order to see the tremendous works of art with which the greatest of souls had covered her cell.
Perhaps they really were great works for someone who would have had to be in a position to disentangle the wealth of associations that had become tangled up in them. Clarisse created them with enormous ten- sion. She felt herself great and hovering. She was beyond the articulated expression of life that creates words and forms, which are a compromise arranged for everyone, and had again arrived at that magic first encoun- ter with herself, the madness of her first astonishment at those gifts of the gods, word and image. What she created was distorted, was piled up in confusion and yet impoverished, was unrestrained and yet obeyed a rigid compulsion; externally.
