But now, as
Meingast
was sitting in the room writing.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
Speak, that it shall be prepared for you.
But we intend to leave, and will no longer appear before your eyes!
" At the same time another woman, who suffered from catatonia, passionately kissed Clarisse's hands, and her eyes were transfigured by approaching death like a star that in the night outshines all others.
Clarisse felt: "It is really not a miracle that I believed I had to fulfill a mission," but in spite ofthis already more focused feeling, she was uncertain about what it was she had to do.
Fortunately, this was the day on which she was trans- ferred to the ward for calm patients.
On Clarisse
1. "Impoverished life"-This is a concept that makes an impression on her, like decadence. Her version of the fin de steele mood. Drawn from her experience with Walter.
2. Along with Walter she adores Wagner, but with rising opposition; whenever he has played Wagner his hands are covered by a cold damp- ness, so this petit-bourgeois heroism comes out at his fingers, this heroic petit-bourgeois posturing. She imagines an Italian music that is driven beyond itself by the cruel cheerfulness of the blue Italian sky (omen! ), "the destiny over her": "Her happiness is brief, sudden, unannounced, without pardon. " (Omen, but Ulrich at first sees only what is usual for the times. ) "The tanned one," "cynical" (omen! ). She criticizes how empty Walter's face becomes in so many ways when he is making music.
3· Love is to be understood as fate, innocent and therefore cruel- that's how it hovers before her. She means by this: that's how she would like to be so filled by her own destiny that she would not think at all of the man who had unleashed it. Walter's love is for her only a "finer para- sitism, a nesting oneself in an alien soul"; she would like to shake it off.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1581
4· "Being able to forbid oneself something harmful is a sign of vital- ity"-she will not allow Walter into her bed. "The harmful lures the ex- hausted person. "
5· Later: "Illness itself can be a stimulus to life, but one has to be healthy enough for this stimulus. "
6. Decadence is for instance the agitated perspective that Wagnerian art compels, "which forces one to change one's position in regard to it at every moment. " That is directed squarely at Ulrich, who sees in this changing of positions the energy of the future.
7· But then she disconcerts him with things that he believes too: "What characterizes all literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and jumps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the sense of the page, the page takes on life at the expense of the whole-the whole is no longer a whole. That's the sign ofevery decadent style: . . . Anarchy of the atoms, dispersion of the will . . . Life pushed back into the smallest structures . . . the remainder poor in vitality" (Voluntarism. A direct power against what is soft, boyish in Ulrich. )
8. Prophetic:". . . that in cultures in decline, that everywhere where the power ofdecision falls into the hands ofthe masses, what is genuine becomes superfluous, disadvantageous, ignored. Only the actor still evokes great enthusiasm. This means that the golden age for the actor is dawning. " Talma: What is supposed to affect one as true can be not true.
g. Against Walter: "The healthy organism does not fight off illness with reasons-one does not contradict a disease-but with inhibition, mistrust, peevishness, disgust, . . . as ifthere were a great danger slinking around in it. "
1 0 . Against Ulrich: "Innocence among oppositions . . . this is almost a definition of modernity. Biologically, modem man represents a contra- diction of values, he sits between two stools, in the same breath he says yes and no . . . All of us have, against our knowledge, against our will, values, statements, formulas, and moralities of opposing lineages within us-physiologically regarded, we are false . . . a diagnostic ofthe modem soul-where would it begin? With a decisive incision into this contradic- toriness ofinstinct . . . "
11. "Everything that is good makes me fruitful. I have no other grati- tude . . . "
1582 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES Clarisse
Nietzsche asks: Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual pref- erence for the hardness, the horrible, evil, problematic aspects of exis- tence? (from fullness of existence) Ulrich and Clarisse come together in this intellectual preference. It separates Clarisse from Walter. So that here the problem ofadultery starts right offwith the intellect. "Depth of the antimoral propensity. "
The desire for the terrible as the worthy foe is one of the forebodings that seize her as she reads Nietzsche. Predisposition to her falling sick.
Nietzsche regards dialectic, the contentedness of the theoretically ori- ented person, as signs of decline, science as a delicate self-defense against truth, an evasion. Here Ulrich distances himself from Nietzsche, for he is enthusiastic about this theoretical person. Indeed, otherwise one would arrive at an imbecilic idolatry of life; but Ulrich runs aground with the ultimate ataraxia [stoical indifference-TRANs. ] of the theoreti- cally oriented person.
This could already be initiated in [Part] I and determine the situation in which he encounters Agathe.
What fascinates him so about Nietzsche, and fascinates Clarisse as well, is Nietzsche's intervention on behalf of the artistic person. He writes for artists who have the ancillary disposition of analytic and retro- spective capacities, an exceptional kind of artist-therefore really for Ul- rich. That Nietzsche says he really does not want to appeal to this kind of artist (but apparently to ones who are less divided) is something Ulrich passes over; that is something which youth reserves to itself as an achievement that it will reveal.
Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of the degeneration, the decay, of a superannuated civilization? Are there perhaps . . . neu- roses of health? Of the youth and youthfulness of the Volk? What does the synthesis of god and he-goat in the satyr show? From what experi- ence of the self, in response to what impulse, was the Greek led to imag- ine the Dionysian enthusiast and primal man as a satyr? And concerning the origin of the chorus in tragedy: were there perhaps in those centu- ries in which the Greek body blossomed, and the Greek soul overflowed with life, endemic transports? Visions and hallucinations that imparted themselves to entire communities, whole gatherings of cults? What if the Greeks, precisely in the abundance of their youth, had the will to the tragic and were pessimists? What if it was precisely madness, to employ a term of Plato's, that brought the greatest blessings to Hellas? And if, on the other hand and inversely, what if it was precisely in the periods of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1583
their dissolution and weakness that the Greeks became increasingly op- timistic, more superficial, more theatrical, also, according to the logic and logicizing of the world, more ardent-that is to say, at once more cheerful and more scientific?
In the Preface addressed to Richard Wagner,O art-and not moral- ity-is already posited as the real metaphysical activity of mankind; in the book itself, the pertinent sentence that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon recurs several times.
. . . betrays a spirit that will at some point, at whatever risk, set itself against the moral explication of existence.
The world ofideas in Clarisse's insanity 1
Life is motion. Therefore never-ending. After death, life again dis- solves into motion.
Since the motion is never-ending, nothing remains unrevenged. To break out of this chain, the mind must dissolve into harmony before it dies and enters cosmic space. That is the idea of Nirvana, which there- fore, accordingly, also issues "unrevenged" from the feeling of guilt; the longing for harmony is the desire to emerge from this condition.
Do you believe in the migration of souls, hell, purgatory? she ex- claims. Perhaps some individuals have attained Nirvana in their earthly life, but then they were the final links in a long chain of people---"in their person the ring closed" (Wagner's magic world again comes to life). But everyone else runs around laden with guilt and shame, tor- tured, reviled, from the first day of their lives onward, sacrifices to a crime committed before their birth.
But there is justice. What we call injustice is only the path to eternal justice.
The earth cannot perish before Nirvana has been attained.
She also explains it mathematically: births and deaths balance each other (everyone who is born dies, a tremendous discovery! ), therefore the souls of modern people are the souls of ancient people. There are no free souls!
Even Darwinism agrees with this: in human beings, animal instincts are in many people reincarnated animal faces. They are still burdened with the animal soul.
"Musil is referring to Nietzsche"s Birth ofTragedy. -TRANs.
1584 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
liquidation . . .
Ideas become clearer and more banal. Clearing, boring sky. Only a deep sadness remains.
The world ofideas in Clarisse's insanity 2
King Ludwig was lying facing her already in Venice.
This is associated with the idea: Between Wagner and Nietzsche stood the snake. This snake is Ludwig, the "feminine king," who loves the artist and in doing so robs him of his only dignity. Evidently the re- flex of her resistance against her sexual role as a woman for Walter; the same thing disappointed her in Ulrich, and in the Greek it struck her so strongly that he was free of it. Therefore a single line of action. Even in Munich, Walter and Ulrich appeared to her in their "sinful shapes. "
Nietzsche, the great friend, turned away horrified from this ignominy, and from that time on had to follow his solitary path alone. Here she identifies herselfwith Nietzsche.
What was done to him and to her is "a sin against the holy spirit. " It must be "reconciled by a human sacrifice. " Nietzsche's d e a t h - a second Christ.
Yet neither Christ nor Nietzsche could redeem mankind from evil: "People remain people. "
"Destiny hovers over us, a second reality," is how she expressed her impotence simultaneously with the thought that in spite of her prede- cessors she had to suffer.
In between, the thought crosses her mind: "Between Nietzsche and Wagner stood Jewry! "
The thought later goes on: There are two realities!
"One" is called: "The way I see it''-
The "Other": "The way I don't see it. "
They are the same ideas as before, but they no longer have the com-
ponents of manic redemption.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1585 The world ofideas in Clarisse's insanity 3
In the clinic in Munich she sees a fat blond woman with a masculine voice, a Polish woman. Immediately the thought "OveJWoman" springs to her mind. She thinks it over. This person before her is a primitive example. She thinks of Semiramis, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of Austria. She is helpless because she has no books.
Such women have superhuman strength.
Her thoughts veer off: even before Nietzsche there were Overmen, she discovers: Napoleon, Jesus Christ. Suddenly she thinks: Christ was ignorant. Like her. That's why in our reckoning of time, our epoch, he is one of the most mysterious figures. For she is locked up.
The world ofideas in Clarisse's insanity 4
Sometimes she slips into confused cursing. Men today are horrible idiots, cowards, weaklings, with no backbone, without courage, bravery, or stamina.
They are either brutal or soft. They have lost the skill of using the whip with delicacy. Their dress is unaesthetic. Their manner ofthinking cowardly, stupid. Their eyes blue or black (Ulrich and Walter).
If from time to time one comes across a man of chivalric appearance, with steely muscles-he is certainly abnormal, therefore no man either. Suddenly she realizes: The woman puts on the secret trousers. That's why. She becomes only half natural. She no longer understands how to be a mother. She longs for motherhood. Divine pregnancy is a reminder of Nietzsche. Longingly she imagines the degenerate women on whose
physical beauty the "sucking pulls. " She would like to feel it.
Later these two words occur again, in another context in which no one
understands them. Helplessness of the expression.
Menwomen and womenmen.
Delire adeux: It's a question of two people, one ofwhom is insane and the other predisposed to insanity. The former usually has some talent,
1586 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the latter not a great deal of intelligence. Through constant contact, by being constantly bombarded with confused and inchoate ideas, the pre- disposed person ends up acting like his companion, and gradually the same madness shows up in him. A dependent relationship establishes itself between the two unfortunates; one is the echo of the other:
The impact of confused and inchoate ideas-is not only a danger for the inferior person. Cf. enjoyment of Expressionism and poetry in gen- eral.
Being together with Clarisse in Italy often makes Ulrich feel like a hot-air balloon that can be released at any moment. He lives through the essence of Expressionism. He, who is so precise, writes such poems. At that time poetry had not got to that point.
Happiness is madness, the not-communicable!
LATE 1920S
Ulrich wanted to see Meingast once more; this eagle, who had floated down from Zarathustra's mountains into the domestic life of Walter and Clarisse, made him curious. Following a sudden inspiration, he invited Schmeisser to go with him; he hoped to summon up in his adversary reasons to soften the latter's opposition to him through the impression made by his friends. He said nothing to Agathe about the expedition; he knew she would not come along.
Meingast had now been whiling away a considerable amount of time with his admirers and adherents Walter and Clarisse, part of whose home consisted of a separate, empty room whose windows looked out on the narrow side of the house. Somewhere the couple had dug up an iron bedstead; a kitchen stool and a tin pail served as bath, and aside from these objects the only other thing in the room, which had no curtains, was an empty dish cupboard, in which there were some books, and a small table of unpainted soft wood. Meingast sat at this table and wrote. That was enough to lend the room, even when he was not in it and Cla- risse or Walter glanced in in passing. that ineffable quality of an old cast- offglove that has been worn on a noble and energetic hand.
But now, as Meingast was sitting in the room writing. he knew (moreover) that Cla- risse was standing beneath his window. Working in such a situation was splendid. Meingast's will formed words on the paper, abandoned them, flowed over the windowsill, and arrived at Clarisse, who, wrapped in the "invisible cloak of an electric northern light," was staring obsessively and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1587
absently before her. Meingast did not love Clarisse, but this ambitious pupil whom he paralyzed gave him pleasure. Meingast's pen was driven across the paper by a mysterious power; the nostrils of his sharp, narrow nose quivered like a stallion's, and his beautiful dark eyes glowed. What he had begun under these conditions was one of the most important sec- tions of his new book; but one ought not call this book a book: it was a call, a command, a mobilization order for New People. When Meingast heard a strange male voice beside Clarisse, he interrupted himself and went down.
Ulrich had seen Clarisse right away as he and Schmeisser turned in at the garden gate. She was standing by the fence beside the vegetable gar- den, with her back to the house, quite stiffly and gazing into the dis- tance, blind to the new arrivals. It did not seem that she was aware of her (frozen) position; her attitude seemed more the involuntary copy of sig- nificant ideas with which she was inwardly preoccupied. And so it was. She was thinking: -This time Meingast is transforming himself in our house. He had come to them without saying a word about it, but Clarisse knew that his life contained several of the most remarkable transforma- tions, and was certain that the work he had begun here had something to do with this. The memory of an Indian god, who before every purifica- tion settles down somewhere, mingled in Clarisse's mind with the mem- ory that insects choose a specific spot to change into a chrysalis and the memory of the fragrance of espaliered peaches ripening against the sunny wall of a house; the logical result was that Clarisse was standing in the burning sunshine beneath the window of the shadowy cave into which the prophet had withdrawn. The day before, he had explained to her and Walter that Knecht0 signified, according to its original meaning, youth, boy, page, a man capable of bearing arms, hero; and Clarisse said: - I am his Knecht! She didn't need any words, she merely stood fast, motionless, her face blinded, against the arrows of the sun.
When Ulrich called out to her she turned slowly toward the unex- pected voice, and he immediately discovered that she was disappointed at his coming. There was no longer any mention of her telling him her childhood stories; she had completely forgotten that. Her eyes, which before he went on his trip had always snatched love for him from the very sight of him, observed him now with that insultingly purposeless indifference that is like an extinguished mountain range after one has seen it in the sunlight. Indeed, this is a petty and also quite common experience, this extinction of light in the eyes when they no longer want
•The English cognate is "knight," but Knecht now means fannhand,laborer. -TRANs.
1588 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
anything from what they are looking at; but it is like a small hole in the veil oflife through which nothingness gazes I but it has something ofthe absolute coldness that is concealed beneath the wann blankets oflife, in the absence of the sympathy of empty space.
As Meingast was on his way down, Walter joined him, and it was de- cided, without making many inquiries of the guests, that they would all walk together to the hill with the pine trees that lay halfway between the house and the edge of the woods. When they reached it, Meingast was charmed. The treetops hovered on their coral-colored trunks as dark- green islands in the burning blue ocean of the sky: hard, insistent colors created room and respect for themselves alongside each other; ideas that are as impossible in words as islands on coral trunks, which one does not trust oneself to think without a cowardly smile, were visible and real. Meingast pointed upward with his finger and spoke with Nietzsche: - A yes, a no; a straight line: formula of my happiness! Clarisse, who had thrown herself down on her back, understood him instantly and an- swered, with her eyes in the blueness, holding the words firmly between her teeth like a character in the last act where there is a lot of disjointed talking anyway: -Light-showers ofthe south! Cheerful cruelty! Destiny hovering over one! What need was there to paste sentences together when nature was like an echoing stage; she knew that Meingast would understand her! Walter understood her too. But as always he also under- stood something more. He saw the feminine softness ofhis wife lying in the feminine softness of the landscape; for all around, meadows sloped to the valley in soft billows, and aside from the group of pines, a small quany was the only heroic thing in the midst of a good-natured cor- poreality that moved him to tears because Clarisse saw nothing of it and knew nothing about herself but had of course chosen just the one place where the landscape was in weighty contradiction to itself. Walter was jealous of Meingast, but he was not jealous in the ordinary way; he was as proud as Clarisse was of their new old friend, who had, after all, re- turned laden with fame as, in a way, her own messenger whom she had sent out into the world. Ulrich noticed that in this brief time Meingast had acquired enormous influence over Clarisse, and that jealousy of
Meingast tortured Walter far more than had his previous jealousy of him, Ulrich, for Walter felt Meingast's superiority, while he had never felt Ulrich's, except physically. At any rate, these three people seemed to be deeply entangled in their affairs; they had already been talking to each other for days, and their guests were as little able to catch up with them as with people who have gone into a jungle. Then too, Meingast did not seem to attach any importance to orienting the newcomers, for
From the PosthuTTWUS Papers · 1589
without any consideration he went on talking at the point where the dis- cussion might have been broken off hours or days ago.
-Music-he declared-music is a supraspiritual phenomenon. Not the bandmaster's or nickelodeon music, ofcourse, which rules the thea- ter; and also not the music of the erotics, upon which a lightning-bright explication followed as to who such an erotic person was, in a great zig- zag from the beginnings of art to the present; but absolute music. Abso- lute music is suddenly, like a rainbow, from one end to the other, in the world; it is radiantly vaulted, without advance notice; a world on whir- ring wings, a world of ice, which hovers like a hailstorm in the other world.
Clarisse and Walter listened attentively, flattered. Clarisse, moreover, made note of the chain of ideas "music-ice-hailstorm" in order to use it in the next domestic musical sbuggle with Walter.
Meingast meanwhile, having worked himself up to a high pitch, ex- plained himself by way of examples from the old Italian still-healthy music. He whistled it for them. He had stepped a little to the side and was standing in the meadow like a totem pole, the describing hand long- limbed, his words an interminable monologue. This really had nothing to do anymore with mere art or an exchange ofaesthetic views: Meingast whistled metaphysical examples, absolute shapes, and phenomena of sound that occur only in music and nowhere else in the world. He whis- tled hovering curves or ineffable images of grief, anger, love, and cheer- fulness; challenged the couple to test the extent to which this resembled what in life is understood under the name of music, and expected of Clarisse and Walter that they, pursuing their own feelings, would arrive at the end of a bridge that breaks off in the middle, from which point they would first glimpse the absolute melodic figure as it drifted away in its total ineffability.
Which was also, as it appeared, what happened, diffusing a fixed shud- der ofhappiness over the three ofthem. -Once it's been pointed out, you yourself feel-said Meingast-that music cannot arise out of us alone. It is the image of itself, and just for that reason not merely an image of your feelings. So it's not an image at all. Not anything that would receive its existence through the existence ofsomething else. It is itselfsimply existence, being, scorning every motivation. And then, with a motion of his hand, Meingast pushed music far behind him, where it became the fragment of something greater, -for-he said-art does not idealize, but realizes. One must, to come to the essential point, break entirely with the view that art lifts up, beautifies, or the like, something within us. It is precisely the other way around. Take greed, greatness,
1590 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
cheerfulness, or whatever you like: it is only the hollow earthly charac- terization of processes that are far more powerful than their ridiculous trailing thread, which our understanding seizes in order to pull them down to us. In truth, all our feelings are inexpressible. We press them out in drops and think that these drops are our feelings. But they are clouds rushing away! All our experiences are more than we experience of them. I could now simply apply the example of music to this; all our experiences would then be of the essence of music, were it not sur- rounded by a still greater circle. F o r -
But here an interruption ensued, for Schmeisser, whose lips had long mated dryly together, could no longer restrain the birth of an objection. He said loudly: - I f you derive the birth of morality from the spirit of music, you're forgetting that all the emotions you might care to talk about receive their meaning from middle-class habits and middle-class assumptions!
Meingast turned amicably to the young man. -When, ten years ago, I came to Zurich for the first time-he said slowly-something ofthat sort would have been considered revolutionary. At that time you would have had great success with your inteijection. I may tell you that it was there that I received my first spiritual training, in the left wing of your party, which had members from all the countries of the world. But today it is clear to us that the creative accomplishment of Social Democracy-he emphasized the component "Democracy"-has so far remained zero, and will never get beyond whitewashing the cultural content of liberal- ism as neorevolutionary!
Schmeisser had no intention of responding to this. It was sufficient that he threw back his hair with a shake of his neck muscles and smiled with sternly closed lips. One could perhaps also say: Oh, don't let me bother you! He was thinking that a few lines in The Shoemaker, a few juicily pointed sarcastic comments, would be appropriate anytime as warning yet again against bourgeois like these, who never stuck it out for long in the movement. But Ulrich interrupted: -Don't run him through with a quotation from Marx; Herr Meingast would answer with Goethe, and we'd never get home today! But still Schmeisser let himself be car- ried away, because he had to say something. Since he lacked the will to do battle his answer was too modest. He simply said: - T h e new culture that socialism has brought into the world is the feeling of solidarity. . . . The response was not immediate; Meingast seemed to be leaving him- self time. He replied slowly: -That's correct. But it's precious little. Now Schmeisser lost his patience: -So-called academic learning-he exclaimed-has long since lost its right to be taken seriously as an intel- lectual center! Poking around among antiquities, pasting together trea-
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1591
tises about the poems of some fifth-rate writer, cramming Roman un- Law; that only breeds empty arrogance. The workers' movement, with its definable goals, has long been developing the real intellectual work- ers, the fighters in the class struggle with their clear aims, who are going to do away with the barbarism of exploitation, and they are the ones who will create the foundations for a culture of the future!
Now it was Meingast's turn to get angry; for years he had not felt as warmly about the culture of the present as he did now, faced with this battler for the future. But with a good-natured motion, Meingast cut off his counterattack. -W e are really not at all as far apart as you think, he answered Schmeisser. - 1 don't think much of academic learning either, and I, too, believe that a new feeling of community, a turning away from the individualism of the most recent age, signifies the most important development under way today. B u t - And again Meingast stood in the meadow like a totem pole, stretching out the hand that descriptively ac- companied his words, and could continue precisely where he had been interrupted: But that had happened before his new doctrine of the will. By "will" one was not, of course, to understand something like the inten- tion of seeking out a specific business because its drawing paper is cheaper, or composing a poem meant to be arrhythmic because up to then all other poems had been rhythmic. Nor was trampling on a supe- rior in order to get ahead a sign ofwill. On the contrary, that's merely the scum ofwill, caused by the many obstacles that today stand in the way of will, and is, therefore, broken will. That one applies the word "will" to such things is a sign that its true meaning is no longer felt. Meingast's charter was the unbroken cosmic stream of will. He illustrated its ap- pearance by great men like Napoleon. Compare Shaw's assertion that it is only great men who do anything, and that in vain. The will of such people is uninterrupted activity, an art of burning up like breathing, it must incessantly produce heat and movement, and for such natures standing still and turning back are equivalent to death. But one can illus- trate this just as well by the will of primeval mythic times; when the wheel was invented, language, fire, religion: those were breakthroughs with which nothing since can be compared. At most in Homer there are perhaps the last traces of this great simplicity of the will and collected creative energy. Now Meingast brought together with extraordinary force these two discrepant examples: It was no accident that they were talking about a statesman and an artist. -For, ifyou all remember what I was telling you about music, the aesthetic phenomenon is that which needs nothing in addition to itself; as a phenomenon it is already all that it can possibly be: in other words, purely realized will! Will belongs not to morality but to aesthetics, to unmotivated phenomena. There are
1592 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
three conclusions that can be drawn from this: First, the world can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon; every attempt to give it a moral basis has failed up to now, and now we can understand why it must be that way. Second, our statesmen must, as the ancient wisdom of Plato already demanded, learn music again; and Plato drew his impetus for this from the wisdom ofthe East. Third, systematically executed cru- elty is the only means now available for the European peoples, still stupefied by humanitarianism, to find their strength again!
Even though this conversation might at times have been rather opaque to ear and understanding, it was different with eye and feeling; it came tumbling down from a philosophical height where everything is in any case One, and Clarisse felt its onrush. She was enthusiastic. All the emotions in her were stirred up and swam, if one may put it this way, once more in feeling. For a while she had placed herself in the meadow not far from Meingast in order to hear better and to be able to conceal her excitement behind a glance that appeared to be distractedly gazing into the distance. But the inner burning of the world of which Meingast spoke opened her thoughts like nuts bursting with flames. Strange things became clear to her: summer noons, freezing with the fever of light; starry nights, mute as fish with gold scales; experiences without reflection or preparation that sometimes overcame her and remained without response, indeed really without content; tension, whenever she made music, certainly, today, worse than any concert pianist, but to the absolute best of her ability and clearly, with the uncanny feeling that something titanic, nameless experiences, a still-nameless person, greater than the greatest music can encompass, was forcing itself against the limits of her fingers. Now she understood her battles with Walter: they were suddenly moments as when a boat glides over an infinite chasm; in words, perhaps not comprehensible to anyone else. Clarisse's fingers and wrists began barely perceptibly to play along; one saw the young woman translating the prophet's wisdom into her own bodily will. The effect he had on her was related to the essence of a dance, a dancing wandering. Her feet released themselves from the impoverished and hardened present; her soul released itself from the uncertainty of in- stinct and weakness; the distance reared up; she held a flower with three heads in her hand; to follow after Meingast, following Christ, to redeem Walter, those were the three heads; if they were not, then Clarisse was not thinking it the way one counts or reads, from left to right, but like a rainbow from one end to the other; out ofthis rainbow arose the smell of the closet in which she kept her traveling clothes, then the three flowers consisted of the three terms I seek, self-search, self-seeking-Clarisse had already forgotten what the flower had consisted of before. Walter
From the Posthumous Papers · 1593
was a stem, even Meingast was just a stem, from the soles of her feet Clarisse grew taller and taller, it happened with dizzying speed, before one could hold one's breath, and Clarisse threw herself down in the grass, horrified at her enthusiasm for herself. Ulrich, who was already lying there, had misunderstood her movements, and thoughtlessly tick- led her with a blade of grass. Clarisse shot out sparks of loathing.
Walter had been observing Clarisse, but something he had to talk about drew him more strongly to Meingast. This was Homer. Homer already a phenomenon of decay? No, decay first set in with Voltaire and Lessing! Meingast was probably the most important person one could encounter today, but what he said about music only showed what a mis- fortune it was that throughout his life Walter had felt too crippled to put his own views in the form of a book. He could understand Clarisse so well; he had long seen how she was carried away by Meingast; he felt so sony for her; she was wrong, for despite everything she put the fortis- simo of her enthusiasm into unimportant things; this coupling pregnant with destiny made his feelings for her flare up in great flames. While he was walking over to Meingast, Clarisse lay stretched out in the grass, Ulrich at her side not understanding anything at all, only, by lying there, pushing the optical center of gravity of the picture somewhat in his di- rection; Walter felt totally like an actor walking across a stage; here they were playing out their destiny, their story; in the seconds before he spoke to Meingast he felt lifted out of himself and frozen to icy silence, performer and poet of his self.
Meingast saw him coming. Four paces away like four ages of the world to be strode through. He had recently called Walter's helplessness that of a democracy of feelings, and with that given him the key to his condition, but he had no desire to carry this discussion further, and before Walter reached him he turned to the quarrelsome stranger.
-Perhaps you are a Socialist-Schmeisser answered him-but you are an enemy ofdemocracy!
-W ell, thank God you noticed! Meingast turned completely to face him and succeeded in forgetting Walter and Clarisse. -1 was, as you heard, a Socialist too. But you say that a new culture will arise by itself out of the workers' movement; and I say to you: on the path that social- ism has taken among us, never!
Schmeisser shrugged his shoulders. -The world is certainly not going to be put on a better path by talking about art, love, and the like!
-Who's talking about art? It seems that you haven't understood me in the least. I am of the same opinion as you that the present condition will not last much longer. The culture of bourgeois individualism will perish the way all previous cultures have perished. Of what? I can tell
1594 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
you: Ofthe increase ofall quantities without a corresponding increase of the central quality. Of there being too many people, things, opinions, needs, wills. The firming energies, the perfusing of the community with its mission, its will to get ahead, its community feeling, the connective tissue of public and private institutions: these are not all growing at the same rate; it is rather left far too much to accident and falls further and further behind. The point comes in every culture where this dispropor- tion gets to be too much. From then on, the culture is vulnerable like a weakened organism, and it takes only a push to bring it down. Today the growing complexity of relations and passions can still barely be main- tained.
Schmeisser shook his head. -We'll give the push, when the time comes.
-W hen it comes! It will never come! The materialistic view ofhistory produces passivity! The time will perhaps be here tomorrow. Perhaps it's already here today! You won't take advantage of it, for with democ- racy you ruin everything! Democracy produces neither thinkers nor doers, but gabblers. Just ask yourself what the characteristic creations of democracy are! Parliament and newspapers! What an idea-Meingast exclaimed-taking over from the whole despised bourgeois world of ideas precisely the most ridiculous one, democracy!
Walter had stood irresolute for a moment and then, since politics re- pelled him, joined Clarisse and Ulrich. Ulrich was saying: - S u c h a the- ory functions only when it is false, but then it's a tremendous machine for happiness! The two ofthem seem to me like a ticket machine arguing with a candy machine. But he found no echo.
Schmeisser had stood up to Meingast smiling, without responding. He told himselfthat it made no difference at all what an individual per- son thought.
Meingast was saying: - A new order, structure, cohesion of energy, is what's needed; that is correct. Pseudohistorical individualism and liber- alism have been ruined by mismanagement; that is correct. The masses are coming; that is correct. But their agglomeration must be great, hard, and with the power to do things! And when he had said that he looked probingly at Schmeisser, turned around, plucked a handful of grass, and silently strode away.
Ulrich felt himself superfluous and went off with Schmeisser. Schmeisser did not say a word. -W e're each carrying-Ulrich thought to himself-beside each other two glass balloons on our necks. Both transparent, of different colors, and beautifully, hermetically sealed. For heaven's sake don't stumble, so they don't break!
Walter and Clarisse remained behind on their "stage. "
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 59 5
Addendum: Clarisse notices criminal instincts everywhere (which later lead to war).
The blue parasol of the sky stretched above the green parasol of the pines; the green parasol ofthe pines stretched over the red coral trunks; at the foot of one of the coral trunks Clarisse was sitting, feeling the large, armadillo-like scales of the bark against her back. Meingast was standing to one side in the meadow. The wind was playing with his lean- ness as it does around the fence ofa steel tower; Clarisse thought: Ifone could bend one's ear that way one would hear his joints sing. Her heart felt: I am his younger brother.
The struggles with Walter, those attempted embraces from which she had to push her way out-chiseling herself out, she called it, although she herselfwas not made ofstone-had left behind in her an excitement that at times chased over her skin in a flash, like a pack of wolves; she had no idea where it had broken out from or where it vanished to. But as she sat there, her lmees drawn up, listening to Meingast, who was speak- ing of men's groups, her panties under her thin dress lying as tight as boy's trousers against her thighs, she felt calmed.
- A league or covenant of men-Meingast was saying-is armed love that one can no longer find anywhere today. Today one lmows only love for women. A covenant of men demands: loyalty, obedience, standing one for all and all for one; today the manly virtues have been turned into the caricature of a general obligatory military service, but for the Greeks they were still living eros. Male eroticism is not restricted to the sexual; its original form is war, alliance, united energies. Overcoming the fear of death! He stood and spoke into the air.
-W hen a man loves a woman it is always the start of his becoming a bourgeois: Clarisse completed the thought, convinced. -T ell me, does one have any business wishing for a child in a time like ours?
-Oh God, a child! Meingast warded her off. -Well, yes; only chil- dren! You should desire a child. This eroticism ofthe bourgeoisie, it's all people lmow today, and the only possibility leading to suffering and sac- rifice is by means of a child. And anyway, childbearing is still one of the few great things in life. A certain rehabilitation.
Clarisse slowly shook her head.
On Clarisse
1. "Impoverished life"-This is a concept that makes an impression on her, like decadence. Her version of the fin de steele mood. Drawn from her experience with Walter.
2. Along with Walter she adores Wagner, but with rising opposition; whenever he has played Wagner his hands are covered by a cold damp- ness, so this petit-bourgeois heroism comes out at his fingers, this heroic petit-bourgeois posturing. She imagines an Italian music that is driven beyond itself by the cruel cheerfulness of the blue Italian sky (omen! ), "the destiny over her": "Her happiness is brief, sudden, unannounced, without pardon. " (Omen, but Ulrich at first sees only what is usual for the times. ) "The tanned one," "cynical" (omen! ). She criticizes how empty Walter's face becomes in so many ways when he is making music.
3· Love is to be understood as fate, innocent and therefore cruel- that's how it hovers before her. She means by this: that's how she would like to be so filled by her own destiny that she would not think at all of the man who had unleashed it. Walter's love is for her only a "finer para- sitism, a nesting oneself in an alien soul"; she would like to shake it off.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1581
4· "Being able to forbid oneself something harmful is a sign of vital- ity"-she will not allow Walter into her bed. "The harmful lures the ex- hausted person. "
5· Later: "Illness itself can be a stimulus to life, but one has to be healthy enough for this stimulus. "
6. Decadence is for instance the agitated perspective that Wagnerian art compels, "which forces one to change one's position in regard to it at every moment. " That is directed squarely at Ulrich, who sees in this changing of positions the energy of the future.
7· But then she disconcerts him with things that he believes too: "What characterizes all literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and jumps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the sense of the page, the page takes on life at the expense of the whole-the whole is no longer a whole. That's the sign ofevery decadent style: . . . Anarchy of the atoms, dispersion of the will . . . Life pushed back into the smallest structures . . . the remainder poor in vitality" (Voluntarism. A direct power against what is soft, boyish in Ulrich. )
8. Prophetic:". . . that in cultures in decline, that everywhere where the power ofdecision falls into the hands ofthe masses, what is genuine becomes superfluous, disadvantageous, ignored. Only the actor still evokes great enthusiasm. This means that the golden age for the actor is dawning. " Talma: What is supposed to affect one as true can be not true.
g. Against Walter: "The healthy organism does not fight off illness with reasons-one does not contradict a disease-but with inhibition, mistrust, peevishness, disgust, . . . as ifthere were a great danger slinking around in it. "
1 0 . Against Ulrich: "Innocence among oppositions . . . this is almost a definition of modernity. Biologically, modem man represents a contra- diction of values, he sits between two stools, in the same breath he says yes and no . . . All of us have, against our knowledge, against our will, values, statements, formulas, and moralities of opposing lineages within us-physiologically regarded, we are false . . . a diagnostic ofthe modem soul-where would it begin? With a decisive incision into this contradic- toriness ofinstinct . . . "
11. "Everything that is good makes me fruitful. I have no other grati- tude . . . "
1582 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES Clarisse
Nietzsche asks: Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual pref- erence for the hardness, the horrible, evil, problematic aspects of exis- tence? (from fullness of existence) Ulrich and Clarisse come together in this intellectual preference. It separates Clarisse from Walter. So that here the problem ofadultery starts right offwith the intellect. "Depth of the antimoral propensity. "
The desire for the terrible as the worthy foe is one of the forebodings that seize her as she reads Nietzsche. Predisposition to her falling sick.
Nietzsche regards dialectic, the contentedness of the theoretically ori- ented person, as signs of decline, science as a delicate self-defense against truth, an evasion. Here Ulrich distances himself from Nietzsche, for he is enthusiastic about this theoretical person. Indeed, otherwise one would arrive at an imbecilic idolatry of life; but Ulrich runs aground with the ultimate ataraxia [stoical indifference-TRANs. ] of the theoreti- cally oriented person.
This could already be initiated in [Part] I and determine the situation in which he encounters Agathe.
What fascinates him so about Nietzsche, and fascinates Clarisse as well, is Nietzsche's intervention on behalf of the artistic person. He writes for artists who have the ancillary disposition of analytic and retro- spective capacities, an exceptional kind of artist-therefore really for Ul- rich. That Nietzsche says he really does not want to appeal to this kind of artist (but apparently to ones who are less divided) is something Ulrich passes over; that is something which youth reserves to itself as an achievement that it will reveal.
Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of the degeneration, the decay, of a superannuated civilization? Are there perhaps . . . neu- roses of health? Of the youth and youthfulness of the Volk? What does the synthesis of god and he-goat in the satyr show? From what experi- ence of the self, in response to what impulse, was the Greek led to imag- ine the Dionysian enthusiast and primal man as a satyr? And concerning the origin of the chorus in tragedy: were there perhaps in those centu- ries in which the Greek body blossomed, and the Greek soul overflowed with life, endemic transports? Visions and hallucinations that imparted themselves to entire communities, whole gatherings of cults? What if the Greeks, precisely in the abundance of their youth, had the will to the tragic and were pessimists? What if it was precisely madness, to employ a term of Plato's, that brought the greatest blessings to Hellas? And if, on the other hand and inversely, what if it was precisely in the periods of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1583
their dissolution and weakness that the Greeks became increasingly op- timistic, more superficial, more theatrical, also, according to the logic and logicizing of the world, more ardent-that is to say, at once more cheerful and more scientific?
In the Preface addressed to Richard Wagner,O art-and not moral- ity-is already posited as the real metaphysical activity of mankind; in the book itself, the pertinent sentence that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon recurs several times.
. . . betrays a spirit that will at some point, at whatever risk, set itself against the moral explication of existence.
The world ofideas in Clarisse's insanity 1
Life is motion. Therefore never-ending. After death, life again dis- solves into motion.
Since the motion is never-ending, nothing remains unrevenged. To break out of this chain, the mind must dissolve into harmony before it dies and enters cosmic space. That is the idea of Nirvana, which there- fore, accordingly, also issues "unrevenged" from the feeling of guilt; the longing for harmony is the desire to emerge from this condition.
Do you believe in the migration of souls, hell, purgatory? she ex- claims. Perhaps some individuals have attained Nirvana in their earthly life, but then they were the final links in a long chain of people---"in their person the ring closed" (Wagner's magic world again comes to life). But everyone else runs around laden with guilt and shame, tor- tured, reviled, from the first day of their lives onward, sacrifices to a crime committed before their birth.
But there is justice. What we call injustice is only the path to eternal justice.
The earth cannot perish before Nirvana has been attained.
She also explains it mathematically: births and deaths balance each other (everyone who is born dies, a tremendous discovery! ), therefore the souls of modern people are the souls of ancient people. There are no free souls!
Even Darwinism agrees with this: in human beings, animal instincts are in many people reincarnated animal faces. They are still burdened with the animal soul.
"Musil is referring to Nietzsche"s Birth ofTragedy. -TRANs.
1584 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
liquidation . . .
Ideas become clearer and more banal. Clearing, boring sky. Only a deep sadness remains.
The world ofideas in Clarisse's insanity 2
King Ludwig was lying facing her already in Venice.
This is associated with the idea: Between Wagner and Nietzsche stood the snake. This snake is Ludwig, the "feminine king," who loves the artist and in doing so robs him of his only dignity. Evidently the re- flex of her resistance against her sexual role as a woman for Walter; the same thing disappointed her in Ulrich, and in the Greek it struck her so strongly that he was free of it. Therefore a single line of action. Even in Munich, Walter and Ulrich appeared to her in their "sinful shapes. "
Nietzsche, the great friend, turned away horrified from this ignominy, and from that time on had to follow his solitary path alone. Here she identifies herselfwith Nietzsche.
What was done to him and to her is "a sin against the holy spirit. " It must be "reconciled by a human sacrifice. " Nietzsche's d e a t h - a second Christ.
Yet neither Christ nor Nietzsche could redeem mankind from evil: "People remain people. "
"Destiny hovers over us, a second reality," is how she expressed her impotence simultaneously with the thought that in spite of her prede- cessors she had to suffer.
In between, the thought crosses her mind: "Between Nietzsche and Wagner stood Jewry! "
The thought later goes on: There are two realities!
"One" is called: "The way I see it''-
The "Other": "The way I don't see it. "
They are the same ideas as before, but they no longer have the com-
ponents of manic redemption.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1585 The world ofideas in Clarisse's insanity 3
In the clinic in Munich she sees a fat blond woman with a masculine voice, a Polish woman. Immediately the thought "OveJWoman" springs to her mind. She thinks it over. This person before her is a primitive example. She thinks of Semiramis, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of Austria. She is helpless because she has no books.
Such women have superhuman strength.
Her thoughts veer off: even before Nietzsche there were Overmen, she discovers: Napoleon, Jesus Christ. Suddenly she thinks: Christ was ignorant. Like her. That's why in our reckoning of time, our epoch, he is one of the most mysterious figures. For she is locked up.
The world ofideas in Clarisse's insanity 4
Sometimes she slips into confused cursing. Men today are horrible idiots, cowards, weaklings, with no backbone, without courage, bravery, or stamina.
They are either brutal or soft. They have lost the skill of using the whip with delicacy. Their dress is unaesthetic. Their manner ofthinking cowardly, stupid. Their eyes blue or black (Ulrich and Walter).
If from time to time one comes across a man of chivalric appearance, with steely muscles-he is certainly abnormal, therefore no man either. Suddenly she realizes: The woman puts on the secret trousers. That's why. She becomes only half natural. She no longer understands how to be a mother. She longs for motherhood. Divine pregnancy is a reminder of Nietzsche. Longingly she imagines the degenerate women on whose
physical beauty the "sucking pulls. " She would like to feel it.
Later these two words occur again, in another context in which no one
understands them. Helplessness of the expression.
Menwomen and womenmen.
Delire adeux: It's a question of two people, one ofwhom is insane and the other predisposed to insanity. The former usually has some talent,
1586 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the latter not a great deal of intelligence. Through constant contact, by being constantly bombarded with confused and inchoate ideas, the pre- disposed person ends up acting like his companion, and gradually the same madness shows up in him. A dependent relationship establishes itself between the two unfortunates; one is the echo of the other:
The impact of confused and inchoate ideas-is not only a danger for the inferior person. Cf. enjoyment of Expressionism and poetry in gen- eral.
Being together with Clarisse in Italy often makes Ulrich feel like a hot-air balloon that can be released at any moment. He lives through the essence of Expressionism. He, who is so precise, writes such poems. At that time poetry had not got to that point.
Happiness is madness, the not-communicable!
LATE 1920S
Ulrich wanted to see Meingast once more; this eagle, who had floated down from Zarathustra's mountains into the domestic life of Walter and Clarisse, made him curious. Following a sudden inspiration, he invited Schmeisser to go with him; he hoped to summon up in his adversary reasons to soften the latter's opposition to him through the impression made by his friends. He said nothing to Agathe about the expedition; he knew she would not come along.
Meingast had now been whiling away a considerable amount of time with his admirers and adherents Walter and Clarisse, part of whose home consisted of a separate, empty room whose windows looked out on the narrow side of the house. Somewhere the couple had dug up an iron bedstead; a kitchen stool and a tin pail served as bath, and aside from these objects the only other thing in the room, which had no curtains, was an empty dish cupboard, in which there were some books, and a small table of unpainted soft wood. Meingast sat at this table and wrote. That was enough to lend the room, even when he was not in it and Cla- risse or Walter glanced in in passing. that ineffable quality of an old cast- offglove that has been worn on a noble and energetic hand.
But now, as Meingast was sitting in the room writing. he knew (moreover) that Cla- risse was standing beneath his window. Working in such a situation was splendid. Meingast's will formed words on the paper, abandoned them, flowed over the windowsill, and arrived at Clarisse, who, wrapped in the "invisible cloak of an electric northern light," was staring obsessively and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1587
absently before her. Meingast did not love Clarisse, but this ambitious pupil whom he paralyzed gave him pleasure. Meingast's pen was driven across the paper by a mysterious power; the nostrils of his sharp, narrow nose quivered like a stallion's, and his beautiful dark eyes glowed. What he had begun under these conditions was one of the most important sec- tions of his new book; but one ought not call this book a book: it was a call, a command, a mobilization order for New People. When Meingast heard a strange male voice beside Clarisse, he interrupted himself and went down.
Ulrich had seen Clarisse right away as he and Schmeisser turned in at the garden gate. She was standing by the fence beside the vegetable gar- den, with her back to the house, quite stiffly and gazing into the dis- tance, blind to the new arrivals. It did not seem that she was aware of her (frozen) position; her attitude seemed more the involuntary copy of sig- nificant ideas with which she was inwardly preoccupied. And so it was. She was thinking: -This time Meingast is transforming himself in our house. He had come to them without saying a word about it, but Clarisse knew that his life contained several of the most remarkable transforma- tions, and was certain that the work he had begun here had something to do with this. The memory of an Indian god, who before every purifica- tion settles down somewhere, mingled in Clarisse's mind with the mem- ory that insects choose a specific spot to change into a chrysalis and the memory of the fragrance of espaliered peaches ripening against the sunny wall of a house; the logical result was that Clarisse was standing in the burning sunshine beneath the window of the shadowy cave into which the prophet had withdrawn. The day before, he had explained to her and Walter that Knecht0 signified, according to its original meaning, youth, boy, page, a man capable of bearing arms, hero; and Clarisse said: - I am his Knecht! She didn't need any words, she merely stood fast, motionless, her face blinded, against the arrows of the sun.
When Ulrich called out to her she turned slowly toward the unex- pected voice, and he immediately discovered that she was disappointed at his coming. There was no longer any mention of her telling him her childhood stories; she had completely forgotten that. Her eyes, which before he went on his trip had always snatched love for him from the very sight of him, observed him now with that insultingly purposeless indifference that is like an extinguished mountain range after one has seen it in the sunlight. Indeed, this is a petty and also quite common experience, this extinction of light in the eyes when they no longer want
•The English cognate is "knight," but Knecht now means fannhand,laborer. -TRANs.
1588 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
anything from what they are looking at; but it is like a small hole in the veil oflife through which nothingness gazes I but it has something ofthe absolute coldness that is concealed beneath the wann blankets oflife, in the absence of the sympathy of empty space.
As Meingast was on his way down, Walter joined him, and it was de- cided, without making many inquiries of the guests, that they would all walk together to the hill with the pine trees that lay halfway between the house and the edge of the woods. When they reached it, Meingast was charmed. The treetops hovered on their coral-colored trunks as dark- green islands in the burning blue ocean of the sky: hard, insistent colors created room and respect for themselves alongside each other; ideas that are as impossible in words as islands on coral trunks, which one does not trust oneself to think without a cowardly smile, were visible and real. Meingast pointed upward with his finger and spoke with Nietzsche: - A yes, a no; a straight line: formula of my happiness! Clarisse, who had thrown herself down on her back, understood him instantly and an- swered, with her eyes in the blueness, holding the words firmly between her teeth like a character in the last act where there is a lot of disjointed talking anyway: -Light-showers ofthe south! Cheerful cruelty! Destiny hovering over one! What need was there to paste sentences together when nature was like an echoing stage; she knew that Meingast would understand her! Walter understood her too. But as always he also under- stood something more. He saw the feminine softness ofhis wife lying in the feminine softness of the landscape; for all around, meadows sloped to the valley in soft billows, and aside from the group of pines, a small quany was the only heroic thing in the midst of a good-natured cor- poreality that moved him to tears because Clarisse saw nothing of it and knew nothing about herself but had of course chosen just the one place where the landscape was in weighty contradiction to itself. Walter was jealous of Meingast, but he was not jealous in the ordinary way; he was as proud as Clarisse was of their new old friend, who had, after all, re- turned laden with fame as, in a way, her own messenger whom she had sent out into the world. Ulrich noticed that in this brief time Meingast had acquired enormous influence over Clarisse, and that jealousy of
Meingast tortured Walter far more than had his previous jealousy of him, Ulrich, for Walter felt Meingast's superiority, while he had never felt Ulrich's, except physically. At any rate, these three people seemed to be deeply entangled in their affairs; they had already been talking to each other for days, and their guests were as little able to catch up with them as with people who have gone into a jungle. Then too, Meingast did not seem to attach any importance to orienting the newcomers, for
From the PosthuTTWUS Papers · 1589
without any consideration he went on talking at the point where the dis- cussion might have been broken off hours or days ago.
-Music-he declared-music is a supraspiritual phenomenon. Not the bandmaster's or nickelodeon music, ofcourse, which rules the thea- ter; and also not the music of the erotics, upon which a lightning-bright explication followed as to who such an erotic person was, in a great zig- zag from the beginnings of art to the present; but absolute music. Abso- lute music is suddenly, like a rainbow, from one end to the other, in the world; it is radiantly vaulted, without advance notice; a world on whir- ring wings, a world of ice, which hovers like a hailstorm in the other world.
Clarisse and Walter listened attentively, flattered. Clarisse, moreover, made note of the chain of ideas "music-ice-hailstorm" in order to use it in the next domestic musical sbuggle with Walter.
Meingast meanwhile, having worked himself up to a high pitch, ex- plained himself by way of examples from the old Italian still-healthy music. He whistled it for them. He had stepped a little to the side and was standing in the meadow like a totem pole, the describing hand long- limbed, his words an interminable monologue. This really had nothing to do anymore with mere art or an exchange ofaesthetic views: Meingast whistled metaphysical examples, absolute shapes, and phenomena of sound that occur only in music and nowhere else in the world. He whis- tled hovering curves or ineffable images of grief, anger, love, and cheer- fulness; challenged the couple to test the extent to which this resembled what in life is understood under the name of music, and expected of Clarisse and Walter that they, pursuing their own feelings, would arrive at the end of a bridge that breaks off in the middle, from which point they would first glimpse the absolute melodic figure as it drifted away in its total ineffability.
Which was also, as it appeared, what happened, diffusing a fixed shud- der ofhappiness over the three ofthem. -Once it's been pointed out, you yourself feel-said Meingast-that music cannot arise out of us alone. It is the image of itself, and just for that reason not merely an image of your feelings. So it's not an image at all. Not anything that would receive its existence through the existence ofsomething else. It is itselfsimply existence, being, scorning every motivation. And then, with a motion of his hand, Meingast pushed music far behind him, where it became the fragment of something greater, -for-he said-art does not idealize, but realizes. One must, to come to the essential point, break entirely with the view that art lifts up, beautifies, or the like, something within us. It is precisely the other way around. Take greed, greatness,
1590 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
cheerfulness, or whatever you like: it is only the hollow earthly charac- terization of processes that are far more powerful than their ridiculous trailing thread, which our understanding seizes in order to pull them down to us. In truth, all our feelings are inexpressible. We press them out in drops and think that these drops are our feelings. But they are clouds rushing away! All our experiences are more than we experience of them. I could now simply apply the example of music to this; all our experiences would then be of the essence of music, were it not sur- rounded by a still greater circle. F o r -
But here an interruption ensued, for Schmeisser, whose lips had long mated dryly together, could no longer restrain the birth of an objection. He said loudly: - I f you derive the birth of morality from the spirit of music, you're forgetting that all the emotions you might care to talk about receive their meaning from middle-class habits and middle-class assumptions!
Meingast turned amicably to the young man. -When, ten years ago, I came to Zurich for the first time-he said slowly-something ofthat sort would have been considered revolutionary. At that time you would have had great success with your inteijection. I may tell you that it was there that I received my first spiritual training, in the left wing of your party, which had members from all the countries of the world. But today it is clear to us that the creative accomplishment of Social Democracy-he emphasized the component "Democracy"-has so far remained zero, and will never get beyond whitewashing the cultural content of liberal- ism as neorevolutionary!
Schmeisser had no intention of responding to this. It was sufficient that he threw back his hair with a shake of his neck muscles and smiled with sternly closed lips. One could perhaps also say: Oh, don't let me bother you! He was thinking that a few lines in The Shoemaker, a few juicily pointed sarcastic comments, would be appropriate anytime as warning yet again against bourgeois like these, who never stuck it out for long in the movement. But Ulrich interrupted: -Don't run him through with a quotation from Marx; Herr Meingast would answer with Goethe, and we'd never get home today! But still Schmeisser let himself be car- ried away, because he had to say something. Since he lacked the will to do battle his answer was too modest. He simply said: - T h e new culture that socialism has brought into the world is the feeling of solidarity. . . . The response was not immediate; Meingast seemed to be leaving him- self time. He replied slowly: -That's correct. But it's precious little. Now Schmeisser lost his patience: -So-called academic learning-he exclaimed-has long since lost its right to be taken seriously as an intel- lectual center! Poking around among antiquities, pasting together trea-
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1591
tises about the poems of some fifth-rate writer, cramming Roman un- Law; that only breeds empty arrogance. The workers' movement, with its definable goals, has long been developing the real intellectual work- ers, the fighters in the class struggle with their clear aims, who are going to do away with the barbarism of exploitation, and they are the ones who will create the foundations for a culture of the future!
Now it was Meingast's turn to get angry; for years he had not felt as warmly about the culture of the present as he did now, faced with this battler for the future. But with a good-natured motion, Meingast cut off his counterattack. -W e are really not at all as far apart as you think, he answered Schmeisser. - 1 don't think much of academic learning either, and I, too, believe that a new feeling of community, a turning away from the individualism of the most recent age, signifies the most important development under way today. B u t - And again Meingast stood in the meadow like a totem pole, stretching out the hand that descriptively ac- companied his words, and could continue precisely where he had been interrupted: But that had happened before his new doctrine of the will. By "will" one was not, of course, to understand something like the inten- tion of seeking out a specific business because its drawing paper is cheaper, or composing a poem meant to be arrhythmic because up to then all other poems had been rhythmic. Nor was trampling on a supe- rior in order to get ahead a sign ofwill. On the contrary, that's merely the scum ofwill, caused by the many obstacles that today stand in the way of will, and is, therefore, broken will. That one applies the word "will" to such things is a sign that its true meaning is no longer felt. Meingast's charter was the unbroken cosmic stream of will. He illustrated its ap- pearance by great men like Napoleon. Compare Shaw's assertion that it is only great men who do anything, and that in vain. The will of such people is uninterrupted activity, an art of burning up like breathing, it must incessantly produce heat and movement, and for such natures standing still and turning back are equivalent to death. But one can illus- trate this just as well by the will of primeval mythic times; when the wheel was invented, language, fire, religion: those were breakthroughs with which nothing since can be compared. At most in Homer there are perhaps the last traces of this great simplicity of the will and collected creative energy. Now Meingast brought together with extraordinary force these two discrepant examples: It was no accident that they were talking about a statesman and an artist. -For, ifyou all remember what I was telling you about music, the aesthetic phenomenon is that which needs nothing in addition to itself; as a phenomenon it is already all that it can possibly be: in other words, purely realized will! Will belongs not to morality but to aesthetics, to unmotivated phenomena. There are
1592 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
three conclusions that can be drawn from this: First, the world can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon; every attempt to give it a moral basis has failed up to now, and now we can understand why it must be that way. Second, our statesmen must, as the ancient wisdom of Plato already demanded, learn music again; and Plato drew his impetus for this from the wisdom ofthe East. Third, systematically executed cru- elty is the only means now available for the European peoples, still stupefied by humanitarianism, to find their strength again!
Even though this conversation might at times have been rather opaque to ear and understanding, it was different with eye and feeling; it came tumbling down from a philosophical height where everything is in any case One, and Clarisse felt its onrush. She was enthusiastic. All the emotions in her were stirred up and swam, if one may put it this way, once more in feeling. For a while she had placed herself in the meadow not far from Meingast in order to hear better and to be able to conceal her excitement behind a glance that appeared to be distractedly gazing into the distance. But the inner burning of the world of which Meingast spoke opened her thoughts like nuts bursting with flames. Strange things became clear to her: summer noons, freezing with the fever of light; starry nights, mute as fish with gold scales; experiences without reflection or preparation that sometimes overcame her and remained without response, indeed really without content; tension, whenever she made music, certainly, today, worse than any concert pianist, but to the absolute best of her ability and clearly, with the uncanny feeling that something titanic, nameless experiences, a still-nameless person, greater than the greatest music can encompass, was forcing itself against the limits of her fingers. Now she understood her battles with Walter: they were suddenly moments as when a boat glides over an infinite chasm; in words, perhaps not comprehensible to anyone else. Clarisse's fingers and wrists began barely perceptibly to play along; one saw the young woman translating the prophet's wisdom into her own bodily will. The effect he had on her was related to the essence of a dance, a dancing wandering. Her feet released themselves from the impoverished and hardened present; her soul released itself from the uncertainty of in- stinct and weakness; the distance reared up; she held a flower with three heads in her hand; to follow after Meingast, following Christ, to redeem Walter, those were the three heads; if they were not, then Clarisse was not thinking it the way one counts or reads, from left to right, but like a rainbow from one end to the other; out ofthis rainbow arose the smell of the closet in which she kept her traveling clothes, then the three flowers consisted of the three terms I seek, self-search, self-seeking-Clarisse had already forgotten what the flower had consisted of before. Walter
From the Posthumous Papers · 1593
was a stem, even Meingast was just a stem, from the soles of her feet Clarisse grew taller and taller, it happened with dizzying speed, before one could hold one's breath, and Clarisse threw herself down in the grass, horrified at her enthusiasm for herself. Ulrich, who was already lying there, had misunderstood her movements, and thoughtlessly tick- led her with a blade of grass. Clarisse shot out sparks of loathing.
Walter had been observing Clarisse, but something he had to talk about drew him more strongly to Meingast. This was Homer. Homer already a phenomenon of decay? No, decay first set in with Voltaire and Lessing! Meingast was probably the most important person one could encounter today, but what he said about music only showed what a mis- fortune it was that throughout his life Walter had felt too crippled to put his own views in the form of a book. He could understand Clarisse so well; he had long seen how she was carried away by Meingast; he felt so sony for her; she was wrong, for despite everything she put the fortis- simo of her enthusiasm into unimportant things; this coupling pregnant with destiny made his feelings for her flare up in great flames. While he was walking over to Meingast, Clarisse lay stretched out in the grass, Ulrich at her side not understanding anything at all, only, by lying there, pushing the optical center of gravity of the picture somewhat in his di- rection; Walter felt totally like an actor walking across a stage; here they were playing out their destiny, their story; in the seconds before he spoke to Meingast he felt lifted out of himself and frozen to icy silence, performer and poet of his self.
Meingast saw him coming. Four paces away like four ages of the world to be strode through. He had recently called Walter's helplessness that of a democracy of feelings, and with that given him the key to his condition, but he had no desire to carry this discussion further, and before Walter reached him he turned to the quarrelsome stranger.
-Perhaps you are a Socialist-Schmeisser answered him-but you are an enemy ofdemocracy!
-W ell, thank God you noticed! Meingast turned completely to face him and succeeded in forgetting Walter and Clarisse. -1 was, as you heard, a Socialist too. But you say that a new culture will arise by itself out of the workers' movement; and I say to you: on the path that social- ism has taken among us, never!
Schmeisser shrugged his shoulders. -The world is certainly not going to be put on a better path by talking about art, love, and the like!
-Who's talking about art? It seems that you haven't understood me in the least. I am of the same opinion as you that the present condition will not last much longer. The culture of bourgeois individualism will perish the way all previous cultures have perished. Of what? I can tell
1594 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
you: Ofthe increase ofall quantities without a corresponding increase of the central quality. Of there being too many people, things, opinions, needs, wills. The firming energies, the perfusing of the community with its mission, its will to get ahead, its community feeling, the connective tissue of public and private institutions: these are not all growing at the same rate; it is rather left far too much to accident and falls further and further behind. The point comes in every culture where this dispropor- tion gets to be too much. From then on, the culture is vulnerable like a weakened organism, and it takes only a push to bring it down. Today the growing complexity of relations and passions can still barely be main- tained.
Schmeisser shook his head. -We'll give the push, when the time comes.
-W hen it comes! It will never come! The materialistic view ofhistory produces passivity! The time will perhaps be here tomorrow. Perhaps it's already here today! You won't take advantage of it, for with democ- racy you ruin everything! Democracy produces neither thinkers nor doers, but gabblers. Just ask yourself what the characteristic creations of democracy are! Parliament and newspapers! What an idea-Meingast exclaimed-taking over from the whole despised bourgeois world of ideas precisely the most ridiculous one, democracy!
Walter had stood irresolute for a moment and then, since politics re- pelled him, joined Clarisse and Ulrich. Ulrich was saying: - S u c h a the- ory functions only when it is false, but then it's a tremendous machine for happiness! The two ofthem seem to me like a ticket machine arguing with a candy machine. But he found no echo.
Schmeisser had stood up to Meingast smiling, without responding. He told himselfthat it made no difference at all what an individual per- son thought.
Meingast was saying: - A new order, structure, cohesion of energy, is what's needed; that is correct. Pseudohistorical individualism and liber- alism have been ruined by mismanagement; that is correct. The masses are coming; that is correct. But their agglomeration must be great, hard, and with the power to do things! And when he had said that he looked probingly at Schmeisser, turned around, plucked a handful of grass, and silently strode away.
Ulrich felt himself superfluous and went off with Schmeisser. Schmeisser did not say a word. -W e're each carrying-Ulrich thought to himself-beside each other two glass balloons on our necks. Both transparent, of different colors, and beautifully, hermetically sealed. For heaven's sake don't stumble, so they don't break!
Walter and Clarisse remained behind on their "stage. "
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 59 5
Addendum: Clarisse notices criminal instincts everywhere (which later lead to war).
The blue parasol of the sky stretched above the green parasol of the pines; the green parasol ofthe pines stretched over the red coral trunks; at the foot of one of the coral trunks Clarisse was sitting, feeling the large, armadillo-like scales of the bark against her back. Meingast was standing to one side in the meadow. The wind was playing with his lean- ness as it does around the fence ofa steel tower; Clarisse thought: Ifone could bend one's ear that way one would hear his joints sing. Her heart felt: I am his younger brother.
The struggles with Walter, those attempted embraces from which she had to push her way out-chiseling herself out, she called it, although she herselfwas not made ofstone-had left behind in her an excitement that at times chased over her skin in a flash, like a pack of wolves; she had no idea where it had broken out from or where it vanished to. But as she sat there, her lmees drawn up, listening to Meingast, who was speak- ing of men's groups, her panties under her thin dress lying as tight as boy's trousers against her thighs, she felt calmed.
- A league or covenant of men-Meingast was saying-is armed love that one can no longer find anywhere today. Today one lmows only love for women. A covenant of men demands: loyalty, obedience, standing one for all and all for one; today the manly virtues have been turned into the caricature of a general obligatory military service, but for the Greeks they were still living eros. Male eroticism is not restricted to the sexual; its original form is war, alliance, united energies. Overcoming the fear of death! He stood and spoke into the air.
-W hen a man loves a woman it is always the start of his becoming a bourgeois: Clarisse completed the thought, convinced. -T ell me, does one have any business wishing for a child in a time like ours?
-Oh God, a child! Meingast warded her off. -Well, yes; only chil- dren! You should desire a child. This eroticism ofthe bourgeoisie, it's all people lmow today, and the only possibility leading to suffering and sac- rifice is by means of a child. And anyway, childbearing is still one of the few great things in life. A certain rehabilitation.
Clarisse slowly shook her head.
