They do produce something, to which they apply the
impersonal
name of music, but what they produce con- sists for the most part, or at least for the part that is most important to them, of themselves, their sensations, emotions, and their shared experi- ence.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
And alto- gether, of course, it's nothing but the soul of the pharisee, which, once it's got inside a body, imagines that every other body has secret defects!
- I started out by saying-Walter exclaimed indignantly-that ifCla- risse really loved Meingast I could not forbid it.
- T h e n why don't you permit her to love me? Ulrich asked, laughing. -Because you don't like me. And you don't like me because when we were children I beat you up a couple of times. As if I had never run into stronger boys who beat me up! That's so absurd, so narrow-minded and petty. I'm not reproaching you; we all have this weakness of not being able to shake off such things, indeed that such idiotic chance happenings actually form the inner building blocks of our personalities, while our
From the Posthumous Papers · 16og
knowledge is no more than the breeze that blows around them. Who's stronger, then: you or I? Engineer Short or Art Historian Long? A mas- ter wrestler or a sprinter? I think that (the individual) this business has lost a lot of its meaning today. None of us are isolated or individual. To speak in your language: We're instrumentalists who have come together in expectation of playing a marvelous piece, the score for which has not yet been located. So what would happen if Clarisse were to fall in love with me? The idea that one can love only one other person is nothing but a legal (civil law) prejudice that has totally overrun us. She would love you, too, and in those circumstances precisely in the way that suits you best, because she would be free of the gnawing anger that you don't have certain qualities which she also considers important. The only con- dition would be that you would really have to behave toward me as a friend; that doesn't mean you have to understand me, for I don't under- stand the cells in my brain either, although something far more intimate exists between us than understanding! . . . And you could contradict me with all your emotions and thoughts, but only in a certain way: for there are contradictions that are continuations, for example those within our- selves; we love ourselves along with them.
This seemed to Walter like a bucket being emptied down a flight of steps. What Ulrich said spread out and at some point had to stop; he, meanwhile, paced back and forth in the room but couldn't wait for that to happen. He stopped and said: - I must interrupt you. I don't want to either contradict you or agree with you. I have no idea why you're saying these things; it seems to me that you're talking into the air. Both of us are some thirty years old, everything isn't hovering in the air the way it was when we were nineteen, one is something, one has something, and ev- erything you're saying is infinitely humdrum. But what's horrible is that I've had to promise Clarisse to send you out to see her today. Promise me that you'll speak less unreasonably with her than with me!
- B u t for that I'd have to first promise that I'll go. Today I don't have the slightest desire to! Excuse me, I don't feel well either.
-But you must say yes! It doesn't matter to you, you can put up with it; but for days Clarisse has been in an alarming state. And on top of that I've let myself be guilty of a great mistake, repulsive, I assure you; one is sometimes like an animal. I'm worried about her! For a moment the memory overwhelmed him. He had tears in his eyes and looked at Ul- rich angrily through the tears. Ulrich placated him and promised to go.
-G o right now, Walter begged. - I had to leave her all upset. And he hurriedly told Ulrich that Meingast's unexpected departure, which had strangely affected him too, had obviously shaken Clarisse, because since then she was strikingly changed. -You know what she's like-Walter
1610 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
said, a veil of tears again and again running over his eyes-her whole nature keeps her from allowing something she doesn't think right to pre- vail; letting things happen, which our whole civilization is full of, is for her a cardinal sin! He reported the incident with the newspaper, which he himself suddenly saw in a new light. Then he added softly that after Meingast's departure, Clarisse had confessed to him that while he had been there she had often suffered from obsessive ideas, which all added up to her regarding the entire peculiar progression to greatness that Meingast had gone through, since he had left them long ago as an ordi- nary young Lothario, as having their basis in his taking upon himself the sins ofall the people with whom he came into contact and, it turned out, also the sins of Clarisse and Walter himself.
Ulrich must have looked involuntarily at his childhood friend in in- quiry, for Walter instantaneously added a defense. -That only sounds unsettling, he asserted, but it hasn't by any means gone too far. Every- one rises by taking on other people's mistakes and improving them in himself. It was only that Clarisse had an unusually vehement intensity when such problems suddenly got hold of her, and a way of expressing t h e m w i t h o u t m a k i n g a n y c o n c e s s i o n s . - B u t i f y o u k n e w h e r as w e l l as I do, you would find that behind everything that seems strange in her there is an incomparable feeling for the deepest questions of life! Love made him blind, while it made Clarisse transparent for him, all the way to the bottom, where one's thoughts lie, while all distinctions between bright and stupid, healthy and sick minds take place in the shallower layers of what one says and does.
After the scene with her husband, Clarisse had washed her whole body and run out of the house. The blue line of the edge of the woods attracted her; she wanted to crawl in. And while she was running, the sparkling, shining, drop-spraying of the white water was around her, like a hedgehog with outward-pointing needles. She was pursued by an obsessively irritating need for cleanliness. But when she had reached the woods, she plopped down between the first tree trunks behind the bushes at the edge. From there she looked straight into the small, dark, nostril-like open windows of her house, and this already made her feel much better. The smell of herbs burned in the morning sun; growths tickled her; she was comforted by nature's sticking, hard, hot inconsider- ateness. She felt removed from the restrictiveness of her personal
From the Posthumous Papers · I 6 I I
bonds. She could think. It had become obvious that Walter was being destroyed by the attraction she radiated; he hardly needed to sink much further than he had today. So it was up to her to make the sacrifice! (Clarisse got up and walked deeper into the woods. ) What was it, this sacrifice? Such words pop up like a poem (but she wished to conceal herself with this word, in order to get behind it). The word "sacrifice" followed (first) the same way it followed that she bore within herself the soul ofa murderer, and, especially after the scene with her husband, she had to assume that she also concealed in herself the soul of a satyr, a he-goat. Uke is, after all, only attracted by like. But whoever sees must sacrifice himself: that is the merciless law by which greatness lives. Cla- risse began to understand; but at the same time that she realized that she bore within herself the soul of a he-goat, the fright that had rolled into her like a block of ice began to melt, and the excitement caused by the body and inhibited by the soul thawed out in her limbs. It was a marvel- ous condition. The contact with the bushes pressed deep into her nerves through her skin; the swelling of the moss under her soles, the twittering of the birds, became sensual and covered the interior of the world with something like the flesh ofa fruit. -Y ou will all deny me when you rec- ognize me! Clarisse thought. As soon as that was thought, it also came to her that Walter would really have to learn to deny her, for that was the only way he could be freed from her. At this thought she was overcome by an immense sadness. -Everyone will deny me, she said once again. - A n d only when you have all denied me will you be grown up. Only when you have all grown up will I return to you! she added. That was like the beginnings ofsplendid poems, whose second lines were already lost in an excess of excitement and beauty. Golgotha Song, she called it. A tension as ifshe would have to break out in a stream oftears at any mo- ment accompanied this incredible achievement. What she admired most deeply was the incredible compulsion in this storm of freedom. - I f I were only a little superstitious and not so hardy- she thought-I would really have to be afraid ofmyself! Her thoughts went now one way-as if she were only an instrument on which a strange and higher being were playing, her beautiful idol that gave her answers before she had managed to ask the questions, and built up ideas that came to her like the outlines of whole cities, so that she stopped in astonishment-and now another way, so that Clarisse herself seemed quite empty, a feath- ery light something that had to restrain its steps with effort, for every- thing upon which her eye fell, or every recollection the ray of memory illuminated, led her hurriedly forward and handed her on to the next thing and the next idea, so that Clarisse's thoughts seemed at times to be
1612 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
running alongside her, and a wild race with her body began, until the young woman in her mental alienation was forced to stop and, ex- hausted, throw herself into some beny bushes.
She had found a clearing into which the sun shone, and while she felt the warm earth on which she lay, she stretched herself out as if on a cross, and the nails of the sun's rays penetrated her upward-turned hands.
She had left a note for Ulrich in the house, which said nothing but that she was waiting for him in the woods.
After the conversation with Walter, Ulrich had set out and had indeed found the note. He automatically assumed that Clarisse was hiding somewhere and would make her presence known when he entered the woods. Oppressed by the hot morning, he set out (listlessly) on the path that they were accustomed to taking when they went to the woods, and when he did not find Clarisse, he pushed on at random farther into the forest. From everything Walter had said, what most stuck in his mind was the news that Clarisse was preoccupied with Moosbrugger. As far as he was concerned, Moosbrugger could have been long dead and hanged, for he had not thought about him for weeks, which was quite remarkable when he thought that not all that long ago the image of this crude figure of fantasy had been one of the focal points in his life. - O n e truly feels, as a so-called normal person-he told himself-just as inco- herent as someone who is insane. The heat relaxed his collar and the pores of his face, and slowly entered and emerged from his softened skin. Meeting Clarisse aroused no particularly pleasant expectations. What could he say to her? She had always been what one calls crazy without meaning it seriously; if she were now really to become so, she might perhaps be ugly and repellent, that would be simplest; but what if she was not repellent to him? No; Ulrich assumed that she would have to be. The deranged mind is ugly. In this way he suddenly almost tripped over her, for they both had spontaneously followed the direction of a broad path that was the continuation of the one that had led them to the woods. Clarisse, a patch of color among the colorful weeds and con- cealed from his glance, had seen him coming. She had quickly crawled out into his path and lay there. The many unconscious, manly, and reso- lute shifts in his face, which believed itself unobserved and was living in no more than vegetative rapport with the obstacles through which it was coming toward her, gave her a marvelous sensation. Ulrich only stopped, surprised, when he discovered her lying almost directly beneath him, her smiling glance lifted up to him. She was not in the least ugly.
-W e have to free Moosbrugger, Clarisse declared, after Ulrich had asked her to explain the sudden inspirations he had heard about. -If
From the Posthumous Papers · 1613
there's no other way, we have to help him escape! Of course I know you'll help me!
Ulrich shook his head.
-Then come! Clarisse said. -Let's go deeper into the woods, where we'll be alone. She had jumped up. The senselessly raging will that ema- nated from this small being was like clouds of unfamiliar insects buzzing and swarming among blackberry shoots exhaling their odors in the sun, inhuman but pleasant. -But you're all hot! Clarisse exclaimed. -You'll catch cold among the trees! She took a kerchieffrom her warm body and swiftly threw it over his head; then she climbed up him, disappearing likewise under the kerchief, and, before he could throw her off, kissed him like a high-spirited little girl. Clarisse stumbled, and fell to a sitting position. - I haven't forgiven you-Ulrich threatened grumblingly- that during the time you were in love with this muddlehead Meingast I simply didn't exist for youi-Oh? Clarisse answered. -Y ou don't un- derstand. Meingast is homosexual. So you didn't understand me at all!
-But what's this chatter about redeeming all about? Ulrich asked severely. -That only blossomed because ofhim, didn't it?
- O h , I'll explain that to you. Come! Clarisse assured him.
Ulrich started with what Walter had already told him.
-All right. But that's not the main point. The main point is the bear. -The bear?
-Yes; the pointed muzzle with the teeth that tear everything to
pieces. I arouse the bear in all of you! Clarisse showed with a gesture what she meant, and smiled innocently. - B u t , Clarisse! - O f course! Clarisse said. -Y ou deny me when I'm being honest! But even Walter believes that every person has an animal in him whom he resembles. From which he has to be redeemed. Nietzsche had his eagle, Walter and Moosbrugger have the bear.
- A n d I ? Ulrich asked, curious.
- I don't know yet.
- A n d you?
- I ' m a he-goat with eagle's wings.
So they wandered through the woods, eating berries now and then,
heat and hunger making them as dry as violin wood. Sometimes Clarisse broke off a small dry twig and handed it to Ulrich; he didn't know whether to throw it away or keep it in his hand; as with children, when they do such things, there was something else behind it, for which there was no articulated notion. Now Clarisse stopped in the wilderness, and the light in her eyes shone. She declared: -Moosbrugger has commit- ted a sexual murder, hasn't he? What's that? Desire separated in him from what's human! But isn't that the same in Walter too? And in you?
1614 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Moosbrugger has had to pay for it. Isn't one obliged to help him? What do you say to that? From the foot of the trees came the smell of dark- ness, mushrooms, and decay, from above of sunlit fir twigs.
-W ill you do that for me? Clarisse asked.
Ulrich again said no, and asked Clarisse to come back to the house. She meandered along beside him and let her head droop. They had
gone quite far from the path. -W e're hungry, Clarisse said, and pulled out a piece of old bread she was carrying in her pocket. She gave Ulrich some of it too. It produced a remarkably pleasant-unpleasant feeling, which quieted hunger and tortured thirst. -The mills of time grind dryly---Clarisse poetized-you feel grain after grain falling.
And it occurred to Ulrich without thinking about it much that among these totally meaningless annoyances he felt better than he had in a long time.
Clarisse set about once more to win him over. She would do it herself. She had a plan. She only needed a little money. And he would have to speak to Moosbrugger in her stead, because she wasn't allowed in the clinic anymore.
Ulrich promised. This derring-do fantasy filled up the time. He guarded himself against all consequences. Clarisse laughed.
As they were on the way home, chance had it that they caught up with a man leading a tame bear. Ulrich joked about it, but Clarisse grew seri- ous and seemed to seek protection in the closeness of his body, and her face became deeply absorbed. As they passed the man and the bear, she suddenly called out: -I'll tame every bear! It sounded like an awkward joke. But she suddenly reached for the bear's muzzle, and Ulrich had difficulty pulling her back quickly enough from the startled, growling beast.
The next time, Ulrich met Clarisse at the painter's studio offriends of hers, where a circle of people had gathered and was making music. Cla- risse did not stand out in these surroundings; the role ofodd man out fell to Ulrich instead. He had come reluctantly and felt repugnance among these people, who, contorted, were listening ecstatically. The transitions from charming, gentle, and soft to gloomy, heroic, and tumultuous, which the music went through several times within the space of a quar- ter hour, musicians don't notice, because for them this progression is synonymous with music and therefore with something of the highest dis- tinctionl-but to Ulrich, who at the moment was not at all under the
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1 615
sway of the prejudice that music was something that had to be, this music seemed as badly motivated and unmediated in its progression as the carryings-on of a company of drunks that alternates periodically be- tween sentimentality and fistfights. He had no intention of imagining what the soul of a great musician might be like and passing judgment on it, but what was usually considered great music seemed to him much like a chest with a beautifully carved exterior and full of the contents of the soul, from which one has pulled out all the drawers, so that the contents lie all jumbled together inside. He usually could not understand music as an amalgam of soul and form, because he saw too clearly that the soul of music, aside from rarely encountered pure music, is nothing but the conventional soul of Jack and Jill whipped to a frenzy.
He was, notwithstanding, supporting his head in both hands like the others; he just did not know whether it was because he was thinking of Walter or closing his ears a little. In truth, he was neither keeping his ears entirely closed nor thinking of Walter. He merely wanted to be alone. He did not often reflect about other people; apparently because he also rarely thought about himself as "a person. " He usually acted on the opinion that what one thinks, feels, wants, imagines, and creates could, in certain circumstances, signify an enrichment of life; but what one is signifies under no circumstances more than a by-product of the process of this production. Musical people, on the other hand, are quite often of the opposite opinion.
They do produce something, to which they apply the impersonal name of music, but what they produce con- sists for the most part, or at least for the part that is most important to them, of themselves, their sensations, emotions, and their shared experi- ence. There is more momentary being and less lasting duration in their music, which among all intellectual activities is closest to that of the actor. This intensification, which he was being forced to witness, aroused Ulrich's antipathy; he sat among these people like an owl among songbirds.
And of course Walter was his exact opposite. Walter thought passion- ately and a great deal about himself. He took everything he encountered seriously. Because he encountered it; as if that were a merit that can make one thing into another. He was at every moment a complete indi- vidual and a complete human being, and because he was, he became nothing. Everybody had found him captivating, brought him happiness, and invited him to remain with them, with the end result that he had become an archivist or curator, had run aground, no longer has the strength to change, curses everyone, is contentedly unhappy, and goes off punctually to his office. And while he is in his office something will perhaps happen between Clarisse and Ulrich that could arouse in the
1616 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
person he is, if he should find out about it, an agitation as if the entire ocean of world history were pouring into it; while Ulrich, on the other hand, was far less agitated. But Clarisse, immediately after she had come in-Walter was not there-had sat down beside Ulrich; with her back bent forward, her knees drawn up, in the darkness, for the lights had not yet been turned on, right after the first beats they heard she had spread her hand over his, as ifthey belonged together in the most intimate fash- ion. Ulrich had cautiously freed himself, and that was also a reason for supporting his head with both hands; but Clarisse, when she saw what he was up to, and saw him from the side sitting there just as moved as ev- eryone else, had gently leaned against him, and she had been sitting that way for half an hour now. He was not happy either.
He knew that what he committed over and over was nothing but the opposite error from Walter's. This error gave rise to a dissolution with- out a center; the person was subsumed in an aura; he ceased to be a thing, with all its limitations, as precious as they were accidental; at the highest degree of intensification he became so indifferent toward him- self that the human, as opposed to the suprahuman, had no more signifi- cance than the little piece of cork to which is attached a magnet that draws it back and forth through a network of forces. At the last it had been like that for him with Agathe. And now-no, it was a calumny to put these things next to each other-but even between himself and Cla- risse something was now "going on," was under way, he had blundered into a realm of effects in which he and Clarisse were being moved to- ward each other by forces, forces that showed no consideration for whether, on the whole, they felt an inclination for each other or not.
And while Clarisse was leaning on him, Ulrich was thinking about Walter. He saw him before him in a particular way, as he often secretly saw him. Walter was lying at the edge of some woods, wearing short pants and unbecoming black socks, and in these socks had neither the muscular nor the skinny legs of a man, but those of a girl, of a not very pretty girl, with smooth, unlovely legs. His hands crossed behind his head, he was looking at the landscape over which, one day, his immortal works would roll, and he radiated the feeling that talking to him would be an interruption. Ulrich really loved this image. In his youth, Walter had actually looked that way. And Ulrich thought: What has separated us is not the musio-for he could quite well imagine a music rising as im- personally and beyond things and each-time-once-only as a trail of smoke that loses itself in the sky-but the difference in the attitude of the individual to music; it is this image that I love because it is left over, a remainder, while he surely loves it for the opposite reason, because it swallows up within itself everything that he might have become, until
From the Posthumous Papers · I 6 I 7
finally it became precisely Walter. - A n d really-he thought-all that is nothing but a sign of the times. Today socialism is trying to declare the beloved private self to be a worthless illusion, which should be replaced by social causes and duties. But in this it had long since been preceded by the natural sciences, which dissolved precious private things into nothing but impersonal processes such as warmth, light, weight, and so forth. The object as a matter of importance to private individuals, as a stone that falls on their head or one they can buy in a gold setting, or a flower they smell, does not interest up-to-date people in the least; they treat it as a contingency or even as a "thing in itself," that is, as some- thing that is not there and yet is there, a quite foolish and ghostly person- ality of a thing. One might well predict that this will change, the way a man who deals daily with millions happens to take with great astonish- ment a single banknote in his hand; but then object and personality will have become something different. But meanwhile there exists a quite comical juxtaposition. Morally, for instance, one still looks at oneself somewhat as physics looked at bodies three hundred years ago; they "fall" because they have the "quality" of avoiding heights, or they become warm because they contain a fluid: moralists are still attributing such good or bad qualities and fluids to people. Psychologically, on the other hand, one has already gone so far as to dissolve the person into typical bundles of typical averages of behavior. Sociologically, he is treated no differently. But musically, he is again made whole.
Suddenly the light was turned on. The final notes of the music were still swinging back and forth like a branch someone has just jumped off; eyes sparkled; and the silence before everyone started talking set in. Cla- risse had promptly moved away from Ulrich, but now new groups formed, and she pulled him into a comer and had something to tell him.
-What is the extreme opposite of letting something prevail? she asked him. And since Ulrich did not respond, she herself gave the an- swer. - T o impose oneself! The tiny figure stood elastically before him, her hands behind her back. But she tried to keep her eyes fixed on Ul- rich's, for the words she now had to look for were so difficult that they made her small body stagger. -Inscribe yourself onto something! I say. I thought of that before while we were sitting next to each other. Im- pressions are nothing; they press you in! Or a heap of earthworms. But when do you understand a piece of music? When you yourself create it inwardly! And when do you understand a person? When you do as he does. You see-with her hand she described an acute angle lying hori- zontally, which involuntarily reminded Ulrich of a phallus-our entire life is expression! In art, in love, in politics, we seek the active, the pointed form; I've already told you that it's the bear's muzzle! No, I
1618 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
didn't mean that impressions don't mean anything: they're the half of it; it's marvelously in the word "redeem," the active "re" and the "deem"; she became quite excited by the effort of making herself comprehensi- ble to Ulrich.
But just then the music making started up again-it had been only a short intermission-and Ulrich turned away from Clarisse. He looked out at the evening through the large studio window. The eye first had to adjust to the darkness again. Then wandering blue clouds appeared in the sky. The tips of a tree reached up from below. Houses stood with their backs upward. - H o w should they stand otherwise? Ulrich thought with a smile, and yet there are minutes when everything ap- pears topsy-turvy. He thought of Agathe and was unspeakably de- pressed. This new, small creature, Clarisse, at his side, was rushing forward at an unnatural speed. That was not a natural process, he was quite clear about that. He considered her crazy. There could be no talk of love. But while behind his back the music seemed to him like a circus, it pleased him to imagine running alongside a circling horse jumping hurdles, with Clarisse standing on it erect and shouting "Aie-ya" and cracking her whip.
1930-1934
ON CLARISSE-WALTER
She comes upon Walter in the "studio"; bare, chilly space. He is half- dressed and has a dressing gown on. The brushes are chy, he is sitting over some sketches. He really should have been at the office already.
He is irritated that Meingast went off without saying good-bye, and Clarisse is secretly excited. Possibly here: He really wanted . . . as long as Meingast was in the house . . .
Already from the doorway Clarisse called out to him: Come, come! We're going to Dr. Friedenthal to ask him to entrust Moosbrugger's care to us.
Walter can't tum his head away from her and looks at her.
Don't ask! Clarisse commands.
Could Walter have any more doubts at this moment that her mind was
disturbed? The answer to this question will always be quite dependent on the circumstances. Clarisse looked impetuous and beautiful. The fire
From the Posthumous Papers · z6zg
in her eyes looked exactly like that of a healthy will. And so what her brother Siegmund had said of her, and had recently repeated when Wal- ter again asked him about it, took hold ofWalter: She is excessively ner- vous, you just have to grab her vigorously.
But for the moment it was Clarisse who was doing the vigorous grab- bing: She hopped around Walter incessantly, repeating: Come, come, come! Don't make me have to ask you!
The words seemed to fly around Walter's ears, they confused him. One might have said that he was laying back his ears and digging his feet into the ground the way a horse, a donkey, a calfdoes, with the obstinacy that is the weak creature's strength of will: but to him it represented itself in the form: Now you'll show her who's master!
"Just come along," Clarisse said, "then you'll see why! "
"No," exclaimed Walter. "You'll tell me right this instant what you're up to! "
"What I'm up to? I'm up to something weird. " She had meanwhile begun to gather up in the neighboring room what she needed to go out; now she pulled off her gardening gloves, held them in her hand for a moment, and with a sudden heave flung them among her husband's paint and brush jars. Something fell over, something rolled, something clattered. Clarisse observed the effect on Walter and burst out laughing. Walter got red in the face; he had no desire to hit her but was ashamed of this very lack Clarisse went on laughing and said: You've been crouching over these jars for a year and a day and haven't produced a thing. I'll show you how it's done. I've told you I'll bring out your genius. I'll make you restless, impatient, daring! " Suddenly she was quiet and said seriously: "It's weird, putting oneself on the same level as the in- sane, but it's resolving for genius! Do you believe that we'll ever amount to anything the way we've been going along? Among these jars that are all so nicely round and picture frames that are so nicely rectangular? And with music after supper! Why, then, were all gods and goddesses antisocial? "
Antisocial? Walter asked in astonishment.
If you must be precise: uncriminally antisocial. Because they weren't thieves or murderers. But humility, voluntary poverty, and chastity are also the expression of an antisocial mentality. And how otherwise could they have taught mankind how the world is to be improved but have denied the world for themselves?
Now Walter was so constituted that in spite ofhis initial astonishment he was capable offinding this assertion correct. It reminded him of the question: "Can you imagine Jesus as director ofa mine? " A question that would obviously have to be answered simply and naturally "no," if one
1620 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
could not just as well say "official of the Bureau for Monuments" in place of"mine director," andifone didn't feel the accompanying flash of a ridiculously warm spark of ambition. Obviously there was not only a contradiction but a more profound incompatibility separating two world systems between nurturing the middle class and nurturing the divine, but Walter, despite his already long-determined inclination to the mid- dle class, wanted both, or wanted, what is even worse, to renounce nei- ther, and Clarisse possessed what he had once already felt as "calling upon God," the decisiveness of a resolve that shows no consideration for anything. And so it happened that after she had spoken, he felt exactly as she had said, as if he were jammed up to his knees into the life he had created for himself, like a wedge in a block of wood, while she flitted about in front of him as the restless, impatient, daring one who was ex- perimenting with him. As a man of many talents, he knew that genius lay not so much in talent as in willpower. To the person being overtaken by paralysis, which he intuitively understood himself to be, it seemed related to the fermenting, the must, indeed even to the mere foam. He enviously recognized in her the improbable, the zigzag dots of varia- tions around the mean, the creature that at the edge of the crowd half goes along ahead of it and is half lost within it, which lies in the notion of genius. Clarisse was the only person in whom he loved this, who still linked him to it, and because her association with genius was patho- logical, his fear for her was also a fear for himself. This was how the desire not to listen to her, indeed to show her "the man," as Siegmund, the brother and physician, had advised him to do, arose out of his assent to the words with which she was persuading him and explaining her in- tention, and out of her powerful charm in pleasing him, which she exer- cised in an apparently natural way and without any awareness of contradiction.
So after a short pause Walter said rather roughly: "But now be reason- able, Clarisse, stop that nonsense and come over here! " Clarisse had meanwhile taken off her clothes and was in the process of drawing a cold bath. In her short panties and with her thin arms, she looked like a boy. She felt the stale warmth ofWalter's body close behind her and immedi- ately understood what he was after. She turned around and put her hand on his chest. But Walter reached out to grab her. With one hand he held her arm, and sought with the other to grasp her by the crotch and pull her to him. Clarisse tore at the embrace, and when that didn't help shoved her free hand into Walter's face, into his nose and mouth. His face turned red and the blood trembled in his eyes while he struggled
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 62 1
with Clarisse, but he did not want to let her see that she was hurting him. And when he threatened to suffocate, he had to strike her hand from his face. Quick as lightning she went at it again, and this time her nails tore two bleeding furrows in his skin. Clarisse was free.
They stood this way opposite each other. Neither of them tried to speak. Clarisse was startled by her cruelty, but she was beside herself. Some inteiVention from above had tom her out of herself; she was to- tally turned to the outside, a bush full of thorns. She was in ecstasy. None of the thoughts that had preoccupied her for weeks was any longer in her mind; she had even forgotten what she had just been talking about and what it was she wanted. Her whole self was gone, with the exception of what she needed to defend hersel£ She felt incredibly strong. Just then Walter again snatched at her, this time with all his strength. He had become angry and feared nothing in the whole world so much as becom- ing rational again. Clarisse struck at him. She was instantly ready to scratch again, to bite, to knee him in the groin or shove her elbow in his mouth, and it was not even anger or dislike that determined this, let alone any rational consideration; rather, in some wild way, this struggle made her like him, even though she was ready to kill him. She wanted to bathe in his blood. She did so with her nails and with the short glances, which, shocked, followed his efforts and the small red gutters that opened up on his face and hands. Walter cursed. He swore at her. Vul- gar words, which had no relation to his usual self, came from his mouth. Their pure, undiluted masculinity smelled like brandy, and the need for common, insulting speech suddenly revealed itself to be just as primeval as the need for tenderness. Apparently what was coming out was noth- ing but a grudge against all the higher ambition that had tortured and humiliated him for decades and was finally raising its head against him once more in Clarisse. Of course he had no time to think about this. But he still felt distinctly that he was not merely on the point of breaking her will because Siegmund had advised him that way, but was also doing it on account of the breaking and snapping itself. In some fashion the ri- diculously beautiful motions of a flamingo went through his mind. "We'll see what's left after a bulldog gets hold of itl" was his thought about the flamingo mind, but what he muttered half aloud between his teeth was: "Stupid goose! "
And Clarisse, too, was inspired by the one idea: "He can't be allowed to have his way! " She felt her strength still growing. Her clothes tore, Walter seized the shreds, she seized hold of the neck in front of her. Half naked, slippery as a wriggling fish, she struggled in her husband's arms. Walter, whose strength was not sufficient simply to overpower her, flung her to and fro and painfully sought to block her attacks. She had lost her
1622 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
shoe and kicked at him with her bare foot. They fell. They both ap- peared to have forgotten the goal of their struggle and its sexual origin, and were fighting only to assert their will. In this utmost, convulsive gathering of their selves they really disappeared. Their perceptions and thoughts gradually took on a totally indefinable texture, as in a blinding light. They almost felt amazement at still being alive I that their selves were still there.
Clarisse especially was worked up to such a pitch that she felt insensi- tive to the pain inflicted on her, and when she came to herself again this intoxicated her in the conviction that the same spirits that had recently illuminated her were now standing by her in her mission and fighting on her side. So she was all the more horrified when she was forced to notice that with time she was growing fatigued. Walter was stronger and heavier than she; her muscles became numb and lax. There were pauses where his weight pressed her to the ground and she could not defend herself, and the succession of defensive maneuvers and ruthless attacks against sensitive face and body parts, during which she caught her breath, were succeeded more and more frequently by powerlessness and suffocating poundings of her heart. So that what Walter had antici- pated happened: nature conquered, Clarisse's body left her mind in the lurch and defended its will no longer. It seemed to her as if she were hearing within herselfthe cocks crowing on the Mount of Olives: incred- ibly, God was abandoning her world, something was about to happen that she could not divine. And at moments Walter was already ashamed ofhimself. Like a bolt oflightning, remorse struck him. It also seemed to him that Clarisse looked horribly distorted. But he had already risked so much that he no longer wanted to stop. To continue anesthetizing him- self, he used the excuse that the brutality he was exercising was his right as a husband. Suddenly Clarisse screamed. She made an effort to utter a long, shrill, monotone cry as she saw her will escaping, and in this final, desperate defense it was in her mind that with this cry and what re- mained of her will she could perhaps slip out of her body. But she no longer had much breath left; the cry did not last long and brought no one rushing in. She was left alone. Walter was alarmed at her cry but then angrily intensified his efforts. She felt nothing. She despised him. Fi- nally, she thought of an expedient: she counted as quickly and as loudly as she could: "One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five," over and over. Walter found it horrible, but it did not stop him.
And when they separated and straightened up, in a daze she said: "Just wait. I'll have my revenge! "
NEW IDEAS ABOUT THE CLARISSE-W ALTER-ULRICH COMPLEX
To make Clarisse human, use the problem of genius. Or instead of ge- nius, one can also say: the will to greatness, to goodness. A miserable Prometheus. Genius in that case about the same thing: a person who is an exception. The person who sees the errors, sees what is out ofjoint in the world, and has the will not to let the matter drop.
- I started out by saying-Walter exclaimed indignantly-that ifCla- risse really loved Meingast I could not forbid it.
- T h e n why don't you permit her to love me? Ulrich asked, laughing. -Because you don't like me. And you don't like me because when we were children I beat you up a couple of times. As if I had never run into stronger boys who beat me up! That's so absurd, so narrow-minded and petty. I'm not reproaching you; we all have this weakness of not being able to shake off such things, indeed that such idiotic chance happenings actually form the inner building blocks of our personalities, while our
From the Posthumous Papers · 16og
knowledge is no more than the breeze that blows around them. Who's stronger, then: you or I? Engineer Short or Art Historian Long? A mas- ter wrestler or a sprinter? I think that (the individual) this business has lost a lot of its meaning today. None of us are isolated or individual. To speak in your language: We're instrumentalists who have come together in expectation of playing a marvelous piece, the score for which has not yet been located. So what would happen if Clarisse were to fall in love with me? The idea that one can love only one other person is nothing but a legal (civil law) prejudice that has totally overrun us. She would love you, too, and in those circumstances precisely in the way that suits you best, because she would be free of the gnawing anger that you don't have certain qualities which she also considers important. The only con- dition would be that you would really have to behave toward me as a friend; that doesn't mean you have to understand me, for I don't under- stand the cells in my brain either, although something far more intimate exists between us than understanding! . . . And you could contradict me with all your emotions and thoughts, but only in a certain way: for there are contradictions that are continuations, for example those within our- selves; we love ourselves along with them.
This seemed to Walter like a bucket being emptied down a flight of steps. What Ulrich said spread out and at some point had to stop; he, meanwhile, paced back and forth in the room but couldn't wait for that to happen. He stopped and said: - I must interrupt you. I don't want to either contradict you or agree with you. I have no idea why you're saying these things; it seems to me that you're talking into the air. Both of us are some thirty years old, everything isn't hovering in the air the way it was when we were nineteen, one is something, one has something, and ev- erything you're saying is infinitely humdrum. But what's horrible is that I've had to promise Clarisse to send you out to see her today. Promise me that you'll speak less unreasonably with her than with me!
- B u t for that I'd have to first promise that I'll go. Today I don't have the slightest desire to! Excuse me, I don't feel well either.
-But you must say yes! It doesn't matter to you, you can put up with it; but for days Clarisse has been in an alarming state. And on top of that I've let myself be guilty of a great mistake, repulsive, I assure you; one is sometimes like an animal. I'm worried about her! For a moment the memory overwhelmed him. He had tears in his eyes and looked at Ul- rich angrily through the tears. Ulrich placated him and promised to go.
-G o right now, Walter begged. - I had to leave her all upset. And he hurriedly told Ulrich that Meingast's unexpected departure, which had strangely affected him too, had obviously shaken Clarisse, because since then she was strikingly changed. -You know what she's like-Walter
1610 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
said, a veil of tears again and again running over his eyes-her whole nature keeps her from allowing something she doesn't think right to pre- vail; letting things happen, which our whole civilization is full of, is for her a cardinal sin! He reported the incident with the newspaper, which he himself suddenly saw in a new light. Then he added softly that after Meingast's departure, Clarisse had confessed to him that while he had been there she had often suffered from obsessive ideas, which all added up to her regarding the entire peculiar progression to greatness that Meingast had gone through, since he had left them long ago as an ordi- nary young Lothario, as having their basis in his taking upon himself the sins ofall the people with whom he came into contact and, it turned out, also the sins of Clarisse and Walter himself.
Ulrich must have looked involuntarily at his childhood friend in in- quiry, for Walter instantaneously added a defense. -That only sounds unsettling, he asserted, but it hasn't by any means gone too far. Every- one rises by taking on other people's mistakes and improving them in himself. It was only that Clarisse had an unusually vehement intensity when such problems suddenly got hold of her, and a way of expressing t h e m w i t h o u t m a k i n g a n y c o n c e s s i o n s . - B u t i f y o u k n e w h e r as w e l l as I do, you would find that behind everything that seems strange in her there is an incomparable feeling for the deepest questions of life! Love made him blind, while it made Clarisse transparent for him, all the way to the bottom, where one's thoughts lie, while all distinctions between bright and stupid, healthy and sick minds take place in the shallower layers of what one says and does.
After the scene with her husband, Clarisse had washed her whole body and run out of the house. The blue line of the edge of the woods attracted her; she wanted to crawl in. And while she was running, the sparkling, shining, drop-spraying of the white water was around her, like a hedgehog with outward-pointing needles. She was pursued by an obsessively irritating need for cleanliness. But when she had reached the woods, she plopped down between the first tree trunks behind the bushes at the edge. From there she looked straight into the small, dark, nostril-like open windows of her house, and this already made her feel much better. The smell of herbs burned in the morning sun; growths tickled her; she was comforted by nature's sticking, hard, hot inconsider- ateness. She felt removed from the restrictiveness of her personal
From the Posthumous Papers · I 6 I I
bonds. She could think. It had become obvious that Walter was being destroyed by the attraction she radiated; he hardly needed to sink much further than he had today. So it was up to her to make the sacrifice! (Clarisse got up and walked deeper into the woods. ) What was it, this sacrifice? Such words pop up like a poem (but she wished to conceal herself with this word, in order to get behind it). The word "sacrifice" followed (first) the same way it followed that she bore within herself the soul ofa murderer, and, especially after the scene with her husband, she had to assume that she also concealed in herself the soul of a satyr, a he-goat. Uke is, after all, only attracted by like. But whoever sees must sacrifice himself: that is the merciless law by which greatness lives. Cla- risse began to understand; but at the same time that she realized that she bore within herself the soul of a he-goat, the fright that had rolled into her like a block of ice began to melt, and the excitement caused by the body and inhibited by the soul thawed out in her limbs. It was a marvel- ous condition. The contact with the bushes pressed deep into her nerves through her skin; the swelling of the moss under her soles, the twittering of the birds, became sensual and covered the interior of the world with something like the flesh ofa fruit. -Y ou will all deny me when you rec- ognize me! Clarisse thought. As soon as that was thought, it also came to her that Walter would really have to learn to deny her, for that was the only way he could be freed from her. At this thought she was overcome by an immense sadness. -Everyone will deny me, she said once again. - A n d only when you have all denied me will you be grown up. Only when you have all grown up will I return to you! she added. That was like the beginnings ofsplendid poems, whose second lines were already lost in an excess of excitement and beauty. Golgotha Song, she called it. A tension as ifshe would have to break out in a stream oftears at any mo- ment accompanied this incredible achievement. What she admired most deeply was the incredible compulsion in this storm of freedom. - I f I were only a little superstitious and not so hardy- she thought-I would really have to be afraid ofmyself! Her thoughts went now one way-as if she were only an instrument on which a strange and higher being were playing, her beautiful idol that gave her answers before she had managed to ask the questions, and built up ideas that came to her like the outlines of whole cities, so that she stopped in astonishment-and now another way, so that Clarisse herself seemed quite empty, a feath- ery light something that had to restrain its steps with effort, for every- thing upon which her eye fell, or every recollection the ray of memory illuminated, led her hurriedly forward and handed her on to the next thing and the next idea, so that Clarisse's thoughts seemed at times to be
1612 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
running alongside her, and a wild race with her body began, until the young woman in her mental alienation was forced to stop and, ex- hausted, throw herself into some beny bushes.
She had found a clearing into which the sun shone, and while she felt the warm earth on which she lay, she stretched herself out as if on a cross, and the nails of the sun's rays penetrated her upward-turned hands.
She had left a note for Ulrich in the house, which said nothing but that she was waiting for him in the woods.
After the conversation with Walter, Ulrich had set out and had indeed found the note. He automatically assumed that Clarisse was hiding somewhere and would make her presence known when he entered the woods. Oppressed by the hot morning, he set out (listlessly) on the path that they were accustomed to taking when they went to the woods, and when he did not find Clarisse, he pushed on at random farther into the forest. From everything Walter had said, what most stuck in his mind was the news that Clarisse was preoccupied with Moosbrugger. As far as he was concerned, Moosbrugger could have been long dead and hanged, for he had not thought about him for weeks, which was quite remarkable when he thought that not all that long ago the image of this crude figure of fantasy had been one of the focal points in his life. - O n e truly feels, as a so-called normal person-he told himself-just as inco- herent as someone who is insane. The heat relaxed his collar and the pores of his face, and slowly entered and emerged from his softened skin. Meeting Clarisse aroused no particularly pleasant expectations. What could he say to her? She had always been what one calls crazy without meaning it seriously; if she were now really to become so, she might perhaps be ugly and repellent, that would be simplest; but what if she was not repellent to him? No; Ulrich assumed that she would have to be. The deranged mind is ugly. In this way he suddenly almost tripped over her, for they both had spontaneously followed the direction of a broad path that was the continuation of the one that had led them to the woods. Clarisse, a patch of color among the colorful weeds and con- cealed from his glance, had seen him coming. She had quickly crawled out into his path and lay there. The many unconscious, manly, and reso- lute shifts in his face, which believed itself unobserved and was living in no more than vegetative rapport with the obstacles through which it was coming toward her, gave her a marvelous sensation. Ulrich only stopped, surprised, when he discovered her lying almost directly beneath him, her smiling glance lifted up to him. She was not in the least ugly.
-W e have to free Moosbrugger, Clarisse declared, after Ulrich had asked her to explain the sudden inspirations he had heard about. -If
From the Posthumous Papers · 1613
there's no other way, we have to help him escape! Of course I know you'll help me!
Ulrich shook his head.
-Then come! Clarisse said. -Let's go deeper into the woods, where we'll be alone. She had jumped up. The senselessly raging will that ema- nated from this small being was like clouds of unfamiliar insects buzzing and swarming among blackberry shoots exhaling their odors in the sun, inhuman but pleasant. -But you're all hot! Clarisse exclaimed. -You'll catch cold among the trees! She took a kerchieffrom her warm body and swiftly threw it over his head; then she climbed up him, disappearing likewise under the kerchief, and, before he could throw her off, kissed him like a high-spirited little girl. Clarisse stumbled, and fell to a sitting position. - I haven't forgiven you-Ulrich threatened grumblingly- that during the time you were in love with this muddlehead Meingast I simply didn't exist for youi-Oh? Clarisse answered. -Y ou don't un- derstand. Meingast is homosexual. So you didn't understand me at all!
-But what's this chatter about redeeming all about? Ulrich asked severely. -That only blossomed because ofhim, didn't it?
- O h , I'll explain that to you. Come! Clarisse assured him.
Ulrich started with what Walter had already told him.
-All right. But that's not the main point. The main point is the bear. -The bear?
-Yes; the pointed muzzle with the teeth that tear everything to
pieces. I arouse the bear in all of you! Clarisse showed with a gesture what she meant, and smiled innocently. - B u t , Clarisse! - O f course! Clarisse said. -Y ou deny me when I'm being honest! But even Walter believes that every person has an animal in him whom he resembles. From which he has to be redeemed. Nietzsche had his eagle, Walter and Moosbrugger have the bear.
- A n d I ? Ulrich asked, curious.
- I don't know yet.
- A n d you?
- I ' m a he-goat with eagle's wings.
So they wandered through the woods, eating berries now and then,
heat and hunger making them as dry as violin wood. Sometimes Clarisse broke off a small dry twig and handed it to Ulrich; he didn't know whether to throw it away or keep it in his hand; as with children, when they do such things, there was something else behind it, for which there was no articulated notion. Now Clarisse stopped in the wilderness, and the light in her eyes shone. She declared: -Moosbrugger has commit- ted a sexual murder, hasn't he? What's that? Desire separated in him from what's human! But isn't that the same in Walter too? And in you?
1614 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Moosbrugger has had to pay for it. Isn't one obliged to help him? What do you say to that? From the foot of the trees came the smell of dark- ness, mushrooms, and decay, from above of sunlit fir twigs.
-W ill you do that for me? Clarisse asked.
Ulrich again said no, and asked Clarisse to come back to the house. She meandered along beside him and let her head droop. They had
gone quite far from the path. -W e're hungry, Clarisse said, and pulled out a piece of old bread she was carrying in her pocket. She gave Ulrich some of it too. It produced a remarkably pleasant-unpleasant feeling, which quieted hunger and tortured thirst. -The mills of time grind dryly---Clarisse poetized-you feel grain after grain falling.
And it occurred to Ulrich without thinking about it much that among these totally meaningless annoyances he felt better than he had in a long time.
Clarisse set about once more to win him over. She would do it herself. She had a plan. She only needed a little money. And he would have to speak to Moosbrugger in her stead, because she wasn't allowed in the clinic anymore.
Ulrich promised. This derring-do fantasy filled up the time. He guarded himself against all consequences. Clarisse laughed.
As they were on the way home, chance had it that they caught up with a man leading a tame bear. Ulrich joked about it, but Clarisse grew seri- ous and seemed to seek protection in the closeness of his body, and her face became deeply absorbed. As they passed the man and the bear, she suddenly called out: -I'll tame every bear! It sounded like an awkward joke. But she suddenly reached for the bear's muzzle, and Ulrich had difficulty pulling her back quickly enough from the startled, growling beast.
The next time, Ulrich met Clarisse at the painter's studio offriends of hers, where a circle of people had gathered and was making music. Cla- risse did not stand out in these surroundings; the role ofodd man out fell to Ulrich instead. He had come reluctantly and felt repugnance among these people, who, contorted, were listening ecstatically. The transitions from charming, gentle, and soft to gloomy, heroic, and tumultuous, which the music went through several times within the space of a quar- ter hour, musicians don't notice, because for them this progression is synonymous with music and therefore with something of the highest dis- tinctionl-but to Ulrich, who at the moment was not at all under the
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1 615
sway of the prejudice that music was something that had to be, this music seemed as badly motivated and unmediated in its progression as the carryings-on of a company of drunks that alternates periodically be- tween sentimentality and fistfights. He had no intention of imagining what the soul of a great musician might be like and passing judgment on it, but what was usually considered great music seemed to him much like a chest with a beautifully carved exterior and full of the contents of the soul, from which one has pulled out all the drawers, so that the contents lie all jumbled together inside. He usually could not understand music as an amalgam of soul and form, because he saw too clearly that the soul of music, aside from rarely encountered pure music, is nothing but the conventional soul of Jack and Jill whipped to a frenzy.
He was, notwithstanding, supporting his head in both hands like the others; he just did not know whether it was because he was thinking of Walter or closing his ears a little. In truth, he was neither keeping his ears entirely closed nor thinking of Walter. He merely wanted to be alone. He did not often reflect about other people; apparently because he also rarely thought about himself as "a person. " He usually acted on the opinion that what one thinks, feels, wants, imagines, and creates could, in certain circumstances, signify an enrichment of life; but what one is signifies under no circumstances more than a by-product of the process of this production. Musical people, on the other hand, are quite often of the opposite opinion.
They do produce something, to which they apply the impersonal name of music, but what they produce con- sists for the most part, or at least for the part that is most important to them, of themselves, their sensations, emotions, and their shared experi- ence. There is more momentary being and less lasting duration in their music, which among all intellectual activities is closest to that of the actor. This intensification, which he was being forced to witness, aroused Ulrich's antipathy; he sat among these people like an owl among songbirds.
And of course Walter was his exact opposite. Walter thought passion- ately and a great deal about himself. He took everything he encountered seriously. Because he encountered it; as if that were a merit that can make one thing into another. He was at every moment a complete indi- vidual and a complete human being, and because he was, he became nothing. Everybody had found him captivating, brought him happiness, and invited him to remain with them, with the end result that he had become an archivist or curator, had run aground, no longer has the strength to change, curses everyone, is contentedly unhappy, and goes off punctually to his office. And while he is in his office something will perhaps happen between Clarisse and Ulrich that could arouse in the
1616 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
person he is, if he should find out about it, an agitation as if the entire ocean of world history were pouring into it; while Ulrich, on the other hand, was far less agitated. But Clarisse, immediately after she had come in-Walter was not there-had sat down beside Ulrich; with her back bent forward, her knees drawn up, in the darkness, for the lights had not yet been turned on, right after the first beats they heard she had spread her hand over his, as ifthey belonged together in the most intimate fash- ion. Ulrich had cautiously freed himself, and that was also a reason for supporting his head with both hands; but Clarisse, when she saw what he was up to, and saw him from the side sitting there just as moved as ev- eryone else, had gently leaned against him, and she had been sitting that way for half an hour now. He was not happy either.
He knew that what he committed over and over was nothing but the opposite error from Walter's. This error gave rise to a dissolution with- out a center; the person was subsumed in an aura; he ceased to be a thing, with all its limitations, as precious as they were accidental; at the highest degree of intensification he became so indifferent toward him- self that the human, as opposed to the suprahuman, had no more signifi- cance than the little piece of cork to which is attached a magnet that draws it back and forth through a network of forces. At the last it had been like that for him with Agathe. And now-no, it was a calumny to put these things next to each other-but even between himself and Cla- risse something was now "going on," was under way, he had blundered into a realm of effects in which he and Clarisse were being moved to- ward each other by forces, forces that showed no consideration for whether, on the whole, they felt an inclination for each other or not.
And while Clarisse was leaning on him, Ulrich was thinking about Walter. He saw him before him in a particular way, as he often secretly saw him. Walter was lying at the edge of some woods, wearing short pants and unbecoming black socks, and in these socks had neither the muscular nor the skinny legs of a man, but those of a girl, of a not very pretty girl, with smooth, unlovely legs. His hands crossed behind his head, he was looking at the landscape over which, one day, his immortal works would roll, and he radiated the feeling that talking to him would be an interruption. Ulrich really loved this image. In his youth, Walter had actually looked that way. And Ulrich thought: What has separated us is not the musio-for he could quite well imagine a music rising as im- personally and beyond things and each-time-once-only as a trail of smoke that loses itself in the sky-but the difference in the attitude of the individual to music; it is this image that I love because it is left over, a remainder, while he surely loves it for the opposite reason, because it swallows up within itself everything that he might have become, until
From the Posthumous Papers · I 6 I 7
finally it became precisely Walter. - A n d really-he thought-all that is nothing but a sign of the times. Today socialism is trying to declare the beloved private self to be a worthless illusion, which should be replaced by social causes and duties. But in this it had long since been preceded by the natural sciences, which dissolved precious private things into nothing but impersonal processes such as warmth, light, weight, and so forth. The object as a matter of importance to private individuals, as a stone that falls on their head or one they can buy in a gold setting, or a flower they smell, does not interest up-to-date people in the least; they treat it as a contingency or even as a "thing in itself," that is, as some- thing that is not there and yet is there, a quite foolish and ghostly person- ality of a thing. One might well predict that this will change, the way a man who deals daily with millions happens to take with great astonish- ment a single banknote in his hand; but then object and personality will have become something different. But meanwhile there exists a quite comical juxtaposition. Morally, for instance, one still looks at oneself somewhat as physics looked at bodies three hundred years ago; they "fall" because they have the "quality" of avoiding heights, or they become warm because they contain a fluid: moralists are still attributing such good or bad qualities and fluids to people. Psychologically, on the other hand, one has already gone so far as to dissolve the person into typical bundles of typical averages of behavior. Sociologically, he is treated no differently. But musically, he is again made whole.
Suddenly the light was turned on. The final notes of the music were still swinging back and forth like a branch someone has just jumped off; eyes sparkled; and the silence before everyone started talking set in. Cla- risse had promptly moved away from Ulrich, but now new groups formed, and she pulled him into a comer and had something to tell him.
-What is the extreme opposite of letting something prevail? she asked him. And since Ulrich did not respond, she herself gave the an- swer. - T o impose oneself! The tiny figure stood elastically before him, her hands behind her back. But she tried to keep her eyes fixed on Ul- rich's, for the words she now had to look for were so difficult that they made her small body stagger. -Inscribe yourself onto something! I say. I thought of that before while we were sitting next to each other. Im- pressions are nothing; they press you in! Or a heap of earthworms. But when do you understand a piece of music? When you yourself create it inwardly! And when do you understand a person? When you do as he does. You see-with her hand she described an acute angle lying hori- zontally, which involuntarily reminded Ulrich of a phallus-our entire life is expression! In art, in love, in politics, we seek the active, the pointed form; I've already told you that it's the bear's muzzle! No, I
1618 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
didn't mean that impressions don't mean anything: they're the half of it; it's marvelously in the word "redeem," the active "re" and the "deem"; she became quite excited by the effort of making herself comprehensi- ble to Ulrich.
But just then the music making started up again-it had been only a short intermission-and Ulrich turned away from Clarisse. He looked out at the evening through the large studio window. The eye first had to adjust to the darkness again. Then wandering blue clouds appeared in the sky. The tips of a tree reached up from below. Houses stood with their backs upward. - H o w should they stand otherwise? Ulrich thought with a smile, and yet there are minutes when everything ap- pears topsy-turvy. He thought of Agathe and was unspeakably de- pressed. This new, small creature, Clarisse, at his side, was rushing forward at an unnatural speed. That was not a natural process, he was quite clear about that. He considered her crazy. There could be no talk of love. But while behind his back the music seemed to him like a circus, it pleased him to imagine running alongside a circling horse jumping hurdles, with Clarisse standing on it erect and shouting "Aie-ya" and cracking her whip.
1930-1934
ON CLARISSE-WALTER
She comes upon Walter in the "studio"; bare, chilly space. He is half- dressed and has a dressing gown on. The brushes are chy, he is sitting over some sketches. He really should have been at the office already.
He is irritated that Meingast went off without saying good-bye, and Clarisse is secretly excited. Possibly here: He really wanted . . . as long as Meingast was in the house . . .
Already from the doorway Clarisse called out to him: Come, come! We're going to Dr. Friedenthal to ask him to entrust Moosbrugger's care to us.
Walter can't tum his head away from her and looks at her.
Don't ask! Clarisse commands.
Could Walter have any more doubts at this moment that her mind was
disturbed? The answer to this question will always be quite dependent on the circumstances. Clarisse looked impetuous and beautiful. The fire
From the Posthumous Papers · z6zg
in her eyes looked exactly like that of a healthy will. And so what her brother Siegmund had said of her, and had recently repeated when Wal- ter again asked him about it, took hold ofWalter: She is excessively ner- vous, you just have to grab her vigorously.
But for the moment it was Clarisse who was doing the vigorous grab- bing: She hopped around Walter incessantly, repeating: Come, come, come! Don't make me have to ask you!
The words seemed to fly around Walter's ears, they confused him. One might have said that he was laying back his ears and digging his feet into the ground the way a horse, a donkey, a calfdoes, with the obstinacy that is the weak creature's strength of will: but to him it represented itself in the form: Now you'll show her who's master!
"Just come along," Clarisse said, "then you'll see why! "
"No," exclaimed Walter. "You'll tell me right this instant what you're up to! "
"What I'm up to? I'm up to something weird. " She had meanwhile begun to gather up in the neighboring room what she needed to go out; now she pulled off her gardening gloves, held them in her hand for a moment, and with a sudden heave flung them among her husband's paint and brush jars. Something fell over, something rolled, something clattered. Clarisse observed the effect on Walter and burst out laughing. Walter got red in the face; he had no desire to hit her but was ashamed of this very lack Clarisse went on laughing and said: You've been crouching over these jars for a year and a day and haven't produced a thing. I'll show you how it's done. I've told you I'll bring out your genius. I'll make you restless, impatient, daring! " Suddenly she was quiet and said seriously: "It's weird, putting oneself on the same level as the in- sane, but it's resolving for genius! Do you believe that we'll ever amount to anything the way we've been going along? Among these jars that are all so nicely round and picture frames that are so nicely rectangular? And with music after supper! Why, then, were all gods and goddesses antisocial? "
Antisocial? Walter asked in astonishment.
If you must be precise: uncriminally antisocial. Because they weren't thieves or murderers. But humility, voluntary poverty, and chastity are also the expression of an antisocial mentality. And how otherwise could they have taught mankind how the world is to be improved but have denied the world for themselves?
Now Walter was so constituted that in spite ofhis initial astonishment he was capable offinding this assertion correct. It reminded him of the question: "Can you imagine Jesus as director ofa mine? " A question that would obviously have to be answered simply and naturally "no," if one
1620 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
could not just as well say "official of the Bureau for Monuments" in place of"mine director," andifone didn't feel the accompanying flash of a ridiculously warm spark of ambition. Obviously there was not only a contradiction but a more profound incompatibility separating two world systems between nurturing the middle class and nurturing the divine, but Walter, despite his already long-determined inclination to the mid- dle class, wanted both, or wanted, what is even worse, to renounce nei- ther, and Clarisse possessed what he had once already felt as "calling upon God," the decisiveness of a resolve that shows no consideration for anything. And so it happened that after she had spoken, he felt exactly as she had said, as if he were jammed up to his knees into the life he had created for himself, like a wedge in a block of wood, while she flitted about in front of him as the restless, impatient, daring one who was ex- perimenting with him. As a man of many talents, he knew that genius lay not so much in talent as in willpower. To the person being overtaken by paralysis, which he intuitively understood himself to be, it seemed related to the fermenting, the must, indeed even to the mere foam. He enviously recognized in her the improbable, the zigzag dots of varia- tions around the mean, the creature that at the edge of the crowd half goes along ahead of it and is half lost within it, which lies in the notion of genius. Clarisse was the only person in whom he loved this, who still linked him to it, and because her association with genius was patho- logical, his fear for her was also a fear for himself. This was how the desire not to listen to her, indeed to show her "the man," as Siegmund, the brother and physician, had advised him to do, arose out of his assent to the words with which she was persuading him and explaining her in- tention, and out of her powerful charm in pleasing him, which she exer- cised in an apparently natural way and without any awareness of contradiction.
So after a short pause Walter said rather roughly: "But now be reason- able, Clarisse, stop that nonsense and come over here! " Clarisse had meanwhile taken off her clothes and was in the process of drawing a cold bath. In her short panties and with her thin arms, she looked like a boy. She felt the stale warmth ofWalter's body close behind her and immedi- ately understood what he was after. She turned around and put her hand on his chest. But Walter reached out to grab her. With one hand he held her arm, and sought with the other to grasp her by the crotch and pull her to him. Clarisse tore at the embrace, and when that didn't help shoved her free hand into Walter's face, into his nose and mouth. His face turned red and the blood trembled in his eyes while he struggled
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 62 1
with Clarisse, but he did not want to let her see that she was hurting him. And when he threatened to suffocate, he had to strike her hand from his face. Quick as lightning she went at it again, and this time her nails tore two bleeding furrows in his skin. Clarisse was free.
They stood this way opposite each other. Neither of them tried to speak. Clarisse was startled by her cruelty, but she was beside herself. Some inteiVention from above had tom her out of herself; she was to- tally turned to the outside, a bush full of thorns. She was in ecstasy. None of the thoughts that had preoccupied her for weeks was any longer in her mind; she had even forgotten what she had just been talking about and what it was she wanted. Her whole self was gone, with the exception of what she needed to defend hersel£ She felt incredibly strong. Just then Walter again snatched at her, this time with all his strength. He had become angry and feared nothing in the whole world so much as becom- ing rational again. Clarisse struck at him. She was instantly ready to scratch again, to bite, to knee him in the groin or shove her elbow in his mouth, and it was not even anger or dislike that determined this, let alone any rational consideration; rather, in some wild way, this struggle made her like him, even though she was ready to kill him. She wanted to bathe in his blood. She did so with her nails and with the short glances, which, shocked, followed his efforts and the small red gutters that opened up on his face and hands. Walter cursed. He swore at her. Vul- gar words, which had no relation to his usual self, came from his mouth. Their pure, undiluted masculinity smelled like brandy, and the need for common, insulting speech suddenly revealed itself to be just as primeval as the need for tenderness. Apparently what was coming out was noth- ing but a grudge against all the higher ambition that had tortured and humiliated him for decades and was finally raising its head against him once more in Clarisse. Of course he had no time to think about this. But he still felt distinctly that he was not merely on the point of breaking her will because Siegmund had advised him that way, but was also doing it on account of the breaking and snapping itself. In some fashion the ri- diculously beautiful motions of a flamingo went through his mind. "We'll see what's left after a bulldog gets hold of itl" was his thought about the flamingo mind, but what he muttered half aloud between his teeth was: "Stupid goose! "
And Clarisse, too, was inspired by the one idea: "He can't be allowed to have his way! " She felt her strength still growing. Her clothes tore, Walter seized the shreds, she seized hold of the neck in front of her. Half naked, slippery as a wriggling fish, she struggled in her husband's arms. Walter, whose strength was not sufficient simply to overpower her, flung her to and fro and painfully sought to block her attacks. She had lost her
1622 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
shoe and kicked at him with her bare foot. They fell. They both ap- peared to have forgotten the goal of their struggle and its sexual origin, and were fighting only to assert their will. In this utmost, convulsive gathering of their selves they really disappeared. Their perceptions and thoughts gradually took on a totally indefinable texture, as in a blinding light. They almost felt amazement at still being alive I that their selves were still there.
Clarisse especially was worked up to such a pitch that she felt insensi- tive to the pain inflicted on her, and when she came to herself again this intoxicated her in the conviction that the same spirits that had recently illuminated her were now standing by her in her mission and fighting on her side. So she was all the more horrified when she was forced to notice that with time she was growing fatigued. Walter was stronger and heavier than she; her muscles became numb and lax. There were pauses where his weight pressed her to the ground and she could not defend herself, and the succession of defensive maneuvers and ruthless attacks against sensitive face and body parts, during which she caught her breath, were succeeded more and more frequently by powerlessness and suffocating poundings of her heart. So that what Walter had antici- pated happened: nature conquered, Clarisse's body left her mind in the lurch and defended its will no longer. It seemed to her as if she were hearing within herselfthe cocks crowing on the Mount of Olives: incred- ibly, God was abandoning her world, something was about to happen that she could not divine. And at moments Walter was already ashamed ofhimself. Like a bolt oflightning, remorse struck him. It also seemed to him that Clarisse looked horribly distorted. But he had already risked so much that he no longer wanted to stop. To continue anesthetizing him- self, he used the excuse that the brutality he was exercising was his right as a husband. Suddenly Clarisse screamed. She made an effort to utter a long, shrill, monotone cry as she saw her will escaping, and in this final, desperate defense it was in her mind that with this cry and what re- mained of her will she could perhaps slip out of her body. But she no longer had much breath left; the cry did not last long and brought no one rushing in. She was left alone. Walter was alarmed at her cry but then angrily intensified his efforts. She felt nothing. She despised him. Fi- nally, she thought of an expedient: she counted as quickly and as loudly as she could: "One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five," over and over. Walter found it horrible, but it did not stop him.
And when they separated and straightened up, in a daze she said: "Just wait. I'll have my revenge! "
NEW IDEAS ABOUT THE CLARISSE-W ALTER-ULRICH COMPLEX
To make Clarisse human, use the problem of genius. Or instead of ge- nius, one can also say: the will to greatness, to goodness. A miserable Prometheus. Genius in that case about the same thing: a person who is an exception. The person who sees the errors, sees what is out ofjoint in the world, and has the will not to let the matter drop.
