Perhaps the idea explicitly governing all these minds was nothing other than the
striving
to escape the place of interdiction and compulsion, an unarticulated dream of the body rebel- ling against its poisoned head.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
Clarisse did not beat around the bush.
She repeated to him that he was not allowed to duck out, God too had suffered on the Mount of Olives, and went for him.
His knees trembled and his hands went up against hers as helplessly as hand- kerchiefs to fend her off, but Clarisse slung her legs and arms around
From the Posthumous Papers · 1571
him and sealed his mouth with the hot phosphate breath of her own. In the extremity of his fear the Greek defended himself by confessing that he was homosexual. The unfortunate man had no idea what to do when she declared that that was precisely why he had to love her.
He was one of those half-sick, half-sociable people who wander through sanatoriums like hotels in which one meets more interesting people than in the ordinary kind. He spoke several languages and had read the books that were on everyone's tongue. A southeastern Euro- pean elegance, black hair, and indolent dark eyes made him the focus of admiration of all those women who love intellect and the demonic in a man. The story of his life was like a lottery of the numbers of the hotel rooms to which he had been invited. He had never worked in his life, had been set up by his wealthy merchant family, and was in accord with the idea that after the death of his father his younger brother would take charge of their affairs. He did not love women but became their prey out of vanity, and was not resolute enough to follow his preference for men other than occasionally in the circles of big-city prostitution, where they disgusted him. He was really a big fat boy in whom the predilection of that indeterminate age for all vices had never given way to anything sub- sequent, and who had merely wrapped himself in the protection of a melancholy indolence and irresolution.
This wretched man had never experienced from a woman an attack of the kind Clarisse was now subjecting him to. Without his being able to grasp it from anything specific, she addressed herself to his vanity. "Great hermaphrodite," she said again and again, and there shone from her eyes something that was like the King of the Mountain, for him play- ful and yet frenzied. -Remarkable woman, the Greek said. -Y ou are the great hermaphrodite-she said-who is not able to love either women or men! And that's just why you've been called to redeem them from the original sin that weakens them!
Of the three men who influenced Clarisse's life, Walter, Meingast, and Ulrich, Meingast, without its ever having become clear to her, was the one who had through his manner made the greatest impression on her by most powerfully stimulating her ambition-if one may so charac- terize the desire for wings of the uncreative mind banished to an ordi- nary life. His league of men, from which she was excluded, clanking in her imagination like archangels, had transformed themselves into the idea that the strong and redeemed person (and along with this: re- deemed from marriage and love) was homosexual. "God himself is ho- mosexual," she told the Greek. "He penetrates the believer, overpowers him, impregnates him, weakens him, rapes him, treats him like a woman, and demands submission from him, while excluding women
1572 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
from the Church. Impregnated by his God, the believer walks among women as among petty, silly elements he doesn't notice. Love is unfaith- fulness to God, adultery; it robs the spirit of its human dignity. The mad- ness of sin and the madness of bliss entice human action into the marriage bed (bed of adultery). 0 my female king. assume along with me the sins of humanity in order to redeem it by committing them, al- though we already see through them. "
"Crazy-crazy," the Greek murmured, but at the same time Clarisse's ideas made unresisting sense to him and touched a point in his life that had never been treated with such seriousness or such passion. Clarisse roused his indolent soul like a dream raging in deepest darkness but, in doing so, treated him the way an older boy in puberty gets hold of a younger one and fondles him in order to carry out on him the most in- sane sacrifices ofthe cult offirst love. The Greek's dignity as an interest- ing man was most violently compromised by this role being forced upon him, but at the same time this role hit upon fantasies buried deep within him, and Clarisse's ruthless visits aroused in him a trembling condition of bondage. Nowhere did he any longer feel safe from her; she invited him on outings in a carriage, during which she molested him behind the driver's back, and his greatest fear was that one day she would do it in the sanatorium in front of everybody, without his being able to defend himself. Finally, he began to tremble as soon as she came near him, but let her do whatever she wanted. Cettefemme estfoUe-he said this sen- tence softly, plaintively, incessantly, in three languages·, like a magic charm.
But at last-this peculiar, half-transparent relationship was attracting attention, and he imagined people were already making fun of him-his vanity tore him out of it; weeping almost from weakness, he gathered all his strength to shake this woman off. When they got into the carriage he said, averting his face, that it was the last time. As they were riding. he pointed out a policeman to her, claimed that he was having a relation- ship with him and that the policeman wanted him to have nothing more to do with Clarisse; he slung his glances around this massive man stand- ing in the street as if he were a rock, but was tom away by the rolling carriage, feeling nevertheless strengthened by his lie, as if someone had sent him some kind of help. But it had the opposite effect on Clarisse. To see the lover of her "female king" affected her as a surprising con- cretization. In poems she had already characterized herself as a her- maphrodite, and now thought she could distinguish hermaphroditic qualities in her body for the first time. She could hardly expect them to break through to the surface. It's a divine constellation oflove, she said.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1573
The Greek was concerned about the coachman and pushed her away. He breathed into her face that this was their last trip. Without looking around, the coachman, apparently sensing that something was going on behind him, whipped the horses on. Suddenly a thunderstorm came up from three sides and surprised them. The air was heavy and filled with an uncanny tension; lightning flashed and thunder came crashing down. "This evening I'm receiving a visit from my lover," the Greek said. "You may not come to me! " "We're leaving tonight! " Clarisse answered. "For Berlin, the city of tremendous energies! " Just then, with a shattering crash, a bolt struck the fields not far from them, and the horses strained in a gallop against the traces. "No! " the Greek shouted, and involuntarily hid himself against Clarisse, who embraced him. "I deem myself a Thes- salian witch! " she screamed into the uproar that now broke loose from all sides. lightning blazes roared, mingled water and earth flew up from the ground, terror shook the air. The Greek was trembling like some poor animal body jolted by an electric charge. Clarisse was jubilant, em- braced him with "lightning arms," and enveloped him. That was when he jumped out of the carriage.
When Clarisse got back, long after he did-she had forced the coach- man to drive slowly through the storm, and slowly on after the sun had come out again and fields, horses, and the leather of the coach were steaming, while she sang mysterious things--she found in her room a note from the Greek informing her once again that the policeman was in his room, forbidding her to visit, and declaring that he was leaving in the morning. At dinner, Clarisse discovered that his departure was the truth. She wanted to rush to him, but became aware that all the women were observing her. The restlessness in the corridors seemed never to end. Women were passing by every time Clarisse stuck her head out of the door in order to scurry to the Greek's room. These stupid people looked mockingly at Clarisse, instead of comprehending that the policeman was scorning all of them. And for some reason Clarisse suddenly no longer trusted herself to walk upright and innocently to the Greek's door. Fi- nally, it was quiet, and she slipped out barefoot. She scratched softly at the door, but no one answered, although light was coming through the keyhole. Clarisse pressed her lips to the wood and whispered. It re- mained quiet inside; someone was listening but not answering. The Greek was lying in bed with his "protector" and despised her. I Or: a strange man angrily opens the door. The Greek already gone? I Then she, who had never loved, was overcome by the nameless torment of submissive jealousy. - I am not worthy of him-she whispered-he thinks I'm sick, and, whispering, her lips slid down the door to the dust.
1574 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
She was befuddled by a heartrending rapture; moaning softly, she pushed against the door in order to crawl to him and kiss his hand, and did not understand that her rapture had been thwarted.
When she awoke in her bed and rang for the chambermaid, she dis- covered that the Greek had left. She nodded, as if it had been agreed upon between them. -I'm leaving too, Clarisse said. -I'll have to tell the doctor-the girl. Hardly had the girl left the room when Clarisse sprang out of bed and, in a frenzy, dumped her belongings into a suit- case; what did not fit, and the rest of her baggage, she left behind. The girl thought the gentleman had taken the train for Munich. Clarisse fled. "Error is not blindness," she murmured, "error is cowardice! He recog- nized his mission but did not have enough courage for it. " As she slunk out of the building, past his abandoned room, she again encountered the pain and shame of the past night. "He thought I was sick! " Tears streamed down her cheeks. She even did justice to the prison that she was escaping from; she took leave of the walls and the benches outside the door with compassion. People had meant to help her here, the best they could. -They wanted to cure me---Clarisse smiled-but curing is destroying! And when she was sitting in the express, the energy ofwhose storming bounds permeated her, her resolves became clear.
How can one be mistaken? Only by not seeing. But how can one not see what is there to be seen? By not trusting oneself to see. Clarisse rec- ognized, like a broad field without a boundary, the general law of human progress: Error is cowardice; if people were to stop being cowardly the earth would make a leap forward. I In an analogous way, Ulrich recog- nizes why there is no radical progress. I Good, the way the train sped on with her without stopping. She knew that she had to catch up with the Greek.
They had all been against her, the sick ones too.
Clarisse took a sleeping compartment. When she got into the carriage she immediately told the conductor: Three gentlemen must be on this train, go and look for them, I absolutely must speak with them! It seemed to her that all her fellow passengers fell under the strong per- sonal influence that emanated from her and were obeying her com- mands. The waiters in the dining car as well. But nevertheless the conductor had to report that he had not found the Greek, Walter, and Ulrich. After that, with a completely clear sensory impression, she rec-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1575
ognized herself in the mirror now as a white she-devil, now as a blood- red madonna.
When she got off the train in Munich the next morning, she went to an elegant hotel, took a room, smoked the whole day, drank brandy and black coffee, and wrote letters and telegrams. Some circumstance or other had led her to assume that the Greek had traveled to Venice, and she issued instructions to him, the hotels, consular offices, and govern- ment bureaus. She displayed enormous industriousness. -Hurry up! she said to the page boys, who galloped around for her the whole day. It was a mood like at a fire when the fire trucks rattle up and the sirens wail, or like a mobilization, where horses trot and endless processions of resolute, helmet-enclosed faces march through the streets as if dream- ing, the air filled with thrown flowers and heavy with gray tension.
That evening she herself went on to Venice.
In Venice, she registered at a pension frequented by Germans, where she had stayed on her honeymoon; people there dimly recalled the young woman. The same life as in Munich began, with abuse of alcohol and alkaloids, but now she no longer sent off any telegrams or messen- gers. From the moment she had got to Venice, perhaps because the offi- cial emissaries were not already waiting for her at the station with their reports, she had been convinced that the Greek had slipped through her net and fled to his homeland. The task now was to stem the flood and prepare a final assault, without haste and with the strictest measures to- ward oneself.
It was clear that she would sail to Greece, but first the frenzied desire for the man, a desire that had pushed her almost too far, had to be re- strained. Besides coffee and brandy, Clarisse took no meals; she stripped naked and barricaded herself in her room, into which she did not allow even the hotel personnel. Hunger and something else, which she was not able to make out, put her in a state of feverlike confusion that lasted for days, in which impatient sexual arousal gradually faded to a vibrating mood in which all sorts of delusions of the senses were min- gled. The abuse of strong substances had undermined her body; she felt it beginning to collapse under her. Constant diarrhea; a cavity appeared in a tooth and bothered her night and day; a small ugly wart began to form on her hand. But all this drove her to exert her mind more and more passionately, like the moment just before the end of a race, when one has to lift one's legs at every step by willpower. She had got hold of brush and paint pots, and from the arm of a chair, the edge of the bed,
1576 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
and an ironing board that she had found outside her door she built her- self a scaffolding that she pushed along the wall, and began to paint the walls of her room with large designs. What she crisscrossed on the bare walls was the story of her life; so great was this process of inner purifica- tion that Clarisse was convinced that in a hundred years humanity would make a pilgrimage to these sketches and inscriptions in order to see the tremendous works of art with which the greatest of souls had covered her cell.
Perhaps they really were great works for someone who would have had to be in a position to disentangle the wealth of associations that had become tangled up in them. Clarisse created them with enormous ten- sion. She felt herself great and hovering. She was beyond the articulated expression of life that creates words and forms, which are a compromise arranged for everyone, and had again arrived at that magic first encoun- ter with herself, the madness of her first astonishment at those gifts of the gods, word and image. What she created was distorted, was piled up in confusion and yet impoverished, was unrestrained and yet obeyed a rigid compulsion; externally. Internally, it was for the first time the ex- pression of her entire being: without purpose, without reflection, almost without will, becoming literally a second thing, enduring, greater, the transubstantiation of the human being into a piece of eternity: finally, the fulfillment of Clarisse's longing. While she painted she sang: "I am descended from luminous gods. "
I Noted outside the novel: Does greatness never lie in content? In a way of ordering things? I
When they broke into her room, uncomprehending eyes stared at these walls like the eyes of hostile animals. Clarisse had bought a boat ticket and laid out a blanket and a towel twisted into a turban as her imperial attire, which she was going to take on board with her. Then it occurred to her that a person who finds himself on sacred paths is not allowed to have any money with him without falling victim to a ridicu- lous incongruity, so she gave away her money and jewelry to laughing gondoliers. As she was about to give a speech in the Piazza of St. Mark's to the people assembled for her departure, a man spoke to her and gently brought her back to her pension. But since this man was unwise enough to recommend her to the protection of her hosts, everyone now poured into her room; the padrona screamed about the damage, gave orders to seize Clarisse's property, swore in vulgar language when none
From the Posthumous Papers · 1577
was to be found, and the staff tittered. A horrendous cruelty stared at Clarisse from every side, that primal hatred of inert matter, one part of which pushes another from the spot unless attraction and understanding mold them together into one. Silently Clarisse took her turban and cloak in order to leave this land and go on board. But at the canal steps the always friendly brown-black chambermaid came after her and begged her to wait, because a gentleman wanted to have the honor of showing her something before she left. Clarisse stopped in silence; she was tired and really no longer had the strength to travel. When the gondola with the man and two strange men appeared she stared gravely into the girl's friendly eyes, which were now almost floating in a moist shimmer, and thought the grievous word: Iscariot. She had no time to reflect on this shattering experience. In the gondola she calmly and seriously kept her eyes on the strange man and had the distinct impression that he was shrinking from her. This satisfied her. They came to the Colleone monu- ment, and now the strange man spoke to her for the first time. "Why don't we go in here," he said, indicating a building beside the church that stood there. "There's something particularly nice to look at. " Cla- risse suspected the trap being set for her by the official of public secu- rity. But this suspicion had no value for her, no causal valency, so to speak. I'm tired and ill, she said to herself. He wants to lure me into the hospital. It's unreasonable of me to go along. But my madness is merely that I fall out of their general order and my causality isn't theirs: only disturbance in a subordinate function, which they overestimate. Their behavior is the crassest lack of ethics I In their causal associations what I do and how I do it is sick; because they don't see the other.
When they entered the building she divided the rest of her jewelry and her towel among the matrons, who accepted them, seized her, and strapped her to a bed. Clarisse began to cry, and the matrons said "poveretta/"
After confinement
This time, it was Wotan who went to get her and brought her back; he took her to Dr. Fried's clinic. When she was brought in, the doctor on duty merely looked at her and had her taken to the ward for the dis- tracted.
The very first scream of a madman forced on her the idea of the mi- gration of souls; the ideas of reincarnation, of the attainable Nirvana, were not far away.
1578 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"Mother! Mother! " That was the cry of a girl who was covered with horrible wounds. Clarisse longed for her mother on account ofthe many sins with which her mother had sent her out into the world. Her parents were now sitting around the table at breakfast; there were flowers in the room; Clarisse was covered with all their sins, they felt good; her migra- tion of souls began.
Clarisse's first walk led to the bath, since she had been excited by being brought in. It was a square room with a tile floor and a large pool filled with water and without a raised edge; from the doorway steps led into it. Two wasted bodies fastened longing glances on her and screamed for redemption. They were her best friends, Walter and Ulrich, in sinful form.
During the night the Pope lay beside her. In the shape of a woman. -Church is black night-Clarisse said to herself-now it longs for the woman. There was a dim light, the patients were sleeping, when the Pope fumbled at her blanket and wanted to slip into bed with her. He was longing for his woman; Clarisse had no objection. - T h e black night longs for redemption, she whispered, as she yielded to the Pope's fin- gers. The sins of Christendom were extirpated. King Ludwig of Bavaria was lying opposite her, etc. It was a night of crucifixion. Clarisse looked toward her dissolution; she felt free of all guilt, her soul floated weight- less and bright as these visions crept to her bed like poems and vanished again without her being able to seize their shapes and hold them fast. The next morning, Nietzsche's soul in the shape of the chief doctor was for her the most glorious sight. Beautiful, kindly, full of profound seri- ousness, his bushy beard grayed, his eyes seeing as from another world, he nodded to her. She knew it had been he who during the night had
bidden her extirpate the sins of Christendom; hot ambition, like the am- bition of a schoolgirl, soared in Clarisse.
During the next two weeks she experienced Faust, Part II. Three characters represented Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity. Cla- risse trampled them with her feet. That happened in the water chamber. For three days. Cackling screams filled the enclosed room. Through the vapors and tropical fogs of the bath naked women crept like crocodiles and gigantic crabs. Slippery faces screamed into her eyes. Scissor arms grasped at her. Legs twined around her neck. Clarisse screamed and fluttered above the bodies, striking her toenails into the damp, slippery flesh, was pulled down, suffocated beneath bellies and knees, bit into breasts, scratched flabby cheeks bloody, worked herselfto the top again, plunged into the water and out, and finally plunged her face into the shaggy wet lap of a large woman and "on the shell ofthe Triton goddess" roared out a song until hoarseness stifled her voice.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1579
One should not think that insanity has no sense; it merely has the tur- bid, fuzzy, duplicating lens of the air above this bath, and at times it was quite clear to Clarisse that she was living among the laws of a different but by no means lawless world.
Perhaps the idea explicitly governing all these minds was nothing other than the striving to escape the place of interdiction and compulsion, an unarticulated dream of the body rebel- ling against its poisoned head. While Clarisse was trampling with her feet the less agile in the slippery knot of people, there was in her head a "sinless Nirvana" like the broad white air outside a window, the longing for a painless and unconflicted state of rest, and like a buzzing insect she bumped with her head against the wall that sick bodies erected around her, fluttering aimlessly, driven from one moment's inspiration to the next, while the conviction hovered like a golden halo behind her head, a halo she could not see and could not even imagine but which was never- theless there, that a profound ethical problem had been laid upon her, that she was the Messiah and the Obernumsch joined in the same per- son, and would enter her rest after she had redeemed the others, and she could redeem them only by forcing them down. For three days and three nights she obeyed the irresistible will of the community of the mad, let herself be pushed and pulled and scratched till the blood came, threw herself symbolically on the cross on the tiles of the floor, uttered hoarse, disconnected, incomprehensible words and answered similar words with actions, as if she not only understood them but wanted to stake her life on the communication. They did not ask, they had no need of meaning that dumps words into sentences and sentences into the cel- lar of the mind; they recognized one another among themselves, and like animals differentiated themselves from the attendants or from anyone who was different, and their ideas produced a chaotic common thread, as during the revolt of a crowd where no one knows or understands any- one else, no one thinks any longer except in fragmented beginnings and endings, but powerful tensions and blows of the oblivious common body unite everyone with one another. After three days and nights, Clarisse was exhausted; her voice was only a bare whisper, her "iiber-strength" had conquered, and she became calm.
She was put to bed and for a few days lay in a state of profound fa- tigue, interrupted by attacks of tortured, shapeless restlessness. A "disci- ple," a rosy blond woman of twenty-one, who had regarded her from the first day as a liberator, finally gave her her first redemption. This woman came to her bed and said something or other; for Clarisse it meant: I am taking over the mission. Clarisse later found out that the rosy blonde had, in her stead, exorcised the devil through song in the water chamber day and night. But Clarisse stayed in the big hall, took care of the sick,
1580 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
and "lay in wait for their sins. " The communication between her and her confessing charges consisted of sentences like dolls, implausible, wooden little sentences, and God alone knows what they originally meant by them; but ifchildren playing with dolls would have to use con- crete words in order to be able to mean the same thing and understand each other, then the magic sleight ofhand that pretends a shapeless stick of wood is a living being would never succeed, a trick that excites the soul more than the most passionate lovers are later able to do. Finally, one day, an ordinary woman, who had earlier pounded on Clarisse's back with her fists, spoke to Clarisse, saying this: "Gather your disciples in the coming night and celebrate your Last Supper. What kind offood does the great lord desire? 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.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1571
him and sealed his mouth with the hot phosphate breath of her own. In the extremity of his fear the Greek defended himself by confessing that he was homosexual. The unfortunate man had no idea what to do when she declared that that was precisely why he had to love her.
He was one of those half-sick, half-sociable people who wander through sanatoriums like hotels in which one meets more interesting people than in the ordinary kind. He spoke several languages and had read the books that were on everyone's tongue. A southeastern Euro- pean elegance, black hair, and indolent dark eyes made him the focus of admiration of all those women who love intellect and the demonic in a man. The story of his life was like a lottery of the numbers of the hotel rooms to which he had been invited. He had never worked in his life, had been set up by his wealthy merchant family, and was in accord with the idea that after the death of his father his younger brother would take charge of their affairs. He did not love women but became their prey out of vanity, and was not resolute enough to follow his preference for men other than occasionally in the circles of big-city prostitution, where they disgusted him. He was really a big fat boy in whom the predilection of that indeterminate age for all vices had never given way to anything sub- sequent, and who had merely wrapped himself in the protection of a melancholy indolence and irresolution.
This wretched man had never experienced from a woman an attack of the kind Clarisse was now subjecting him to. Without his being able to grasp it from anything specific, she addressed herself to his vanity. "Great hermaphrodite," she said again and again, and there shone from her eyes something that was like the King of the Mountain, for him play- ful and yet frenzied. -Remarkable woman, the Greek said. -Y ou are the great hermaphrodite-she said-who is not able to love either women or men! And that's just why you've been called to redeem them from the original sin that weakens them!
Of the three men who influenced Clarisse's life, Walter, Meingast, and Ulrich, Meingast, without its ever having become clear to her, was the one who had through his manner made the greatest impression on her by most powerfully stimulating her ambition-if one may so charac- terize the desire for wings of the uncreative mind banished to an ordi- nary life. His league of men, from which she was excluded, clanking in her imagination like archangels, had transformed themselves into the idea that the strong and redeemed person (and along with this: re- deemed from marriage and love) was homosexual. "God himself is ho- mosexual," she told the Greek. "He penetrates the believer, overpowers him, impregnates him, weakens him, rapes him, treats him like a woman, and demands submission from him, while excluding women
1572 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
from the Church. Impregnated by his God, the believer walks among women as among petty, silly elements he doesn't notice. Love is unfaith- fulness to God, adultery; it robs the spirit of its human dignity. The mad- ness of sin and the madness of bliss entice human action into the marriage bed (bed of adultery). 0 my female king. assume along with me the sins of humanity in order to redeem it by committing them, al- though we already see through them. "
"Crazy-crazy," the Greek murmured, but at the same time Clarisse's ideas made unresisting sense to him and touched a point in his life that had never been treated with such seriousness or such passion. Clarisse roused his indolent soul like a dream raging in deepest darkness but, in doing so, treated him the way an older boy in puberty gets hold of a younger one and fondles him in order to carry out on him the most in- sane sacrifices ofthe cult offirst love. The Greek's dignity as an interest- ing man was most violently compromised by this role being forced upon him, but at the same time this role hit upon fantasies buried deep within him, and Clarisse's ruthless visits aroused in him a trembling condition of bondage. Nowhere did he any longer feel safe from her; she invited him on outings in a carriage, during which she molested him behind the driver's back, and his greatest fear was that one day she would do it in the sanatorium in front of everybody, without his being able to defend himself. Finally, he began to tremble as soon as she came near him, but let her do whatever she wanted. Cettefemme estfoUe-he said this sen- tence softly, plaintively, incessantly, in three languages·, like a magic charm.
But at last-this peculiar, half-transparent relationship was attracting attention, and he imagined people were already making fun of him-his vanity tore him out of it; weeping almost from weakness, he gathered all his strength to shake this woman off. When they got into the carriage he said, averting his face, that it was the last time. As they were riding. he pointed out a policeman to her, claimed that he was having a relation- ship with him and that the policeman wanted him to have nothing more to do with Clarisse; he slung his glances around this massive man stand- ing in the street as if he were a rock, but was tom away by the rolling carriage, feeling nevertheless strengthened by his lie, as if someone had sent him some kind of help. But it had the opposite effect on Clarisse. To see the lover of her "female king" affected her as a surprising con- cretization. In poems she had already characterized herself as a her- maphrodite, and now thought she could distinguish hermaphroditic qualities in her body for the first time. She could hardly expect them to break through to the surface. It's a divine constellation oflove, she said.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1573
The Greek was concerned about the coachman and pushed her away. He breathed into her face that this was their last trip. Without looking around, the coachman, apparently sensing that something was going on behind him, whipped the horses on. Suddenly a thunderstorm came up from three sides and surprised them. The air was heavy and filled with an uncanny tension; lightning flashed and thunder came crashing down. "This evening I'm receiving a visit from my lover," the Greek said. "You may not come to me! " "We're leaving tonight! " Clarisse answered. "For Berlin, the city of tremendous energies! " Just then, with a shattering crash, a bolt struck the fields not far from them, and the horses strained in a gallop against the traces. "No! " the Greek shouted, and involuntarily hid himself against Clarisse, who embraced him. "I deem myself a Thes- salian witch! " she screamed into the uproar that now broke loose from all sides. lightning blazes roared, mingled water and earth flew up from the ground, terror shook the air. The Greek was trembling like some poor animal body jolted by an electric charge. Clarisse was jubilant, em- braced him with "lightning arms," and enveloped him. That was when he jumped out of the carriage.
When Clarisse got back, long after he did-she had forced the coach- man to drive slowly through the storm, and slowly on after the sun had come out again and fields, horses, and the leather of the coach were steaming, while she sang mysterious things--she found in her room a note from the Greek informing her once again that the policeman was in his room, forbidding her to visit, and declaring that he was leaving in the morning. At dinner, Clarisse discovered that his departure was the truth. She wanted to rush to him, but became aware that all the women were observing her. The restlessness in the corridors seemed never to end. Women were passing by every time Clarisse stuck her head out of the door in order to scurry to the Greek's room. These stupid people looked mockingly at Clarisse, instead of comprehending that the policeman was scorning all of them. And for some reason Clarisse suddenly no longer trusted herself to walk upright and innocently to the Greek's door. Fi- nally, it was quiet, and she slipped out barefoot. She scratched softly at the door, but no one answered, although light was coming through the keyhole. Clarisse pressed her lips to the wood and whispered. It re- mained quiet inside; someone was listening but not answering. The Greek was lying in bed with his "protector" and despised her. I Or: a strange man angrily opens the door. The Greek already gone? I Then she, who had never loved, was overcome by the nameless torment of submissive jealousy. - I am not worthy of him-she whispered-he thinks I'm sick, and, whispering, her lips slid down the door to the dust.
1574 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
She was befuddled by a heartrending rapture; moaning softly, she pushed against the door in order to crawl to him and kiss his hand, and did not understand that her rapture had been thwarted.
When she awoke in her bed and rang for the chambermaid, she dis- covered that the Greek had left. She nodded, as if it had been agreed upon between them. -I'm leaving too, Clarisse said. -I'll have to tell the doctor-the girl. Hardly had the girl left the room when Clarisse sprang out of bed and, in a frenzy, dumped her belongings into a suit- case; what did not fit, and the rest of her baggage, she left behind. The girl thought the gentleman had taken the train for Munich. Clarisse fled. "Error is not blindness," she murmured, "error is cowardice! He recog- nized his mission but did not have enough courage for it. " As she slunk out of the building, past his abandoned room, she again encountered the pain and shame of the past night. "He thought I was sick! " Tears streamed down her cheeks. She even did justice to the prison that she was escaping from; she took leave of the walls and the benches outside the door with compassion. People had meant to help her here, the best they could. -They wanted to cure me---Clarisse smiled-but curing is destroying! And when she was sitting in the express, the energy ofwhose storming bounds permeated her, her resolves became clear.
How can one be mistaken? Only by not seeing. But how can one not see what is there to be seen? By not trusting oneself to see. Clarisse rec- ognized, like a broad field without a boundary, the general law of human progress: Error is cowardice; if people were to stop being cowardly the earth would make a leap forward. I In an analogous way, Ulrich recog- nizes why there is no radical progress. I Good, the way the train sped on with her without stopping. She knew that she had to catch up with the Greek.
They had all been against her, the sick ones too.
Clarisse took a sleeping compartment. When she got into the carriage she immediately told the conductor: Three gentlemen must be on this train, go and look for them, I absolutely must speak with them! It seemed to her that all her fellow passengers fell under the strong per- sonal influence that emanated from her and were obeying her com- mands. The waiters in the dining car as well. But nevertheless the conductor had to report that he had not found the Greek, Walter, and Ulrich. After that, with a completely clear sensory impression, she rec-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1575
ognized herself in the mirror now as a white she-devil, now as a blood- red madonna.
When she got off the train in Munich the next morning, she went to an elegant hotel, took a room, smoked the whole day, drank brandy and black coffee, and wrote letters and telegrams. Some circumstance or other had led her to assume that the Greek had traveled to Venice, and she issued instructions to him, the hotels, consular offices, and govern- ment bureaus. She displayed enormous industriousness. -Hurry up! she said to the page boys, who galloped around for her the whole day. It was a mood like at a fire when the fire trucks rattle up and the sirens wail, or like a mobilization, where horses trot and endless processions of resolute, helmet-enclosed faces march through the streets as if dream- ing, the air filled with thrown flowers and heavy with gray tension.
That evening she herself went on to Venice.
In Venice, she registered at a pension frequented by Germans, where she had stayed on her honeymoon; people there dimly recalled the young woman. The same life as in Munich began, with abuse of alcohol and alkaloids, but now she no longer sent off any telegrams or messen- gers. From the moment she had got to Venice, perhaps because the offi- cial emissaries were not already waiting for her at the station with their reports, she had been convinced that the Greek had slipped through her net and fled to his homeland. The task now was to stem the flood and prepare a final assault, without haste and with the strictest measures to- ward oneself.
It was clear that she would sail to Greece, but first the frenzied desire for the man, a desire that had pushed her almost too far, had to be re- strained. Besides coffee and brandy, Clarisse took no meals; she stripped naked and barricaded herself in her room, into which she did not allow even the hotel personnel. Hunger and something else, which she was not able to make out, put her in a state of feverlike confusion that lasted for days, in which impatient sexual arousal gradually faded to a vibrating mood in which all sorts of delusions of the senses were min- gled. The abuse of strong substances had undermined her body; she felt it beginning to collapse under her. Constant diarrhea; a cavity appeared in a tooth and bothered her night and day; a small ugly wart began to form on her hand. But all this drove her to exert her mind more and more passionately, like the moment just before the end of a race, when one has to lift one's legs at every step by willpower. She had got hold of brush and paint pots, and from the arm of a chair, the edge of the bed,
1576 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
and an ironing board that she had found outside her door she built her- self a scaffolding that she pushed along the wall, and began to paint the walls of her room with large designs. What she crisscrossed on the bare walls was the story of her life; so great was this process of inner purifica- tion that Clarisse was convinced that in a hundred years humanity would make a pilgrimage to these sketches and inscriptions in order to see the tremendous works of art with which the greatest of souls had covered her cell.
Perhaps they really were great works for someone who would have had to be in a position to disentangle the wealth of associations that had become tangled up in them. Clarisse created them with enormous ten- sion. She felt herself great and hovering. She was beyond the articulated expression of life that creates words and forms, which are a compromise arranged for everyone, and had again arrived at that magic first encoun- ter with herself, the madness of her first astonishment at those gifts of the gods, word and image. What she created was distorted, was piled up in confusion and yet impoverished, was unrestrained and yet obeyed a rigid compulsion; externally. Internally, it was for the first time the ex- pression of her entire being: without purpose, without reflection, almost without will, becoming literally a second thing, enduring, greater, the transubstantiation of the human being into a piece of eternity: finally, the fulfillment of Clarisse's longing. While she painted she sang: "I am descended from luminous gods. "
I Noted outside the novel: Does greatness never lie in content? In a way of ordering things? I
When they broke into her room, uncomprehending eyes stared at these walls like the eyes of hostile animals. Clarisse had bought a boat ticket and laid out a blanket and a towel twisted into a turban as her imperial attire, which she was going to take on board with her. Then it occurred to her that a person who finds himself on sacred paths is not allowed to have any money with him without falling victim to a ridicu- lous incongruity, so she gave away her money and jewelry to laughing gondoliers. As she was about to give a speech in the Piazza of St. Mark's to the people assembled for her departure, a man spoke to her and gently brought her back to her pension. But since this man was unwise enough to recommend her to the protection of her hosts, everyone now poured into her room; the padrona screamed about the damage, gave orders to seize Clarisse's property, swore in vulgar language when none
From the Posthumous Papers · 1577
was to be found, and the staff tittered. A horrendous cruelty stared at Clarisse from every side, that primal hatred of inert matter, one part of which pushes another from the spot unless attraction and understanding mold them together into one. Silently Clarisse took her turban and cloak in order to leave this land and go on board. But at the canal steps the always friendly brown-black chambermaid came after her and begged her to wait, because a gentleman wanted to have the honor of showing her something before she left. Clarisse stopped in silence; she was tired and really no longer had the strength to travel. When the gondola with the man and two strange men appeared she stared gravely into the girl's friendly eyes, which were now almost floating in a moist shimmer, and thought the grievous word: Iscariot. She had no time to reflect on this shattering experience. In the gondola she calmly and seriously kept her eyes on the strange man and had the distinct impression that he was shrinking from her. This satisfied her. They came to the Colleone monu- ment, and now the strange man spoke to her for the first time. "Why don't we go in here," he said, indicating a building beside the church that stood there. "There's something particularly nice to look at. " Cla- risse suspected the trap being set for her by the official of public secu- rity. But this suspicion had no value for her, no causal valency, so to speak. I'm tired and ill, she said to herself. He wants to lure me into the hospital. It's unreasonable of me to go along. But my madness is merely that I fall out of their general order and my causality isn't theirs: only disturbance in a subordinate function, which they overestimate. Their behavior is the crassest lack of ethics I In their causal associations what I do and how I do it is sick; because they don't see the other.
When they entered the building she divided the rest of her jewelry and her towel among the matrons, who accepted them, seized her, and strapped her to a bed. Clarisse began to cry, and the matrons said "poveretta/"
After confinement
This time, it was Wotan who went to get her and brought her back; he took her to Dr. Fried's clinic. When she was brought in, the doctor on duty merely looked at her and had her taken to the ward for the dis- tracted.
The very first scream of a madman forced on her the idea of the mi- gration of souls; the ideas of reincarnation, of the attainable Nirvana, were not far away.
1578 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"Mother! Mother! " That was the cry of a girl who was covered with horrible wounds. Clarisse longed for her mother on account ofthe many sins with which her mother had sent her out into the world. Her parents were now sitting around the table at breakfast; there were flowers in the room; Clarisse was covered with all their sins, they felt good; her migra- tion of souls began.
Clarisse's first walk led to the bath, since she had been excited by being brought in. It was a square room with a tile floor and a large pool filled with water and without a raised edge; from the doorway steps led into it. Two wasted bodies fastened longing glances on her and screamed for redemption. They were her best friends, Walter and Ulrich, in sinful form.
During the night the Pope lay beside her. In the shape of a woman. -Church is black night-Clarisse said to herself-now it longs for the woman. There was a dim light, the patients were sleeping, when the Pope fumbled at her blanket and wanted to slip into bed with her. He was longing for his woman; Clarisse had no objection. - T h e black night longs for redemption, she whispered, as she yielded to the Pope's fin- gers. The sins of Christendom were extirpated. King Ludwig of Bavaria was lying opposite her, etc. It was a night of crucifixion. Clarisse looked toward her dissolution; she felt free of all guilt, her soul floated weight- less and bright as these visions crept to her bed like poems and vanished again without her being able to seize their shapes and hold them fast. The next morning, Nietzsche's soul in the shape of the chief doctor was for her the most glorious sight. Beautiful, kindly, full of profound seri- ousness, his bushy beard grayed, his eyes seeing as from another world, he nodded to her. She knew it had been he who during the night had
bidden her extirpate the sins of Christendom; hot ambition, like the am- bition of a schoolgirl, soared in Clarisse.
During the next two weeks she experienced Faust, Part II. Three characters represented Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity. Cla- risse trampled them with her feet. That happened in the water chamber. For three days. Cackling screams filled the enclosed room. Through the vapors and tropical fogs of the bath naked women crept like crocodiles and gigantic crabs. Slippery faces screamed into her eyes. Scissor arms grasped at her. Legs twined around her neck. Clarisse screamed and fluttered above the bodies, striking her toenails into the damp, slippery flesh, was pulled down, suffocated beneath bellies and knees, bit into breasts, scratched flabby cheeks bloody, worked herselfto the top again, plunged into the water and out, and finally plunged her face into the shaggy wet lap of a large woman and "on the shell ofthe Triton goddess" roared out a song until hoarseness stifled her voice.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1579
One should not think that insanity has no sense; it merely has the tur- bid, fuzzy, duplicating lens of the air above this bath, and at times it was quite clear to Clarisse that she was living among the laws of a different but by no means lawless world.
Perhaps the idea explicitly governing all these minds was nothing other than the striving to escape the place of interdiction and compulsion, an unarticulated dream of the body rebel- ling against its poisoned head. While Clarisse was trampling with her feet the less agile in the slippery knot of people, there was in her head a "sinless Nirvana" like the broad white air outside a window, the longing for a painless and unconflicted state of rest, and like a buzzing insect she bumped with her head against the wall that sick bodies erected around her, fluttering aimlessly, driven from one moment's inspiration to the next, while the conviction hovered like a golden halo behind her head, a halo she could not see and could not even imagine but which was never- theless there, that a profound ethical problem had been laid upon her, that she was the Messiah and the Obernumsch joined in the same per- son, and would enter her rest after she had redeemed the others, and she could redeem them only by forcing them down. For three days and three nights she obeyed the irresistible will of the community of the mad, let herself be pushed and pulled and scratched till the blood came, threw herself symbolically on the cross on the tiles of the floor, uttered hoarse, disconnected, incomprehensible words and answered similar words with actions, as if she not only understood them but wanted to stake her life on the communication. They did not ask, they had no need of meaning that dumps words into sentences and sentences into the cel- lar of the mind; they recognized one another among themselves, and like animals differentiated themselves from the attendants or from anyone who was different, and their ideas produced a chaotic common thread, as during the revolt of a crowd where no one knows or understands any- one else, no one thinks any longer except in fragmented beginnings and endings, but powerful tensions and blows of the oblivious common body unite everyone with one another. After three days and nights, Clarisse was exhausted; her voice was only a bare whisper, her "iiber-strength" had conquered, and she became calm.
She was put to bed and for a few days lay in a state of profound fa- tigue, interrupted by attacks of tortured, shapeless restlessness. A "disci- ple," a rosy blond woman of twenty-one, who had regarded her from the first day as a liberator, finally gave her her first redemption. This woman came to her bed and said something or other; for Clarisse it meant: I am taking over the mission. Clarisse later found out that the rosy blonde had, in her stead, exorcised the devil through song in the water chamber day and night. But Clarisse stayed in the big hall, took care of the sick,
1580 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
and "lay in wait for their sins. " The communication between her and her confessing charges consisted of sentences like dolls, implausible, wooden little sentences, and God alone knows what they originally meant by them; but ifchildren playing with dolls would have to use con- crete words in order to be able to mean the same thing and understand each other, then the magic sleight ofhand that pretends a shapeless stick of wood is a living being would never succeed, a trick that excites the soul more than the most passionate lovers are later able to do. Finally, one day, an ordinary woman, who had earlier pounded on Clarisse's back with her fists, spoke to Clarisse, saying this: "Gather your disciples in the coming night and celebrate your Last Supper. What kind offood does the great lord desire? 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.
