Agathe

by Robert Musil

  It might be useful to consider the word “forks.” There are table forks, pitchforks, tree forks, gun forks, road forks, and other forks; and all these have a formative property of “forkness” in common. This is the decisive experience, the essence of all that is forked, the gestalt of the fork in the most dissimilar things that are called by that name. If we start from these things, it turns out that they all belong to the same category; but if we start from the initial impression of forkedness, it appears to be filled out and amplified by impressions received from the various particular forks. The common feature, then, is a shape or gestalt, and the differentiation lies first in the diverse forms it can assume, but then also in the objects that have such a form, their material, their purpose, and so forth. But while any fork may be immediately likened to any other, and is a sensory given, even if only in a chalk line or in the imagination, this is not the case with the various configurations of love; and the entire usefulness of the example is limited to the question whether here too, corresponding to the forkness of forks, there is a principal experience, a loveness, a lovehood, a lovelikeness, in every case. But love is not an object of sensory cognition that could be grasped with a glance, or even with a feeling, but a moral event in the way that premeditated murder, justice, or contempt is; and this means among other things that a variously ramifying, multiply supported chain of comparisons is possible between different examples of it, the most distant of which may be quite dissimilar, indeed distinct from each other to the point of being opposite, and yet be connected by a resonance that is passed from one link to another. In treating of love, therefore, one may arrive at hatred; and yet the cause is not the much-invoked “ambivalence,” the divided nature of feeling, but precisely the wholeness and plenitude of life.

  Nevertheless, such a word could also have preceded the segue that was beginning to develop. For forks and other such innocent aids aside, sophisticated conversation nowadays knows how to treat of the essence and nature of love without faltering and nevertheless express itself as grippingly as if this core inhered in all the appearances of love as forkness does in the pitchfork or salad fork. One tends to say then—and the habit of common usage might have tempted Ulrich and Agathe to do so as well—that the main thing in all matters of love is libido, or else eros. These two words do not have the same history, nevertheless, and especially in view of our time, their histories can be compared. For when psychoanalysis (because an age that refuses to have any truck with intellectual depth is intrigued to learn that it has a depth psychology) began to become the philosophy of the day and disturbed the adventureless life of the bourgeoisie, everything and everyone was declared to be the libido, so that in the end it is as impossible to say what this key and skeleton key to the psyche is not as it is to say what it is. And precisely the same is true of eros; except that those who with the greatest conviction reduce all physical and emotional bonds to eros, have experienced their eros in this way from the beginning. It would be futile to translate “libido” as “drive” or “desire,” specifically sexual or presexual desire, and “eros,” conversely, as spiritual or even suprasensory “tenderness”; one would then have to add a special historical treatment on the subject, a prospect so tedious it makes ignorance a pleasure. But this is what determined in advance that the conversation conducted between two deck chairs did not take the direction indicated but instead found appeal and refreshment in the primitive and insufficient process of simply registering as many examples as possible of what is called love in order to sort them in rows as if in a game, and indeed to allow themselves the utmost naivete and not to dismiss even the silliest examples.

  And so, comfortably chatting, they classified the examples that occurred to them, and the way in which they occurred, according to the feeling, its object, and the action through which it expressed itself. But there was also an advantage in first taking stock of the behavior, and in considering whether it merited the name of love in a real or a metaphorical sense, and to what extent. In this way many kinds of material were brought together from various directions.

  But spontaneously, the first thing they talked about was feeling; for apparently the whole nature of love is to feel. All the more surprising is the answer that feeling is the least part of love: to pure inexperience, it would be like sugar and toothache; not quite as sweet and not quite as painful, and as restless as cattle plagued by horseflies. This comparison may not seem a masterpiece to someone who is himself plagued by love; and yet the usual description is not much different: a sweet torment of joy and anxiety, pain and longing, an intangible ache of desire. It seems that since time immemorial nothing more precise could be said of this condition. But lack of emotional distinctness is not characteristic of love alone. Being happy or sad is also not something one experiences as irrevocably and straightforwardly as one distinguishes smooth from rough, nor can other feelings be recognized purely by feeling, let alone by touch. This turn in their investigation prompted a remark, which they might have elaborated with suitable examples, regarding the unequal disposition and formation of feelings. That was the term Ulrich gave it in advance; and he could just as well have said “disposition,” “elaboration,” and “crystallization.”

  He began by positing a natural experience: Every feeling involves a convincing certainty of itself that is apparently part of its nucleus. It must also be assumed, on equally general grounds, that the differences among feelings originate no less with this nucleus. He gave several examples. Love of a friend has a different origin and different traits from love of a girl, of a woman in full bloom, or of a woman who lives in saintly seclusion; and feelings that diverge even further, such as—to remain with the subject of love—love, veneration, lechery, sexual dependence, or the various kinds of love and kinds of antipathy, are already different at their source. If one allows both these assumptions, then all feelings, from beginning to end, would have to be as solid and transparent as crystals. And yet no feeling is unmistakably what it appears to be; and neither self-observation nor the actions prompted by the feeling provide any certainty about it. Now, this difference between the self-assurance and the uncertainty of feelings is certainly not negligible. But if one observes the birth of a feeling in the context of its physiological as well as its social causes, that difference becomes quite natural. These causes awaken in broad outlines, so to speak, merely the species of a feeling without determining it more specifically; for corresponding to every drive and every situation that triggers it, there is a whole bundle of feelings that can answer for them. That which is there at the beginning can be called the nucleus of the feeling still in a state between being and nonbeing; but if one wanted to describe this nucleus, irrespective of its nature, nothing more accurate could be said about it than that it is a something which, in the course of its development, and dependent on a great many things that are or are not added to it, will develop into the feeling it was supposed to become. Thus every feeling has, in addition to its original disposition, a destiny as well; and because what it later develops into is increasingly dependent on accruing conditions, there is no feeling that could unmistakably be itself from the beginning; indeed there is perhaps not even one that would purely and indisputably be a feeling. Put another way, it follows from this interplay of disposition and elaboration that in the domain of feelings it is not their pure occurrence and unequivocal fulfillment that predominate, but their progressive approximation and approximate fulfillment. And something similar is also true of everything that requires feeling in order to be understood.

  This was the conclusion of the observation introduced by Ulrich, which contained approximately these formulations in this sequence. Hardly less curt and hyperbolic than the assertion that feeling is the least part of love, it could also be said that because love is a feeling, it cannot be recognized by feeling. Incidentally, this shed some light on the question of why he had called love a moral event. Those three nouns, however—disposition, elaboration, and crystallization—had been the main
knots that held together the ordered understanding of the phenomenon of feeling, at least according to a certain fundamental view to which Ulrich, too, was not unhappy to turn when he had need of such an explanation. But because working this out properly would have demanded a more extensive and more methodical treatment than he was willing to take on, he broke off what he had begun at this point.

  The continuation extended in two directions. In accord with the theme of the conversation, the object and the action of love should have been next in turn, in order to determine what it was in them that gave rise to their highly dissimilar manifestations, and finally to discover what love “really” is. That was why they had talked about the role actions played in defining a feeling at its very beginning, a determining influence which that feeling’s subsequent destiny should be all the more capable of reprising. But Agathe asked another question: it might have been possible—and she had reasons, if not for distrust, then at least for fear of such distrust arising—that the explanation her brother had chosen really applied only to a weak feeling or even to an experience that wanted to have nothing to do with strong ones.

  Ulrich responded: “Not in the least! It is precisely in its greatest strength that feeling is not at its most secure. In the greatest fear, one is paralyzed or screams instead of fleeing or defending oneself. In the greatest happiness there is often a peculiar pain. Too much zeal “loses the way,” as the proverb says. And in general it can be maintained that at its most exalted, feeling loses its color and fades away as if blinded. It may be that the entire world of feelings that are known to us is suited to a middling life and ceases at the highest degrees, just as it does not begin at the lowest.”

  Tangentially related to this was the experience that often occurs when one observes one’s feelings, especially if one “holds them up to scrutiny.” They become indistinct and are hard to tell apart. But what they lose in clarity of strength they ought to gain, at least to some extent, through the clarity of attention, and they don’t do even that. —That was Ulrich’s reply, and it was not by chance that he associated the extinction of emotion under scrutiny and its dying away in the highest degrees of excitation. For both are states in which action is suspended or disrupted; and because the connection between feeling and action is so close that some people consider them a unit, the way the two examples complemented each other was not without meaning.

  But what he avoided saying was precisely what they both knew from their own experience, that at its highest stage the feeling of love can involve a state of mental obliteration and physical disarray. This led him to turn the conversation somewhat arbitrarily away from the significance action has for feeling, apparently with the intention of coming back to the classification of love with regard to its objects. At first glance, this somewhat capricious possibility did seem better suited to the purpose of bringing order to love’s multiplicity of meanings. If it is in effect a blasphemy, to begin with a concrete example, to use the same word for the love of God and the love of fishing, this is doubtless due to the differences between the beloved objects. Similarly, the significance of the object can be measured by other examples. When we love something, therefore, the factor that introduces the enormous differences in the relationship between love and its object is not be found in the love but in the something. Thus there are objects that make love rich and healthy; and others that make it poor and sickly, as if that were due entirely to them. There are objects that must reciprocate love if it is to unfold all its power and unique character; and there are others of which it would be meaningless from the outset to make any similar demand. This separates categorically a relationship with living beings from one with inanimate things; but even when inanimate, the object is the true partner of love, and its qualities influence those of love.

  Now the more incompatible this partner is, the more skewed, not to say distorted by passion, love itself becomes. “Compare the healthy love of young people for each other,” Ulrich admonished, “with the ridiculously exaggerated love of the lonely person for his dog, cat, or canary. Look at the passion between a man and a woman fading away, or becoming a nuisance like an ignored and importunate beggar, when it is no longer or not fully reciprocated. Don’t forget, either, that in unequal relations like those between parents and children or master and servant, between a man and the object of his ambition or his vice, the balance between love and its reciprocation could not be more precarious and ultimately perishable. Wherever the natural regulating exchange between the state of love and its object is imperfect, love degenerates like unhealthy tissue!”

  There was something special about this idea that attracted him. It could be elaborated in several ways and with many examples. While he was still thinking about it, something he had not foreseen but that crossed his intended path like a pleasant fragrance coming from faraway fields inadvertently directed his reflection to what in the art of painting is called still life, or according to an opposite but equally useful approach in another language, nature morte. “In a way it’s ridiculous for a person to prize a well-painted lobster,” Ulrich continued without transition, “grapes that gleam like a polished mirror, a hare hanging by its hind legs, and the inevitable pheasant, because human appetite is ridiculous, and painted appetite even more so.” And they both had the feeling that this association reached back more deeply than was immediately apparent and was part of the continuation of what they had omitted to say about themselves.

  For in actual still lifes—objects, animals, plants, landscapes, and human bodies magically cast, as if by a spell, into the circle of art—something other than what is depicted shows itself, namely the mysterious demonic power of painted life. There are famous paintings of this kind, so they both knew what they were talking about; but it is better, Ulrich said, not to speak of particular pictures but of a kind of picture, and one that moreover does not produce followers, but arises without rules at the summons of a creative impulse. Agathe asked by what signs one would recognize such a painting. Ulrich was visibly unwilling to indicate any definitive trait, but then said slowly, smiling, and without hesitation: “The exciting, indefinite, infinite echo!”

  And Agathe understood him. Somehow you feel that you’re on the beach. Small insects are humming. The air brings hundreds of meadow scents. Thought and feeling stroll busily side by side. But stretched out before your eyes is the unresponding wasteland of the sea, and what has importance on the shore loses itself in the monotonous motion of the infinite view. She was thinking how all true still lifes can arouse this happy, insatiable sadness. The longer one looks at them, the clearer it becomes that the things depicted in them seem to be standing on the colorful shore of life, their eyes filled with immensity and their tongues paralyzed.

  Ulrich now replied with another paraphrase. “All still lifes really paint the world of the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!” And in answer to a questioning smile from his sister he said: “So what they arouse in the way of human emotion would probably be jealousy, a mysterious curiosity, and sorrow!”

  That was almost an “aperçu,” and not even the worst of its kind: he noted it with displeasure, for he was not fond of these insights turned to precision as if on a lathe and hastily gilded. But neither did he do anything to improve what he had said, nor did his sister ask him to do so. For the obstacle that kept them both from adequately expressing themselves about the uncanny art of the still life, or nature morte, was its mysterious resemblance to their own life.

  This resemblance had always played a great role for both of them. Without there being any need to recount in detail something that reached back to their shared childhood memories and that had reawakened at their reunion and ever since imbued all their experiences and most of their conversation with an indefinable strangeness, it cannot be left unmentioned that the narcotic breath of the still life was always to be felt in it. Spontaneously, therefore, and without adopting anything specific that might have guided them, they turn
ed their curiosity toward everything that might be related to the nature of the still life; and the result was something more or less like the following exchange of words, which tautened and mobilized their conversation once again like a vortex:

  Having to beg for something before an imperturbable countenance that grants no response drives a person into a frenzy of despair, attack, or humiliation. It is just as harrowing, but unspeakably beautiful, to kneel before an unmoving countenance in which life was extinguished a few hours ago, leaving behind a glow like a sunset.

  This second example is even an emotional commonplace, if ever anything could be labeled as such! The world speaks of the benediction and dignity of death; the poetic motif of the beloved on his bier has existed for hundreds if not thousands of years; there is a whole genre of related, especially lyric, death poems. There is probably something adolescent about this. Who imagines that death bestows upon him the noblest of beloveds to keep as his own? He who lacks the courage or the possibility of having a living one!