by Robert Musil
“Come, Clarisse, tell us what you’re thinking,” he heard Meingast prompting her, like a doctor or a teacher, in that polite, formal tone he sometimes took with her since his return.
Walter also noticed that Clarisse was looking questioningly at Meingast.
“You were telling me about a certain Moosbrugger, that he was a carpenter… .”
Clarisse kept her eyes on him.
“Who else was a carpenter? The Savior! Wasn’t that what you said? In fact, you even told me that you had written a letter about it to some influential person, didn’t you?”
“Stop it!” Walter burst out. His head was spinning. But he had no sooner expressed his protest than it occurred to him that the letter was something else he had not heard about, and growing weak, he asked: “What letter?”
He got no answer from anyone. Meingast, passing over his question, said: “It’s one of the most timely ideas. We’re incapable of liberating ourselves by our own efforts, no doubt about it; we call it democracy, but that’s merely the political term for our psychological state, our ‘you can do it this way, but you can also do it another way.’ Ours is the era of the ballot. Each year we determine our sexual ideal, the beauty queen, by ballot, and all we have done by making empirical science our intellectual ideal is to let the facts do the voting for us. We are living in an unphilosophical, dispirited age; it doesn’t have the courage to decide what is valuable and what isn’t, and democracy means, expressed most succinctly: Do whatever is happening! Incidentally, this is one of the most disgraceful vicious circles in all the history of our race.”
While he spoke, the prophet had irritably cracked and peeled a nut, the pieces of which he was now shoving into his mouth. Nobody had understood what he was saying. He broke off his speech in favor of a slow chewing motion of his jaws, in which the turned-up tip of his nose also participated, while the rest of his face remained ascetically still, but he did not take his eyes off Clarisse. They remained fixed somewhere in the region of her breast. The eyes of both the other men involuntarily left the master’s face to follow his abstracted gaze. Clarisse felt a suction, as though these six eyes might lift her right out of her chair if they remained fastened on her much longer. But the master vigorously gulped down the last of his nut and went on with his lecture:
“Clarisse has found out that Christian legend has decreed that the Savior was a carpenter. That’s not quite correct: his foster father was. Nor is she in the least justified in trying to make something of the fact that some criminal she’s heard of happens to be a carpenter too. Intellectually that’s simply beneath criticism. Morally it is frivolous. But it shows courage! It really does!” Here Meingast paused, to let the force with which he had said “courage” take effect. Then he quietly continued: “She recently saw, as we did also, a psychopath exposing himself. She makes too much of it; there is in general far too much emphasis on sexuality these days. But Clarisse says: ‘It is not by chance that this man stopped under my window… .’ Now, let us try to understand her rightly. She’s wrong, for causally the incident is, of course, a coincidence. But what Clarisse is really saying is: If I regard everything as explained, then a person will never be able to change the world. She regards it as inexplicable that a murderer whose name, if I am not mistaken, is Moosbrugger happens to be a carpenter; she regards it as inexplicable that an unknown sufferer from sexual disturbances should have stopped just under her window; and so she has fallen into the habit of regarding all sorts of other things that happen to her as inexplicable and …” Again Meingast kept his listeners waiting awhile; his voice had become reminiscent of a man with a resolve who is firmly but warily tiptoeing up to something, and now he pounced: “And so she will do something!” Meingast ended on a strong note.
It gave Clarisse goose pimples.
“I repeat,” Meingast said, “this is not subject to intellectual criticism. But intellectuality is, as we know, only the expression or the tool of a life that has dried out, while the point Clarisse is making may arise from another sphere: that of the will. Clarisse may never be able to explain what is happening to her, but she may well be able to solve it, resolve it. So she is quite right to call it ‘salvation’—she is instinctively using the right term for it. It would be easy for one of us to speak of delusional thinking, or to say that Clarisse is a person with weak nerves, but what would be the point? The world is currently so undeluded that it doesn’t know when to hate or to love anything, and since we’re all of two minds about everything, all of us are neurasthenics and weaklings. In short,” the prophet concluded abruptly, “although it is not easy for a philosopher to renounce insight, it is probably the great, growing insight of the twentieth century that this is what must be done. For me, in Geneva, it is today of greater spiritual importance that we have a French boxing coach than that the dissector Rousseau did his thinking there!”
Meingast could have continued talking, now that he had hit his stride: To begin with, the idea of salvation had always been anti-intellectual. “What the world today needs more than anything else is a strong, healthy delusion” was what he had been on the point of saying, but he had swallowed it in favor of the other ending. Second, there was the concomitant physical meaning implied in the etymology of salvation, its link with “salve” carrying an inference that deeds alone could save, or at least experiences involving the whole person, neck and crop. Third, he had been prepared to say that the overintellectualization of the male could under certain conditions bring woman to the fore as the instinctive leader in action, of which Clarisse was one of the first examples. Finally, there were all the transformations of the salvation idea in the history of peoples, and the present movement from salvation as a purely religious concept, which had been dominant for centuries, toward the realization that salvation must be brought about by resoluteness of will and even, if necessary, by force. Saving the world by force happened to be his central idea at the moment.
Meanwhile, however, the suction of all those eyes on her was becoming more than Clarisse could stand, and she cut off the master’s discourse by turning to Siegmund, as the point of least resistance, saying to him rather too loudly:
“That’s what I told you: we have to experience something ourselves to understand it. That’s why we have to go to the asylum ourselves!”
Walter, who had been peeling a tangerine as a way of keeping steady, at this moment cut too deeply; an acid jet spurted into his eyes, making him start back and grope for his handkerchief. Siegmund, as always well dressed, first contemplated with an expert’s concern the acid’s effect on his brother-in-law’s eye, then moved his gaze to that still life of respectability, the pigskin gloves and bowler hat resting on his knee. It was only when he could not shake off his sister’s relentless stare, and no one spoke to save him the trouble, that he looked up with a grave nod and murmured serenely: “I have never doubted that we all belong in an asylum.”
Clarisse then turned to Meingast and said: “I’ve told you about the Parallel Campaign. That could be another tremendous opportunity and obligation for us to do away with all the ‘you can do it this way … and another way’ that is the great evil of our century.”
The master waved this off with a smile.
Clarisse, overcome with a heady sense of her own importance, cried out obstinately and somewhat incoherently: “A woman who lets a man have his way with her when it’s only going to weaken his mind is a sex murderer too!”
Here Meingast issued a gentle warning: “Let’s keep this on a general plane! Incidentally, I can set your mind at rest on one point: As regards those absurd committee meetings where a dying democracy is trying to give birth to one more great mission, I’ve had my observers and confidential agents for a long time now.”
Clarisse simply felt ice at the roots of her hair.
Walter made another vain stab at stemming developments. Deferentially, he took his stand against Meingast, his tone very different from that which he might have used with Ulrich, for example
: “What you say probably amounts to much the same thing I’ve been saying for a long time, that one ought to paint only in pure colors. It’s high time to finish with the broken and blurred, with our concessions to the inane, to the fainthearted vision that no longer dares see that each thing has a true outline, true colors. I put it in pictorial terms, you in philosophic terms. But even though we share a point of view …” He suddenly became embarrassed, feeling that he could not talk openly in front of the others about why he dreaded Clarisse’s involvement with the insane.
“No, I won’t have Clarisse doing it!” he exclaimed. “It won’t happen with my consent.”
The master had listened amiably, and he answered Walter just as pleasantly as if not one of these emphatic words had reached his ear. “Incidentally, there’s something Clarisse has expressed beautifully: She claimed that besides the ‘sinful form’ we inhabit, we all have an ‘innocent form.’ We could take this in the lovely sense that, apart from the miserable world of experience, our mind has access to a glorious realm where in lucid moments we feel our image moved by dynamics of an infinitely different kind. How did you put it, Clarisse?” he asked her in an encouraging tone. “Didn’t you say that if you could stand up for this wretch without disgust, go into his cell and play the piano for him day and night, without tiring, you would draw his sins, as it were, out of him, take them upon yourself, and ascend with them? Naturally,” he said, turning back to Walter, “this is to be taken not literally but as a subliminal process in the soul of the age, a process that here assumes the form of a parable about this man, inspiring her will… .”
He was at this point uncertain whether to add something about Clarisse’s relation to the history of the idea of salvation, or whether it might be more attractive to explain her mission of leadership to her all over again in private. But Clarisse leapt from her chair like an overexcited child, raised her arm, with fist clenched, high above her head, and with a shyly ferocious smile cut short all further praise of herself with the shrill cry: “Onward to Moosbrugger!”
“But we still have nobody who can get us admitted …,” Siegmund was heard to say.
“I am not going along with this!” Walter said firmly.
“I cannot accept favors from a state where freedom and equality are to be had at every price and in every quality,” Meingast declared.
“Then Ulrich must get us permission!” Clarisse exclaimed.
Meingast and Siegmund, having gone to enough trouble already, gladly agreed to a solution that relieved them, at least temporarily, of the responsibility, and even Walter finally had to give in, in spite of his protest, and take on the mission of going down to the nearby grocery to phone their chosen emissary.
This was the call that made Ulrich break off writing his letter to Agathe. Walter’s voice took him by surprise, and so did his proposal. There was certainly room for a difference of opinion about Clarisse’s scheme, Walter freely conceded, but it could not be entirely discounted as a whim. Perhaps it was time to somehow make a start somewhere, it didn’t matter so much where. Of course, it was only a coincidence that Moosbrugger was involved; but Clarisse was so startlingly direct: her mind looked like those modern paintings in unmixed primary colors, harsh and unwieldy, but if one went along with it, often amazingly right. He couldn’t really explain it all on the phone, but he hoped Ulrich wouldn’t let him down… .
Ulrich was happy to drop what he was doing and agreed to come, although it was a disproportionately long way to go for the sake of talking with Clarisse for a mere fifteen minutes; for Clarisse had been invited for supper at her parents’, along with Walter and Siegmund. On the way, Ulrich had time to wonder at his not having given a thought to Moosbrugger in so long and always having to be reminded of him by Clarisse, though the man had been almost constantly on his mind before. Even in the darkness of late evening through which Ulrich had to walk from the last trolley stop to his friends’ house, there was no room for such a haunting apparition; a void in which he had occurred had closed. Ulrich noted this with satisfaction and also with that faint self-questioning which is a consequence of changes whose extent is clearer than their cause. He was enjoying the sensation of cutting through the permeable darkness with the solider black of his own body, when Walter came uncertainly toward him, nervous at night in this lonely vicinity but anxious to say a few words to Ulrich before they joined the others. He eagerly took up his explanations from the point where he had broken off. He appeared to be trying to defend himself, and Clarisse as well, from being misunderstood. Even when her notions seemed to be incoherent, he said, one could always detect behind them an element of pathology that was part of the ferment of the times; it was her most curious faculty. She was like a dowsing rod pointing to hidden springs—in this case, the necessity of replacing modern man’s passive, merely intellectual, rational attitude with “values.” The form of intelligence of the time had destroyed all firm ground, so it was only the will—indeed, if it couldn’t be done otherwise, then it was only violence—that could create a new hierarchy of values in which a person could find beginning and end for his inner life… . He was repeating, reluctantly and yet with enthusiasm, what he had heard from Meingast.
Guessing this, Ulrich asked him impatiently: “Why are you talking so pompously? Is it that prophet of yours? It used to be you couldn’t have enough simplicity and naturalness!”
Walter put up with this for Clarisse’s sake, lest his friend decline to help, but had there been just one ray of light in that moonless gloom, the flash of his teeth would have been visible as he bared them in frustration. He said nothing, but his suppressed rage made him weak, and the presence of his muscular friend shielding him from the eerie loneliness of the place made him soft. Suddenly he said: “Imagine loving a woman and then meeting a man you admire and realizing that your wife admires and loves him, too, and that both of you feel, in love, jealousy, and admiration, this man’s hopeless superiority—”
“I’d rather not imagine it!” Ulrich should have heard him out, but he squared his shoulders with a laugh and interrupted him.
Walter shot him a venomous glance. He had meant to ask: “What would you do in such a case?” But it was the same game they had been playing since their school days. As they entered the dimly lit hall he said:
“Drop that act of yours! You’re not as conceited and thick-skinned as all that!” Then he had to run to catch up with Ulrich on the stairs, where he hastily whispered the rest of what Ulrich needed to know.
“What has Walter been telling you?” Clarisse asked when they got upstairs.
“I can do it, all right,” Ulrich said, going straight to the point, “but I don’t think it would be sensible.”
“Did you hear that? His very first word was ‘sensible,’” Clarisse called out to Meingast, laughing. She was rushing back and forth between the clothes closet, the washstand, the mirror, and the half-open door between her room and the one where the men were. They could catch glimpses of her now and then: with a wet face and her hair hanging down; with her hair brushed up; still bare-legged; in stocking feet; in her long-skirted dinner dress below with a dressing jacket above that looked like a white institutional uniform. She enjoyed this appearing and disappearing. Since she had got her way, all her feelings were submerged in an easy sensuality. “I’m dancing on light-ropes!” she shouted into the room. The men smiled, but Siegmund glanced at his watch and dryly asked her to hurry up. He was treating the whole thing as a gymnastic exercise.
Then Clarisse glided on a “light-rope” to the far corner of her room, for a pin, and shut the drawer of her night table with a bang.
“I can change faster than a man,” she called back to Siegmund in the other room, but suddenly paused over the double meaning of “change,” which right now could mean for her both “dressing for dinner” and “being transformed by mysterious destinies.” She quickly finished dressing, stuck her head through the door, and gravely regarded her friends one after the other. Anyone w
ho did not think of it as a game might have been alarmed that something in this solemn countenance had been extinguished that should have been part of a natural, healthy face. She bowed to her friends and said ceremonially: “So now I have put on my destiny!” But when she straightened up again she looked quite normal, even rather charming, and her brother Siegmund cried: “Forward—march! Papa doesn’t like people to be late for dinner!”
When the four of them walked to the streetcar—Meingast had disappeared before they left the house—Ulrich fell back a few steps with Siegmund and asked him whether he had not been a bit worried about his sister of late. The glow of Siegmund’s cigarette sketched a flatly rising are in the darkness.