by Robert Musil
“A little dishonesty is good, like sweet or sour,” he now instructed his brother-in-law, “but we are obligated to refine it in ourselves to the point where it would do credit to a healthy life! What I mean by a little dishonesty,” he went on, “is as much the nostalgic flirting with death that seizes us when we listen to Tristan as the secret fascination that’s in most sex crimes, even though we don’t succumb to it. For there’s something dishonest and antihuman, you see, both in elemental life when it overpowers us with want and disease, and in exaggerated scruples of mind and conscience trying to do violence to life. Everything that tries to overstep the limits set for us is dishonest! Mysticism is just as dishonest as the conceit that nature can be reduced to a mathematical formula! And the plan to visit Moosbrugger is just as dishonest as”—here Walter paused for a moment—“as if you were to invoke God at a patient’s bedside!”
There was certainly something in what he had said, and he had even managed to take Siegmund by surprise with his appeal to the physician’s professional and spontaneous humanitarianism, to make him see Clarisse’s scheme and her overwrought motivation as an impermissible overstepping of bounds. However, Walter was a genius compared with Siegmund, as may be seen in Walter’s healthy outlook having led him to confess such ideas as these, while his brother-in-law’s even healthier outlook manifested itself in his dogged silence in the face of such dubious subject matter. Siegmund patted the soil with his fingers while tilting his head now to one side, now to the other, without opening his lips, as if he were trying to pour something out of a test tube, or then again, as if he had just heard enough with that ear. And when Walter had finished there was a fearfully profound silence, in which Walter now heard a statement that Clarisse must have called out to him once, for without being as vivid as a hallucination, it was as if the hollow space were punctuated by these words: “Nietzsche and Christ both perished of their incompleteness!” Somehow, in some uncanny fashion reminiscent of the “coal mine boss,” he felt flattered. It was a strange position that he, health personified, should be standing here in the cool garden between a man he regarded condescendingly and two unnaturally overheated people just out of earshot, whose mute gesticulations he watched with a superior air and yet with longing. For Clarisse was the slightly dishonest element his own health needed to keep from flagging, and a secret voice told him that Meingast was at this very moment engaged in immeasurably increasing the permissible limits of this dishonesty. He admired Meingast as an obscure relation admires a famous one, and seeing Clarisse whispering conspiratorially with him aroused his envy more than his jealousy—a feeling, that is, that ate into him even more deeply than jealousy would have, and yet it was also somehow uplifting; the consciousness of his own dignity forbade him to get angry or to go over there and disturb them; in view of their agitation he felt himself superior, and from all this arose, he did not know how, some vague, mongrel notion, spawned outside all logic, that the two of them over there were in some reckless and reprehensible fashion invoking God.
If such a curiously mixed state of mind must be called thinking, it was of a kind that cannot possibly be put into words, because the chemistry of its darkness is instantly ruined by the luminous influence of language. Besides, as his remark to Siegmund had shown, Walter did not associate belief of any sort with the word “God,” and when the word occurred to him it generated an abashed void around itself. And so it happened that the first thing Walter said to his brother-in-law, after a long silence, had nothing to do with this. “You’re an idiot to think you have no right to talk her out of this visit in the strongest possible terms,” he said bitterly. “What are you a doctor for?”
Siegmund wasn’t in the least offended. “You’re the one who will have to have it out with her,” he replied, glancing up calmly before turning back to what he was doing.
Walter sighed, then started over again. “Clarisse is an extraordinary person, of course. I can understand her very well. I’ll even admit that she’s not all wrong to be as austere in her views as she is. Just thinking of the poverty, hunger, misery of every kind the world is so full of, the disasters in coal mines, for instance, because the management wouldn’t spend enough on timbering …”
Siegmund gave no sign that he was giving it any thought.
“Well, she does!” Walter continued sternly. “And I think it’s wonderful of her. The rest of us get ourselves a good conscience much too easily. And she’s better than we are for insisting that we all ought to change and have a more active conscience, the kind with no limit to it, ever. But what I’m asking you is whether this isn’t bound to lead to a pathological state of moral scrupulousness, if it isn’t something like that already. You must have an opinion!”
Siegmund responded to this pressing challenge by propping himself up on one knee and giving his brother-in-law a searching look. “Crazy!” he said. “But not, strictly speaking, in a medical sense.”
“And what do you say,” Walter continued, forgetting his superior stance, “to her claim that she’s being sent signs?”
“She says she’s being sent signs?” Siegmund said dubiously.
“Signs, I tell you. That crazy killer, for instance. And that crazy swine outside our window the other day!”
“A swine?”
“No, a kind of exhibitionist.”
“I see,” Siegmund said, turning it over in his mind. “You’re sent signs too, when you find something to paint. She just expresses herself in a more high-strung way than you,” he concluded.
“And what about her claim that she has to take these people’s sins on herself, and yours and mine as well, and I don’t know whose else’s?” Walter pressed him.
Siegmund had risen to his feet and was brushing the dirt from his hands. “She feels oppressed by sin, does she?” he asked, again superfluously, politely agreeing as if glad to be able at last to support his brother-in-law. “That’s a symptom!”
“That’s a symptom?” Walter echoed, crushed.
“Fixed ideas about sin are a symptom,” Siegmund affirmed with the detachment of a professional.
“But it’s like this,” Walter added, instantly appealing against the judgment he had just been suing for: “You must first ask yourself: Does sin exist? Of course it does. But in that case there’s also a fixed idea of sin that is no delusion. You might not understand that, because it’s beyond empiricism! It’s a human being’s aggrieved sense of responsibility toward a higher life!”
“But she insists she’s receiving signs?” Siegmund persisted.
“But you just said that signs are sent to me too!” Walter cried. “And I can tell you there are times when I would like to go down on my knees and beg fate to leave me in peace; but it keeps sending signs, and it sends the most inspiring signs through Clarisse!” Then he continued more calmly: “She now claims, for instance, that this man Moosbrugger represents her and me in our ‘sinful body’ and has been sent to us as a warning; but it can be understood as a symbol of our neglecting the higher possibilities of our lives, our ‘astral body,’ as it were. Years ago, when Meingast left us—”
“But an obsession with sin is a symptom of specific disorders,” Siegmund reminded him, with the relentless equanimity of the expert.
“Symptoms, that’s all you know!” Walter said in animated defense of his Clarisse. “Anything beyond that is outside your experience! But perhaps this superstition, which regards everything that doesn’t accord with the most pedestrian experience as a disorder, is itself the true sin and sinful form of our life. Clarisse demands spiritual action against this! Many years ago, when Meingast left and we …” He thought of how he and Clarisse had “taken Meingast’s sins upon themselves,” but realized it was hopeless to try telling Siegmund the process of a spiritual awakening, so he ended vaguely by saying: “Anyway, I don’t suppose you’ll deny that there have always been people who have, so to speak, drawn humanity’s sins on themselves or even concentrated them in themselves.”
Hi
s brother-in-law looked at him complacently. “There you are!” he said amiably. “You yourself prove just what I’ve been saying. That she regards herself as oppressed by sin is a characteristic attitude of certain disorders. But there are also untypical modes of behavior in life: I never claimed anything more.”
“And the exaggerated stringency with which she carries things out?” Walter asked after a while, with a sigh. “Surely to be so rigorous can hardly be called normal?”
Clarisse, meanwhile, was having an important conversation with Meingast.
“You’ve said,” she reminded him, “that the kind of people who pride themselves on understanding and explaining the world will never change anything in it, isn’t that so?”
“Yes,” the Master replied. “‘True’ and ‘false’ are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.”
“So that’s why you said one must have the courage to choose between ‘worth’ and ‘worthless’?” she pressed on.
“Right,” the Master said, somewhat bored.
“And then there’s your marvelously contemptuous formulation,” Clarisse cried, “that in modern life people only do what is happening anyway.”
Meingast stopped and looked down; one might have said that he was either inclining an ear or studying a pebble lying before him on the path, slightly to the right. But Clarisse did not go on proffering honeyed praises; she, too, had now bent her head, so that her chin almost rested in the hollow of her neck, and her gaze bored into the ground between the tips of Meingast’s boots. A gentle flush rose to her pale cheeks as, cautiously lowering her voice, she continued:
“You said all sexuality was nothing but goatish caperings.”
“Yes, I did say that in a particular context. Whatever our age lacks in willpower it expends, apart from its so-called scientific endeavors, in sexuality.”
After some hesitation, Clarisse said: “I have plenty of willpower myself, but Walter is for capering.”
“What’s really the matter between you two?” the Master asked with some curiosity, but almost immediately added in a tone of disgust: “I can guess, I suppose.”
They were standing in a corner of the treeless garden that lay under the full spring sun, almost diametrically opposite the corner where Siegmund was squatting on the ground with Walter standing over and haranguing him. The garden formed a rectangle parallel with and against the long wall of the house, with a gravel path running around its vegetable and flower beds, and two others forming a bright cross on the still-bare ground in the middle. Warily glancing in the direction of the two men, Clarisse replied: “Perhaps he can’t help it; you see, I attract Walter in a way that’s not quite right.”
“I can imagine,” the Master answered, this time with a sympathetic look. “There is something boyish about you.”
At this praise Clarisse felt happiness bouncing through her veins like hailstones. “Did you notice before,” she eagerly asked him, “that I can change clothes faster than a man?”
A blank expression came over the philosopher’s benevolently seamed face. Clarisse giggled. “That’s a double word,” she explained. “There are others too: sex murder, for instance.”
The Master probably thought it would be wise not to show surprise at anything. “Oh yes, I know,” he replied. “You did say once that to satisfy desire in the usual embrace is a kind of sex murder.” But what did she mean by “changing,” he wanted to know.
“To offer no resistance is murder,” Clarisse explained with the speed of someone going through one’s paces on slippery ground and losing one’s footing through overagility.
“Now you’ve really lost me,” Meingast admitted. “You must be talking about that fellow the carpenter again. What is it you want from him?”
Clarisse moodily scraped the gravel with the tip of her shoe. “It’s all part of the same thing,” she said. And suddenly she looked up at the Master. “I think Walter should learn to deny me,” she said in an abruptly cut-off sentence.
“I can’t judge that,” Meingast remarked, after waiting in vain for her to go on. “But certainly radical solutions are always best.”
He said this only to cover all contingencies. But Clarisse dropped her head again so that her gaze burrowed somewhere in Meingast’s suit, and after a while her hand reached slowly for his forearm. She suddenly had an uncontrollable impulse to take hold of that hard, lean arm under the broad sleeve and touch the Master, who was pretending to have forgotten all those illuminating things he had said about the carpenter. While this was happening she was dominated by the feeling that she was pushing a part of herself over to him, and in the slowness with which her hand disappeared inside his sleeve, in this flooding slowness, there eddied fragments of a mysterious lust, which derived from her perception that the Master was keeping still and letting her touch him.
But Meingast for some reason stared aghast at the hand clutching his arm this way and creeping up it like some many-legged creature mounting its female. Under the little woman’s lowered eyelids he caught a flash of something peculiar and realized the dubious character of what was taking place, although he was moved by her doing it so publicly.
“Come!” he said gently, removing her hand from his arm. “We’re too conspicuous, standing here like this; let’s go on walking.”
As they strolled up and down the path, Clarisse said: “I can dress quickly, faster than a man if I have to. Clothes come flying onto my body when I’m—what shall I call it?—when I’m like that! Maybe it’s a kind of electricity. I attract things that belong to me. But it’s usually a sinister attraction.”
Meingast smiled at her puns, which he still did not understand, and fished haphazardly in his mind for an impressive retort. “So you put on your clothes like a hero his destiny?” he responded.
To his surprise, Clarisse stopped short and cried: “Yes, that’s it exactly! Whoever lives like this feels it even in a dress, shoes, knife and fork!”
“There’s some truth in that,” the Master confirmed her obscurely credible assertion. Then he asked point-blank: “But how do you do it with Walter, actually?”
Clarisse failed to understand. She looked at him, and suddenly saw in his eyes yellow clouds that seemed to be driven on a desert wind.
“You said,” Meingast went on with some reluctance, “that you attract him in a way that ‘isn’t right.’ You mean, I suppose, not right for a woman? How do you mean? Are you frigid with men?”
Clarisse did not know the word.
“Being frigid,” the Master explained, “is when a woman is unable to enjoy the act of love with men.”
“But I only know Walter,” Clarisse objected timidly.
“Even so, it does seem a fair assumption, after what you’ve been telling me.”
Clarisse was nonplussed. She had to think about it. She didn’t know. “Me? But I’m not supposed to—I’m the one who must put a stop to it!” she said. “I can’t permit it to happen!”
“You don’t say?” The Master’s laugh was vulgar. “You have to prevent yourself from feeling anything? Or prevent Walter from getting satisfaction?”
Clarisse blushed. But now she understood more clearly what she had to say. “When you give in, everything gets swamped in lust,” she replied seriously. “I won’t let a man’s lust leave him and become my lust. That’s why I’ve attracted men ever since I was a little girl. There’s something wrong with the lust of men.”
For various reasons Meingast preferred not to go into that.
“Do you have that much self-control?” he asked.
“Well, yes and no,” Clarisse said candidly. “But I told you, if I let him have his way, I’d be a sex murderer!” Warming to her subject, she went on: “My woman friends say they ‘pass out’ in the arms of a man. I don’t know what that is. I’ve never passed out in a man’s arms. But I do know what it’s like to ‘pass out’ without being in a man’s arms. You must know about that too; after all, you d
id say that the world is too devoid of illusions …!”
Meingast waved this off with a gesture, as if to say she had misunderstood him. But now it was all too clear to her.
“When you say, for instance, that one must decide against the lesser value for the sake of the higher value,” she cried, “it means that there’s a life in an immense and boundless ecstasy! Not sexual ecstasy but the ecstasy of genius! Against which Walter would commit treason if I don’t prevent him!”
Meingast shook his head. Denial filled him on hearing this altered and impassioned version of his words; it was a startled, almost frightened denial, but of all the things it prompted him to say, he chose the most superficial: “But who knows whether he could do anything else?”
Clarisse stopped, as if rooted to the ground by a bolt of lightning. “He must!” she cried. “You yourself taught us that!”
“So I did,” the Master granted reluctantly, trying in vain to get her to keep walking by setting an example. “But what do you really want?”
“There was nothing I wanted before you came, don’t you see?” Clarisse said softly. “But it’s such an awful life, to take nothing more than the little bit of sexual pleasure out of the vast ocean of the possible joys in life! So now I want something.”
“That’s just what I am asking you about,” Meingast prompted.
“One has to be here for a purpose. One has to be ‘good’ for something. Otherwise everything is horribly confused,” Clarisse answered.
“Is what you want connected with Moosbrugger?” Meingast probed.
“That’s hard to say. We’ll have to see what comes of it,” Clarisse replied. Then she said thoughtfully: “I’m going to abduct him. I’m going to create a scandal!” As she said this, her expression took on an air of mystery. “I’ve been watching you!” she said suddenly. “You have strange people coming to see you. You invite them when you think we’re not home. Boys and young men! You don’t talk about what they want!” Meingast stared at her, speechless. “You’re working up to something,” Clarisse went on, “you’re getting something going! But I,” she uttered in a forceful whisper, “I’m also strong enough to have several different friends at the same time. I’ve gained a man’s character and a man’s responsibilities. Living with Walter, I’ve learned masculine feelings!” Again her hand groped for Meingast’s arm; it was evident she was unaware of what she was doing. Her fingers came out of her sleeve curved like claws. “I’m two people in one,” she whispered, “you must know that! But it’s not easy. You’re right that one mustn’t be afraid to use force in a case like this!”