The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “And it’s not at all against nature for a child to be the object of such feelings?” Agathe asked.

  “What would be against nature would be a straight-out lustful desire,” Ulrich replied. “But a person like that also drags the innocent or, in any event, unready and helpless creature into actions for which it is not destined. He must ignore the immaturity of the developing mind and body, and play the game of his passion with a mute and veiled opponent; no, he not only ignores whatever would get in his way, but brutally sweeps it aside! That’s something quite different, with different consequences!”

  “But perhaps a touch of the perniciousness of this ‘sweeping aside’ is already contained in the ‘ignoring’?” Agathe objected. She might have been jealous of her brother’s tissue of thoughts; at any rate, she resisted. “I don’t see any great distinction in whether one pays no attention to what might restrain one, or doesn’t feel it!”

  Ulrich countered: “You’re right and you’re not right. I really just told the story because it’s a preliminary stage of the love between brother and sister.”

  “Love between brother and sister?” Agathe asked, and pretended to be astonished, as if she were hearing the term for the first time; but she was digging her nails into Ulrich’s arm again, and perhaps she did so too strongly, and her fingers trembled. Ulrich, feeling as if five small warm wounds had opened side by side in his arm, suddenly said: “The person whose strongest stimulation is associated with experiences each of which is, in some way or other, impossible, isn’t interested in possible experiences. It may be that imagination is a way of fleeing from life, a refuge and a den of iniquity, as many maintain; I think that the story of the little girl, as well as all the other examples we’ve talked about, point not to an abnormality or a weakness but to a revulsion against the world and a strong recalcitrance, an excessive and overpassionate desire for love!” He forgot that Agathe could know nothing of the other examples and equivocal comparisons with which his thoughts had previously associated this kind of love; for he now felt himself in the clear again and had overcome, for the time being, the anesthetizing taste, the transformation into the willless and lifeless, that was part of his experience, so that the automatic reference slipped inadvertently through a gap in his thoughts.

  These thoughts were still oriented toward the more general aspect, with which his personal case could be compared as well as contrasted; and if in favor of the inner coherence of these ideas one leaves aside how they succeeded and shaped one another, what remained was a more or less impersonal content that looked something like this: For the articulation of life, hate might be just as important as love. There seem to be as many reasons to love the world as to detest it. Both instincts he in human nature ready for use, their powers in unequal proportions, which vary in individuals. But there is no way of knowing how pleasure and bitterness balance each other in order to allow us to keep going on with our lives. The opinion we like to hear, that this calls for a preponderance of pleasure, is evidently false. For we also go on with our lives with bitterness, with an excess of unhappiness, hatred, or contempt for life, and proceed as surely as we would with a superabundance of happiness. But it occurred to Ulrich that both are extremes, the life-loving person as well as the person shadowed by animosity, and this is what led him to think of the complicated balance that is the usual one. Belonging to this balance of love and hate, for example, and thereby to the processes and structures with whose help they reach an accommodation, are justice and all other ways of observing moderation; but there belong to it no less the formation of fellowships of two or of vast numbers, combinations that are like feathered nests elaborately girdled with thorns; there belongs to it the certainty of God; and Ulrich knew that in this series the intellectual-sensual structure of the “sister” ultimately also had its place as a most daring expedient. From what weakness of soul this dream drew its nourishment stood hindmost, and foremost stood, as its origin, a really superhuman disparity. And apparently it was for this reason that Ulrich had spoken of revulsion toward the world, for whoever knows the depth of good and evil passion experiences the falling away of every kind of agreement that mediates between them, and he had not spoken the way he did in order to gloss over the passion for his own flesh and blood. Without accounting for why he was doing so, he now told Agathe a second little story as well, which at the beginning seemed to have no connection at all with the first. “I once came across it, and it is supposed to have actually happened in the time of the Thirty Years’ War, when individuals and peoples were thrown about in confusion,” he began. “Most of the peasants from one isolated group of farms had been snatched away to serve in the war; none of them returned, and the women managed the farms by themselves, which was tiring and vexatious for them. Then it happened that one of the men who had disappeared returned to the region, and after many adventures came to his wife. I’ll say right off that it wasn’t the right man but a tramp and deceiver, who had shared camp and march for a few months with the missing and perhaps dead man, and had so successfully absorbed the other man’s stories, when homesickness loosened his tongue, that he was able to pretend to be him. He knew the nicknames of wife and cow, and the names and habits of the neighbors, who moreover lived some distance away. He had a beard exactly like the other man’s. He had a way of looking, with his two eyes of nondescript color, that one might easily think he wouldn’t have done it much differently before; and although his voice sounded strange at first, it could certainly be explained by saying that one was now listening more closely than one had before. In short, the man knew how to imitate his predecessor trait for trait, the way a coarse and unlike portrait at first repeals but becomes more of a likeness the longer one remains alone with it, and finally takes over one’s recollection entirely. I can imagine that, from time to time, something like dread must have warned the woman that he was not her husband; but she wanted to have her man again, and perhaps just a man, and so the stranger became more and more established in his role—”

  “And how did it end?” Agathe asked.

  “I forget. Apparently the man must have been unmasked by some sort of accident. But man in general is never unmasked, his whole life long!”

  “You mean: One always only loves the standin for the right person? Or do you mean that when a person loves for the second time he doesn’t confuse the two, but the image of the new one is in many places only an over-painting of the image of the first one?” Agathe asked, with a charming yawn.

  “I intended to say a lot more, and it is much more boring,” Ulrich responded. “Try to imagine someone, color-blind, for whom shades of brightness and shadow represent almost the entire world of colors: he can’t see a single color and yet can apparently act so that no one notices, for what he can see represents for him what he can’t. But what happens in this case in a particular area is what really happens to us all with reality. In our experiences and investigations, reality never appears otherwise than through a glass that partially transmits one’s glance and partially reflects back the image of the viewer. If I observe the delicately flushed white of your hand, or feel the refractory inwardness of your flesh in my fingers, I have something real before me, but not in the way in which it is real; and just as little when I reduce it to its ultimate atoms and formulas!”

  “Then why make such an effort to reduce it to something loathsome!”

  “Do you recall what I said about the intellectual portrayal of nature, of its being an image without similarity? There are many quite different ways in which anything can be apprehended as the exact image of something else, but everything that occurs in this image, or results from it, must in just this one specific view always be a depiction of what investigating the original image demonstrates. If this also turns out to be the case where it could not have originally been foreseen, then the image is as justified as it can possibly be. That’s a very general and quite unsensory notion of image-ability. It presupposes a specific relationship of two areas, and gives t
o understand that it can be comprehended as a portrayal whenever it covers both areas without exception. In this sense, a mathematical formula can be the image of a natural process, just as much as a portrayal established by external sensory similarity. A theory can in its consequences accord with reality, and the effects of reality with theory. The cylinder in a music box is the portrayal of a way of singing, and an action portrays a fluctuating feeling. In mathematics, where for the sake of unsullied progression of thought one would most like to trust only what can be counted off on one’s fingers, one usually speaks only of the precision of coordinates, which has to be possible point for point. But fundamentally, everything can also be regarded as a portrayal that is called correspondence, represent-ability for some purpose, equal value and exchangeability, or equality in respect to something, or undifferent-ability, or mutual appropriateness according to some kind of standard. A portrayal, therefore, is something like a relationship of complete correspondence in view of any particular such relationship—”

  Agathe interrupted this exposition, which Ulrich was pronouncing listlessly and out of a sense of duty, with the admonition: “You could really get one of our modern painters fired up with all that—”

  ‘Well, why not!” he replied. “Consider what sense there is in talking about fidelity to nature and similarity where the spatial is replaced by a surface, or the motley colors of life by metal or stone. That’s why artists aren’t entirely wrong to reject these notions of sensory imitation and similarity as photographic and, with the exception of a few traditional laws that go along with their medium and tools, why they recognize only inspiration, or some kind of theory that has been revealed to them; but the customers who are portrayed, who after the execution of these laws see themselves as victims of a miscarriage of justice, mostly aren’t….” Ulrich paused. Although he had intended to speak about the logically strict notion of portrayal only in order to be able to derive from it its free but by no means random consequences, which dominate the various imagistic relationships that occur in life, he was now silent. Observing himself in this attempt left him dissatisfied. He had lately forgotten many things that had formerly been at the tips of his fingers, or to put it better, he had pushed them aside; even the pointed expressions and concepts of his earlier profession, which he had used so often, were no longer viable for him, and in searching for them he not only felt an unpleasant dryness but was also afraid of talking like a bungler.

  “You said that a color-blind person isn’t missing anything when he looks at the world,” Agathe encouraged him.

  “Yes. Of course I oughtn’t to have put it quite that way,” Ulrich responded. “It’s still an obscure question altogether. Even if you limit yourself to the intellectual image that the understanding derives from something, in confronting the problem of whether it’s true you come up against the greatest difficulties, although the air you ordinarily breathe is always dry and crystalline. However, the images we make for ourselves in life so we can act and feel rightly, or even act and feel energetically, aren’t determined just by the understanding; indeed, these images are often quite irrational and, according to rational standards, not at all accurate representations, and yet they must fulfill their purpose in order for us to remain in harmony with reality and with ourselves. They must also be precise and complete according to some kind of key or manual of images, and according to the notion that determines the manner in which they are portrayed, even if this notion leaves room for various methods—”

  Agathe interrupted him excitedly. She had suddenly grasped the connection. “So the false peasant was a portrayal of the real one?” she asked.

  Ulrich nodded. “Originally, an image always represented its object completely. It bestowed power over it. Whoever cut out the eyes or the heart of an image killed the person portrayed. Whoever secretly got hold of the image of an inaccessible beauty was able to conquer her. The name, too, is part of these images; and so one was able to conjure God with His name, which is equivalent to making Him subservient. As you know, even today one makes off with secret remembrances, or gives oneself a ring with an engraved name, and wears pictures and locks of hair over one’s heart as a talisman. In the course of time, something split off; but it has all sunk to the level of superstition, although one part has achieved the tedious dignity of photography, geometry, and such things. But just think of the hypnotized person, who with every sign of satisfaction bites into a potato that for him represents an apple, or think of your childhood dolls, which you loved more passionately the simpler they were and the less they looked like people; so you see that it doesn’t depend on externalities, and you’re back at the bolt-upright fetish column that represents a god—”

  “Couldn’t you almost say that the more dissimilar an image is, the greater the passion for it as soon as we’ve attached ourselves to it?” Agathe asked.

  “Yes, absolutely!” Ulrich agreed. “Our reason, our perception, have separated themselves from our emotions in this matter. One could say that the most stirring representations always have something unlike.” Smiling, he observed her from the side and added: “When I’m not in your presence I don’t see you before me in a way one would like to paint; it’s rather as if you had glanced into some water and I was trying vainly to trace your image in the water with my finger. I maintain that it’s only indifferent things that one sees properly and truly alike.”

  “Strange!” his sister replied. “I see you before me precisely! Perhaps because my memory is entirely too precise and dependent!”

  “Similarity of portrayal is an approximation of what the understanding finds real and equal; it is a concession to the understanding,” Ulrich said agreeably, and went on in a conciliatory way: “But besides that, there are also the images that address themselves to our emotions, and an image in art is, for example, a mixture of both demands. But if, beyond that, you wish to take it to the point where something portrays something else only for the emotions, you’ll have to think of such examples as a flag flying, which at certain moments is an image of our honor—”

  “But there you can only be talking about a symbol, you’re no longer talking about images!” Agathe interjected.

  “Mental image, simile, metaphor, they shade into one another,” Ulrich said. “Even such examples as the image of a disease and the doctor’s plan for curing it belong here. They must have imagination’s inventive lack of precision, but the precision of execut-ability as well. This flexible boundary between imagining the plan, and the image that endures in the face of reality, is important everywhere in life, but hard to find.”

  “How different we are!” Agathe repeated thoughtfully.

  Ulrich parried the reproach with a smile. “Very much so! I’m speaking of the lack of precision in taking something/or something, as of a divinity bestowing fruitfulness and life, and I’m trying to impart as much order to it as it will bear; and you don’t notice that I’ve been talking for a long time about the truthful possibility of twins who are doppelgangers, who have two souls, but are one?” He went on spiritedly: “Imagine twins who resemble each other ‘interchangeably’; place them before you, each in the same attitude, separated only by a wall indicated by a line to confirm that they are two independent beings. And in an uncanny augmentation, they can repeat themselves in whatever they do, so that you spontaneously assume the same about their inner processes. What’s uncanny about this performance? That there’s absolutely nothing by which we can distinguish them, and that yet they are two! That in everything we might undertake with them, one is as good as the other, although in the process something like a destiny is being fulfilled! In short, they are the same for us but not for themselves!”

  “Why are you playing such gruesome and spooky games with these twins?” Agathe asked.

  “Because it’s a case that happens often. It’s the case of mistaking things, of indifference, of perceiving and acting wholesale, of represent-ability: in other words, a major chapter from the usages of life. I’ve on
ly prettied it up in order to dramatize something for you. Now let me turn it around: Under what circumstances would the twins be two for us and one for themselves? Is that spooky too?”

  Agathe pressed his arm and sighed. Then she admitted: “If it’s possible for two people to be the same for the world, it could also be that a person appears to us doubled— But you’re making me speak nonsense!” she added.

  “Imagine two goldfish in a bowl,” Ulrich asked.

  “No!” Agathe said firmly, but laughing at the same time. “I’m not going along with any more of this!”

  “Please, imagine them! A large bowl in the shape of a ball, as you sometimes see in someone’s living room. You can, incidentally, imagine the bowl to be as large as the boundaries of our property. And two reddish-gold fish, moving their fins slowly up and down like veils. Let’s leave aside whether they are really two or one. For each other, at least, they will be two, for the time being; their jealousy over feeding and sex will see to that. They avoid each other, too, whenever they come too near each other. But I can well imagine that for me they can become one: I need only concentrate on this motion that slowly draws in upon itself and unfolds, and then this single shimmering creature becomes merely a dependent part of this common up-and-down motion. Now I ask when this might also happen to them—”