The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “They’re goldfish!” Agathe admonished. “Not a group of dancers suffering from supernatural delusions!”

  “They are you and I,” her brother responded pensively, “and that’s why I would like to try to bring the comparison to a proper conclusion. It seems to me a soluble problem to imagine how the world glides past in its separate-but-united motion. It’s no different from the world undulating past from a railway car going around curves, except that it happens twice over, so that at every one of the double being’s moments, the world occupies two positions, which somehow must coincide in the soul. That means that the idea of getting from one to the other through some motion will never be associated with these double beings; the impression of a distance existing between them will not arise; and more such things. I think I can imagine that one would also manage to be tolerably comfortable in such a world and could doubtless puzzle out in various ways the necessary constitution of the mental tools and procedures needed to make sense of things.” Ulrich stopped for a moment and reflected. He had become aware of many objections, and the possibility of overcoming them also suggested itself. He smiled guiltily. Then he said: “But if we assume that the constitution of that other world is the same as ours, the task is much easier! Both hovering creatures will then feel themselves as one without being bothered by die difference in their perception and without there being any need of a higher geometry or physiology to attain it, as long as you are simply willing to believe that spiritually they are bound to each other more firmly than they are to the world. If anything at all important that they share is infinitely stronger than the difference of their experiences; if it bridges these differences and doesn’t even let them reach awareness; if the disturbances reaching them from the world aren’t worth being aware of, then it will happen. And a shared suggestion can have this effect; or a sweet indolence and imprecision of the habits of receptiveness, which mix everything up; or a one-sided tension and exaltation that allows only what is desired to get through: one thing, it seems to me, as good as the next—”

  Now Agathe laughed at him: “Then why did I have to march through all that precision about the conditions of portrayal?” she asked.

  Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. “It’s all interconnected,” he answered, falling silent.

  He himself knew that with all his efforts he had nowhere made a breach, and their variety confused his recollection. He foresaw that they would repeat themselves. But he was tired. And as the world becomes snugly heavy in the evaporating light and draws all its limbs up to itself, so did Agathe’s nearness again force its way physically among his thoughts while his mind was giving up. They had both become accustomed to conducting such difficult conversations, and for rather a long time these had already been such a mixture of the pulsating power of the imagination, and the vain utmost effort of the understanding to secure it, that it was nothing new for either of them at one time to hope for a resolution, at another to allow their own words to rock them to sleep much as one listens to the childishly happy conversation of a fountain, babbling to itself happily about eternity. In this condition Ulrich now belatedly thought of something, and again had recourse to his carefully prepared parable. “It’s amazingly simple, but at the same time strange, and I don’t know how to present it to you convincingly,” he said. “You see that cloud over there in a somewhat different position than I do, and also presumably in a different way; and we’ve discussed how whatever you see and do and what occurs to you will never be the same as what happens to me and what I do. And we’ve investigated the question of whether, in spite of that, it still might not be possible to be one being to the ultimate degree, and live as two with one soul. We’ve measured out all sorts of answers with a compass, but I forgot the simplest: that both people could be minded and able to take everything they experience only as a simile! Just consider that for the understanding every simile is equivocal, but for the emotions it’s unequivocal. For someone to whom the world is just a simile could also probably, according to his standards, experience as one thing what according to the world’s standards is two.” At this moment the idea also hovered before Ulrich that, in an attitude toward life for which being in one place is merely a metaphor for being in another, even that which cannot be experienced—being one person in two bodies wandering about separately—would lose the sting of its impossibility; and he made ready to talk about this further.

  But Agathe pointed at the cloud and interrupted him glibly: “Hamlet: ‘Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?’ Polonius: ‘By th’ mass, and ‘tis like a camel indeed.’ Hamlet: ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’ Polonius: ‘It is back’d like a weasel.’ Hamlet: ‘Or like a whale?’ Polonius: ‘Very like a whale!’ “ She said this so that it was a caricature of assiduous accord.

  Ulrich understood the objection, but it did not prevent him from continuing: “One says of a simile, too, that it is an image. And it could be said just as well of every image that it’s a simile. But none is an equation. And just for that reason, the fact that it’s part of a world ordered not by equality but by similitude explains the enormous power of representation, the forceful effect that characterizes even quite obscure and unlike copies, which we’ve already spoken about!” This idea itself burgeoned through its twilight, but he did not complete it. The immediate recollection of what they had said about portrayals combined in it with the image of the twins and with the picture-perfect numbness Agathe had experienced, which had repeated itself before her brother’s eyes; and this brew was animated by the distant memory of how often such conversations, when they were at their finest and came from heart and soul, themselves proclaimed an inclination to express themselves only in similes. But today that did not happen, and Agathe again hit the sensitive spot like a marksman as she upset her brother with a remark. “Why, for heaven’s sake, are all your words and desires directed at a woman who, oddly enough, is supposed to be your exact second edition?” she exclaimed, innocently offending. She was, nevertheless, a little afraid of the reply, and protected herself with the generalization: “Is it comprehensible that in the whole world the ideal of all lovers is to become one being, without considering that these ungrateful people owe almost all the charm of love to the fact that they are two beings, and of seductively different sexes?” She added sanctimoniously, but with even craftier purpose: “They even sometimes say to one another, as if they wanted to accommodate you, ‘You’re my doll’!”

  But Ulrich accepted the ridicule. He considered it justified, and it was difficult to counter it with a new accommodation. At the moment it was not necessary either. For although brother and sister were speaking quite differently, they were still in agreement. From some undetermined boundary on, they felt as one being: the way that from two people playing piano four-handedly, or reading with two voices a scripture important for their salvation, a single being arises, whose animated, brighter outline is indistinctly set off from a shadowy background. As in a dream, what hovered before them was a melting into one form—just as incomprehensibly, convincingly, and passionately beautifully as it happens that two people exist alongside each other and are secretly the same; and this unity was partly supported and partly upset by the dubious manipulation that had lately emerged. It can be said of these reflections that it should not be impossible that the effects the emotions can achieve in sleep can be repeated when one is wide awake; perhaps with omissions, certainly in an altered fashion and through different processes, but it could also be expected that it would then happen with greater resistance to dissolving influences. To be sure, they saw themselves sufficiently removed from this, and even the choice of means they preferred distinguished them from each other, to the extent that Ulrich inclined more to accounting for things, and Agathe to spontaneously credulous resolution.

  That is why it often happened that the end of a discussion appeared to be further from its goal than its beginning, as was also the case this time in the garden, where the meeting had begun almost as an att
empt to stop breathing and had then gone over to suppositions about ways of building variously imagined houses of cards. But it was basically natural that they should feel inhibited about acting according to their all too daring ideas. For how were they to turn into reality something that they themselves planned as pure unreality, and how should it be easy for them to act in one spirit, when it was really an enchanted spirit of inaction? This was why in the midst of this conversation far removed from the world they suddenly had the urgent desire to come into contact with people again.

  PART 2

  Drafts of Character and Incident

  Ulrich Ulrich and Agathe Agathe

  MID 1920s

  [Ulrich visits the clinic]

  He encountered Moosbrugger towering broadly among the cunning deceivers. It was heroic, the futile struggle of a giant among these people. He seemed through some quality or other to actually deserve the admiration that he found a sham but enjoyed in a naively ridiculous way. In the grossest distortions of insanity, there is still a self struggling to find something to hang on to. He was like a heroic ballad in the midst of an age that creates quite different kinds of songs but out of habitual admiration still preserves the old things. Defenseless, admired power, like a club among the arrows of the mind. One could laugh at this person and yet feel that what was comic in him was shattering. The clouding of this mind was connected with that of the age.

  —Do you have a friend? Ulrich asked in a moment when they were unobserved. —I mean, Moosbrugger, don’t you have anyone who could get you out of here? There’s no other way. Moosbrugger said he did, but he wouldn’t be easy to find. What is he? A locksmith. But he’s a locksmith who works on cabinets, Moosbrugger grinned rather sheepishly, (he’s not easy to find), he works in many places. He’d do it, but Ulrich would have to go to his wife and get his address from her. And he didn’t want to impose that on him, this wife was an awful person. Moosbrugger was visibly cutting capers and preening in a courtly way before Ulrich. Ulrich said she would probably give him the information, whether she was awful or not. Yes, she no doubt would; he would have to mention Moosbrugger’s name. Before his last wandering, when he was working in Vienna, he had lived with her himself, the heart of the matter now emerged; he, Moosbrugger; but she was a woman with low tastes, a criminal, a quite common sort Moosbrugger shows all the symptoms of his hatred for women only because he is afraid that Ulrich might have a poor opinion of him when he sees this woman.

  So she would tell Ulrich where he could meet her partner.

  Ulrich went to see her. Borne by the automatism that accompanies all deeds of daring. He was really not in the least surprised when he entered an apartment that looked like forty others in a building on the outskirts of the city, and encountered in the kitchen a young woman doing chores, who must have been just like the forty other housewives. Nor did the suspicion with which he was greeted in any way differ from the suspicion one often finds in these circles. As soon as he entered he had to say something, and through the general European courtesies he uttered was immediately placed in a quite impersonal relationship. There wasn’t a breath of crime in this environment. She was a coarse young woman, and her breasts moved under her blouse like a rabbit under a cloth.

  When he brought up the name of Moosbrugger Fraulein Hornlicher smiled deprecatingly, as if to say: the useless crazy things he gets himself into; but she was willing to help him. Of course it depended on Karl, but she didn’t think he’d leave Moosbrugger in the lurch. This all took place in courteous exchanges, as when a businessman who’s got himself into a corner begs his solid neighbors for support.

  She gave Ulrich the name of a small tavern where he would presumably find Karl. He’d probably have to go several times, since Karl’s movements were never entirely predictable. He should tell the tavern keeper who had sent him and whom he wanted to speak to and calmly sit down and wait.

  Ulrich was lucky, and found Karl Biziste on his first try. Again an automatic play of limbs and thoughts carried him there; but this time Ulrich was paying attention, and followed with curiosity what seemed to be happening to him rather than to be something he was doing. His emotions were the same as they were the time when he had been arrested. From that moment, when Clarisse’s interest had cautiously begun to tickle him like the end of a thread, until now, where events were already being woven into a heavy rope, things had taken their own course, one thing leading to another with a necessity that merely carried him along. It seemed incredibly strange to him that the course of most people’s lives is this course of things that so alienated him, while on the contrary for other people it is quite natural to let themselves be borne along by whatever turns up, and thus finally be raised to a solid existence. Ulrich also felt that soon he would no longer be able to turn around, but this made him as curious as when one suddenly notices the inexorable movement of one’s own breathing.

  And he made yet another observation. When he imagined how much mischief could arise from what he was proposing to do, and that it soon would no longer be in his power to avoid initiating the process. With an evil deed that he felt on his conscience as if it had already been committed, he saw the world he was walking through in a different way. Almost as if he had a vision in his heart. Of God, or a great invention, or a great happiness. Even the starry sky is a social phenomenon, a structure of the shared fantasy of our species, man, and changes when one steps out of its circle.

  Moosbrugger—Ulrich told himself—will wreak more havoc if I help him to freedom. There’s no denying that sooner or later he will again fall victim to his disposition, and I will bear the responsibility for it. —But when he tried grave self-reproach in order to stop himself, there was something really untruthful in it. About as if one were to take the stance of being able to see clearly through a fog. The sufferings of those victims were really not certain. Had he seen the suffering creatures before him, he would probably have been overcome by a fierce empathy, for he was a person of oscillations, and that also meant of sympathetic oscillations. But as long as this suggestive power of experiencing with the senses was missing, and everything remained only a play of mental forces, these victims remained adherents of a mankind that he would really have liked to abolish, or at least greatly change, and no amount of sympathy diminished the emotional force of this dislike. There are people whom this horrifies; they are under the impress of a very strong moral or social power of suggestion; they speak up and start shouting as soon as they notice even the most remote injustice, and are furious at the badness and coldness of feeling that they frequently find in the world. They demonstrate violent emotions, but in most cases these are the emotions imposed on them by their ideas and principles: that is, an enduring suggestiveness, which like all powers of suggestion has something automatic and mechanical about it, whose path never dips into the realm of living emotions. The person who lives disinterestedly is, in contrast to them, ill-disposed and indifferent toward everything that does not touch his own circle of interests; he not only has the indifference of a mass murderer, in its passive form, when he reads in his morning paper about the accidents and misfortunes of the previous day, but he can also quite easily wish all kinds of misfortune on people he doesn’t care about, if they annoy him. Certain phenomena lead one to assume that a forward-marching civilization based on shared works also strengthens the repressed and immured antagonists of these emotions. This was what was going through Ulrich’s mind as he walked along. Moosbruggers victims were abstract, threatened, like all the thousands who are exposed to the dangers of factories, railroads, and automobiles.

  When he happened to look around on his way to Herr Biziste, he thought he could see that all the life we have created has been made possible only through our neglecting our duty to care for our more distant neighbor. Otherwise we would never think of putting on the street machines that kill him; indeed, we would never let him go out on the street himself, as is actually the case with cautious parents and their children. Instead of this, however,
we live with a statistically predictable annual percentage of murders, which we commit rather than deviate from our manner of living and the line of development we hope to maintain. Ulrich suddenly thought, too, that part of this was a general division of labor in which it is always the task of a particular group of people to heal injuries caused by the indispensable activities of others; but we never restrain a force by demanding that it moderate itself; and finally there are still quite specific institutions, like parliaments, kings, and the like, that serve exclusively as equalizers. Ulrich concluded from this that for him to assist Moosbruggers escape had no significance, for there were enough other people whose job it was to prevent any injuries that might result, and if they fulfilled their obligations they were bound to succeed, which made his personal deed no worse than an irregularity. This individual, moral prohibition—that he was nevertheless obliged as an individual not to let things go that far—was in this context nothing more than a doubled coefficient of security, which the knowledgeable person could afford to neglect.

  The vision of a different order of things hovering far in advance of these specific ideas, an order that was more honest, one might say technically without clichés, accompanied Ulrich even as the adventure enticed him, tired as he was of the indecisive life of a person of today. Possibly: It was not his good fortune to be effective in the world and to be defined by that. like Thomas Mann or the good upstanding citizen of this age. Nor was he involved in the struggle for something. Thus this path was not unlike the dive into the water, well known to Ulrich, from a height of thirty feet. On the way down one sees one’s own image rushing toward one faster and faster in a watery reflection and can adjust small errors in one’s position; but for the rest, one can no longer change anything in what is taking place.