by Robert Musil
But this brought him back once again to the opposition between truth and love, which for him was nothing new. It occurred to him how often in recent weeks Agathe had laughed at his, for her taste much too pedantic, love of truth; and sometimes it must also have caused her grief! And suddenly he found himself thinking that there is really no more contradictory term than “love of truth.” “For one can raise truth up high in God knows how many ways, but love it you can’t, because truth dissolves in love,” he thought. And this assertion, by no means the same as the fainthearted one that love cannot bear the truth, was for him as familiar and unachievable as everything else. The moment a person encounters love not as an experience but as life itself, or at least as a kind of life, he knows several truths. The person who judges without love calls this opinions, personal views, subjectivity, caprice; but the person who loves knows that he is not insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himself in a land of enthusiasm of thinking, where the words open themselves up to their very core. Of course that can be an illusion, die natural consequence of an all too excitedly involved emotion, and Ulrich took that into account. Truth arises when the blood is cold; emotion is to be deducted from it; and to expect to find truth where something is “a matter of feeling” is, according to all experience, just as perverse as demanding justice from wrath. Nevertheless, there was incontestably some general content, a participation in being and truth, that distinguished love “as life itself” from love as individual experience. And Ulrich now reflected on how clearly the difficulties that ordering his life presented to him were always connected with this notion of a super-powerful love that, so to speak, overstepped its bounds. From the lieutenant who sank into the heart of the world to the Ulrich of this past year, with his more or less assertive conviction that there are two fundamentally distinct and badly integrated conditions of life, conditions of the self, indeed perhaps even conditions of the world, the fragments of recollection, so far as he was able to call them to mind, were all in some form connected with the desire for love, tenderness, and gardenlike, struggle-free fields of the soul. In these expanses lay, too, the idea of the “right life”; as empty as it might be in the bright light of reason, it was richly filled by the emotions with half-born shadows.
It was not at all pleasant for him to encounter so unequivocally this preference for love in his thinking; he had really expected that there were more and different things his thinking would have absorbed, and that shocks such as those of the past year would have carried their vibrations in different directions; indeed, it seemed to him really strange that the conqueror, then the engineer of morality, that he had expected himself to be in his energetic years should have finally matured into a mooning seeker of love.
Clarisse Walter Ulrich
MID 1920s
CLARISSE
Ulrich did not think about Walter and Clarisse. Then one morning he was urgently called to the telephone: Walter. Why didn’t he come out to see them; they knew he was back. A lot had changed, they were waiting for his visit.
Ulrich declined with the curt excuse that after his long absence he had a lot of work to do.
To his surprise, Walter appeared soon afterward; he had taken off from work. The manner in which he inquired after Agathe and the experiences of the trip gave the impression of uncertainty or embarrassment; he seemed to know more than he wanted to let on. Finally, the words came out. He had only now realized that it is insanity to doubt the faithfulness of a woman one loves. One has to be able to let oneself be deceived but know how to be deceived in a fruitful way; for example: he had been wrong to be jealous of Ulrich—
—Ah, so he’s talking about Clarisse, Ulrich said to himself, suddenly breathing easier.
—Wrong—Walter went on—even if of course he had never thought of it in any terms other than as mental unfaithfulness; but it hurt so much to have to admit the simple bodily empathy.
—Of course, of course. Ulrich nodded.
—Meingast has left, Walter added.
Ulrich looked up; it really didn’t interest him, but he had the feeling that this was something new. “Why?”
Simply, it had been time. But for several days afterward Clarisse had been out of sorts in a way that gave grounds for anxiety. A real depression. But that was just it; that was what first made him grasp the whole business. Imagine—Walter said—that you love a woman, and you meet a man you admire, and you see that your wife loves and admires him too; and both of you feel that this man is far superior to you, unreachable—
—That I can’t imagine. Ulrich raised his shoulders with a laugh. Walter looked at him with annoyance; both friends felt that they were simulating an old game they had often played with each other.
—Don’t pretend, Walter said. —You’re not so swellheaded to the point of insensitivity that you believe no one is better than you!
—All right. The formulation is false. Who is objectively superior? Engineer A or Aesthetician B, a master wrestler or a sprinter? Let’s drop that. So you’re saying that a person becomes emotionally dependent on someone and the beloved does too: then what happens? You would have to play along with her role as well as your own. The man plays the man’s role and the woman’s role; the woman has womanly feelings for the superior man and a more manly inclination for her earlier and still-loved lover. So this gives rise to something hermaphroditic, doesn’t it? Assuming that no jealousy is involved. A spiritual intertwining of three people, which appears mysterious, and at times almost mystic? God on six legs.
Ulrich had improvised this reflection and was himself astonished at the conclusion it had involuntarily reached. Walter looked at him in surprise. He did not agree—again there was too much intellect in it—but Ulrich had come surprisingly close to the truth, and Walter admired the lightness of Clarisse’s instinct when she had asked that Ulrich be let in on what was going on. He now began to talk a little. —Yes, Clarisse had been swept away by Meingast, and quite rightly, since only a new community of wills and hearts that embraced more than just one couple would be capable of again forging a humanity out of chaos. These ideas had had a powerful effect on her. After Meingast had left she had confessed to Walter: the whole time he had been there—he had really changed in a strange way—she had continually been bothered by the idea that he had taken her and Walter’s sins upon himself and overcome them; it only sounds crazy, Walter said defensively, but it isn’t at all, for he and Clarisse … behind their conflicts one finds everywhere a pathological disorder of the age. She would now like to speak to Ulrich on Moosbrugger’s account.
Ulrich was astonished. What brings the two of you to Moosbrugger?
Well. Moosbrugger is of course only a chance encounter. But when one has once come into contact with something like that one can’t at the same time just ignore it.
Look, you talked with Clarisse about it yourself a couple of times. Before. How can you forget something like that?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders, but the next morning went to see Clarisse.
He felt that one of the two things was not to his taste. He had not thought of Moosbrugger for weeks; yet earlier Moosbrugger had for a time been a point of orientation in his thinking! And after he had thought this over for a while he noticed that once again Clarisse had suddenly managed to fasten onto him with this delicate claw, although he had already become indifferent to her, indeed even found her repulsive. He was curious about what it was Clarisse wanted. When he saw her, he knew that he would do something for Moosbrugger in order to get out of the anxious, reproachful, and unsettled state he was in on account of Agathe. When Ulrich came in she was standing at the window, her hands crossed in front of her hips, legs spread apart as if playing ball. It was a habitual stance of hers, from which her smile emerged with paradoxical charm.
—Our destinies are interwoven—she said—yours and mine. Did Walter tell you? she began. Ulrich replied that he had not quite understood what Walter was after. I must see Moosbrugger! Clarisse said. After greet
ing him she held his hand in hers, moving his index finger downward, as if unintentionally. —I can influence such destinies, she added vaguely.
In the intervening time some quite specific constellation of ideas must have formed in her; one felt it by the way the walls pulsated. With no other person Ulrich knew did everything internal become so physical as with Clarisse, and this, too, doubtless explained her extraordinary abihty to impart her excitement to others.
Her brother had already been won over to the idea, Clarisse related. He was a physician. Ulrich could not stand him. Because as a child of the Wagner craze he had been baptized “Wotan” [Siegfried], he believed everyone would think he was Jewish, and emphasized in equal measure his distaste for Jews and music. He had another peculiarity. Since he had grown up among their other friends, he had found himself when young compelled to read Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Huys-mans, and Peter Altenberg, to whom at that time the spiritual expressiveness of youth was attuned, and when in later years this style eroded and his own nature came to the fore, there arose a quite peculiar mishmash oifleurs du mal and provincial hymns to the Alps. He had come to visit his sister today too, and Clarisse said that he was working somewhere in the garden or in the (adjoining) vineyards. Since even his proximity was enough to put Ulrich out of sorts, he responded with some disappointment. But Clarisse seemed to have been expecting this. “We need him,” she said, and tried to give this sentence an emphasis from the back of her eyes, as if to mean: it’s really too bad he’s bothering us, even if we’re lucky that Walter isn’t here
(but it has to be!) —Be reasonable, Ulrich said: —Why do you want to see Moosbrugger?
Clarisse went and shut the door, which was open. Then she asked a question: Do you understand railway accidents? (One never happens because a locomotive engineer deliberately rams his engine into another train.) Well, they all happen because in the confusing network of tracks, switches, signals, and commands, fatigue makes a person lose the power of conscience. He would only have needed to check one more time whether he was doing the right thing … isn’t that right?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders.
—So the accident comes about because one allows something to happen, Clarisse went on. She cautiously closed her fangs around Ulrich’s hand, smiled in embarrassment, and drilled her glance into his the way one drives a thumbtack into wood. —That’s right, Ulrich, I see it in Walter! (You already know what.) (Every time I’ve yielded we were destroyed. We just didn’t know that in doing it we were drinking a drop of the greatest poison in the world.)
—Oh? Ulrich said. —So it’s like that again between you?
Clarisse flashed at him from her eyes, pulled out the thumbtack again, and nodded.
—It is and it isn’t; I’m already a lot further. What’s the extreme opposite of letting things happen; that one yields to… impressing? You understand, he wants to impress; nothing else! She did not wait for a response. —To make a mark! she said. Her tiny figure had been striding up and down the room with supple energy, her hands at her back; now she stopped and sought with her eyes to hold fast to Ulrich’s, for the words she was now searching for made her mind somewhat unsteady. —To inscribe himself, I’m saying. Lately I’ve discovered something else that’s really uncanny, it sounds so simple: Half our life is expression. (The) impressions are nothing. A heap of earthworms! When do you understand a piece of music? When you yourself create it inwardly! When do you understand a person? When for a moment you make yourself just like him! In art, in politics, but also in love, we’re trying painfully to express ourselves. We re-deem ourselves to the outside. You see—with her hand she described an acute angle lying horizontally, which involuntarily reminded Ulrich of a phallus—like this. That is the expression; the active form of our existence, the pointed form, the— She became quite excited by the effort to make herself understandable to Ulrich. Ulrich must have been rather taken aback, for Clarisse went on to declare: —That’s already in the words re-deem and redemption, both, the “deeming” and the active “re-” Now you understand, of course one has to practice it, but ultimately everything will be like an arrow.
—Dear Clarisse—Ulrich pleaded—please speak so that I can understand you.
Continuation: The Dionysiac. The murderer
At this moment Siegfried came in. Ulrich had not interrupted Clarisse. She had nonetheless retreated and was standing excitedly, as if he were crowding her, against the wall. Ulrich was accustomed to how hard it was for her to find the right words and how she often tried to seize them with her whole body, so that the meaning for which the words were lacking lay in the movement. But this time he was a little astonished. Clarisse, however, was not yet satisfied, there was still something she had to say. —You know, if I’m unfaithful to him—or let’s assume anyway that he is to me—then it’s like digging into one’s own raw flesh. Then you can’t do anything that doesn’t cut deep. Then you can’t talk about that table over there without there being a feeling of bleeding. A smile forced its way through her excitement because Siegfried was listening, but Siegfried was watching her calmly, as if it were a gymnastics exercise. He had taken off his jacket while working, and his hands and shoes were full of dirt. He had been accustomed since Clarisse’s marriage to be the confidant of surprising secrets, and used a glance at his watch to urge haste in a businesslike way. Ulrich felt that this last gesture was directed very much at him.
Clarisse quickly changed her dress. The door remained open, and it hardly seemed accidental that he could see her, standing among her skirts like a boy. Siegfried was saying: —The assistant at the clinic was a fellow student. —You don’t say, Ulrich said. —What do you really want of him? Siegfried shrugged his shoulders. —Either this Moosbrugger is mentally ill or he’s a criminal. That’s correct. But if Clarisse imagines that she can help him … ? I’m a doctor, and I also have to let the hospital chaplain imagine the same thing. Redeem! she says. Well, why shouldn’t she at least see him there? Siegfried went through his calm routine, brushed off his pants and shoes, and washed his hands. Looking at him, it was hard to believe his broad, modishly trimmed mustache. Then they drove to the clinic. Ulrich was in a state in which he would, without resisting, have let far crazier things happen to him.
The physician to whom Wotan conducted them was an artist in his profession.
This is something that exists in every profession that depends on working with one’s head and consists of unsatisfied emotions.
In earlier decades there were photographers who placed the leg of the person to be immortalized on a cardboard boulder; today they strip him naked and have him emote at the sunset; at that time they were wearing curled beards and flowing neckties, today they are clean-shaven and underline their art’s organ of procreation—in precisely the same way a naked African emphasizes her pudenda with a loincloth of mussel shells—by means of glasses. But there were also such artists in the sciences, on the General Staff, and in industry. In such professions they are considered interesting not-just-experts and often, too, as liberators from the narrowness of the craft. In, for instance, the biology of the general doctrine of life, it has been discovered that mechanical, dead, causal explanations and functional laws are inadequate, and that life has to be explained by life or, as they call it, the life force; and in the War they sacrificed entire divisions, or had the population of whole regions shot, because they were generous / thought they owed something to a certain heroic generosity.
With doctors, this romanticism often takes only the harmless form of the family adviser who prescribes marriage, automobile trips, and theater tickets, or advises a neurasthenic who is deeply depressed by his failing business not to pay any attention to the business for a period of two months. It was only psychiatry that occupied a special position, for in science the slighter the success in precision, the greater, generally speaking, is the artistic component, and up until a few years ago psychiatry was by far the most artistic of all modern sciences, with a literature as ingen
ious as that of theology and a success rate that could not be discerned in the earthly realm here below / was to be as little discerned here below as theology’s. Its representatives were therefore often frequently , and today to some extent still are, great artists, and Dr. Fried, Wotan’s university friend, was one of these. If one asked him about the prospects for a cure he would dismiss it with an ironic or a fatigued gesture, while on the other hand there was always lying on his desk a cleanly prepared and beautifully dyed section of brain on a slide, beside the microscope through which he would look into the incomprehensible astral world of cell tissue, and on his face there was the expression of a man practicing a black art, a notorious but admired craft that brings him into daily contact with the incomprehensible and with depraved desires. His black hair was plastered down demoniacally, as if it would otherwise stand on end; his movements were soft and unnatural, and his eyes those of a cardsharp, hypnotist, master detective, gravedigger, or hangman.
Of the three visitors, he devoted himself from the beginning exclusively to Clarisse. He showed Ulrich the least possible politeness. Since this left Ulrich free to observe him in peace and with annoyance, he soon discovered the man’s major points. Clarisse, on the other hand, who from the beginning regarded her desire as fulfilled, was charging ahead too impetuously, and as clinical assistant and instructor, Dr. Fried saw himself compelled to raise obstacles. Clarisse was a woman and not a doctor, and science demands strictly circumscribed limits. Wotan wanted to assume the responsibility of having his sister let in with false documents. But since this was stated openly, the assistant could only smile wearily. —Since we aren’t doctors—Ulrich asked—couldn’t we be a pair of writers, who for research purposes … ? The doctor dismissed this with a gesture: —If you were Zola and Selma Lagerlof I would be charmed by your visit, which of course I am anyway, but here only scientific interests are recognized. Unless—he made a smiling gesture of yielding—the ambassadors of your countries had made application for you to the administration of the clinic.