The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  When she awoke in her bed and rang for the chambermaid, she discovered that the Greek had left. She nodded, as if it had been agreed upon between them. —I’m leaving too, Clarisse said. —I’ll have to tell the doctor—the girl. Hardly had the girl left the room when Clarisse sprang out of bed and, in a frenzy, dumped her belongings into a suitcase; what did not fit, and the rest of her baggage, she left behind. The girl thought the gentleman had taken the train for Munich. Clarisse fled. “Error is not blindness,” she murmured, “error is cowardice! He recognized his mission but did not have enough courage for it.” As she slunk out of the building, past his abandoned room, she again encountered the pain and shame of the past night. “He thought I was sick!” Tears streamed down her cheeks. She even did justice to the prison that she was escaping from; she took leave of the walls and the benches outside the door with compassion. People had meant to help her here, the best they could. —They wanted to cure me—Clarisse smiled—but curing is destroying! And when she was sitting in the express, the energy of whose storming bounds permeated her, her resolves became clear.

  How can one be mistaken? Only by not seeing. But how can one not see what is there to be seen? By not trusting oneself to see. Clarisse recognized, like a broad field without a boundary, the general law of human progress: Error is cowardice; if people were to stop being cowardly the earth would make a leap forward. In an analogous way, Ulrich recognizes why there is no radical progress. Good, the way the train sped on with her without stopping. She knew that she had to catch up with the Greek.

  They had all been against her, the sick ones too.

  Clarisse took a sleeping compartment. When she got into the carriage she immediately told the conductor: Three gentlemen must be on this train, go and look for them, I absolutely must speak with them! It seemed to her that all her fellow passengers fell under the strong personal influence that emanated from her and were obeying her commands. The waiters in the dining car as well. But nevertheless the conductor had to report that he had not found the Greek, Walter, and Ulrich. After that, with a completely clear sensory impression, she recognized herself in the mirror now as a white she-devil, now as a blood-red madonna.

  When she got off the train in Munich the next morning, she went to an elegant hotel, took a room, smoked the whole day, drank brandy and black coffee, and wrote letters and telegrams. Some circumstance or other had led her to assume that the Greek had traveled to Venice, and she issued instructions to him, the hotels, consular offices, and government bureaus. She displayed enormous industriousness. —Hurry up! she said to the page boys, who galloped around for her the whole day. It was a mood like at a fire when the fire trucks rattle up and the sirens wail, or like a mobilization, where horses trot and endless processions of resolute, helmet-enclosed faces march through the streets as if dreaming, the air filled with thrown flowers and heavy with gray tension.

  That evening she herself went on to Venice.

  In Venice, she registered at a pension frequented by Germans, where she had stayed on her honeymoon; people there dimly recalled the young woman. The same life as in Munich began, with abuse of alcohol and alkaloids, but now she no longer sent off any telegrams or messengers. From the moment she had got to Venice, perhaps because the official emissaries were not already waiting for her at the station with their reports, she had been convinced that the Greek had slipped through her net and fled to his homeland. The task now was to stem the flood and prepare a final assault, without haste and with the strictest measures toward oneself.

  It was clear that she would sail to Greece, but first the frenzied desire for the man, a desire that had pushed her almost too far, had to be restrained. Besides coffee and brandy, Clarisse took no meals; she stripped naked and barricaded herself in her room, into which she did not allow even the hotel personnel. Hunger and something else, which she was not able to make out, put her in a state of fever-like confusion that lasted for days, in which impatient sexual arousal gradually faded to a vibrating mood in which all sorts of delusions of the senses were mingled. The abuse of strong substances had undermined her body; she felt it beginning to collapse under her. Constant diarrhea; a cavity appeared in a tooth and bothered her night and day; a small ugly wart began to form on her hand. But all this drove her to exert her mind more and more passionately, like the moment just before the end of a race, when one has to lift one’s legs at every step by willpower. She had got hold of brush and paint pots, and from the arm of a chair, the edge of the bed, and an ironing board that she had found outside her door she built herself a scaffolding that she pushed along the wall, and began to paint the walls of her room with large designs. What she crisscrossed on the bare walls was the story of her life; so great was this process of inner purification that Clarisse was convinced that in a hundred years humanity would make a pilgrimage to these sketches and inscriptions in order to see the tremendous works of art with which the greatest of souls had covered her cell.

  Perhaps they really were great works for someone who would have had to be in a position to disentangle the wealth of associations that had become tangled up in them. Clarisse created them with enormous tension. She felt herself great and hovering. She was beyond the articulated expression of life that creates words and forms, which are a compromise arranged for everyone, and had again arrived at that magic first encounter with herself, the madness of her first astonishment at those gifts of the gods, word and image. What she created was distorted, was piled up in confusion and yet impoverished, was unrestrained and yet obeyed a rigid compulsion; externally. Internally, it was for the first time the expression of her entire being: without purpose, without reflection, almost without will, becoming literally a second thing, enduring, greater, the transubstantiation of the human being into a piece of eternity: finally, the fulfillment of Clarisse’s longing. While she painted she sang: “I am descended from luminous gods.”

  Noted outside the novel: Does greatness never he in content? In a way of ordering things?

  When they broke into her room, uncomprehending eyes stared at these walls like the eyes of hostile animals. Clarisse had bought a boat ticket and laid out a blanket and a towel twisted into a turban as her imperial attire, which she was going to take on board with her. Then it occurred to her that a person who finds himself on sacred paths is not allowed to have any money with him without falling victim to a ridiculous incongruity, so she gave away her money and jewelry to laughing gondoliers. As she was about to give a speech in the Piazza of St. Mark’s to the people assembled for her departure, a man spoke to her and gently brought her back to her pension. But since this man was unwise enough to recommend her to the protection of her hosts, everyone now poured into her room; the padrona screamed about the damage, gave orders to seize Clarisse’s property, swore in vulgar language when none was to be found, and the staff tittered. A horrendous cruelty stared at Clarisse from every side, that primal hatred of inert matter, one part of which pushes another from the spot unless attraction and understanding mold them together into one. Silently Clarisse took her turban and cloak in order to leave this land and go on board. But at the canal steps the always friendly brown-black chambermaid came after her and begged her to wait, because a gentleman wanted to have the honor of showing her something before she left. Clarisse stopped in silence; she was tired and really no longer had the strength to travel. When the gondola with the man and two strange men appeared she stared gravely into the girl’s friendly eyes, which were now almost floating in a moist shimmer, and thought the grievous word: Iscariot. She had no time to reflect on this shattering experience. In the gondola she calmly and seriously kept her eyes on the strange man and had the distinct impression that he was shrinking from her. This satisfied her. They came to the Colleone monument, and now the strange man spoke to her for the first time. ‘Why don’t we go in here,” he said, indicating a building beside the church that stood there. “There’s something particularly nice to look at.” Clarisse suspected the trap being set for
her by the official of public security. But this suspicion had no value for her, no causal valency, so to speak. I’m tired and ill, she said to herself. He wants to lure me into the hospital. It’s unreasonable of me to go along. But my madness is merely that I fall out of their general order and my causality isn’t theirs: only disturbance in a subordinate function, which they overestimate. Their behavior is the crassest lack of ethics / In their causal associations what I do and how I do it is sick; because they don’t see the other.

  When they entered the building she divided the rest of her jewelry and her towel among the matrons, who accepted them, seized her, and strapped her to a bed. Clarisse began to cry, and the matrons said “poveretta!”

  After Confinement

  This time, it was Wotan who went to get her and brought her back; he took her to Dr. Fried’s clinic. When she was brought in, the doctor on duty merely looked at her and had her taken to the ward for the distracted.

  The very first scream of a madman forced on her the idea of the migration of souls; the ideas of reincarnation, of the attainable Nirvana, were not far away.

  “Mother! Mother!” That was the cry of a girl who was covered with horrible wounds. Clarisse longed for her mother on account of the many sins with which her mother had sent her out into the world. Her parents were now sitting around the table at breakfast; there were flowers in the room; Clarisse was covered with all their sins, they felt good; her migration of souls began.

  Clarisse’s first walk led to the bath, since she had been excited by being brought in. It was a square room with a tile floor and a large pool. filled with water and without a raised edge; from the doorway steps led into it. Two wasted bodies fastened longing glances on her and screamed for redemption. They were her best friends, Walter and Ulrich, in sinful form.

  During the night the Pope lay beside her. In the shape of a woman. —Church is black night—Clarisse said to herself—now it longs for the woman. There was a dim light, the patients were sleeping, when the Pope fumbled at her blanket and wanted to slip into bed with her. He was longing for his woman; Clarisse had no objection. —The black night longs for redemption, she whispered, as she yielded to the Pope’s fingers. The sins of Christendom were extirpated. King Ludwig of Bavaria was lying opposite her, etc. It was a night of crucifixion. Clarisse looked toward her dissolution; she felt free of all guilt, her soul floated weightless and bright as these visions crept to her bed like poems and vanished again without her being able to seize their shapes and hold them fast. The next morning, Nietzsche’s soul in the shape of the chief doctor was for her the most glorious sight. Beautiful, kindly, full of profound seriousness, his bushy beard grayed, his eyes seeing as from another world, he nodded to her. She knew it had been he who during the night had bidden her extirpate the sins of Christendom; hot ambition, like the ambition of a schoolgirl, soared in Clarisse.

  During the next two weeks she experienced Faust, Part II. Three characters represented Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity. Clarisse trampled them with her feet. That happened in the water chamber. For three days. Cackling screams filled the enclosed room. Through the vapors and tropical fogs of the bath naked women crept like crocodiles and gigantic crabs. Slippery faces screamed into her eyes. Scissor arms grasped at her. Legs twined around her neck. Clarisse screamed and fluttered above the bodies, striking her toenails into the damp, slippery flesh, was pulled down, suffocated beneath bellies and knees, bit into breasts, scratched flabby cheeks bloody, worked herself to the top again, plunged into the water and out, and finally plunged her face into the shaggy wet lap of a large woman and “on the shell of the Triton goddess” roared out a song until hoarseness stifled her voice.

  One should not think that insanity has no sense; it merely has the turbid, fuzzy, duplicating lens of the air above this bath, and at times it was quite clear to Clarisse that she was living among the laws of a different but by no means lawless world. Perhaps the idea explicidy governing all these minds was nothing other than die striving to escape the place of interdiction and compulsion, an unarticulated dream of the body rebelling against its poisoned head. While Clarisse was trampling with her feet the less agile in the slippery knot of people, there was in her head a “sinless Nirvana” like the broad white air outside a window, the longing for a painless and unconflicted state of rest, and like a buzzing insect she bumped with her head against the wall that sick bodies erected around her, fluttering aimlessly, driven from one moment’s inspiration to the next, while the conviction hovered like a golden halo behind her head, a halo she could not see and could not even imagine but which was nevertheless there, that a profound ethical problem had been laid upon her, that she was the Messiah and the Ubermensch joined in the same person, and would enter her rest after she had redeemed the others, and she could redeem them only by forcing them down. For three days and three nights she obeyed the irresistible will of the community of the mad, let herself be pushed and pulled and scratched till the blood came, threw herself symbohcally on the cross on the tiles of the floor, uttered hoarse, disconnected, incomprehensible words and answered similar words with actions, as if she not only understood them but wanted to stake her life on the communication. They did not ask, they had no need of meaning that dumps words into sentences and sentences into the cellar of the mind; they recognized one another among themselves, and like animals differentiated themselves from the attendants or from anyone who was different, and their ideas produced a chaotic common thread, as during the revolt of a crowd where no one knows or understands anyone else, no one thinks any longer except in fragmented beginnings and endings, but powerful tensions and blows of the oblivious common body unite everyone with one another. After three days and nights, Clarisse was exhausted; her voice was only a bare whisper, her “tiber-strength” had conquered, and she became calm.

  She was put to bed and for a few days lay in a state of profound fatigue, interrupted by attacks of tortured, shapeless resdessness. A “disciple,” a rosy blond woman of twenty-one, who had regarded her from the first day as a liberator, finally gave her her first redemption. This woman came to her bed and said something or other; for Clarisse it meant: I am taking over the mission. Clarisse later found out that the rosy blonde had, in her stead, exorcised the devil through song in the water chamber day and night. But Clarisse stayed in the big hall, took care of the sick, and “lay in wait for their sins.” The communication between her and her confessing charges consisted of sentences like dolls, implausible, wooden little sentences, and God alone knows what they originally meant by them; but if children playing with dolls would have to use concrete words in order to be able to mean the same thing and understand each other, then the magic sleight of hand that pretends a shapeless stick of wood is a living being would never succeed, a trick that excites the soul more than the most passionate lovers are later able to do. Finally, one day, an ordinary woman, who had earlier pounded on Clarisse’s back with her fists, spoke to Clarisse, saying this: “Gather your disciples in the coming night and celebrate your Last Supper. What kind of food does the great lord desire? Speak, that it shall be prepared for you. But we intend to leave, and will no longer appear before your eyes!” At the same time another woman, who suffered from catatonia, passionately kissed Clarisse’s hands, and her eyes were transfigured by approaching death like a star that in the night outshines all others. Clarisse felt: “It is really not a miracle that I believed I had to fulfill a mission,” but in spite of this already more focused feeling, she was uncertain about what it was she had to do. Fortunately, this was the day on which she was transferred to the ward for calm patients.

  On Clarisse

  “Impoverished life”—This is a concept that makes an impression on her, like decadence. Her version of the fin de Steele mood. Drawn from her experience with Walter.

  Along with Walter she adores Wagner, but with rising opposition; whenever he has played Wagner his hands are covered by a cold dampness, so this petit-bourgeois heroism comes out
at his fingers, this heroic petit-bourgeois posturing. She imagines an Italian music that is driven beyond itself by the cruel cheerfulness of the blue Italian sky (omen!), “the destiny over her”: “Her happiness is brief, sudden, unannounced, without pardon.” (Omen, but Ulrich at first sees only what is usual for the times.) “The tanned one,” “cynical” (omen!). She criticizes how empty Walter’s face becomes in so many ways when he is making music.

  Love is to be understood as fate, innocent and therefore cruel— that’s how it hovers before her. She means by this: that’s how she would like to be so filled by her own destiny that she would not think at all of the man who had unleashed it. Walter’s love is for her only a “finer parasitism, a nesting oneself in an alien soul”; she would like to shake it off.

  “Being able to forbid oneself something harmful is a sign of vitality”—she will not allow Walter into her bed. “The harmful lures the exhausted person.”