The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  —I’m not a woman! Clarisse exclaimed, and jumped up. (—Didn’t you call me “little fellow” when I was fifteen years old?)

  The philosopher smiled. Clarisse jumped up and went over to him. —I want to go away with you! she said.

  —Love can be revealed in any of the following relations—the philosopher answered—servant to master, friend to friend, child to parents, wife to spouse, soul to God.

  Clarisse put her hand on his arm; with a wordless request and awkwardly, but as deeply moving as a dog’s faithfulness.

  Meingast bent down and whispered something in her ear.

  Clarisse whispered back hoarsely: —I’m no woman, Meingast! I am the hermaphrodite!

  —You? Meingast made no effort to hide a little contempt.

  —I’m traveling with you. You’ll see. I’ll show you the first night. We won’t become one, but you will be two. I can leave my body. You will have two bodies.

  Meingast shook his head. —Duality of bodies with a certain cancellation of the emphasis on self: a woman can accomplish that. But a woman will never lose herself in a higher community—

  —You don’t understand me! Clarisse said. —I have the power of transforming myself into a hermaphrodite. I’ll be very useful to you in your band of men. You hear that I’m speaking very calmly, but pay attention to what I’m saying: Look at these trees and this round sky above them. Your breath goes further, your heart goes further, health is working in your viscera. But the longer you look, the more the picture sucks you out of yourself. Your body remains standing in its place alone. The world sucks you up, I say. Your eyes make you a woman. And if all your feelings could reach the top, for the world you would be dead and your body decayed.

  —Am I right? But there are other days. Then all your muscles and thoughts become urgent. Then I’m a man. Then I stand here and raise my arm, and the sky shoots down into my arm. As if I were tearing down a banner, I say to you. I’m not a megalomaniac. My arm, too, tears me away from the place where I’m standing. Whether I dance, fight, weep, or sing: all that’s left are my movements, my song, my tears; the world and I are blown up.

  —Now do you believe that I belong in the league of men?

  Meingast had been listening to Clarisse with an uncertain and almost anxious expression. Now he bent down and kissed her on the forehead. His words inspired Clarisse. —I did not know you! he said. —But it still won’t do. A woman’s love renders me infertile.

  With this, he walked slowly with his high gait through the meadows on the shortest way back to the house. Clarisse did not run after him and did not let any word run after him. She knew that he was leaving. She wanted to wait, to spare him the leave-taking. She was certain that he needed time to come to terms with her proposal, and that a letter would soon call her. Her lips were still murmuring words, like two little sisters talking over an exciting event; she reprimanded them, and closed them.

  Addition to hermaphrodite: For the first time again like it used to be, when young girls had secrets. You really know what it means to be married, and you know how Walter is. (Each of these sentences occurs to her as at the beginning.) And I’m sometimes a man. I’ve never “perished” in a man’s arms; I push! I permeate him! I don’t belong to anyone; I’m so strong that I could have a friendship with several men at once. A woman loves like an enormous pot that draws all the fire into itself. Clarisse says of herself: To love not like a woman but the way a brave little fox loves a big dog against which it is helpless. Or like a brave dog its master. That’s what you love. Or: I’m a soldier, I disarm you, then disarm you just one degree more. Can’t move a limb because of so much superior strength. That’s the way you love boys. Young people. But I’m a person too, why then just a woman.

  But isn’t she still—hermaphrodite—a woman too? Perhaps depict it this way: as if a man would think it beautiful.

  I go my way, I have my tasks; but you open my dress and fall upon me and draw my helplessness out of me. And I lean on you, unhappy at what you’re doing to me but unable to resist. And go on and wear a black crepe on my helmet.

  ***

  She would like to have intercourse (possibly with Walter too).

  It is weakening.

  From this the idea: You will weaken me, make me a woman, so that you remain radiant… (at times)

  We struggle hand to hand and are like the bath after the battle.

  Concretely: I have the character and duties of a man. I don’t want (this time) a child and don’t want love, but I want the deep phenomenon of desire, of purification (salvation) through weakness. I-you like you-me? even if servant and master.

  [?] I’ll press one leg against yours and wind the other around your hips, and your eyes will mist over.

  I’ll be insolent and forget my shyness toward you.

  The woman has feminine feelings for the superior man, masculine feelings for the subordinate man. Therefore something hermaphroditic arises, a spiritually intertwined threesome.

  Clarisse waited for Meingast’s letter; the letter did not arrive. Clarisse became agitated. Ulrich, whom she suddenly thought of again, was away. She did not want to talk to Walter.

  One morning, something strange happened. Clarisse was reading the newspaper; Walter had not yet left for the office. Suddenly Clarisse asked: —Wasn’t there something in the paper yesterday about a train wreck near Budweis? —Yes, said Walter, who was reading another part of the paper. —How many dead? —Oh, of course I can’t remember; I think two or three; it was a small accident. Why are you asking? —Nothing. Reading on for a while, Clarisse said: —Because there’s been an accident in America too. Where’s Pennsylvania? —I don’t know. In America. They went on reading. Clarisse saw strands like railroad tracks fanning out before her, which went on tangling wildly. Had she not seen these strands of tracks weeks or months ago? She reflected. Little trains shot out on the tracks, roared through curves, and collided. Clarisse said: —The engineers never mean for their locomotives to collide. —Of course not, Walter said, without paying attention. Clarisse asked whether her brother Siegfried was coming later that afternoon. Walter answered, he hoped so. He was bothered, it was time for him to be off, and Clarisse was constantly interrupting his reading.

  Suddenly Clarisse said: —I want to talk with Siegfried about taking me to see Moosbrugger.

  —Who is Moosbrugger?

  —You mean you don’t remember? Ulrich’s friend the murderer.

  Now Walter understood whom she meant. She had once talked about this man. —But Ulrich knows him either not at all or only very slightly, he corrected Clarisse.

  —Well, in any case—

  —You really shouldn’t be so eccentric.

  Clarisse did not dignify this with a response. Walter leafed through the paper once more and thought he was surprised at not finding any mention of this person; he had assumed that Clarisse had been moved to make her comment because of some article; but he didn’t have time for a question or genuine surprise, because he had to find his hat and rush off. Clarisse made an unpleasant face when he kissed her on the forehead; two arrogant long lines ran down alongside her nose, and her chin jutted forward. This very unreal face, which Walter did not notice, might have been grounds for anxiety.

  But the strange thing that happened was this. While Clarisse was asking her question, she had recognized that an accident happens not because of evil intent but because in the confused network of tracks, switches, and signals that she saw before her, the human being loses the power of conscience with which he ought to have checked over his task once more; had that happened, he would certainly have done whatever was necessary to avoid die accident. At this moment, where she saw this before her eyes like a child’s toy, she felt an enormous power of conscience. So she possessed it. She had to half close her eyes so that Walter would not notice their flashing. For she had recognized instantly that when one said “letting things prevail,” it was only another expression for it. She understood that one was forced
to let things have their way. But she did not let Walter have his, and would not do so.

  That was the moment when Moosbrugger had occurred to her.

  Everyone is familiar with what a miracle it is when a long-forgotten name, and one that moreover may be unimportant, suddenly pops up in one’s memory. Or a face, with details that one is not at all aware of having seen. Evoked by some accidental stimulus. It is really as if a hole were to open in the sky. Clarisse was by no means wrong when she felt it as a process with two ends, Moosbrugger at one end, and far away, looking at him, herself; although one could of course say that in general this is not correct, because memory outside ourselves is nothing.

  But precisely if something is not true in general, but is in particular, then this was something for Clarisse. It now occurred to her that Moosbrugger was a carpenter. And we know who else was a carpenter? Right. So at one end there was the carpenter, and at the other, Clarisse. Clarisse, who was not permitted to let things prevail, who had a black mole on her thigh that fascinated every man. For there was no question that Meingast had run away from her; it had come too suddenly, he had wanted to save himself.

  One cannot expect everything to be equally clear in the first moment. Somehow, of course, the carpenter was also connected with Ulrich; when a person whom one has almost forgotten after having loved him suddenly walks in the door, without, so to speak, being inwardly announced, as Ulrich now did, even though in the company of other people, this is in and of itself something of the kind that makes one have to hold one’s breath for a moment. Nor was it clear what all this had to do with the hermaphrodite that Clarisse was in order to enter the league of men; but she would get to that, she felt, and at the root of the emotion there most certainly was a connection; that could be seen in the manner of activity among these thoughts, which up there, on the outside, remained isolated for now.

  For all these reasons Clarisse considered it her duty to meet Moosbrugger. That certainly wouldn’t be difficult. Her brother was a physician and could help her with it. She waited for him, and the time passed quickly. She considered how little Meingast had meant to her when she had known him beforehand how great he had become since. While he was present, everything here in the house had been elevated. She had the feeling that he had simply taken her and Walter’s sins upon himself, and that was what had made everything so easy. Perhaps now, in the next phase, she would have to take Meingast’s sins upon herself.

  But what are sins? She used this word perhaps too often, without thinking enough about it. It is a poisonous Christian word. Clarisse could not discover what she herself meant, precisely. A butterfly occurred to her, which suddenly falls motionless to the ground and becomes an ugly worm with dead wings. Then naturally Walter, who sought the milk of love at her breast and thereafter became stiff and lazy. Besides, had she not once known quite clearly that she would redeem this carpenter from his sins? She had, had she not, once written a letter? It was uncanny to recall that only so dimly. It obviously signified that something was still to come.

  ***

  No letter came from Meingast, the business with the league of men remained out of Clarisse’s purview; sometimes she forgot it because of the new things that were happening. She had to think how she might get into the clinic again in spite of Dr. Friedenthal, who had forbidden her to return. She realized that it would be difficult. Climb over the wall surrounding the grounds? she thought; this idea of penetrating the forbidden space like a warrior appealed to her greatly, but since the clinic was not in open country but in the city, if it was to be done without being seen it could be risked only at night, and then, once on the grounds, how was Clarisse to find her way among the many locked buildings? She was afraid. Although she knew that it would have to be considered out of the question, she was frightened by the image of falling into the hands of a madman among the black trees and being raped or strangled by him. She still had the screams of the maniacs in her ears: at the last station, before she went past the lovely ladies and returned once more to rational life. She often saw before her the naked man standing in the center of a totally empty room that had nothing in it but a low cot and a toilet that were of a piece with the floor. He had a blond beard and light-brown pubic hair. He ignored both the opening of the door and the people looking at him; he stood with his legs spread apart, kept his head lowered like a savage, had thick saliva in his beard, and repeated like a pendulum the same motion again and again, throwing his upper body around in a shallow circle, always with a push, always toward the same side, his arms forming an acute angle to his body, and the only thing that changed was that with every one of these motions another finger jumped up from his clenched fist; it was accompanied by a loud, panting scream, forced out by the requisite monstrous exertion of the whole body. Dr. Friedenthal had explained that this went on for hours, and had allowed Clarisse to look into other cells, where for the moment quiet reigned. But this had been if anything even more horrifying. He showed her the same bare cement room containing nothing but a person whose fit was imminent, and one of these people was sitting there still in his street clothes; only his tie and collar had been removed. It was a lawyer with a lovely full beard and carefully parted hair; he sat there and glanced at the visitors as if he had been on the point of going to court and had sat down on this stone bench only because he was compelled, for God knows what reason, to wait. Clarisse was especially horrified by this person because he looked so natural; but Dr. Friedenthal said that just a few days before, in his first fit, he had killed his wife, and almost all the transient inhabitants of this section were murderers. Clarisse asked herself why she was afraid of them, when it was precisely these patients who were best secured and supervised? She feared them because she did not understand them. There were several others in her memory who affected her the same way. —But that’s still no reason for my having to meet them if I’m walking through the grounds at night! she said to herself.

  But it was like this. It was almost certain that she would meet them; that was an idea it was impossible to eradicate, for no matter how often Clarisse imagined the process of climbing over the wall and then walking forward through the gloomy, widely spaced trees, sooner or later it came to a gruesome encounter. This was a given fact one had to reckon with, and therefore it was reasonable to ask what it meant. Even as solid a man as the famous old American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she had read in her adolescence because her friends told her he was marvelous, maintained that it is a general law of nature and man that like is attracted by like. Clarisse remembered a sentence which went, roughly, that everything that comes to a person tends toward him of itself, so that cause and effect only apparently succeed each other but in reality are simply two sides of the same thing, and all cleverness is bad because with every precautionary rule against danger one is put in the power of this danger. All Clarisse had to do, when she remembered this, was to apply it to herself. If it was established that she, even if at first only in some mysterious fashion in her mind, was continually meeting murderers, then she was attracting these murderers. But is like being attracted by like? That meant that she bore within herself the soul of a murderer. One can imagine what it means when such extraordinary thoughts suddenly find solid ground beneath their feet! Meingast had run away from her; she was apparently too strong for him. It was like lightning bolts striking each oilier! Walter was attracted by her to murder his talent again and again in her, no matter how much she pushed him away. She carried a black medallion at the crease of her hip, and the insane divined it: perhaps such people can see through clothes and came toward her rejoicing. In a confusing way, all the facts fit.

  Laughter and difficulties struggled around Clarisse’s mouth; it alternately opened and clamped tight. She had got up too early; Walter was still sleeping; she had hastily thrown on a light dress and gone outside. The singing of birds reached her from the woods through the empty morning stillness. The hemisphere of the sky had not yet filled with warmth. Even the light was still
shallowly dispersed. —It only reaches as far as my ankles—Clarisse thought—the cock of the morning has just been wound up. Everything was before its time. Clarisse was deeply moved that she was wandering through the world before its time. It almost made her cry. She fervently regretted that during her visit to the madhouse she had seen through Moosbruggers situation too late. What she had seen being played out before her was worthless devils gambling for a soul. She heard herself being called to turn back there once more, but Dr. Friedenthal blocked her path. She felt quite ashamed, and went on like that for a ways. But at some point a thought took shape that released her from this depression: Many great men had been in insane asylums. And they had been derided by those who had remained in possession of their reason. They had now become incapable of explaining themselves to those for whom earlier they had had only contempt. She remembered the muteness of the late Nietzsche, whom she worshiped. And what had vexed her just now because she had not seen through it in time, how the three devils had intentionally brought her before Moosbrugger in so miserably casual a fashion in order to get the better of her through cunning and paralyze her, indeed that she had really shown herself to be stupid and weak, now slowly made her understand as a sign that the fate of the great man among the repulsive jailers of the world would be laid upon her too. Her heart was filled by a drifting rain of light and tears. It was uncanny, putting oneself on an equal footing with the insane; but being on the same footing with the uncanny is to cast one’s lot for genius! She decided to free Moosbrugger from his jailers. Thoughts regarding how she might do this flitted around in her mind. The swallows had meanwhile begun to flit through the air. In some way it would have to work. Clarisse was so absorbed in these thoughts that she felt the depths like the narrow incline of an abyss. She had to draw in her shoulders and could only cautiously venture a smile. It occurred to her that this would be the “depth of anti-moral inclination” that Nietzsche demanded of his disciples. She was astonished at this, for she had not expected that it was possible to experience it so palpably. It was a path through a “landscape of counter-morality.”