The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  He felt all that. The idea “Open up!” tortured him. like a child’s toy. That’s what she wants. But over and over again there is some new wall of disappointment with no way through, and then she will get angry with me.

  And the second torture was: She’s pursuing me. She’s just unrolling herself. Always right in front of me. What’s she talking about so incessantly? I’m supposed to fall like a dog all over the round, rolling ball of her life. Otherwise she’ll do something to me. His eyes darted back and forth in the darkness like fish.

  Now she was sitting before him in only shoes and stockings. Her hips rolled down in three swelling folds. She began to tremble.

  She had taken off all her clothes because he had spoken about her. That seemed certain to her. And she felt that she was wronging him; did he not have to mistrust her, since he knew nothing more about her than that she had followed him? She wanted to tell him that Leopold was, of course, a good person.…Again silence intervened.

  Then he heard himself saying the nonsensical sentence: Whoever loves is young. At the same moment he felt her arms around his neck. To save herself she had to find him enchanting. “Beloved, beloved! Leave your eyes, you look so suffering and noble!”

  Then with the strength of despair he lifted up his burden and heard himself asking: “Would you rather make Kung Fu-tse, or do you prefer rollies?” She took these for technical terms from men’s talk. She did not want to expose her ignorance. She made herself cozy with them. What does your Kung Fu-tse do? The tip of his tongue touched her lips. This ancient manner of understanding between people, such foreheads always sitting above such lips, was familiar to her. The stranger knew so much. She slowly flattened out her tongue and pushed it forward. Then she quickly drew it back and smiled roguishly; when she was still a child she knew herself to be already famous for her roguish smile. And she said without thinking, moved perhaps by some unconscious association of sounds: “I’d like rollies. My husband will be gone for a week.”

  At this moment he bit off her tongue. It seemed to him to be a long time before his teeth got all the way through. Then he felt it thick in his mouth. The storm of a great deed whirled up in him, but the unfortunate woman was a white, bleeding mass, beating all around her in a corner of the room, circling around a high, hoarse, screeching note, around the reeling root of a sound.

  In those places where the woman and his reaction to her is described: Is this a woman at all? Or is it the being pushed from the experience into a jackal’s den of the imagination, condensation of all the hatefulness of the world in the infantilely special person with skirts and ringlets, rage against the most lovable thing on earth?

  It is probably unnecessary to say that this is not a true experience but a dream, for no decent person would think such a thing in a waking state.

  The place of this dream lay on one of the major traffic arteries that radiate out from the center of Vienna. Even though from that time on, when world metropolises full of enormous rushing around came into being, Vienna was still only a big city, traffic in the peak hours filled this tube of streets with a dizzying stream of life, which can best be compared with swill being poured into a trough. Dark lumps of cars shot around in a no-longer-transparent fluid of voices, metals, air, stones, and wood, in a pleasantly tart smell of haste, through the standing throng of interests running in and out at the opening of a thousand stores, and the constitutive stream of pedestrians hastening toward some distant goal pushed forward. This is the city person’s drink that invigorates the nerves. At the place of this dream fifty cars a minute came by on average, at a speed of twenty miles an hour, and six hundred pedestrians. If the eye, or at least the mind, took all that in, then the stimulus had to traverse a path of 1,800 feet per second, leaving aside smell, hearing, aroused desire, and everything else, and observing only the mad film.

  An unnatural spread.

  But the place itself did not appear on this film; only the fence around its grounds did. If one were propelled on past this garden fence, there lay behind it well-tended grounds, and among trees one saw a small white house with broad wings and looked into the noble stillness of a scholar’s home. Between it and the nature in front of the fence the un-nature of trees, muffled sound, and pure air intervened; as indeed the un-nature of various ideals and antiquities also lie between life and the thinking of a scholar (and only a quite complicated connection makes it possible for life to afford scholars).

  The scholar who had unfortunately had this dream had a great many friends among men and women, and was a quite pleasant, handsome, and well-to-do young man. In order not to expose him, and for various reasons, let us assume that his name was simply antlers [literally, “different”: an earlier name for Ulrich—TRANS.].

  Here it could also go on:

  One of his women friends happened to be with him at the moment and was called…and because of the moral songs she sang. She looked like a beautiful woman from an illustrated magazine of 1870. Her beauty was like a lion’s skin stuffed by a furrier. She spelled out this beauty from an invisible book and underlined the teasing as well as the tragic qualities of love with gestures like the emphases of an eight-year-old schoolgirl reciting Schiller.

  It would not be appropriate to inquire further into the meaning of his horrible dream, but on the other hand we cannot avoid mentioning Christian Moosbrugger, for Moosbrugger doubtless had something to do with its source. Who was Christian Moosbrugger?

  What distinguished him from other good-natured and right-thinking carpenters was merely that he was to be executed on account of several sex murders.

  In one of the newspaper reports, a collection of which lay in front of antlers (while he held an unopened letter in his hand), it was said of Moosbrugger that he was good-natured. All the other reports described him in similar fashion, but the thing about his smile, for instance, was wrong, and in general the business about his self-important smile, his good nature, and his monstrous deeds was by no means a simple affair.

  There was no doubt that he was, at times, mentally ill. But since the bestial crimes that he committed in this condition were presented in the newspapers in the most extreme detail, and thirstily sucked up by their readers, his mental illness must have somehow partaken of the general mental health. He had cut up a woman, a prostitute of the lowest class, with a knife in the most horrifying manner, and the newspapers fully and pitilessly described the delights, to be sure incomprehensible to us, of a wound reaching from the back part of the neck to the middle of the front part; further, two stab wounds to the breast, which bored through the heart, two more in the left side of the back, and the cutting off of the breasts. In spite of (the most vivid retching of) their loathing, the reporters and editors could not look away before adding up thirty-five stab wounds to the belly, which, moreover, was slit open by a wound running to the sacrum and continuing on up the back in a swarm of wounds, while the neck bore traces of strangulation.

  Perhaps one ought not repeat this at all, for it is dubious whether the novelist will be allowed the protection of the duties of his calling enjoyed by the newspapers, which, like those men who prowl in the dark of night with shielded lanterns and seamen’s boots, have to climb into all those things in which mankind, upon waking, is accustomed to proclaim its interest. But ultimately it cannot be said anywhere but in a less serious place than the newspapers how remarkable it is that no sooner were Moosbrugger’s abominable excesses made known to thousands of people, who lose no opportunity to scold the public’s desire for sensation, than they were immediately felt by these very people to be “at last something interesting again”: by capable officials in a hurry to get to the office, by their fourteen-year-old sons, and by their spouses immersed in a cloud of household cares. People of course sighed over such a monster, but inwardly he preoccupied them more than their professions did. Indeed, it might happen that on going to bed the very correct Section Chief Tuzzi, or the second in command of the Nature Cure Association, said to his sleepy wife: What
would you do if I were a Moosbrugger now?

  C. 193a

  49

  ULRICH’S DIARY

  Often Ulrich thought that everything he was experiencing with Agathe was reciprocal hypnotic suggestion and conceivable only under the influence of the idea that they had been chosen by some unusual destiny. At one time this destiny represented itself to them under the sign of the Siamese twins, at another under that of the Millennium, the love of the seraphs, or the myths of the “concave” experiencing of the world. These conversations were no longer repeated, but they had in the past assumed the more potent shadow of real events, of which mention was made earlier. One might call it merely half a conviction, if one is of the opinion that the kind of thinking involved in conviction is one that has to be entirely certain of its subject; but there is also a total conviction that arises simply from the absence of all objections, because an emotional mood that is strong and one-sidedly motivated keeps all doubt away from conscious awareness: there were times when Ulrich already felt almost convinced of something without even knowing what it was. But if he then asked himself—for he had to assume that he was suffering from delusions—what it was that he and Agathe must have reciprocally imagined at the beginning, their wondrous feeling for each other or the no less remarkable alteration in their thinking in which this feeling expressed itself, that could not be determined either; for both had appeared at the very beginning, and taken singly, one was as unfounded as the other.

  This sometimes made him think of the idea of a hypnotic suggestion, and then he felt the uncanny anxiety that steals up on the independent will which sees itself treacherously attacked and shackled from within. ‘What am I to understand by this? How is one to explain this vulgar notion of hypnosis, which I use as facilely as everyone else, without understanding it? I was reading about it today,” Ulrich noted on a piece of paper. “The language of animals consists of affective expressions that evoke the same affects in their companions. Warning call, feeding call, mating call. I might add that these utterances activate and permeate not only the same affect but also quite directly the action associated with it. The terror call, the mating call, goes right through them! Your word is in me and moves me: if the animal were a person it would feel a mysterious, incorporeal union! But this affective suggestibility is also supposed to be still completely intact in people, in spite of the highly developed language of reason. Affect is contagious: panic, yawning. It easily evokes the ideas appropriate to it: a cheerful person spreads cheerfulness. It also encroaches on unsuitable vehicles: this occurs in all gradations, from the silliness of a love token to the complete frenzy of love, whose brainstorms are worthy of the madhouse. But affect also knows how to exclude what is inappropriate, and in both ways evokes in people that persistent unified attitude that gives the state of hypnotic suggestion the power of fixed ideas. Hypnosis is only a special case of these general relations. I like this explanation, and I’ll adopt it. A singular, persistent, unified attitude, but one that blocks us off from the totality of life: that is our condition!”

  Ulrich was now beginning to write many such pages. They formed a sort of diary, with whose aid he sought to preserve the mental clarity he felt was threatened. But immediately after he had put the first of his notes on paper, he thought of a second: “What I have called magnanimity may also be connected with hypnotic suggestion. By passing over what is not part of it, and seizing hold of what furthers it, it is magnanimous/’ When that was done, his observations did not, of course, seem nearly as remarkable as they had before he had written them down, and he made another effort to look for an indisputable milestone of the condition in which he found himself together with his sister. He found it once more in the realization that thinking and feeling were changed in the same sense, and they not only corresponded with each other to a remarkable degree but also stood in contrast to the ordinary condition as something one-sided, indeed almost insoluble and addictive, an inevitable synthesis of aspirations and insights of all lands. When their conversations were in the right mood—and the susceptibility to this was extremely great—the impression they gave was never that one word was forcing another, or one action dragging the next along after it, but that something was aroused in the mind to which the answer followed as the next-higher step. Every movement of the mind became the discovery of a new, even finer movement; they furthered each other reciprocally, and in this manner gave rise to the impression of an intensification that did not end, and of a discussion that rose without falling. It seemed that the last word could never be spoken, for every end was a beginning, and every final result the start of a new opening, so that every second shone like the rising sun but at the same time carried with it the peaceful passing of the setting sun. “If I were a believer, I would find in this the confirmation of the unfathomable assertion that His nearness is for us as inexpressible a raising up as our oppressive helplessness allows us to feel!” Ulrich wrote.

  He recalled having read with his senses on fire, in those early years when he was entering upon his intellectual life, the description of similar feelings in all sorts of books that he never read through to the end because impatience and a will that urged him to assert his own power prevented him, although he was moved by them, indeed for just that reason. Then too, he had not lived as was to have been expected, and when he now happened to pick up several of these books again, which was something he did gladly, meeting the old witnesses once more made it seem as if he were quietly entering a door in his house that he had once arrogantly slammed shut. His life seemed to he unrealized behind him, or perhaps even before him. Intentions not carried out can be like rejected lovers in dreams, who have remained beautiful over many years while the astonished wanderer returning home sees himself devastated: in the exquisite expansion of the power of one’s dreams, one thinks these lovers make one grow young again, and this was the mood, divided between enterprise and doubt, between the tips of flame and ashes, in which Ulrich now most frequently found himself. He read a great deal. Agathe, too, read a great deal. She was already content that the passion for reading, which had accompanied her in all the circumstances of her life, no longer served as mere distraction but had a purpose, and she kept up with her brother like a girl whose blowing dress leaves her no time to think about the path she’s taking. It happened that brother and sister got up in the night, after just having gone to bed, and met each other anew with their books, or that they prevented each other from going to bed at all, in spite of the late hour. About this Ulrich wrote: “It seems to be the only passion we permit ourselves. Even when we are tired we don’t want to part. Agathe says: ‘Aren’t we brother and sister?’ That means: Siamese twins; for otherwise it would be meaningless. Even when we’re too tired to talk she won’t go to bed, because we can’t sleep beside each other. I promise to sit beside her until she falls asleep, but she doesn’t want to undress and get into bed; not out of shame but because she would be doing something before I did. We put on bathrobes. A few times we’ve even fallen asleep leaning on each other. She was warm with the fervor of her mind. I had, to support her, wrapped my arm around her body and didn’t even realize it. She has fewer ideas than I do, but a higher temperature. She must have a very warm skin. In the morning we are pale with fatigue, and sleep for part of the day. Incidentally, we don’t derive the slightest intellectual progress from this reading. We burn in the books like the wick in oil. We assimilate them really without any effect other than our burning….”

  Ulrich added: “The young person listens with only half an ear to the voice of those books which become his destiny: he flees them in order to raise his own voice! For he is not seeking truth; he is seeking himself. That’s the way it was with me too. Large-scale conclusion: There are always new people and always the old events, merely mixed in new combinations! Moral fragility of the age. They are essentially like our reading, a burning for its own sake. When was the last time I told myself that? Shortly before Agathe’s arrival. Ultimate cause of this phenomenon
? The absence of system, principles, a goal, and also absence of the possibility of intensifying life and any logical consequence in it. I hope to be able to write down some things that have occurred to me about this. It’s part of the ‘General Secretariat.’ But the strange thing about my present condition is that I am further away than ever from such active participation in intellectual work. That’s Agathe’s influence. She radiates immobility. Nevertheless, this incoherent state has peculiar weight. It is pregnant with meaning. What characterizes it, I would say, is the great amount of rapture it contains; although this notion is of course as vague as all the rest. Temporizing restriction, which I allow myself to be guilty of! Our condition is that other life which has always hovered before me. Agathe is working toward it, but I ask myself: can it be carried out as actual life? Not long ago she, too, asked me about that “

  But Agathe, when she had done so, had merely lowered her book and asked: “Can you love two people who are enemies?” She added by way of explanation: “I sometimes read something in a book that contradicts what I have read in another book, but I love both passages. Then I think of how both of us, you and I, contradict each other about lots of things. Isn’t that what it depends on? Or is conscience not involved?”

  Ulrich immediately recalled that in the irresponsible state of mind in which she had altered the will, she had asked him something similar. This led to a remarkable depth and undermining beneath the present situation, for the main current of his thoughts led Agathe’s statement without reflection back to Lindner. He knew that she was seeing him; she had, to be sure, never told him so, but also made no efforts to conceal it.

  The response to this open manner of concealment was Ulrich’s diary.