The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  On Agathe’s depression: According to Adler, the person inclined toward God is the person deficient in a sense of community—according to Schleiermacher, the morally indifferent person, therefore evil. Woman, too, is a criminal. True sympathy for no one but Ulrich. I have to love you because I cannot love the others. God and antisocial. Her love for Ulrich has from the beginning mobilized hatred and hostility against the world.

  Note: this mood has the quality of magnanimity; she has to (can) remember what Ulrich has said about it. It contains the continuation into life.

  It has to happen with (undescribed) Clarisse! That’s why not with Bonadea! Disturbance, interruption at the last minute. Ulrich knows that he has already given in.

  ***

  In this mood, God is the hypostasized need to believe. But it is not given her to see God. The mood is really a fulfillment of the Other Condition, but still schematically.

  Differently: When Ulrich comes in again she recalls his aversion to defectiveness. Impels her to do it quickly, but also inhibits her.

  Ulrich: experimental year. Is there enough for both of them?

  We will not kill ourselves until we have tried everything.

  Addendum: Belief can only be an hour old. But then it is an intimation.

  Missing: Ulrich’s depression and possible grounds for suicide.

  49 now 50

  CRISIS AND DECISION

  Main point here: suicide attempt.

  Content: Agathe hurt, feminine. Silly weeping, mindless weeping; but a fountain of the body, the body claiming its right. You have hurt me. As excuse: reading poems and newspapers. Insight: What is it then that I should give you? I could perhaps consent to it with a woman I love. Inwardly more than two people can be in love. Ulrich depicts what that would be like and confesses that he is too fainthearted for it. Ulrich develops the idea. Suddenly Agathe kisses him, and the kiss becomes sensual.

  Between this chapter and the preceding there must be a brief separation, Ulrich’s leaving the house or just the room. During this time Agathe’s mood suddenly changes.

  Description of a deep depression and the happiness of such a resolve.

  (Clarisse’s exaltation in 46 or 47 corresponds to this deep depression.)

  Tentative resume: Always did everything badly, beginning with father, and one can’t defend oneself because the defense is still worse (more stupid).

  Ulrich manages to prevent her. Used as motives for the resolve:

  It is our destiny: perhaps we love what is forbidden. But we will not kill ourselves before we have attempted the utmost. Promise!

  The world is fleeting and fluid: Do what you want!

  We stand powerless before a perfected imperfected world. Other people also have everything that’s in us, but they’ve shunted it aside without noticing. They remain healthy and idealistic; we skirt the edge of crime.

  Loneliness: people who believe quarrel with God, unbelievers are getting to know him for the first time. There is no necessity in this. This world is only one of…experiments. God bestows partial solutions, creative people do the same, they contradict one another, out of this the world forms a relative whole that doesn’t correspond to any solution. Into the mold of this world I am poured like molten ore: that’s why I never entirely am what I do and think: an attempted form within an attempted form of the totality. One can’t listen to the bad teachers, who according to God’s plan have constructed one of His lives for eternity, but must humbly and stubbornly entrust oneself to God himself. Act without reflection, for a man never gets further than when he doesn’t know where he’s going. (That is Agathe’s influence! Ironic, but already anticipated by Count Leinsdorf.) narratively: Perhaps Ulrich reflects about this in a pause, so that there are no reflections at the end

  Over all a breath of Stella morality [Goethe’s play—TRANS.]. Otherwise he would have said literally the same things to Stumm and others. To be described more as mood and state than as idea. If they had now carried out what they were feeling, in an hour everything would have been over. But this way…

  Poison as support. Confidence that this world, in which she feels incomplete, is not the only one—

  On the suicidal mood: This sadness was like a deep ditch with slippery sides that had her going back and forth, while she heard Ulrich above, invisible and inaccessible, talking with other people.

  When Agathe returned home, this took place at twilight, she looked around for Ulrich, but he had (after Bonadea’s departure) left the house (for a while) in order to forget what had happened as much as he possibly could. She sat down in his study, laid her hat and gloves beside her on the sofa, and abandoned herself to the slow fall of darkness, which suited her mood. It was her intention not to visit Lindner so soon again, and she wanted to ask Ulrich’s forgiveness for her ill nature.

  Just then her ringers came in contact among the pillows with a hard, gently curved, pronged object, and when she held it up to the light she recognized it as a small comb of the kind women wear in their hair. Bonadea had lost it. It quite confused Agathes hands as they held it. She looked at it with parted lips, and the blood drained from her face. If the word “thunderstruck” means that all thoughts are struck out and the small house of the skull stands empty with opened drawers and doors, then Agathe was thunderstruck. Tears rose to her eyes without brimming over.

  She waited vacandy—with few thoughts, which hardly tried to stir in her—for her brother. Among them was the thought that now everything was over, and the opposite one, that what she had stumbled upon was only natural and that she ought to have believed in it at any time; she appeared unable to grasp what lay between these thoughts until Ulrich should come.

  When he came in, he immediately noticed the presence of someone else in the darkness and went up to his sister, who was the only person it could be, in order to greet her gently and ruefully. But Agathe asked him in such a voice not to come near her, but rather to turn on the light, that he turned on his heel. When light came on she held out the little comb to him with outstretched arm, and he read in her eyes what she did not say. Ulrich could have denied it; it probably would not have been credible to explain her find through disorder, as something left behind from earlier times, and yet it would perhaps have deflected and softened the immediate effect: but he was overcome with remorse and made no attempt at denial.

  Agathe got hold of herself and listened to him with a dismayed smile.

  “Are you jealous of Bonadea?” he asked her, and wanted to stroke her face in order to turn the incident into a jest. But before it touched her, Agathe grabbed his hand and held it fast. “I have no right to be,” she said. At the same moment tears began streaming from her eyes. Ulrich’s eyes, too, nearly misted over—”You know how such things happen.”

  Ulrich stays behind. Satiated like a beast of prey Better: As he tells himself: like a dog that has torn a chicken to pieces and that on the one hand is oppressed by conscience, on the other contentedly suffused with having satisfied a basic instinct Possibly: Remorse is nothing other than the collapse of a dominant affect brought about by the one competing with it / So he is predisposed to remorse.

  Second Part

  Finally they sat together for a while, held each other by the hands and did not trust themselves to either say or do anything. It had become quite dark. Agathe felt a temptation to undress without saying a word. Perhaps the darkness also enticed Ulrich to creep over to her or do something similar. Both resisted this energy of the sex drive that forms types of actions (or something similar). But Agathe asked herself: Why doesn’t anything happen? / Why not…? Something from the paradise conversation, so to speak: why doesn’t he try it!

  And when nothing happened she asked her brother: Don’t you want to turn the light on now?

  Ulrich hesitated. But then out of fear he turned on the light.

  And then it appeared that he had forgotten something he had to take care of himself. It was evident that he had to take care of it, it would take at most
forty-five minutes, and Agathe herself persuaded him to do it. He had promised someone important some information, and it couldn’t be done over the phone. Thus even in this hour normal life intervened, and normal life was what it was, and after they had separated both became melancholy.

  Ulrich became so melancholy that he nearly turned around, but continued on; Agathe, on the other hand, became more melancholy than she had ever been in her life. In contrast to all the other times, this melancholy seemed to her positively unnatural; she shrank back and even felt an inquisitive astonishment. Unnaturalness was a special kind of peculiarity. As far as this melancholy left any room at all for anything else; as it were like a shimmer at its margin. Profound melancholy, moreover, is not black, but dark green or dark blue, and has the softness of velvet; it is not so much annihilation as rather a rare, positive quality. This deep happiness in melancholy, which Agathe felt immediately, apparently has its origin in the relationship of single-mindedness and enthusiasm, that happiness is associated with the exclusive dominance of every individual emotion at being freed from all contradictions and irresolution, not in a cold, pedantic, impersonal way, as through reason, but magnanimously. All great courage and bad temper have the quality of magnanimity. Without having to think for a moment Agathe remembered where she kept her poison and stood up to get it. The possibility of ending life and its ambivalences liberates the joy that dwells within it. Agathe’s melancholy became cheerful in a way she found barely comprehensible as she emptied the poison, as the directions prescribed, into a glass of water / when she put the poison in front of her on a table. She fetched a glass and a bottle of water and put them beside it. In the most natural way her future split into the two possibilities of killing herself or attaining the Millennium, and since the latter had not worked, there remained only the former.

  It was time to take leave. Agathe was much too young to be able to part from Ufe totally without pathos, and to understand her properly it cannot be passed over in silence that her resolve was not, affectively speaking, sufficiendy fixed: her despair was not without remedy, it was not collapse after every attempt had been made, there was always for her, even if at the moment it seemed obscured, still a second way. Initially, her departure from the world was animated, like leaving on a trip. For the first time, all the people she had encountered in the world appeared to her as something that was quite in order, now that she was not to have anything more to do with it.

  It seemed to her peaceful and lovely to look back at life. And besides, entire generations disappear in a flash. She was not the only person who had not really known what to do with her beauty. She thought of the year 2000, would have liked to have known how things would look then. Then she remembered faces from the sixteenth century she must have seen portrayed in some collection. Splendid faces with strong foreheads and far more powerful features than one sees today. One could understand that all these people had once played a role. But for that you doubtless need fellow players: a profession, a task, and an animating life. But this ambition to have a role was completely alien to her. She had never wanted to be any of the things one could be. The world of men had always been foreign to her. She had despised the world of women. At times, she had brought the curiosity of her body, the desire of the flesh, in contact with others the way one eats and drinks. But it had always happened without any deeper responsibiUty, and so her Ufe had led only from the desert of the nursery where it had started into a vague kind of happening with no borders. Thus everything ended in impotence.

  To be sure, this impotence was not without a core: It was not only this world that God…World one of many possible ones…The best in us a breathUke (mass) that flies eternally like a bird from its branch…There was always a vision contained within her dislike of the world’s authority. Indeed, more than a vision; she had almost got hold of it already: one comes to oneself when…vanishes. It is more than a seizure, this obscure twinkling…But it seemed to her not to make much sense to go over it again. All these experiences mixed up together echoed along with it, but they were not…before. They have something schematic and…real. It had not been given to her to see God clearly, as Utde as anything!

  Without God, all that remained of her was the bad that she had done. She was uselessly besmirched and felt repugnant to herself. Everything, too, that she had just gone over had become clear to her only in Ulrich’s company, become more than a nervous playing of games. She spontaneously felt warmly grateful to her brother. At this moment she loved him madly.

  And then it occurred to her: everything he had said, everything he still might say, he had debased!

  She had to do it before he came back. She looked at her watch. What a delicate thing its tiny hand was. She pushed the watch away. A gloominess came over her…fear of death…dull, horribly painful, repugnant. But the thought that it had to happen—she had no idea how it had come in…horrible appeal. She found she had very little reflection left…inability…nothing but the idea…kill, and this only in the form of this sentence…emptiness.

  She wanted to put her affairs in order; she had none. I’m not leaving anyone behind…not even Ulrich…She pitied herself. The pulse in her wrist flowed like weeping.

  Ulrich was to be envied, when he struggled and worked. Possibly: He is marvelous just as he is!

  But the sovereignty of her resolve calmed her. She, too, had an advantage. Whoever is able to do this…She felt the marvelous isolation with which she had been born.

  And when she had emptied the powder into the glass the possibility of turning back was gone, for now she had committed her talisman (like the bee, which can sting only once).

  Suddenly she heard Ulrich’s steps, sooner than expected. She could have quickly downed the glass. But when she heard him she also wanted to see him once more. After that she could have jumped up and…downed the glass. She could have said something peremptory and withdrawn from life that way. But she looked at him helplessly, and he saw the devastation in her face. He saw the glass; he did not ask. He did not understand; the spark of excitement jumped over to him instantaneously. He took the glass and asked: “Is there enough for us both?” Agathe tore it from his hand.

  With the exclamation…?…? I’ve never loved anything besides you! “he clasped her in his arms.”

  Or: not a word, [but] an action, an event! He collapses or the like. Horrified at what he has brought about!

  Better: Ulrich’s aversion against defectiveness. Suicide. But finally: one cannot make amends for anything but can only make them better. That’s why remorse is passionate. For both. Suddenly one of them is struck by this idea and laughs.

  I have decided. Experimental year…kill myself.

  That is the resolution that is now impetuously carried out.

  But that would also mean, more or less: journey to God.

  Perhaps in place of the rejected jealousy chapter

  The period of mobilization. Agathe had, in spite of it, had a carpenter called in. He might be a Htde under thirty, is tall and really built like a mechanic, that is, slender, with broad shoulders, dry; long, well-formed hands of great strength, and sinewy wrists. His face is open and intelligent, his hair dark blond and quite natural. His overalls become him. He speaks dialect but without roughness.

  Agathe in the next room with him. Ulrich—lost in thought—has left. He doesn’t want to be bothered by anything anymore. But then he turned around and crossed a garden terrace back into the house and into his room, without Agathe noticing.

  He eavesdrops on the next room. The expression of both voices strikes him. The man’s voice is explaining something: articulately, quietly, and with a certain superiority. Ulrich doesn’t understand what it’s about but guesses from his prior knowledge and the sound of wood that it has something to do with a rolltop desk of Agathe’s. It is opened and closed. The young workman demands Agathe’s assent to a more comprehensive repair than she would like, and she makes uncertain objections. Ulrich knows and understands all that. It must have
something to do with a mystery of the old rolltop mechanism.

  And suddenly it breaks loose from reality. For the conversation would have run exactly the same course if it had been a love transaction. The persuading, the easy superiority, the positing-as-necessary or it’s-not-such-a-big-thing in the man’s voice. As if it were for him a sexual improvisation. And then that beloved voice! Resisting, intimidated, unsure. She would like to and doesn’t want to. She yields, but here and there still stands firm. She says in an undertone: “yes…yes…but…” She’s known for quite a while that she will yield. How Ulrich loves this restrained, brave voice and the woman who fears everything as she does darkness and yet who does everything! He would not have been able to bring himself to rush in with a gun and take revenge, or even call them to account.

  Then a sigh of submission even comes over Agathe’s lips, and the cracking of wood is deceptively heard.

  And in spite of this being-happy-for-Agathe that Ulrich has dreamed through, he goes off to the war. But by no means with conviction.

  1930-1938/39

  QUESTIONS FOR VOLUME TWO

  Exposition of Volume Two of The Man Without Qualities

  When I think of the reviews of Volume One [Musil is here referring to Chapters 1-123, which were published in 1930/31; Chapters 1-38 of Part III appeared in 1932/33], I note again and again as something they have in common the question as to what will or might happen in the second volume. The answer to this is simple: nothing or the beginning of the World War. Note the title of the major portion of the first volume: Pseudoreality Prevails. This means that in general today the personal givens of events are definite and delineated, but that what is general about them, or their significance, is indefinite, faded, and equivocal, and repeats itself unintelligibly. The person awakened to awareness of the current situation has the feeling that the same things are happening to him over and over again, without there being a light to guide him out of this disorderly circle. I believe that this characterizes a major idea of the first volume, around which large parts of the material could be ordered. Above all, there is a continuity in that volume that permits the present period to be already grasped in the past one, and even the technical problem of the book could be characterized as the attempt to make a story at all possible in the first place.