The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  Count Leinsdorf had aimed at bringing about a powerful demonstration arising spontaneously out of the midst of the people themselves, meaning the universities, the clergy, certain names never absent from the rosters of charity affairs, and even the press. He was counting on the patriotic parties, the “sound sense” of the middle class, which hung out flags on the Emperor’s birthday, and the support of leading financiers; he even included the politicians, because he hoped in his heart that his great work would render politics superfluous by bringing it all down to the common denominator of “our fatherland,” from which he subsequently intended to subtract the “land,” leaving the fatherly ruler as the only remainder. But the one thing His Grace had not reckoned with and that surprised him was the widespread need to improve the world, which was hatched out by the warmth of a great occasion as insect eggs are hatched by a fire. His Grace had not counted on this; he had expected a great amount of patriotism but was not prepared for inventions, theories, schemes for world unity, and people demanding that he release them from intellectual prisons. They besieged his palace, hailed the Parallel Campaign as a chance to help make the truth prevail at last, and Count Leinsdorf did not know what to do with them. In awareness of his social position he could not, after all, sit down at table with all these people, yet, given a mind filled with intense morality, he did not want to avoid meeting them, either; but since his education had been in politics and philosophy to the exclusion of science and technology, he had no way of telling whether there was anything to their proposals or not.

  In this situation he felt an increasingly desperate need for Ulrich, who had been recommended to him as the very man for the occasion; obviously, his secretary or any ordinary secretary could not cope with such exigencies. Once, when he had been very annoyed with his secretary, he had even prayed to God—though he was ashamed of it the next day—for Ulrich to come. And when this did not happen, he personally took systematic steps to find him. He ordered the directory to be checked, but Ulrich was not yet in it. He then went to his friend Diotima, who could usually be counted on for advice, and it turned out that the admirable woman had actually seen Ulrich already, but she had forgotten to ask for his address, or pretended she had in order to use the opportunity to propose a new and far better candidate for secretary of the great campaign. But Count Leinsdorf was quite agitated and declared most positively that he had already grown used to Ulrich, that a Prussian was out of the question, even a reformed Prussian, and that he wanted to hear nothing at all about still further complications. Dismayed to see that he had apparently hurt his friend’s feelings, he came up with an idea of his own—he told her that he would drive straight to his friend the Commissioner of Police, who should certainly be able to dig up the address of any citizen whatever.

  38

  CLARISSE AND HER DEMONS

  When Ulrich’s note arrived Walter and Clarisse were again playing the piano so violently that the spindly reproduction furniture rattled and the Dante Gabriel Rossetti prints on the walls trembled. The aged messenger who had found house and doors open without being challenged was met by a full blast of thunder in the face as he fought his way into the sitting room, and the holy uproar he had wandered into left him nailed to the wall with awe. It was Clarisse who finally discharged the onrushing musical excitement with two powerful crashes and set him free. While she read the note, the interrupted outpouring still writhed under Walter’s hands; a melody ran along jerkily like a stork and then spread its wings. Clarisse kept a mistrustful ear on this while she deciphered Ulrich’s handwriting.

  When she announced their friend’s impending arrival, Walter said: “Too bad!”

  She sat down again beside him on her little revolving piano stool, and a smile that for some reason struck Walter as cruel parted her lips, which looked sensual. It was that moment when the players rein in their blood in order to be able to release it in the same rhythm, eyes blazing out of their heads in four long parallel axes while their buttocks tense and grip the little stools that keep trying to wobble on the long necks of their wooden screws.

  The next instant, Clarisse and Walter were off like two locomotives racing side by side. The piece they were playing came rushing at their eyes like flashing rails, vanished under the thundering engine, and spread out behind them as a ringing, resonant, marvelously present landscape. In the course of this ride these two people’s separate feelings were compressed into a single entity; hearing, blood, muscles, were all swept along irresistibly by the same experience; shimmering, bending, curving walls of sound forced their bodies onto the same track, bent them as one, and expanded and contracted their chests in the same breath. In a fraction of a second, gaiety, sadness, anger, and fear, love and hatred, desire and satiety, passed through Walter and Clarisse. They became one, just as in a great panic hundreds of people who a moment before had been distinct in every way suddenly make the same flailing movements of flight, utter the same senseless screams, their gaping mouths and staring eyes the same, all swept backward and forward, left and right, by the same aimless force, howling, twitching, tangling, trembling. But this union did not have the same dull, overwhelming force as life itself, where this kind of thing does not happen so easily, although it blots out everything personal when it does. The anger, love, joy, gaiety, and sadness that Clarisse and Walter felt in their flight were not full emotions but little more than physical shells of feelings that had been worked up into a frenzy. They sat stiffly in a trance on their little stools, angry, in love, or sad, at nothing, with nothing, about nothing, or each of them at, with, about something else, thinking and meaning different things of their own; the dictate of music united them in highest passion, yet at the same time it left them with something absent, as in the compulsive sleep of hypnosis.

  Each of these two people felt it in his own way. Walter was happy and excited. Like most musical people, he considered these billowing surges and emotional stirrings, all this cloudy, churned-up, somatic sediment of the soul, to be the simple language of the eternal that binds all mankind together. It delighted him to press Clarisse to himself with the powerful arm of primal emotion. On this day, he had come home earlier than usual from the office, where he had been cataloging works of art that still bore the imprint of great, un-fragmented times and emitted a mysterious strength of will. Clarisse had given him a friendly welcome, and now in the awesome world of music she was firmly bound to him. It was a day of mysterious successes, a soundless march as if gods were approaching. “Perhaps today is the day?” Walter thought. He wanted to bring Clarisse back, but not by force; the realization would have to rise up from her innermost self and incline her gently to him.

  The piano was hammering glinting note heads into a wall of air. Although the origin of this process was entirely real, the walls of the room soon disappeared, and there arose in their place golden partitions of music, that mysterious space in which self and world, perception and feeling, inside and outside, plunge into one another in the most indefinable way, while the space itself consists entirely of sensation, certainty, precision, a whole hierarchy of ordered detail of glory. It was to these sensual details that the threads of feeling were fastened, spun from the billowing haze of their souls, and this haze was mirrored in the precision of these walls of sound and appeared clear to itself. The two players’ souls hung like cocoons in these threads and rays. The more tightly they became enwrapped and the farther their beams were spread, the cozier Walter felt; his dreams were assuming so much of the shape of a small child that he was beginning here and there to strike the notes with a false and too sentimental emphasis.

  But before it came to the point of making a spark of ordinary feeling strike through the golden mist and bring them back to an earthly relationship to each other, Clarisse’s thoughts had diverged as far from Walter’s as is possible for two people who are storming along side by side with twinned gestures of desperation and rapture. In fluttering mists, images sprang up, overlapped, fused, faded—that was Clarisse’s
thinking. She had her own way of thinking; sometimes several ideas were intertwined simultaneously, sometimes none at all, but then one could feel the thoughts lurking like demons behind the stage. The temporal sequence of events that gives such real support to most people became in Clarisse a veil that threw its folds one over the other, only to dissolve them into a barely visible puff of air.

  This time, three people were around Clarisse: Walter, Ulrich, and the woman-killer Moosbrugger.

  Ulrich had told her about Moosbrugger.

  Attraction and repulsion blended into a peculiar spell.

  Clarisse was gnawing at the root of love. It is a forked root, with kisses and bites, glances clinging and a tormented last-minute aversion of the gaze. “Does getting along well together lead to hate?” she wondered. “Does a decent life crave brutality? Does peacefulness need cruelty? Does orderliness long to be torn apart?” Such were, and were not, the thoughts provoked by Moosbrugger. Beneath the thunder of the music a world was suspended around her, a conflagration on the verge of breaking out, inwardly eating away at the timbers. But it was also like a metaphor, where the things compared are the same yet on the other hand quite different, and from the dissimilarity of the similar as from the similarity of the dissimilar two columns of smoke drift upward with the magical scent of baked apples and pine twigs strewn on the fire.

  “We should never have to stop playing,” she said to herself, and flicking the pages back she started again at the beginning when they reached the end. Walter smiled self-consciously and joined in.

  “What is Ulrich actually doing with his mathematics?” she asked him.

  Walter shrugged his shoulders while playing, as if he were at the wheel of a racing car.

  “One would have to go on and on playing, till the very end,” Clarisse thought. “If one could go on playing uninterruptedly to the end of one’s life, what would Moosbrugger be then? A horror? An idiot? A black bird in the sky?” She did not know.

  She knew nothing at all. One fine day—she could have calculated to the day when it happened—she had awakened from the sleep of childhood and found the conviction ready-made that she was called upon to accomplish something, to play a special role, perhaps even chosen for some great purpose. At the time, she knew nothing of the world. Nor did she believe what she was told about it—by her parents, her older brothers; their chattering was all well and good, but one could not assimilate what they said, one simply couldn’t, any more than a chemical substance can absorb another that does not “fit” it. Then came Walter; that was the day; from that day on everything “fit.” Walter wore a little mustache, a toothbrush on his upper lip; he called her “Fräulein,” and all at once the world was no longer a barren, chaotic, parched plain but a gleaming circle, with Walter at the center, herself at the center, two centers coinciding in one. Earth, buildings, fallen leaves not swept away, aching lines of perspective (she remembered the moment as one of the most tormenting of her childhood, when she stood with her father looking at a scenic view, and her father, the painter, went into endless raptures over it, while for her, gazing into the world along those long aerial lines of perspective only hurt, as if she had to run her finger along the sharp edge of a ruler)—these were the things that had made up life before. Now, all at once, it had become hers, flesh of her flesh.

  She knew then that she would do something gigantic, though what it would be she did not yet know. Meanwhile she felt it most powerfully with music, and hoped then that Walter would become an even greater genius than Nietzsche, to say nothing of Ulrich, who arrived on the scene later and who had merely given her Nietzsche’s works as a present.

  From then on things had progressed. How fast, it was now impossible to say. How badly she had played the piano before; how little she had known about music! Now she played better than Walter. And all the books she had read! Where had they all come from? She saw it all before her like swarms of black birds fluttering around a little girl standing in the snow. But somewhat later she saw a black wall with white spots in it; black stood for all she didn’t know, and while the white ran together to form little, and sometimes larger, islands, the black remained unchangingly infinite. This blackness emitted fear and agitation. “Is this the devil?” she thought. “Has the devil turned into Moosbrugger?” Between the white spots she now noticed thin gray tracks; on these she had moved from one thing to the next in her life; they were events: departures, arrivals, excited discussions, battling with her parents, the marriage, the house, the incredible struggle with Walter. The thin gray tracks coiled like snakes. “Snakes!” Clarisse thought. “Snakes!” These events entangled her, trapped her, kept her from getting where she wanted to go, were slippery, and made her aim at a target she did not want.

  Snakes, snares, slippery; that was life’s way. Her thoughts began to race like life. Her fingertips dipped into the torrent of music. In the streambed of music snakes and snares came slithering down. Then the prison where they kept Moosbrugger hidden opened like the refuge of a quiet bay. Clarisse’s thoughts entered his cell with a shudder. “One must make music to the end,” she repeated to herself for encouragement, but her heart was trembling violently. When it had calmed down the entire cell was filled with her self. It was as gentle a feeling as salve on a wound, but when she tried to hang on to it forever it began to open and spread apart like a fairy tale or a dream. Moosbrugger sat with his head in his hand, and she freed him from his fetters. As her fingers moved, and as if at their summons, strength, courage, virtue, kindness, beauty, and riches entered the cell like a breeze from many meadows. “It doesn’t matter at all why I am doing this, it doesn’t matter why I feel like doing this,” Clarisse felt, “what counts is that now I am doing it.” She laid her hands, a part of her own body, on his eyes, and when she withdrew her fingers Moosbrugger had turned into a handsome youth and she stood beside him as an incredibly beautiful woman with a body as sweet and soft as a southern wine, not at all recalcitrant, as little Clarisse’s body usually was. “This is the form of our innocence,” she noted in some deep-down thinking layer of consciousness.

  But why couldn’t Walter be like this? Emerging from the depths of her music fantasy, she remembered what a child she still had been, already in love with Walter at fifteen, and prepared to save him by her courage, strength, and kindness from all the dangers that threatened his genius. And how beautiful it had been when Walter glimpsed those deep spiritual pitfalls everywhere. She wondered whether it had all been mere childishness. Their marriage had irradiated it with a disturbing light. Somehow their marriage was suddenly creating a great embarrassment for their love. Not that things hadn’t also been wonderful of late, perhaps even richer in meaning and substance than formerly; still, that huge conflagration, those flames everywhere flickering across the sky, had dwindled to the difficulties of a fire of the hearth that is reluctant to burn. Clarisse was not quite sure whether her struggles with Walter still mattered. Meanwhile life was racing by like this music that was vanishing under her hands. In a wink it would be over! She was gradually overcome by hopeless terror. At this moment she noticed that Walter’s playing was becoming unsure. His feelings were splashing like big raindrops on the keys. She instantly guessed what he was thinking of: the child. She knew that he wanted to bind her to himself with a child. They argued about it day in, day out. And the music did not stop for a second. The music knew no denial. Like a net whose entangling meshes she had not noticed, it was pulling shut with lightning speed.

  Clarisse leapt up in mid-chord and banged the piano shut; Walter barely managed to save his fingers.

  Oh, how that hurt! Still shocked, he understood everything. It was Ulrich’s coming, the mere news of which was enough to throw her mind into a frenzy! Ulrich was bad for Clarisse in that he callously roused in her something that Walter himself hardly dared touch, that wretched streak of genius in Clarisse. The secret cavern where something calamitous was tearing at chains that might one day give way.