The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  Here he broke off; evidently something disturbing had occurred to him, and he ended with the almost unfriendly words: “There are traces of this in even the most commonplace situations of love: the charm of every change of clothing, every disguise, the meaning two people find in what they have in common, the way they see themselves repeated in the other. This little magic is always the same, whether one’s seeing an elegant lady naked for the first time or a naked girl formally dressed for the first time in a dress buttoned up to the neck, and great reckless passions all have something to do with the fact that everyone thinks it’s his own secret self peering out at him from behind the curtains of a stranger’s eyes.”

  It sounded as though he were asking her not to attach too much importance to what they were saying. But Agathe was again thinking of the lightning flash of surprise she had felt when they first met, disguised, as it were, in their lounging suits. And she answered:

  “So this has been going on for thousands of years. Is it any easier to understand as a case of shared self-delusion?”

  Ulrich was silent.

  And after a while, Agathe said delightedly: “But it does happen in one’s sleep! There you do sometimes see yourself transformed into something else. Or meet yourself as a man. And then you’re much kinder to him than you are to yourself. You’ll probably say that these are sexual dreams, but I think they are much older.”

  “Do you often have that sort of dream?” Ulrich asked.

  “Sometimes. Not often.”

  “I almost never do,” he confessed. “It must be ages since I had such a dream.”

  “And yet you once explained to me,” Agathe now said, “—it must have been at the very beginning, back in our old house—that people really did experience life differently thousands of years ago.”

  “Oh, you mean the ‘giving’ and the ‘receiving’ vision?” Ulrich replied, smiling at her although she could not see him. “The ‘embracing’ and ‘being embraced’ of the spirit? Yes, of course I should have talked about this mysterious dual sexuality of the soul too. And how much else besides! There’s a hint of it wherever you look. Every analogy contains a remnant of that magic of being identical and not identical. But haven’t you noticed? In all these cases we’ve been talking about, in dream, in myth, poem, childhood, even in love, feeling more comes at the cost of understanding less, and that means: through a loss of reality.”

  “Then you don’t really believe in it?” Agathe asked.

  Ulrich did not answer. But after a while he said: “Translated into the ghastly jargon of our times, we could call this faculty we all lack to such a frightening degree nowadays ‘the percentual share’ of an individual’s experiences and actions. In dreams it’s apparently a hundred percent, in our waking life not even half as much. You noticed it today at once in my house; but it’s exactly the same with my relations to the people you’ll meet. I also once called it—if I’m not mistaken, in conversation with a woman where it was truly relevant, I must admit—the acoustics of the void. If a pin drops in an empty room, the sound it makes is somehow disproportionate, even incommensurable; but it’s the same when there’s a void between people. There’s no way to tell: is one screaming, or is there a deathly silence? For everything out of place and askew acquires the magnetic attraction of a tremendous temptation when there’s nothing with which to counteract it. Don’t you agree? . . . But I’m sorry,” he interrupted himself, “you must be tired, and I’m not letting you have your rest. It seems there are many things in my surroundings and my social life that won’t be much to your liking, I’m afraid.”

  Agathe had opened her eyes. After coming out of hiding at last, her glance contained something uncommonly hard to define, which Ulrich felt coursing sympathetically through his whole body. He suddenly started to talk again: “When I was younger I tried to see just that as a source of strength. And if one doesn’t have anything to pit against life? Fine, then life flees from man into his works! That’s more or less what I thought. And I suppose there’s something daunting about the lovelessness and irresponsibility of today’s world. At the very least there’s something in it of adolescence, which centuries can go through as well as teenagers, years of rapid, uneven growth. And like every young man I began by plunging into work, adventures, amusements; what difference did it make what one did, as long as one did it wholeheartedly? Do you remember that we once spoke of ‘the morality of achievement’? We’re born with that image, and orient ourselves by it. But the older one gets, the more clearly one finds out that this apparent exuberance, this independence and mobility in everything, this sovereignty of the driving parts and the partial drives—both your own against yourself and yours against the world—in short, everything that we ‘people of the present’ have regarded as a strength and a special distinction of our species, is basically nothing but a weakness of the whole as against its parts. Passion and willpower can do nothing about it. The moment you’re ready to go all out into the middle of something, you find yourself washed back to the periphery. Today this is the experience in all experiences!”

  Agathe, with her eyes now open, was waiting for something to happen in his voice; when nothing changed and her brother’s words simply came to an end like a path turning off a road into a dead end, she said: “So your experience tells you that one can never really act with conviction and will never be able to. By conviction,” she explained, “I don’t mean whatever knowledge or moral training have been drilled into us, but simply feeling entirely at home with oneself and with everything, feeling replete now where there’s emptiness, something one starts out from and returns to—” She broke off. “Oh, I don’t really know what I mean! I was hoping you’d explain it to me.”

  “You mean just what we were talking about,” Ulrich answered gently. “And you’re also the only person I can talk to about these things. But there’d be no point in starting over just to add a few more seductive words. I’d have to say, rather, that being ‘at the inner core’ of things, in a state of unmarred ‘inwardness’—using the word not in any sentimental sense but with the meaning we just gave it—is apparently not a demand that can be satisfied by rational thinking.” He had leaned forward and was touching her arm and gazing steadily into her eyes. “Human nature is probably averse to it,” he said in a low voice. “All we really know is that we feel a painful need for it! Perhaps it’s connected with the need for sibling love, an addition to ordinary love, moving in an imaginary direction toward a love unmixed with otherness and not-loving.” And after a pause he added: “You know how popular those babes-in-the-wood games are in bed: people who could murder their real siblings fool around as brother-and-sister babies under the same blanket.”

  In the dim light his face twitched in self-mockery. But Agathe put her trust in his face and not in his confused words. She had seen faces quivering like this a moment before they plunged; this one did not come nearer; it seemed to be moving at infinitely great speed over an immense distance. Tersely she answered: “Being brother and sister isn’t really enough, that’s all.”

  “Well, we’ve already spoken of being twins,” Ulrich responded, getting noiselessly to his feet, because he thought that she was finally being overwhelmed by fatigue.

  “We’d have to be Siamese twins,” Agathe managed to say.

  “Right, Siamese twins!” her brother echoed, gently disengaging her hand from his and carefully placing it on the coverlet. His words had a weightless sound, light and volatile, expanding in widening circles even after he had left the room.

  Agathe smiled and gradually sank into a lonely sadness, whose darkness imperceptibly turned into that of sleep. Ulrich meanwhile tiptoed into his study and stayed there, unable to work, for another two hours, until he, too, grew tired, learning for the first time what it was like to be cramped out of considerateness. He was amazed at how much he would have wanted to do during this time that would involve making noise and so had to be suppressed. This was new for him. And it almost irritated him a
little, although he did his best to imagine sympathetically what it would be like to be really physically attached to another person. He knew hardly anything about how such nervous systems worked in tandem, like two leaves on a single stalk, united not only through a single bloodstream but still more by the effect of their total interdependence. He assumed that every agitation in one soul would also be felt by the other, even though whatever evoked it was going on in a body that was not, in the main, one’s own. “An embrace, for instance—you are embraced by way of the other body,” he thought. “You may not even want it, but your other self floods you with an overwhelming wave of acceptance! What do you care who’s kissing your sister? But her excitement is something you must love jointly. Or suppose it’s you who are making love, and you have to find a way to ‘ensure’ her participation; you can’t just let her be flooded with senseless physiological processes . . .!” Ulrich felt a strong arousal and a great uneasiness at this idea; it was hard for him to draw the line between a new way of looking at something and a distortion of the ordinary way.

  149

  SPRING IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN

  The praise Meingast bestowed on her and the new ideas she was getting from him had deeply impressed Clarisse.

  Her mental unrest and excitability, which sometimes worried even her, had eased, but they did not give way this time, as they so often did, to dejection, frustration, and hopelessness; they were succeeded instead by an extraordinary taut lucidity and a transparent inner atmosphere. Once again she took stock of herself and arrived at a critical estimate. Without questioning it, and even with a certain satisfaction, she noted that she was not overly bright; she had not been educated enough. Ulrich, on the other hand, whenever she thought of him by comparison, was like a skater gliding to and fro at will on a surface of intellectual ice. There was no telling where it came from when he said something, or when he laughed, when he was irritable, when his eyes flashed, when he was there and with his broad shoulders preempting Walter’s space in the room. Even when he merely turned his head in curiosity, the sinews of his neck tautened like the rigging of a sailboat taking off with the wind into the blue. There was always more to him than she could grasp, which acted as a spur to her desire to fling herself on him bodily to catch hold of it. But the tumult in which this sometimes happened, so that once nothing in the world had mattered except that she wanted to bear Ulrich’s child, had now receded far into the distance, leaving behind not even that flotsam and jetsam that incomprehensibly keeps bobbing up in the memory after the tide of passion has ebbed. When she thought of her failure at Ulrich’s house, insofar as she ever still did, Clarisse felt cross, at most, but her self-confidence was hale and hearty thanks to the new ideas supplied by her philosophic guest, not to mention the sheer excitement of again seeing this old friend who had been transported into the sublime. Thus many days passed in all kinds of suspense while everyone in the little house, now bathed in spring sunshine, waited to see whether Ulrich would or would not bring the permit to visit Moosbrugger in his eerie domicile.

  There was one idea in particular that seemed important to Clarisse in this connection: The Master had called the world “so thoroughly stripped of illusions” that people could no longer say about anything whether they ought to love it or hate it. Since then Clarisse felt that one was obliged to surrender oneself to an illusion if one received the grace of having one. For an illusion is a mercy. How was anyone at that time to know whether to turn right or left on leaving the house, unless he had a job, like Walter, which then cramped him, or, like herself, had a visit to pay to her parents or brothers and sisters, who bored her! It’s different in an illusion! There life is arranged as efficiently as a modern kitchen: you sit in the middle and hardly need stir to set all the gadgets going. That had always been Clarisse’s sort of thing. Besides, she understood “illusion” to mean nothing other than what was called “the will,” only with added intensity. Up to now Clarisse had felt intimidated by being able to understand so little of what was going on in the world. But since Meingast’s return she saw this as a veritable advantage that freed her to love, hate, and act as she pleased. For according to the Master’s word mankind needed nothing so much as willpower, and when it came to wanting something with a will, Clarisse had always had that inner power! When Clarisse thought about it she was chilled with joy and hot with responsibility. Of course, what was meant by will here was not the grim effort it took to learn a piano piece or win an argument; it meant being powerfully steered by life itself, being deeply moved within oneself, being swept away with happiness!

  Eventually she could not help telling Walter something about it. She informed him that her conscience was growing stronger day by day. But despite his admiration for Meingast, the suspected instigator of this deed, Walter answered angrily: “It’s probably lucky for us that Ulrich doesn’t seem able to get the permit!”

  Clarisse’s lips merely quivered slightly, betraying sympathy for his ignorance and stubbornness.

  “What is it you want from this criminal, anyway, who has nothing whatever to do with any of us?” Walter demanded manfully.

  “It’ll come to me when I get there!” she said.

  “I should think you ought to know it already,” Walter asserted.

  His little wife smiled the way she always did when she was about to hurt him to the quick. But then she merely said: “I’m going to do something.”

  “Clarisse!” Walter remonstrated firmly. “You may not do anything without my permission. I am your lawful husband and guardian.”

  This tone was new to her. She turned away and took a few steps in confusion.

  “Clarisse!” Walter called after her, getting up to follow her. “I intend to take steps to deal with the insanity that’s going around in this house!”

  Now she realized that the healing power of her resolve was already manifesting itself, even in the strengthening of Walter’s character. She turned on her heel: “What steps?” she asked, and a flash of lightning from her narrowed eyes struck into the moist, wide-open brown of his.

  “Now look,” he said to mollify her, backing away a little, in surprise at her demanding such a concrete response. “We’ve all got this in our system, this intellectual taste for the unhealthy, the problematic, for making our flesh creep; every thinking person has it; but—”

  “But we let the philistines have their way!” Clarisse interrupted triumphantly. Now she advanced on him without taking her eyes off him; felt how a sense of her own healing power held him in its strong embrace and overpowered him. Her heart was filled with an odd and inexpressible joy.

  “But we won’t make such a to-do over it,” Walter muttered sulkily, finishing his sentence. Behind him, at the hem of his jacket, he felt an obstacle; reaching backward, he identified it as the edge of one of those light, thin-legged little tables they had, which suddenly seemed spooky to him; he realized that if he kept backing away he would make it slide backward, which would be ludicrous. So he resisted the sudden desire to get far away from this struggle, to some dark-green meadow under blossoming fruit trees, among people whose healthy cheerfulness would wash his wounds clean. It was a quiet, stout wish, graced with women hanging on his words and paying their toll of grateful admiration. At the moment Clarisse came up close he actually felt rudely molested, in a nightmarish way. But to his surprise Clarisse did not say: “You’re a coward!” Instead, she said: “Walter? Why are we unhappy?”

  At the sound of her appealing, clairvoyant voice he felt that happiness with any other woman could never take the place of his unhappiness with Clarisse. “We have to be!” he answered with an equally noble upsurge.

  “No, we shouldn’t have to be,” she said obligingly. She let her head droop to one side, trying to find a way to convince him. It didn’t matter what it was: They stood there facing each other like a day without an evening, pouring out its fire hour after hour without lessening.

  “You’ll have to admit,” she said finally, at once shy
ly and stubbornly, “that really great crimes come about not because somebody commits them but because we let them happen.”

  Now Walter knew, of course, what was coming, and felt a shock of disappointment.

  “Oh God!” he cried out impatiently. “I know as well as you do that far more people’s lives are ruined by indifference and by the ease with which most of us today can square our conscience than by the evil intentions of isolated individuals. And of course it’s admirable that you’re now going to say that this is why we must all quicken our conscience and carefully weigh in advance every step we take.”

  Clarisse interrupted him by opening her mouth, but thought better of it and did not respond.

  “Of course I think about poverty too, and hunger, and all the corruption that’s allowed to go on in this world, or mines caving in because the management economized on safety measures,” Walter went on in a deflated tone, “and I’ve agreed with you about it already.”

  “But in that case two lovers mustn’t love each other either, as long as they’re not in a state of ‘pure happiness,’” Clarisse said. “And the world will never improve until there are such lovers!”

  Walter struck his hands together. “Don’t you understand how unfair to life such great, dazzling, uncompromising demands are?” he exclaimed. “And it’s the same with this Moosbrugger, who keeps popping into your head like something on a turntable. Of course you’re right to claim that no stone should be left unturned as long as such miserable human creatures are simply killed off because society doesn’t know what to do with them. But of course it’s even more right that the healthy, normal conscience is justified in simply refusing to bother with such overrefined scruples. A healthy way of thinking is recognizable, in fact, by certain signs; one can’t prove it but has to have it in one’s blood.”