38 Clarisse Thinking (Her Demons)

In this chapter we once again find Clarisse and her husband Walter violently playing the piano. For them, playing the piano is all about giving form to their feelings.  In the course of playing together "these two people's separate feelings were compressed into a single entity."  But there is something missing, as the narrator is quick to point out:

But this union did not have the same dull, overwhelming force of life itself . . . 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. . .  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.

Through their piano playing Walter wants to bring Clarisse back to a "realization . . . from her innermost self and incline her gently to him."  In the simplest terms, he wants her to consent to having a child.  But "his dreams were assuming so much 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 Clarisse has "her own way of thinking: "three people were around Clarisse: Walter, Ulrich, and the woman-killer Moosbrugger.  Clarisse, the narrator states, "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.

Clarisse then makes a curious connection between playing the piano and Moosbrugger:

"One would have to go on and on plying, 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.

Like Ulrich and Walter, Clarisse has intimations of her great potential.  Having "awakened from the sleep of childhood," she "found the conviction ready-made that she was called upon to accomplish something . . . perhaps even chosen for some great purpose."  That was the appeal of Walter: "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."

As Clarisse continues playing she imagines herself entering Moosbrugger's cell and freeing him.

Moosbrugger had turned into a handsome youth and she stood beside him as an incredibly beautiful woman with a body as sweet as 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.

Clarisse wonders "why couldn't Walter be like this" and decides (feels?) that "their marriage was suddenly creating a great embarrassment for their love."  She knows Walter wants to "bind her to himself with a child," but she resists him.  At this point, noticing that Walter's "playing was becoming unsure," Clarisse "leapt up in mid-chord and banged the piano shut."

Walter immediately concludes that Clarisse's feelings for Ulrich have caused her sudden change of mood:

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 dare touch, that wretched streak of genius in Clarisse.

Walter voices his jealousy, and Clarisse declares she "was definitely not at all in love with Ulrich:

But she did feel kindled by him, like a light. She felt she shone more herself, amounted to more, when he was near; Walter on the other hand always wanted only to close the shutters. Besides, her feelings were nobody else's business, not Ulrich's and not Walter's!

The narrator concludes the chapter by noting that "The silhouettes of two people who loved each other were black." As the last sentence,  he adds:

Regardless of the greatest affairs of state occurring in the world outside, and despite its vexations, this seemed to be one of those moments for which God had created the earth.

35-37 The Principle of Insufficient Cause

Ulrich's train of thought (as erratic as it may be) is once more derailed when he encounters "Bank Director Fischel," who has become flustered by "two little words" repeated several times in a circular he had received from Count Leinsdorf.  Those words being: "the true."

Fischel confronts Ulrich with three short questions: "What is really meant by 'the true patriotism,' 'the true progress,' and 'the true Austria.'" Ulrich's reply reflects his off-the-cuff philosophy regarding "The Principle of Insufficient Cause."  He says: "I give you my solemn word, . . . that neither I nor anyone else knows what 'the true' anything is, but I can assure you that it is on the point of realization."

Chapter 36 and 37 illustrate how the "Principle of Insufficient Cause" applies to the Parallel Campaign and makes it "a tangible reality before anyone knows what it is."

It seems it was all the fault of an "influential journalist:

 . . . who had heard that something was in the wind [and] quickly published two long articles in his paper offering as his own ideas everything he had guessed to be in the works. . . . He was really the inventor of the idea of the "Year of Austria" that he wrote about in his columns, without himself knowing what he meant by it but writing sentence after sentence in which this phrase combined with others as in a dream and took on new forms and unleashed storms of enthusiasm. 

This was in part what Count Leinsdorf had intended: "to let newsmen serve as the mouthpiece for his actual intention [regarding the Parallel Campaign] so as to be able to acknowledge or disavow them as circumstances might dictate."

But there is a problem:  "His Grace [Leinsdorf] had not reckoned with . . . the widespread need to improve the world . . . 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."

Once again poor Ulrich is dragged into the fray: "In this situation he [Leinsdorf] felt an increasing desperate need for Ulrich, who had been recommended to him as the very man for the occasion."

Who better to deal with a made up crisis than a man without qualities?

32-34 Lovesickness and the Ready-Made World

In chapter 32, Ulrich's preoccupation with Moosbrugger continues: "For some unknown reason Moosbrugger concerned him more deeply than the life he himself was leading."

As usual, Ulrich's thoughts take him in all sorts of directions -- from Luther ("We never judge an act by that aspect of it which is pleasing or displeasing to God.") and Machiavelli to a quote from Eckhart on Christ ("In Christ too there was an outer and an inner man, and everything he did with regard to outward things he did as the outer man, while his inner man stood by in immovable solitude.") and a sentence from a "parlor philosopher" that Diotima had repeated to him.

But Ulrich's thoughts also bring a memory "of a passion he had felt for a woman considerably older than he." Their mutual love "remained short and unreal throughout its course."  Under the influence of this passion, Ulrich felt he had "penetrated the heart of the world."  The chapter ends with this conclusion:

It was not long before she had turned entirely into that impersonal center of energy, the underground dynamo that kept his lights going, and he wrote a final letter, setting forth that great ideal of living for love actually had nothing to do with physical possession and the wish "Be Mine! that came from the sphere of thrift, appropriation, and gluttony.  This was the only letter he mailed, and approximately the high point of his lovesickness, from which it soon declined and suddenly ended.

* * *

In the next chapter we return to Bonadea, "who could not go on staring continually at the ceiling," and her aggrieved question: "So you are really capable of blaming me for our passion?" Ulrich's response is not directed to her question but related to "what he had been thinking, off and on, all day":

"Every such question has as many answers hanging on it as there are bees in a hive," Ulrich replied, "All human spiritual disorder with its never-resolved problems, hangs on every single one of them in some disgusting way."

Totally misunderstanding Ulrich's train of thought, Bonadea was "humiliated by her helpless and obscene position, half-naked on a sofa, an easy target for insults." Bonadea gets dressed, but "the rustling and switching of the silken chalices into which she was slipping back did not move Ulrich to remorse."

* * *

After Bonadea leaves, Ulrich is also restless and "he went out to the street with the intention of sending a message to Walter and Clarisse that he would come and see them this evening." Being Ulrich, he stops and contemplates his environment.

All these circular lines, intersecting lines, straight lines, curves and wreaths of which a domestic interior is composed and that had piled up around him with neither nature nor inner necessity but bristled, to the last detail with baroque overabundance. . . . "I am only fortuitous," Necessity leered. . . .  a fluid, mysterious equilibrium between feeling and world was upset for the space of a second. Everything we feel and do is somehow oriented "lifeward," and the least deviation away from this direction toward something beyond is difficult or alarming. 

The narrator decclares "It may be a convenience and a comfort for most people to find the world ready-made . . . and there is no disputing that whatever endures is not only conservative but also the foundation of all advances and revolutions."  Yet, "this casts a feeling of deep, shadowy unease on those who live according to their own lights."

Then Ulrich ponders an even more abstract and difficult question:

The goals, the voices, the reality, all this seductiveness that lures and leads us on, that we pursue and plunge into -- is this reality itself or is it no more than a breath of the real, resting intangibly on the surface of the reality the worlds offers us? What sharpens our suspicions are all those prefabricated compartments and forms of life, semblances of reality, the molds set by earlier generations, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of sensations and feelings. 

At little later the narrator steps in and speaks:

Imagine, if you will, what it is to have a heavy world weighing on tongue, hands, and eyes, a chilled moon of earth, houses, mores, pictures, and books, and nothing inside but an unstable, shifting mist; what a joy it must be whenever someone brings out a slogan in which one thinks one can recognize oneself. What is more natural than that every person of intense feeling get hold of this new form before the common run of people does? It offers that moment of self-realization, of balance between inner and outer, between being crushed and exploding.

The "craving for the renovation of life," Ulrich decides:

 "is nothing but the discomfort at the intrusion, between one's own misty self and the alien already petrified carapace of the self of one's predecessors, of a pseudoself, a loosely fitting group soul.  As the chapter concludes, Ulrich thinks of "the friends of his youth . . . all the rebels who wanted to bring new things and new people into the world."  They had "become professors, celebrities, names, recognized participants in the recognized development of progress; they had made it by a more or less direct path from the mist to the petrifact, . . ."

So ends chapter 34, "A Hot Flash and Chilled Walls." 

28-31 Ulrich Thinking (With Bonadea Present)

Chapter 28 has the wonderful title "A Chapter That May Be Skipped by Anyone Not Particularly Impressed by Thinking as an Occupation."  We're back with Ulrich, who is at home "musing."  And what is he musing about?  "Wasn't I telling Clarisse something about water?" he says aloud.

Nothing, the narrator laments, "is so hard to achieve as a literary representation of a man thinking."  Yet the man without qualities is thinking, in a rambling kind of way, about water. And because he "has modern scientific concepts in his head," he comes to this conclusion:

Ultimately it all dissolves into systems of formulas, all somehow interlinked, and there are only a few dozen people in the whole wide world who thought alike about even so simple a thing as water; all the rest talk about it in languages that belong somewhere between today and some thousands of years ago.

Ulrich feels the "healing power of thought," but "unfortunately" it also "diminishes the personal sense of experience."

In the next chapter, Ulrich's thoughts are interrupted by the sudden appearance of a tearful, neglected Bonadea.  Of course, he responses to her "erotically," but he still can't completely stop thinking.

But this erotic transformation of the consciousness seemed only a special instance of something much more general: for an evening at the theater, a concert, a church service, all such manifestations of the inner life today are similar, quickly dissolving islands of a second state of consciousness that is sometimes interpolated into the ordinary one.

He is ready for Bonadea to leave (so he can continue with his thoughts), but "Bonadea did not hurry up, and Ulrich was forced to think of something else."  At first, he thinks about Walter, how he:

 "always had a quite special ability to experience intensely. He never got what he was after because he was swamped by his feelings.  He seemed to have a built-in, highly melodious amplifier of the minor joys and miseries of life."

But Ulrich has yet another idea:

"A young man with an active mind . . . is constantly sending out ideas in every direction. But only those that find a resonance in his environment will be reflected back to him and consolidate, while all the other dispatches are scattered in space and lost!" 

He then makes a leap of thought:

For if, in the course of time, commonplace and impersonal ideas are automatically reinforced while unusual ideas fade away, so that almost everyone, with a mechanical certainty, is bound to become increasingly mediocre, this explains why, despite the thousandfold possibilities available to everyone, the average human being is in fact average.

At this point, Bonadea is thoroughly irritated with him: "She felt it was indelicate of him to be so absentminded when they should be savoring the last drops of their precious time together."

In Chapter 30, which is little more than a page long, Ulrich's thoughts focus, and he suddenly has a vision of Christian Moosbrugger and "his judges."  Moosbrugger is arguing with the judges.  "Injustice" he says, "must be the basis of my brutality. I have stood before the court, a simple man, and thought Your Honors must know everything anyway. But you have let me down!"

So in Chapter 31 Ulrich and Bonadea end up discussing Moosbrugger. Bonadea "reminded of the . . . compassionate partisanship for Moosbrugger as victim," momentarily sweeps "aside any thought of Moosbrugger the criminal."  

"Then you are always for the victim," Ulrich challenges her, "and against the act?"

Bonadea declares that the conversation is not "appropriate" for the aftermath of the (amorous) situation in which they have just participated.  But Ulrich is thinking and has no idea of Bonadea's feelings.  This is how the chapter ends:

    "But if your judgment is so consistent in condemning the act," Ulrich replied, instead of instantly apologizing, "then how can you justify your adulteries, Bonadea?"
      It was the plural that was in such especially bad taste!  Bonadea said nothing but sat down, with a disdainful look, in one of the luxurious armchairs and stared up, insulted, at the dividing line between wall and ceiling. 

It could just as easily have been the "dividing line" between her and Ulrich.

23-27 The Birth of a Great Idea

In these chapters we are introduced to Dr. Paul Arnheim, a rich Prussian who travels with a "little blackamoor," and we learn more about Diotima. In chapter 27 we discover that Arnheim's visit has given Diotima a "great idea."  And what is it?

. . . Diotima's great idea amounted to nothing more than that the Prussian, Arnheim, was the man to assume the spiritual leadership of the great Austrian patriotic endeavor, even though this Parallel Campaign contained a barb of jealousy aimed at Prussia-Germany. 

This idea, of course, advances the plot. But what is more interesting is the narrator's analysis of Diotima and how she came to maintain, with Count Leinsdorf's help, "a 'salon' which enjoyed a reputation as a place where 'society and intellect' met."

One characteristic of Diotima's approach to society is her cultivation of women:

"Life is much too overburdened with knowledge these days," she was accustomed to say, "for us to be able to do without the 'unfragmented woman.'" She was convinced that only the unfragmented woman still possessed the fated power to embrace the intellect with those vital forces that, in her opinion, it obviously sorely needed for its salvation. This concept of the entwining woman and the power of Being, incidentally, redounded greatly to her credit among the young male nobility who attended regularly because it was the thing to do . . .

Another characteristic is her suffering because she has grown tired of the very "Old Austrian culture" she represents:

At this point Diotima had discovered in herself the well-known suffering caused by that familiar malady of contemporary man known as civilization. It is a frustrating condition, full of soap, radio frequencies, the arrogant sign language of mathematical and chemical formulas, economics, experimental research, and the inability of human beings to live together simply but on a high plane. 

Diotima is also unhappy in her marriage, especially in terms of sex which the narrator sums up as "something violent, assaultive, and brusque that was released only once every week . . .  This change in the nature of two people, which always began promptly on time, to be followed, a few minutes later by a short exchange on those events of the day that had not come up before and then a sound sleep."

Here is how the narrator describes the effect this has on her:

On the one hand, it was the cause of that extravagantly swollen ideality --- that officious, outwardly-oriented personality -- whose power of love, whose spiritual longing, reached out for all things great and noble . . . Diotima evoked the impression, so confusing to males, of a mightily blazing yet Platonic sun of love . . . On the other hand, . . . this broad rhythm of marital contact had developed, purely physiologically, into a habit that asserted itself quite independently and without connection to the loftier parts of her being, like the hunger of a farmhand whose meals are infrequent but heavy. 

Enter Dr. Arnheim, "not only a rich man but also a man of notable intellect . . . [who] proclaimed nothing less than the merger of soul and economics, or of ideas and power."  The narrator gives us a wonderful sample of their "intimate" conversation.

   "Yes," he had said, "we no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannizes our lives."
   To which she replied: "I like the company of women. They don't know anything and are unfragmented."
   And Arnheim has said: "Nevertheless, a beautiful woman understands far more than a man, who, for all his logic and psychology knows nothing at all of life." 

As Diotima tells Arnheim about her desire to "bring ideas for the very first time into the domain of power," Arnheim sighs and then, the narrator tells us, says something very important: "No democracy of committees but only strong individual personalities, with experience in both reality and the realm of ideas, would be able to direct such a campaign!"

Thus a great idea is born in Diotima's mind.  And trailing along, almost as an afterthought, is her decision that Ulrich should still be part of the campaign, "where he would have occasion to be much in her and Arnheim's company."