Agathe Read online

  The Millennium, in German, is das tausendjährige Reich, a term that, irrespective of Hitler’s use of it as a slogan for his twelve-year reign, carries a good deal more emotional charge and mythic resonance than the Latinate English word, which in our century most of us have come to associate with the turn of a page in the calendar. It is the name for the thousand-year Kingdom of peace prophesied in the Bible and fervently awaited by millenarian sects through the centuries and still today. One does not expect Robert Musil to invoke such a reference without irony. He was as imbued with the ethos of the Enlightenment as any twentieth-century author, a merciless critic of all kinds of mystification, secular as well as religious. Nevertheless, it is the skeptical, scientifically trained Ulrich, in many ways Musil’s alter ego, who declares to his sister, only half jokingly, that together they will embark on a voyage to that fabled, improbable realm.

  The source of his faith is not a belief founded in Scripture but a memory referred to by the title of an early chapter as “The long forgotten and supremely important affair with the major’s wife”—an unconsummated romance when he was a twenty-year-old recruit that ended with his fleeing the object of his love and withdrawing to a remote island. There he experienced “the very state described by those believers in God who have entered the state of mystic love, of whom the young cavalry lieutenant at that time knew nothing at all.” This condition is so different from ordinary consciousness that it constitutes a “second reality,” in which “love is not a desire for possession but a gentle self-unveiling of the world for which one would gladly forego possession of the beloved.” Ever since then, at transient moments in the midst of his otherwise worldly and alienated existence, he has felt intimations of that same state of being, which he calls “the other condition.” The descriptions of this state in the writings of the mystics speak to him “in tones of intimate kinship; with a soft, dark inwardness” that is “the opposite of the imperious tone of mathematical and scientific language.”*

  Ulrich has no intention of renouncing science and mathematics. Their austere beauty is the passion of his intellect. But he rejects the rationalist prejudice against mystical experience, which has its own, necessarily poetic and metaphoric language, just as he rejects, with a good deal of revulsion, the sentimental cult of “spiritual” feeling pitted against the hard-won attainments of reason.

  •

  Is Ulrich unhappy or despairing? Not in the usual sense we give to these words. He is extremely lonely but is too tough-minded to indulge in self-pity, and he enjoys human company, though always at an ironic remove. Vaguely, he notices that he does not love himself as he once did, but it is in the nature of such lack that it largely occludes what was lost. It’s probably fairest to say that he has a genius for disillusionment. In any case, by the time he departs for the provincial city of —— to discharge himself of his filial obligations on the occasion of the death of his father, he has shed almost all of his attachments and ambitions and is open to whatever unforeseen possibilities life may have to offer him.

  2

  Agathe and Ulrich meet under quasi-magical auspices—a ready loophole for skeptical irony. But the magic is compelling. By pure coincidence they are wearing nearly identical Pierrot costumes. Perhaps I should say Pierrot and Columbine. But it is characteristic of such a pairing (Papageno and Papagena are another example) that male and female, even self and other, are subsumed in the charm of an impossible identity. Are they one or two? They are two of a kind.

  In commedia dell’arte, these creatures of fantasy are never taken to be real, and yet they are super-real in the claim they make on our longing for such bravery of innocence and love, and maybe our secret belief that such feelings might be possible even for people like ourselves. Why not? Of course there are a million reasons why not. But here, by a trick of chance, a man and a woman of cultured sophistication, siblings separated since childhood, find themselves transformed into a semblance of this moon-enchanted couple.

  Naturally, they are charmed, by each other as much as by the amusing coincidence, but they think little of it (although Agathe’s quip—“I didn’t know we were twins”—is prescient). But the reader, meeting them as characters in a book, knows that something out of the ordinary can be expected in the light of such an event. And that light, when we speak of Pierrot, is moonlight.

  Skeptical Ulrich as Pierrot in love with the moon seems an unlikely stretch, but late in the story, on a moonlit evening, Ulrich says to Agathe, “You are the moon,” and Agathe understands him. And it is not only Ulrich but Musil himself who gives himself over to “the fantastically altered reality of moonlit nights” and writes transportingly about them, only to have Agathe, three pages on, say to Ulrich, “Do you know what you look like now? ‘Pierrot Lunaire.’ This calls for prudence.”

  Ulrich immediately agrees, which saddens Agathe, but they both know she is right. The necessary prudence of rational checks on mystical intuition is a constant refrain in the exchanges between the siblings, not as a defense against drifting into kitsch—that would be merely a lapse in taste—but against deceiving themselves, or worse, each other, about something that matters to them more than life itself.

  •

  Ulrich contemplates Agathe’s face, hoping to find it similar to his own. He sees no clear resemblance. And then: “There was something about this face that unsettled him. After a while he realized what it was: he couldn’t make out its expression. It lacked whatever it is that allows one to draw the usual conclusions about a person. It was not an empty face by any means, but nothing in it was emphasized or summed up as a readable character trait.”

  A little later, as they smoke their last cigarettes before retiring for the night, he muses again about her appearance:

  He didn’t know what to make of his sister. There was nothing either emancipated or bohemian about her, even though she was sitting there in the wide trousers in which she had received her unknown brother. It was more something hermaphroditic, it seemed to him now; as she gestured and moved in conversation, the light, masculine garment, which was semitransparent, like water, suggested the delicate form underneath, and in contrast to the independent freedom of her legs, her lovely hair was gathered up in decidedly feminine style. But the center of this amphibious impression was still her face, which possessed the charm of a woman to a high degree and yet had something missing or held in reserve whose nature he could not make out.

  Ulrich never comments on the fundamental trait they have in common, but the reader is prompted to recognize it: Agathe is a woman without qualities and is thus Ulrich’s counterpart in female form.

  Not having known each other since they were children and now meeting as adults at a moment in their lives when they are at parallel points of isolation and estrangement from the worlds they have each inhabited, they are delighted to find in each other not just a sibling but a kindred soul. What is this kinship, what is its nature? The question is charged with ambiguous appeal. They are a man and a woman, after all. Moreover, they are young, attractive, highly intelligent, and not bound by any ties, aside from Agathe’s marriage to an unloved husband, that might stand in the way of an intimate relationship. But they are brother and sister.

  Agathe seems no more constrained by the incest taboo than she is by any other prohibition. In her education in a convent school, she has known moral authority only as rules laid down for the suppression of pleasure. And if she has lived a life of submission to her wifely duties, it was not out of conviction but in self-humbling penitence for her failure to keep her first husband, and with him her first and only true love, alive when he was dying of typhus. Ulrich, on the other hand, Nietzschean iconoclast though he is, and obsessed with discovering, together with his sister, the sunken continent of an ecstatic, primordial morality, is surprisingly wary of trespassing the moral and legal codes of his day.

  It is Agathe who does that in his stead. Or rather, she does it for him: “Essentially she was making Ulrich the gift of a crime, b
y placing herself in his hands, fully trusting that he would understand her rashness.” And Ulrich, watching her as she forges her father’s will, “experienced a pleasure he had never known, for there was an enchanting absurdity in succumbing, for once entirely and without caution, to what another being was doing.”

  And yet, though her crime—and his by complicity—may well have grave consequences for them both, it is only a foil to a spiritual event that is made visible by the narrator briefly parting the curtains to a view behind the physical action:

  An aura of justice with flames instead of logic surrounded her. Goodness, decency, and law-abidance, as she had experienced these virtues in the people she knew, Hagauer in particular,† had always seemed to her as if a stain had been removed from a dress; but the wrong that hovered around her at this moment was like the drowning of the world in the light of a rising sun. It seemed to her as if right and wrong were no longer general terms and a compromise arranged for millions of people, but the magical encounter of Me and You, the madness of a first creation, not yet comparable with any thing, not measurable by any standard.

  There is no hint of irony in this description. It is meant to evoke a dimension of consciousness that knows nothing of the statutes by which the world of seinesgleichen geschieht conducts its business, and that knows instead something of incomparable value, power, beauty, and even utility, if people would only avail themselves of it. That, of course, is not a reasonable proposition. It is the view from within the precincts of the other reality.

  •

  Strolling together in their dead father’s garden on paths that “turned back upon themselves,” talking about the nature of morality, the siblings find themselves “in a state of mind that drifted in circular eddies like those of a current rising behind a dam.” The entire image—of the current impeded by a barrier and the mental state that drifts in circles that rise as they turn—is a virtual diagram of Ulrich and Agathe’s relationship and of the direction and even the form their conversations will take in the course of the book.

  •

  A circle that rises as it turns is describing a spiral. That is the peculiar form of the siblings’ quest and of the novel within the novel that, in this edition, bears Agathe’s name as a title. Unlike narratives that progress on the horizontal plane of a timeline, their story proceeds in a slowly cycling ascent to higher and higher stations. This asks of the reader a special kind of attention and imaginative participation. When, for example, the narrator says of Agathe, who is puzzling over the fantastical prospect of the Millennium, that “even now she was not sure yet if it was truly possible. . . . But for as long as she had been with him she had always had the feeling that a country was taking shape from his words, and that this land was not forming in her head, but truly beneath her feet,” the reader is invited, or perhaps I should say more strongly “enjoined,” to imagine—which is to say, attempt to intuit—the other condition as an at least conceivable reality, separate from the socially conditioned world we all inhabit.‡

  Reading in this way becomes a contemplative activity—one of inward listening to a resonance that responds to descriptions of subtle and profound, sometimes nearly intangible states of feeling and perception. Ulrich, in an earlier part of the novel, proposed half jokingly to Count Leinsdorf, the leader of the Parallel Campaign, that they institute a “world secretariat for precision and soul.” That is Musil’s motto as a writer as well, and nowhere more than in these late chapters where Agathe joins Ulrich in his investigations. Intellect and feeling, intuition and reason cooperate without abandoning their different criteria for truth in expression. According to Ulrich, this is the sine qua non of authentic ecstatic experience in our time. It is also the alchemy that infuses a sentence by Robert Musil with its characteristic balance of lightness and gravity, sensuousness and rigor, spiritual lucency and intellectual wit.

  •

  Before they met, Agathe was the embodiment of lethargic, compliant indifference. Nothing mattered, because love had died. Virtually from the moment Ulrich arrives, as she talks to him about her husband, her capacity for decisive action is awakened—with a vengeance, one might say. Ulrich in turn begins, almost immediately, to experience the miracle of meeting himself in feminine form. He is entranced by Agathe’s spontaneity, so different from his objective watchfulness and methodical habits of mind. And little by little, without any controlling intent on her part, simply by the convergence of his fascinated passivity and the energy and freedom she exhibits in his presence, he becomes an instrument of her will. At the same time he notices to his astonishment that her impulsive actions, from the charmingly outré to the criminal, are nothing less than enactments of his own ideas, which he has expounded to her in his role of “older brother and somewhat obtuse dispenser of edifying counsel,” and to which she has attended with the eagerness of a disciple. And yet, at one point Agathe realizes that “much of what he said she had already thought: just not with words, for with only herself to rely on, as she had been until now, she would never have made such definite assertions!” Who is the leader, then, in this constellation, and who the follower?

  •

  Gradually it becomes clear to them and to the reader that their relationship is defined by a single astonishing fact: they are indeed related, not only as brother and sister but also in the painful and beautiful way in which the living halves of a severed whole are related and necessary to each other.

  •

  “You are my lost self-love,” Ulrich says to Agathe at one point, and at another: “I would want to be a woman if only—women did not love men.” It seems he can only love himself as a woman. Agathe has no great respect for women, no matter if they consider themselves emancipated or “raise a brood for which a male must supply the nest.” “Ridiculous parasites,” she calls them. “They share a man’s life together with his dog!” Clearly Ulrich and Agathe are renegades, not only to polite society but to their own sex.

  Such a marginal position offers them a vantage from which to reflect with scorn and sorrow on the erotic theater in which men and women like themselves have been obliged to perform. There are two passages, a brief one from Ulrich’s perspective (he is the less conscious of the two, at least at this juncture) and a longer one from Agathe’s point of view, that are worth reading in tandem as mutually mirroring ethnographic descriptions of the stage directions by which the European bedroom dramas of their time were played out. It seems that men experienced sexual love as an opportunity to either enjoy “a hunter’s delight” in amorous conquest or else grant themselves “an hour of weakness” in a variety of performance styles that strike Agathe “as cheaply melodramatic and overdone, since she had at no time ever felt herself to be other than weak in a world so superbly constructed by the strength of men.” It is an exhausted and exhausting game for both of them.

  “Sooner or later,” Ulrich prophesies, “there will come an age of simple sexual companionship, where boy and girl will stand, like-minded and perplexed, before an old heap of broken springs that once drove the mechanisms called Man and Woman!”

  •

  Late in the book we are introduced to two men who are far from being players in the jousts of love. Both have a strong interest in Agathe, and both, it turns out, are experts in educational theory, one of them “progressive and forward-looking,” the other a pietistic conservative fiercely opposed to his colleague’s liberal views.

  The first is Gottlieb Hagauer. The reader has been aware of him all along, mainly through Agathe’s and Ulrich’s uncharitable opinion of him. Now, in a single chapter, we get to know him from within, so to speak, as the understandably aggrieved husband of a wife who, with no forewarning and for no declared reason, is letting him know through a curt missive from her brother, whom Hagauer dislikes, that she wants a divorce. It is a devastating portrait, not least because Musil does not appear to be satirizing him. He is a prototype of conscientious mediocrity so justified in his self-conceit that he cannot imagine why Aga
the might have cause for dissatisfaction and concludes, in a carefully reasoned chain of reflection that goes off to Agathe in a letter, that she is “socially feebleminded” and for that reason not fit to live without his protection.

  The second exemplar of male authority is Professor August Lindner, whom Agathe meets by chance after fleeing Ulrich’s house with the intention of killing herself, and in whom she believes to have found a paragon of empathy capable, perhaps, of helping her to close the gap between herself and the fullness of love that Ulrich’s dialectics seem unable to deliver. Where Hagauer is merely pathetic and self-righteous, Lindner, goaded by sexual excitement that he cannot admit into his puritanical worldview, becomes a character both sympathetic and ridiculous. Both men are Kantian automatons, models of duty-bound rectitude and probity. They are epitomes of “men with qualities,” completely entrapped in their social personas and professional identities.

  •

  Agathe slips in and out of the other condition with ease and without Ulrich’s tutelage. Here she is, for example, in her father’s house after Ulrich has left for Vienna to prepare for her arrival:

  During this time and from the moment when she had stayed behind alone, Agathe had been living completely at ease, released from the tension of all relationships, in a serenely melancholy suspension of the will, as if at a great height where there was nothing to be seen but the wide blue sky. . . . Nothing troubled the state she was in, no clinging to the past, no straining for the future; when her gaze fell on any of the objects in her vicinity, it was as if she were coaxing a young lamb to come near; it would either gently approach her, or else simply take no notice of her—but she never took mental possession of it with that motion of inner grasping that imbues every act of cold recognition with something violent and yet futile, for it scares away the happiness that is in things.

  Ulrich seems incapable of such humility before the unknowable, though he aspires to it with deep sincerity. In one scene, for example—they are lying in deck chairs on a sunlit lawn—he is talking about the terrifying immensity of pure sense experience unmediated by a conceptual framework. The apparently self-evident fact that grass is green, he laments only half humorously, is actually ungraspable, impossible to capture with words or even to nail down with a scientific measurement.