SOURCE: "Three Mysterious Women: Grigia, The Lady from Portugal, Tonka," in Robert Musil, Master of the Hovering Life: A Study of the Major Fiction, Columbia University Press, 1978, pp. 105-87.

[In the following excerpt, Peters interprets The Lady from Portugal from a psychoanalytic perspective.]

The second story [The Lady from Portugal] in the trilogy Three Women is set (as was the first story, Grigia) in a geographical area that is intentionally vague, in a region situated between North and South and in a world at once specifically medieval and yet enveloped in the timelessness of the fairy tale. Generations earlier, the Ketten family had come from the North and stopped, as did Homo, on the threshold of the South near the Brenner pass in Italy. It is in such an ambiguous geographical setting that Musil treats once again the conflict between reason and mysticism. And it is because of the way in which the present Herr von Ketten eventually resolves this duality (which, as in Grigia, Musil treats as an internal psychological conflict between the male and female principles) that he manages to escape the destiny of all the previous heads of his family. Generation after generation, all of them had died before reaching their sixtieth birthday. Each one of them had been cut down by death as soon as he had completed a great task. Ketten also accomplishes a great task, by which and through which his life becomes defined. Like his ancestors, he, too, suffers a "death," but is then, as if by a miracle, reborn and restored to life with his family and the others for whom he is responsible.

The Wolf and His Moonlady

Because of the importance to this story of the conflict within Ketten of the male and female principles as Musil understood them, Musil goes to great pains to describe husband and wife in terms that are not only at once both concrete and symbolic, but also at first antagonistic. Throughout the story, Musil compares Ketten's life and nature to that of a wolf, a ferocious beast of prey who pursues his goal inexorably and without deviation. If Ketten can get what he wants by honest means, he does so; but, if not, he uses methods both violent and cunning. He is alert, cruel, and aggressive. Ketten is also compared with the landscape surrounding his family seat. The castle stands on a sheer and lonely cliff. Five hundred feet below a torrent of water rages so loudly that no sound can penetrate from the outer world into the castle; nor can any sound from the castle reach the outer world. The patterns in which the woods rise and fall on the mountainsides bestow an air of savagery and violence upon the landscape. The atmosphere surrounding the stunted trees and ragged cliffs is chilly and the countryside is described as being inhabited by stags, wild boars, wolves, dragons, and perhaps even the unicorn. Eagles soar in the clouds above, and demons and spirits seem to lurk in the upper air. After his courtship in Portugal, a land of beauty described in terms of the gentle blue waves of the sea, Ketten brings his wife home to his castle. Although she had assumed that the landscape would be in some way similar to the nature of her husband, what she sees as she rides up to the castle for the first time is something "unimaginably hideous." Her first impulse is to flee. But she forces herself to remain by assuming that the castle and the landscape have a beauty of their own, "like a man's ways, to which one had to become accustomed."

Ketten, for his part, perceives his lady from Portugal as being more than merely a very beautiful woman from the South. She is an unceasing mystery to him, an enchantment that can never be dispelled: "Embracing the woman, might he not suddenly be brought up short by the force of some magical resistance?" On one occasion, when she is standing on the steps waiting to mount her horse, she seems to Ketten as if she were about to step into the saddle and ride off into an Other World. Amid the continuing violence of Ketten's life, she blooms silently as a rose; she is also compared to a pearl necklace that could easily be crushed but which nevertheless continues to exist in the everyday world, absolutely invulnerable. Eventually a legend arises among the people that Ketten has sold his soul to the Devil, who now lives in his castle disguised as a beautiful woman. It is significant that husband and wife rarely seem to talk to each other. And yet, everything that is meaningful in Ketten's life is in some way connected with his lady's existence, an uncanny existence that cannot be expressed discursively in language or comprehended by reason. Ketten's intense love Ketten's wife, the lady from Portugal, is a close literary relation of Homo's mistress, Grigia. From a Jungian perspective, both women represent the anima figure, Grigia a lower stage of its development and the Portugese lady a higher one. The first stage .. . is often represented by an Eve, a woman who expresses only the instinctual and biological needs of man. The second stage is represented by a figure like Faust's Helen, who embodies not only the sexual but also the aesthetic elements of man's nature. The Portugese lady may be regarded as embodying this higher aspect. The way in which the anima figure first manifests itself in Grigia is different from the way it is introduced in The Lady from Portugal, and this difference determines the utter dissimilarity of atmospheres pervading the two works. Homo rides into Grigia's world, into the world of the anima, and his attitude toward her causes the story to be enveloped by a sentimental and romantically pastoral mood. But in The Lady from Portugal, it is the woman who rides into the man's world; the story therefore takes place in a violent, masculine, and almost primeval setting.

The Temptation of the Warrior

When Ketten brings his bride home after a year-long courtship in Portugal, he is eighteen years old. He spends the next twelve years almost without interruption in a war with the Bishop of Trent, a war that the Ketten family has been waging on and off for generations. Musil indicates the presence of ambivalence in Ketten's sense of identity by the fact that he bears two names, the German "von Ketten" (North) and the Italian "delle Catene" (South). The narrator comments, further, that Ketten himself did not know whether he revealed his true self during the one-year period of his graceful courtship in the South, throughout which he had behaved in accordance with the rules of feminine society, or only in all the other years of incessant and brutal warfare. Because his existence as a human being is defined by his role in the external world as leader of the army against the Bishop's forces, he must resist the temptations of his wife's world. Ketten must play the role of man, as understood in his society. For in the world of medieval northern Italy, life is war and the man who kills survives. It is Ketten's dilemma that he must fight and murder while at the same time feeling drawn toward another alien and ambiguous world whose human expression appears in his gentle and silent wife. Her very being seems always to be "luring him on into some Other Realm." This is the world of religious feeling; it is the realm of God, as both Johannes and Homo designated it. But it is also a realm that negates all those virtues and vices required by a war lord in order to achieve victory over his enemies.

Musil describes Ketten's attitude toward these two worlds of being in terms of the sun and the moon: "To command is a thing of clarity; such a life is day-bright, solid to the touch, and the thrust of a spear under an iron collar that has slipped is as simple as pointing one's finger at something and being able to say: This is this. But the other thing is as alien as the moon." Out of this other soft and ambiguous world no commands are given and none are received, for it is sufficient unto itself. Sometimes in the evenings when Ketten is sitting at the campfire, halfdreaming and in a state of total physical exhaustion, this Other World seems to creep out of the shadows toward him and threatens to undo his manly strength and determination. The same question that Homo had asked himself expresses in a most lucid and dramatic fashion the dilemma of Ketten's life: "Kill, and yet feel the presence of God? . . . Feel the presence of God and yet kill?"

Ketten resists the temptation and manages to remain keen, alert, and cruel, happy in the knowledge that he is still able to "cause others to die without that other thing," i.e., the mystical realm, intruding to paralyze all activity. While there never seemed to be a point in Homo's life where he considered the possibility of resisting the temptation of the mystical realm, the thought never occurs to Ketten that he could ever surrender to the Bishop and yield to this alien world. Ketten is filled with "the happiness of not yielding, and this was the very soul of his soul." Homo's family will survive without him. Ketten, however, must defend his wife, sons, and subjects by waging aggressive war. There is no alternative for him: Ketten must repress the same impulse in which Homo, having once discovered it, indulged himself to the point where life became irrelevant to him.

It is clear—to continue the comparison between Grigia and The Lady from Portugal—that the relationship of the protagonist to mysticism is different in both stories. The duality in Grigia was that between two forms of mysticism: Homo's love-at-a-distance for his wife (contemplative mysticism) and his attraction to the exotic Grigia (dionysian mysticism). The glory of Homo's one moment of eternal "reunion" with his wife caused the sexual attraction for Grigia to fade by comparison into insignificance, although their relationship continued to drift on. The final struggle was one between Homo's passive drifting off into death and his instinctual desire to live. Because of the intensity and purity of the mystical "reunion" with his wife, Homo relinquished his life almost with an air of indifference. In The Lady from Portugal, however, the initial conflict is between Ketten's everyday duties to the world as a man and his attraction to the mystical realm in general, for both dionysian and contemplative mysticism are present in one woman. From a Jungian point of view, Ketten has married his anima: Madonna-like wife and exotic temptress are one. It is obvious, then, that neither Grigia nor The Lady from Portugal can be regarded as merely describing a superficial conflict between man and woman. Neither Grigia nor the lady are simple, external, active female temptresses, to whom the male protagonist must succumb or from whom he must flee. It is true that Homo succumbs. And in The Lady from Portugal, Ketten is always in flight. In the twelve years of war, Ketten in fact never spends more then twelve hours at home: "Doubtless he feared to stay at home longer, just as a tired man dare not sit down." But the conflict is essentially endopsychic. Both Homo and Ketten are dealing with an impulse from within themselves that manifests itself externally in the form of a particular woman. The unconscious nature of this psychological dynamic explains why Homo felt such an irrational attraction for Grigia as well as why Ketten chose to marry such an exotic woman from the South. Both women are able to accommodate the projection of the protagonist's repressed feminine soul, a repression that had been required on behalf of the pursuit of extremely masculine professions: that of scientist and soldier.

Victory and Decline

The Bishop falls ill and dies, and the cathedral chapter, being without its leader, decides to sue for peace. A war that has lasted for four generations comes to an end. After having spent almost every waking moment of his life and every ounce of his strength in the violent pursuit of a specific goal, Ketten suddenly finds himself with nothing to do but to manage his estates, a task that his wife had discharged adequately enough during the twelve years of his absence. (A striking parallel exists here between Ketten's life and that of the author. It will be recalled that Musil suddenly lost his job in 1922 due to cutbacks in government expenditures, thus ending a twelve-year period of steady employment that had begun with his marriage. This was a traumatic experience for Musil who, at 42, was twelve years older than the 30-year-old Ketten, but it finally permitted him to devote himself entirely to his creative work as a writer. Ketten, too, now faces a traumatic turning point in his life.) A man who has been defined and supported mainly by his profession as a soldier is now expected to return to a life of tranquility and passivity. The prospect for his declining years is a life of boredom and meaninglessness, circumscribed by the duties of the farmer—"no goal," as the narrator comments, "for a great lord." Then, while traveling home, Ketten is stung by a fly, whereupon he falls into deep and protracted illness. Ketten, who had won his war with the Bishop and who had survived hundreds of dangerous engagements on the battle field as well as numerous wounds from the enemy, is defeated by a fly. Or, more precisely, the success of the fly's attack is merely an external sign of the fact that Ketten's life, now without its high goal, has fallen into a state of total vulnerability. He no longer possesses a reason to fight and to survive.

Ketten's fever continues to linger on. While his wife chalks secret signs on his door and bedposts, learned doctors are called from distant places. But nothing helps. Ketten becomes ever more isolated in his suffering. This man, who had once stood squarely in the middle of wordly events, now feels that the world is steadily receding from him. For days and even weeks, he is only vaguely aware of what is happening around him. Previously, he had never remained very long in the presence of his wife, because "if he had ever remained longer, he would have had to be truly as he was"—an oblique statement which implicitly, though only tentatively, suggests that his deepest impulse is to surrender as did Homo. Cared for by his wife, he will now be forced into confronting whatever his true nature might really be, for the persona of the soldier, the professional disguise, will gradually be burned away by the fever.

Jung once stated [in The Practice of Psychotherapy] that a significant number of his patients were not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but rather from the aimlessness and senselessness of their daily existence. It is at such periods in the individual's life that he tends to fall either mentally or physically ill. However, such illness can be regarded as the first stage of a process in which the individual moves toward greater psychological health: illness may indeed be the transitional stage through which the individual passes as he outgrows the first half of his psychic development and enters the second half. Ketten's illness functions in precisely this fashion. While the individual's prime task in the first half of his life is concerned with his adaptation to the demands of the external environment, his task in the second half is, as Jacobi writes, directed toward "the so-called 'initiation into the inner reality,' a deeper self-knowledge and knowledge of humanity, a 'turning back' (reflectio) to the traits of one's nature that have hitherto remained unconscious or become" [Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung, 1968]. The following observation made by another Jungian analyst, M.-L. von Franz, is relevant to the diagnosis not only of Ketten's illness but also of the "higher" function of this illness in contributing towards his psychic development: "The actual process of individuation—the conscious coming-to-terms with one's own inner center (psychic nucleus) or Self—generally begins with a wounding of the personality and the suffering that accompanies it" [M.-L. von Franz, "The Process of Individuation," in Man and His Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung, 1971].

M.-L. von Franz also draws attention to one theme which persistently occurs in the fairy tales of different cultures and is also directly related to the subject of Musil's story, namely, the suffering of the individual psyche at the beginning of the individuation process: "Beneath the surface a person is suffering from a deadly boredom that makes everything seem meaningless and empty. Many myths and fairy tales symbolically describe this initial stage in the process of individuation by telling of a king who has fallen ill or grown old." Jung in his psychotherapy often made much reference to the quests of heroes in fairy tales in order to illuminate the state of a patient's psyche. In The Lady from Portugal, Musil may well have presented an aesthetic version of his own inner psychic condition which, because of its high degree of objectification, appears to the reader as a self-contained, sophisticated exercise in the fairy tale genre. The symbolic manner in which Musil was able to capture the inner life of the individual by the aesthetic means of a fairy-tale-like story is illuminated by Jung's explanation of the origin and function of all fairy tales. In Jung's thought, fairy tales represent an aesthetic formulation of various developmental stages of the psyche of a race or culture as a whole, and the literature of Jungian psychology refers to a number of fairy tales which are analagous to the one that Musil wrote.

During the course of his illness, Ketten eventually feels that he has died and is surprised that dying was so peaceful. At the same time, he also feels that he is standing somewhere at the periphery of life, as though he might be able to come back to life again. What it is that will make it possible for him to return to life is not yet clear. However, Ketten believes that only part of his being has gone on ahead into death, and that his bones have been left behind on the bed. Ketten sees his wife bending over him and he looks directly into her face. At this point halfway between life and death, Ketten experiences the equivalent of Veronica's and Homo's mystical moment of "reunion." In a vision, he sees himself and his wife arise together out of his dead body and walk quietly into the distance. The Ketten resting in bed as well as the Ketten walking with his wife in the distance seem to be cradled in some gigantic and benevolent hand: "Doubtless that was God," he thinks. Veronica's and Homo's respective mystical moments differ in a significant manner from that of Ketten: their experience is one of "melting," of "flowing" into the beloved, of a union so total that the personalities dissolve. In Ketten's ephiphany, on the other hand, he and his wife appear and remain as two separate and independent individuals, existing side by side in total equality. This epiphany proves to be prophetic of the couple's happy fate after Ketten has overcome his crisis.

Time continues to pass without any significant change occurring in Ketten's condition until the day on which a fearful thought suddenly grips his mind. He realizes that if he is going to return to life, he must gather together all of his will-power now. If he is not to die completely, he must exert his will upon the course of events in daily reality; he must will an action (as Veronica felt she had to recall a repressed memory in order to prevent herself from degenerating into insanity). As is consonant with Ketten's behavior before his illness, he kills. The first stage of his recovery is indicated by his ordering the killing of a wolf. Why it is that he chooses specifically a wolf as his victim requires further elaboration. During Ketten's absence in the field, his wife had adopted a wolf. She was particularly attracted to the wolf because it reminded her of her husband. (This relationship between a woman and an animal is reminiscent of that between Veronica and her dog, although the sexual aspect of the attraction is not overtly mentioned by Musil in the case of the Portugese lady except indirectly and ironically when she once wonders whether her two sons are really hers, for they remind her of two young wolves rather than of two children.) It may be recalled that throughout the story the narrator has often compared Ketten's behavior with that of a wolf. It is clear that Ketten, his wife, and Musil's reader cannot help but be quite conscious of the parallel between the man and the wolf. Without informing his wife, Ketten, who is still too weak to carry out the action himself, orders a serving man to kill the beast. What Ketten has done is to destroy the usurper; for in his feverish mind, the wolf seemed more like the vigorous Ketten he once had been than this man now victimized and broken by suffering and illness. By means of this violent action, Ketten has begun the process of recovering his old identity. When the Portuguese lady learns what her husband has done, her blood seems at first to freeze in her veins. But she accepts and in fact welcomes his act of violence, for in this decision she, too, recognizes the return of the vigorous man she had married twelve years before. She goes to his bedside, "and for the first time he looked her straight in the eyes again." His shame has passed and he is now able to gaze at his wife, feeling himself to be truly her husband.

The Little Cat from the World Beyond

An interpretation of the complex function of the little cat in this story presents many difficulties. The following analysis will be informed by two perspectives: first, the transformation of the cat into human being and, second, the cat's life and death as a secular analogue to the religious drama of the sacrifice of the scapegoat.

Although he has willed an action by having the wolf killed, Ketten is unable by his own powers to reach the second stage of recovery, and it seems to him that only some miracle from outside can now alter his situation for the better. The bearer of the miracle arrives one day quite unexpectedly and unannounced at the gate of the castle. A more inauspicious beginning for a miracle can hardly be imagined. It is a small cat who arrives, but it is a rather strange cat. This cat insists upon entering the castle through the front gate as human beings do and not by climbing over the wall cat-fashion. The cat also strikes everyone as possessing a slightly sadder and more meditative air than is appropriate for a mere kitten. It also seems to lack something, and "this absence of whatever would have made it into an ordinary kitten—was like a second presence, a hovering double, perhaps, or a faint halo surrounding it." It is the absence of something in cat-nature that makes the kitten more than an animal and relates it to human beings. In the context of Musil's psychology, to be a human being means (among other things) to lack to a greater or lesser extent something in or of animal nature; man is the only animal who has lost his instincts. What takes the place of this absence in man and in this particular cat? The unnatural psychological vacuum, caused by the absence of instinctual nature, becomes "filled" with illness and suffering.

Musil's story of the humanization and eventual spiritualization of the cat by means of illness represents an artistic climax in the history of an idea that has received analogous formulations in German romanticism, Christianity, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. . . .

In a spirit nearer to the romantics and Nietzsche than to Freud, Musil treated the process of psychological heightening through suffering, but chose to do so in the context of medieval Europe. Because he set the story in a religious world, the metaphors provided by Christian theology became available to him. And as the work of C. G. Jung has revealed, religious metaphors give dramatic and objective expression to profound psychological truths and processes that are the same in every age.

The cat in The Lady from Portugal becomes sick and, like Ketten, grows ever weaker. After three days, its vomiting and filth have become so unbearable that Ketten, with feelings of great guilt, has the cat forcibly removed to a peasant's house outside the castle walls. But the cat returns and continues its physical decline. The cat's intense and sustained suffering seems to be transforming it into a human being. Heine's statement is particularly relevant here: "I believe that by suffering even animals could be made human." Ketten has the distinct feeling that his "illness and its deathly gentleness had been transformed into that little animal's body and so were no longer merely within him." He believes that his own destiny is "being vicariously accomplished in this little cat already half released from earthly bonds." As Ketten killed the wolf, his wife now orders that the cat be taken away and destroyed. With the death of the cat and its illness, Ketten's illness passes and he returns to life.

It is the Portuguese lady who, not surprisingly, has the first intuition into the meaning of the "miracle," into the significance of the cat's appearance, illness, and death. She says to Ketten: "If God could become man, then He can also become a kitten." She intuitively recognizes the intrinsically religious nature of the cat's last passion and her insight receives further confirmation from the narrator, who stresses the religious connotations of the cat's sickness: he terms the cat's suffering "its martyrdom" and describes its struggles as a trial of strength between the cat's "imperceptible halo and the dreadful filth." In reality—if one may distinguish between the characters' reactions and the objective world from which their reactions arose—this final episode merely tells of a somewhat odd-looking kitten, who happens to catch a disease and finally dies in an extremely wretched manner. The religious significance is projected upon the cat by Ketten and his wife.

Jung's psychology offers some illuminating insights into why, how, and for what purpose such projections occur. The presupposition for Jung's theories about the religious impulse is his belief . . . that its expression is as important for the psychic health of the individual as are the equally natural expressions of sexual and aggressive urges. By means of ritual and drama, religions have given external form in action and verbal formulae to certain profound psychological needs. Fordham explains dogma as being "the product of conscious thought working on and refining the raw material of the unconscious" [Frieda Fordham, An Introduction to Jung's Psychology, 1961]. Thus, dogma and ritual may be regarded as crystallized forms of original mystical experiences that take place prior to and are more profound than their eventual expression in orthodox religious terms. Jung identified the fundamental forms that the external religious drama takes in the West: organized religion expresses "the living process of the unconscious in the form of the drama of repentance, sacrifice, and redemption" [Psychology and Religion: West and East]. In The Lady from Portugal, Musil has presented a story whose central mystery is closely related to a religious drama: the sacrifice of the scapegoat which brings salvation to the sick in mind and body.

While Ketten is a foe of the Church, the Bishop—so Ketten's chaplain tells him—is able to pray to God, and this must prove of ultimate disadvantage to Ketten's interests. It is a decided irony, therefore, that when the Bishop becomes ill he dies, while Ketten is saved by the kind of sacrifice and redemption that is at the heart of Christian theology. Ketten's situation, in this regard, is analogous to the relationship between the individual and the Church in the modern world as analyzed by Jung. Although modern man may possess a religious impulse that is in no way inferior to the drive experienced by his medieval brothers, he is no longer able to return to the Church and to find in the Christian drama of Christ's suffering and self-sacrifice for man a satisfactory expression of the "living processes of the unconscious." In place of the search for God, the modern individual is in search of that mysterious entity "the whole man," which represents the culmination of the individuation process. Jung expressed this historical change as follows: "There is no deity in the [modern] mandala, nor is there any submission or reconciliation to a deity. The place of the deity seems to be taken by the wholeness of man." The problem that the contemporary Church faces arises from the fact that modern man is no longer able to feel the presence of God within its walls. Musil once noted in his diaries that the Church was the "ruin of the Other Condition (des andern Zustandes)." Today's unfortunate situation has occurred for two reasons, Jung asserted: first, the Church's creed and ritual have become so elaborate and obscure that they have degenerated into mere formalities and, second, the Church (as in Musil's The Lady from Portugal) reveals a face to the believer that little distinguishes it from any secular power bent upon increasing its political power and extending its ownership of land. Ultimately, it is the Bishop who appears as the warrior and Ketten who undergoes a profound religious transformation. In this sense, Ketten is really a representative of modern man who continues to undergo profound psychological transformations but who no longer interprets them in the context of metaphors provided by Christian theology. Jung believed that his own "process of individuation" provided man with a new series of metaphors for the expression of spiritual experience in the modern world.

A few observations may now be offered by way of summarizing the function of the animal and animal metaphors in Musil's fiction up to this point. First, characters are often "debased" and identified with animals: Basini behaves like a pig, Claudine's stranger is compared to a goat, Demeter is associated with a dog, and Grigia is identified with a cow. The function of such metaphors is clear: certain human beings are thereby reduced to the animal level or, more specifically, they are transformed into sexual objects. Such characters function in the narrative as projections of the protagonist in a state of dionysian mysticism, the major examples of which are found in The Temptation of Quiet Veronica and Grigia. The thought once occurred to Veronica that an animal would be like the Other Dimension. Not only does she compare the sensual Demeter with a dog but the priestlike Johannes as well. And just as Johannes seems to have lost the instincts of the lower animals so too has the cat in The Lady from Portugal. Both Johannes and the cat are associated with animals, but in their aura of impersonality (which is present in all animals) and in the absence of animal instincts, they become in the minds of Veronica and the Kettens, respectively, the bearers of a projected religious impulse. It is the martyred cat alone of all the other animals (dogs, pigs, cows) mentioned above who brings salvation: the cat is the bearer of the miracle whereby Ketten, who feels that he has already died, achieves a resurrection of the body. In Grigia Homo's religious impulse remained merely at the level of a profound feeling. In The Lady from Portugal, Ketten's religious feelings are given symbolic expression in the drama of the sufferings and death of the little cat.

It should be noted also that although such religious terms as "spiritual," "resurrection," and "salvation" have been used in this analysis of the function of the cat in The Lady from Portugal—for the story is set during an age of faith—Musil's narrative never transcends the secular plane of existence. As is also the case in Jung's writings, religious experience provides metaphors for psychological occurrences. But whereas Jung analyzes these psychological processes from within, Musil merely indicates from outside what may be occurring within the psyche of the protagonist. The act of psychologizing is left to the reader.

The Climb into Manhood

At some indefinite point during Ketten's illness a young Portuguese knight, a childhood friend of Ketten's wife, had arrived at the castle for an extended visit. In front of this radiantly healthy young man, Ketten "lay in the grass like a dog, filled with shame." As the days passed, suspicions arose in Ketten's mind that his wife and her friend were deceiving him. But he was unable, because of his debilitated state, either to investigate his suspicions or to take any immediate and decisive action, as he would have done in times long gone by when he had been the great and forceful warrior. Suffering had now become his new occupation. After his illness passes, however, Ketten firmly decides that if his wife does not send the knight away, he will kill him in spite of all the rules of hospitality. Nevertheless, although Ketten finally makes a decision, he finds himself unable to act upon it and to carry out the kind of task that he had previously found to be so easy to accomplish. For now, after his illness, fighting and killing strike him as being a "senseless, alien mode of action." This revaluation and striking reversal of his former style of life provide the most graphic indication of the change that illness and suffering have wrought upon his psyche. On the other hand, it is not in Ketten's nature to continue to suffer his suspicions quietly. Moreover, although he is over his physical illness because of the miracle of the cat, he has not yet recovered his self. The miracle of the cat was a passive occurrence: Ketten had merely watched and believed that the cat had taken on his illness. Therefore, although Ketten was cured of his physical illness, he is not yet a whole man. He knows intuitively that "he would never be wholly well again if he did not wrench himself free of all this." The Portuguese knight provides the pretext for a second act of will that completes Ketten's final stage of recovery just as the murder of the wolf signified the first step in his return to health.

Ketten recalls that he had once consulted a soothsaying woman who had made him the following prophecy: "You will be cured only when you accomplish a task." Suddenly a thought comes to him. As a boy, he had always wanted to climb the cliff on top of which the castle was built. The accomplishment of this feat will be the task, the "trial by ordeal," through which Ketten will regain himself. It is a suicidal task, he knows, for no human being can scale such a sheer and high cliff. Nevertheless, he begins to climb at nightfall and as he climbs he feels that it is not he but the little cat from "the world beyond" who is returning to the castle in this fashion. As the cat had entered the castle as a human being, a human being is now entering the castle like a cat. Sweat pours from his body and waves of heat flash through his limbs. By means of this supreme physical exertion combined with the risk of sudden death, he has duplicated to a great extent the situation on the field of battle. Ketten recaptures and reenters his body and his earlier spirit by accomplishing the task: "it was strange to feel how in this struggle with death strength and health came flowing back into his limbs." He reaches the castle and "with his strength his ferocity had also returned." With dagger at his side, he climbs through the window and into the bedroom of the young knight. But the bed is empty. He immediately goes to his wife's bedroom and is overjoyed to find that the knight is not there either. A servant tells Ketten that the knight had ridden away at the rising of the moon. Considering the Portuguese lady's identification with the moon, we may safely interpret this remark as meaning that Ketten's wife herself had sent him away. In this regard, the Portuguese lady would be following the pattern set by the two earlier Musil women, who also eventually either reject or leave men associated solely with vitality and sexuality: Claudine leaves the stranger and returns to her husband and Veronica rejects Demeter utterly. The Portuguese lady is startled by Ketten's entry and sits up in bed "as though in her dreams she had been waiting for this." She knows that her husband has finally returned to her after twelve years of battle and many months of illness.

In Grgia and The Lady from Portugal, Musil has presented women who exert a profound effect upon the life of the male protagonist. Whether as a particular, although somewhat strange woman (if Musil's narrative is read on a literal level) or whether as the feminine element within the male psyche (if the narrative is "internalized" for the purposes of psychological interpretation), she functions to lure the protagonist toward the "other side." The temptation of the protagonist in Grigia leads to his death, although the preconditions for his disintegration were already present within himself before he met his peasant mistress. (Grigia was herself no more directly responsible for Homo's death than Tadzio was for the collapse and death of Gustav von Aschenbach in "Death in Venice.") The Portuguese lady also tempts the protagonist to experience another dimension—either of life in general or one existing within his own psyche: it is a world of gentleness, patience, suffering, passivity, and intuition.

The fact that Homo dies and Ketten is reborn reflects the differing relationship of the protagonist to the mystical realm in the two stories. It would have been conveniently symmetrical to be able to argue that while Grigia represents a mysticism that destroys, the lady from Portugal is a force that saves. But such an interpretation places too great a significance upon the women as characters; the essential difference in these two stories is one that exists between the two male protagonists. It should also be pointed out that the Portuguese lady does not save Ketten: at most she is able to chalk magic signs on his door. She can but nurse him; only something that seems to transcend the human altogether, only "a miracle" followed by the exertion of Ketten's own mental and physical powers is able to save him. But as a representative of that other aspect of life, which Ketten as a warrior had had to repress, the lady from Portugal introduces her husband to and nurses him through that realm in which miracles occur, a realm where scientific thought and rational proof bow before intuition and faith. Unlike Homo, Ketten passes through this Other World, makes contact with its deepest level near the point of death, and emerges beyond it. Thus Ketten's relationship to his wife and to the Other Realm as represented by the cat finally serves only to enlarge his personality, to widen and deepen his understanding of life.

Musil has on occasion been misinterpreted as suggesting that psychological perfection is to be found in the hermaphroditic ideal. But as Veronica's perfect mystical moment could not be sustained in time and was eventually destroyed, so the hermaphroditic balance, if it occurs, also passes. For Musil always returns to reality, to "possible possibilities." Ketten may well experience the mystical world of his wife, a feminine dimension within himself, in such an intense fashion that the ferocious wolf within him almost dies. But he eventually returns into his old self. In this regard, Musil and Jung are in agreement. Fordham wrote: "A man, for instance, by accepting and learning to know his anima, may become more receptive, or he may develop his intuition or his feeling, but he cannot possess himself of those qualities." Feminine qualities may be present in him in the form of compassion, mercy, sensitivity, and so forth, but they will remain in a sense only worthy accretions, additions to his fundamental self that are necessary to produce a more balanced life. Ketten remains essentially what he was before, tempered by the opposite way of life without undergoing a total conversion to it. Ketten began as the ferocious wolf, became a climbing cat who had come back from the dead, and ends not as half-wolf, half-cat, but as a wolf again. But although he aggressively defends what is his, he is no longer "cruel as a knife." He is glad, therefore, that the Portuguese knight has escaped and that he will not need to kill him. In Ketten we now recognize neither a very worldly wolf nor an otherworldly cat, but a balanced human being—a rather rare phenomenon in Musil's fiction.