by Robert Musil
ROBERT MUSIL
YOUNG TÖRLESS
“Young Törless,” from Selected Writings, by
Robert Musil Copyright 1986 by The Continuum
Publishing Company
Reprinted with permission
Introduction
Robert Musil was born in 1880 in Klagenfurt, capital of the Austrian province of Carinthia. His mother, who came from the upper bourgeoisie, was a highly strung woman with an interest in the arts. His father was an engineer in the imperial administration who in his later years would be rewarded for a career of faithful service with elevation to the minor nobility. Musil Senior accepted without protest a liaison between his wife and a younger man, Heinrich Reiter, that began soon after his son’s birth. Reiter later settled in with the Musils, in a ménage à trois that endured for a quarter of a century.
Musil himself was an only child. Younger and smaller than his classmates at school, he cultivated a physical toughness that lasted all his life. His home life seems to have been tempestuous; at the demand of his mother - and, it must be said, with the boy’s enthusiastic agreement — he was sent at the age of eleven to board at a military Unterrealschule outside Vienna. From there he moved in 1894 to the Oberrealschule in Mährisch-Weisskirchen near Brno, capital of Moravia, where he spent a further three years. This school became the model for ‘W.’ in Young Törless.
Rather than follow a military career, Musil decided to study engineering, and at the age of seventeen enrolled in the Technische Hochschule in Brno, where his father now taught. Here he plunged into his scientific studies, disdaining the humanities and the kind of student attracted to the humanities. His diaries reveal him as preoccupied with matters of sex, but in unusually thoughtful ways. He found it difficult to accept the sexual role prescribed for him as a young man by the mores of his class, sowing his wild oats with prostitutes and working girls until it was time to make a bourgeois marriage. He began a relationship with a Czech girl named Herma Dietz who had worked in his grandmother’s house; against the resistance of his mother and at the risk of losing his friends, he lived with Herma in Brno and later in Berlin. Choosing Herma constituted a major step in breaking the erotic spell his mother had over him. For some years Herma was the focus of his emotional life. Their relationship — straightforward on Herma’s side, more complex and ambivalent on Robert‘s — became the basis of the story ‘Tonka’, collected in Three Women
In intellectual content, the education Musil had received at his military schools was decidedly inferior to the education offered by the classical Gymnasia. In Brno he began attending lectures on literature and going to concerts. What began as a project in catching up with his better-educated contemporaries soon turned into an absorbing intellectual adventure. The years 1898 to 1902 mark the first phase of Musil’s literary apprenticeship. He identified particularly with the writers and intellectuals of the generation that flowered in the 1890s, active in various strands of the Modernist movement. He fell under the spell of Mallarmé and Maeterlinck; he rejected the naturalist premise that artwork should reflect a pre-existing reality. For philosophic support he turned to Kant, Schopenhauer and (particularly) Nietzsche. In his diaries he developed the artistic persona of ‘Monsieur le vivisecteur’, exploring states of consciousness and emotional relations with his intellectual scalpel, practising his skills impartially on himself, his family and his friends.
Continuing, despite his literary aspirations, to plan for a career in engineering, he passed his examinations with distinction and moved to Stuttgart as a research assistant at the prestigious Technische Hochschule. But his work there bored him. While still writing technical papers, and inventing an instrument for use in optical experiments (he patented the device, hoping, rather unrealistically, that it would provide him with enough money to live on), he embarked on a novel, The Confusions of Young Törless. He also began to lay the ground for a change in academic direction; in 1903 he finally abandoned engineering and left for Berlin to study philosophy and psychology.
Young Törless was completed in early 1905. After it had been turned down by three publishers, Musil sent it to Alfred Kerr, a respected Berlin critic. Kerr lent Musil his support, suggested revisions, and reviewed the book in glowing terms when it appeared in print in 1906. Despite the success of Young Törless, however, and despite the mark he was beginning to make in Berlin artistic circles, Musil felt too unsure of his talent to commit himself to a life of writing. He continued with his philosophical studies, taking his doctorate in 1908.
By this time he had met Martha Marcovaldi, a woman of Jewish descent seven years his senior, separated from her second husband. With Martha - an artist and intellectual in her own right, au fait with contemporary feminism - Musil established an intimate and intensely sexual relationship that lasted for the rest of his life. They were married in 1911, and took up residence in Vienna, where Musil had accepted the position of archivist at the Technische Hochschule.
In the same year Musil published his second book, Unions, consisting of the novellas ‘The Perfecting of a Love’ and ‘The Temptation of Quiet Veronika’. These short pieces were composed in a state of obsessiveness whose basis was obscure to him; writing and revision occupied him day and night for two and a half years.
When war came, Musil served with distinction on the Italian front. After the war, troubled by a sense that the best years of his creative life were slipping away, he sketched out no fewer than twenty new works, including a series of satirical novels. A play, The Visionaries(1921), and a set of stories, Three Women (1924), won awards. He was elected vice-president of the Austrian branch of the Organization of German Writers. Though not widely read, he was on the literary map.
Before long the projected satirical novels had been abandoned or absorbed into a master project: a novel in which the upper crust of Viennese society, oblivious of the dark clouds gathering on the horizon, discusses at length what form its next festival of self-congratulation should take. The novel was intended to give a ‘grotesque’ (Musil’s word) vision of Austria on the eve of the World War. Supported financially by his publisher and by a society of admirers, he gave all his energies to The Man without Qualities.
The first volume came out in 1930, to so enthusiastic a reception in both Austria and Germany that Musil — a modest man in other respects — thought he might win the Nobel Prize. The continuation proved more intractable. Cajoled by his publisher, yet full of misgivings, he allowed an extended fragment to appear as the second volume in 1933. He began to fear he would never complete the work.
A move back to the livelier intellectual environment of Berlin was cut short by the coming to power of the Nazis. He and his wife returned to the ominous atmosphere of Vienna; he began to suffer from depression and poor health. In 1938 Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich. The couple moved to Switzerland. Switzerland was meant to be a staging-post en route to a home offered by Martha’s daughter in the United States, but the entry of the United States into the war put paid to that plan. Along with tens of thousands of other exiles, they found themselves trapped.
‘Switzerland is renowned for the freedom you can enjoy there,’ observed Bertolt Brecht. ‘The catch is, you have to be a tourist.’ The myth of Switzerland as a land of asylum was badly damaged by its treatment of refugees during World War Two, when its first priority, overriding all humanitarian considerations, was not to antagonize Germany. Pointing out that his writings were banned in Germany and Austria, Musil pleaded for asylum on the grounds that he could earn a living as a writer nowhere else in the German-speaking world. Though allowed to stay, he never felt at home in Switzerland. He was little known there; he had no talent for self-promotion; the Swiss patronage network disdained him. He and his wife survived on handouts.
‘Today they ignore us. But once we are dead they will boast that they gave us asylum,’ remarked Musil bitterly to Ignazio Silone. Depressed, he could make no headway with the novel. In 1942, at the age of sixty-one, after a bout of vigorous exercise on the trampoline, he had a stroke and died.
‘He thought he had a long life before him,’ said his widow. ‘The worst is, an unbelievable body of material — sketches, notes, aphorisms, novel chapters, diaries - is left behind, of which only he could have made sense.’ Turned away by commercial publishers, she privately published a third and final volume of the novel, consisting of fragments in no hard and fast order.
Musil belonged to a generation of German intellectuals who experienced the successive phases of the breakdown of the European order between 1890 and 1945 with particular immediacy: first, the premonitory crisis in the arts, giving rise to the various Modernist reactions; then the war and the revolutions spawned by the war, which destroyed both traditional and liberal institutions; and finally the rudderless post-war years, culminating in the Fascist seizure of power. The Man without Qualities — a book to some extent overtaken by history during its writing — set out to diagnose this breakdown, which Musil more and more came to see as originating in the failure of Europe’s liberal elite since the 1870s to recognize that the social and political doctrines inherited from the Enlightenment were not adequate to the new mass civilization growing up in the cities.
To Musil, the most stubbornly retrogressive feature of German culture (of which Austrian culture was a part - he did not take seriously the idea of an autonomous Austrian culture) was its tendency to compartmentalize intellect from feeling, to favour an unreflective stupidity of the emotions. He saw this split most clearly among the scientists with whom he worked, men of intellect living coarse emotional lives. The education of the senses through a refining of erotic life seemed to him to hold the most immediate promise of lifting society to a higher ethical plane. He deplored the rigid sexual roles that bourgeois mores laid down for women and men. ‘Whole countries of the soul have been lost and submerged as a consequence,’ he wrote.
Because of the concentration in his work, from Young Törless onwards, on the obscurer workings of sexual desire, Musil is often thought of as a Freudian. But he himself acknowledged no such debt. He disliked the cultishness of psychoanalysis, disapproved of its sweeping claims and its unscientific standards of proof. He preferred a psychology of what he ironically called the ‘shallow’ — that is, experimental - variety.
Both Musil and Freud were in fact part of a larger movement in European thought. Both were sceptical of the power of reason to guide human conduct; both were diagnosticians of fin de siècle Central European civilization and its discontents; and both assumed the dark continent of the feminine psyche as theirs to explore. To Musil, Freud was a rival rather than a source.
His preferred guide in the realm of the unconscious was Nietzsche (‘master of the floating life within’, as he called him). In Nietzsche Musil found an approach to questions of morality that went beyond a simple polarity of good and evil; a recognition that art can in itself be a form of intellectual exploration; and a mode of philosophizing, aphoristic rather than systematic, that suited his own sceptical temperament. The tradition of fictional realism had never been strong in Germany; as Musil developed as a writer, his fiction became increasingly essayistic in structure, with only perfunctory gestures in the direction of realistic narrative
Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Verwirrungen are perplexities, troubled states of mind; Zögling is a rather formal term, with upper-class overtones, for a boarder at a school) is built around a history of sadistic victimization at an elite boys’ academy. More specifically, it is an account of a crisis that one of the boys, Törless (his first name is never given), experiences as a result of participating in the deliberate humiliation and breaking down of a fellow student, Basini, who is caught stealing. The exploration of this inner crisis, moral, psychological, and ultimately epistemological, rendered largely from within Törless’s own consciousness, makes up the substance of the novel.
In the end Törless has his own breakdown and is discreetly removed from the school. Törless’s sense is that he has weathered the storm and come through. But it is not clear how far we are intended to trust his newfound confidence, since it seems to be based on a decision that the only way of getting along in the world is not to peer too closely into the abysses opened up in us by extreme experience, particularly sexual experience. The single glimpse we are allowed of Törless in later life suggests that he has become not necessarily a wiser or a better man, merely a more prudent one.
In later life Musil denied that Young Törless was about youthful experiences of his own, or even about adolescence in general. ‘The reality one is describing is always only a pretext,’ he said, meaning (one presumes) that the action of the novel was simply a vehicle to allow him to explore a certain state of mind. Nevertheless, the originals of Basini and of his tormentors Beineberg and Reiting can easily be identified among the boys Musil knew at Mährisch-Weisskirchen, while one of Törless’s deepest confusions - about the nature of his feelings towards his mother — is mirrored in Musil’s own early diaries. The gap between Törless’s own outward sang-froid and the seething forces within him, between the well-regulated daily life at school and the eerie nocturnal floggings in the attic, has its parallel in the gap between the orderly bourgeois front presented by Törless’s parents and what he darkly knows must go on in the privacy of their bedroom.
The master metaphor that Musil uses for all these incommensurabilities comes from Törless’s studies in mathematics. Living side by side with the real numbers, and somehow made to interlock with them by the operations of mathematical reasoning, are the imaginary numbers, numbers which have no referent in the real world. Adults, led by Törless’s teachers, seem to have no trouble in bringing together the domains of the real and the imaginary (to Törless the vertiginously unimaginable). In the euphoric speech he makes to the assembled teachers at the end of the book, Törless claims to have resolved this confusion in his mind (‘I know that I was indeed mistaken’) and to have emerged safely into young adulthood (‘I’m not afraid of anything any more. I know: things are things and will remain so for ever’). His teachers understand nothing of what he says: they have either never had experiences like his, or have tightly repressed them. Törless is unusual in the thoroughness with which he has faced - or been driven to face - the darkness within; whether or not we regard as self-betrayal his later adoption of the pose of what Musil as narrator calls the ‘aesthetically inclined intellectual’, he is certainly, in his confused youth (‘confusion’, Verwirrung, is a word Musil uses with continual irony), the figure of the artist in the modern world, exploring the remoter shores of experience and bringing back his reports.
Despite the amoralism that makes Young Törless so much a product of its age, the moral questions raised by the story will not go away. Beineberg, the more intellectually inclined of Törless’s comrades, has a vulgar-Nietzschean, proto-Fascist justification for what they do to Basini: the three of them belong to a new generation to which the old rules do not apply (‘the soul has changed’); as for pity, pity is one of the lower impulses and must be conquered. Törless is not Beineberg. Nevertheless, his own particular perversity — making Basini talk about what has been done to him - is morally no better than the whippings the other two carry out; while in his own homosexual acts with Basini he is at pains to show the boy no tenderness.
In a world in which there are no more God-given rules, in which it has fallen to the philosopher-artist to give the lead, should the artist’s explorations include acting out his own darker impulses, seeing where they will take him? Does art always trump morality? This early work of Musil’s offers the question, but answers it in only in the most uncertain way.
Musil did not disown Young Törless. On the contrary, he continued to look back with surprise at what he had been able to achieve
, even at a technical level, at so early an age. The master metaphor of the book, with its implication that the foundations of our real, reasonable, everyday world have no real, reasonable existence, continues to be explored in The Man without Qualities, though in a spirit more of paradox and irony than of anguish. ‘A person must believe he is something more in order to be capable of being what he is,’ suggests Ulrich, the central character. ‘The present is nothing but a hypothesis that one has not yet finished with.’ Musil’s work, from beginning to end, is of a piece: the evolving record of a confrontation between a man of supremely intelligent sensibility and the times that gave birth to him, times he would justly call ‘accursed’.
“In some strange way we devalue things as soon as we give utterance to them. We believe we have dived to the uttermost depths of the abyss, and yet when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pallid finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We think we have discovered a hoard of wonderful treasure-trove, yet when we emerge again into the light of day we see that all we have brought back with us is false stones and chips of glass. But for all this, the treasure goes on glimmering in the darkness, unchanged.”
MAETERLINCK
It was a small station on the long railroad to Russia. Four parallel lines of iron rails extended endlessly in each direction, on the yellow gravel of the broad track-each fringed, as with a dirty shadow, with the dark strip burnt into the ground by steam and fumes. Behind the station, a low oil-painted building, there was a broad, worn dirt-road leading up to the railway embankment. It merged into the trampled ground, its edges indicated only by the two rows of acacia trees that flanked it drearily, their thirsty leaves suffocated by dust and soot.
Perhaps it was these sad colours, or perhaps it was the wan, exhausted light of the afternoon sun, drained of its strength by the haze: there was something indifferent, lifeless, and mechanical about objects and human beings here, as though they were all part of a scene in a puppet-theatre. From time to time, at regular intervals, the station-master stepped out of his office and, always with the same turn of his head, glanced up the long line towards the signal-box, where the signals still failed to indicate the approach of the express each time, which had been delayed for a long time at the frontier; then, always with the very same movement of his arm, he would pull out his pocket-watch and, then, shaking his head, he would disappear again: just so do the figures on ancient towerclocks appear and disappear again with the striking of the hour.
