September 2021

And so we meet again, Herr Musil.

I return in 2021 not to talk so much of 'The Confusions of Young Törless' as a kind of interrupted Bildungsroman (though it is certainly that), but instead to focus on Törless's (and by extension, Musil's) meditations on the human soul.

Musil tackles this ineffable subject (for he does seem to come to the conclusion that certain elements are ineffable) through 2 lenses: the practical and the emotional.

The plot serves to explore the practical side of the human soul; what is 'humanness' and how can we/should we harness that humanness to push the boundaries of knowledge? According to Törless's classmate, Beineberg, both the ability to feel compassion and the thirst to understand the world are innate elements of humanness, but mutually exclusive. He says:

I have this certain feeling, just as you have, that Basini is, after all, in the last resort a human being too. There's something in me too that is upset by any act of cruelty. But that's just the point! The point is the sacrifice! You see, there are two threads fastened to me. The first is an obscure one that, in contrast with my clear conviction, ties me to the inaction that comes from pity. But there is the second, too, which leads straight to my soul, to the most profound inner knowledge, and links me to the universe [...] But hitherto everyone who has followed up the second thread, has had to tear the first. (p.82)

The claim is certainly an ugly one, but not one that is exclusive to this character in this novel. Here, Musil uses the word 'pity,' but this very argument has also been levied by those who have asserted that knowledge and truth are the most valuable of human pursuits and that if to make an omelet a few eggs may need to be cracked, well, the knowledge gained at least benefits the remaining eggs.

Here, Beineberg isn't really making a 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' argument as he is speaking only of his own personal enlightenment, but the line of reasoning is rather the same, and raises some unsettling ethical questions about everything from experimenting on animals to pursuing the root causes of the variance within sexuality and gender identity, intelligence, the slippery slope possibilities are endless.

Musil pulls no punches when it comes to advocating for pity over the potential for knowledge. Not only is the brutality endured by Beineberg's victim, Basini, foisted on the reader in horrifyingly vivid detail, in the end, Beineberg's 'experiment' comes to nothing. In front of Törless and another classmate, Beineberg purports to have achieved his aim of revealing the human soul only to realize when Basini can no longer play along that sacrificing (as he said) his pity for Basini unlocked no secret knowledge at all. Indeed, he is laughed at for thinking that it had.

Törless doesn't come away from this philosophical discussion looking any better. He spends much of the plot swaying back and forth between fascination and revulsion when it comes to the torture of Basini. But though he never participates directly, his scientific interest in the affair renders him immobile, and only when the torture goes 'too far' for his sensibilities does he intervene, albeit passively.

He meets up with Basini one night when the school is largely deserted over a break. Basini implores him for help that Törless is unwilling to provide. Instead of offering even a word of sympathy, Törless interrogates Basini about what the torture and ostracization he's experienced make him feel:

Basini wept. "You're tormenting me..."
"Yes, I'm tormenting you. But that's not what I'm after. [...] When I drive all that into you like knives, what goes on in you? What happens inside you? Does something burst in you? Tell me! [...] Doesn't the picture you've made of yourself go out like a candle?"
Basini wept without stopping. [...] Törless was silent. He remained leaning against the wall, exhausted, motionless, blankly staring. (p.157)

Here too, Musil leaves us with the implication that this: understanding the 'happening' within a person (in this case within a person in considerable emotional distress) isn't worth the price of maybe getting an answer. That perhaps this aspect of the human condition isn't something we need to understand even if it leaves us with the unsettling alternative of not knowing ourselves completely or having a heads up of what would happen within ourselves under the same circumstances.

Coldness being ascribed to scientific intellectualism was, even in 1906, a tad trite, but Musil goes a step further by pointing out how that same cold intellectualism can invade even the humanities when we privilege insight over preventing the harm that leads to it.

[...] he was one of those aesthetically inclined intellectuals [...] the only real interest they feel is concentrated on the growth of their own soul, or personality, or whatever one may call the thing within us that every now and then increases by the addition of some idea picked up between the lines of a book, or which speaks to us in the silent language of a painting. [...] This was why in his later life Törless never felt remorse for what had happened at that time. (p.169)

The second lens Musil explores the human soul through, the emotional, has less of an ethical dilemma attached to it. In this case, we focus primarily on how experience is filtered through faith such that we can't ever really experience anything in its purest form.

"It was the failure of language that caused him anguish, a half-awareness that the words were merely accidental, mere evasions, and never the feeling itself." (p.91)

This failure of language seems to stymie Musil as well, as throughout the narrative, Törless tries and fails many times to articulate this gap.

" Isn't that like a bridge where the piles are there only at the beginning and at the end, with none in the middle and yet one crosses it just as surely and safely as if the whole of it were there?"
Beineberg grinned. [...] "You see an apple--that's the light-waves and the eye and so forth--and you stretch out your hand to steal it--that's the muscles and the nerves that set them in action--but between these two there lies something else that produces one out of the other, and that is the immortal soul." (p.107)

This explanation leaves Törless unsatisfied, and he turns to mathematics to provide the answer after a lesson on imaginary numbers since they too possess this quality he's so desperate to pin down.

But a meeting with his mathematics teacher provides no answers. His teacher is either unable or unwilling to explain imaginary numbers as anything other than a concept needed to be taken on faith, insisting that Törless is as yet too young and inexperienced to do more than upset himself trying to 'get' it.

Musil too seems to link Törless's anxiety with adolescence; an acknowledgement that there is something to it, but that part of maturing is accepting things like parallel lines crossing at infinity without question. Or, as Beineberg puts it:

"Really, we ought to have despaired long ago, for in all fields our knowledge is streaked with such crevasses [...]. But we do not despair. We go on feeling as safe as if we were on firm ground. If we didn't have this solid feeling of certainty, we would kill ourselves in desperation about the wretchedness of our intellect." (p.177)

What are we to take from this rather bleak conclusion? Is it even bleak? Or is this a circle back around to the two threads that Beineberg described: an impossible push and pull between wanting to understand everything and knowing that this may be outright impossible or possible only if we sacrifice pity.

Ultimately, Törless seems to fall in line with Plato: 'I know that I know nothing.' His decision is, as the adults at the school seem to suggest is healthiest, to employ active ignorance of the gaps to avoid anxiety around them.

There are also some elements of what philosopher Jennifer Foster called 'doxastic anxiety' at play in other aspects of Törless's unease, but I don't have a solid enough philosophy background to delve into that side of it all very deeply...yet.

Perhaps next time. Lord only knows there will be a next time.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 2020
This is such a controversial book that it makes writing a review difficult, but I certainly won't bury the lead by hiding the fact that this book fascinates me. I've read it several times in English and in German, and I'll probably go back to it again.

Every time I've read it has been at a different time in my life and so I've read it quite differently.

The first time, I was in high school and the pure angst and homoeroticism of it was perfect for my emo teen self just starting to form my own personality and sexual identity. I was starved for anything that reflected my feelings of detachment and a churning inner world peculiar to young adults. Young Törless perfectly fit into that niche for me.

The next time I remember reading it was at Uni while I was taking a lot of literature courses and was in a better position to appreciate the technical aspects of it, e.g. Musil's turns of phrase, his use of description to build atmosphere, the twists and turns in Törless's moods and the way they colored his worldview.

This latest read-through, though, has circled me back around to what I found so appealing as a sixteen-year-old: the way in which Musil was able to capture in words the emotions I felt at that age but couldn't have described.

~"Sitting at the open window at night and feeling abandoned by everyone, feeling different from the grown-ups, misunderstood by every laugh and every mocking glance, being unable to explain to anybody what one already felt oneself to be, and yearning for her, the one who would understand."~ (p.42)

~"His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired." (p.43)

~"But now Törless became stubborn. He himself felt that he had not put his case well, but both the antagonism and the misguided approval he had met with gave him a sense of haughty superiority over these older men who seemed to know so little about the inner life of a human being." (p.209)

One of the main focuses of Törless's inner turmoil is framed around his frustration that irrational numbers are just that: an enigma within the 'rational' field of mathematics that paradoxically has to be taken on faith. The very ineffability of the human condition disturbs him just as much as the irrational numbers and he struggles throughout the novel to get to a point of understanding. Understanding the irrational numbers, understanding the inner workings of Basini's mind and emotions. And he can't. Beineberg offers what I, from my adult perspective, would agree with is the only possible reconciliation of this very element of the unknown in life that Törless remains too immature to grasp:

~"Really, we ought to have despaired long ago, for in all fields our knowledge is streaked with such crevasses--nothing but fragments drifting in a fathomless ocean. But we do not despair. We go on feeling as safe as if we were on firm ground. If we didn't have this solid feeling of certainty, we would kill ourselves in desperation about the wretchedness of our intellect."

Beineberg is quite extreme, but nonetheless I think there is something to the notion that to be mature one has to accept that we can't know everything.

Now, to the elephant in the room.

This is not a pleasant book to read. No one, not even our protagonist is sympathetic when it comes to the torture of their classmate, who they dehumanize utterly. Even the very humanness that Törless tries to uncover and parse through, the "something behind it all" (p.190) is completely disconnected from the person, from Basini, for whom he ultimately feels no compassion.

While the brutality is by no means graphic, the implications are grotesque and disturbing and not for the faint of heart, not least because one can easily imagine such things happening outside just the fictional (thought reportedly semi-autobiographical) world presented here.

Bullying and torture are ugly things, and Musil does not try to glorify them here. If anything, Törless's very detachment is the most disturbing element of all. That being said, if you use fiction as a means of escaping the brutality of reality, this isn't the book for you.

This isn't even a traditional coming-of-age story, nor, arguably, does Törless get a clear character arc. But that seems to be the point. Development isn't a linear thing, and as with its successor in the anti-coming-of age sub-genre, The Catcher in the Rye, Young Törless is a snapshot of the darker, less bubblegum side of adolescence, and a work with a point as of yet just out of my grasp, in the periphery of my understanding.

And it continues to fascinate me.

Until the next ride on the carousel, Herr Musil.