by Robert Musil
The others lost no time in agreeing with the Headmaster’s well-intentioned suggestion.
“He really is most peculiar,” remarked the maths tutor to the person next to him. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had hysterical tendencies.”
At the same time as his parents received the Headmaster’s letter, one also arrived from Törless, in which he asked them to take him away from the school, because he no longer felt it was the right place for him.
22
IN THE MEANTIME Basini was expelled, and life at the school returned to its usual routine.
It had been agreed that Törless’s mother would come and collect him. He said goodbye to his classmates with a feeling of indifference. He had almost forgotten their names already.
He had never gone up to the red-painted room in the attic again. All that seemed far, far behind him now.
Now Basini had gone, it had died a natural death. It was almost as if the person who had been at the centre of the whole affair had taken it away with him.
A form of calm tinged with doubt descended on Törless, although the feelings of despair had left him. “It was probably the things I did in secret with Basini that made it worse,” he thought. He couldn’t imagine there being any other reason.
And yet he felt ashamed. In the way we are ashamed when we wake up in the morning after a night spent in the clutches of fever, during which we saw terrifying threats loom up from every corner of the darkened room.
His behaviour in front of the committee now struck him as utterly ridiculous. All that fuss over nothing! So perhaps they were right? And yet there was something in him that blunted this feeling of shame. “I probably behaved unreasonably,” he thought, “although this whole business seems to have had very little to do with reason.” This was how he felt about it now. He could still remember the storm that had raged in his head, which couldn’t begin to be explained by the reasons he found in himself. “In that case,” he concluded, “it must have been something far too vital and deep-seated to be judged in terms of reason and concepts.”
Yet what had come before this outburst of passion, and which had simply been overshadowed by it – that was the real problem, and it hadn’t gone away. It was the mental perspective that he had experienced, which varied according to the distance he was from something: that incomprehensible connection which, according to the point of view from which we see them, gives objects and events a value that sets them apart, makes them incomparable, alien to each other…
He saw this and everything else with a curious and perfect clarity – in every tiny detail. In the way we see things at daybreak, when the sun’s first pure rays have dried the cold sweat of our fears, and our table, wardrobe, enemies and fate shrink back to their normal dimensions.
Nor was he spared the faint, brooding weariness that this leaves in its wake. He now knew the difference between night and day; in fact he had always known, although an oppressive dream had swept over the borderline between them, causing it to blur, and this confusion filled him with shame. And yet the thought that this could happen, that there were fragile, easily obliterated boundaries around people through which the febrile dreams that prowl around the edges of the soul are able to gnaw and open up strange, sinister pathways – this thought had embedded itself deep inside him, from where it cast pale, wan shadows.
This was not something that he could readily explain. But the inability to find the right words was an exquisite sensation, like the certainty of the expectant mother who feels the gentle tug of the future in her blood. And this confidence and lassitude were mingled together in him…
And so it was that, in a state of quiet, thoughtful serenity, he awaited the day of departure.
His mother, who had expected to find an overexcited, distraught young man, was struck by his cool composure.
As they drove to the station, on the right-hand side they passed the little wood where Božena’s house stood. It looked so innocent and insignificant now, just a dusty tangle of willows and alders.
It reminded him of how inconceivable his parents’ existence had seemed to him at the time. And he gave his mother a surreptitious glance.
“What is it, my boy?”
“Nothing Mama, I was just thinking.”
And he inhaled the faint, gentle fragrance that drifted up from the bodice of her dress.
NOTE ON THE TEXT
This translation is based on Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2012). The chapter divisions have been introduced for clarity and ease of reading, as has been the practice in other translations of the novel.
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
The Devil is a beautiful boy.
Old Orthodox saying
Among the many contributions that Central Europe has made to literature, the Bildungsroman is the form that it has in a sense made its own. The region’s position at the geographical and cultural heart of Europe, where borders, regimes, language and national identities have for centuries been in a state of flux, creates an atmosphere in which coming of age – a difficult time of life in any part of the world – can be particularly torturous, beset by external influences that are as complex and ill defined as the inner life of the adolescent.
The Confusions of Young Master Törless (Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß), Robert Musil’s first novel, is one of the earliest and most influential examples of the genre, an austere and yet pointillist tale that examines aspects of human nature that at the time were taboo subjects, and which to a certain extent still have the power to unsettle. What marks Törless out for greatness is that the themes with which it deals have subsequently become perennial, not only in literature but also in philosophy, sociology, psychology, social movements and the cinema, and continue to have a profound effect on our fundamental understanding of ourselves and of human relationships.
In essence, Törless is a story about adolescence, the age at which we become acutely and often painfully aware of ourselves and the world around us – a world viewed through the distorting lens of self-doubt, which can create monsters that will accompany us throughout our lives, with often far-reaching consequences for ourselves and for society. Yet Musil goes further, picking up the threads of a complex subject and following them into areas whose importance would not be recognized until much later, due in no small measure to his contemporaries Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. He explores the themes of androgyny, young male beauty, the first stirrings of tenderness, the delicate vulnerability of adolescent boys, and how this conflicts with their displays of what they and many people even today regard as “masculine behaviour”. Similar ideas regularly appear in Thomas Mann’s work, notably Tonio Kröger, The Confessions of Felix Krull and Death in Venice, in Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, as well as in the Slovene writer Florjan Lipuš’s The Confusions of Young Tjaž and Friedrich Torberg’s Young Gerber – all novels in which sensitive and intelligent adolescent boys are manipulated and often destroyed by the brute ugliness of the world. More recently, the controversy provoked by Germaine Greer’s book The Boy serves to remind us that society’s attitudes to the reality of homoerotic feelings and the attraction felt for adolescent boys by both sexes has changed remarkably little since the scandal caused by Musil’s novel in 1906.
For Törless is undoubtedly a homoerotic book (Basini has “a beautiful physique”, not unlike that of a girl), set as it is in a boys’ boarding school, where the place of the female is traditionally taken by attractive junior boys, a perverse landscape whose reality is rendered all the more contorted by the position accorded to women (Törless’s sensitive friend, the young Prince H., is regarded by the others as “soppy” and “effeminate”, while Basini – himself the largely willing focus of his classmates’ desires – tells Božena, a local prostitute, that women “aren’t fit for anything else”). The narrative constantly draws our attention to the atmosphere of tumescent longing in the grim establishment – whose isolated position is apparently de
signed to insulate pupils from the “bad influences” of the city – inhabited by hundreds of adolescents whose senses are finely tuned to the slightest sexual innuendo.
Yet the longings that the boys feel are not only sexual or sentimental. Musil later claimed that his choice of subject matter was incidental, and that he could have developed any number of other “perversions” and taken them to their logical conclusion. The carefully orchestrated bullying campaign, the sexual abuse of Basini, are just part of a much wider, more commonplace and, as a result, far more sinister phenomenon: the abuse of power. It is in this respect that the novel acquires the parabolic quality that some people have interpreted as predicting the Great War and the subsequent rise of Fascism – although to any observant European of the time (and this can be seen in Mann’s Death in Venice with its cast of pursued Poles and overbearing Russians and Germans, as well as in the scandal caused by the Colonel Redl affair), it was clear that the “old” Europe was disintegrating under the pressure of malign influences.
To anyone who, like Musil, was educated at such a school or at a military academy, or served in a fashionable regiment, the setting and atmosphere of the novel will be instantly and perhaps uncomfortably familiar. In a sense, the four main protagonists represent the different, conflicting elements of the adolescent character: Beineberg is a cold, pseudo-intellectual manipulator, Reiting a compulsively ambitious and seductive orator and Basini – temptation incarnate – a pleasure-seeking flirt (and arguably the person who is most honest with himself), while Törless is the sceptic, the misguided fool who questions and agonizes – in fact he could be described as the collective conscience who, in Musil’s unfinished chef-d’œuvre The Man without Qualities, develops into the cynical seducer, Ulrich. As is often the case, Törless is an outsider, partly by choice; he desperately wants to belong, but on his own terms. He is drawn to the cloistered life, but it rejects him. What he is really seeking is a cloister within a cloister, his own private milieu. But, as usually happens, his youthful attempts to find it end in failure, and yet also in greater self-awareness.
Much of the novel’s impact derives from Musil’s poetic and incisive prose, an incomparable blend of Schönbrunner Deutsch, the version of German spoken at the Habsburg Court (and indeed still used by some elements of Austrian and particularly Viennese society, where girls say küss die Hand – “I kiss your hand” – to greet their mothers, and young men routinely click their heels to their elders and seniors) – littered with idioms from French and the many different national languages of the Empire – and Kanzleisprache, the intricately formal parlance of the omnipresent Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. As a result the narrative often resembles a combination of an epic poem and a ministerial briefing document, leading us through a maze of subordinate clauses where foreign words and phrases suddenly explode like fireworks.
The subtle and sometimes labyrinthine idiosyncrasies of Musil’s language were instrumental in choosing the title of this new translation – The Confusions of Young Master Törless. The word Zögling from the original German title has never been properly reflected in English. At the time the novel was written, the term described a pupil at a boarding school, deriving from the verb ziehen (“to draw along” or “draw up”) and also possibly from züchten (“to breed”), with its attendant aristocratic associations. Since then, however, Zögling has largely fallen out of use, acquiring a humorous or ironic sense which today might be used to describe someone who (like Törless) has aristocratic pretensions. Hence “Young Master Törless” seemed a suitably ironic English rendering – although true equivalents rarely exist in translation.
Despite the passage of time, the novel has lost none of its ability to unsettle, to make us reflect on the darker and more troubling aspects of human nature and the violent excesses to which they can lead – and, even in the enlightened twenty-first century, one doesn’t have to look far to find examples. Children are still routinely abused, bullying is still widespread at every level of society, people misuse power for their own ends and wars are fought for the most specious ideological reasons or simply to bolster the egos of insecure dictators. Yet when such institutionalized crimes are exposed, those who uncover them (or “blow the whistle”) are often condemned as traitors.
So has anything really changed? Adolescent boys still suffer from the same angst experienced by Törless, unaware that their fragile beauty is as ephemeral as their self-doubt. As Thomas Mann wrote in Tonio Kröger: “I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and in consequence I suffer.”
It is still a world that Robert Musil would recognize.
– Christopher Moncrieff
Christopher Moncrieff translates widely from French, German and Romanian literature. After military service in Europe, the Near East and the USA during the Cold War, he produced large-scale son et lumière shows in Germany, France and Los Angeles before beginning to write and translate. He read Theology at Oxford and has qualifications in design and on the military staff. A frequent traveller in Central and Eastern Europe, he speaks a number of the languages of the region.
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Table of Contents
The Confusions of Young Master Törless
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