The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil (1906)

This may be an Expressionist novel; it very doubtfully might, in some very oblique way, prefigure Nazism as some have suggested; what it really is is much more bland sounding, but much more searching - it's a psychological novel. And the key word of the title is Confusions. It's quite a specific scenario that Musil is investigating. The school which the adolescent Torless attends is a high-walled forbidding place in a relatively lonely spot. Musil makes it clear in the first few pages that Torless is in some respects abandoned to the mercies and emotional privations of this place, contrasting the muddy warmth of his family who have just finished a visit. One can assume that some sort of similar emotional effect resounds in all the boys. His close associates are three, and again they don't appear to be particular symbols of anything wider, other than in the most general sense. Reiting is a charmer with a tough, manipulative element, likely to travel pretty well in the bleached school environment; Beineberg is a savant, who has a fascination with eastern philosophy, and is revealed to have psychopathic tendencies as the action progresses - he's also likely to do well in the school while his manipulations are accepted, but it's scary to think what could occur if he felt thwarted; Bassini is a weaker sensualist with some of the same manipulative urges, but a more slippery character. Torless himself is less manipulative, more of a wonderer, engaged and taken up by these three, but nervously intense about them at the same time. When Reiting and Beineberg discover that Bassini has been stealing money from others, they have their pretext for action. And this is where a difficulty arises for me - there is asserted by Musil in all four of these boys some element of sadism and masochism, not in what might be called the typically undercurrent human way, but instead in a pronounced way, as a fairly fully formed character element. I don't quite believe it. So, up in the attics of the tall dark building, in a very warm side storeroom, Reiting and Beineberg begin the humiliation of Bassini, which includes beatings and sexual "services". Torless is fascinated and repelled by it all. He is going through a period of intense personal reflection, and the savagery and ritual concatenates through his mind, sending ripples in all directions. The way this is written about by Musil, entering the boys' minds and describing in deep detail their patterns of thought, down to profound contrarieties which they haven't yet plumbed or concluded, is fascinating, though I'm sure to some it will seem hopelessly over-intellectualised. I don't find it that, but I don't necessarily believe all of it - not everything rings true. And we can't forget that this is over a hundred years ago in super-philosophically charged Germany, where this kind of thought was much closer to the surface, especially among the elite classes Musil is describing. True to the schematics of its psychological theme, Torless emerges at the end, once Bassini has been exposed and expelled through the twistings of Reiting and Beineberg (Torless too has had moments of involvement with Bassini, independently of them), as having come through a cloud of unknowing and brought himself up to the light, of not needing these fellows any more. The old impossibility of a 'true' psychological novel then reasserts itself - the result feels very slightly compromised, as well as absolutely intriguing.