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.

Commonplace Book

'Because thoughts are something special. Often they are nothing more than accidents that pass away without leaving a trace, and thoughts, too, have their times to live and to die. We can have a flash of insight, and then, slowly, it fades beneath our touch like a flower. The form remains, but the colours, the scent are missing. We remember them word for word, and the logic of the sentence is completely unimpaired, and yet it drifts ceaselessly around on the surface of our minds and we feel none the richer for it. Until - perhaps several years later - all of a sudden another moment comes when we see that in the meantime we have known nothing of it, although logically we knew everything.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil

Commonplace Book

'...A surprise, a misunderstanding, confused impressions, had smashed open the secret hiding places where everything furtive, forbidden, overheated, uncertain and lonely in Torless's soul had accumulated, and channelled those dark impulses towards Basini. Because there, all of a sudden, they encountered something which was warm, which breathed, which was fragrant, which was flesh, something that gave those indistinct and wandering dreams a form and part of its own beauty, in place of the corrosive ugliness with which Bozena had tortured them in his loneliness. All at once a door to life was opened up for them, and everything mingled in the resulting half-light, desires and reality, orgiastic fantasies and impressions that still bore the warm traces of life, sensations that broke in from without and flames that flickered towards them from within, shrouding them beyond recognition.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil

Commonplace Book

'One thought concentrated Torless's whole body. Are adults like that, too? Is the world like that? Is it a universal law that there is something within us that is stronger, bigger, more beautiful, more passionate, darker than we are ourselves? Something over which we are so powerless that we can only aimlessly scatter a thousand seeds until suddenly one of them sprouts forth like a dark flame that finally towers over us?...And every nerve in his body quivered with the impatient answer: Yes.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil

Commonplace Book

'The memory of the terribly still, sad-coloured silence of certain evenings alternated suddenly with the hot, tremulous unease of a summer afternoon that had once rippled glowing across his soul, as though with the twitching feet of a hissing swarm of glittering lizards.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil

Commonplace Book

'He was afraid of that fantasy, because he was aware of its lascivious furtiveness, and he was unsettled at the thought that such ideas might win ever greater mastery over him. But they overwhelmed him precisely when he imagined himself at his most serious and pure. As a reaction, it might be said, to the moments when he became aware of emotional realizations which were preparing themselves within him, but which were not yet appropriate to his age. For early in the development of every fine moral force there is such a point, when the soul weakens, and that will perhaps be its boldest moment - as though it must first put down searching roots in order to churn up the earth destined later to support it - which is why adolescent boys with great futures ahead of them possess a past rich in humiliations.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil