Musil's Confusions of Young Törless
Mama, just dom'd a man...
Heads-up: There will be a weeklong hiatus in posting while I take some extra time to finish up some professional (over)commitments. Thanks for your patience, and see you later in June!
The Solenoid Notebooks is a series of letters reporting on the capacious field of literary and bibliographical references within Cărtărescu’s big book, translated by Sean Cotter.
Solenoid is a massive, ambitious novel that, in addition to spinning a long conspiratorial narrative, kind of summarizes the last century of modernist aesthetics and art in Europe and their relationship with scientific and mathematical knowledge. We’ll try to elucidate the many literary and historical threads woven into this meganovel, one book at a time.
These letters are meant to accompany my review piece that ran in Asymptote.
School stinks. Austrian school at the turn of the 20th century is stinkier. Boarding school in the same is worse yet. And Austrian military boarding schools? Good lord…
That was the kind of campus Robert Musil, who came from an academic family, went to for his schooling. Discipline was excessive, sadistic hazing and torture was routine, and suicides were common enough that these institutions would have their own cemeteries.
When Musil translated his experiences into his debut novel, he apparently didn’t have to change the events all that much.
Silent Friends has an odd relationship with Musil. The preferred theoretical approach here is to view him as Modernism’s Resident Machian. Musil did his doctoral thesis on Mach’s philosophy (he’s also the namesake of Mach numbers), which he would go on to promote in his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities.
While Mach was a successful physicist in certain areas, his philosophy goes astray into the denial of matter’s existence and of objective knowledge. The resulting system was essentially a modern form of subjective idealism, where there is no material reality, just the assemblages—Mach called them “complexes”—of perceptions and thoughts inside our minds.
While Musil pursued this retread of the most backward expression of 18th century philosophy, he was also a staunch anti-Communist leftist, a severe demerit here at SF . Nevertheless, he was a refined and very funny writer of novels, stories, essays, and plays. Even in the mid twenty-teens you can find journal articles that insist Musil is still underrated and neglected by scholarship, relative to other European titans of high modernism like Proust, Joyce, and Thomas Mann, especially considering his overt philosophical orientation as a literary author.
Young Törless has always generated a lot of curiosity, ever since I’d peeped at the opening lines in the university library:
A little station on the line going to Russia.
Four parallel iron rails on the yellow gravel of the wide embankment running endlessly straight in both directions, with the dark line burnt into the ground by the exhaust steam like a dirty shadow alongside each one.
I have a slight personal peeve at “fragmented” sentences, the way other readers hate split infinitives, so I prefer to see this as a long sentence with two periods and a paragraph break chopping up. But even still these two paras are self-contained constructions, the second one evoking the world of “rational” administration we’re about to enter, with its infinite parallel lines.
The train brings Törless to his new home, he says goodbye to his parents, and begins rolling with two boys named Beineberg and Reiting. When the three catch a pupil named Basini stealing money, they begin a series of degrading sexual tortures.
Before that, however, there’s still the rhythms of collegial life: reading, reflecting, and riffing with your classmates outside class time.
For example, Törless and Beineberg have a conversation about religion in a cafe early in the book. Beineberg is interested in Buddhism. Törless for his part finds religion “fun.” “There always comes a point where you don’t know whether you’re lying of if what you’ve invented is truer than you are yourself.”
There’s also visits to Božena, the local prostitute, though Törless consistently feels awkward and in the down position when he goes with his buddies.
But when Törless gets involved in Basini’s sexual degradation, he’s aware of a chilling thought. His effective power over another student sends a shiver “from time to time.” “People say that’s what happens to a man the first time he sees a woman who is going to entangle him in a destructive passion.”
But as it goes on for days and days, Božena is long forgotten: “what he had felt for her had turned into the memory of a fantasy that had now been replaced with serious business.” Heterosexual desire is child’s play; homosexual assault is “serious business.”
Filling out this storyline are episodes of idealist sophistry—Törless is confusing himself, after all, not cultivating himself, the way a bildungsroman is supposed to work. There’s a contretemps with his math teacher over imaginary numbers.
He’s also a skeptic of linguistics. Late in the novel he reflects on a memory of blurting out a remark in his father’s presence, and feeling “embarrassed when his father was pleased.” He acted with his speech and got positive feedback, but Törless feels his act was meaningless; he literally could have said anything; he doesn’t really know what he’s conveying. It’s not a failure of his awareness, but a failure of words themselves. Words “were merely random escape valves for what he had felt.”
He searches “tirelessly” for a “bridge, a connection, a comparison between himself and that which was there, wordless, before his mind.” It’s not long before Törless arrives at Mach’s positivist idealism, stopping only at sensory impressions.
These impressions were therefore transitory, variable, accompanied by an awareness of their chance nature. Törless was never able to hold on to them for, when he looked more closely, he felt that these surface representatives bore no relationship whatsoever to the force of the dark mass lurking below that they claimed to represent.
Musil’s descriptions can be quite theatrical in a literal sense. The secret spot where the debauchery takes place—where Beineberg and Reiting strip Basini naked and whip him—is a dark room with only a lantern for a “spotlight.” The narrator convey’s Törless’s sightline. We see shadow and “dust swirling in the beam of light.” Then Basini’s face appears, “ashen in the uncertain light."
Otherwise, this novel wasn’t super resonant on a first reading. There some unique if haphazard visual elements: namely dashes, as many a six, that break into the prose along with space breaks and unnumbered chapter breaks. I don’t know exactly what they are but I’m glad the publisher preserved them.
Young Törless was mentioned in Solenoid in the list of readings that ended with Kafka’s notebooks. (It included a reference to “Shameless Death by Dagmar Rotluf,” which is an invention.)
We don’t have to dig too deep to identify a strong connection on the philosophical substrate between between these two books, along with Dostoevsky as the lodestone.
Solenoid contains a storyline of the narrator’s stay as a child in the mid 60s at a “preventorium” for tuberculosis treatment called, called Voila, which offers the closest to the boarding-school experience relayed in the Musil.
I arrived at Voila along with autumn, quickly, as though the torrid summer, with its red-hot walls and tram lines, with its black, desiccated tree leaves, had existed only over Bucharest. Voila was another world. Heavy gray clouds, promising rain, hung down a few feet above the large rectangular buildings that housed the dorms, cafeteria, and the round tower of the infirmary. The entire complex was surrounded by forest and smelled green and fresh, like a forest without end. After we got out of the buses, dazed by the aggressive novelty of the concrete surfaces, of the windows reflecting our pale faces, the melancholic peaks of the trees rising over the buildings, we were taken, each with his suitcase, to the dorms. We put our suitcase on one of the white metal beds, hospital-style, of the thirty in the dorm room.
Among the anecdotes and characters in this setting is a memorable bit about the boys’ dormitory:
My bed smelled like pee. They all did, actually. Because after lights-out at nine, we weren’t allowed to leave the dorm room, for any reason. The halls and washroom were haunted by the cleaning ladies, with their enormous breasts and bottoms, with their cheeks so swollen in their mongoloid faces there was no room for their eyes. If one of us, insane with the need to urinate, dared open the door, he heard a bestial bellowing from the other side that woke all of us up. How many nights did I suffer, lying on my sheets, my knees to my mouth, my bladder ready to burst, trying to fall asleep to forget the terrible need to urinate! How many times did I poke my head into the clear light of the hall, hoping the women were somewhere on the girl’s floor, or the stairs. . . . But every time I came back to my white, iron bed, feeling at every moment I would have to let go. In the end I clenched my eyelids shut, and consumed with a terrible shame, I put the pillow between my legs and soaked it with liquid, trembling so much my teeth chattered.
And one night, an uncanny event, where one of the kids is “abducted,” the bed sinking below the floor as if on an elevator. “The bed, with the child asleep in its sheets, descended under the floor, without the slightest sound, and when the boy’s body was completely below, the floor closed above him, leaving an unexplained interruption in the regular series of beds.”