He disliked the cultishness of psychoanalysis, disapproved of its sweeping claims and its unscientific standards of proof. He preferred a psychology of what he ironically called the ‘shallow’ — that is, experimental - variety. 

Both Musil and Freud were in fact part of a larger movement in European thought. Both were sceptical of the power of reason to guide human conduct; both were diagnosticians of fin de siècle Central European civilization and its discontents; and both assumed the dark continent of the feminine psyche as theirs to explore. To Musil, Freud was a rival rather than a source. 

His preferred guide in the realm of the unconscious was Nietzsche (‘master of the floating life within’, as he called him). In Nietzsche Musil found an approach to questions of morality that went beyond a simple polarity of good and evil; a recognition that art can in itself be a form of intellectual exploration; and a mode of philosophizing, aphoristic rather than systematic, that suited his own sceptical temperament. The tradition of fictional realism had never been strong in Germany; as Musil developed as a writer, his fiction became increasingly essayistic in structure, with only perfunctory gestures in the direction of realistic narrative  

Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Verwirrungen are perplexities, troubled states of mind; Zögling is a rather formal term, with upper-class overtones, for a boarder at a school) is built around a history of sadistic victimization at an elite boys’ academy. More specifically, it is an account of a crisis that one of the boys, Törless (his first name is never given), experiences as a result of participating in the deliberate humiliation and breaking down of a fellow student, Basini, who is caught stealing. The exploration of this inner crisis, moral, psychological, and ultimately epistemological, rendered largely from within Törless’s own consciousness, makes up the substance of the novel. 

In the end Törless has his own breakdown and is discreetly removed from the school. Törless’s sense is that he has weathered the storm and come through. But it is not clear how far we are intended to trust his newfound confidence, since it seems to be based on a decision that the only way of getting along in the world is not to peer too closely into the abysses opened up in us by extreme experience, particularly sexual experience. The single glimpse we are allowed of Törless in later life suggests that he has become not necessarily a wiser or a better man, merely a more prudent one. 

In later life Musil denied that Young Törless was about youthful experiences of his own, or even about adolescence in general. ‘The reality one is describing is always only a pretext,’ he said, meaning (one presumes) that the action of the novel was simply a vehicle to allow him to explore a certain state of mind. Nevertheless, the originals of Basini and of his tormentors Beineberg and Reiting can easily be identified among the boys Musil knew at Mährisch-Weisskirchen, while one of Törless’s deepest confusions - about the nature of his feelings towards his mother — is mirrored in Musil’s own early diaries. The gap between Törless’s own outward sang-froid and the seething forces within him, between the well-regulated daily life at school and the eerie nocturnal floggings in the attic, has its parallel in the gap between the orderly bourgeois front presented by Törless’s parents and what he darkly knows must go on in the privacy of their bedroom. 

The master metaphor that Musil uses for all these incommensurabilities comes from Törless’s studies in mathematics. Living side by side with the real numbers, and somehow made to interlock with them by the operations of mathematical reasoning, are the imaginary numbers, numbers which have no referent in the real world. Adults, led by Törless’s teachers, seem to have no trouble in bringing together the domains of the real and the imaginary (to Törless the vertiginously unimaginable). In the euphoric speech he makes to the assembled teachers at the end of the book, Törless claims to have resolved this confusion in his mind (‘I know that I was indeed mistaken’) and to have emerged safely into young adulthood (‘I’m not afraid of anything any more. I know: things are things and will remain so for ever’). His teachers understand nothing of what he says: they have either never had experiences like his, or have tightly repressed them. Törless is unusual in the thoroughness with which he has faced - or been driven to face - the darkness within; whether or not we regard as self-betrayal his later adoption of the pose of what Musil as narrator calls the ‘aesthetically inclined intellectual’, he is certainly, in his confused youth (‘confusion’, Verwirrung, is a word Musil uses with continual irony), the figure of the artist in the modern world, exploring the remoter shores of experience and bringing back his reports. 

Despite the amoralism that makes Young Törless so much a product of its age, the moral questions raised by the story will not go away. Beineberg, the more intellectually inclined of Törless’s comrades, has a vulgar-Nietzschean, proto-Fascist justification for what they do to Basini: the three of them belong to a new generation to which the old rules do not apply (‘the soul has changed’); as for pity, pity is one of the lower impulses and must be conquered. Törless is not Beineberg. Nevertheless, his own particular perversity — making Basini talk about what has been done to him - is morally no better than the whippings the other two carry out; while in his own homosexual acts with Basini he is at pains to show the boy no tenderness. 

In a world in which there are no more God-given rules, in which it has fallen to the philosopher-artist to give the lead, should the artist’s explorations include acting out his own darker impulses, seeing where they will take him? Does art always trump morality? This early work of Musil’s offers the question, but answers it in only in the most uncertain way. 

Musil did not disown Young Törless. On the contrary, he continued to look back with surprise at what he had been able to achieve, even at a technical level, at so early an age. The master metaphor of the book, with its implication that the foundations of our real, reasonable, everyday world have no real, reasonable existence, continues to be explored in The Man without Qualities, though in a spirit more of paradox and irony than of anguish. ‘A person must believe he is something more in order to be capable of being what he is,’ suggests Ulrich, the central character. ‘The present is nothing but a hypothesis that one has not yet finished with.’ Musil’s work, from beginning to end, is of a piece: the evolving record of a confrontation between a man of supremely intelligent sensibility and the times that gave birth to him, times he would justly call ‘accursed’.

  

“In some strange way we devalue things as soon as we give utterance to them. We believe we have dived to the uttermost depths of the abyss, and yet when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pallid finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We think we have discovered a hoard of wonderful treasure-trove, yet when we emerge again into the light of day we see that all we have brought back with us is false stones and chips of glass. But for all this, the treasure goes on glimmering in the darkness, unchanged.”

MAETERLINCK


It was a small station on the long railroad to Russia.