Customer Reviews

The Confusions of Young Törless (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"The Confusions of Young Torless" (1906), by Robert Musil (1880-1942), is the poignant story of a young man who leaves his secure conservative farm home in rural Austria, for the prestige and worldlinesss of a private upper-class boys school. He settles easily into his new school, even managing to experience some grown-up pleasures with a local prostitute. He enjoys his new freedom and intellectual stimulation, finding his new environment preferable to the staid life of home, and his new friends more sophisticated than his country parents. He meets two intellectually confident boys, Beineberg, a spiritualist philosopher, and Reiting, a logicalist mathematician, both budding into youthful ideologues, both naively experimental and both youthfully extreme. Torless is drawn to their dominant personalities, and the three form a small club, meeting secretly in an attic storage room, which the rest of the school has long forgotten.

Another boy, Basini, weak-willed and rather spineless, is caught robbing. The boys have heard his mother called "Excellency" during a visit, but for some reason Basini cannot support himself financially. To find money, he borrows it from his friends, but when he cannot repay one, he borrows from another, in an endless deception. Reiting and Beineberg catch Basini at his game, and decide to blackmail him into servitude, exhibiting the casual cruelty boys so naturally inflict upon each other. Each boy tortures Basini according to his own ideology, the philosophical Beineberg trying to manipulate his soul, the mathematical Reiting trying to demonstrate universal theories of humanity. The torture is not just psychological, but also physical, and even sexual. The entire business confuses Torless at first, and shocks him further the more he sees, ultimately forcing him to take sides. Will he join the game as well, or defend Basini himself, or leave all three to their fate? Will Torless adopt the heartless exploratory endeavors of his two intellectual and stimulating friends, or will he rediscover the old-fashioned morals of his common-place parents? And where are the adults during this brutish tableau? Will Torless surrender his friends to the school's authorities, possibly fanning the flames some more? No matter what path Torless might choose, it is clear the outcome will be dramatic.

The writing itself is first-class. An educated psychologist, and an academic contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil demonstrates great skill describing his characters and settings. The boys are drawn in perfect psychological illustrations of reality, the plot episodes effective and well-conceived, and the entire book superbly executed. Contemporary readers will recognize the same struggle in Torless that William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" would explore a half-century later (1954): How do undisciplined youth behave in the absense of guardians?

In "Lord of the Flies", after descending into deadly primitivism, the youth can only be rescued by outside forces. In "Torless", however, the choice rests upon the shoulders of Torless himself, making this drama far more compelling than Golding's. If not for a few brief sexual episodes, the book might be much more widespread among high schools than "Lord of the Flies". Nothing in "Torless" reaches even a portion of the gratuitous frankness of popular culture today, so I only hope more schools will open their eyes to this superior tale soon. The realistic school-house drama of "Torless" speaks more effectively to the modern reader than Golding's abstract fantasy island. This book can easily be recommended to anyone interested in the themes at the heart of this concise (160pp) and well-written novel: the moral struggles of adolescence, the tension of values between a "simple country upbringing" and the "sophisticated upper-class", and the ideologically destructive potential of both ill-conceived philosophy and pseudo-science.

Robert Musil's "Confusions of Young Törless" was published in 1906, the twilight of 19th century certainties (Freud published "Studies in Hysteria" in 1895, "Interpretation of Dreams" in 1900; Franz Wedekind's "Spring Awakening" was published in 1890, first produced in 1906, and banned in 1908; Einstein's General Theory was less than a decade away), in Austria-Hungary, a semi-faux empire taking too long to rot away. The greatness of Musil's work lies in its distillation of the zeitgeist into a relatively simple narrative about an incident of abuse in a boys' academy. The novel, which at times becomes meditation, transcends time and place. It depicts how, not only children but adults deal with passion, knowledge, order and justice, while trying to grasp within themselves that which in themselves they can neither control nor fully understand (ergo the metaphoric use of discussions about imaginary numbers) finally resorting to such staples of orthodoxy as rationalization, dogma and discipline to avoid truth which subverts their sense of whole. Törless, his companions, his teachers and the school chaplain struggle in darkness with their own demons and limitations, deluding themselves as having been truly enlightened in some fashion by experience, whereas each in their own way, seeks only to quiet their own internal turmoil and restore comprehensible order. Törless comes closest to breaking free, but we are lead to believe his own pusillanimity and conformity win out in that nebulous future after the novel ends. (Maybe he becomes "a man without qualities"). Whatever else, the work is extremely ironic, nowhere more than in its title, as "Confusions" are not limited to Young Törless but to the whole world around him. Musil was 26 when it was published.

Sex is a pervasive and disruptive force throughout Musil's novel. At one point, Törless is sexually aroused when witnessing abuse. Beineberg, Reiting and Törless individually, albeit differently, each with their own motivation (which Musil develops with remarkable thoroughness and economy), use Basini sexually. Basini uses his sexuality to press his case with Törless; Törless rationalizes his own acquiescence. All four use the town whore. Part of Törless "confusions" is his intellectualization of his own sexual turbulence: does he act this or that way because what he thinks, or do his feelings shape his thoughts which then rationalize his actions? Is he truly in an intellectual quest or is that only an excuse to give in to sex, however convoluted? Musil does not pose questions of sexual identity, as perhaps would have been posed in an early 21st century work, but he seems to explicitly address the disruptive power of passion in humankind. Sexuality is pervasive and central to the novel.

Some have seen a premonition of Nazism in Musil's novel. The fact that Basini, a rather unsympathetic "victim," is taken to be a jew, contributes to this, though at the time, Dreyfusian France was probably more anti-Semitic than Austria-Hungary or Germany. In the event, it is difficult to divorce what we know of intervening history when reading a text written in German at the beginning of the 20th century. However, any such inference particularizes, indeed obscures meaning, deflects relevance and diminishes the work. What was true and relevant in the 1906 text remains true and relevant today. One of the consistently reliable themes in human history is how orthodoxy, as a governing principle in ordering human affairs, tends to fall apart, time and time again. Early in his life, Musil grasped that, as did Freud (we may be in a post-Freudian, clinically and therapeutically neo-chemical world but certainly the influence of his insights are still very much with us). "Confusion" can still be apt description for humankind: arguably, the delusions, contradictions, and self-righteousness in contemporary, reactionary, America provide a good example. In the end, there is a touch of smugness to the irony with which Young Törless concludes, a detachment, which translates as apprehensive harbinger of our expanding awareness of ourselves, of the power we have, what we can do, and of the absurdly infinite capacity and recondite ways we find to grant ourselves absolution. "Yes we can..." a frightening thought indeed.

Törless, his mates, Basini, the adults, all of us, need ethics, not Belief.

A strange and compelling tale surrounding the misdeeds and sexual proclivities of four boys in a European boarding school. Published in 1906, these are indeed the "confusions" of young Torless, a character tormented by a rationalized sense of objective intellectualism and a literal cowardice in the face of tyranny.

Basini, an effeminate teen, is caught stealing by Reiting and Beineberg. These two conniving little bastards, representives of Europe's ever pervasive fascisim, decide to "punish" Basini themselves, believeing themselves to be conducting an experiment of sorts - "how far can we take this?" What follows is a series of scenes which depict the beating, sexual dominance and systematic breaking down of Basini's pysche. Throughout these events our young Torless, a mostly silent witness to the continuative events, is tortured by his own homosexual longings for the beautiful Basini. Their relationship is consummated in a very delicately rendered scene (Shaun Whiteside's translation is expert throughout). Conflicted by his sexual longings and their inherent ramifications (one must remember this behavior was considered both scandalous and ruinous), Torless betrays his lover. In an effort to disassociate himself from all three "nefarious" characters, Torless attemps to divorce himself from all comlicity in the foregoing and subsequent torture of Basini.

Musil has illustrated with great clarity the cacophony of conflicting emotions which plague most adolescent males. That Torless is confused is apparent, that his betrayal of Basini was on a much grander scale than those of his fellows is just as apprently lost on him. Perhaps a better title for this novel would have been "The Amoralist."

There is a cult of Musil, just as there is a cult of his truly wonderful, incomplete work of a lifetime, "The Man without Qualities", a monument which casts a strong shadow on everything else he wrote, including "Törless", and also one to which everything else he wrote made its contribution. I will try to avoid the worshipful attitude which is a feature of such cults. "The Man without Qualities" is an immense and complex novel, the first two volumes of which start out as a panoptic survey of Austrian society in 1912-13, as seen through the lens of a planned celebration of Franz Josef's anticipated 70th anniversary of rule, with both personalities and events considered ironically and sometimes presented farcically. The final (never completed) volume, "Into The Millennium (The Criminals)", narrows its focus considerably onto the brother-sister relationship of its central character, Ulrich, a relationship that is extremely cerebral, while at the same time very sensual and possibly even heading toward an incestuous coupling (the novel was never completed to the extent where one can say such a coupling is "inevitable"). While the social framing of the mind of the protagonist (i.e., in the early parts of "The Man without Qualities") barely exists in "Törless", the latter type of uneasy personal relationship makes its first appearance in Musil's debut novel.

Both the style and the scope of Musil's "big book" and his first, compact novel, "The Confusions of Young Törless" are very different. However, there are some commonalities, which retrospectively appear to be what are, for lack of a better term, "thematic obsessions" that characterize all of his books. To see these connections and the recurrence of certain ideas and stylistic approaches to handling them, it helps to have read his Notebooks (also called "Diaries"), which exist in toto in a German compilation, and in an abridged and selected version in English. These Notebooks contain the seeds of characters that appear in his published works, sketches of the relationships among them, and the combination of psychological and philosophical examination to which Musil subjects all aspects of the human mind and the specific personalities which embody it. This goes for "Törless" (published in 1906) as well as for "The Man without Qualities" (first two volumes published in 1930), although the latter is a far more polished work which naturally incorporates Musil's own responses to developments in his own life and the social life of Austria and Germany throughout the eventful quarter-century which separates the publication dates of his first and last novels.

Lest any professor or critic of a certain stripe jump into this discussion with the usually sensible proviso, "Let's not confuse the man with his work, let's not confuse Robert with Törless or Ulrich", he should be prepared to be gainsaid in a rather incontrovertible manner by the substance of Musil's Notebooks, in which he clearly models characters after himself, whether their actions and thoughts were his or merely those which he contemplated as possibilities for himself, or "someone like him" (the notion of human possibilities converted into actual choices and deeds is in fact at the core of his idea of what he calls "ethics", another of his preoccupations). As the Notebook and its supplementary materials indicate, Musil's education at the University of Berlin in both "phenomenological" psychology and philosophy convinced him of the necessity of authorial introspection for the development of fictional characters (and almost all of his characters are modeled on family members, friends and acquaintances). The path to the "scientific" distancing and objectivity which he considered ideal for a writer had to commence with detailed self-examination, although this might be dismissed as something like squaring the circle (arriving at a higher objectivity by proceeding through intense subjectivity). The earliest Notebook entries (1899-1902) contain musings and jottings which are clearly related to the development of the character of Törless, especially his mixed feelings toward his parents and his obsessive examination and re-examination of this own thoughts and actions, which appear to have a cloudy relationship to another "darker reality" which he believes underlies the everyday "normal reality". (Incidentally, one will run across the destabilizing universal modernist influence of Nietzsche early on in these Notebooks.)

A brief word on the story itself. In the main it can be described as the depiction of a triangular relationship, with a composite physical/spiritual bully represented by the pair Reiting/Beineberg at one apex, their unattractive victim Basini at the other, and Törless at the third, vacillating in his relationships with the other two apices and constantly shifting his judgment of the character of the others and of what these relationships mean for him, above all, for him. In a sense, he has little interest in what it all means to the others or to the larger society to which they belong - the others are like a "force field" which elicits responses from him that teach him about himself. He veers between being a tormenter, rescuer, and icy observer, and he finally "opts out" of the local crisis (the setting is in a typical military preparatory school of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which there has been a theft by a student followed by systematic tormenting of that student) by expressing a self-evaluation of his role in the affair in terms that are so existential and hypothetical that they baffle the authorities and lead to his withdrawal from the school. In the frequent moments of solitude and self-examination that occur in the book, thoughts and emotions move like vast cloudy weather fronts within Törless's mind, unsettling him and comforting him at the same time (he takes comfort in the fact that this kind of introspection is his own peculiar distinction). To reinforce the autobiographical interpretation given in the previous paragraph, there was an erotic triangle within his own parents' home, and there were probable fumbling erotic antics between Musil and his childhood friend Gustl Donath (the model for "Walter" of "The Man without Qualities"); these are alluded to in the Notebooks. Such biographical facts get transformed in "Törless" into a rather brutal homoerotic set of relationships. (I.e., again, personal relationships from Musil's life serve as models for fictional ones, undergoing suitable transformations to make them consistent with the facts of the stories and the psychological make-up of the characters.) In the same fashion the admission that Musil makes of a life-long "psychologically incestuous" relationship with his own mother appears in one or another guise in "Törless", "Tonka" (from "Five Women"), and "The Man without Qualities" and is constantly worked over in the Notebooks.

The book is, I think, as incomplete as its famous successor, but this is the incompletion of youth. With regard to "The Man without Qualities" Musil may have come to believe that it could not be brought to a satisfactory conclusion (although he was still determined to do this at the time of his death in 1942) because he himself did not know how to put a lid on the "possibilities" of Ulrich's relationship with Agathe; or because he came to believe that "incompletion" was a correct and desirable ending for a novel which would also be a guide to the creation of a new sort of human personality. The incompletion of "Törless" stems from the typical problem of first novels of this sort (i.e., novels in the German tradition of the Bildungsroman) - the lack of distance and the inability to achieve a useful ironic detachment toward one's recent adolescent past, which has an intensity and turbulence that have not yet receded when the work is undertaken.

The translation by Shaun Whiteside is good, and there is an excellent brief introduction by the novelist J. M. Coetzee. Admirers of "The man Without Qualities" (I am one such, but no longer an "unqualified admirer" as I was in my own youth) should read "Törless" and Musil's other novellas (published in English as "Five Women") and his play "The Enthusiasts", all in the light of the Notebooks as a sort of Talmudic companion-piece, to arrive at a fuller understanding and appreciation of the "big book". A final note -- the three-stars rating I give this work is to be understood as a "within Musil category", that is, a rating that is relative to better (more ambitious, psychologically and stylistically) works such as "Five Women" and to the very best work, "The Man without Qualities". (I don't think Musil would quibble with this kind of evaluation himself; the Notebooks indicate his dissatisfaction with and desire to revise certain passages from "Törless" immediately after it was published, especially in the language he used for Törless's cloudy musings about his own recent past and about the "other reality".)

Musil's 1908 novel is a masterpiece about the discovery of and the abuse of power (physical, emotional, sexual). Törless is a young man attending a private school, where he befriends two rough characters, Reiting and Beineberg. The two target the weaker Basini after it's discovered he's been stealing, and the torture and manipulation begins. At first, Törless watches and participates in a listless, detached fashion. He's intrigued by the moral and philosophical dilemmas of committing evil, but this eventually turns to distaste as the beastliness and grotesqueness of their collective actions against Basini mount. Törless begins to empathize with Basini, and after following Beineberg and Reiting's lead and having sex with Basini, young Törless wakes up and disconnects abruptly from his former friends. Perhaps Törless needed these interactions in order to figure out his own path in life? There's much grist for discussion here, and it's certainly not an easy book in subject or language. I read an earlier translation than the one here, but I expect it to be the same. Other books this reminded me of include Garland's "The beach", Gide's "The immoralist", Mann's "Death in Venice", Hesse's "Steppenwolf", and "Lord of the flies".

As the specialized critics have established this short novel was a preparation for Musil's tour de force "The Man without qualities", in spite of that Musil had written a masterpiece of deutsch literature of the XXth century.

The story of the young student Torless penetrates in the deepness of human nature, the lad's philosophical dissertations about math made the reader understand the limits of rational thinking and his refined sensibility toward beauty and friendship made us remembered Achilles and Patroclus agapic love in the Iliad.

To sum up, if anyone desires to read a penetrating story about the complexity of beauty in modern times; Musil's novel based in its own experience as cadet in a military academy is a suitable answer to his preys.

"The Confusions of Young Torless" reminds me of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies". Though I sometimes sympathize with "Young Torless", I like him much less than Stephen Dedalus of "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce or Holden Caulfield of "Catcher in the Rye"by J.D. Salinger. Though I remember very little about it, there could be an affinity with John Knowles "A Separate Peace". I do remember an atmosphere of violent cruelty and adolescent cowardice which binds "Torless" to both "Lord of the Flies" and "A Separate Peace". I admire all of these authors for focusing so acutely on the sensually disturbed adolescent male--spot-on each and every one of them!

I first read this book over 10 years ago, when I came across it by chance (bookshop browsing). Since then I have read it every few years and am impressed every time. This book is about as high-brow as it gets, but it is not pretentious or gratuitously intellectual. Rather, it is an authentic analysis of a sadomasochistic mind-set, mysticism, and the sense of not-belongingness/social alienation. The latter aspects of this book are compellingly dealt with but what sets this book apart is that the psychology of sadomasochistic desire is so impressively explored - I do not know of any other writer who has demonstrated such intuition. Note, this is a rather dark and ultra-intellectual book, so although the homoerotic and latently sadomasochistic erotic content is there, if that is all you're looking for you will very disappointed. Musil is a subtle writer, and it is the mind he examines, not the flesh.

Robert Musil is best-known for a very long novel (A Man Without Qualities) that few people have read. Young Törless is his first novel, as concise as it is memorable. Rather than a sprawling overview of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this chilling little novel focuses on the insecurities and corruptions of young man in a boarding school. Whether you take an interest in it for the metaphors of international power struggles (no coincidence that the "feminine," exploited boy is Italian), the sadistically expressed homosexuality of these upper class kids, or the psychological study of adolescent angst at the turn of the 20th century, it's a compelling read. It was made into a film in 1966 by Volker Schlöndorff, with music by Hans Werner Henze.

Robert Musil is one of the 20th century's greatest prose stylists, and one of its gigantic chroniclers. I hate to have to compare him with others--in a sense that's a senseless enterprise--but because he is still relatively unknown I feel compelled to say he's the peer of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, et al. This is his first novel and it's strange, strange indeed, but I loved it. Have read it twice. The character of Basini is fascinating, as are the "confusions" and introspections of Torless. The ending is wonderful. Musil gives us no falseness. His is a diamond-eye.