Robert Musil (1880-1942), Selected Writings: Stories, ed. Burton Pike. Continuum (New York) 1995. The German Library vol. 72. Translated from the German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser

It was Tony at Tony’s Book World whose recommendation I followed in starting with Young Törless (published 1906; my post on it from a few years ago is HERE). I’ve now carried on with his next recommendation, moving on to these stories in the same volume (link to his post HERE) by Austrian author Robert Musil.

‘The Perfecting of a Love’ was first published with another novella in 1911;  ‘Grigia’, ‘Tonka’ and ‘The Lady from Portugal’ were published as Drei Frauen (Three Women) in 1924. They all deal, in various ways with the tensions and connections between eroticism and transcendence. If that sounds too grandiose, I suppose it’s also true to say they’re about sexual desire and romantic notions of love, and the struggle to reconcile these with a rational, logical understanding of powerful experience.

In the first of these stories a woman leaves her apparently much-loved husband to travel by train alone to visit her young daughter who’s at boarding school. There are suggestions that Claudine has lived a sexually promiscuous life in the past. The daughter was the result of an affair she had before marrying.

On the train she gazes out at the world rushing past her window, feeling her soul ‘groping into emptiness’. She feels also like a climber on a rock-face, contemplating ‘the stony brow of the void’.

As she experiences this existential angst, she’s both attracted to and repelled by a male fellow passenger. When they’re snowed in en route at an inn, she grapples with these conflicting impulses. When she makes a decision, she undergoes a kind of existential epiphany: she sees the encounter as something she can jump into, as over a ‘line’, then jump back – to where it hasn’t happened. At least that’s what I think is going on.

‘Grigia’ and ‘Tonka’ both contain some slightly disturbing portrayals of women as the objects of male sexual desire. Both women are of a lower social class than these men; they are uneducated, and described in terms that associate them with animals.

Grigia’s name, for example, is actually that of her cow. The male protagonist is a mining engineer called by the supremely masculine name ‘Homo’. He’s left his wife and sick child at the invitation of a friend to explore reopening some disused gold mines over the border from Austria in a rural valley in Italy. He quickly picks out Grigia as being the most attractive of the peasant women who have added menial work for the miners to their usual agricultural activities – hence that cow.

Homo’s attitude to these women is decidedly patronising. He sees them as living a feral life; when he sees some of them stacking hay he muses ‘One had only to remember that one was living among savages here’. Unlike Claudine, in the previous story, he has no moral problem with being unfaithful to his wife. Women are like possessions, to be used and controlled. This misogynistic attitude leads him to a sticky end.

There are some extraordinarily strange, poetic and moving passages in this and the other stories. Just after the quotation above about the women as ‘savages’, Homo’s stream-of-consciousness narrative describes the positions in which one can lie in the hay bales:

One can lie in it as in the Hand of God, and would gladly wallow in God’s Hand like a little dog or a little pig. One may lie obliquely, or almost upright like a saint ascending to heaven in a green cloud.

He seems, that is, to be more inspired by the romantic and mystical qualities of the rural scenery than by the women who feature in it.

Questions of sexual fidelity arise again in ‘Tonka’. Once again, the woman protagonist is objectified symbolically by her name, which in this case is ‘not her real name’:

At her baptism she had been given the German name Antonie, and Tonka was the abbreviated form of the Czech diminutive Toninka. The inhabitants of those back streets talked a queer mixture of the two languages.

In other words she’s neither Czech nor German, incomplete, just as Grigia’s name signifies ‘grey’ in Italian, neither black nor white, kind of subhuman. Those ‘back streets’ are the haunt of prostitutes and criminals. Tonka lives there in a tiny, squalid apartment in a building that also houses a brothel. As in ‘Grigia’, then, women are belittled and scorned by men, seen as commodities, with loose morals and feral tendencies. The way they speak (Grigia and Tonka) is symbolic of their uncivilised and hybrid, uncouth natures. The men attracted to these women, being more ‘enlightened’, are repelled by them, the language indicates, as much as they are attracted.

As in ‘Grigia’, the male narrator gives an account of this contradictory erotic situation. Despite his apparent infatuation with her, he comes to doubt her fidelity. The sexual constancy of a sexual or marital partner is therefore a central theme again in this story – and it doesn’t reflect well on the male view that conveys the privileged, unreliable narrating male voice. Even though Tonka is almost stupidly ignorant, in the narrator’s view, she remains a fascinating enigma to him, a romantic fairytale figure that he uses as an irrational justification for his obsession. Her own feelings are barely mentioned; they’re of less interest to this solipsistic, self-deluding man.

‘The Lady from Portugal’ is very different in setting and period. It’s a sort of medieval fable set in another border zone (Italy and Austria again). An aristocratic warlord knight wages a long, vicious fight against the Bishop of Trent’s forces. The story, however, focuses again on the precariousness of sexual fidelity.

In this case the lord suspects his wife (originally from Portugal, so belonging to another world, as Grigia and Tonka were from the men’s pov) of having an affair while he’s away for years on end slaughtering foes. As in the other stories, he’s blissfully unaware of the unfairness of his high-handed treatment of and attitude towards this marital ‘possession’ of his. How dare a person, let alone a woman, betray him? Oh, and there’s a cute, possibly supernatural cat.

These modernist stories didn’t appeal to me too much at first, but perseverance rewards the reader, and their strangeness gradually becomes familiar and pleasing.

Melissa has a long, perceptive essay at The Bookbinder’s Daughter on ‘The Perfecting of a Love’ (translated by Genese Grill as ‘The Completion of Love’) HERE