Tag Archives: Robert Musil

‘Groping into emptiness’: stories by Robert Musil

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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

Nervous romanticism: Robert Musil, Young Törless

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Robert Musil, Young Törless. Translated from the German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, ed. Burton Pike. Part 1 of Selected Writings in the series The German Library, vol. 72 (The Continuum Publishing Co., New York, 1995).

 Robert Musil was born in Austria in 1880 and died in Switzerland in 1942. He’d been living in Germany, but left with his Jewish wife to escape the monstrosities of the Nazis and their dictators. There are ominous foreshadowings of this regime in his novel Young Törless.

Musil began working on it when he was in his early twenties. There is a plot of sorts – an adolescent boy is caught stealing from his fellow pupils at a swanky, stuffy military academy for boys (the setting is evidently based on Musil’s own unhappy education). A small group of them begin a campaign of sadistic, increasingly sexual torment and bullying of their victim, Basini.

Robert Musil, Young Törless coverTörless has become a member of this group, but he’s always something of an outsider. He joins in with some of the homoerotic torture and sexual violence, but finds himself curiously aroused but simultaneously repelled by his reactions – and those of the other boys involved.

This is where the prediction of what arose in post-war Germany emerges. Two of the boys who persecute Basini anticipate the lust for power of the Nazis, and their contempt for those they consider lesser beings. One of them, Beineberg, says to Törless, when he’d shown half-hearted signs of concern about their cruel treatment of Basini:

People like Basini…signify nothing – they are empty, accidental forms. True human beings are only those who can penetrate into themselves.

A page or two later (there are some very long conversations in this narrative) he goes on:

The very fact that I find it hard to torture Basini – I mean to humiliate him, debase him, and cast him away from me – is good. It requires a sacrifice. It will have a purifying effect. I owe it to myself to learn daily, with him as my material, that merely being human means nothing – it’s a mockery, a mere external semblance.

Along with a whiff of Nietzshe’s ubermensch here, there’s also the vaguely oriental Buddhism which Beineberg learned from his father. His pose of strutting, heartless supremacy is validated by his spurious, self-justifying mysticism. So much for the master race.

Törless is sensitive and intelligent enough to see through this egomaniacal tosh. His quest for enlightenment takes him in the direction of metaphysics and science, and, in particular, mathematics (and its sister, philosophy). In a scene of bathetic comic brilliance he’s disillusioned by his lacklustre, intellectually limited maths teacher. Infinity and ‘imaginary numbers’ remain another unsolved mystery.

The novel has been translated in some editions as The Confusions of Young Törless; this sums up quite well its theme. The protagonist is a searcher, looking for some kind of cosmic solution to the problems of the soul and the world.

So far he’s not so different from most precocious, intelligent young men. What’s fascinating about this strange, unsettling novel is that he’s not quite smart or mature enough to recognise his own shortcomings. He tries reading Kant, and gives up. His ‘confusions’ torment him, he feels, more than his friends torment the hapless Basini. But he’s too callow and complacent to make the effort required to transcend them.

There’s something of the aesthete and decadent about him. He tends to wallow in his darkling state. Time and again our narrator, with a touch perhaps of irony, describes the existential void into which Törless gazes, like a post-Romantic poet on opium: he feels ‘the horror of emptiness’ on confronting ‘some insoluble enigma and some inexplicable kinship for which he could never quite produce any evidence.’

His uneasiness resides ultimately in the failure of language: ‘words meant nothing.’ He recalls marvelling as a child at a landscape and exclaiming to his father how beautiful it was, then being overcome with embarrassment at his emotional outburst:

It was the failure of language that caused him anguish, a half-awareness that the words were merely accidental, mere evasions, and never the feeling itself.

‘Anguish’ is a word that is often used of Törless in these musings. His confusions might begin to seem ‘tangibly comprehensible’, but he could never  entirely

resolve them into words and ideas. Between events and himself, indeed between his own feelings and some inmost self that craved understanding of them, there always remained a dividing-line, which receded before his desire, like a horizon, the closer he tried to come to it.

Young Törless is no embryonic TS Eliot. I don’t know if the translators deliberately alluded to ‘The Hollow Men’ in this passage. Whatever, our young decadent is clearly relishing his spiritual dilemma like a connoisseur. He dabbles in morality and ethics, but there’s always something of the dilettante about these dabblings.

I’m not sure how far Musil wanted us to side with his young intellectual aesthete. My own feeling is that he’s intrigued by him, shares much of his philosophical ‘anguish’, but also sees the pretentiousness.

I haven’t yet read what’s said to be Musil’s masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities; a fellow blogger recommended I start with Young Törless. I presume because it contains in embryo what I’ve read about it… whatever it is, that huge, unfinished expressionist-modernist novel. Törless struggles and ultimately fails to connect feelings and actions to his ultra-sharp intellect. The narrator hints that he succeeded later in life, when he’d outgrown these immature indulgences.

Meanwhile he wallows in the pleasure derived from dismissing values, moral and ethical constraints as irrelevant for someone as exquisitely sensitive as him.

Herman Bahr, writing about the literary-artistic scene in Vienna in 1891, declared the ‘bondage’ and ‘pain’ of reality had to be escaped, that ‘the supremacy of naturalism is over…its spell is broken’. He summed up classicism and its view of humanity as ‘reason and feeling’; romanticism was ‘passion and the senses’; out of these emerged modernism, which is nerves. Young Törless is a prototype of what Bahr called ‘nervous romanticism.’ Or is it nervous mysticism? When ‘nervousness’ becomes completely liberated, humans, especially artists, become ‘subordinate to the nerves, without regard for the rational and sensuous’, and then ‘the lost joy will return to art.’ Törless would surely endorse that strange view, which sounds a bit hysterical.

‘Nervioso’ in Spanish doesn’t really mean ‘nervous’ – it’s edgier than that. I presume it’s the same in German. Not so hysterical.

Herman Bahr, ‘The overcoming of naturalism’ HERE

Melissa at Bookbinder’s Daughter blog May 2019 HERE

Volker Schlöndorff directed a film of the novel in 1966.