The Youth Without Qualities

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.-W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"IWritten while Robert Musil was deserting the career trajectory favored by his parents, when he was immersing himself in literature and in philosophy, Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torless, published in 1906, was a success-a surprising success, given its dispassionate, even blunt, account of events at a military boarding school in the provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Musil's protagonist is partially implicated in the sadistic torture of a fellow student, Basini, who later seduces Torless into short-lived homosexual relations. When the bullying becomes unbearable, Basini follows Torless's advice and confesses to the theft that had initially enabled his tormentors to dominate him. Before the authorities begin their investigation of the affair, Torless runs away from the school, and is only found and returned after the principal bullies, Beineberg and Reiting, have successfully convinced the teachers that their "rough justice" was excusable. Basini is expelled, and, after Torless delivers a speech that puzzles his schoolmasters, it is recommended that his education be continued privately. His mother makes the long journey from Vienna to bring him home: Beineberg and Reiting remain.The Confusions of Young Torless (Torless)1 can be read as an indictment of Austrian education in the decades before the first world war. Or, expanding the frame, it can be interpreted as a denunciation of the social and cultural condition of the pre-war "Kaiserlich und Koniglich" (K.u.K) Empire, an overture to the fully operatic treatment of the decline of Austro-Hungarian society ("Kakania") Musil would undertake in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Looking back from the 1930s, the author would view his first novel in those terms, identifying Reiting and Beineberg as prefiguring the dictators and "Putsch-officers" of Fascist Europe.2 Yet if public deficiencies were the principal focus, many lengthy passages in Torless would not be necessary: readers could skip over the pervasive probing of Torless's discomfited reactions or the painful narrative of his attempts to make sense of his thoughts and feelings. Even the title would have been ill-chosen.After little more than a page of scene-setting, Musil plunges us into the mind of his protagonist, and we remain there, viewing characters and events from his perspective, until the evening before he runs away from the school.3 One of the great achievements of Torless is the precision with which the boy's confusions are evoked. So powerful is the treatment of Torless's inner life that it is easy to understand how the novel can be hailed as turning the Bildungsroman in a new direction, toward an anatomy of the "larval existence," out of which a definite self will eventually metamorphose.4 Appreciating the richness of the internal perspective, and simultaneously recognizing the critique of the broader culture, Torless can be understood as combating, and ultimately recovering from, the infections transmitted to him by a corrupt society. Or perhaps we should suppose that, even in his maturity, the sickness and confusion will have left scars and residual weaknesses.5IIIn my judgment, none of these strategies for reading is satisfactory, none penetrates to the heart of Musil's accomplishment. Torless may regard his condition as a larval stage, he may yearn for some future metamorphosis, but it does not follow that the desired transition comes, or that his "sensitive attempt to shape a self out of the cultural dis-ease of late nineteenth-century Austria" culminates in success, that he finds "a way out," "grows beyond his crisis," and becomes "finally prepared to solve the mystery of his own nature". …