Musil's Imaginary Bridge

1. IntroductionIf it is trae that Musil wrote Torless "out of boredom"1-after leaving a career in the army, earning a degree in mechanical engineering, completing a year of compulsory military service, taking up a research assistantship at Stuttgart's Technical University, and patenting an ingenious chromatometer just for the purpose of earning the financial security necessary to "buy freedom,"2 quitting the job, and going back to school to study philosophy and psychology-it is hard to see any sign of it. In many ways, it could have been a mundane exercise in genre writing, and of a genre that in central Europe had been popular for almost two decades when Musil's debut novel appeared in 1906. The setting wasn't that original, either. The military academies that came out of the reform of Kakania's education system provided a common milieu for this sort of Bildungsroman. Even Rilke had just published 'Die Turnstunde'3 -and Rilke's story reflects his traumatic experience at the very same boarding school where Musil spent the three miserable years that inspired Torless: the infamous senior academy in Mahrisch-Weiskirchen, the real-world W., the "a-hole of the Devil."4 Nonetheless, Musil's novel was not just an exercise in the genre. And it was not self-admiration that led literary critic Alfred Kerr (who had helped Musil with the final revisions and patronized the publication) to write a six-column review in Der Tag describing Torless as a "masterful" and psychologically sophisticated disclosure of Musil's "literary vocation."5 The vocation was there and one could see its imprint on every page, regardless of Musil's lingering misgivings about his own talent and regardless of how bored he might have been with his life as a mechanical engineer. After all, he had meanwhile gone to Berlin to study philosophy and psychology and would soon complete his doctorate, but when Meinong offered him an assistantship at the University of Graz, at the end of 1908, Musil decided to turn it down to focus on his literary projects: "My love for artistic literature is no less than my love for science," he explained politely.6Exactly what kind of love and literary vocation was driving the young engineer-psychologist-philosopher is, of course, a different question. In his first, unsuccessful efforts to find a publisher, Musil tried to explain that his manuscript was "struggling towards a new way of writing,"7 but that doesn't help much. The plot itself is rather meager, the focus being entirely on the inner responses of young Torless (we are never told his first name and exact age) to a collage of more or less distressing events: a classmate being caught thieving money; the blackmailing and vicious punishments to which the thief is subjected; homosexual and heterosexual experiences, the latter with an aging and degraded local prostitute; the inability to accept the web of values and prejudices in which the grownups have spun themselves up; and more. All of this made Torless a perfect candidate for a Bildungsroman at the twilight of nineteenth-century certainties. Yet Musil was worried that "the good, tolerant, literary audience" would be disappointed and would complain that "the novel falls short of developing its bold but rather promising theme."8 More importantly, he was worried his readers would just not get it. "[Tjhey will find things 'that do not even belong in a novel'. An excursus on irrational numbers, etc."9 This is precisely the worry that interests me here. Why, indeed, that odd mathematical excursus in the middle of everything? What is it about and what purpose does it serve? What does it tell us about Torless? What does it tell us about Musil's emerging literary vocation?2. An Excursus on Imaginary NumbersThe excursus takes place right in the middle of the story, after one more description of the sort of brutal humiliation to which Basini, the pupil who had been caught stealing, was subjected by Torless and his two comrades, Beineberg and Reiting. …