263. The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil

If one seeks to satisfy his desire diligently and ambitiously, and if he goes a step farther anytime it is attained, one could lose himself. This seems to be the message of Robert Musil's The Confusions of Young Torless (Penguin Classics, 2001 (FP: 1906) translation by Shaun Whiteside; 160). Musil's story is about sexual repression, oppression and its covert expression. It is the sexual expression of power and the depression that results when it is repressed. Though published in the early twentieth century, Musil discusses several of today's sexual roles and identities: gender trap, homosexuality, and sadism. The latter is talked about with regards to the power it affords the oppressor.

Torless is in a boarding house for boys. He is developing sexually and is bothered by thoughts of sex and his sexuality. As these ideas and thoughts inundate him, he is forced to seek refuge from every possible source but her parents, whose faces he could no longer conjure no matter how hard he tried. His first source, in his quest for an answer, is mathematics, which leads him to philosophy. Torless is afraid to think about his own feelings for what he will discover. For he finds himself attracted to Beineberg, his schoolmate, and indifferent to the whore they have both sneaked out to patronise. This feeling repels and scares him in equal measure. It confuses him. He is unable to explain it and does not know the implication. But he shies away from interrogating it and is therefore unable to understand what it is. 

You'll only ever be half-way there! Finding something a bit strange, shaking your head a bit, being a shit shocked - that's your way; you don't dare go beyond it. [92]

Torless seems to suggest that for one to live a normal life, one must regulate the depth to which one wants to explore one's desires or the extent to which one wants to obey them. Yet, the more he refuses to interrogate that feelings, that emotion drawing him closer to his friend, the deeper the torments. The torment increases with the clear lack of means to discuss his feelings and, in the process, learn about himself. First, he is trapped by a society that expects him to be a man and behave in a certain way; second, he is trapped by a body he feels unconnected with; and third, expressing his feelings within the broader laws of the society will mean living on the peripherals of society.

In his skin, all over his body, a feeling awoke that suddenly turned into a remembered image. When he had been very small - yes, yes that was it - when he had still worn little dresses and before he went to school, there were times when he felt a quite inexpressible longing to be a girl. And that longing wasn't in his head - oh no - and it wasn't in his heart - it tingled throughout his whole body and ran all over his skin. Yes, there were times when he felt so vividly like a girl that he thought he must really be one. [96]

This furtive feeling, which Torless has been afraid of interrogating, of confronting, bursts out from him when, in his presence, his two friends - Reiting and Beineberg - sexually molest Basini, as payment for keeping a secret they have come to posses. This is where Musil merges abuse and absolute power. The three friends have identified Basini as the person behind the numerous theft cases the students have been experiencing. He is living beyond his means and needs the money to pay off debts and free himself from harassment.

Armed with this secret, the the three friends became powerful and exercised complete control over Basini, who, afraid of being sacked, allowed them to do to him as they wished. The sadistic abuse, expressed through their secret knowledge of his affairs, became a constant event in Basini's evenings. Whereas Reiting sexually abused him, Beineberg used him for every metaphysical experiment his warped mind could conjure. It was at Torless's first appearance at this esoteric performances, especially of Reiting's sexual abuse, that his sexual craving for a male body began to manifest itself. Torless felt his manhood respond to the sounds emanating from the abuse, and it dawned on him that he had been gay all along. All he had done had been to repress that feeling; not look beyond what is allowable. Trapped in this confusion - his inability to fully express his gayness, for fear of society, and his inability to fully control it - Torless became depressed. 

Reiting's sexual abuse and Beineberg's warped experiments show the depth of human wickedness, especially by those who possess absolute power. Our quest to express what we might not be - for it was the quest to be manly that set each of the four (including Basini) on this destructive path - could have disastrous effects on us. Here the similarity between Torless's clique and the Nazis who came to power, almost a decade after the book's publication, is striking.

Musil also explored that which makes people succumb to such treatments, as Basini did. Torless having now softened towards Basini, from his newly discovered yet unfulfiled affection, was worried about Basini's inability to prevent his daily tortures. He was disturbed by Basini's ability to normalised something as grievous as what he was going through.

'But the first time with Reiting? When he demanded things of you for the first time? Do you understand...?'
'Oh, it was certainly unpleasant, because everything was an order. And then...just imagine how many people do that kind of thing for fun, and no one knows anything about it. It's not so bad in comparison.'
'But you carried out the order. You humiliated yourself. As if you would be willing to crawl in the mud because someone else wanted you to.'
'I admit it. But I had to.'
'No, you didn't have to.'
'They'd have beaten me, they'd have reported me; all kinds of scandals would have landed on my head.' [116]

However, Torless realised that had he found himself in the same situation, he would not have reasoned any differently from Basini. And this realisation and conclusion of the matter worried him the more. 

No, what matters isn't how I would act, but the fact that if I really did act like Basini, I'd feel it was every bit as normal as he does. That's the important thing: my sense of myself would be just as straightforward, just as unambiguous as his... [118]

Later, Basini independently responded to Torless's repressed affection towards him. However, this response came from a person whose mind had been rewired and who wanted to move into the realms of depravity. Basini had seen through the cloak of manliness that shrouded Beineberg and Reiting. He saw that they were not as evil as they pretended to be and all that they did to him, though abusive and grave, were mere expressions of their weaknesses. His response to Torless was therefore an attempt to elicit more grievous treatments from him - he wanted someone who would despised him more.

But Basini pleaded. 'Oh, don't be like that again! There isn't anyone like you. They [Reiting and Beineberg] don't despise me like you do; they only pretend to, so they can be different again afterwards. And you? You of all people...? ... You're even younger than I am, although you're stronger. We're both younger than the others... I love you...!' .... 'Oh... do... please... oh, it would be a pleasure to serve you.' [121]

Not only did Basini normalised his position as an abused person, he accepted it and was prepared to do more. He was prepared to add whatever Torless was ready to do to what the others were already doing. Basini was, thus, changed. However, as stated, Basini himself set on this path towards his own destruction because he wanted to prove a manliness he did not have. He perhaps also suppressing his homosexual tendencies.

'Listen, I know you've spent a lot of money at Bozna's. You opened up to her, you bragged to her, you boasted of your manliness. So you want to be a man? Not just with your mouth and your... but with the whole of your soul? Look all of a sudden someone asks you to perform a humiliating service like that, and the same moment you feel you're too cowardly to say no: didn't your whole being feel torn asunder? Wasn't there some vague terror, as though something unspeakable had happened inside you?' [116-7]

The ending to the story is fascinating and indicates how perceptions, values, and learning affects the decoding and interpretation of information and, therefore, the understanding of issues. In the end, the abused Basini was dismissed, the oppressors won, and Torless became the genius. But for him, he had looked deeper enough. He was not prepared to look farther than he had done. That is, Torless could not resolve the two sides of his feelings - the reasonableness of society and his own contra-feelings; he chose not to compare, in order to remain sane but rather learnt to live with both.

'Now that is past. I know that I was indeed mistaken. I'm not afraid of anything any more. I know: things are things and will remain so for ever; and no doubt I will see them and now one way, now another. Now with the eyes of reason, now with those other eyes... And I will no longer try to compare the two...' [157]

Musil wrote the story from the point of view of Torless; he completely captured the thought processes that converged into and determined his actions. He captures, absolutely, the helplessness that results from a young boy's inability to understand himself and see himself different from the masses. The book is filled with philosophical discourse on sex and sexuality and also on power.

#Quotes from Robert Musil's The Confusions of Young Torless

For early in the development of every fine moral force there is such a point, when the soul weakens, and that will perhaps be its boldest moment - as though it must first put down searching roots in order to churn up the earth destined later to support it - which is why adolescent boys with great futures ahead of them possess a past rich in humiliations. [24-5]

If Bozena had been pure and beautiful, and if he had been capable of love in those days, he might have bitten her, heightening both her lust and his own to the point of pain. For the first passion of the adolescent boy is not love of one, but hatred for all. That sense of being misunderstood, of not understanding the world, not only goes hand in hand with the first passion, but is also its only non-arbitrary cause. And it too is a form of flight, in which two people's togetherness means only the duplication of their solitude. [31]

Almost every first passion lasts only a short while and leaves a bitter aftertaste. It is a mistake, a disappointment. Afterwards one doesn't understand oneself, and doesn't know whom to blame. This is because the relationships between the protagonists in this drama are largely arbitrary: they are chance companions in flight. Once things have calmed down they no longer recognize one another. They become aware of oppositions between themselves, because they are no longer aware of what they have in common. [31]

Sitting by the open window at night and feeling abandoned, feeling different from the grown-ups and adults; feeling misunderstood by every laugh and every mocking look, being unable to explain to anyone what one meant, and longing for someone who might understand ... that is love! But you have to be young and lonely for that. [35]

He seems to me just to have been created at random, apart from the usual way of things. That is - even he must mean something, but only something vague, like a worm or a stone in our path, which we don't know whether to step on or kick aside. And that's as good as nothing. Because if the world-soul wishes one of its parts to be preserved, it says so more clearly. It says no, and creates an obstacle, it makes us walk around the worm, it makes the stone so hard that we can't break it without a hammer. Because by the time we go and get one it will have interposed a host of small, stubborn considerations, and if we can overcome them, then the whole business meant something else from the start. [60-1]

These grown-ups and clever people have completely spun themselves into a web, one stitch supporting the next, so that the whole miracle looks entirely natural; but no one knows where the first stitch is, the one that holds everything up. [91]

He did not think, with the affability that comes with moral reflection, of telling himself that after suffering a humiliation every human being has the potential at least to try to appear casual and confident as quickly as possible. [101]

[A]nything that looks big and mysterious from afar always arrives as something simple and undistorted, in natural, everyday proportions. It is as though an invisible frontier has been drawn around each human being. Something that has been prepared elsewhere and which approaches from afar, is like a misty sea full of giant, changing forms; what approaches the person, becomes action, impacts against one's life, is small and distinct, with human dimensions and human features. And between the life that is lived and the life that is felt, sensed and seen from a long way off, that invisible frontier lies like a narrow door, through which the images of events must cram themselves together in order to enter the human being. [120]

In solitude everything is permitted. [122]

And would you wish to count the hours of degradation that are branded on the soul after any great passion? Just think of the hours of deliberate humiliation in love! Those enraptured hours that lovers spend leaning over certain deep wells, or placing their ears to one another's hearts, listening for the sound of the great, unsettled cats clawing against the dungeon walls? Just to feel themselves trembling! Just to fear being alone above those dark, fiery depths! Just suddenly - out of fear of their own loneliness with those dark forces - to seek refuge within one another! [128]

Things happen: that's wisdom in its entirety. [143]

Because thoughts are something special. Often they are nothing more than accidents that pass away without leaving a trace, and thoughts, too, have their times to live and to die. We can have a flash of insight, and then, slowly, it fades beneath our touch like a flower. The form remains, but the colours, the scent are missing. We remember them word for word, and the logic of the sentence is completely unimpaired, and yet it drifts ceaselessly around on the surface of our minds and we feel none the richer for it. Until - perhaps several years later - all of a sudden another moment comes when we see that in the meantime we have known nothing of it, although logically we knew everything. [155-6]
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