Confusions of Young Torless (Penguin Twentieth-century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Moral Drama
Review: "The Confusions of Young Torless" (1906), by Robert Musil (1880-1942), is the poignant story of a young man who leaves his secure conservative farm home in rural Austria, for the prestige and worldlinesss of a private upper-class boys school. He settles easily into his new school, even managing to experience some grown-up pleasures with a local prostitute. He enjoys his new freedom and intellectual stimulation, finding his new environment preferable to the staid life of home, and his new friends more sophisticated than his country parents. He meets two intellectually confident boys, Beineberg, a spiritualist philosopher, and Reiting, a logicalist mathematician, both budding into youthful ideologues, both naively experimental and both youthfully extreme. Torless is drawn to their dominant personalities, and the three form a small club, meeting secretly in an attic storage room, which the rest of the school has long forgotten.

Another boy, Basini, weak-willed and rather spineless, is caught robbing. The boys have heard his mother called "Excellency" during a visit, but for some reason Basini cannot support himself financially. To find money, he borrows it from his friends, but when he cannot repay one, he borrows from another, in an endless deception. Reiting and Beineberg catch Basini at his game, and decide to blackmail him into servitude, exhibiting the casual cruelty boys so naturally inflict upon each other. Each boy tortures Basini according to his own ideology, the philosophical Beineberg trying to manipulate his soul, the mathematical Reiting trying to demonstrate universal theories of humanity. The torture is not just psychological, but also physical, and even sexual. The entire business confuses Torless at first, and shocks him further the more he sees, ultimately forcing him to take sides. Will he join the game as well, or defend Basini himself, or leave all three to their fate? Will Torless adopt the heartless exploratory endeavors of his two intellectual and stimulating friends, or will he rediscover the old-fashioned morals of his common-place parents? And where are the adults during this brutish tableau? Will Torless surrender his friends to the school's authorities, possibly fanning the flames some more? No matter what path Torless might choose, it is clear the outcome will be dramatic.

The writing itself is first-class. An educated psychologist, and an academic contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil demonstrates great skill describing his characters and settings. The boys are drawn in perfect psychological illustrations of reality, the plot episodes effective and well-conceived, and the entire book superbly executed. Contemporary readers will recognize the same struggle in Torless that William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" would explore a half-century later (1954): How do undisciplined youth behave in the absense of guardians?

In "Lord of the Flies", after descending into deadly primitivism, the youth can only be rescued by outside forces. In "Torless", however, the choice rests upon the shoulders of Torless himself, making this drama far more compelling than Golding's. If not for a few brief sexual episodes, the book might be much more widespread among high schools than "Lord of the Flies". Nothing in "Torless" reaches even a portion of the gratuitous frankness of popular culture today, so I only hope more schools will open their eyes to this superior tale soon. The realistic school-house drama of "Torless" speaks more effectively to the modern reader than Golding's abstract fantasy island. This book can easily be recommended to anyone interested in the themes at the heart of this concise (160pp) and well-written novel: the moral struggles of adolescence, the tension of values between a "simple country upbringing" and the "sophisticated upper-class", and the ideologically destructive potential of both ill-conceived philosophy and pseudo-science.

Rating:
Summary: "Miss. Jean Brodie, meet The Lord of the Flies."
Review: A strange and compelling tale surrounding the misdeeds and sexual proclivities of four boys in a European boarding school. Published in 1906, these are indeed the "confusions" of young Torless, a character tormented by a rationalized sense of objective intellectualism and a literal cowardice in the face of tyranny.

Basini, an effeminate teen, is caught stealing by Reiting and Beineberg. These two conniving little bastards, representives of Europe's ever pervasive fascisim, decide to "punish" Basini themselves, believeing themselves to be conducting an experiment of sorts - "how far can we take this?" What follows is a series of scenes which depict the beating, sexual dominance and systematic breaking down of Basini's pysche. Throughout these events our young Torless, a mostly silent witness to the continuative events, is tortured by his own homosexual longings for the beautiful Basini. Their relationship is consummated in a very delicately rendered scene (Shaun Whiteside's translation is expert throughout). Conflicted by his sexual longings and their inherent ramifications (one must remember this behavior was considered both scandalous and ruinous), Torless betrays his lover. In an effort to disassociate himself from all three "nefarious" characters, Torless attemps to divorce himself from all comlicity in the foregoing and subsequent torture of Basini.

Musil has illustrated with great clarity the cacophony of conflicting emotions which plague most adolescent males. That Torless is confused is apparent, that his betrayal of Basini was on a much grander scale than those of his fellows is just as apprently lost on him. Perhaps a better title for this novel would have been "The Amoralist."

Rating:
Summary: excellent intro to underrated author
Review: Things just happen : that's the sum total of wisdom.
-Torless, Young Torless

Torless, the young man of the title, leaves home to attend a boarding school in turn of the century Austria. For the first time he is freed from the moral influence of his parents and is left to his own devices, with disastrous results. At first he is merely homesick, but:

Later, as his 'homesickness' became less violent and gradually passed off, this, its real character,
began to show rather more clearly. For in its place there did not come the contentment that might
have been expected; on the contrary, what it left in young Torless's soul was a void. And this
nothingness, this emptiness in himself, made him realise that it was no mere yearning that he had
lost, but something positive, a spiritual force, something that had flowered in him under the guise
of grief.

So here is this young man, his soul a void, no parental guidance to help fill the void, and he's just entered a community where he'll be surrounded by his similarly unformed peers. It just doesn't seem likely that much good can come of this situation, nor does it.

The first attachment Torless forms is with a prince from a conservative and religious family, but they become estranged. Subsequently, he experiments with mathematics, philosophy, sexual relations with the local whore, and several other pursuits, in an attempt to fill the void. But, by far, his most important relationship is with two other boys, von Reiting and Beineberg, who have decided to start psychologically, physically and sexually abusing a classmate, Basini, whom they caught stealing money. Beineberg assures Torless:

You needn't be shocked, it's not as bad as all that. First of all, as I've already explained to you,
there's no cause to consider Basini's feelings at all. Whether we decide to torment him or perhaps let
him off depends solely on whether we feel the need of the one or the other. It depends on our own
inner reasons. Have you got any? All that stuff about morality and society and the rest of it, which
you brought up before, doesn't count at all, of course. I should be sorry to think you ever believed
in it yourself. So I assume you to be indifferent.

When Torless later joins in the degradation of Basini he does so for reasons of his own, but it is the character of Beineberg--and his eagerness to exercise power over other, "lesser", beings-- that has earned the book a reputation of having forecast the rise of Nazism. But Torless does take advantage of Basini's situation and begins to exploit Basini for sexual purposes, though he tries to hide this from the other two boys. This leads to a falling out amongst the little gang and the whole sordid story is exposed.

(...)It is interesting to contrast these books with works like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Chosen which depict how difficult it is to raise children so that they are morally centered even if you keep them at home.

Beyond this obvious level, the book can be read as a statement about the general attempt to replace traditional morality. The moral decline that Torless lives out over the course of the novel essentially parallels the descent of modern man--initially cut adrift from family and religion, he passes through varying aspects of scientific rationalism, experiments with the pursuit of mere physical pleasure, and falls under the spell of Beineberg and his theory that all morality is a social construct, that each individual is free to follow his own whims. Several times over the course of the novel, Musil assures us that Torless turns out okay in later life, that after this period of youthful confusion and experimentation, he grows into a sturdier adult. One can only hope that the same will eventually be said of the species.

Musil was writing in the first full blush of Freudianism and the novel is somewhat marred by it's reliance on Freudian themes. One hundred years ago, it may have seemed daring and honest to portray a young man's sexual fantasies about his mother; today, with Freud exposed as a quack and consigned to the ash heap of history, it simply makes Torless seem more aberrant than the author intended.

Still, it's an excellent introduction to the work of a really underrated author. A Man Without Qualities, at least what I've read of it, is even better, a genuinely funny novel of Europe approaching the cataclysm of war and the destruction of the old order.

GRADE: B