"Lieutenant Gustl" - Arthur Schnitzler innovates

Arthur Schnitzler’s longish story “Lieutenant Gustl” (1900) is commonly considered the first pure piece of stream-of-consciousness fiction, meaning that all of the usual information of the story, the plot, characters, setting, and so on, with one crucial exception, is provided somewhere in the supposed thoughts of the title character.

No cheating, then – no narrator, no background, nothing that would not be part of the thoughts of this character at this moment.  So an extra degree of cleverness is required to turn the mental chaos into a coherent story with all of the usual features.

The exception is the first thing I see, the title, which at least suggests the possibility that the lines that begin the story belong to a fellow named Gustl with the title of lieutenant:

How much longer is this thing going to last?  Let’s see what time it is… perhaps I shouldn’t look at my watch at a serious concert like this.  But no one will see me.  If anyone does, I’ll know he’s paying just as little attention as I am.  In that case I certainly won’t be embarrassed…  (251, ellipses all in the original)

A time, a place, a little bit of insight into the shallow ego of the character.  I might question  the coherence of the sentences – “perhaps I shouldn’t”? – and wonder about those ellipses but it is easy enough to go along with the conceit, to accept that the text does not reproduce but at least resembles thought.

Gustl looks at his program, looks for pretty girls, and lets slip that “day after tomorrow I might be dead as a corpse” (252).  He does not have a great talent for metaphor, this guy.  Since it is a Schnitzler story about an army officer, a duel is as a matter of course part of the story.  How Schnitzler hated dueling.

But then I, like the character, am surprised.  Gustl is a jerk in the coat-check line and is quietly reprimanded, insulted, by a baker who is clearly used to dealing with hothead officers.  A duel with a lowly baker is out of the question, so there is only one way to erase the stain on Gustl’s honor.

Most of the remaining two-thirds of the story consists of Gustl wandering around central Vienna planning his suicide, his thoughts flitting to his mother, his career, women he has known or not (“A window is being opened up there. – Pretty creature. – Well I would at least put on a shawl or something when I go to an open window,” 271).  I was constantly reminded of Mrs. Dalloway, since Schnitzler anticipates so many of Woolf’s technical flourishes.

I doubt that Woolf or Joyce or Dorothy Richardson had any idea what Schnitzler had done.  I doubt Schnitzler had any idea.  Woolf et. al . were looking for solutions to a more general artistic problem of the representation of consciousness.  Schnitzler was looking for a novelty hit (and also a way to follow the thinking, such as it is, of this particular nitwit).  The great clue is the nimble twist ending.  Under the innovative wrapping, “Lieutenant Gustl” is a first-rate Maupassant story.

Schnitzler would write a longer and more complex stream-of-consciousness novella, Fraulein Else, but that was not until 1924.  It is curious to see what would later, in English, be thought of as an important breakthrough in literary technique treated by Schnitzler as one more demonstration of his cleverness.  “One more” meaning: more clever Schnitzler tomorrow.

Quotations from the version in the German Library Plays and Stories of Arthur Schnitzler, tr. Richard L. Simon and Caroline Wellbery, Continuum, 1982.