Hermann Broch's Vienna - decay leads to the museum

If I think of a culture as a person and then overlay a seasonal metaphor, both of which are misleading ideas, the period from 1860 to 1890 begins to look like Vienna’s Indian summer.  Stifter’s novel again provides a strangely prophetic model (“My collections are getting more complete, the building projects are increasingly receiving their finishing touches”).  The Indian summer is followed by winter, and death.

As attractive as the values of the period can seem to me, I have to ask the same questions I asked about Stifter.  Are we sure that the connection between aesthetics and ethics is so strong?  Is collecting as meaningful an activity as Stifter argues?  Are there risks in an aesthetic focused so strongly on the past?  And fundamentally, are the answers to questions like these the same for individuals and for society?

Aestheticism easily becomes decadent, empty, sterile.  Collecting is almost necessarily neurotic and, like art appreciation more generally, can become, or always is, a device for signaling social status – how good a catch is the guest at my artistic dinner, how visible is my box at the theater.

So were the aestheticized Viennese more like Green Henry, reading and re-reading their second-hand collected Goethe until it is torn from their hands, or more like Törless’s family, who store Goethe “in the bookcase with the green glass panes” that “was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor”?

Hermann Broch, in his critical study Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time (1974)*, argues for the latter, vociferously:  “Was this really nothing but the roast chicken era, a period of pure hedonism and sheer decoration of life?” (59).  Vienna and its “gelatin democracy” (78) was the purest example of the European “value vacuum.”  It “was really far less a city of art than a city of decoration par excellence” where “[p]oetry was an affair of gold-edged books on the parlor table” (60).

Broch, born in 1886, is describing the generation of his parents.  I have written admiringly about the artistic institutions they created, the art museum and the opera.  Exactly the problem, says Broch:

In fulfillment of its duty to tradition, Vienna confused culture with “museumness” [Museumshaftigkeit] and became a museum to itself (unfortunately not in its architecture, where it was guilty of the most outrageous devastations).  Because Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert had miraculously converged on this spot, had been treated badly and nevertheless composed, Vienna set itself up as a musical institution…  The “museumish” was reserved for Vienna, indeed as a sign of its ruin, the sign of Austrian ruin.  For in despondency decay leads to vegetating, but in wealth it leads to the museum.  (61)

The tone of this passage should look familiar to readers of later Austrian literature.  I feel bad about omitting any of it.  Unfortunately, or maybe not, the entire book is not made of this kind of rhetoric.

Broch’s indictment, written from the far side of the horrors of World War II, is ethical.  The Viennese did not achieve the kind of ethical and aesthetic balance Stifter described, but rather used false aesthetic values to “mask” an ethical crisis.  The inevitable aesthetic result was not art but kitsch, and “as the metropolis of kitsch, Vienna also became the metropolis of the value vacuum of the epoch” (81).  And kitsch leads to, well, to Nazis (“the dance of apocalyptic ruin,” 175).  Art can also be the source of ethics, though; true art, of course, not kitsch.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and other artists, Broch and his generation. are thus engaged in a kind of struggle to fill the ethical vacuum created by their parents.  They mostly lose.

Broch has an outstanding definition of kitsch, by the way - “music in which cowbells ring is kitsch” (16, from “Artistic Style as the Style of the Epoch,” 1919).

*  Written 1947-50 and published in pieces.

As though by lecherous women in high-necked long robes - Musil's metaphors, or revisiting the limits of language

This has been my third time through The Confusions of Young Törless.  I have read it at ten year intervals.  The book is rich, so of course I make new discoveries every time, although I am not sure if that is because I read it better or because I have just read more – more relevant texts, more Goethe or philosophy or German novellas.

I have certainly not solved the puzzle of the novel, which is how its different pieces work together, how the political parable meshes with the philosophical novel and the Bildungsroman and the homosexuality.  This week I have deliberately fragmented the pieces, in part because I am not sure that they all fit together so well.

But they do work to form a novel, because they are all pulled together by Robert Musil’s style.  He is not, at this point, a first-rate stylist – I mean, he is not Flaubert or Proust – but he has some good tricks.

Musil’s physical world in Törless is plain and functional.  He is good with space.  That tradition of 19th century novellas was always good at placing its characters in space.  But the main feature of the novel is a constant swing between the outside world and Törless’s jumbled interior.   Similarly the narrator sometimes shares that interior with the character and sometimes is commenting on it like a trained analyst:

Törless’s taste for certain moods was the first hint of a psychological development that was later to manifest itself as a strong sense of wonder…  Indeed, the more accurately he circumscribed his feelings with thoughts, and the more familiar they became to him, the stranger and more incomprehensible did they seem to become, in equal measure…  (etc. etc., 28-9, ellipses mine)

The narrator is more confident in his judgment than Törless but has as much trouble describing the state and process of the boy’s thoughts.  Which is, let’s face it, a challenging task.  The narrator might actually be Törless (as an adult).  Never mind that.

The tool that moves Musil from the analytic to the artistic is his use of metaphor:

And Törless felt that under that immovable, dumb vault he was quite alone, a tiny speck of life under that vast, transparent corpse. (i.e., the sky, 92)

It [T.’s “sense of urgency”] was something that was encircled by a whirling throng of emotions, as though by lecherous women in high-necked long robes, with masks over their faces.  (168)

One phase of development was at an end; the soul had formed another annual ring, as a young tree does.  (202)

Metaphorical language of this sort is not common in the novel but is reserved for moments of unusual tension, whether Törless is at an impasse or making a breakthrough.  Musil, like Törless, finds language inadequate to directly describe how Törless feels, but as an artist he has another path: he can show what the feelings are like.  By moving away from the thing itself, the writer moves his reader closer to it.  Language is inherently imperfect; the writer makes art out of the imperfections.

It was the failure of language that caused him anguish - the linguistic turn of young Törless

Do I have any grad student readers left?  The Confusions of Young Törless was published  while Robert Musil was working on his PhD at the University of Berlin.  Psychology and philosophy; he finished in 1908, two years after the novel came out.  Just a little something extra he knocked out while working on a philosophy PhD.  So there is some inspiration for the grad students, my little gift to them.

Has any literature been more concerned with the failures of language than Austrian literature?  Hofmannsthal and Broch had crises that led them to abandon this or that form; a Peter Handke novel ends with the narrator abandoning words for abstract symbols; Wittgenstein did whatever it was that he did (I must remain silent).

And young Musil makes young Törless’s crisis of meaning in part a linguistic crisis:

It occurred to him that once, when he had been standing with his father, looking at one of those landscapes, he had suddenly cried out: ‘Oh, how beautiful it is!’ – and then been embarrassed when his father was glad.  For he might just as easily have said: ‘How terribly sad it is.  It was the failure of language that caused him anguish, a half-awareness that the words were merely accidental, mere evasions, and never the feeling itself.  (91)

Much of the novel consists of descriptions of Törless’s thought.  Sometimes he is directly working on an idea; sometimes an experience leads to the idea, as when staring into the sky leads him to question his  received notion of infinity (“now it flashed through him, with startling clarity, that there was something terribly disturbing about this word,” 88).  The process of thinking is more important than the content, and both are believably adolescent, often shallow and unfocused, frequently tangling themselves with Törless’s sexual frustration.  Törless is confused – it says so right in the title!

When he turned round, Basini was standing there naked.

Involuntarily Törless fell back a step.  The sudden sight of this naked snow-white body, with the red of the walls dark as blood behind it, dazzled and bewildered him…  He could not shake off the spell of this beauty.  He had never known before what beauty was. (148)

Unlike his experience with his father, Törless knows that “beauty” is the right word.  Arthur Schopenhauer argued that aesthetic perception was one of the few ways for us to transcend the endless suffering of our existence, however imperfectly.  In this scene and many others, I detect hints of Schopenhauer.  Törless often seems to be working towards Schopenhauer’s ideas without knowing it.

The sex has to wait another fifteen pages (“Then Törless abandoned his search for words,” 163).  If Törless is searching for freedom from his own thoughts, in this scene he finds it, at least temporarily.

The novel ends with a mix of thought and experience:

“What is it, my dear boy?”

“Nothing, Mamma.  I was just thinking.”

And, drawing a deep breath, he considered the faint whiff of scent that rose from his mother’s corseted waist.  (217)

That is a strange word, isn’t it, “considered”?  But after the experiences of the novel, Törless has developed, as characters in Bildungsromanen do, so he is calmer, self-controlled, able to direct his thoughts to a single detail of the objective world, one that just happens to have sexual connotations and involve his mother.  I guess.

What business to I have venturing into philosophy?  Tomorrow, style, literary style, finally, thank goodness.

One thing he did not understand, and that was how anyone could approach this matter in such a long-winded way. - in which I identify with young Törless

The title of The Confusions of Young Törless suggests a relationship with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774), and it would not be too hard to pull together some parallels.  There is a trick, though.  Musil’s actual title is Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Törless.  My German does not have to be very advanced to note that “Zoglings” is capitalized and is therefore not an adjective but a noun.  The Confusions of the Student Törless is closer, or “cadet” maybe.  Now people who actually know German can get to work on alternatives to “confusions” and additional associations of “Zoglings.”

To add to the confusion, the 1966 Volker Schlöndorff film adaptation is called Der junge Törless, or Young Törless.  I cannot just blame the English translators.

Goethe will reappear in a minute.

When I left Törless, he was passively watching his supposed friends bully and torture another student, meanwhile having sex with the victim.  When I left Törless before that, he was being taunted with an unspecified book by Immanuel Kant.  This was supposed to calm his anxiety, but instead it put him “in a state of inward upheaval” (114).  Törless has never read Kant yet knows him well:

Now, in Törless’s hearing the name Kant had never been uttered except in passing and then in the tone in which one refers to some awe-inspiring holy man.  And Törless could not think anything but that with Kant the problems of philosophy had been finally solved, so that since then it had become futile for anyone to concern himself with the subject, just as he also believed there was no longer any point in writing poetry since Schiller and Goethe.  (115)

It gets worse:

At home these men’s works were kept in the bookcase with the green glass panes in Papa’s study, and Törless knew this book-case was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor.  It was like the shrine of some divinity to which one does not readily draw nigh and which one venerates only because one is glad that thanks to its existence there are certain things one need no longer bother about.

Part of the story of Musil’s novel, however circuitously he goes about it, is how Törless gets out from under the crushing weight of German culture, how he cultivates “a longing for quietness, for books” (195).  Even his failures are helpful, as when, stung by the math teacher, he tries to read Kant:

But with all its parentheses and footnotes it was incomprehensible to him, and when he conscientiously went along the sentences with his eyes, it was as if some aged, bony hand were twisting and screwing his brain out of his head.  (118)

He makes it through three pages, with teeth clenched and “sweat on his forehead.”

I do not usually write about how I identify with this or that imaginary bundle of words, but at this point I strongly identified with poor Törless.  I have felt that hand.

I still need a title for my post.  This is appropriate:

One thing he did not understand, and that was how anyone could approach this matter in such a long-winded way.  (78)

Invent your own context, please.

I have a liking for these mass movements - Young Törless and fascism

There have been plenty of novels about fascism; that is clear enough.

The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil’s 1906 debut novel, is one of them.   Except, hold it, in 1906 there was no fascism.  I assume that Musil was such a keen observer of some of the psychology of the proto-fascist movements of his time, like the anti-Semitic political parties that were governing Vienna, that he was able to tease out the direction of events.  Or else the fascist bullies in Young Törless are exact portraits of boys Musil knew in school who just happen to prefigure the future.  Could be.  Either way, it is weird.

Young Törless lives at an isolated boarding school on the Hungarian plains.  The covers of the Penguin Classics edition and the older Pantheon I read include helpful photos that remind me that the students are always in military uniform, at least when they are not naked.

Törless has fallen in with “the boys who counted as the worst of his year,” a bad set, the brutal Reiting and the mystical Beineberg.  Reiting discovers that another boy, Basini, has been stealing, and the trio begin to blackmail Basini.  What Reiting wants from Basini is power; Beineberg wants a specimen on which to test his esoteric theories; Törless, passive, but cruel in his own way, want answers to metaphysical questions.  And sex, they all want sex, which they extract from Basini in one way or another:

“You know that sort of thing, it happens every few years.  But they went a bit too far.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well – how!  Don’t ask such silly questions!  And that’s what Reiting’s doing with Basini!”

Törless suddenly understood what he meant, and he felt a choking in his throat as if it were full of sand.  (75)

This is almost the limit of the novel’s explicitness, in other words wild stuff for 1906, plus it is not quite the limit.  Törless’s response to Beineberg’s news is actually pretty explicit.  One of Törless’s confusions is that he is homosexual, or so I see it, although that is an interpretive question.  Perhaps it is a just a phase in Törless’s development.

It is for Reiting, by contrast, who is simply a monster, with sex as another form of humiliation for when he tires of beating and insulting Basini.  Reiting in his later life will marry a women of his class and chase women below him; he will enter politics, eventually joining the Austrian Nazi Party and rising to a high position after the Anschluss.  Obviously this is not in the novel.  But it is Reiting who says things like “And anyway, I have a liking for these mass movements” (175) while planning a violent public humiliation of Basini.

Reiting is really just a charismatic thug, while Beineberg’s evil is ideological.  He is under the influence of Eastern mysticism and perhaps some form of degenerate Nietzschean thought:

“First of all, as far as Basini goes, it’s me view he’s no loss in any case.  It makes no difference whether we go and report him, or give him a beating, or even if we torture him to death, just for the fun of it.  Personally. I can’t imagine that a creature like that can have any meaning in the wonderful mechanism of the universe.”  (77)

Beineberg calls Basini a worm – step around him or on him, what difference does it make.  At this early point in the novel, it is likely a reader takes this all as adolescent bluster, which it is in part.  But Musil’s novel is also about the other part, the part that acts.

Also, there is the stuff about math.

You see this book. Here is philosophy. For the present I think it would still be a little beyond you - plunging into Robert Musil's Young Törless

Not enough novels are about math; that is clear enough.

The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil’s 1906 debut novel, has some math.

“I say, did you really understand all that stuff?”

“What stuff?”

“All that about imaginary numbers.”

“Yes.  It’s not particularly difficult, is it?  All you have to do is remember that the square root of minus one is the basic unit you work with.”

“But that’s just it.  I mean, there’s no such thing.” (105)

Young Törless is having an intellectual and emotional crisis, in part caused by a simple yet deep linguistic confusion.  He is having difficulty relating the name of a mathematical concept to the thing-itself.  Imaginary numbers are no more imaginary than real numbers are real; both are identically real and imaginary.  René Descartes is endlessly smarter than either Törless or me, but this particular confusion is apparently his fault.  If someone had at some point given the concept a less imaginative name – if imaginary numbers were called “Euler numbers” or “Cardano numbers” – Törless would have to go back to worrying about infinity, which he works on a bit earlier in the novel.

I remember – this is an aside – all of the confusion caused twenty or twenty-five years ago by so-called “chaos theory.”  Mathematicians have proven the world is chaotic, certain hasty non-mathematicians declared, which was as wrong as could be, since the “theory” suggested that certain processes that looked random were in fact perfectly orderly and predictable.  I suppose the great example of this kind of confusion is Einstein’s theory of relativity proving that all things – moral values, for example – are relative.  But that is history; I lived through the chaos confusion.

If only mathematicians would restrain their poetic impulses.

Törless, who attends a boarding school, visits his math teacher’s office, hoping for enlightenment.  He has apparently never been to the teacher’s office before.  It is “permeated with the smell of cheap tobacco-smoke,” and the teacher’s long underwear (“rubbed black by the blacking of his boots”) is visible over his socks.  Törless

could not help feeling further repelled by these little observations; he scarcely found it in him to go on hoping that this man was really in possession of significant knowledge…  The ordinariness of what he saw affronted him; he projected this on to mathematics, and his respect began to give way before a mistrustful reluctance.  (110)

Törless is in search of transcendent, not ordinary knowledge, beyond the scope of the teacher who urges Törless to trust math and be patient – “for the present: believe!”

But then the teacher makes a terrible error:

On a little table lay a volume of Kant, the sort of volume that lies about for the sake of appearances.  This the master took up and held out to Törless.

“You see this book.  Here is philosophy…  For the present I think it would still be a little beyond you.”  (112-3)

Which is not the right thing to say to this particular kid, although it might be good advice for me.  Nevertheless, we will see how far I can get this week with Robert Musil’s little book.

Page numbers refer to the 1955 Pantheon edition, titled Young Törless.  Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser were the translators.

Austria, what a naïve place you are!

That cheerful thought is courtesy of Peter Altenberg, the archetypal Viennese coffeehouse Bohemian, who spent his life wandering from café to café and writing Baudelaire-inspired prose poems or articles of short fiction or whatever they are.  As collected in the 2005 Archipelago book Telegrams of the Soul, his importance seems more historical than literary, but that is a thought I hope to sketch out some other time.  For the title line in context, see p. 120.

A greater writer, a greater figure, is the Diogenes of Vienna, Karl Kraus, who moved from journalism to founding his own paper Die Fackel (“The Torch”) in 1899 to writing every word of its contents for twenty-five years:

I no longer have collaborators.  I used to be envious of them.  They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself.

Kraus is highly quotable.  This one is from In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader (Carcanet, 1984, p. 5).  It is amusing to joke that this or that old timey writer, Montaigne or Dr. Johnson or what have you, would now be a blogger.  Not a joke with Kraus.

Along with his articles, jokes, vitriol, parodies, shivs, and bile, Kraus also sometimes presented one-man performances of Shakespeare plays which must have been a sight.  Somewhere along the way he wrote an enormous play-like object titled The Last Days of Mankind, published 1918-19, of which a fraction has been translated.  Perhaps if we all read it someone will translate the whole thing!  I will do my part.

What other Austrian books might I try to read?

I am in the middle – no, closer to the front – of a long, tedious, magnificent Adalbert Stifter novel, Der Nachsommer (“Indian Summer”, 1856).  I have written plenty about Stifter before and recommend him strongly to patient readers, but anyone who introduces himself to Stifter with this novel is insane, no offense.   His subsequent novel, Witiko (1867), is reputed to be even more boring, which if true is an achievement.

Another mid-century writer who should have no existence in English is the comedic playwright Johann Nestroy, but one of his Viennese dialect comedies was adapted by Thornton Wilder and eventually turned into the 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!  That exclamation point is in the title of the show, but I also lay claim to it – what, really?  More appealing to me is that the same play was adapted by Tom Stoppard as On the Razzle (1981).

The young Salzburg poet Georg Trakl I read in November.  I should revisit him.  The other major poet of the period is Rainer Maria Rilke whom I should also revisit (after fifteen years).

If I stick to the kind of cutoff date I used in previous reading projects, say something around 1919, I will then stop before I get to Rilke’s best-known works, the Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies (both 1923).  I thus also cordon off most Robert Musil, all Joseph Roth, most Stefan Zweig, most Ernst Weiss, etc. etc.  Unwise, perhaps, but it is a guideline, not a rule.

An important exception: Young Törless (1906) is Robert Musil’s first novel, a story of boarding school sadism with a humanist turn.  It also features a long monologue about the meaning of imaginary numbers.  I have read it twice and will likely read it again.  A fine readalong book, but c’mon, The Last Days of Mankind, right?

Perhaps it is clearer why what once seemed like a project of wide scope has come to seem a bit narrow.  Valuable reading but less fun for more casual participants.

Tomorrow:  some supplementary or alternative paths that may well be more fruitful than anything I have mentioned so far.