Young Torless Read Free

bringing back his reports. 
    Despite the amoralism that makes Young Törless so much a product of its age, the moral questions raised by the story will not go away. Beineberg, the more intellectually inclined of Törless’s comrades, has a vulgar-Nietzschean, proto-Fascist justification for what they do to Basini: the three of them belong to a new generation to which the old rules do not apply (‘the soul has changed’); as for pity, pity is one of the lower impulses and must be conquered. Törless is not Beineberg. Nevertheless, his own particular perversity — making Basini talk about what has been done to him - is morally no better than the whippings the other two carry out; while in his own homosexual acts with Basini he is at pains to show the boy no tenderness. 
    In a world in which there are no more God-given rules, in which it has fallen to the philosopher-artist to give the lead, should the artist’s explorations include acting out his own darker impulses, seeing where they will take him? Does art always trump morality? This early work of Musil’s offers the question, but answers it in only in the most uncertain way. 
    Musil did not disown Young Törless . On the contrary, he continued to look back with surprise at what he had been able to achieve, even at a technical level, at so early an age. The master metaphor of the book, with its implication that the foundations of our real, reasonable, everyday world have no real, reasonable existence, continues to be explored in The Man without Qualities, though in a spirit more of paradox and irony than of anguish. ‘A person must believe he is something more in order to be capable of being what he is,’ suggests Ulrich, the central character. ‘The present is nothing but a hypothesis that one has not yet finished with.’ Musil’s work, from beginning to end, is of a piece: the evolving record of a confrontation between a man of supremely intelligent sensibility and the times that gave birth to him, times he would justly call ‘accursed’.

  
    “In some strange way we devalue things as soon as we give utterance to them. We believe we have dived to the uttermost depths of the abyss, and yet when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pallid finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We think we have discovered a hoard of wonderful treasure-trove, yet when we emerge again into the light of day we see that all we have brought back with us is false stones and chips of glass. But for all this, the treasure goes on glimmering in the darkness, unchanged.”
    MAETERLINCK
    It was a small station on the long railroad to Russia. Four parallel lines of iron rails extended endlessly in each direction, on the yellow gravel of the broad track-each fringed, as with a dirty shadow, with the dark strip burnt into the ground by steam and fumes. Behind the station, a low oil-painted building, there was a broad, worn dirt-road leading up to the railway embankment. It merged into the trampled ground, its edges indicated only by the two rows of acacia trees that flanked it drearily, their thirsty leaves suffocated by dust and soot.
    Perhaps it was these sad colours, or perhaps it was the wan, exhausted light of the afternoon sun, drained of its strength by the haze: there was something indifferent, lifeless, and mechanical about objects and human beings here, as though they were all part of a scene in a puppet-theatre. From time to time, at regular intervals, the station-master stepped out of his office and, always with the same turn of his head, glanced up the long line towards the signal-box, where the signals still failed to indicate the approach of the express each time, which had been delayed for a long time at the frontier; then, always with the very same movement of his arm, he would pull out his pocket-watch and, then, shaking his head, he would disappear again: just so do the figures on ancient towerclocks appear and disappear again with the