New Left Review 27, May-June 2004
STEFAN JONSSON
A CITIZEN OF KAKANIA
To read Robert Musil is to sense an approaching catastrophe. His narratives spiral downward from the daylight world of bourgeois conventions into the night of madness, the negativity of disorder, criminality and war. Such is the case with Musil’s literary debut, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), in which the innocuous rivalry among a group of boarding-school boys builds up to homosexual abuse and sadistic humiliation. In Musil’s second book, Unions (1911), a woman’s promise of matrimonial fidelity activates subconscious processes that drive her to sleep with another man. What matters in these stories is less the manifest content than the finely tuned narrative language, which records how a certain state of affairs is turned into its opposite: the faithful wife becoming an adulteress, the dutiful schoolboy turning into a fascist torturer—but without their noticing when they pass the point of no return.
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