The Lessons of Young Törless
The students speak. (Notes for a performance lecture)
The term “deep listening” often feels disingenuous— not because of what it conveys, but because it is too often thrown around in insincere ways: a condescending rhetorical device to supposedly validate feelings or views with little true regard for what those feelings or views might be. Yet, in light of the current student protests, deep listening is vital right now. To be clear, antisemitism, anti-Muslim racism and violence are abhorrent and must be condemned, but no conflict ever gets resolved without dialogue and mutual understanding.
When my older brother was a philosophy student at the university (I have in many instances talked about how he brought me along in his studies as both apprentice and audience) he and his friends were very fond of Austrian author Robert Musil’s philosophical novel, “The Confusions of Young Törless”. Musil’s book, written in 1906 when the author himself was only 26 years old, is a bildungsroman about a boarding school boy with an emergent homosexual awareness. Along with two classmates , Törless unwittingly engages with bullying and abusing another student named Basini who they have caught stealing money from other students; the abuse eventually becomes increasingly sexual and sadistic, complicating matters when Basini expresses love for Törless, which throws the latter deeper into emotional conflict. In the end, Törless convinces Basini to turn himself in and all comes to a head in a school investigation.
The culminating scene of this book occurs when Törless is confronted by the school authorities to gain clarity about what has happened. In that moment, Törless starts providing an explanation that evolves into a disquisition about perception and rationality, which befuddles the professors. Törless’s reflection revolves around the concept of imaginary numbers, a subject that he had studied in class with his mathematics professor. In his narrative, his own inability to articulate an explanation for the incidents he has lived through (that is, the events around the actions and subsequent abuse of Basini) had to do with things that go beyond logic and yet offer an inner certainty. The religion professor believes Törless is speaking about faith, but Törless dismisses the suggestion right away. Törless appears to imply that he is finding his footing in embracing meaning in uncertainty —something that feels incomprehensible to the older and dull professors, shaped as they are by the straightjacket of established bureaucratic thought.
As the parent of a teenager, I have learned that what adolescents say is as important as what they do not say, and that there is a subtext of meaning that we, the older adults, often do not appreciate or bother to uncover. While the articulation might be raw, it conveys complex sentiments and authentic feelings. Yet we often dismiss youth as idealistic or inexperienced, with patronizing witticisms such as George Bernard Shaw’s “youth is a defect that gets corrected with age”. But now, more than ever, it is essential to not hasten to condemn, dismiss or minimize; now, more than ever, it is important to understand the deeper meaning of words.
In the final scene of The Confusions of Young Törless, what is most important is that the tables have turned and the student is in fact imparting a lesson to the professors: the section serves as a philosophical parable of sorts: one that conveys that, for all our supposed wisdom and experience we, the older generation, have developed blind spots and hardened views: they are known quantities, unable to deal with the complexity of a new reality.
In his speech, Törless in fact does something that another famous Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein, only a few years later would encapsulate in an aphorism: “only describe, don’t explain”.
So, in that same spirit I share I recording I have made of an excerpt from the last section of The Confusions of Young Törless.