Confusion

I’ve set myself the task of reading some novellas, and this period just before and after WWI seems particularly fruitful for short existential novels that lend themselves well to contemplative, poetic reading. There’s something Freudian about a lot of these works, as if society was undergoing a collective desublimation especially as regards sexuality and more specifically the dawning possibility of (open) homosexuality as a way that life could be lived.This is the latent subject of Zweig’s “Confusion”. Indeed, the title refers to sexual confusion, and more broadly to unexpected experiences of love. I don’t think I’m giving too much away by saying this, because although in the 1920s the novella undoubtedly read more like an unfolding thriller than it does today, the contemporary reader senses early on the various homoerotic subtexts.As a gay reader myself, it’s exciting to experience 100 year old literature that is basically of higher quality than almost any gay literature produced today. The background of the story is the urban liberalization happening in Berlin in the 1920s. The professor escapes there on clandestine trips, and for a moment we think Zweig will leave it at that, the nature of his trips mysterious or only suggested. But no, the ending is like a rising up of all the unconscious elements, a confession of pent up desires.Zweig is not a poetical and ambiguous writer like Andre Gide. His sentences do not leave us wondering about reality, identity in quite the same fundamental way as Gide. Of course, Zweig’s novel is really about how the transmission of knowledge is the ultimate erotic act, one that unites these two men. But Zweig does not use language itself in the way Gide does to dive and twist into the nature of the soul. Rather, his method is narrative Bildungsroman, the classic campus novel with a Freudian undercurrent.One thing I’ve learned so far from these novellas is that the “great works” of literature are often called that for rather impersonal reasons. Why, for example, are the novels of Dumas or Thackeray considered great? I’m not questioning their quality per se. But anything that is collectively decided cannot be ours. Art must be rediscovered on a personal level if it is to live within us. Suggestions can be useful, but ultimately we just have to twist and turn until we happen upon something that speaks to us.As Roland says at the end of the novel, all the plays and poems of history were as cheap nothings in comparison with the professor’s revelation. This makes us wonder: what art remains for us now? After all the desublimation our society has been through, how can we find what speaks to us on a deeper level? We cannot use Shakespeare as a point of obsession like the professor because we already have our secrets out in the open. So our art must be existential, personal, romantic “found” art.

One of the strongest of Zweig's novellas, `Confusion', despite its brevity, conveys human emotions with depth and intensity.The story is told in reflection by an aging professor who, upon receiving a Festschrift of his own work on his 60th birthday, looks back at his beginnings.As the son of a provincial schoolmaster, Roland reluctantly goes off to study at the University in Berlin where, like many in the first throes of freedom, he quickly abandons his studies, and sets off to explore the joys of the city.Discovered by his father after a few months, exposed as a slacker and cad, he is deeply ashamed and resolves to reform in that small University far from the enticements of Berlin where he is sent.And reform he does. Immediately entranced by a powerful and impassioned professor of English whose extemporaneous explication of the Elizabethans seduces him, he takes a room in the Professor's lodgings and soon becomes the favored protégé.As Roland privately assists in preparation of the teacher's long neglected magnum opus, they become closer. Yet this intimacy agitates and dizzies him as the professor seesaws, alternatively pushing him away, then pulling him back in.We come to see in Roland a bit of a later day Werther: highly emotional, intelligent, acutely observant, sensual, and yet unworldly and unwise.Although a nominal theme here has been rendered moot for many contemporary readers, (which can make the longish penultimate section seem didactic), there are some strong reasons why `Confusion' merits contemporary attention.First, there is the joy of Zweig's prose, which is both physically descriptive and compelling. Characters notice the nuances of expression, the movement hands, subtle gestures of the body, and the result is both sensual and revelatory.This from p. 90: "...he sat there in almost solemn cheerfulness, as if he heard music in the outside street, or were listening to some unseen conversation. His lips, around which tiny movements usually played, were still and soft as a peeled fruit, and his forehead when he turned it gently to the window took on the refraction of the mild light and seemed to me nobler than ever."Zweig captures the intensity of human interaction and brings it to life not simply within context, but mimetically stirs the reader's own passions. He gets at the essence of emotions, especially shame, admiration, desire and, of course, confusion.And as always, Zweig is himself: graceful, charming, erudite, ever the European raconteur. A wistful, bittersweet man informed by the heady zeitgeist of fin de siècle Vienna, Zweig is a astute observer of the human condition, especially its inherent contradictions and the resulting play of emotions.Yet unlike Roland, he is both worldly and wise:"Nothing has such a powerful effect on a youthful mind as a sublime and virile despondency.... and the same phenomena accounts for the eternal readiness of young people to face danger and reach out a fraternal hand to all spiritual suffering."

I read this book months ago. I wish I'd written a review of it then. I can say now that I liked it very much, and spoke to my therapist about it at length. The book is very psychologically oriented, the story of a youth who goes away to college in the early to mid twentieth century in some nondescript European backwater setting. The youth falls in love with his professor and the professor's wife. The sexuality is understated, but the wife's fling with the boy is a bit more detailed while the husband/professor's is more ambiguous. It is a short novel, perhaps even a novella, and it is powerful in the description of how people are thrown together, sink or swim together or not, and the effect that those experiences have on them later in life. I highly recommend it.This book came to my attention in an odd way. After watching Wes Anderson's movie THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, I noticed in the credits at the end that film was derived from the writings of the author of this book. Having been very entertained and provoked intellectually by Anderson's film, I ordered a couple of the author's books. I was not disappointed.