eJournals Colloquia Germanica 51/1

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/31
2020
511

Tonka’s Voice: Narrative Perspective and the Desire for Silence in Robert Musil’s Early Novella

31
2020
Laura Bohn Case
I read Robert Musil’s intimate autobiographical novella “Tonka” within linguistic history to show how the novella undermines the increasingly monolingual identity replacing possible multilingual identities within the late Austrian Empire. Through the novella’s criticism of speech and Musil’s complex use of psycho-narration, Tonka’s identity can be understood beyond the silence desired by her lover – not least because of her Czech bilingualism. The novella even blames Tonka’s death on his inability to accept her as an equal interlocutor, and I suggest the death of Tonka reveals Musil’s mourning for a lost multilingual German identity – something valuable and uniquely Habsburgian.
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Tonka’s Voice: Narrative Perspective and the Desire for Silence in Robert Musil’s Early Novella Laura Bohn Case Wheaton College Abstract: I read Robert Musil’s intimate autobiographical novella “Tonka” within linguistic history to show how the novella undermines the increasingly monolingual identity replacing possible multilingual identities within the late Austrian Empire. Through the novella’s criticism of speech and Musil’s complex use of psycho-narration, Tonka’s identity can be understood beyond the silence desired by her lover - not least because of her Czech bilingualism. The novella even blames Tonka’s death on his inability to accept her as an equal interlocutor, and I suggest the death of Tonka reveals Musil’s mourning for a lost multilingual German identity - something valuable and uniquely Habsburgian. Keywords: Habsburg Multilingualism, Psycho-narration, Language Politics, Multilingual Identity “Das war Tonka,” we read in the first paragraph of Robert Musil’s 1923 novella, “Tonka” (Musil, Drei Frauen 46). The unnamed male protagonist spends the next forty pages in a project of remembering and defining his lover. Significantly, most of this remembering is centered on his desire for Tonka’s silence� He presents her as being without meaningful language, and even “stumm” (57, 63). The first dialogue between the lovers opens with this representation of Tonka’s silence, as their conversation is missing her answer (50). The passage gives us only her lover’s question and then his response to whatever she said, thus foregrounding her silence from the very beginning of their supposed communication� In the following article, I interrogate this desire for Tonka’s silence� I show the limits to the protagonist’s representation of Tonka, as the novella’s criticism of speech and its complex narration, including several surprising moments of 28 Laura Bohn Case psycho-narration from within Tonka’s perspective, undermine his refusal of expression to Tonka. I then situate the novella within linguistic history to show how this restriction of Tonka’s language reflects an increasingly monolingual Austrian identity, which was replacing earlier possible multilingual identities within the late Empire� While Musil is well known for his vivid descriptions in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften of the Habsburg Empire just before its collapse, I suggest that a decade before starting this masterpiece, he mourns for a lost multilingual identity - something valuable and uniquely Habsburgian - in his intimate autobiographical novella, “Tonka.” The male protagonist of the story meets Tonka during a year of military service in what he describes as the provinces of the Empire� He pursues her, and their sexual relationship follows a pattern common to the literature of the time: the exploitation of working-class women, who are comfortable in a local language or dialect, by wealthier, German-speaking men� 1 Tonka becomes pregnant and dies from a sexually transmitted infection a few days after giving birth to a stillborn child� Despite the relationship’s predictability, an unsolved mystery arises because Tonka’s lover shows no signs of the illness himself and was away at the possible time of impregnation� While Tonka claims her faithfulness to him until her death - more specifically, she refuses to speak words admitting her guilt - the doctors in the novella insist that this is impossible� The novella follows the later attempts of her lover, as an older man, to settle what must have happened between himself and Tonka. The narrative never solves this central mystery of Tonka’s illness, pregnancy, and faithfulness� Instead, Musil displaces the importance of an answer, and the novella allows this medical impossibility within the “Möglichkeitssinn” that Musil attributes to fiction. 2 Instead of answering the question of her faithfulness, the novella shows that Tonka’s lover is unable to communicate with her, and thus the possibility for her faithfulness is left uncontained and unresolved. In Musil’s work, psycho-narration - identified by Dorrit Cohn as the “narration of the character's thoughts by a knowledgeable narrator, in the narrator's own-language and concepts” - allows deep access to a character’s mind, access to unarticulated ideas and impressions that lie beyond the thoughts of the characters (Cohn 14). Unlike other modernist narration that relies on inner monologue, Musil uses psycho-narration to allow expression beyond what the characters can even articulate to themselves. This narrative technique allows for expression that is independent from spoken or thought German words, as Musil’s fiction assumes that the mind works beyond speech. His use of psycho-narration shows minds whose workings are not limited by words. The novella’s use of psycho-narration undermines the primacy of speech and enables Tonka to communicate beyond her lover’s desire for her silence. “Tonka” is narrated Tonka’s Voice 29 in this third person very closely aligned with the characters’ psyches� For most of the novella, the narrator offers the perspective of the protagonist as an older man investigating various aspects of memory as he reflects on his younger self in this relationship with a troubling end� In fact, all of the secondary literature I have encountered assumes that the narrator is Tonka’s lover remembering his past� However, thrice-separated tenses and several moments of psycho-narration from Tonka’s perspective show the presence of an outside critical narrator despite this close alignment between the narrator and the male protagonist throughout most of the novella� In the following passage, as in many other instances, we find evidence of this outside narrator� Das waren gewiss lauter kleine Erlebnisse, aber das Merkwürdige ist: sie waren in Tonkas Leben zweimal da, ganz die gleichen. Sie waren eigentlich immer da. Und das Merkwürdige ist, sie bedeuteten später das Gegenteil von dem, was sie anfangs bedeuteten� So gleich blieb sich Tonka, so einfach und durchsichtig war sie, dass man meinen konnte, eine Halluzination zu haben und die unglaublichsten Dinge zu sehen (Musil, Drei Frauen 55)� The use of the past tense “bedeuteten” for the time from which the story is told indicates a narrative position beyond the older man remembering his youthful relationship� If he were merely remembering, the position from which he remembers would be in present tense� Musil’s use of tenses and the confusion they create persist throughout the novella. “Aber war es überhaupt so gewesen? Nein, das hatte er sich erst später zurechtgelegt. Das war schon das Märchen; er konnte es nicht mehr unterscheiden” (46). Here, the present narrator, in speaking in the past tense, again puts Tonka’s lover as an older man - “er” - into an earlier past tense, indicating again a triple remove of temporal distance� We also read, “Er erinnerte sich dann nur noch …” also indicating this distance (55). The events appear first as Tonka’s lover perceives them when they happen, second as he interprets them after her death, while the third separation comes from the remove of their narration to the narrator, away from Tonka’s lover’s memory� Tonka refuses to admit her guilt, and thus her lover dismisses her ability to communicate entirely. The logic goes something like this: if Tonka is unable to speak and communicate, then her silence around her unfaithfulness becomes insignificant. The pressure to represent Tonka as speechless shows the emotional investment of her lover in her refusal to admit to any unfaithfulness� Her lover repeatedly demands a verbal admission of guilt, and this desire becomes an obsession in the novella. The narrator uses tortuous and violent vocabulary as the young man again and again seeks Tonka’s admission of unfaithfulness (68). Indeed, the pressure on Tonka’s incommunicability is heightened in the scenes 30 Laura Bohn Case of confrontation around this mystery� Her lover reasons that if she will not confess, it must be because she cannot confess, and thus her silence presumes her guilt. The pressure on silencing Tonka becomes the only possible answer to her lover’s unfulfilled desire for her confession. From the first pages of the novella, his insistence on Tonka’s inability to communicate attempts to contextualize and cauterize her reticence in the face of his mistrust and accusations� He even dreams of this desire: “sie [die Träume] sagten wohl nur, Tonka sollte gestehen, und alles wäre gut” (78). By framing the dreams as speaking (“sagten”) the narrator casts suspicion on this need for her confession� Much of the novella’s speech, either in quotations or in the grammatical indirect speech, is framed by mistrust and misunderstanding. This aligns with Musil’s choice of psycho-narration over interior monologue, as words are secondary to the thought that is possible beyond speech in psycho-narration� By underplaying the importance of speech, the narrator also separates Tonka from the bureaucratic and instrumental use of German by the young man and other characters, including his family (60). For example, his mother’s meddling comments are reported through excessively marked quotations. “‘Denn,’ sagte sie, ‘es könnte dieser Unglücksfall ja geradezu noch zum Glück ausschlagen, und man wäre dann’ - sagte sie - ‘mit dem Schreck davongekommen: es gelte nur, die Zukunft vor der Wiederkehr solcher Ereignisse zu schützen! ’” (69) Here her address is marked by “sie sagte” twice, and Musil also uses grammatical indirect speech, an unusual and unnecessary over-marking of speech. The narrator replicates his mother’s words in their awful and insulting entirety as she explains why Tonka should be paid to disappear from her son’s life, and thus fluent spoken German is linked to prejudice against Tonka� Musil even uses the verb “sagen” to describe the mother’s insinuating smile. Her smile expresses suspicion around Tonka’s insistence of faithfulness: “[d] ieses Lächeln […] Es sagte: Gott, jeder Mensch weiß, dieses Geschäft?!” (49). By granting clichéd and prejudiced speech to this smile, Musil emphasizes the limits of all kinds of shallow, if fluent, communication. The family uses many other phrases - presented by Musil in quotation marks - to call Tonka’s morality into question, for example, “‘von so einem Mädchen’”; later, she is described as a “‘pflichtvergessenes Mädchen’” (69). The quotation marks in this context create ironic distance but also increase suspicion around speech� Moreover, the young man’s thoughts, for example his belief in his intellectual superiority, are frequently framed by “er sagte sich” and called into question by those who hear his remarks (52). Therefore, while the spoken German language is set against Tonka, it is also undermined throughout the novella and shown to be severely compromised in it its ability to communicate truth about her character� Tonka’s Voice 31 The unreliability of the protagonist’s memory reveals the possibility of fiction to allow for multiple realities, but it also shows the instability of the times, as Tonka’s lover struggles to define Tonka in terms of her language. For example, the narrator gives contradictory suggestions as to the location of the lovers’ first meeting, thus introducing a motivated uncertainty which continues throughout their entire relationship. After describing nature as the place of their first contact, he further suggests that they met at Tonka’s home (stigmatized by its proximity to prostitution). He then returns to his first version with, ‘[s]ie war ja doch an einem Zaun gestanden damals” (48). He supports this location with remembered peasant clothes, affirming Tonka’s connection to the land and nature through this repetition. However, the narrator finally settles on a meaningful urban meeting place, the city’s central Ringstrasse: “In Wahrheit hatte er sie zum ersten Mal am ‘Ring’ gesehen” (48), and the confirmation “[d]as war nun klar” only emphasizes the uncertainty and roundabout path to this supposed clarity (49). The Ringstrasse in Brno is a meaningful meeting place, as it separated the inner city of Brno, which was predominantly German, from the growing suburbs populated by the Czech working class� 3 These false, but meaningful openings reveal the ambiguity of the novella’s depiction of Tonka, and the tension within the narrator’s close alignment with the young man’s memories and their motivated misrepresentation of Tonka� Scholars agree that “Tonka” is highly autobiographical. While there is confusion in the secondary literature around the autobiographical details, it seems that the woman from Musil’s youth did not actually die as Tonka does in the novella� 4 I suggest that the heightening of tragedy through Tonka’s death can be understood symbolically to reflect Musil’s mourning for the end of multilingualism in the Empire� Tonka’s death symbolizes the end of a certain type of bilingual or multilingual identity previously possible� Historians such as Pieter Judson and Jeremy King have argued for a multilingual identity found in Habsburg Austria before the emergence of many Central European nations, and for the normalcy of this multilingual identity continuing even until the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire� Indeed, Austria celebrated a unique culture around language that promoted unity, with multilingualism and the equality of languages being a sign of authentic belonging to the Empire instead of its inevitable fragmentation� 5 The growing frequency and intensity of nationalist conflict in Austria-Hungary after 1867 was not an inevitable result of the multilingual quality of Austrian and Hungarian societies, as traditionally argued, but, instead, a product of institutions and those in power attempting to separate the population for political gain ( Judson, Habsburg Empire 273)� Instead of the urban centers enabling the most openness of identity, as we might assume of today’s metropolitan centers, language choice was most free in the 32 Laura Bohn Case rural imagined peripheries of the Empire where various languages were most mixed ( Judson, Guardians 6). The nationalist origin of rural conflict was often exaggerated, and much effort went into persuading the rural inhabitants to use only one language and to thus choose an exclusive nationality. Nationalist accounts document “the worrying absence of that which was being claimed […] that is, the frequent irrelevance of nationalist identities to rural society” ( Judson, Guardians 11)� In fact, the stringency of nationalist rhetoric in describing rural conflict indicates the very instability of this distinction. Thus until the First World War, national identity was much less important than has come to be expected and argued, and until this very late period of Habsburg history, self-identification with the German nation was flexible and dependent largely on language use and choice, where choice of language eventually meant choice of national identity� Indeed, there was a transition to identifying nation with language during the nineteenth century, and as the social asymmetry between languages slowly decreased it left different definitions of ethnicity. The normalcy of multilingualism was especially true around German identity, and, initially, German ethnicity was most open to assimilation� According to the claims of the liberal parties, anyone speaking German, often for bureaucratic reasons, could claim German identity ( Judson, Habsburg Empire 298). In this linguistic context the unease around Tonka’s bilingualism takes on greater significance. The unfolding of this history in Brno - widely assumed to be the unnamed city in “Tonka” as well as the town of Musil’s adolescence and the place of his experience of these language conflicts - was similar to that of other cities in Czech-speaking lands. As a city with a bilingual past, Brno experienced heightened nationalist conflict during this particularly tense period in the German-Czech relationship in Moravia� Historically, Brno was predominately German speaking, and remained German through the first wave of industrialization, but the Czech population soon began to grow as agricultural workers moved to the city in search of jobs in the factories. The Ringstrasse, where the lovers meet in “Tonka,” divided the German-speaking inner city from the outer Czech suburbs. These suburbs were not officially incorporated into the city to avoid a flooding of the vote and a shift of politics towards Czech interests, as the inclusion of the Czech population in city politics would have threatened the precarious German hegemony ( Judson, “Inventing Germans” 52). The historical background of Brno heightens the importance of the tension around Tonka’s bilingual identity� The young man’s insistence on defining Tonka’s speech fits into this history of linguistic power, as a character from a dominant class - here a German-speaking male - both defines and silences according to his desire. The Tonka’s Voice 33 young man insists on describing Tonka as without meaningful expression, as strange and foreign, and her language even as “seltsam” (Musil, Drei Frauen 48)� She is said to be “am falschen Platz,” and to be “fremd.” Later, when the couple moves to a German city, Tonka’s strangeness even comes to include him, for example when they first sleep together and the repetition of “das Unbekannte und Fremde” returns as her lover himself remembers feeling separated from this new German city in their moments of closeness (55, 65, 72). Yet, the young man is somehow blind to her actual foreignness. For example, Tonka is unsuccessful at getting a raise at her job in the city because she has neither good handwriting nor perfect linguistic skills. Her difficulty could also, of course, be explained by the fact her primary language is Czech rather than German� Yet, this bilingualism does not seem to enter the mind of her lover, who instead pokes fun at her broken grammar and childish script (62). Although Tonka’s language mixture is probably rich, multilingual, and has expressive quality beyond German, this is not reflected in any way in the young man’s description of it, and nowhere does he acknowledge the effect of her Czech background and bilingualism on her access and use of the German language� Tonka is of mixed Czech and German origin, and while her bilingualism reflects the freedom of linguistic identity, and her access to German identity, the novella also clearly shows the young man’s anxiety as he is excluded from her language. Tonka speaks Czech, and although she is fluent enough in German to function within the young man’s family and to work in the German city, he is unable to understand Czech. In first introducing Tonka, the narrator qualifies her name, exposing a significant underside to the frequent narrative uncertainties: “Übrigens hieß sie nicht ganz mit Recht Tonka, sondern war deutsch getauft auf den Namen Antonie, während Tonka die Abkürzung der tschechischen Koseform Toninka bildet” (48). However, neither the young man nor the narrator ever use “Antonie” again. Although her first name represents an attempt at social mobility and bilingualism, her last name (which is never given in the novella) connects her to the young man’s limited categories for her identity� While Tonka sings Czech folksongs, the “Volkslieder ihrer Heimat” (53), her lover interprets her singing to mean that she expresses herself only, or primarily, in song - rather than in speech - and thus pities her. The passage continues to connect her singing to some sort of greater speech, to “eine Sprache des Ganzen,” or a “Sendung” (53). As the young man is incapable of acknowledging Tonka’s bilingualism, he thus connects her to nature and to a mythical language in order to lessen the importance of, and to contain, her communication� Indeed, from the beginning of the novella, the influence of Czech on Tonka’s speech is described with suspicion - even as a criminal activity - and the novella refers to the mix of languages in the streets in proximity to the pros- 34 Laura Bohn Case titution around Tonka’s home, which taints this language mix with a dubious morality� When the couple sings Czech folksongs together, it is described as “Corpus delicti” and “Lokalaugenschein,” both words used in jurisprudence in the context of crimes. On the one hand, the narrator is using this vocabulary to poke fun of their out-of-tune singing, but on the other hand these terms criminalize the young man’s attempts at Czech (52). This is reminiscent of how the wrong choice of language on a census could land someone in jail shortly after this era ( Judson, Habsburg Empire 446). Furthermore, the young man calls into question the worth of someone who is considered speechless: he asks if they are “gut, wertlos, oder bös [sic]” and thus suggests that Tonka’s lack of expression may actually be evil and criminal (Musil, Drei Frauen 57)� Tonka is also called “stumm” in the context of the young man’s family while she listens to the reading of the grandmother’s unfair will, which confirms her financial exploitation, with “festgeschlossenen Lippen”(57). This cheating her out of money is directly connected to her Czech identity, as it is in this context that we learn about her Czech surname, itself invested with the novella’s confusion around her relationship to nature: “[der] traumhafte Nachnamen, der einer jener tschechischen Familiennamen war, die ‘Er sang’ oder ‘Er kam über die Wiese’ hießen” (55). Her last name, in both these possible meanings, exactly aligns with her lover’s interpretation of her speech, because he believes that she has both access to a mythical language when she sings and to nature. Her last name, the clearest expression of her identity in words, thus falls directly within her lover’s attempts at dismissing her communication and his family’s abuse of their power� The protagonist is unable to admit Tonka’s ability with language, even when the narrative includes examples of her linguistic and intellectual talent. This is evident in the following sentence: “Und zuweilen überraschte sie ihn durch Kenntnisse von Gedanken, die ihr ganz fern liegen müssten” (62—63). The final word in the sentence, the subjunctive verb form “müssten,” emphasizes the young man’s expectations of Tonka, and his inability to absorb truths that do not fit with these expectations. This passage includes another mention of “stumm” and emphasizes her silence when confronted with evidence to the contrary. When Tonka brings up chemistry examples she learned to help her brother study for his exams, the young man again judges this knowledge as something that she does not really understand, “[u]nd länger als zehn Jahre war das wie schöne Steine, deren Namen man nicht weiß, in einem Kästchen gelegen! ” (63). However, in trying to prove Tonka’s speechlessness, her lover becomes tied up in his own metaphor as it ends up expressing the opposite of what he tries to suggest - the fitting metaphor would be a loss of stones whose names are remembered, as he is trying to show that Tonka possesses more words than knowledge� In his eagerness to refuse Tonka access to language, her Tonka’s Voice 35 lover accurately describes her jewels of wisdom, supported in the narrative in moments from within her perspective� Indeed, behind the protagonist’s desire to silence Tonka, there is evidence of clarity and eloquence in her communication. The young man asks Tonka why she works for his grandmother: “Aber er sah, dass sie mit Antworten kämpfte, die sie immer wieder im letzten Augenblick von den Lippen verwarf” (51). He attempts to answer for Tonka and suggests several reasons for her willingness to work under such exploitative conditions. She responds, “Nein, aber das ist es doch nicht” (51). When he finally lets her talk, Tonka tells him that she has to support herself, “Ich musste mir doch etwas verdienen,” and in her supposed ineloquence expresses something beyond his mocked philosophizing, “Ach, dieses Einfachste! Welch feiner Esel war er und welche steinere Ewigkeit lag in dieser so gewöhnlichen Antwort” (52). This answer is one in several moments where she, in her supposed speechlessness, expresses a deeper and greater, though simultaneously simple truth. Later, Tonka even finds the perfect, meaningful words that give relief for the almost unbearable intimate situations between the lovers, “Komm zu mir, bat Tonka, und sie teilten Leid und Wärme mit traurigem Gewährenlassen” (82). Thus, from a place of supposed silence, her words bring about the perfect action of closeness and love� In a scene central to the couple’s early romance, they walk in the countryside together. Her lover again attempts to limit her within nature, but the narrator allows Tonka to fit into, and interact linguistically with, her natural environment. This is the first of the rare moments in which we hear Tonka’s thoughts, which here expose the young man’s distance from a world he claims to understand. Using the conditional tense, full of irony, the narrator gives the young man’s assumptions of Tonka’s intellectual weakness: “Hätte sie denken gelernt wie ihr Begleiter, so hätte Tonka in diesem Augenblick gefühlt, dass die Natur aus lauter hässlichen Unscheinbarkeiten besteht” (53—54). The narrator next offers Tonka’s actual thoughts, which are breathtaking in their wisdom and relevance to the moment and place at which the lovers stand: “Tonka hatte sich oft davor gefürchtet, dass einmal ein Mann vor ihr stehen würde und sie nimmer ausweichen könnte” (54). The informal “nimmer” reads as Tonka’s inflection, evidence that here the narrator is allowing us into her thoughts through the intimate psycho-narration. The narrator’s language becomes more precise, direct, and colloquial as we enter Tonka’s voice: “bis zu diesem Augenblick hatte sie noch nie gefühlt, mit einem Mann in seiner Gesellschaft zu sein, denn alles war anders” (54). The young man assumes Tonka is feeling shy and insecure because of his greater skill with language and is therefore silent, while Tonka’s thoughts actually reflect on the nature around them knowing, “jedes einzelne war hässlich, 36 Laura Bohn Case und alles zusammen war Glück” (54). Here we find reported emotion not limited by her lover’s assumptions, unlike throughout most of the rest of the novella� Sometimes her insights take the form of action: “Sie verstand nicht, was er dachte, aber sie las alles zugleich in seinem Auge und ertappte sich mit einem Mal bei dem Wunsch, seinen Kopf in den Arm zu nehmen und seine Augen zuzudecken” (54). Instead of responding in speech, she wants to respond with a comforting action� Yet, he misinterprets why she presses his arm as they walk together; the action expresses her tenderness and not, as he assumes, her helplessness in the dark and her need for him� Instead of speaking, she acts, communicating emotion through her gesture: “[sie wusste] nicht aus noch ein und fand bei der Jungfrau Maria keine andere Antwort, als dass sie ihren Arm inniger in seinen schob” (54). In these passages, we see the layering of perspectives that show the novella’s typical presentation of Tonka; we read the thoughts that the young man assumes Tonka to have� However, in this unusual scene, the use of psycho-narration from Tonka’s perspective shows how much more profound her thoughts are than her lover imagines and how much more fitting than his indulgence in daydreaming and philosophizing. The infrequent uses of psycho-narration from Tonka’s perspective show her thoughts to be strikingly relevant and expressive, supporting the truth of the words she does have represented in the novella. While the young man tries to define Tonka and to limit the meaning of her words, she confronts him with her love for him� In this moment, as both characters feel themselves to be in love, the narrator comes closest to allowing the reader access to the two thought worlds, just enough to show us how their communication fails� Tonka’s speech is generally underrepresented by quotation marks, and little of what she says is directly reported, except for words such as “oh, ja” and “O doch,” exclamations often not contained in quotes (for example 50—51). Words by her that are set in quotations are often clichés and exclamations instead of truly expressive uses of language, in either German or Czech. For example, to express her unwillingness to return home to her aunt, she comments, “‘[d]ann werde ich es eben wieder alle Augenblicke auf dem Teller haben’” (58). However, in the infrequent instances of psycho-narration from Tonka’s perspective her thoughts are strikingly relevant and expressive. To return to the scene when the young man offers to care for Tonka and invites her to join his life, we again find a response from her perspective. After his unclear offer she blushes and unpacks her belongings, accompanied by the profound statement “und [sie] fühlt: das war jetzt die Liebe” (58). Significantly, the narrator connects this greater truth to feeling and not to speech, again avoiding the novella’s suspicion towards speech� Tonka’s Voice 37 The last scene in the novella from Tonka’s perspective is more complicated than the earlier moments in which we hear from her, because this scene slides back and forth between Tonka and her lover’s psycho-narration. The narrator gives a clear description of Tonka’s faithfulness as resulting from a simple lack of interest in other men after her long hours of work: “Und wenn sie abends aus dem Geschäft kommt, ist sie ganz ausgefüllt von seinen lärmenden, lustigen, ärgerlichen Erlebnissen; ihre Ohren sind voll, ihre Zunge spricht innerlich noch weiter; da ist kein kleinstes Plätzchen für einen fremden Mann” (85). Her continued ability to use language - to hear and to speak - protect her from unfaithfulness, and make her lover’s insistence on her silence even more destructive� Finally, while her lover dominates the story, Tonka’s importance is evident from the title of the first collection in which it appears: Drei Frauen . We attribute the title of stories and collections to the author, and thus these outward textual markings challenge the attempt to silence Tonka. The narrative never refers to the male protagonist by name, but Tonka herself has this power of naming her lover� In speaking his name, something the narrator refuses to do, Tonka enters her lover: “[E]in sinnloses, Hilfe suchendes Wort, durch einen endlosen, einsamen Gang hervorstürzend, verwandelte sich in seinen Namen” (65). Therefore, despite the young man’s insistence on Tonka’s speechlessness, she is able to claim and to contain him in this one powerful word: his name� In conclusion: while much of the narrative supports the protagonist’s desire for Tonka’s silence, moments of psycho-narration in the novella question this determination. Through the novella’s suspicion around speech and the complexity of narrative perspective, we come to an understanding of Tonka’s identity beyond that suggested by her lover� She is greater than, and other than, the speechless woman he desires her to be� In these rare moments from Tonka’s perspective we see her as an intelligent, emotionally astute character attempting to live out a new romantic relationship� Her bilingual voice and the strength of her intelligence and love undermine the dominant perspective of the narrative and show the inadequacy of the young man’s memories and his attempts to silence her. The novella blames Tonka’s death on the young man’s inability to understand and accept her as a bilingual interlocutor and equal partner in communication. Their personal tragedy points to the loss of multilingual identities - especially around the use of German - in the last decades of the Austrian Empire as Musil’s masterful novella mourns the disappearance of a unique Habsburg possibility of open linguistic identity� 38 Laura Bohn Case Notes 1 A striking example is Max Brod’s 1909 Tschechisches Dienstmädchen , which spends 150 pages eroticizing a Czech servant girl and her connections to a nature from which her Viennese lover is excluded, in a tone reminiscent of “Tonka.” In much of this fiction, including “Tonka,” depictions of these women clearly depend on colonial vocabulary� 2 Musil famously explores this unique ability for fiction to explore possibility, to allow for this kind of contradiction, in the opening chapters of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften � 3 For further details see Felber 82, quoted in Prinz 149—59. 4 Most secondary literature assumes that the lover from Musil’s youth - Herma Dietz - followed Tonka’s fate and died. Peter Jungk points out the record of Dietz’s miscarriage appears in 1906, but notes that Musil mentions meeting Dietz in his journal as late as April 24, 1907� Neither journal entries nor documents suggest Dietz’s death, which significantly leaves this complication to fiction ( Jungk 154). 5 Judson quotes sentiments such as “[t]he more languages of the monarchy one learns, the more one becomes a true Austrian,” voiced by Joseph Baron Hammer-Purgstall in his “Vortrag über die Vielsprachigkeit” in a “Feierliche Sitzung der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften” on 29 May 1852 in Vienna, and concludes that “equality of language use symbolized a unity of peoples that was anchored in their fundamental interchangeability as citizens” ( Judson, The Habsburg Empire 242 ) . The work of historians Pieter Judson and Jeremy King consistently argues for this type of multilingual identity available to German speakers during the Habsburg Empire� For more information on the efforts put into creating artificially separate German and Czech identities see Judson, Guardians of the Nation � For an exploration of the disintegration of a possible bilingual identity see King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans. Works Cited Brod, Max. Tschechisches Dienstmädchen. Berlin: A. Juncker, 1909. Cohn, Dorrit� Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Judson, Pieter. Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006. —. The Habsburg Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016. —. “Inventing Germans: Class, Nationality and Colonial Fantasy at the Margins of the Hapsburg Monarchy.” Social Analysis 33 (1993): 47—67. Tonka’s Voice 39 Jungk, Peter Stephan. “Die Vergessene: Robert Musil und Herma Dietz. Ein Beitrag zur Musil-Forschung.” Neue Rundschau 103.2 (1992): 151—61. King, Jeremy. Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 . Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. Musil, Robert� Drei Frauen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002� —. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften � Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978� Prinz, Martin. “Brno-Brünn Musils Topografie der Vergehung.” Maske und Kothurn. Internationale Beiträge zur Theaterwissenschaft 47.3-4 (2002): 149—59.