Robert Musil's Tonka is a blatantly mysterious story. Like Joseph in the Gospel according to Matthew, or like the Marquise von O . . . in Kleist's novella, the unnamed male protagonist of Musil's work is confronted with an enigmatic pregnancy. Midway through the tale we learn that Tonka has become pregnant at a time when her lover was out of town. Tonka nevertheless insists until her death that she has not been unfaithful. In all probability she is lying, either consciously or unconsciously, but it is at least conceivable that a modern miracle has occurred. Whatever the correct explanation of Tonka's pregnancy may be, both she and the baby die before the answer is revealed.

Thus Tonka is structured in such a way as to frustrate the conventional expectations of its readers. In a typical narrative such a problem would be introduced for the purpose of keeping the reader's attention until the solution was revealed towards the end of the work. In Tonka, however, our perspective is limited to that of the unnamed character who retrospectively narrates an episode of his youth which remains rationally inexplicable. The persistence of this mystery within the text, in turn, requires a different strategy on the part of the reader. Because we will never know the source of her pregnancy we are compelled to direct our attention to the thematic significance of this unanswered question. . . .

[Robert Peters, in Robert Musil: Master of the Hovering Life, 1978] stands out among critics by reminding us of the ethical problems in the work which are usually bypassed in the attempt to ascertain its religious, psychological, or philosophical significance. The following essay will be devoted to the elaboration and modification of issues raised by Peters' analysis of the work. First, Peters sees the protagonist's guilt primarily in terms of a personal flaw, whereas I will emphasize his status as a typical representative of the particular ideology which governs the sexual relations between upper-class men and lowerclass women in many works of European literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The young man's "love" for Tonka expresses itself primarily in terms of his need to dominate her in a number of ways. Second, I will consider the function of the epistemological problems which are raised by the unsolved mystery of Tonka's pregnancy. If knowledge and power are shown to be intimately connected in the first half of Musil's text, then the persistent enigma of Tonka's pregnancy precipitates the systematic frustration of the protagonist's attempts at domination. Finally, I will examine the protagonist's role as the narrator of the text. Consistent with his treatment of Tonka during her life, the act of narration marks one more attempt on his part to assert control over her after her death, by either inculpating her on the basis of circumstantial evidence, or exonerating her as a twentieth-century Madonna, but in any case rendering her comprehensible. Yet because Tonka has died with her secret, these attempts remain at the level of hypothetical conjectures, which reveal less about Tonka than the mind of the narrator and the ideology he perpetuates.

In many ways Tonka is anything but a traditional work of literature. It not only introduces a mystery which is never solved, but also fails to provide a name for one of its two central characters, the young man who later recounts the work through the unusual technique of erlebte Rede. The story itself, however, follows a pattern familiar at least since the Sturm und Drang period of German literature. Goethe's Faust is only the most famous example of a work which contains a configuration repeated in Heinrich Leopold Wagner's Die Kindermörderin, J. M. R. Lenz's Die Soldaten, and Schiller's Kabale und Liebe. A cultivated man of high social status has a brief affair with what is perceived as a simple, natural girl of the lower classes. Marriage is inconceivable, an unwanted pregnancy often results, and the conclusion is generally tragic, at least for the woman. The same basic pattern is repeated and varied in European literature throughout the nineteenth century in works such as Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Gottfried Keller's "Regine," Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei.

Musil clearly draws on this tradition in the basic outline of the plot of Tonka. A gifted young scientist of a respectable family meets a young working girl during his year of military service. To the deep distress of his mother, the relationship threatens to become more serious than is socially acceptable when the young man takes Tonka to live with him while he pursues his studies at the university. However, she soon becomes pregnant under suspicious circumstances and dies with her stillborn child, leaving him to continue a successful career without remorse.

Their relationship is marked by social and economic inequality from the beginning. While the young man pursues a career destined to bring him both financial rewards and high social status, Tonka is systematically exploited in each of the three jobs she fills in the course of the novella. Her first job in a cloth factory results in constant irritation to her hands. She receives a mere pittance from the young man's family when his grandmother dies earlier than expected. Finally, her last employer fires her when he learns that she is pregnant.

The young man's attitude towards Tonka seems ambivalent at first. On the one hand, he does seem genuinely attracted to her and makes several attempts to help her. It is he who arranges to have Tonka care for his grandmother, and when his grandmother dies, he offers to care for her. Later, when Tonka is underpaid by her last employer, he makes up the difference with his own money. On the other hand, it becomes increasingly evident that these actions are motivated more by a need to dominate Tonka than genuine sympathy. This is particularly evident in the young man's attitude to Tonka's last employer. To her this man seems "eine übermenschliche Macht" because of her complete financial dependence on him. After she has been driven out of her job we learn that he too "bewunderte heimlich diesen schäbigen, kleinen, namenlosen Kaufmann," not from the perspective of the cowed employee, but rather because he is a decisive man who does not hesitate to sacrifice an individual to the needs of his business.

The young man's social and economic dominance of Tonka extends further to the intellectual realm. While he pursues his education and inventions, she has little time and seemingly less ability to acquire academic knowledge. What fragments of knowledge have clung to Tonka from her older, now deceased brother and her brief visit to night school are greeted with at best bemused condescension, never genuine interest on the part of the young man. More often than not, his impatience with her reticence in conversation turns towards the assertion of force.

Thus the social, financial, and intellectual inequality between Tonka and the young man results in a relationship in which he is unquestionably in control. His treatment of Tonka fluctuates between patronizing attention and the direct assertion of his authority. These tendencies intensify when the young man decides it is time to begin having sexual relations with Tonka. His friend Baron Mordansky has already set the mood for the type of affair which follows when he comments on the harvest for his uncle's sugar factory, "wo Hunderte solcher Bauernmädchen auf den Fabriksfeldern arbeiten und sich den Gutsinspektoren und deren Gehilfen in allem so willig unterwerfen sollen wie Negersklaven." The first open expression of the young man's interest in Tonka occurs after she has received the small amount of money for the care of his grandmother. He goes upstairs and watches her pack without being noticed, until she turns and starts, at which point he "freute sich über ihre Verlegenheit." He sets the date for their first sexual intercourse "wie ein Gerichtsvollzieher!" She prepares for the event in silence, "als würde sie von der Macht des 'Herrn' unterjocht." Finally, just before the consummation of the act, his sense of anxiety and helplessness is coupled with "Entsetzen über ihre Undankbarkeit."

A crucial change is introduced immediately after this remarkably unromantic "wedding night." Several years are passed over in silence to bring us to the problem of Tonka's pregnancy, which dominates the second half of the work. If in the first part of the story the nature of the sexual act epitomizes the general pattern of the young man's complete power over Tonka, then the mysterious pregnancy in the second half of the work functions to frustrate each of the ways in which he formerly controlled her. The young man is threatened sexually by Tonka's pregnancy, because it suggests the possibility of a rival lover. Yet the alternative explanation, namely that some sort of modern miracle has taken place, is equally threatening to his scientific intellect, as it would indicate a serious shortcoming in his understanding of the world. This sexual and intellectual dilemma precipitated by Tonka's pregnancy leads to economic and social denigration as well. When Tonka loses her last job he is thrust into the soup kitchens of the impoverished lower class. The intellectual frustration surrounding Tonka's pregnancy results further in a turn towards superstition. He begins to bet on horses and makes a futile try at the lottery. His irrational decision to wear a cheap ring in place of an old family heirloom not only supplies further evidence of his growing superstition, but can be seen as a symbolic representation of his lost social status. The story thus falls neatly into two halves, the first demonstrating the young man's social, intellectual, financial, and sexual dominance of Tonka, the second inverting this pattern through the unresolved mystery of Tonka's pregnancy.

Given this interpretation of Tonka, one would logically expect to find the protagonist utterly crushed, perhaps, even suicidal by the end of the work. The actual ending, however, is quite the opposite. Much like Goethe's Faust, who awakens refreshed and without a trace of guilt at the beginning of the second part of the drama, Musil's protagonist experiences the death of Tonka as a release from a troubled phase of his life. "Er stand im Licht und sie lag unter der Erde, aber alles in allem fühlte er das Behagen des Lichts." The sight of a crying child reminds him of the charmingly innocent way in which "Tonka 'hatte' nur 'Kinder gern'." She has brought a touch of warmth into his world, "das ihn etwas besser machte als andere, weil auf seinem glänzenden Leben ein kleiner warmer Schatten lag." To be sure, Tonka herself is no longer able to share this warmth—"Das half Tonka nichts mehr. Aber ihm half es." And that, presumably, is all that really matters.

It is quite possible to take this happy ending at face value. One critic summarized the events of the work as follows: "We can now see the whole novelle as an educational experience of the hero. He has finished his invention, he is ready for life, but he has also been changed into a better man" [Wilhelm Braun, "An Interpretation of Musil's Novelle 'Tonka'," Monatshefte 53, 1961]. But who says that he has become a better man? Not an omniscient third-person narrator, but the protagonist himself. From the opening pages of the work it is clear that the story is told from the perspective of the now older scientist, who is looking back over an incident of his youth. He chooses to set the work in the third person because it gives his account of the events a guise of objectivity. The narrative as a whole is less a disinterested presentation of the facts than a highly self-interested attempt on the part of the protagonist to justify himself at the expense of Tonka, to gain a triumph over her after her death which was denied him during her life.

The caution one must exercise when reading this novella is summed up nicely in a seemingly peripheral comment in the midst of the young man's agonized attempts to determine the source of Tonka's pregnancy. He lists a series of situations in which one assumes that a given interpretation is correct, while admitting that it is at least theoretically possible that this particular incident may be an exception. The first example is the following: "Kommst du zu einem Kaufmann und eröffnest nicht eine Aussicht, die bald seine Begehrlichkeit reizt, sondern hältst ihm eine lange Rede über die Zeiten und das, was ein reicher Mann eigentlich tun müßte, so weiß er, du bist gekommen, um ihm sein Geld zu stehlen." This passage provides us with a small example of the sort of ambiguity which pervades Musil's Tonka. Because people do not always say what they mean, each utterance has to be interpreted by its addressee. Tonka says she is innocent, but the facts speak against her. Is she lying or telling the truth? Is it ever possible to be absolutely certain that we have correctly understood our interlocutor? Yet this passage does not merely raise an abstract philosophical problem. If the salesman's deceptive speech is not interpreted correctly, the result may well be financial ruin for his victim, just as Tonka's repeated assertions of her innocence despite her pregnancy push the young man into the crisis sketched above.

When at some later date the scientist begins to recount this event, he still is not sure of what actually happened. How did the affair with Tonka begin? One memory is presented, but then quickly corrected, only to be reasserted a few lines later. It is this hesitant, even self-contradictory beginning of the story which led Rudolf Schier to see affinities between this work and the nouveau roman: "Das bedeutet aber, daß die in der traditionellen Epik bestehende Verbindung zwischen Erzählung und Wirklichkeit, Sprache und Welt, weitgehend verloren gegangen ist" ["Robert Musils 'Tonka' als Vorläufer des nouveau roman," Etudes Germaniques 32, 1977]. However, one need only look at the content of the various fragments which begin the novella to realize that this is hardly an adumbration of the postmodern condition, but rather a clear attempt on the part of the narrator to cast doubt on Tonka's moral character, and therefore to justify his suspicion that she has been in fact unfaithful to him. Tonka grew up in the house of her "aunt" who allowed cousin Julie, a prostitute, to come to visit. Tonka was permitted to associate with the female prisoners, "auch meist Prostituierte," at an early age. Next door to the house was a bordello, and Tonka played with the daughter of the proprietress. None of the family relationships are quite what they seem, with the exception of the "aunt's" illegitimate son. This opening segment ends with the comment that Tonka, although still a virgin at this time, was one of those women about whom one cannot be quite sure on the wedding night, due to "physiologische Zweideutigkeiten, wo selbst die Natur nicht ganz klar Aufschluß gibt, und im gleichen Augenblick, wo das wieder vor der Erinnerung stand, wußte er: auch der Himmel war gegen Tonka."

This comment marks the beginning of a process which runs parallel to the narrator's attempt to establish a logical, if inconclusive, explanation for Tonka's behavior. She is not merely unfaithful—she is cursed by heaven! That is, if a rational explanation for her pregnancy cannot be established, it can still be accounted for in terms of the traditional symbolism of Western culture. God has singled Tonka out, either to curse her, or in an alternative interpretation offered later in the work, to sanctify her: "Tonka war in die Nähe tiefer Märchen gerückt. Das war die Welt des Gesalbten, der Jungfrau und Pontius Pilatus, und die Ärzte sagten, daß Tonka geschont und gepflegt werden müßte, sollte sie ihren Zustand überdauern." In a third attempt at a symbolic interpretation she becomes neither virgin nor whore, but simply Nature, a mysterious, unfathomable being whose essence is mystery: "Sie war Natur, die sich zum Geist ordnet; nicht Geist werden will, aber ihn liebt und uner-gründlich sich ihm anschloß wie eins der vielen dem Menschen zugelaufenen Wesen."

As noted above, readers have been quick to adopt the vocabulary of the narrator uncritically in their efforts to understand who Tonka is or what she represents. But we must bear in mind that Tonka herself remains silent in this work. All we have are the narrator's perspectives on this enigmatic figure, with no guarantee that they have any validity. While the narrator can never shed any light on the object of his investigation, his various attempts do reveal a good deal about himself and the purposes of his interpretations of Tonka. Whether Tonka really "is" a miraculous virgin, a despicable whore, or nature incarnate is beside the point; what matters is that these are the categories which present themselves to the narrator as the only logical explanations for her pregnancy.

The very passages which seem to grant symbolic richness to the figure of Tonka are therefore actually motivated by a complete ignorance of her true nature. In this sense we can see a direct parallel between the narrator's account of Tonka and the dubious productions of his "uncle" Hyacinth. Hyacinth is introduced as an "Oberfinanzrat und nebenher noch ein vielgelesener deutscher Dichter, dessen Erzählungen große Auflagen erreichten." Despite their great popularity, his stories are poor. For all of Hyacinth's attempts at intellectual profundity, "seine Gedanken waren daher so beschaffen, daß sie desto größer erschienen, je leerer sie waren, indem sie sich über die Jahrtausende und größten Fragen ausdehnten." There is thus an inverse proportion between the pretentiousness of the novels and their actual worth, which finds an ironic parallel in the scope of their public success. The public, in other words, finds itself in the position of the person confronted by the shady businessman in the anecdote recalled above, but in their case they fail to see through the literary charlatan.

The public success of this verbal huckster is further crowned by a private triumph over the young man's mother. As a child the future scientist admired the seemingly selfless love of Hyacinth for his mother, but when he grew older he realized that Hyacinth was actually attracted to her because he could exploit her ideals as a source for his novels, "wahrscheinlich weil sie als Offizierstochter von Ehrund Charaktervorstellungen gehalten und, diese lebhaft ausstrahlend, jene Festigkeit der Grundsätze besaß, die er für die Ideale seiner Bücher brauchte, während ihm dunkel ahnte, daß die Flüssigkeit seiner Rede und Erzählergabe gerade davon kam, daß sie seinem Geist fehlte." The suspicion that Hyacinth's attraction to the protagonist's mother is linked to her ability to inspire bombastic, but highly profitable prose is confirmed when Hyacinth is asked to write a letter to the protagonist's father in the place of his ailing mother: "Was soll ich denn schreiben?—er, welcher der Mutter bogenlange Episteln bei jeder Trennung schrieb!"

The example of Hyacinth's duplicity causes the young man to reject any sort of poetic mysticism in his life. "Der vielseitig Begabte studierte Chemie und stellte sich taub gegen alle Fragen, die nicht klar zu lösen sind, ja er war ein fast haßerfüllter Gegner solcher Erörterungen und ein fanatischer Jünger des kühlen, trocken phantastischen, Bogen spannenden neuen Ingenieurgeistes." Yet despite this professed rejection of anything but the most sober and precise sort of scientific language, we frequently find the protagonist using language in a way in which the words seem to become detached from any direct communicative purpose. At one point he finds himself defending Tonka's seeming lack of emotion to his mother by pointing out that some people don't cry easily, "nicht weil es ihn wichtig zu sagen dünkte, sondern weil ihn seine Redegeschicklichkeit reizte." Later he spends considerable effort writing quite poetic letters to first his mother and then to Tonka, which however he never mails. Whereas the normal letter is written to establish communication between two individuals, here writing becomes a private exercise whose content has less significance than the act of writing itself: "Da erst fiel ihm ein, daß er die Briefe nie abgeschickt hatte; sie waren ja nicht mit Sicherheit seine Meinung, sondern eben ein Zustand, der sich nicht anders helfen kann als mit Schreiben."

This condition evidently persists in the scientist after Tonka's death, causing him to recall the event again in the narrative we read. Like his mother for Hyacinth, she becomes the impetus for his seemingly profound allusions to questions of philosophy, religion, and language, while relegating the fate of Tonka to a matter of indifference, just as in Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß we are encouraged to consider the problem of Basini's sufferings as one of those "trivial concerns for trivial minds" [Peters]. What separates Musil's Tonka from the work of Hyacinth, however, is the subtle way in which it reveals the duplicitous character of the narrator. The heavy artillery of literary symbolism is brought to bear on an enigmatic target, but the shots explode into darkness, revealing only the location of the ramparts from which they were launched. That the young man is able to walk away from the experience with more of a smug grin than a mortal wound is indicative more of his willful self-deception than any real victory. This becomes particularly evident in his last encounters with the mortally ill Tonka, in which the question of his belief in her comes closest to its resolution: "Er sprach nie das Wort aus: ich glaube dir. Obgleich er längst an sie glaubte. Denn er glaubte ihr bloß so, daß er nicht länger alle Folgen daraus auch vor seinem Verstand einstehen wollte. Es hielt ihn heil und an der Erde fest, daß er das nicht tat." His sanity is only retained by deliberately ignoring the full consequences of his halfhearted belief. One is again reminded of Törleß, who serenely leaves the boarding school and the battered Basini behind, while aware that "das Eigentliche, das Problem, saß fest." Peace of mind is bought by ignoring the questions which bothered them, rather than finding a solution.

This element of bad faith in the seeming maturity of the young man at the end of Tonka suggests a motivation for one of the most radical aspects of the work, the fact that its protagonist remains unnamed. As Tonka's pregnancy progresses and her changing physical appearance becomes a constant reminder of the threat she poses to the young man's ability to maintain control over either her or himself, he decides to grow a beard. Like his turn to superstition in this period of crisis, the beard becomes a symbol of his increasing alienation from his former self, which involves an increased aggression towards Tonka: "Und da man nichts weiß, wünschte er Tonka vielleicht zuweilen tot, damit dieses unerträgliche Leben ein Ende finde, und mochte den Bart bloß deshalb, weil er alles verstellte und verbarg." However, as soon as Tonka has left the house to go to the hospital, he has his beard shaved off: "Nun war er wieder mehr er selbst." Yet as we have seen, Tonka's departure only removes the constant reminder of the problem posed by her pregnancy but not the problem itself. Thus the alleged recovery of the young man's true identity masks this fact in a way which directly parallels his avoidance of the consequences of his "belief in Tonka during the last days of her life. His namelessness, in turn, can be understood as a reflection of the dissonance which lies just beneath the surface of the uplifting tonality of the final paragraphs of the work. The happy ending is paid for with the deliberate willingness to put some problems into the dark in order to claim that one is standing in a comforting light.

To what extent is Musil to be identified with this narrator? Even the staunchest formalist would have to admit that there is some strong evidence for equating the author with his fiction in the case of this particular text. In the early drafts of the story, found in Musil's diary of 1905, the protagonist is named Robert. His lover's name is not Tonka, but Herma, the name of Musil's early lover Herma Dietz, whom he compares to his mother, Hermine Musil. The figure of Hyacinth directly parallels the actual situation in Musil's household as a child, where his mother openly maintained an intimate relationship with Heinrich Reiter while remaining married to Alfred Musil.

However intriguing the evidence of Musil's diaries may be, it would be a mistake to reduce Tonka, completed nearly twenty years later, to a piece of camouflaged autobiography. The strength of the work lies in its manipulation of a familiar literary archetype, not its private significance for its author. Musil takes the familiar story of a woman who suffers at a man's expense and complicates it by introducing the unresolved problem of Tonka's pregnancy, resulting in the symbolic frustration of the young man's attempt to assert his power over Tonka.

The situation is further complicated by the young man's role as narrator of the text. Narration becomes an exercise in compensating for repressed frustration by turning mystery into myth. Thus the enigma of Tonka's pregnancy which results in the inversion of the familiar pattern of the man's cultural, intellectual, and class dominance of the woman in the plot of the text becomes the primary motivation for the narrator's attempt to interpret Tonka's silence in terms of the old clichés of woman as nature, virgin, or whore. In this way Musil's Tonka becomes a powerful comment on the resiliency of the ideology which is both defeated and resurrected in the course of the work.