Items of clothing from Can Themba’s suit to Gogol’s overcoat serve a number of purposes in    fiction. Elizabethan drama famously used costumes as a means for actors to transform into characters and for characters to turn into other characters. While this kind of costuming relies on popular stereotypes (a man can only dress as a woman if there’s such a thing as ‘women’s clothing) it affirms the idea that a clever actor with a well-stocked closet can change identity as easily as he or she might change shoes. Modern literature tends to take a more Althusser-like attitude towards costumes: fashion is but one of many social practices that inculcate ideology into a subject, tailoring us to suit dominant social values.A good story takes details seriously, whether the character are using their clothes to express something or whether their clothes are using them. In ‘The Romantic’, the first part of Hermann Broch’s trilogy ‘The Sleepwalkers’ there is an passage that considers the importance of military uniforms occupy in Prussian ideology:

A generic uniform provides its wearer with a definitive line of demarcation between his person and the world; it is like a hard casing against which one’s personality and the world beat sharply and directly and are differentiated from each other; for it is the uniform’s true function to manifest and obtain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life, just as it conceals whatever in the human body is soft and flowing, covering up the soldier’s underclothes and skin, and decreeing that sentries on guard should wear white gloves. So when in the morning a man has fastened up his uniform to the last button, he acquires a second and thicker hide and feels that he has returned to his more essential and steadfast being… Yet this does not mean that the man in uniform has become blind, nor that he is filled with blind prejudices as is commonly assumed; he remains all the time a man like you and me, dreams of food and love, even reads his newspaper at breakfast but he is no longer tied to things, and as they scarcely concern him any longer he is able to divide them into the good and the bad, for on intolerance and lack of understanding the security of life is based. (Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir.)

This paragraph ties into a theory of the origins of uniforms that Broch articulates through the character of Bertrand (a friend of the novel’s hero.) His theory states that the military learned the power of uniforms from the church, finding it to be an excellent means of fusing the transcendent with the secular. This mix of practicality and idealism produced the particular form of Romantic patriotism that fuelled 19th Century nationalism. Ideally, uniforms reduce the world to a place where surface appearances are representations that tell us everything we want to know, concealing nothing. Of course, the real question is whether an individual person can truly become that which he represents. For Bertrand, the wearer comes to belong to his clothing more than he does to his family or community. Feelings of authority, pride, security, intolerance are enhanced. But this is not merely the result of indoctrination nor is it merely uniform fetishism.

Broch explicitly tells us that the uniform solider feels empowered for he is no longer ‘tied’ to life. This is not a total negation of the wearer’s ‘real self.’ The same person still  exists beneath. Still, the wearing of a uniform creates a double consciousness: importance is no longer invested in ordinary, concrete matters while abstractions (such as duty or camaraderie) become concrete entities, imbued with absolute importance. The novel does not set up the usual existential opposition between a soldier’s ‘bad faith’ (his acting out the being of a soldier) and his authentic being. Instead, it depicts ideology in the style of the 19th Century novel, where personal transformation is largely a matter of learning new techniques of self-narration. The solider continues to have the same boring, everyday thoughts but his experience of them is fundamentally altered. A uniform is meant to offer the solider liberation from pettiness, from normalcy. Despite its demands, it offers a different framework through which the self can be perceived. In this way, the uniform contributes as much freedom as it deducts from the soldier. In a way, Broch’s theory combines the optimism of the Elizabethan costume as a tool for self-fashioning with the Marxist sense of the uniform as an instrument of dehumanization, of shaping the person to fit its context. Broch demonstrates this ambivalence more overtly in the next sequence, which shows the protagonist, Joachim von Pasenow’s neurotic reflections on his uniform:

He could almost have wished that the uniform was a direct emanation of his skin, and often he thought to himself that that was the real function of a uniform, and wished at least that his underclothes could by a distinctive pattern be made a component part of the uniform. For it was uncanny to think that every solider carried about with him under his tunic the anarchical passions common to all men. Perhaps the world would have gone off the rails altogether had someone at the last moment invented stiff, shirt-fronts for the civilians, thus transforming the shirt into a white board and making it quite unrecognizable as underclothing.

Joachim recognizes that the appeal of his uniform lies in the fact that it provides limitations, it forces him to inflict discipline upon problematic urges, to keep things on the rails. It remains a hard casing that relieves his insecurity. More interesting is his view of the modern civilian shirt as ‘a white board.’ The civilian wears clothes that stifle his individuality, doing so even without claiming prestige as compensation. In this, the average person is worse off than the soldier: they have chosen to stand for nothing. Yet, a society obsessed with order is also one that is obsessed with arbitrary formalities and soulless ceremony. Joachim says he believes the uniform is ‘decreed by nature’, but it is clear that he doubts that this way of life truly is natural. He grows anxious when his tunic is taken off. In these moments, he does not experience a loss of self but a loss of self-knowledge. He returns to his old narrative, which is no longer satisfactory. He is reminded that military garments do not grow out of his skin. Ideology has been mistaken for natural law. In uniform, Joachim’s underlying ‘passions’ are overmastered. He finds comfort in accepting and deferring them. He knows they may be gratified later when he’s dressed in other clothes, for this is a principle around which German military ideology is built: do not deny desire, confine it to situations where it can be indulged in without guilt or loss of control. Joachim, for instance, is well aware that officers may only visit brothels when in civvies.

Broch endured his own struggle with German Fascism but this digression is not meant to simply point out the obvious hypocrisy of the military caste. His purpose is to establish a tension between two romantic sentiments: Joachim is ruled both by passion and by principle. He idealizes both the Appollonian and Dionysian in equal measure. The two impulses are kept in separate spheres so that a balance can be maintained. As a trilogy, ‘The Sleepwalkers’ tells three stories using the literary styles of three periods, from the romantic to the realist to High Modernist avant-garde. The second section ‘The Anarchist’ picks up on certain, similar concerns, though its emphasis is much more on constructing a realistic impression of the lives of ordinary Germans. This first story has a classic love triangle plot. Joachim must choose between his lover (a beautiful, Czech prostitute named Ruzena) and a more appropriate match, an aristocratic woman named Elisabeth. This plot is strictly conventional but Broch uses it to explore how the emotionally charged sturm undt drang movement challenge a culture based on rigid adherence to regulations. A dichotomy of sex and chivalric love is pivotal to this issue. Broch uses clothing to intensify the eroticism of Joachim and Ruzena’s sexual encounter:

“Open that.” She whispered, tearing at the same time at his necktie and the buttons of his vest. And as if in sudden, precipitate humility, whether towards him or towards God, she fell on her knees, her head against the foot of the bed, and quickly unfastened his shoes. Oh, how terrible that was – for why should they not sink down together, forgetting the casings in which they were held? And yet how grateful he was to her that she made it easier and so touchingly; the deliverance of the smile with which they threw open the bed into which they flung themselves. But the sharp-cornered starched plastron of his shirt, cutting against her chin, still irked her, and opening it and squeezing her face between sharp angles, she ordered: “put that off” and now they felt release and freedom, felt the softness of their bodies, felt their breathing stifled by the urgency of emotion, and their delight rising up out of their dread. Oh, dread of life streaming from the living flesh with which the bones are clothed, softness of the skin spread and stretched over it, dreadful warning of the skeleton and the many-ribbed breast frame which he can now embrace and which, breathing, now presses against him, its heart beating.

Joachim, Ruzena, and the narration itself, fall into disorder as symbolic surfaces are abruptly removed. The sequence relies on verbs of motion and long lines to render their urgency but its atomistic treatment of the body itself is more ambiguous. Broch’s descriptions nearly tip over into body-horror as the stitching of the human caul is traced and examined. They feel dread. Joachim wants to embrace Ruzena’s bones, forsaking the outer layers of flesh and clothing. Her body becomes an ‘it’, the outer casing that holds her beating heart. Try as he might, Joachim can only make sense of Ruzena’s flesh as a living garment not as her total being. It continues:

Sweet fragrance of the flesh, humid exhalation, soft runnels beneath the breasts, darkness of the armpits. But still, Joachim was too confused, still they were both too confused, to know the delight they felt; they knew only that they were together and yet they must still seek each other.

Is this another instance of the longstanding superstition that holds that the corporeal is a false self? Is religion or metaphysics, once again, to blame? I think the implications go further than this. If clothing unties one from the world then nakedness is a necessary condition for emotional engagement. Even in nakedness, in physical union, the complete image or texture of the other cannot be found. It resides neither in clothing nor even in ‘dreadful’ flesh. They want to feel the loved one as a totality. No amount of uncovering can expose this. Perhaps it is clothing all the way down. Broch ends ‘The Romantic’ on a bittersweet note, as Joachim lies on his wedding night watching his new wife Elisabeth, whom he has not touched, fall sleep:

She had moved a little to the side, and her hand, which with its befrilled wrist was all that emerged from the bedclothes, rested in his. Through his position his military coat had become disordered, the lapels falling apart left his black trousers visible, and when Joachim noticed this he hastily set things right again and covered the place. He had now drawn up his legs, and so as not to touch the sheets with his patent-leather shoes, he rested his feet in a rather constrained postured on the chair standing beside the bed.

This is a victory for conservative values and appearances but it is, above all, a victory for security over vulnerability. This final moment of abstinence might be endearing in a way, if we had not been asked, along the way, to consider what clothes mean.