Context
Reading Robert Walser
John Taylor
It is regrettable that the Swiss writer
Robert Walser (1878-1956) remains so scarcely known in the United
States at a time when his arresting novels and short prose pieces are
considered, not only in German-language countries but throughout
continental Europe, to constitute a major oeuvre. For most American readers, the author of Jakob von Gunten (1908) and The Robber (written in 1925, published in 1972)—if he is acknowledged at all—is
obscured by the long shadows cast by contemporaries who, in recent
decades, have become more renowned: Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Robert
Musil. Yet in his day, Walser’s work was admired by these and other
pioneering modernists. Tellingly, when Musil reviewed Kafka’s first
collection of stories, he observed that the Prague author was "a
special case of the Walser type." However intriguing this
remark now seems, when we can fully compare the two authors (who were
at least equally fascinated by castles), it implies that Walser’s
accomplishments were already taken for valid touchstones. And if,
having been championed by Kurt Wolff, who brought out three collections
of Walser’s short prose in 1913-14, the writer later had to overcome
greater obstacles when seeking publishers for his writing (which had
gained in stylistic complexity and philosophical consequence), his
books continued to be studied closely by exacting minds. He was never
forgotten; perhaps only, as Elias Canetti put it, "camouflaged" for a
while. Finally, two decades after Walser’s death, as the Suhrkamp Collected Works began to appear and as scholars Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang
brilliantly deciphered Walser’s notorious "micrograms"—unpublished
manuscripts composed in an infinitesimal shorthand—the Swiss author was
enthusiastically rehabilitated, in Europe, as a stunning precursor of
our own preoccupations. The genres in which he excelled
comprise hypersensitive reminiscences, sketches of banal yet
"delightful"—a favorite epithet—everyday occurrences, oblique accounts
of haphazard "strolls" through town and countryside, disturbing
monologues constructed upon a conspicuous absence of conventional
transitions, as well as sundry dreams, fantasies, parodies, fairy
tales, and ironic anti-Bildungsromane involving mediocre
Everymen who "prefer believing they are nowhere," or who eventually
"leave behind" all that they have toiled to achieve. (A recurrent
phrase is "But, at last, I departed.") Long before the novelists
associated with the French New Novel, Walser questions the
epistemological validity of narrators and characters, and doubts that
events can be described linearly or linked together causally. Above
all, he wonders deeply about the "self." Provocatively, his intimism
self affirms as it self-dismisses. "I feel how little it concerns me,"
he observes in Jakob von Gunten, "everything that’s called ‘the
world,’ and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is
to me." At the end, however, this "individual me is only a zero." (To
comprehend this reductive process, so typical of Walser, try giving an
infinite regress to Peter Handke’s interesting title, indebted to
Rilke: The Inner World of the Outer World of the Inner World. . . . ) Walser
feels at any rate ominously, painfully, "separated" from all that he
subsumes under the notion of "the world," as well as from all that
which, as he vaguely yet tenaciously intuits, might compose his true
self. "His head," he perceptively avows in The Robber, "was
constantly busied with something somehow very far distant." Truly
astonishing can be the elaborate stylistic and narrative means mustered
when he endeavors to span bridges to those distant horizons. Reading
Walser’s prose on its own terms demands keeping in a proper perspective
certain disturbing facts concerning the last third of his life, which
was spent in two mental asylums. This troubling personal dimension can
of course allure, even endear us, to his work, particularly to its
ultimate stage, when his style tended to eschew the more immediate—if
ever engagingly quirky—realism of his first, essentially
autobiographical, provincial novels. By the 1920s Walser, although
never abandoning his autobiographical inspiration and his search for
self-lucidity, increasingly explores the tenuous relationship between
language and perceived reality, between personal experience and the
thought processes brought to bear on the narrative reconstruction of
experience. The results can disconcert, with their abstruse
perspectives and cogitative leaps. Walser himself describes The Robber as "one great huge gloss, ridiculous and unfathomable." What stands behind, we must ask, this "gloss"? Clues are furnished by The Robber, a (self-)portrait and love-story narrated at playful removes. Paradoxes
abound, the most striking of which concerns the first-person narrator—a
writer of course created by another writer named Robert—who gradually
merges with his protagonist, given the quasi-punning nickname of "der
Raüber." Even at the beginning, this Robber "pilfers . . . landscape
impressions" and "purloins affections." Later, the narrator—the
Robber’s "guardian"—worries that the impressions "crowding in" on him
likewise pressure his character. By the end, we come full circle: the
Robber is "ghostly pale from all his writing, for you can imagine how
valiantly he’s been assisting me in the composition of this book."
Faced with this somehow contourless personality (that is, faced with
himself), the writer-narrator of The Robber announces that "on
the basis of [the Robber’s] extraordinary and yet also quite ordinary
existence, I am constructing here a commonsensical book from which
nothing at all can be learned." This is not the only place in Walser’s oeuvre where a painstakingly, even frenetically, constructed edifice of
language collapses like a castle of cards. Walser’s characteristic joy
at coming across "charming" events or objects is often similarly
numbed. His writings devolve internally from proclaimed wonder (or at
least an odd, self-mocking contentment) to the conclusion that there
exist no sure foundations for marveling at anything. "I like listening
for something that doesn’t want to make a sound," he states in Jakob von Gunten. "I pay attention, and that makes life more beautiful, for if we don’t
have to pay attention there really is no life." This "no life,"
however, always threatens the writer’s fragile, transitory
attentiveness. Often his delight, invoked by the will’s renewed
energies, resembles pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. Although Walser can concentrate on a given anecdote per se (thereby revealing his predilection for the singular event and the
isolated instant, as opposed to a world-view presupposing temporal
continuity), the logic of coherent storytelling—in which several
anecdotes must be woven together plausibly—can become comically
chaotic. The narrator of The Robber regularly declares his
desire "to narrate in an orderly fashion," yet he implies—without
telling us why—that his subject matter inherently resists rational
structuring. Having introduced a footbath into the story, he
immediately laments: "To this footbath we are most certain to return. .
. . Oh, if only I could get to work on this footbath right away! But,
alas, deferred it must be." Walser often converses in this frantic, if
lighthearted, fashion with his reader; yet he also insists on mirroring
his own thought processes faithfully, preserving the exact order in
which perceptions, sentiments or reflections pop-up in the mind, then
vanish. The "gloss" that ensues includes no graceful rhetoric, no
fictional filler, no narrative smoothing out of flighty associations: Yet
Walser’s biography cannot fully be ignored when we read his work, for
his internment perhaps nonetheless remains linked to an important theme
already underlying his earliest work. The known facts, succinctly
stated, run as follows: In 1929, while he was suffering from depression
and even had attempted suicide, Walser allowed himself to be committed
to the Waldau Sanatorium. He continued to write there until 1933, when
he was transferred—probably against his will—to Herisau, a closed
asylum. Classified (mistakenly) as a schizophrenic, the once-prolific
Walser apparently stopped writing once he was locked up in
Herisau—although recent testimony given by a former attendant claims
that Walser continued to write there, even extensively, on tiny scraps
of paper. Be this as it may, none of these jottings (whatever they
were) have surfaced, and Walser seems to have spent his days mostly
performing menial tasks, such as assembling paper bags. Rather
portentously, Walser had, in an earlier text, described life itself as
a "shaded dead-end." The only respite from these routines came, once or twice a year, when his admiring confrère, Carl Seelig, dropped by for a visit. Seelig, who became the writer’s
guardian, would take Walser for a long hike in the surrounding
mountains, then invite him to a sumptuous meal in some nearby inn.
Seelig’s necessarily repetitive yet touching memoirs, Wanderungen mit Robert Walser (1957), portray an author who had abandoned writing yet who enjoyed
steep climbing, savory victuals, potent beer and wine, as well as
prolonged discussions about books (though not his own). Then the author
of The Walk (1917), an essay-like novella heralding German and
French "strolling literature," would be accompanied back to the asylum
for another six months or so. In The Walk, Walser eerily
recalls the eighteenth-century German writer Jakob Michael Reinhold
Lenz who, "having fallen into madness and despair, learned how to make
shoes and indeed made them." Walser’s literary destiny thus
abruptly terminates—for complex psychological, familial and perhaps
even metaphysical linguistic or aesthetic reasons—in one of those
awesome "silences" that we also associate with, say, Arthur Rimbaud,
Jean Genet or, more recently, Louis-René des Forêts. Walser’s silence
is particularly troubling because, from the beginning of his career
through the mid-1920s, and despite increasing periods of abject
poverty, self-reclusion and nomadism, his productivity was impressive,
by any writer’s standards. One of his novels, Geschwister Tanner (The Tanner Siblings, 1906), a lightly fictionalized account of his own growing up, was completed in six weeks. His first book, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (Fritz Kocher’s Essays, 1904), as well as Der Gehülfe (The Apprentice, 1908), which recounts time spent assisting an unsuccessful inventor,
date from this same fruitful period. Walser’s exalted creative spells
also included the simultaneous production of stories, vignettes,
reviews, and mini-essays for various periodicals. The man worked hard
to earn his living as a freelance writer; he accepted dozens of part-
or full-time jobs, even enrolling in a school for servants in Berlin,
in 1905. Yet already in Jakob von Gunten, in which Walser
memorializes this butler school (as a mysterious "Benjamenta Institute"
in which hardly anything happens, let alone is taught), the narrator
can exclaim: "One thing I know for certain: in later life I shall be a
charming, utterly spherical zero." Whatever now-opaque reasons
underlie Walser’s real-life literary silence, his earliest prose
manifestly anticipates it. Yet like des Forêts’s classic novella, Le Bavard (1946), Walser’s literary investigation of this theme soars beyond his
own torment. Both writers envision "talking," indeed "babbling," as
man’s poignant, vain search for—or perhaps, rather, postponement of
searching for—ontological or metaphysical roots in a hostile, Godless,
cosmos. Already in The Tanner Siblings, the narrator
experiences existential stability only when he is talking himself into
a job. It is striking how the young Walser turned so many of his
attempted occupations into, literally, "pretexts" for future texts—he
who, during the same period, could movingly write: "I don’t want a
future, I want a present." "There is something unspeakably cool about
me," the narrator of Jakob von Gunten pellucidly admits, "in
spite of the excitements that can attack me." Robert Walser’s prose,
and perhaps his life as well, courageously point time and again to the
hovering threat and significance of that harrowing qualifier,
"unspeakably."
The swans there in the castle pond, the Renaissance façade.
Where did I see this? Or rather, where did the Robber? Staircases led
up the trunks of old trees. Entire tea parties could ascend so as to
hold their gatherings beneath a roof of green. And that inn standing
upon a lonely rise, that little forest of birches, or whatever sort of
trees they were. And the pavilion on the hill, the house with its low
wall, and, behind windowpanes, gazing out solemnly at the arriving
guests, the proud lady. Pride is often our last refuge, but a refuge to
which we should never take flight. . . .
A heartfelt plea included in The Robber sums up this tense ultimate approach and points to an overriding concern of modernism: "How to conjoin these disjunctions?"
