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[PDF] Walks With Walser

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An odd timeliness. It appears that with this essay this newsletter has reawakened after a duration of slumber, just after I finished the Bernofsky book and started The Tanners. It's clear from the essay and the biography that the short fiction and Jakob von Gunten are the glittering treasures in Walserland. I look forward to sitting down with those in due time. But why did I read the biography before reading any of the man's work? I guess some personalities are as compelling as the work they produce.

Walser\u2019s brilliant short fictions ally him with Erik Satie, Paul Klee, and the other gifted miniaturists of modernism. The Walserian mode is elusive, gentle, courteous, submissive, youthful, disarming, and genial. His unassuming protagonists\u2014students, artists, servants, and children\u2014are poets of inconspicuousness and locality. They are impish and somehow otherworldly, petit-bourgeois sprites saddled with classes and clerkships, making suspiciously cheerful meaning of their own disenchantment. But this innocence is one of twentieth-century literature\u2019s most sophisticated acts of legerdemain. The smaller, the more picturesque, the more seemingly guileless the narrative form, the more tightly Walser coils his lacerating ambiguities. Infinitely light and impossibly dense, his short prose works are gorgeous confinements out of which some radiant and contradictory energy is forever threatening to escape.

Susan Bernofsky\u2019s \u201CClairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser,\u201D the first English-language biography of Walser, looks to dispel the fantasy of the idling, half-mad na\u00EFf. (The title is taken from one of Walser\u2019s many admirers, W.G. Sebald: \u201CHe is no Expressionist visionary prophesying the end of the world, but rather a clairvoyant of the small.\u201D) Bernofsky, a professor and distinguished translator of German literature, situates Walser\u2019s eccentricity, reticence, and melancholy within a life of exemplary literary discipline. He comes across, first and foremost, as a tireless worker: living by his pen, badgering editors for advances, and enduring terrible austerity for his art. Bernofsky\u2019s welcome corrective is exhaustively researched, though necessarily fragmentary. Given the relative scarcity of surviving letters during certain periods, Walser\u2019s semi-autobiographical fictions are marshalled to fill in the gaps. What emerges from the record is a tantalizing chiaroscuro: flashes of life and work offset by shadowy lacunae.

The short prose piece is Walser\u2019s essential narrative unit. His is a world of fables, travelogues, essays, idylls, meandering critical pieces on painting and theater, fantasies, dramolettes, and uncanny extemporizations. Their snow globe titles (\u201CLittle Snow Landscape,\u201D \u201CTwo Little Fairy Tales,\u201D \u201CThe Carousel\u201D) and bejeweled surfaces belie the totalizing irony that awaits the reader. Subjects are effaced by way of endless refinement and qualification. Insignificance is embroidered with impossible verbal finery. Themes disintegrate, only to reform later with strange, totemic significance. The velocity and mutability of his observations are finally comic. Walser casts himself as a sort of alpine Buster Keaton, his slapstick energy palpable even as the set crumbles around him. He often relies on some pleasing foundational misdirection, as in \u201CVacation,\u201D which begins: \u201CThe waves splash in the bay. Surely I\u2019m lying when I claim this, but we do say anything to get something going.\u201D

After the publication of his first novel, 1904\u2019s \u201CFritz Kocher\u2019s Essays,\u201D a collection of short pieces masquerading as a precocious child\u2019s notebook, Walser felt ready to take on Berlin. There he moved in with his brother Karl, whose artistic success granted Robert access to the city\u2019s rich vein of Secessionist bohemian life. As in his sometimes whimsical fictions, Walser was not above acting the fool for his cosmopolitan friends. It was a version of himself he seemed to enjoy, the handsome yokel and rabble rouser, drinking heavily, flirting, eating too much at dinner parties, and insulting other writers. (He and Karl once chased the playwright Frank Wedekind into a caf\u00E9 with shouts of \u201CMuttonhead!\u201D Wedekind never spoke to them again.) He enrolled in butler school to shock Karl\u2019s wealthy patrons and spent an autumn in the employ of a Silesian count.

The European novel was then in the midst of its great internal emigration. Works like Robert Musil\u2019s \u201CThe Confusions of Young T\u00F6rless\u201D and Rainer Maria Rilke\u2019s \u201CThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge\u201D featured young, disoriented protagonists exploring perilous inner worlds. Elsewhere, in Prague, Kafka was just beginning to document his dreamlike inner life. Walser\u2019s free-floating fictions, pocket soliloquys suggesting an impenetrable private terrain, placed him at the forefront of this imaginative vanguard. Though his triptych of Berlin novels began in realist territory\u2014\u201CThe Tanners,\u201D published in 1907, nakedly dramatized the lives of the Walser brood; \u201CThe Assistant,\u201D appearing a year later, was based on his apprenticeship to an inventor in W\u00E4denswil\u2014a great shift occurred with 1909\u2019s \u201CJakob von Gunten.\u201D With it the modernist novel plunged into bottomless ambiguity.

Walser\u2019s favorite among his longer works, \u201CJakob von Gunten\u201D purports to be the diary of a young man enrolled in a school for servants. The eponymous hero has run away from his aristocratic family, intent on becoming \u201Ca charming utterly spherical zero.\u201D At the Benjamina Institute, he discovers a curious pedagogical limbo. Its teachers \u201Care asleep, or they are dead, or seemingly dead, or they are fossilized, no matter, in any case we get nothing from them.\u201D There is only one class: \u201CHow should a boy behave?\u201D The entire operation is run by a mysterious brother and sister whose private chambers delineate a remote world every bit as tantalizing and fantastical as Kafka\u2019s \u201CThe Castle.\u201D The novel proceeds with a shimmering, oneiric quality. Jakob, a figure of indolence and mock-solemnity, thrives in this unfixed environment. He slowly gains ascendancy over the Benjamentas, humiliating and exalting them in equal measure. His motives for doing so remain inscrutable. Akin to an allegory sprung free of its meaning, the novel finally rejects both aspiration and submission alike. \u201CHow fortunate I am,\u201D Jakob writes, \u201Cnot to be able to see in myself anything worth respecting and watching! To be small and to stay small.\u201D As the meticulous labor of his writing demanded an ever more circumscribed way of life, this mantra of diminution could have been Walser\u2019s own

For all their sophistication, these remarkable novels made no discernible difference to Walser\u2019s material condition. Broke and homesick, he returned to Switzerland in 1913, spending the next seven years in the attic of a temperance hotel in Biel. Though ambivalent about the war, he was called up several times\u2014mainly to dig trenches and build fortifications\u2014while maintaining an intimate correspondence with a laundress. (\u201CWriting each other letters is like gently, carefully touching,\u201D he wrote.) His prolific run of short fiction during this middle period is marked by its stylistic turn toward recursiveness. In stories like \u201CThe Sausage,\u201D \u201CBasta,\u201D and \u201CWell Then,\u201D the spiraling repetitions of postwar formalists like Thomas Bernhard can be discerned. Despite this ambitious evolution, his audience and income diminished. Two novels, \u201CTobold\u201D and \u201CTheodor,\u201D were lost or abandoned. A third, \u201CThe Robber,\u201D an extravagant and sexually anxious work of deferment, would not be published until 1972. These abdications have about them a sense of willed reprieve. To write such works only to render them unavailable is an eminently Walserian gesture. His exploding ambition conspired with his shrinking life to produce a secret, vanishing literature. This was one way to free himself from fear of failure and the commercial grind: to consign particular works to oblivion. He would later write to Max Brod, in 1927, \u201CEvery book that has been printed is, after all, a grave for its author, isn\u2019t it?\u201D

After experiencing psychosomatic hand cramps, he developed a new form of composition commensurate with his narrowing circumstances. This abbreviated script, one to two millimeters in height, was written in the medieval German he preferred. Long considered to be indecipherable, or else a kind of private code, an entire story could fit on a business card or rejection slip. (He wrote on any surface available to him.) The secretive and provisional nature of his micrography\u2014what he called the \u201Cpencil method\u201D\u2014ensured a private world of experimentation could exist outside the pressures of publishing. Combining necessary thrift with a need for seclusion, this miniaturization was, as Bernofsky has it, \u201Can instinctual gesture of self-preservation.\u201D It was also a rehearsal for a more permanent form of disappearance. The great silence of Herisau awaited, though not before the final flourishing of his mature style and its lush, fractal complexity. 589ccfa754

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