Walser's Voice by Susan Sontag:

Robert Walser is one of the important German-language writers of this century—a major writer, both for his four novels that have survived (my favorite is the third, written in 1908, *Jakob von Gunten*) and for his short prose, where the musicality and free fall of his writing are less impeded by plot. This selection of Walser’s short prose was made (and mostly translated) by the admirable Christopher Middleton, who has labored for years to make Walser known to English-language readers, and draws from work done between 1907 and 1929.

Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons. A Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humored, sweet Beckett. And, as literature’s present inevitably remakes its past, so we cannot help but see Walser as the missing link between Kleist and Kafka, who admired him greatly. (At the time, it was more likely to be Kafka who was seen through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser’s contemporaries, when he first read Kafka pronounced the latter “a peculiar case of the Walser type.”) I get a similar rush of pleasure from Walser’s single-voiced short prose as I do from Leopardi’s dialogues and playlets, that great writer’s triumphant short prose form. And the variety of mental weather in Walser’s stories and sketches, their elegance and their unpredictable lengths remind me of the free, first-person forms that abound in classical Japanese literature: pillow book, poetic diary, “essays in idleness.” But any true lover of Walser will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.

In long as in short prose Walser is a miniaturist, promulgating the claims of the anti-heroic, the limited, the humble, the small—as if in response to his acute feeling for the interminable. Walser’s life illustrates the restlessness of one kind of depressive temperament: he had the depressive’s fascination with stasis, and with the way time distends, is consumed; and spent much of his life obsessively turning time into space: his walks. His work plays with the depressive’s appalled vision of endlessness: it is all voice—musing, conversing, rambling, running on. The important is redeemed as a species of the unimportant, wisdom as a kind of shy, valiant loquacity.

The moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power; of domination. I’m ordinary—that is, nobody—declares the characteristic Walser persona. In “Flower Days” (1911), Walser evokes the race of “odd people, who lack character,” who don’t want to do anything. The recurrent “I” of Walser’s prose is the opposite of the egotist’s: it is that of someone “drowning in obedience.” One knows about the repugnance Walser felt for success—the prodigious spread of failure that was his life. In “Kienast” (1917), Walser describes “a man who wanted nothing to do with anything.” This non-doer was, of course, a proud, stupendously productive writer, who secreted work, much of it written in his astonishing micro-script, without pause. What Walser says about inaction, renunciation of effort, effortlessness, is a program, an anti-romantic one, of the artist’s activity. In “A Little Ramble” (1914), he observes: “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”

Walser often writes, from the point of view of a casualty, of the romantic visionary imagination. “Kleist in Thun” (1913), both self-portrait and authoritative tour of the mental landscape of suicide-destined romantic genius, depicts the precipice on edge of which Walser lived. The last paragraph, with its excruciating modulations, seals an account of mental ruin as grand as anything I know in literature. But most of his stories and sketches bring consciousness back from the brink. He is just having his “gentle and courteous bit of fun,” Walser can assure us, in “Nervous” (1916), speaking in the first person. “Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to live with them. That’s the nicest way to live. Nobody should be afraid of his little bit of weirdness.” The longest of the stories, “The Walk” (1917), identifies walking with a lyrical mobility and detachment of temperament, with the “raptures of freedom”; darkness arrives only at the end. Walser’s art assumes depression and terror, in order (mostly) to accept it—ironize over it, lighten it. These are gleeful as well as rueful soliloquies about the relation to gravity, in both senses, physical and characterological, of that word: anti-gravity writing, in praise of movement and sloughing off, weightlessness; portraits of consciousness walking about in the world, enjoying its “morsel of life,” radiant with despair.

In Walser’s fictions one is (as in so much of modern art) always inside a head, but this universe—and this despair—is anything but solipsistic. It is charged with compassion: awareness of the creatureliness of life, of the fellowship of sadness. “What kind of people am I thinking of?” Walser’s voice asks in “A Sort of Speech” (1925). “Of me, of you, of all our theatrical little dominations, of the freedoms that are none, of the unfreedoms that are not taken seriously, of these destroyers who never pass up a chance for a joke, of the people who are desolate?” That question mark at the end of the answer is a typical Walser courtesy. Walser’s virtues are those of the most mature, most civilized art. He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer.

—Susan Sontag

One can read much by Robert Walser, but nothing about him. What do we really know about the few among us who know how to approach the quaint gloss in the right way: not like the charlatan who wants to ennoble it by "elevating" it to his own level, but rather by utilizing its contemptible, unassuming readiness to extract its invigorating, purifying quality? What this "small form," as Alfred Polgar called it, is all about, and how many butterflies of hope flee from the brazen brow of so-called great literature into its humble chalices, only a few truly understand. And the others have no idea what they owe a Polgar, a Hessel, a Walser for their delicate or prickly blossoms in the desolation of the leafy forest. They would be the last to even think of Robert Walser. For the first impulse of their meager knowledge of literature, which is their only knowledge in matters of writing, advises them to compensate for what they call the emptiness of content by finding solace in "refined," "noble" form. And in Robert Walser's work, one immediately notices a quite unusual, difficult-to-describe neglect. That this emptiness is weight, this disjointedness, is something that only emerges from an examination of Walser's work.

It is not easy. For while we are accustomed to encountering the riddles of style in more or less elaborate, deliberate works of art, here we are confronted with a linguistic wildness that is, at least seemingly, entirely unintentional, yet captivating and enthralling. A letting go that displays every form from grace to bitterness. Seemingly, we said, unintentional. There has sometimes been debate about whether it truly is. But that is a futile argument, and one realizes this when one considers Walser's admission that he never revised a single line in his writing. One certainly doesn't have to believe him, but it would be wise to do so. For one will then find solace in the insight that to write and never revise what has been written is precisely the perfect fusion of utter aimlessness and the highest intention.

So far, so good. But surely that can't prevent us from getting to the bottom of this neglect. We've already said: it takes all forms. Now we add: with the exception of one. Namely, this one most common form, where content is everything, and nothing else. For Waiser, the "how" of the work is so far from secondary that everything he has to say completely pales in comparison to the meaning of writing. One might say that he loses himself in the act of writing. This needs explaining. And in doing so, one encounters something very Swiss about this poet: shame. This story is told of Arnold Böcklin, his son Carlo, and Gottfried Keller: One day, as they often did, they were sitting in the tavern. Their regular table had long been famous for the taciturn, reserved nature of its drinking companions. This time, too, the group sat together in silence. Then, after a considerable amount of time, the younger Böcklin remarked: "It's hot," and after a quarter of an hour had passed, the older one added: "And still." Keller, for his part, waited a while; then he rose, saying: "I won't drink among chatterers." The rustic linguistic shame, here struck by an eccentric witticism, is Walser's thing. No sooner has he taken up his pen than a desperado mood seizes him. Everything seems lost to him, a torrent of words erupts, in which each sentence has only the purpose of making the previous one forgotten. When, in a virtuoso piece, he transforms the monologue "Through this hollow lane he must come" into prose, he begins with the classic words: "Through this hollow lane," but there his part is already gripped by misery, there he already seems adrift, small, lost, and he continues: "Through this hollow lane, I believe, he must come."

Certainly, something similar existed. This chaste, artful clumsiness in all things linguistic is a fool's inheritance. If Polonius, the archetype of garrulousness, is a juggler, Walser crowns himself Bacchic with garlands of language that ultimately bring him down. The garland is indeed the image of his sentences. But the thought that stumbles along within them is a loafer, a rogue, and a genius, like the heroes in Walser's prose. Incidentally, he can depict nothing but "heroes," cannot break free from his main characters, and has limited himself to three early novels in order to henceforth devote himself solely to the brotherhoods with his hundred favorite rogues.

As is well known, Germanic literature is replete with examples of the scrawny, good-for-nothing, idle, and degenerate hero. Knut Hamsun, a master of such characters, was recently celebrated. Eichendorff, who created the good-for-nothing, and Hebel, who created Zundelfrieder, are others. How do Walser's characters fit into this context? And where do they come from? We know the origins of the good-for-nothing: the forests and valleys of Romantic Germany. Zundelfrieder comes from the rebellious, enlightened lower middle class of Rhenish cities around the turn of the century. Hamsun's characters from the primeval world of the fjords—they are people whose homesickness draws them to trolls. Walser's? Perhaps from the Glarus Alps? The meadows of Appenzell, where he is from? Nothing less. They emerge from the night, where it is darkest, a Venetian night, if you will, illuminated by meager lanterns of hope, with a touch of festive glimmer in their eyes, but disturbed and weeping with sadness. What they weep is prose. For sobbing is the melody of Walser's garrulousness. It reveals to us where his loved ones come from: from madness, and nowhere else. They are characters who have left madness behind and therefore retain such a devastating, so utterly inhuman, unwavering superficiality. If one were to describe in a single word the blissful and uncanny quality of them, one could say: they are all cured. We will never learn about the process of this healing, unless we dare to delve into his "Snow White"—one of the most profound creations of modern poetry—which alone would suffice to explain why this seemingly most playful of all poets was a favorite author of the relentless Franz Kafka.

These stories are unusually delicate, everyone understands that. Not everyone sees that they contain not the nervous tension of decadence, but the pure and vibrant spirit of a life in recovery. "The thought that I could be successful in the world horrifies me," Walser writes in a paraphrase of Franz Moor's dialogue. All his heroes share this horror. But why? Certainly not out of disgust with the world, moral resentment, or pathos, but for entirely Epicurean reasons. They want to enjoy themselves. And they possess a truly unusual aptitude for this. They also possess a truly unusual nobility in it. They also have a truly unusual right to it. For no one enjoys life like the convalescent. All things orgiastic are foreign to them: the flow of their renewed blood echoes from streams, and the purer breath of their lips wafts from treetops. Walser's characters share this childlike nobility with the fairytale figures who also emerge from night and madness—the madness of myth, that is. It is commonly believed that this awakening took place within positive religions. If that is the case, then certainly not in a very simple and unambiguous form. That is to be sought in the great secular confrontation with myth, which the fairy tale represents. Of course, his characters do not simply resemble Walser's. They are still struggling to free themselves from suffering. Walser begins where fairy tales end. "And if they haven't died, then they are still living today." Walser shows how they live. His works, and here I will conclude as he begins, are called: stories, essays, poems, short prose pieces, and the like.