Robert Walser, German – Swiss Writer

Robert Walser’s death ground

“On Christmas Day, 1956, the police of the town of Herisau in eastern Switzerland were called out: children had stumbled upon the body of a man, frozen to death, in a snowy field. Arriving at the scene, the police took photographs and had the body removed. The dead man was easily identified: Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, missing from a local mental hospital. In his earlier years Walser had won something of a reputation, in Switzerland and even in Germany, as a writer. Some of his books were still in print; there had even been a biography of him published. During a quarter of a century in mental institutions, however, his own writing had dried up. Long country walks—like the one on which he had died—had been his main recreation.” (1)

Robert Walser

One of the most remarkable and truly singular artists of the twentieth century, Robert Walser (1878-1956) has had a huge influence on a long list of literary, artistic and philosophical figures from Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin and Herman Hesse, from W.G. Sebald to J.M. Coetzee; inspiring musicians such as Heinz Holliger, contemporary visual artists like Fischli & Weiss, Tacita Dean and Billy Childish, and filmmakers, like Percy Adlon and the Brothers Quay. (6)

Rober Walser, Der Spaziergang

Walser’s “walk” is many things at once: the walk of life as in Dante’s cammin di nostra vita; the fusion of a Romantic’s celebration of nature as the source of all knowledge and inspiration with a Modernist’s playful intertextuality and layering of language; the artistic process in conflict with the conditions of material existence. Palpable throughout the story are echoes of wanderers and outsiders that have always been suspect to settled society: the vagabonds, artisans, circus performers, journeymen, and nomads who were exempt from the duties and moral codes that order, tame, and impose limitations on human coexistence. I cannot help but suspect that Walser remained in the asylum to preserve his state of inner exile; in any case, there is ample evidence that he was anything but psychotic and that his nervous breakdown was in all likelihood caused more by the hopelessness of his professional, financial, and social situation than by inner demons. Walser must have sensed that he’d lost the audience receptive to his work and would not recover it, at least not in his lifetime. If his writing retained its mischief, whimsy and wonder, it also masked a defiant plea for the legitimacy of his vision and literary achievement. In an effort to have his taxes reduced, Walser’s walker/writer feels called upon to defend his profession and—by implication—justify his very existence: “There accompanies the walker always something remarkable, something fantastic […] by thinking, pondering, drilling, digging, speculating, writing, investigating, researching, and walking, I earn my daily bread with as much sweat on my brow as anybody. And although I may cut a most carefree figure, I am highly serious and conscientious, and though I seem to be no more than dreamy and delicate, I am a solid technician! Might I hope, through the meticulous explanations I have brought forth, to have convinced you completely of the obviously honorable nature of these endeavors?” (2)

Robert Walser

“Esteemed Gentlemen,
I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. . . . Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-reaching sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. . . . Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream?—I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. ” (3)

Robert Walser in 1937

“If I were rich, I wouldn’t travel around the world. To be sure, that would not be so bad. But I can see nothing wildly exciting about getting a fugitive acquaintance with foreign places. In general I would decline to educate myself, as they say, any further. I would be attracted by deep things and by the soul, rather than by distances and things far off. . . . And I wouldn’t buy anything either. I would make no acquisitions. . . . I would walk about on foot, just as usual, with the consciously secret intention of not letting people notice very much how regally rich I am. . . . It would never occur to me to take a cab. Only people who are in a hurry or want to put on noble airs do that. But I wouldn’t want to put on noble airs, and I would be in no hurry whatever. ” (4)

Thomas Schutte: Walser’s wife

This article was “ignited” by Thomas Schutte’s sculpture, “Walser’s Wife”, which I saw recently in Serpentine Gallery in London. I did not know of Walser until the time I saw his imaginary wife’s sculpted head. I figured that if an artist like Schutte was so moved by Walser that he went all the way to invent the wife and sculpt her head, it might be worth having a look at what this guy was all about. In the video clip below, Thomas Schutte, talks about Robert Walser in Chicago, back in February 2012.

Walter Benjamin, in an essay from 1929, made the ingenious suggestion that Walser’s cheerful people must all be convalescents; only recovered health could explain the intense pleasure they take in absolutely everything. More recently, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben offered a gloss on the flatness, the thus-ness, of Walser’s frequently very matter-of-fact prose: this, he says, is how the world of left-behind objects and people will look after the Messiah has come and gone, abandoned in what Agamben calls the Irreparable. That works, too, for much of Walser’s writing, though it doesn’t cover the ironic moments. In these, it truly seems as if Walser has been laid under a curse: permitted only to speak well of the world, he is forced to express any sorrow or rage he feels in terms of the most unequivocal praise. The resulting sense of torment, endlessness, and absurdity puts one in mind of Kafka again. (5)

Robert Walser’s microscript

“Approximately ten years ago I began to first shyly and reverentially sketch out in pencil everything I produced, which naturally imparted a sluggishness and slowness to the writing process that assumed practically colossal proportions. This pencil system, which is inseparable from a logically consistent, office-like copying system, has caused me real torments, but this torment taught me patience, such that I now have mastered the art of being patient. . . .

This pencil method has a great meaning for me. The writer of these lines experienced a time when he hideously, frightfully hated his pen, I can’t begin to tell you how sick of it he was; he became an outright idiot the moment he made the least use of it; and to free himself from this pen malaise he began to pencil-sketch, to scribble, fiddle about. With the aid of my pencil I was better able to play, to write; it seemed this revived my writerly enthusiasm.” (7)

Susan Bernofsky, the translator of many  of Robert Walser’s from German to English, talks about his Microscripts.

Her Not All Her is a play about, from, and to the great Swiss writer Robert Walser, by the great Austrian writer and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. It highlights what Jelinek calls ‘the fundamental fragmentation’ of Walser’s voice, revealing Walser as ‘one of those people who, when they said “I”, did not mean themselves’.

Elfriede Jelinek’s play about Rober Walser

Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004.

Sources

1. The New York Review of Books, The Genius of Robert Walser

2. The Rumpus: The Walk (Der Spaziergang) by Robert Walser

3. Robert Walser, “Job Application”, quoted in (5)

4. Robert Walser, “Jakob von Gunten”, quoted in (5)

5. The New Yorker, Still Small Voice, The Fiction of Robert Walser

6. About Robert Walser 

7. From a letter written by Walser in 1927 to editor Max Rycnher, quoted in the Quarterly Conversation

Venice: A “Fluxus Eleatis” Discourse

Michel Foucault:  Discourse operates in four major ways. Discourse creates a world; discourse generates knowledge and “truth”; discourse says something about the people who speak it; discourse always incorporates elements of power.

Socrates und Alcibiades

 A poem by Friedrich Hoelderlin

“Warum huldigest du, heiliger Socrates,

“Diesem Juenglinge stets? kennest du Groessers nicht?

“Warum siehet mit Liebe,

“Wie auf Goetter, dein Aug’ auf ihn?

Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste,

Hohe Jugend versteht, wer in die Welt geblikt

Und es neigen die Weisen

Oft am Ende zu Schoenem sich.

 

Gustav von Aschenbach: ‘What lies in wait for me here, Ambiguous Venice, Where water is married to stone, And passion confuses the senses?’

 

Farfarello: And so, if you’d like to give me your soul before its time, I’m here, ready to take it.

 

Luchino Visconti: The sky has to be orange, even if Fassbinder copies me in Querelle.

 

Mr. FFF:  I started my trip from the Northern Cemetery in Munich. I arrived in Venice by train. The Marathon run finished a few minutes ago. There are many visitors. The water of the lagoon has a dull grey color. It is chilly. It is cloudy but there is no rain. Mrs. T misses you already.

MM:  Do not get lost in the art farm that is Venice! I googled and saw that you have bad weather and it’s raining. Hope you got your wellies.

 

Apollo: Reason, control, and clarity

 

Gustav von Aschenbach: I am furious because I am forced to return, but secretly I rejoice.

 

Dionysus: Wander lust

 

Gustav von Aschenbach:  Vacillating, irresolute, absurd.

 

Thomas Mann: A life spiraling out of control.

 

Friedrich Hoelderlin:

Und immer,

Ins Ungebundene gehet eine Sehnsucht.

(And always,

there is a longing to dissolve)

 

Mr. FFF:   In Palazzo Grassi I met Mr. Dob, the Manga character that has been adopted by Takashi Murakami. He has three eyes and an energizing stare.  Mr. Dob inhabits Murakami’s masterpiece 727-272 (The Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate). Mrs. T is in love with him but he ignores her.  For her, it was love at first sight. For him, she does not even exist.

 

MM:  Luckily today I will be on scrub watch so that should keep me busy enough not to think about not having the both of you around.

 

Don Giovanni:

 Deh vieni alla finestra, o mio tesoro,

Deh vieni a consolar il pianto mio.

Se neghi a me di dar qualche ristoro,

Davanti agli occhi tuoi morir vogl’ io.

Tu ch’ ai la bocca dolce piu che il miele,

Tu che il zucchero porti in mezzo il core!

Non esser, gioia mia, con me crudele!

Lascati almen veder, mio bell’ amore!

Friedrich Nietzsche: To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly – (which, incidentally, is why marriage for love is, from the point of view of society, the most unreasonable king of marriage). The demand for art and beauty is an indirect demand for the ecstasies of sexuality communicated to the brain.

 

Farfarello: Well, then, since of necessity you love yourself with the greatest love of which you’re capable, of necessity you desire your happiness as strongly as you can. And since this supreme desire of yours can never be satisfied even in the smallest degree, it follows that in no way can you escape being unhappy.

 

Gustav von Aschenbach: Time presses, time does not press

Constantine Cavafy: Πλαϊ στο παραθυρο ηταν το κρεββατι που αγαπηθηκαμε τοσες φορες. (By the window was the bed where we made love so many times).

 

Mr. FFF:  A Cretan Madonna in Santa Maria della Salute. It was taken from the Church of Saint Titus in the last minute before fleeing Candia and Crete, by the Commander of the Venetians Morozini. The Ottomans captured Candia immediately after. Crete and Venice, share a co-existence that brought El Greco to Venice before he continued his journey to go to Spain.

MM:  I can’t say I am doing such exciting stuff as you. I waited in line for an hour to change the tires on my car and now it’s being done. Nothing fun to report.  Of course I miss the both of you terribly. It seems like I cannot have meaningful conversation with anybody else, but you.  Not to mention the fact that we took our jokes and puns to a whole other level and now whatever jokes anybody tries to do is pointless.

 

Filippo Ottonieri: Except for the times of suffering, as well as of fear, I would think that the worst moments are those of pleasure because the hope for them and the memory of them, which occupy the rest of our lives, are better and much more pleasant than the pleasures themselves.

 

Thomas Schutte: Efficiency Men, Punta della Dogana, Venice

Jean Baudrillard: Everyday experience falls like snow. Immaterial, crystalline and microscopic, it enshrouds all the features of the landscape. It absorbs sounds, the resonance of thoughts and events; the wind sweeps across it sometimes with unexpected violence and it gives off an inner light, a malign fluorescence which bathes all forms in crepuscular indistinctness.  Watching time snow down, ideas snow down, watching the silence of some aurora borealis light up, giving in to the vertigo of enshrouding and whiteness.

 

Friedrich Hoelderlin:

 Wo aber gefahr ist, waechst,

Das Rettende auch.

(Where there is danger,

some Salvation grows there too.)

 

Gustav von Aschenbach : What if all were dead, and only we two left alive

Luigi Pirandello: The torment of imagining you far away – among other people who can have the joy of seeing you, talking to you, being near you while I am here without life because I can neither see you nor talk with you, nor be near you – can be mitigated only by the thought that you feel my presence within you and that even from far away you give me life, and that even in your silence you see me and talk to me; in one word, that I am alive and close to you, more than those who see you, talk to you, and are around you.

 


Mr. FFF:  Thomas Schuette’s “Efficiency Men” were waiting for me at the Punta della Dogana.  Their steel bodies were covered down to their knees by felt blankets. It was like a call to Joseph Beuys. His felt self is all over German Art.

 MM:  You realize I’m not having nearly as much fun as you are, but I expect to be entertained upon your return! So prepare lots of stories from Venice. You know the kind: money, blood and sex.

Giuseppe Ungaretti:

ECO

Scalza varcando da sabbie lunari,

Aurora, amore festoso, d’ un’ eco

Popoli l’ esule universe e lasci

Nella carne dei giorni,

Perenne scia, una piaga velata.

 

Luigi Pirandello: What life is there left for me? I don’t care anymore about anything. Only about you do I care, and all that concerns you, my Marta; if you suffer, suffering with you and for you; if you get angry, getting angry with you; if you hope, hoping with you and for you. And remaining – for as long as I stay alive, for as long as my eyes stay open, for as long as my heart keeps beating, for as long as the soul burns in me – with my eyes, my heart, my soul, enchanted by your beauty, by the charms of your person, by the divine nobility of your feelings and of your spirit.

Adele:

Whenever I’m alone with you

You make me feel like I am home again

Whenever I’m alone with you

You make me feel like I am whole again

Whenever I’m alone with you

You make me feel like I am young again

Whenever I’m alone with you

You make me feel like I am fun again

However far away I will always love you

However long I stay I will always love you

Whatever words I say I will always love you

I will always love you

Mr. FFF:  Fog everywhere. I boarded a U-boat where a rabbi was reading the Kaballah. Later, in Hotel Metropol during lunch I met an Indian Maharadja and his German maiden.

MM:  All these cultural encounters! We redid the kitchen; the hard part is over now. You may be interested to know that nothing works without me!

Gustav Mahler: I should not have cried on the train departing Venice. I should not have dismissed Alma’s music compositions. It is too late now.  I gave my name to von Aschenbach.

Discource Participants

Adele, English singer

Apollo, Greek God of light

Gustav von Aschenbach, German writer (through the pen of Thomas Mann, through the interpretation of Myfawny Piper, through the camera of Luchino Visconti, through the interpretation of Fluxus Eleatis)

Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher

Constantine Cavafy, Greek poet

Dionysus, Greek God of pleasure

Farfarello, character created by Giacomo Leopardi

Michel Foucault, French philosopher

Mr. FFF, wanderer

Don Giovanni, a young, extremely licentious nobleman (created by Lorenzo da Ponte)

Friedrich Hoelderlin, German poet

Gustav Mahler, Austrian composer

Thomas Mann, German writer

MM, partner

Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher

Filippo Ottonieri, philosopher created by Giacomo Leopardi

Luigi Pirandello, Italian writer and Nobel Laureate

Giuseppe Ungaretti, Italian poet

Luchino Visconti, Italian director

In my beginning is my end (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker, I)

5th century BC

Acropolis, Athens, Greece

6th century AD

Basilica di San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy

16th century

Matthias Gruenewald, Die Stuppacher Mdonna
Tiziano: Salome con la testa di S. Giovanni Battista

16th – 17th century

Caravaggio, San Giovanni Battista

18th century

San Francisco Church, Salvador, Bahia, Brasil
Inside the Church of San Francisco in Salvador

19th century

Cezanne, Large Pine and Red Earth
Degas, The Millinery Shop

20th century and beyond

Nolde, Hermit on Tree
Freud's Couch, The Freud Museum, London, England
Helmut Newton
Maria Adair, Instalacao Ambiental
Elaine Roberts, Lotus Flower
Venice - my photo
Anselm Kiefer, Salt of the Earth
Boy - my photo
Thomas Schutte, Efficiency Men
Naoussa, Paros, Greece - my photo
Lefkes, Paros, Greece - my photo
Marpissa, Paros, Greece - my photo
The Earth of Marathon, Attica, Greece - my photo
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets, East Coker, III

 

Happy New Year!!!

P.S. This came as a result of rediscovering X’s letter with the extensive quotation from Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets”. The hand written page is hers.