During his lifetime, Walser was known well enough that the critic Robert Musil referred to the young writer Franz Kafka as a "special case of the Walser type." Other contemporary admirers were Hermann Hesse, Max Brod, and Franz Hessel. Walter Benjamin particularly dug Walser's work in the "short form." "Few, indeed," Benjamin wrote, "realize what this 'short form' ...is all about; how many hopeful butterflies can find refuge in its modest chalices from the cliff face of so-called great literature. And the others have no idea how much, amid the sterile jungle of the newspapers, they owe the gentle or prickly blossoms of... Walser." But the odd charm that so delighted Benjamin made Walser's work unpalatable to less adventurous readers. Walser's work continues to elude middling readers who insist that writing both fit into a genre and be useful to society.
If you must think of Walser's short work as essays, stories, or, as the folks who published them in German and Swiss literacy magazines during the 1910s and '20s did, feuilletons, then go ahead -- but you could just as easily call them toys. They can be as playful as they are serious, as silly as they are wise, as lucid as they are mad. Walser embraces the non sequitur, the irrelevant, the goofy. He writes about how accidental our lives are, how irregularly we think, how slippery are the stories we try to tell.
In addition to several volumes of short pieces, many of which were published during his lifetime, Walser also wrote nine books whose lengths allowed them to be called novels. Five of these long things, unfortunately, have been lost, but two of them have recently been published in English. Last year, New York Review Books reprinted Christopher Middleton's translation of Walser's 1909 masterpiece, Jakob von Gunten. This year, University of Nebraska publishes the first ever English translation of The Robber.
Walser wrote The Robber in 1925, but as translator Susan Bernofsky notes in her smart introduction, he didn't expect it to be published. The modest success Walser had once enjoyed getting his short work accepted by newspapers and magazines had waned by 1920. One newspaper editor complained about having received nasty letters from readers calling Walser's work "nonsense." Walser knew that the sudden shifts that most readers could barely tolerate in his short pieces would seem only more difficult in longer work, so he never submitted a finished copy to publishers. The Robber therefore stayed in his micro script, a teensy scrawl that looks more like the nervous scratching of a madman than the text of a savvy novelist. Walser, of course, was both.
It's not the ostensible protagonist who is mad in The Robber, but the "normal" folks around him. The "responsible" characters drive themselves crazy insisting that the robber make something useful of himself. The robber, a Walser stand-in, is perfectly happy being useless. Walser writes seductively about the abdication of power. A typical Walser character is a loser, a wastrel, a nincompoop who delights in his own lack of ambition. He is a weak student, a bumbling servant, a low-level clerk for whom humiliation is not only correct, but sweet. He doesn't make plans for the future and avoids doing what he's told. He delights in the accidental, the insignificant. He likes being unimportant.
The stories Walser seems to tell are as self-defeating as his characters. This is the beginning of The Robber: "Edith loves him. More on this later."
The real excitement in Walser's work is neither in the plot nor in the characters, but in the manner of the telling. The prose is full of sudden shifts in perspective or point of view, with comically extended metaphors and self-sabotaging clauses. The narrative voice, which switches between "I" and "he," can be ridiculously confident: "Never before, in all my years at my desk, have I sat down to write so boldly, so intrepidly. All these sentences I've splattered the page with, all the sentences yet to follow!"
But the narrator doesn't expect readers to make much sense of the characters. Walser does not create characters to illustrate deep psychological truths. In fact, he makes fun of our selfishness in finding characters -- or people -- interesting only insofar as we can make use of them: "It's easy for us," the robber-narrator says, "to project our own failings onto our fellow citizens, who, however, when you stop to consider, aren't there for this purpose alone." I love how that last word sneaks up. Walser is right: Literature is not for "this purpose alone," either. Literature should not have to be for anything.
That's a daring, career-killing thing for any writer to say, but especially one writing in the dour, moralist German tradition. Walser also expertly deflates the self-importance of careerist artists in Jakob von Gunten, his book of 1909. Jakob is a teenage boy who has run away from home to attend a school that purports to train boys to be servants. It turns out to be an odd school, though. There don't seem to be any class meetings and the faculty spend most of their time asleep in a secret room. There's also a mysterious inner sanctum that is revealed to be only a dull room with a goldfish bowl. Earnest Jakob writes in his journal a lot about learning obedience, but he never makes clear what it is he's being taught to obey.
Through his successful painter brother, Jakob meets a group of artists. "They seem to be pleasant people," Jakob notes. "Actually, people who make efforts to be successful are terribly alike each other. They all have the same face. Not really, and yet they do. They're all alike in their rapid kindness, which just comes and goes. I think this is because of the fear which these people feel. They deal with persons and objects, one after the other, only so that they can cope again with some new thing that also seems to be demanding attention. They don't despise anyone, these good people, and yet perhaps they despise everything but they aren't allowed to show it because they're frightened of being suddenly incautious...."
Walser had no such fear of being "incautious." His writing was daring, excessive, strange. He also knew exactly what he was doing.
As the narrator of The Robber explains, "I am constructing here a commonsensical book from which nothing at all can be learned. There are, to be sure, persons who wish to extract from books a guiding principle for their lives. For this sort of most estimable individual I am... not writing." Walser's insistence on the useless, un-co-optable beauty of art is exactly the antidote we need to the drearily earnest, self-congratulatory, identity- and issue-oriented propagandistic junk that passes for mainstream lit today.
