The Imposition of Dreams on Robert Walser

Edward Morose

"We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much." Robert Walser

This night I havefound myself in a small room, within a mysterious, darkened old house, where my companion is none other than Robert Walser, the idiosyncratic Swiss writerfrom the turn of the century, who, despite his rich, innovative explorations inprose, despite his having gained the admiration of Kafka, Hesse, Musil and Thomas Mann, remained outside the literary world of his day, lived a life ofpoverty and obscurity, and was virtually unknown until the lastfew decades in Europe and still remains, for the most part, little known in the English speaking world today.

In wooden chairs we sitfacing one another across a small table where a bottle of wine, two half-filled glasses, an ashtray and cigarettes are laid out. Neither has lit a lamp and the room, with its impossibly high ceiling and ancient wallpaper, steeped in shadows, provides us with a sort of comfort as we wait and listen, with only the moonlight breaking through the window andforming irregular rectangles upon the worn carpet that move slowly along, telling us the hours are passing. What is this night, I wonder? How did I come to be here? Is this some improbable dream mirroring the tangle of so many of Walser's own tales? There is so much I want to ask this man who sits circumspect in his wom, but respectable traveller's suit - not the image of the proletariat, but certainly not of the salon either.

Kafka, taken with Walser's writing, remarked on the manyparallels between their work. He spoke ofthe man's innovative use of language, and handed out copies of Walser's books to his literary friends, especially the novel, 'Jakob von Guton.' Herman Hesse stated, "If [Walser] had a hundred thousand readers the world would be a betterplace." And Robert Musil, upon first encountering Kajka's writing said that it seemed, "a peculiar case of the Walser kind."

I look at Walser and want to ask: did any of this praise from the greatest of his contemporaries ever reach him? Would it have made a difference in his world ofpoverly and obscurity? Would this place in the world, have saved himfrom the psychological horrors alwaysjust around the comer?

A certain unease is abroad. From different parts of the house its subdued noises reach us. There is pacing above us. Thefront door opens and closes. Someone speaks in hushed tones. Outside our room, in the corridor, someone walks past, a woman it seems. They go some distance, pause for awhile and then walk back.

Who are these individuals, Iwant to ask Walser? Are they the figures who people your stories? How did you come to create the mysterious and yet sofamiliar worlds we see in your works? What ofyour life as legendary wanderer, as a precursor of many literary movements of the 20th century? This room itself, why is it sofamiliar to you? How many rooms like this have you lived in as you worked as a servant, or clerk or secretary in banks or insurance companies, then quit to take your impossibly long walks through village after village and finally settle into some cast off room or attic to write without proper heat or food.

Walser, of course, is hardly forthcoming. By the faint moonlight I can barely make out the side of hisface and on it the tiniest of ironic smiles. But. it seems improper to break the silence that has enveloped him in Europe and North America for many decades.

Perhaps my vision of things is not clear at all. Perhaps it is simply that his sympathy has gone out to me trying to understand his work better and he has allowed me to keep him company on this decisive night. Perhaps this is 1929, and Walserfor some time now has been plagued by horrible, relentless voices from within that will not leave his thoughts alone for a moment. Tomorrow his sister will arrive at the house and his life will take a final decisive turn.

I look him over very carefully, but still his expression betrays nothing. Perhaps he only wants me here as a small diversion, something to keep those unbidden, troubling voices at bay. Tomorrow will usher in stark reality, when he and his sister walk through the gates ofthe Waldau Insane Asylum. Later, when he is moved against his will to another asylum in Herisau, he will abandon all pretence of writing and remain alive, but silent for more than 30 years, and then make one last gesture by being found, having gone out for his walk, dead and alone in afield of fresh snow, clutching his heart, on Christmas day in 1956 Finally, of course, I want to ask the question that has always hovered over him and his work: Whether it was his perception of life, fragmentary, contradictory, unresolved, that brought him to this place, this night of madness, or whether there was madness there from the beginning, in his nervous disposition, his heightened anxiety, and this led him to the unique revelations contained in his work?

One sees disturbing and enlightened elements of expression and content which led to this question right from Walser's beginnings as a writer at the age of 28. There is a work, written in Zurich Switzerland, in 1902 which touches directly upon the issue. This is, "Two Stories," and is made up of two tales, fables really, one entitled, "The Genius," and the other, "World."

  "The Genius, " concerns an outrageous character
 begging on the street in poor clothing in the
 winter. He is recognised as a genius by passersby,
 but never helped since, "Geniuses cannot freeze."
 In the morning he goes off to a castle and bursts
 in to see a young, beautiful princess who has
 always been amused by him.  He demands breakfast
 and, despite his arrogant manner, is presented
 with a feast, but then during the repast as he
 and the princess make conversation he comes out
 with off-handed ideas about breaking apart world
 domination.  He is not really paying attention to
 what he is saying, but these ideas greatly alarm
 the princess and she rushes off to her father
 where she presents a distorted picture of what
 the man had said. Immediately he is thrown out.

  "So now," Walser writes, "our genius finds himself
 in the street again with nothing to eat, but all
 are glad to forgive him this... [his run-in with
 royalty] ... as he's such an ill-tempered genius.
 He's beside himself with worry.  Such is his
 situation when a swift ingenious thought (all
 ingenious thoughts are exceedingly quick) comes
 to his aid.  He makes it snow.  He, the genius,
 lies atop the frozen crust of snow, enjoying the
 not unpleasant sensation of having a world buried
 beneath him.  It was a world of oppressive
 memories he tells himself.  He keeps saying this
 until finally he notices he's hungry again, not
 only for good, earthy food (for instance, at the
 Hotel Continental) but also for ill-treatment at
 the hands of men......

  The second tale entitled, "World, " describes
 a place where everything, all rules, all mores,
 have been turned upside down. Children
 discipline parents. Young ladies attempt to
 take young men captive. School teachers do
 not know their lessons and so are detained,
 depriving them of an "afternoon, drinking
 beer, bowling, and engaging in other uncouth
 pastimes." Dogs are horrified to see
 pedestrians relieving themselves against
 buildings in public streets. An aristocratic
 lady bears a booted and spurred lackey upon
 her shoulder and a red-skinned maid is taken
 for a drive in a coach by the duke of the
 land. She smiles quite civilly with her three
 wobbly teeth.
  "Above this world of folly and sin the sky
 collapsed this afternoon, not with a crash,
 no, but like a soft, moist cloth, veiling
 everything..," the Story goes.
  Angels and devils are loosed in the street. 
 "Heaven and hell go strolling along the 
 boulevards; in shops the blessed haggle with
 the damned ... At last God had mercy on this
 world.  He condescended to stick it in his
 sack without further ado.  The moment (thank
 God it was only a moment) was certainly
 horrifying. The air suddenly became as hard
 as stone, or perhaps even harder. It
 shattered the city's houses, which crashed
 together like drunkards. The broad backs of
 mountains heaved, trees7flew like monstrous
 birds through space... Even God Almighty
 dissolved out of grief at his own destructive
 ftenzy, and so this nothing did not even
 retain the character that defined it and gave
 it colour.-"

"Two Stories," confronts us with one tale of an unruly, anti-social genius who produces nothing but unwieldy ideas, creates destructive natural phenomena leaving himself deprived, and another, where all convention has disintegrated, and a terrible fate takes hold of the world, until God Almighty decides to destroy everything he has created, and in the bargain, himself ceases to be.

These fables reveal Walsers as a precursor of many of the literary movements and discoveries in literature that came in the 20th century. There is the contradiction and randomness of Dada; the new reality created by the integration of reality and dream, of the rational and irrational which are the basics of Surrealism. By giving digression and intention equal weight, having the sequential and non-sequential stand side by side, instead of assigning them values, he foreshadows stream-of-consciousness. His narrator, in speaking boldly and directly to the reader, in recognising their presence, sometimes with welcoming language, sometimes with disdain, and by openly colouring his observations with subjectivity he stakes out the basics of expressionism. In his disregard for the division between the narrator and the subject, his doing away with 'normal' structures for stories, doing away with beginnings and endings, and writing non-stories about non-characters he presents us with the principles of post-modemism.

The mysteries behind Walser's enigmatic, highly individual work, could not e more complex, yet the facts of his life could not be more simple.

He was born in Biel, Switzerland in 1878 and early in life made a pact with his brother Kurt, to go into creative ventures. Quitting school at fourteen he tookjobs with no status and no future such as clerk or secretary in banks, insurance offices and such. After an unsuccessful attempt to enter the theatre, he began at the age of 28, around 1896, to submit his writing to newspapers and magazines.

Walser's life was nomadic, lived out on the periphery of society. He was constantly changing addresses, living in spare rooms, attics, and moving from one menial job to another. Often he grew weary of cities and would drop everything including employment to take some long trek through the country side.

His style varied over the years of his production, but basic themes, concerns and preoccupations underlined all his work. There is a web of description, a concentration on voice or narration, and the use of such techniques as foreshortening, foreshadowing, flash backs or flash forwards. The probable clashes with the improbable and always the door is opened to the incomprehensible, the inexpressible.

His tonality could be startled, emotional, revealing manic joy or dark defiance, derision, or despair. Often in a single piece the writing would shift back and forth across these lines.

The novels Walser published, which he wrote in Berlin, were to his mind unsuccessful. While they received some favourable notices, and gained the attention of some of the more remarkable writers of his time (who nevertheless did not seek him out) there was no mounting attention in the reading public, no commercial prospects that promised his being able to make a living from his work.

One of his novels, "Jakob Von Guten," the only one that has been translated into English, is widely acknowledged as his masterpiece. The novel is subtitled a diary, but there are no dates for entries, or other chronological structures that would provide the novel with this kind of feel. Instead we have a series of strange episodes, vignettes, written down by a young man who has entered a school for servants, the Benjamenta Institute. He is a young aristocrat it seems, and no rationale is given for his taking up this trade.

  The owner's only interest is in getting the
 boy's money. After that the boy is sent away
 to some class and the master stays forever
 alone in his office.
  In the school there are no teachers - or
 rather, if there are, they "are lying around
 like dead men, and sleeping..." They contribute
 nothing, or are ignored.
  "For the most part the boys have little to do
 and learn by reading the book, 'What is the
 Aim of Benjamenta's Boys' School?"'
  "There is only one class," Walser
 writes....... a young lady instructs and
 rules us, Fraulein Lisa Benjamenta, the sister
 of the Principal. She comes, with a small
 white cane in her hand, into the classroom and
 the class. We all stand up at our desks when
 she appears. Once she has sat down, we are
 allowed to sit down also.  She gives three
 sharp imperious knocks on the edge of her
 desk, and instruction begins..."
  "The instruction that we enjoy consists mainly
 in impressing patience and obedience upon
 ourselves, two qualities that promise little
 success or none at all......
  The reader is never informed of any specifics
 concerning Fraulein Benjamenta's instructions.
 In fact Von Guten tells us very early on,
 "Since I have been at the Benjamenta Institute
 I have already contrived to become a mystery to
 myself." Not much later he tells us, "God knows,
 sometimes my whole stay here seems like an
 incomprehensible dream."
  Von Guten spends his time describing his near
 pathological and certainly eccentric fellow
 students.  Strange ambitions, emotions that
 are impossible to comprehend are recounted as
 they go on outings into town, or carry out
 duties around the institute.

It is as if we are penetrating the dark heart of things, looking at life in a distorted mirror. The reader is hardly on solid ground. Turning a corner, entering a room, encountering a fellow student can change everything or nothing. Paradox, illusion, self-deprecation are everywhere.

Extreme alienation echoes down every hallway, sterile and destructive. The place is sealed off from the world. Students are to play a complacent, servile role, yet beneath the surface a terrible oppression seethes in them and is manifest in Von Guten. By writing the diary itself he demonstrates that he is a caged, yet rebellious young man.

Christopher Middleton, the first to translate Walser from German to English in 1957, with, 'The walk and other Stories,' which has been reprinted every couple of decades by different publishers, and who also translated 'Jakob von Guten,'has given Walser the curious label, 'luminoid.'

This is a description usually reserved for religion, mysticism, carnival psychics and such. In Middleton's view it is a quality in Walser where norms do not hold, where values give way to repressed urges. It speaks of pinnacles of imagination and intellectual clarity where the 'luniinoid', "can penetrate normative codes, arrive at an unpremeditated insight ... behold the world afresh..."

Middleton asserts that Walser was an innocent and in his work, "...wholly dependent on a spontaneity that eludes us..." He maintains that nothing in Walser's life was ever resolved, and that the 'luminoid' personality can be quite dangerous to the subject. "It is amazing," Middleton wrote, "that he held out so long as he did against the loneliness, horror, disappointments and maybe against a cruel death wish..."

Certainly Walser's writings, his style and subject matter, mark him as an individualist, much like the writers, Alfred Jarry and Appolinaire, the painter Henri Rousseau or the composer Erik Satie, all of whom defy categorisation, and all of whom were neglected in their day. They too saw the world as a different place than the 'norms' of the time pretended, but now we recognise them for their insight and celebrate them as precursors to a variety of 20th century artistic movements.

For the last few decades, Walser has been acknowledged as a major writer in Europe and a variety of his books as well as critical studies on his work are available there.

Despite the advocacy of major writers and critics this same interest has yet to be established in the English speaking world. Susan Sontag has written, "Robert Walser is one of the important German-language writers of this century - a major writer..." She called him, "A Paul Klee in prose - as delicate, as shy, as haunted." The novelist, William H. Gass, has stated that in Walser's work, "...the good and beautiful dances hand in hand while a reassuring lie unfolds ... If Kafka's neutrality widens our eyes with horror and surprise, Walser's depictions, always working within what is socially given, are equally revealing. The effect is complex, and wholly his own... "

After serving a kind of apprenticeship in Zurich, teaching himself the writing trade and reading extensively, Walser moved to Berlin in 1905. There he plunged headlong into the literary fray, attending salons where he was obviously out of place. He lived with his brother Kurt who illustrated many of his works. His brother, a successful and well-known set designer in theatre, moved in the circles of high culture yet Walser could take no advantage from this. It appears however, that after his initial brush with society, where his irreverent sense of humour, his disdain of literary and artistic cliques and his curious way of dress, were judged as an affront, he drew back, and it is said he stayed mostly in his brother's apartment looking after the cat. Even the publisher for his novels and other works was a man brought home and introduced to him by his brother.

Walser, feeling defeated, departed from Berlin for Switzerland again, first moving to Biel in 1913. There he worked at his odd jobs and wrote many short pieces sending them to newspapers and magazines.

Short works were known as feuilletons in the trade. They filled the back pages of the publications behind the hard news. They were made up of short impressions, bits of gossip, daydream entertainments, personal anecdotes and parables. Most attempted a lyrical twist. Their style was to be clever but not at all deep. Somehow Walser, perhaps because of his irony or lyricism, perhaps because some editors took his work to be impossible, nonsensical, managed to slip through the cracks and onto the pages. Still, the payment was but a pittance.

Finally, however, Walser felt that he had had enough of anything even resembling compromise. His last move was in 1921 to Bern. There, subject to a life of abject poverty, he decided to write only what he would wish to see in print.

Bern was his most productive period, yet there resulted only one book,The Rose. It is a volume in which well crafted very short stories and essays are interspersed with wild outrageous sketches, fragments of stories, letters by imaginary persons to imaginary persons, aphorisms, and near incoherent soliloquies. Many of the works, as always, used the device of the walk, where landscapes turn to dreamscapes, or where the narrator is some objective person viewing events from afar, then suddenly an integral part of the story.

Over the approximately thirty years ofwalser's production gradually a darker picture of himself and humanity, more incoherent, more fragmentary and more menacing, emerged. The prose is filled with contradictions, role reversals and conflicts between himself and the stories. Always there is irony, but even that over time began to have a bitter edge.

Of his work, Walser simply wrote, "my prose pieces, are to my mind nothing more, nor less, than parts of a long plotless realistic story. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced up, or tom up, book of myself."

The rectangles of light on the floor before us have moved quite a distance now. Between Walser and me, all has remained quiet, respectful, distant. From his expression, which seems more well defined to me now, I sense that he has been reading my thoughts as the night has passed Has he been alarmed by my impressions? Disconcerted by them?

It is impossible to say. Walser, the per ,fect host, lifts his goblet in amiable salute each time he refills our wine glasses. Taking a cigarettefor himself he offers one to me.

I have the idea that the house contains his stories. That they are lurking everywhere, behind closed doors in empty rooms, or down unlit passages. Three storiesfrom different times of his life seem to define his development as a writer, as well as what may be takenfor his ascent into clarity, or his descent into madness. These are "Response to a Request, " written in Berlin, Germany, in 1907, "Frau Wilke, "from his time in Biel Switzerland and written in 1918, and lastly, from Bem, Switzerland, "A Village Tale, " which he wrote in 1927.

 "Response to a Request" begins;
  "You ask me if I have an idea for you,
 a sort of sketch that I might write, a
 spectacle, a dance, a pantomime, or anything
 else you could use as an outline to follow..."
  The narrator advises whoever, likely an actor,
 has made this request to gather masks, noses,
 foreheads, tufts of hair, eyebrows, and to
 "...be sure to obtain a few good pieces of
 scenery, so that bearing a black overcoat, you
 can walk up some stairs or look out at a window,
 then utter a roar, a short, leonine, thick, heavy
 roar, to make people really believe that a soul
 is roaring, a human heart."
  He instructs his actor to pull a tuft of hair
 out at this point and throw it down.  "This,
 if done gracefully will have a horrifying effect.
 People will think that pain has made you stupid."
 Next he tells the actor to pick his nose so that
 the spectators will weep when they see this, such
 a noble, sombre figure as yours, behaving so
 rudely and deplorably."
  Suddenly he demands that daily exercises be done
 in the actor's room, that he take instructive
 walks in the forest, that he practice sports and
 go to the circus and observe the behaviour of the
 clowns." He talks of the stage as, "the open,
 sensual throat of poetry as the..."face and its
 thousand meanings."
  The actor, until now, has said nothing. The
 narrator writes, "...lost in thought, your nose
 picked ... and now you begin to speak.  But as
 you are about to do so, a greenish, fiery snake
 crawls its way out of your pain contorted mouth
 which makes all your limbs tremble with dread."
  The snake falls to the stage, curls around the
 tuft of hair. The audience, as one, shrieks but
 already you are offering something new, you stick
 a long curved knife into one eye so that the
 knife's point, dripping with blood, appears from
 the lower part of your neck."
  Afterwards the actoris to light acigarette,
 behave casually, "...as if you were privately
 amused about something."
  The blood that soils the actor's clothes become
 stars which dance around the whole stage burning
 and wild."
"This will have brought your theatrical art
 essentially to a degree of perfection.  The
 painted scenery houses collapse, like frightful
 drunkards, and bury you.  Only one of your hands
 is to be seen reaching up from the smoking ruins.
 The hand is still moving a little, then the
 curtain descends."

Certainly "A Response to a Request" is a precursor to Dada and Surrealism which developed some years later. However, in terms of structure, no matter how irrational the elements within the work are, no matter how Walser makes use of a heightened sense of ambiguity, or how he employs digression to send us down one path after another, leaving us feeling that either we are being cast into the indescribable, or have reached one dead end after another, the piece still has its ground in the here and now, and hence in literary convention. The narrator has received a request for some theatrical outline, from a friend, or stranger. He then, no matter what his outline consists of, simply responds.

Content brings forward a different set of questions. Walser describes an impossible world. Is this a metaphor for the world in which we all perform, a world where everything is out in the open, but hidden from view? Is the chaos he describes our own inner chaos? Does this violence and constant uncertainty beneath the surface of things belong to us? Does he see us forever teetering on the brink of collapse?

Walser takes a long pull on his cigarette, then a gulp of wine. The smoke, drifting outfrom his nose and throat obscures hisfeatures and then is gone. I think of'the story, "Frau Wilke," which begins;

  "One day when I was looking for a suitable
 room, I entered a curious housejust outside the
 city ... an elegant, oldish and seemingly rather
 neglected house, whose exterior had a
 singularity which at once captivated me."
  What they call former beauty is extraordinarily
 attractive to some people. Ruins are rather
 touching. Before the residues of noble things our
 pensive, sensitive inward selves involuntarily
 bow ... Bygone days and old decrepitude, how
 enchanting you are!"
  He seeks out the woman who seems to be the
 landlady, Frau Wilke, who at first shows great
 suspicion, even hostility towards him.  He
 explains that he is there to see 'the room,'
 and she takes him....... down a strangely dark
 corridor to the room, whose appearance
 immediately charmed and delighted me."
  He decides the price is moderate, the room
 refined and noble, and takes it.  The woman
 asks him, "What are you?" He replies, "A poet"
 and then she leaves without a word.
  Fatigue overcomes the narrator.  He decides
 at this point that any resting place would
 have done.  But also he begins to imagine all
 sorts of glorious people who might have lived
 in the room....... [H]ere," he writes, "I
 really feel I am concealed. My inmost want\
 seems to be gratified..." The room is in poor
 shape.  The wallpaper in places hangs in shreds,
 the curtain is old and dusty. "But that is 
 precisely what pleases me, for I do like a
 certain degree of raggedness and neglect."
  Outside there is a birch tree for him to gaze
 at and within a marvellous old desk where he
 can write. From here he can send them to
 highly reputable papers "...whence, for sure,
 prosperity and success must come.."

  He studies the room further, deciding first
 not to examine the bed too closely. "Then I
 saw, and here remark, a truly strange and
 ghostly hatstand ... The couch is old,
 consequently pleasant and appropriate.  New
 furniture easily disturbs one, because
 novelty is always importunate, always
 obstructs us...Regarding the air in this
 chamber, I would nevertheless deem it
 credible, or rather postulate at once with
 certitude almost, that for some time here
 no thought has been given to regular and,
 it seems, wholly requisite ventilation.  I do
 declare that there is a smell of decay about
 the place.  To inhale stale air provides a
 certain peculiar pleasure.  In any case, I can
 leave the window open for days and weeks on
 end; then the right and good will stream into
 the room."
  He begins to stay in bed for entire days on
 end. At last, Frau Wilke intercedes, telling
 him he must make the effort to get up.
  "I was in a bad way.  Decrepitude surrounded
 me. I lay there as if in heaviness of heart;
 I neither knew nor could find myself any more.
 All my more lucid and gay thoughts floated in
 obscure confusion and disarray.  My mind lay
 as if broken in fragments before my grieving
 eyes.  The world of thought and of feeling
 was jumbled and chaotic.  Everything dead,
 empty, and hopeless to the heart...
  Yet he does make the effort to get up and
 takes to walking in the forest.  "Ineffably
 kind voices spoke down to me from the trees:
 'You must not come to the dark conclusion that
 everything in the world is hard, false, and
 wicked. But come often to us; the forest
 likes you.  In its company you will find
 health and good spirits again and entertain
 more lofty and beautiful thoughts."'
  Then suddenly he reports that Frau Wilke has
 died. Thinking on this he writes, "At least
 we should learn to understand our fellow
 beings, for we are powerless to stop their
 misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their
 weakness, and their death."
  The narrator realises that the woman has had
 nothing to eat.  The lady who owns the house
 and who will take Frau Wilke's rooms after
 her death had pity and brought her a cup of
 broth at midday and evening, but she too lost
 interest. Frau Wilke faded, and was taken to
 hospital where she died.
  After her death he visits her room into which
 the good evening sun was shining, gladdening
 it with rose-bright, gay and soft colours."
  On the bed he sees her clothes laid out. 
 "The strange sight of them made me unspeakably
 sad, and my peculiar state of mind made it
 seem to me almost that I had died myself, and
 life in all its fullness, which had often
 appeared so huge and beautiful, was thin and
 poor to the point of breaking. All things
 past, all things vanishing away, were more
 close to me than ever. For a long time I
 looked at Frau Wilke's possessions, which now
 had lost their mistress and lost all purpose,
 and at the gold room, glorified by the smile
 of the evening sun, while I stood there
 motionless, not understanding anything any
 more. Yet, after standing dumbly for a time,
 I was gratified and grew calm.  Life took me
 by the shoulder and its wonderful gaze rested
 on mine. The world was as living as ever and
 beautiful as at the most beautiful times. I
 quietly left the room and went out into the
 street."

Now in Walser's work the narrator appears as a cold observer, standing outside of life, apart and detached from personal and social contact. He sees Frau Wilke's hunger, but does not act. Only the decrepit room, the dusty curtains, give him the illusions of wonder and hold meaning for him. Deterioration is an endearing quality. Only the solitude of the forest holds the pronidse of joy.

With Walser's move to Bem in 1921, further changes asserted themselves in his work. A direct consequence was that many more rejection slips piled up and that his isolation and deprivation increased. Although this was his most productive period as a writer only one book was published during this time, The Rose. In it, well crafted stories and essays are interspersed with paragraph-long bursts of rage, and disillusion, the derision of characters, wild soliloquies, improbable sketches, aphorisms, works which are a tangle of language. Very directly he confronts the reader with the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, and destroys many comforting illusions.

"A Village Tale" reveals much of his process and thought:

  "I sit down somewhat reluctantly at my desk
 to play my piano, that is to say, to begin to
 discourse on the potato famine which long ago
 struck a village on a hill that stood about
 two hundred meters high.  Painfully I wrest
 from my wits a tale that tells of nothing of
 more account than a country girl. The longer
 she laboured, the less she was able to do for
 herself."
  Outside at night a parson was teaching his
 proteges the planetary system. "A writer was
 working in a lamp lit room at his rapidly
 waxing work when, vexed by visions, the girl
 rose up from her bed intending to rush into
 the pond, which she did with almost laughable
 alacrity.
  "When she was found the next morning in a
 condition which made it plain to all that she
 had ceased to live, the question rose among
 these country folk: Should she be buried."
  The narrator calls her "a finished article"
 and notes that not a hand was laid on her;
 that, "Tribal displeasure asserted itself."
  Abailiff approaches, more curious about
 painting the group around her, since he
 paints in his leisure hours, than by the
 incident. He urges the people to be sensible,
 but has no success. In a room with huge
 windows, basking in warin sunlight, a
 sheriff writes a report and dispatches it
 to city authorities.
  "But," the narrator writes, "what feelings
 assail me when I consider the famine whose
 waves rose higher and higher. The populace
 grew unspeakably thin.  How they longed
 for food!"
  Then a labourer shoots another labourer,
 his rival, in the street. "In fact the
 rival was.iust returning from a successful
 encounter with the @oung lady, who seemed
 to be a somewhat indecisive person....
  "Never in all my years as a writer have I
 written a tale in which a person, struck by
 a bullet, falls down. This is the first
 time in my work that a person has died."
  There being no houses the body is removed
 to a cottage, a type ofcottage which will,
 in the future, have some historical
 significance. When the young woman, "...heard
 what had occurred on her account, she simply
 stood there, bolt upright, pondering deeply
 perhaps her peculiar nature.
  "Her mother besought her to speak, but all
 in vain; it seemed she had changed into a
 statue.
  "A stork flew through the azure air high
 over the village drama, bearing in it's
 beak a baby.  Wafted by a slight wind, the
 leaves whispered.  Like an etching it all
 looked, anything but natural."

In this story, time, events, and emotions, have all collapsed into jaggedstreamsofbarelyconnecteddevelopments.Justwhenoneimpression is formed it is smashed into new possibilities. Everything rushes by. Nothing takes hold for long. All continuity, assurance and complacency are disallowed, swept from the page.

I look at Walser again. The day is beginning and there is light now, though it is quitefaint. His work, Ifeel, morefaithfully renders actual life than literary conventions which still dictate to us the shape of stories, the role of the narrator, the interaction of characters and events.

In Walser, as in life, the narrative, the continuity of life is always broken, even hidden at times, dreams trouble orfree us but are rarelyfully remembered, though their effects remain. Landscapes, rooms, other individuals lose their relevance or identify and become for instances or forever the repository of our flights of fancy. Our perspective is never straight forward, but always coloured by projected joys, protective emotions, or guilty deeds and thoughts. We goforward or backward, not always in goodfaith, but also in doubt, in weariness, in uncertainty.

"Your gift," I want to tell him, "was not simply to be a precursor, a man who lighted the wayfor so many others. You have given us something more, an account ofyour own inner life and hence of our inner world. You have shown the self to have many bewildering dimensions."

Walser seems to understand, but the quiet remains. It is timefor me to go. In the end, all there is is the treasure trove of the work with his preoccupations, the manner ofhis observations, his drawing of characters,his reoccurring symbols of the forest, the walk, the satanic trill of civilisation, his obsessions of love always unrequited.

Whether it was madness which shaped his perception, or his perception which left him vulnerable to madness, we shall never know. The question will always remain whether what developed in his work revealed Walser's growing enlightenment or his gradual personal disintegration.

In the insane asylum he was once asked why, when he was no longer plagued by poverty, did he not keep on writing. Walser's answer was true to the tone of all his work. "I am not here to write, " he apparently, quite calmly replied, "but to be mad."

Works of Robert Walser translated into English

Books in Print:
The Walk and Other Stories, Translated by Christopher Middleton. Forwarded by Susan Sontag. Publisher: Serpent's Tail Publishing, 1993.
Masquerade and Other Stories, Translatedby Susan Bemofsky. Forwarded by William H. Gass. Publisher: John Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Books Out Of Print:
Jakob von Guten, Translated and forwarded by Christopher Middleton. Publishers: University of Texas Press 1969/Reprinted Vintage Books 1983.
Robert Walser Rediscovered, Collected Essays and Translations. Edited with translations by Mark Harmon. Publisher: University of New England Press, 1985.

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