SOURCE: Dowden, Steve. “A German Pragmatist: Martin Walser's Literary Essays.” In New Critical Perspectives on Martin Walser, edited by Frank Pilipp, pp. 120-33. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994.

Martin Walser's nearest American counterpart is probably John Updike. They belong to the same generation, the former having been born in 1927, the latter in 1932, and they both excel in the same prose forms: the novel and the literary essay. In addition, both writers are conspicuously interested in the riddles of postwar national life and identity in the contemporary middle classes. The neurotic perplexities of a Harry Angstrom or an Anselm Kristlein reflect the larger anxieties of the modern self—or at least the one that is white, male, and more or less affluent—as it floats freely on the unquiet seas of marriage and nation, religion and workplace, sex and the sundry bewilderments of just getting along in the conformist world of contemporary Germany and America.

Since a self always has to be born and raised somewhere, national identity inevitably emerges as a major theme for both novelists. Of course, neither of them advocates any kind of chauvinistic sense of nation or national destiny. Instead, each strives in his fiction to see his respective country with clarity and candor. In the interest of concrete specificity, they focus attention on the individual in society, rather than risk losing narrative momentum to abstraction and advocacy (moral ambiguity is always more interesting than moral certainty). In the psychosocial design of their novels, the public arena and private sphere are interlocked.¹ Nowhere is this more striking than in the realm of love and sex.

Sexual misadventure and distress of varying degrees hold a special interest for both Updike and Walser. Of course, sex is, in and of itself, an arresting topic for most people, and it may be that it accrues no particular meaning other than itself. This is frequently enough true. Still, in this matched pair of writers, both plainly preoccupied with the Americanness and Germanness of their respective settings and characters, it is difficult not to assume that sex, too, has other, more self-transcendent meanings. Among them, it may be that the sexual self-doubts so troubling to Helmut Halm and Rabbit Angstrom tap some larger insecurity that is characteristic of the historical moment.

Larger insecurities are not hard to come by. In Updike's case the failure of American potency in Vietnam comes irrepressibly to mind. American military ventures in Grenada and the Persian Gulf, Somalia and Panama seem as linked to the restoration of national self-confidence as Rabbit Angstrom's endless search for self-affirmation in repeated erotic encounters with different women. Similarly, Helmut Halm's misgivings about his settled married life and his ebbing sexual prowess can be understood as a refracted image of German self-doubts about the firmness and fidelity of its commitment to liberal, Western values. A good wife, a good job, and a stable home leave Halm feeling unfulfilled. He yearns for something beyond the bourgeois average, something more dangerous, more Nietzschean. Exciting prospects beckon, especially in the hedonistic California of Breakers (1985). But ultimately Halm does not yield to his impulses—partly because he can never quite tell his impulses from the ones that his time and place have imposed upon him. Halm's self-doubt should be reassuring. In the current political climate of Germany and Central Europe, it is encouraging that Walser's would-be adventurers are inclined to return to their wives, the only stable characters in his world. In a Walser novel the reaffirmation of marriage seems oddly like a reaffirmation of Germany's postwar liberal order and the values that make it work: tolerance, self-acceptance, the commitment to living with and improving a fallible institution from within.

However, let us not get sidetracked into the interesting but complex issues of Walser's sexual themes. They are only one facet of the larger question of the literary correlation between individual and national self. Sex is merely an obvious example of how the public invades the private. The public saturates and governs the private when public standards of competition, performance, and domination become internalized in assumptions about sexual life. Helmut Halm is a typical example. He feels liberated in California, but in fact he surrenders his autonomy to a set of preestablished norms and expectations—a consumerist Leistungsethik—of exactly how the good life is to be led. The New Age myths that draw him to a narcissistic lifestyle, embodied in the allure of Fran Webb, liquidate his individuality as surely as the conformist myths that entrap Franz Horn in his German work life, or the ideological machinery that severs Alfred Dorn from the self of his past in Die Verteidigung der Kindheit (1991; In Defense of Childhood). What links ideology, work, politics, and sex here is the underlying issue of self-fulfillment, of true and authentic selfhood.

In novel after novel, authentic individuality (often expressed as the hunger for control over one's own life) emerges as Walser's guiding theme. It is not for nothing that Halm reads Kierkegaard and has written a book about Nietzsche, the two great masters of individualism. He clings to them like Huck Finn clings to his raft. Nor is it surprising that a novelist should take questions of individuality as his controlling theme. It has been with the novel at least since Robinson Crusoe (1719). In particular, there is something about the nature of the modernist novel—and both Walser and Updike have been shaped by modernism—that gives a special prominence to the actual and symbolic importance of the individual. According to Updike, fiction

offers to enlarge our sense of possibilities, of potential freedom; and freedom is dangerous. The bourgeois, capitalist world, compared with the medieval hierarchies it supplanted and with the Communist hierarchies that would supplant it, is a dangerous one, where failure can be absolute and success may be short-lived. The novel and the short story rose with the bourgeoisie, as exercises in democratic feeling and in individual adventure. Pamela, The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe—what do they tell us but that our entrepreneurism, on one level or another, may succeed? If fiction is in decline, it is because we have lost faith in the capacity of the individual to venture forth and suffer the consequences of his dreams.²

Even though Walser, well known as a sharp critic of capitalism and its human costs, would presumably bridle at Updike's enthusiasm for capitalist metaphors, there is a sense in which Updike has described Walser personally and exactly.

Walser's protagonists have difficulty in asserting themselves and sustaining a sense of their own individuality. They lack what Updike, for better or for worse, calls “entrepreneurism.” Updike goes on to point out that the entrepreneurial world is a dangerous one, that failure can be absolute, as it is for so many of Walser's protagonists who find themselves trapped in the web of capitalist competition and its social consequences. It is an insight that Kafka expressed best of all, and which has not been wasted on Walser.³ As surely as Josef K. is unable to break free of his trial, Franz Horn of Beyond All Love (1976) fails to overcome the mind-numbing job and way of life that oppress him. Such examples from Walser's fiction could be multiplied at length. Similarly, Updike's own protagonists are more likely to be defeated than not, even if the defeat is seldom absolute.

However, the entrepreneurism that Walser's characters lack is abundantly present in Walser himself. He labored in the ranks of broadcasting media during the 1950s before “venturing forth” on his own into that most uncertain and competitive of market-oriented livelihoods, freelance writing. And even he, so he has said, was unable to make a living at it before he was fifty-one years old.⁴ Still, Walser counts among the survivors. Where his protagonists mostly fail, i.e., in making their way independently, Walser has mostly succeeded. Moreover, he stands out in German literary and intellectual life as a plain-speaking individualist. His opponents are inclined to lump him together with the left, but the left has had hard words for him, too. For example, when Walser agreed to an interview to be published in the conservative daily Die Welt, left-wing observers claimed he had gone over to the other side. Walser's thinking is not ideologically bound to the agenda of one side or the other.

As a novelist he explores the failed lives of downtrodden and mystified middle- or lower-class men, combining sympathy and critique in fair measure. His allegiances as literary critic are similar, siding with the failures or, if not exactly failures, then at least the canonical outsiders of German literary history: Hölderlin and Kleist, Büchner, Kafka and Robert Walser. In this sphere, too, the ideal of autonomous individuality comes to the fore. It suggests that authentic selfhood may be the supreme virtue, or at least one of the chief virtues, in both the fiction and criticism that Walser writes.

Having begun as a critic in the late forties and early fifties with an academic dissertation on Kafka, which as a book subsequently became one of the more influential studies in academic Kafka criticism, Walser is no stranger to the claims of Wissenschaft on the study of literature in the academic setting. But the nonacademic Walser makes no pretense of impartiality or “scientific” standards of scholarship. As he sees it, the virtue of his criticism, and of literary criticism in general, is the spontaneity and personal intensity of what he calls a Lese-Erlebnis.⁵ Walser believes that criticism begins with our experience of the text.

Here we broach the task of his literary criticism, which is to understand the exploration of limitation and lack of freedom. In his best essays, which he has himself collected and published under the title Liebeserklärungen (1983; Declarations of Love), Walser examines the insecurities and deficiencies of great writers. He calls our attention to the ways in which a sense of inadequacy—Mangel is Walser's favorite word for it—can compel the writing of fiction and poetry. In Walser's literary essays the preoccupation with self and the fear of its entrapment are continuous with the same themes in his fictions. Walser sets his emphasis upon the poverty of the self, its precarious hold on life, and the need to escape into some wider realm.⁶ Seen from a more positive point of view, writing is one way of establishing oneself in the world, of escaping from the narrowness of self that Walser has carefully described in his fiction and criticism.

In this sense the principal theme of Walser's literary criticism is freedom. He argues that the self is a small and airless place from which we must escape, and that fiction is one way of achieving a partial escape, and he strongly implies that literary criticism is similarly a way of escaping the limitations of mere self. Now, if literary criticism is to be an experimental way of freeing the self, what are the limits of its freedom? It is at this point that Walser runs afoul of the professional scholars. Subjectivity suggests arbitrariness.

It is obvious that a part of Walser's overall intention in his literary critical forays, which could also be described as raids, has been to attack and reinterpret the canon, casting Thomas Mann into the outer darkness,⁷ and examining the received wisdom of German classicism with a skeptical eye, at least where Walser perceives that wisdom (especially its traditional place in German culture) to reaffirm the status quo of an oppressive social and political climate.

His detractors argue that his criticism is willfully slanted in the direction of his social and political prejudices and that this vested interest obliges him to misrepresent literary history. Walser's mode of critique is arguably antihistorical.⁸ The charge, if true, aligns Walser with the advocates of postmodernist fiction. There are probably not many commentators who perceive Walser as a postmodernist. Still, the accusation that he is antihistorical, arbitrary in his dealing with literature, and given to making fun of the German preoccupation with high culture and cultural heros—from the dotty Goethe of In Goethes Hand (1982; In Goethe's Hand) to the Thomas Mann of his Frankfurt Lectures—seems to point in the direction of postmodern culture. In Goethes Hand can be seen as liberating, or disrespectful, or simply self-indulgent, depending on the interpreter's standpoint in the culture wars. From any point of view, Walser obviously intends to bring the exalted figure of Goethe back to earth.⁹

The leveling of cultural values has emerged as one of postmodernism's central and most pernicious features.¹⁰ Walser is known as a champion of the marginal and traditionally uncanonical literary forms, from the dialect poetry, workers’ literature, the writings of convicts and mental patients, to the odd films of Herbert Achternbusch. When asked about what he learned from his advocacy of all these forms of writing, Walser responded that he learned that anyone can become an author by virtue of what is missing from his life.¹¹ Anyone who writes out of some sense of lack or failure, as a reaction against it, is a writer as far as Walser is concerned. In an interview he clarified his view by way of a personal experience. During the late fifties he spent what for him was a liberating few weeks in the United States. When the visit was over he had no desire to return to West Germany, and when he did, the sense of entrapment that overcame him propelled a novel:

And then I sat down after about four weeks and wrote a novel. Out of pure rage, so to speak. I worked up everything, the whole decade of the fifties, for myself; I reacted to everything that had happened to me. The energy for it came out of the experience of entrapment: on a continent, in a country, in a language, in a family—this roped-off, bottled-up, packed-in feeling that goes with having a biography, that goes with the suspicion you are so-and-so who has to turn up with his passport at such and such an address. It seemed unbearable to me.¹²

His literary criticism, too, is driven by an inner need.¹³ On these grounds Walser's criticism could be attacked as both too personal and partisan, too much bound to private experience. The dominant theme of his criticism is, indeed, the experience of insecurity, uncertainty, and ‘unfreedom’ common to the writers whom he favors. According to Walser, the experience of unfreedom is at the bottom of all literature. And to explore this unfreedom means an opportunity to overcome it, in a limited sense—or if not truly to banish it then at least to look it in the eye and challenge it.

Walser's essays, intellectually aggressive, subjective, and fallible, have something that criticism in its professional, institutional, academic form often lacks. This something is an appeal to actual aesthetic experience. What Walser offers, warts and all, ought to feel more reassuring to us than academic conventions allow.

First of all, Walser does not claim to have cornered the market on truth. In fact, he goes to considerable lengths to emphasize the subjectivity of his response. It is true that he is opinionated, makes effective rhetorical use of his prestige, and speaks with a command of text and language that implicitly lays claim to authority. But his voice is individual, not institutional, ideological but not binding. It should be a consolation to us that insight into literature is not in the keeping of a priestly caste. Walser presents it as a more democratic undertaking.

Second, criticism, like fiction in Updike's formulation, “offers to enlarge our sense of possibilities, of potential freedom; and freedom is dangerous.” Subjectivity grades over into egotism all too easily. There is also a sense in which a one-sided critique of Walser's subjectivism undermines the liberating aspects of both reading literature and writing about it. When the professional critic—Wolfgang Wittkowski, for example¹⁴—reproves Walser for shortcomings as a critic (in particular for what he denounces as a left-wing ideological bias), he also implies that only the expert is qualified to understand these matters properly. His posture is symptomatic of a wider problem. The right to speak about literature has been arrogated by a class of professionals. Current academic writing about literature sends the message that a reading cannot be successfully carried out without the legitimation of a rigorously elaborated critical apparatus.

The dangers of misunderstanding must be weighed against the freedom of independent reading. It is beyond dispute that literary scholarship—the existence of experts who have the time and inclination to study fiction and poetry in great depth—is a good thing. However, it is not such a good thing that intelligent nonexperts—ordinary theatergoers or readers of novels, for example—should feel obliged to defer to the experts. This may be especially true in the United States.

Whatever beneficial effects the rise of theory may have had in American departments of literature, it has also had the unfortunate side effect of repressing large numbers of actual and potential readers. What well-educated undergraduate is likely to care about or even remember the meaning of Lacanian analysis for good reading habits? More likely, undergraduates finishing college today leave the university with a certain feeling of inferiority in literary matters. Similarly, it seems likely that the well-educated German readers of today may experience a like feeling of exclusion when they pick up the most recent issue of Merkur and try to read a literary essay.

Third, the “subjectivity” of Walser's response is not closed and private. The distinction between subjectivity and introversion ought to be plainer now than it was in the discussion around the so-called New Subjectivity of the 1970s and 1980s. Individual experience merely serves as the self-evident point of departure into the political, social, historical, and other meanings a work may offer. He defines it concretely and pragmatically as experience, the way a book makes the reader think and feel, the world it opens up: “Erfahrungen sind im Gegensatz zu Meinungen nicht wählbar” [In contrast to opinions, experiences are ineluctable].¹⁵

Subjective aesthetic experience, then, does not mark an abdication of intellectual responsibility.¹⁶ Instead, it offers itself as a sensible place to begin serious thinking. But what should be the aim of “serious” literary criticism as practiced by a nonprofessional? The example of Martin Walser suggests this answer: Literary criticism aims, or ought to aim, to make us independent, to enable us to experience the world of poetry, drama, and fiction from the vantage of autonomous reflection. In the particular case of literary criticism, autonomy would mean freedom from the popular taste-makers, the setters of intellectual fashion, and preestablished schools of criticism. But is such a thing possible?

Commentators have noted an affinity between Walser's critical orientation and the reader-response theories of the Constance School. For his part, Walser has shown no particular interest in the theoretical edifice of his learned neighbors. When an eager questioner once tried to pin him down on the topic, Walser only said he was glad to hear that other people shared his point of view. We may reasonably suppose his lack of curiosity on this point to be a matter of principle. It points toward reservations about the immobility that can come of system-building, the entrapment within concepts that puts an end to the vitality of personal and public aesthetic experience.

These two features of his criticism are decisive: the primacy of aesthetic experience and the resistance to an institutionalized framework. The critical result of his way of thinking about literature is the notion of irony that he elaborates in his Frankfurt Lectures—but not only in his Frankfurt Lectures. The concept of irony turns up in all of his literary writings. What is most important and instructive from the perspective of writing about literature is not so much the particular concept of irony that he advocates. Instead, the way he arrives at it should arrest our attention. In Walser's criticism the emphasis falls on process, not product.

Walser is an advocate of the honest reading experience, which suggests that the discovery of fixed and permanent meanings is not his main interest. Aesthetic experience is infinitely renewable, which is another way of saying that meanings are variable. While the proximity of reader-response criticism is clear enough, it appears that Walser's views actually bring him closer to the aesthetics of American pragmatism. From the philosophical foundations in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, up through Dewey's Art as Experience (1934), to the recent literary criticism of Richard Poirier:¹⁷ art is foremost and first of all experience.

There is no reason to believe that Walser has derived his views from the American pragmatist tradition. That does not mean, however, that the points at which they converge will not illuminate Walser's attitudes and practice as a writer of literary essays. Indeed, the very absence of imitation makes that convergence all the more interesting. He shares with the American pragmatists an antagonism to the professionalization of thinking about literature. In “What Pragmatism Means” William James describes the pragmatist as someone who

turns his back resolutely once and for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. …¹⁸

The literary pragmatist could be described as one who turns away from the similar habits of the professional literary critics. Walser's turn of mind has less to do with Ingarden and Gadamer, the founding grandfathers of Rezeptionstheorie, than with the concrete reading experience of actual people. Obviously, Walser can only speak for himself, which shifts the center of gravity away from what he says toward the intellectual mobility that underlies his saying of it. The crisp precision of his criticism has the effect not of defining the normative response to a given work or writer but of challenging the reader to measure up to the sheer quality of imagination with reading experiences of his own. Walser's example invites us to explore our own reading experiences more fully and with a keener eye.

The emphasis on experience implies a liberal, democratic perception of literary meaning as something intrinsically subject to change. In this he is close to the preoccupation of American pragmatism with experiment, openness to new experience and change. Above all, the pragmatists have emphasized temporality and a certain skepticism about the permanence of things, including literary meanings. Emerson and his pragmatic followers, writes Poirier, “want to prevent words from coming to rest and want to dissuade us from hoping that they ever might.”¹⁹ In a similar spirit, Walser warns against the critics who have failed to understand that a book or a play is “a contribution to a process that is in continual motion.”²⁰ Authoritative literary evaluations, he says, threaten to “bring the current to a standstill.”²¹ Walser is, for example, an opponent not of Goethe—whom he openly admires—but of the Goethe industry that has stylized and petrified the writer into the glorified image of a national monument.²² The more liberating approach to Goethe, or any other tradition-encrusted national monument, is one of creative skepticism. Goethe ought to be challenged to renew himself over and over again.

The institutions of criticism resist this process of continual renewal. Theories of criticism, as Nietzsche repeatedly pointed out, always contain their own findings implicit within their system for producing them. The welter of competing critical discourses in current academic use is evidence enough. However, what is at issue here is not a clear-cut choice between “radical” theory and “traditional” reading that the contemporary cultural conservatives would like to force on us. The choice is a false one. After all, any utterance about literature is at some level always already informed by theory, or if not by a formal theory then at least by a set of more or less organized assumptions. There is nothing wrong with airing and exploring such assumptions. Instead of a choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives, we have only a question of proportion. Academic critics have a seldom-acknowledged vested interest in difficulty.

Difficulty is a value of literary modernism that has drifted into the critical establishment. In “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) T. S. Eliot hailed difficulty as symptomatic of the age, and he went on to make it a literary virtue in his own poetry. The fiction of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Mann did their part, too, to establish difficulty as a component and virtue of modern prose. The challenge to readers may well have helped establish the academic critic as the master of complexity too arcane for the ordinary reader to fathom. It may also have helped establish complexity as a virtue of critical prose. The examples of Adorno and Benjamin are suggestive. Whatever historical assumptions may have shaped them, the technocratic idioms of literary criticism are now a part of the intellectual landscape. The literary instrumentalization of figures as diverse as Lacan and Derrida, Foucault and Heidegger, Kristeva and Irigaray establishes the critic as master of a sectarian discourse that is pitched at a considerable remove from the unindoctrinated, usually nonacademic reader. Cliques and clerisies take shape and then struggle for turf in universities and in professional journals. The consequent professionalization of literary criticism, a system strictly policed by the academic publishing imperative and the tenure system, leaves a large gap between college-educated lay readers and the professors who taught their literature courses.

Walser's literary criticism suggests an alternative to the assumption that difficulty is a virtue of literature and criticism. His understanding of Kafka stands as a good example. No modern writer is more difficult than Kafka, yet this difficulty has not forced Walser into a defensive recourse to theoretical systems. Walser takes Kafka seriously as a writer, by which I mean he plainly believes that Kafka's writing seriously probes human nature and culture. The conventions of contemporary criticism take a writer such as Kafka less seriously. To scrutinize Kafka through the lens of New Historicism, for example, entails reducing Kafka to a case, the product of forces beyond his control. It entails taking Freud and Foucault more seriously than Kafka. It may be that we need a Kafkan reading of Foucault more earnestly than we need a Foucaultian reading of Kafka. It may be that Walser has offered something like that in Breakers, in which a major American literature department figures prominently.²³

Notes

1. The once-New Subjectivity of the 1970s and 80s did not necessarily signal a withdrawal into the “merely” private. Public and private can seldom be separated; Jonathan P. Clark, “A Subjective Confrontation with the German Past in Martin Walser's Ein fliehendes Pferd,” Martin Walser: International Perspectives, eds. Jürgen E. Schlunk and Armand E. Singer, American University Studies: Series 1, Germanic Languages and Literature 64 (New York: Lang, 1987) 47-58.

2. John Updike, “The Importance of Fiction,” Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1991) 87.

3. Walser's protagonists are descendants of Kafka's K. and Josef K., concerning whom Walser has written with great insight; Beschreibung einer Form: Versuch über Franz Kafka (Munich: Hanser, 1961).

4. Auskunft: 22 Gespräche aus 28 Jahren, ed. Klaus Siblewski (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1991) 140.

5. For a detailed look at his views see Thomas Nolden, “Der Schriftsteller als Literaturkritiker: Ein Porträt Martin Walsers,” Martin Walser: International Perspectives, pp. 171-83; and Dirk Göttsche, “Liebeserklärungen und Verletzungen—Zur Literaturkritik von Martin Walser und Ingeborg Bachmann,” Literaturkritik: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit, DFG Symposium 1989, ed. Wilfrid Barner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990) 197-212.

6. Here, too, we ought to think of Updike's Rabbit character in his various novels, who is literally on the run: “The title [Rabbit, Run] is a piece of advice,” writes Updike, “in the imperative mode …”; Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1983) 851.

7. “Ironie als höchstes Lebensmittel,” Die Zeit 13 June 1975: 33-34; Selbstbewußtsein und Ironie: Frankfurter Vorlesungen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981) 115-52.

8. Wolfgang Wittkowski, “Der Schriftsteller und die Tradition: Walser, Goethe und die Klassik,” Martin Walser: International Perspectives, p. 167.

9. Unlike his Thomas Mann, though, Walser returns his Goethe to the canon, arguing that Goethe's appeal lies in a personal vulnerability expressed as a literature in which evil and catastrophe are always overcome; “Goethes Anziehungskraft,” Liebeserklärungen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981) 237-59.

10. See esp. Alain Finkielkraut, Die Niederlage des Denkens, trans. Nicola Volland (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989) 115-40.

11. Auskunft, p. 140.

12. Auskunft, p. 99.

13. “Über den Umgang mit Literatur,” Martin Walser: International Perspectives, pp. 202-03.

14. Wittkowski rebukes Walser as historically ill-informed, ideologically prejudiced, and fashionably subjective, even hedonistically egocentric (161).

15. “Was ist ein Klassiker?” Über Deutschland reden (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1988) 40.

16. For a fuller account of contemporary views of subjectivism in a philosophical register see Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992). Taylor offers strong arguments for maintaining confidence in autonomous subjectivity as a moral resource.

17. For example, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987). More than any other contemporary literary critic, Poirier is responsible for mining the vein of pragmatism for literary understanding.

18. Cited in Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, p. 17.

19. Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, p. 16. The idea of that the passage of time means the continual renewal of literature is a piece of the pragmatist heritage that Poirier develops at length.

20. Wer ist ein Schriftsteller?, p. 36.

21. Auskunft, p. 102.

22. Liebeserklärungen, pp. 237-59; Auskunft, pp. 113-14.

23. Bernd Fischer deals with this question in his essay in reference to Breakers.

Works Cited

Finkielkraut, Alain. Die Niederlage des Denkens. Trans. Nicola Volland. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989.

Göttsche, Dirk. “Liebeserklärungen und Verletzungen—Zur Literaturkritik von Martin Walser und Ingeborg Bachmann.” Literaturkritik: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit. DFG Symposium 1989. Ed. Wilfrid Barner. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990. 197-212.

Nolden, Thomas. “Der Schriftsteller als Literaturkritiker: Ein Porträt Martin Walsers.” Martin Walser: International Perspectives. Eds. Jürgen E. Schlunk, and Armand E. Singer. American University Studies: Series 1, Germanic Languages and Literature 64. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. 171-83.

Poirier, Richard. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Updike, John. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1983.

———. Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Walser, Martin. Auskunft: 22 Gespräche aus 28 Jahren. Ed. Klaus Siblewski. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1991.

———. “Goethes Anziehungskraft.” Liebeserklärungen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981. 237-59.

———. “Ironie als höchstes Lebensmittel,” Die Zeit 13 June 1975. 33-34.

———. Selbstbewußtsein und Ironie. Frankfurter Vorlesungen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981.

———. “Über den Umgang mit Literatur.” Martin Walser: International Perspectives. 195-214.

———. Über Deutschland reden. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1988.

Wittkowski, Wolfgang. “Der Schriftsteller und die Tradition: Walser, Goethe und die Klassik.” Martin Walser: International Perspectives. 157-69.