SOURCE: "Unrelenting Style," translated by J. McC, in Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses, edited by Mark Harmon, University Press of New England, 1985, pp. 153-68.

[Here, in an essay originally published in German in 1983, German novelist and dramatist Martin Walser examines the tone and irony in many of Robert Walser's works. He also describes the author's influences.]

Shall we enroll our author forever among the ranks of the so-called controversials? We know that is no longer necessary. Those who understand have compared him with Shakespeare, Mozart, Schubert. That he is a classic is admitted today even by those who do not much care for him. Especially by them, perhaps. So they can be rid of him. Apparently there is no need to fear that anyone will actually read him. From the man who did the very fine translation of Jakob von Gunten into English, I learned in 1973 that in the previous year sixteen copies had been sold in the United States of America. Ten years ago I would have said zealously: And how many hundreds of thousands of Hesse! But I don't say that any more. Years of associating with Robert Walser's books have developed in me a sensation that might be captured like this: There are books that spread like brush fire, and books that sink gradually into us; they never cease sinking into us, and we never cease wondering that books can have such an endless, gentle weight or that there are in us such depths to be awakened. The accompanying feeling is something like happiness. I have now had this experience three times: with Hölderlin, with Kafka, and with Robert Walser. For an author who offers such a degree of inexhaustibility, there is no need to fear, for all eternity. So one is free to just talk about him. If one can.

I would like to talk about the tone of Robert Walser. Who would not be glad to help free this author from the scented cloud, still with us, of the gifted dilettante, that of the charming genius living entirely off soulful spontaneity? The big-shot critics and colleagues, those especially, recognized in him the most charming of all authors. Since they believed him nothing more than that, they were only too glad to consider him a kind of exquisitely lyrical poet-simpleton, who had staggered out of the competitive arena and whom they might readily grant a grain or two of their superior attention. I would like to mention the manufacturedness of Walser's tone—his attempt to treat life ever more exclusively as if it were writing. With the counterbalancing smile that for him had to accompany every big word, he himself designates what he has thus achieved as his "unrelenting style."

When his first book, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze, appeared in November 1904, one reviewer believed the author to be an overrefined offshoot of some extremely refined house; possibly even of Mann's Tonio Kröger, which had appeared the year before. But even if one did not take the contents to be pure realism—"Papa has carriages and horses," and such like—the Fritz Kocher tone sounded over-delicate and graceful. And naïve. Incredibly naïve. Well, at least Tonio Kröger had never been that, not for one second. How haughtily Tonio Kröger despises everything that is not up to his current standards! And with what naïve vehemence Fritz Kocher adores everything that happens to come before his scent-addicted nose! That is how literary society perceived and maintained the author: as the Paragon of Sincerity, the poet who walks about on dreamed legs, and who, to his good fortune, does not quite know what is happening when yet another pretty line springs forth from him. In brief appearances in the Wedekind salon in Munich, involving dreamily sudden passes at girls' legs and chitchat as easily confiding as it was productively uninhibited, Robert Walser was only too glad to play the role of boy-page-cherub-poet against a completely provincial Alemannic backdrop. Even more so from 1905 to 1912, amongst the twining Jugendstil tendrils in the western suburbs of Berlin, which seemed as though prepared for him alone. For a time, he played the shepherd boy, the Beardsley figure from Biel, so well apparently that for years afterwards he was forced to hear that he was really much better in person than on the page. The split began when they all thought him nothing more than his role. In the eleven or twelve or thirteen hundred prose pieces that he wrote because he considered himself "bottomlessly unsuccessful" as a novelist, he was forced to react again and again to the period from 1895 to 1913. In 1928, when even his prose piece writing had been soured for him by the general lack of recognition, he described his debut in literary society with Fritz Kocher in the prose piece "The First Step" ("Der erste Schritt"): "So-and-so-many years ago I sped, not unlike a traveling journeyman, through brownish green forests and over shimmering, yellowish blue flowered, unforeboding plains, and arrived in all innocence at a place where important contemporaries, standing one and all on a terrace, received me with a friendly smile, crying out with unmistakable amusement: Behold, here marches and dances our way one who still seems completely unassailed, unspoiled." He says that fellow writers to whom he himself had told his life story would then thunder at him regularly: "How gloriously embarrassed you then stood there, so magnificently sweet natured, with such a wonderful shepherdboyishness?" And in 1932, shortly before he had to quit, he wrote in the prose piece "The Midget" ("Der Knirps"), this too is one of his roles: "Now and then, his facility, arising as it were from a kind of sleep, bore the stamp of calculated naïveté or artificial artlessness."

The grotesque thing is that his cleverest contemporaries—including even Kafka and Walter Benjamin—were unable to see through the shepherd boy, whereas he himself, the naïve child, was able to formulate grandiose diagnoses of this misunderstanding in terms as clear and hard as a diamond. As well intentioned as Kafka and Benjamin were towards Robert Walser, I nevertheless believe that Kafka's much-cited love for him is a creation of Max Brod, who, in his capacity as editor, published Robert Walser's prose pieces for years, and also, by a stroke of intellectual luck, attempted just about the only analysis of his poetic method we have. Walter Benjamin, with his admiring murmurs about the enigmatic qualities of Robert Walser's "language returned to the wild" and his "letting himself go," did more to nourish the cultural rumor of the naïve poet than to make his poetics comprehensible.

There is a fine touch of lunacy to Robert Walser's finding himself surrounded by "younger intellectualizers" in the late twenties who urge him, as he himself puts it, to "free [himself] from his novice ways," while also making him "most respectfully, i.e., painstakingly, aware of the jewel of still being absolutely unaccomplished."

So who is naïve? Those who took him (and still take him) to be a Jugendstil version of the Romantic Taugenichts, or the Walser who could describe his role so accurately:

They laugh at me primarily because I seem in earnest. They think it happens unwittingly, whereas in fact it's by design. But my vocation, my mission, consists mainly in making every effort to keep my audience believing that I am truly simple. I give them the illusion that unspoiledness and naïveté still exist.

If he shows himself at his "full height, carefully gone to seed from head to toes," then, he says, "this sloppiness [is] a product of art." Even Walter Benjamin was unequal to this sophistication from the town of Biel. Possibly he got his impressions from reading magazines now and again. The reader who can survey the Collected Works has an easier time recognizing the author as an author.

Today anyone can see, for example, that the Kocher prose piece about poverty cannot have been written either by a scion of affluence or by somebody who is totally naïve. In one of his favorite roles, that of the servant Tobold, Walser reworked his stay at Dambrau Castle in Silesia in the fall of 1905; in the guise of Tobold he lets himself say that he wants to take part always in the battle of good against evil, of the "movable ones against the hard boiled . . . , of the diligent toilers against those who do nothing and nevertheless still stay on top, in the battle of the innocent against the shrewd and the sly." In this Robert Walser battle plan, the front which pits the movable against the hard boiled tells us most about the struggles of his life. Mobility, getting carried away, instability are his wealth and his poverty, his happiness and his distress, the sine qua non of his existence, which he assumes and develops as his profession. He wants to become an author immediately, of course. And famous, with all his heart. Fritz Kocher is already the fundamental figure for his life: The child, a poet; or, the poet as child. And he enters with just as great a thirst for great enterprises as Hölderlin at his youngest. "I am frightfully ambitious," says Fritz Kocher. Like the earliest Hölderlin, he feels almost naked with ambition. He has no theme, he just wants to write. But was he really so themeless, so pointlessly and emptily ambitious as he, the scruple-struck lad from the petite bourgeoisie, accuses himself of being? The manner in which this child Fritz Kocher turned away from the industry of his home town! He does not concern himself, he says, with what is made in the factories. "I only know that all the poor people work in the factory, perhaps as a punishment for being so poor."

The poor are punished for being poor "by having to work in the factory"; in other words, it serves them right. Since Swift made his famous "modest proposal" that the poor should sell their extra children to the rich for the Sunday dinner table, thus simultaneously solving the problems of a surplus of children and a shortage of suckling pigs, probably no ironic author has gone as far as our young naïf, who declares poverty a crime properly punishable with work in a factory. I find it astonishing how soon he completely masters the art of pronouncing an evil reasonable. And in the next few years, this becomes the task through which he develops his style. Personal distress, far from being represented or lamented as such, is to be answered experimentally in the affirmative, and this yeasaying to want and distress is to be developed ever more reasonably, ever more richly. He dispatches Fritz Kocher off into the forest to this end. Subsequent Robert Walser characters also find in nature an otherness which has at least the advantage of not being a society intent upon doing harm. It is as with Hölderlin. Thus nature is not a fixed opposite, but is itself a process. "The forest flows," we read in Kocher, "it is a green, deep flowing away, a running away, its branches are its waves." In this movement, which of course proceeded from the ego and was amplified by the forest, the ego itself is caught up, unstable as it is. Whoever flees society and comes suffering into the forest, will experience, in this region of amplification, a back and forth with nature that finally makes him able to say his happiness kisses his suffering, indeed his suffering is his happiness; he has learned that from the forest. Happiness and suffering are the closest of friends.

Here it sounds precocious, cheeky, preposterous: At the end of the forest piece, which is the end of the Kocher book, the author can already demonstrate his kind of tone and procedure—that is, his method—applied to his own writing. He would really have preferred to pour out his feelings in front of the beauties of nature, he says, but there he learned that "pouring out in the art of writing demands a perpetual self-restraint." What this colorfully spoken but still very green poet-youth formulates here might readily remind one of Jean Paul at his most mature—who would not become one of our young man's favorite authors until years later. Irony, said Jean Paul, requires "a perpetual keeping to oneself or objectification .. . [a] countering frost in the language." A fellow wants to pour out his feeling, but notes it would carry him away too far, so he restrains himself and instead formulates a completely different tone so as not to lose himself; when he hears how the countertone sounds, compared to the spontaneous one, he is pleased. We can see that the countertone stems from a countersteering. Instead of letting go, a person has oppressed himself a little. And lo and behold, he has a much clearer sense of himself as his own oppressor than he would have as one who gets carried away and loses himself. That too is an achievement; it reminds one of the rewards for good behavior in a petit bourgeois childhood and adolescence. Instead of biting into the chocolate, one makes a face as if one had bitten into it. And this becomes a method. It is decisive that no blows from the world around him—and these blows, as we know, get lower and lower—could make this author give up writing.

Goethe, I believe, once advised his colleague Eckermann that young writers should be careful not to get caught up in projects that would more or less tie them up for a long time. He himself, said Goethe, could have achieved still more if he had been less intent on long-term projects and had thus been even more alive to the stimulus of the moment. It took the crashing failure of Walser's three novels, written and published in Berlin, and the know-itall advisors drawn like bluebottles to this failure, to drive Walser away from the novel and make him a writer of short prose, at the mercy of everyday events. That is, he had to be driven in a great fall from his planned course, in which he competed with Cervantes, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, and Keller, down to the chicken-run of the manufacturer of prose pieces, who could answer to his experiences only with the kind of complaisance and limited scope grimly prescribed by the fine arts page. In 1907 he could still write, rather breezily, to Christian Morgenstern that he would rather join the army than become a supplier to magazines. Yet that is exactly what he became. He put up with it until 1933. But by then, in the prose piece form allotted him, he had truly carried out his project. Even if one wants to gnash one's teeth a little in rage, reading his Robber novel, at the thought that more of the kind has been lost to us, Walser's enforced concentration on the prose piece bore an uncanny fruit: a life-novel, consisting of a thousand and several hundred segments. In the late twenties he himself wrote that in his opinion his prose pieces formed "nothing more nor less than parts of a long, plotless, realistic story. For me the sketches are . . . shorter or lengthier chapters of a novel. The novel, on which I am constantly writing, is still the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself."

He had his ego appear in this book in the roles of the youths Fritz, Wenzel, Simon, Kasimir, Fridolin, Felix; in the bookkeepers Tanner, Helbling, and Josef Marti; in the servants Tobold and Jakob; in those eerie celebrities named Mehlmann, Oskar, Wladimir, and Schwendimann; he was also fond of letting himself be guessed or even easily discovered as Kleist or Brentano; naturally he also wrote about Kleist, Lenau, Lenz, Cézanne, Watteau, Mozart, Beardsley, Voltaire, and so on, without bringing in himself every time as the main character. But he liked to dress up as [Schiller's] Karl and Franz Moor; even more, in the garb of the Prodigal Son. And best of all, and more and more frequently, with no name at all. To him, names were things that tied up, pasted down, shut in. He was much fonder of appearing under labels signifying a function, an activity, a relationship; most preferably as a child; then as a page; as a servant. In a prose piece from the late twenties about a lackey, his gift for mobility dictated the following to him: "He lacked the desire to be what he was."

If one wants to get any real sense of Walser's style—without getting lost in a merry-go-round of aesthetic ghosts—then at some point one must also take into account that possibly no poet has ever wanted to make a friendlier entrance into the world. Whenever he recalls it, one senses this. "Certainly I was beautiful then, I know that now," he says. Everything made him glad, he said. He loved everything, welcomed everything without exception. "Yes, I used to stand and go about like a person entitled to say he was carousing." "The wind flew in blue waves across the field, and bells chimed, and everything was namelessly beautiful . . . , I was free as never before . . . , each thought a part of life, and each living apparition immediately a thought." And he needed no objects for his rapture. "The simple awareness of existence, enchanting me, dug down deep within me in search of love, which was flying through screens and walls all about into the Measureless and whatever came next. Outside, amid the echoes and the noise, a stillness embraced me as though I could never again fail. Everything around me was blue as fluttering flags and red as blossoming lips and young as the eyes and cheeks of children. Then seriousness was alongside laughter, and dying was alongside living. So it went, back and forth in constant movement; the flashing days were like shimmering fruit." Naturally, he then took a man on the road at night to be Jesus Christ. Naturally, for him writing and praying were one. But the seraphic tone of the man from Biel produced a dissonant echo in his time and world. And he does not reject this echo, but absorbs it and makes it his own. He says, quite right. Not immediately. Not all at once. It's not that easy to say yes to the world's saying no. After the fall, being the fallen one, he first had to feel himself all over. When he fell in Berlin with his novels, he wrote his first Brentano prose piece. It says: "He saw no more future before him . . . , the past was like . . . something incomprehensible. All justifications scattered like dust. Voyages and journeys . . . had become oddly repulsive to him: he was afraid to take a step, and at the idea of changing his abode he shuddered as at something monstrous." First he begins to reproach mankind, then himself: he was "the most unreliable, most lascivious, and least faithful thing on earth." At this point one sees directly how it is possible for the world, for society, to arouse someone dangerously against himself. He would like to separate himself from the person who put him in this situation. He still believes in a better self within him. "O, his person," he cries, "he would have liked to rip it away from his essence, which was still good. To kill one half of himself so as to save the other from destruction, to save the man from destruction, to keep the God within him from being completely lost." Then he returns to Biel. Beaten, but sheltered again. His prose piece "The Entrance" ("Die Einfahrt") may very possibly be the most insuperably beautiful piece ever bestowed upon a country by a returning Prodigal Son. "Slowly, as if it were prey to a profound reflectiveness, and as if it had a need to advance hesitantly, the train moved along; it was a workman's train." "The homeland, and the high, golden thought of it, soared around my heart... O what beautiful train riding among mild-mannered, sensible, serious fellow countrymen, all the way into embracedness." By virtue of the powerful gratitude of one who has been saved—or who considers himself saved—all the prose pieces about the return home are simply magnificent. In Biel, to be sure, he was not forced to perform the self-alienating salon tricks of Berlin; for here he remained from the outset at his own level; but the lack of confirmation and recognition, the not being perceived or understood, broke him down again over the years until, in the end, he was worse off than after the Berlin fiasco. Now there was no longer any Switzerland to shelter him. At this point something occurred that he, who had called himself "a man of development," had feared—life itself threatened to grind to a halt. A prose piece that bears witness to this after six years of Biel is called "The Street" ("Die Strasse") (1919): "I had taken steps that had proved useless, and now I went into the street, upset, numbed. First I was as if blind, and thought no one saw anyone any more, that all had gone blind, and that life had come to a standstill because everything was groping about madly." This is also the night he goes up to a figure standing in the dark. But it is no longer Jesus Christ, as in bygone days. Now he says: "This heaped-up collectivity wants and does nothing. They are tangled in one another; they do not move, are as if locked in; surrender themselves to indistinct force, and yet are themselves the power that weights them down and fetters their minds and limbs." He escapes to Bern. Wants to stay in motion. But by failing utterly to perceive his movements, the world around him intensifies its negation of them. He must not only cope with this. He must—unrelentingly—approve it. To sanctify the misery by lamenting it in the tone it had itself set, that was out of the question. A professional does not permit himself such directness. He could not allow himself to be an unjustly unrecognized writer and complain of it into the bargain. No, he cries: Nothing does a writer such good as a hefty portion of nonrecognition. Nothing is as good as misery, because from the vantage point of the worst you can only look ahead to better. "Stendhal was well off because he was badly off." That's how the unrelenting style puts it. It is a movement of existence that allows not a single second of peace or safety. Recognition is, after all, as the story "The Negro" ("Der Neger") puts it, "a soft shattering of something that, supported by unconsciousness, has been building within us." That is unrelentingly petit bourgeois realistic. Every one of Walser's readers knows his racing fugues of modesty, those orgies of belittlement that eliminate all imitators as surely as do Kafka's subjunctive snares. Yet in Robert Walser, as in Kafka, there is nothing that expresses solely the author and not his fellow citizen just as well. Not for one second did Walser feel justified as an author. No experience can extinguish his passionate desire to be the good neighbor. Nor can experience diminish the strength of his love. But as a result of all that experience, love gradually begins to consider itself comic. He has his "Robber" go to a doctor and say: "maybe my illness, if I can call my condition that, is that of loving too much. I have a horrifyingly large fund of love in me, and each time I go out on the street I start to love something, someone, and everywhere as a result they call me a man of no character: I would like to request you to laugh a little at that." Max Rychner, who could not have known this passage, compared him to Shakespeare; after which Walser—in his own tone—called himself the Shakespeare of the "wee prose piece." So the blissful early tone has evidently attended the school of hard knocks that inclines one to comedy. After the "midsummer night's dream," the person in question knows that under certain conditions love is comic; indeed—if it does not behave correctly—it can even be called a sickness.

In other words, the blissful tone, which has never been at all naïve, produces a terrible echo, which the author does not bewail, but instead prefers to amplify to the shrillest. "If dying must be done anyway, I'd sooner die willingly than unwillingly"—that is what his style dictates. Anyone who still takes the passage in the "Negro" story about recognition as demolition to be the product of a genius feigning modesty can be directed to passages of the same tendency that have no aesthetic horizons, but only moral ones. For instance in 1926: "Admiration, after all, begets arrogance, hardness." Or, both morally and aesthetically, in 1915-16: "Isn't defeat better than the wan smile of triumph?" And again from the twenties, in a section in which he again represents himself as a forty-year-old child: "Mockery and lovelessness made him happy." And in the Wladimir role: "Seemingly peculiar that he admits having often been joyous as a down-and-out and morose as a success story." The worst is really and truly the best—that is the thrust in the development of his unrelenting tone; it is to be demonstrated again and again until calm plausibility sets in. In a prose piece written after 1930, he still allows himself to be questioned about his failure; letting himself respond, we read, "reluctantly and at the same time openheartedly." So, just as in Kocher's days, self-restraint and pouring out belong together. And that is how the answer turns out: "Bad writers [he said] are sometimes more entitled than good ones. . .. Anyway, all recognition has forever tended to turn into a trap or a ditch, and lying within rejection are all kinds of encouragement." In the prose role of the adventurer, he uttered the same with shrill pride: "I would wither away, lose myself, if everyone with reason to do so were to respect me." Here he ascribes to contempt rights that are downright fabulous. One must often recall as the source of energy the petit bourgeois Christian treasure chest of morality; otherwise this radical cultivation simply evaporates into aesthetics. In one of his finest roles, that of the servant Tobold, he says: "if, of my own free will, borne by courage and compassion into higher frames of mind, I renounce heaven: then will I not, sooner or later, as a reward for upright behavior, fly to a heaven many times more beautiful?" One should also place the instability of his ego, and thus his mobility and preference for change, within their real context, which he himself names often enough—poverty: "only the poor man is able to walk away contemptuously from the narrow self, so as to lose himself in something better, .. . in movement that does not come to a halt, . . . in the vibrating generality, in the inextinguishable mutuality that bears us" (1919). Or: "There was a cheerful mobility and freedom in poverty. The cold provided scorching heat." A poor man, we read somewhere else, respects everything except himself. "Where would he have gotten respect for himself?" Indeed, perhaps he even began writing, he says, because he had been poor and needed to start a sideline to make himself feel richer.

I have spent too long showing his method only as it applies to himself; it is really one-sided to demonstrate the elaboration of his unrelenting irony only through the evermore-successful touting and justification of his own failure. His dialectical art, derived from the most personal experience of deprivation, can also solve problems. He proves this as early as Jakob von Gunten when, in a crazy passage of dialectic, we are led to concede that only the suppression of freedom makes it possible to experience freedom, that only a life not being lived is really a life. Twenty years after Gunten he still calls his "never having lived" a "gigantic, magnificent, radiantly green tree." The cunning of reason which Hegel discerned in world history is not for one second alien to this author's perception of reality. "The bad are of use to the good," he says. "The Swiss," he writes twenty years after Gunten, "perhaps owe their freedom not only to William Tell, the fighter for freedom, but also to Governor Gessler, who considered freedom out of place, and who provided the former with the occasion to set himself in motion. . . . The shover and the shovee, the one who exerts pressure and the one who shakes it off, somehow complement each other; and as for freedom, it desperately needs governors, etc., in order to grow." Later on, he presents Tell and Gessler as "a single contradictory personality." What interests him is solely the "circumstance of the giving-cause-for-movement." Tell and Gessler are an "inseparable unity;" for him movement becomes the highest value, as for Hölderlin, Fichte, Hegel, and Kierkegaard it had become the highest value, the only absolute. "The movable is always the most just," he writes. One can now look back differently on his preference for misfortune, on his serious attempt to praise his failure, on his preference for the negative, on his ability, developed to the point of virtuosity, to experience, represent, and acclaim as the most pleasant that which is least pleasant: Nothing should remain, absolutely nothing. Thus whoever spent a moment among the elect would the very next moment have to face becoming one of the disadvantaged. The orderly, the diligent, the much approved, the good, the successful, the ruling, the fortunate, the living: because time continually pulls all things down, everything will be thrust next moment into its opposite. That is all they have to look forward to now. "Because things cannot be otherwise than that they become otherwise, they became otherwise," says he in jest, in a truly Hegelian mood. On the other hand, whoever exists only in the negated moment is constantly looking forward to existence. Maturity was always alien to him. Spring engendered autumn in him, and autumn spring. There was no summer. Absolutely not to be in the present moment, or perhaps to be absolutely not in the present moment—therein lies the countertone that he developed against time as well as world.

Once we have followed Walser all the way into these frequencies of his realistic sense of history, we can finally get beyond compassion for the author as one who was and still is misunderstood. Otherwise it would be like feeling sorry for Jesus because he was crucified. Some people are simply able to transform what has been inflicted upon them into their work. They become objective. That is the highest goal. Robert Walser achieved it. And formulated it thus: "My activity is stronger than I." There is—one must say this with all due awe—no one whom Robert Walser approached more often or more boldly than Jesus, whom he simply called his favorite. As early as 1913 the man who had returned completely beaten from Berlin to Biel allowed himself the perspectival luxury of calling himself a "vanquisher," whereupon he of course immediately had "an attack of laughter." If one entrusts Jesus' message of love to the unrelenting style of this terrible, gentle man from Biel, it comes out like this: "There is something almost malicious in not hating anything." Or: "With modesty you can practically do in somebody." And can any author formulate more like Jesus than one who writes that his best lines are those that "make the reader consider himself superior to the author?" People have restricted themselves too emphatically to extolling this author's funny-masochistic lapdog antics as the droll achievement of his charm. Someday we must realize that he mediates himself into Jesus just as exactly and uninhibitedly as he did into Kleist, Brentano, Schwendimann, or Knirps. He has the scribes thus confront his favorite role, Jesus: "Your modesty is all artfulness." As with the Negro role, this applies at least as much to the Bieler as to the Nazarene. He can now express everything, even the greatest bliss, in the form of a negation. He can also express the worst in the form of a completely perceptible, magnificent affirmation. At times one can even get the impression that the style has reached these turning points all by itself. It has become that highly developed; an author's existence has become that professionalized. But however monstrous its achieved phrasings, this stylistic movement borrows not a gram of weight from any traditional workshop for making impressions. While playing, he achieves sentences such as the following: "It will sound exquisite if I say I know, with enviable precision, that the present essay contains errors, and that this certainty is something beautiful." Such a sentence has an effect on me like news from a better world. Just when, by dint of interference, scolding, disdain, and rejection, they have almost wholly deprived a man of his sense of self, he manages to make the bundle of impositions his own and uses it to produce phrases of Mozartian lightness. That his most extreme gestures should still be light as a feather is probably due to the way his Alemannic mother tongue watches over these unrelenting movements. This linguistic womb pursues her child, who wants to become pathetically independent in standard German, with all kinds of ridicule. Often enough one watches Robert Walser hammer the most intractable raw materials of the thing-addicted Alemannic dialect into a lyrical sketch that is fine to the point of making one faint.

If I now go on to point out that agglomerated contradictions begin to proliferate almost frighteningly in his works, I should add—as stridently as possible—that these knots of contradictions, through which he practically allows his prose to decompose itself, have nothing in common with the mania for opposites that led a different "literary oftenmentioned" of the age to set up mechanically opposing rows of dummy concepts, between which the author dashes back and forth for a while, only to betray them cheerfully to one another, while raising himself above them to hover on high, untouchable, most eminent, and incontestably himself. It does make a difference whether one descends from Friedrich von Schlegel or from Hegel. Schlegel prided himself on his ability always to top one heaven with yet another. Robert Walser wanted to learn to renounce heaven completely, so as to become worthy of an even higher heaven, which he would then, of course, also renounce for a still higher one. In reality, that meant renunciation of heaven, absolutely; but not as a single act—rather, as a lifelong movement in the work. Hence the conspicuous increase in his style of compound contradictions: He would have preferred most of all to hyphenate each adjective with the opposite that language holds in store. And he does that, too, more and more frequently. Just as Kafka, with his chains of speculations, gradually throttles all movement by his characters so that absolute indeterminacy can assume its dominion in prose, Robert Walser takes each point wanting to pin itself down and jams it headlong into its counterpoint, thus yielding a knot of words that shivers with the tension of contradiction; or perhaps a patch of bright darkness such as one finds in Rembrandt—one can no longer dwell anywhere. Gradually one does grasp that the language arisen from our story of pain always arose through a tearing apart of something whole. Because of its origins, language is always a specialized deprivation. It is language because of its ability to distinguish life from death. In reality, faith and skepticism, life and death, and so on are unstoppable points along paths of movement; it is only when the various verbal labels are superimposed that they are transformed into opposites, in a way that annihilates their movement, and therefore their sense. The last step of this prose restores the real contradictions as inducements to movement. Nothing is separated from anything any more. Everything is linked by its negation to everything else. In a century in which authors have adopted the oddly unprofessional notion of considering themselves the representatives and vicars of all that is possible, we would be almost morally endangered if this genius of change had not arisen among us as a corrective. His countertext earns us a future: "To a great degree, one possesses only what one lacks, for then one must seek it." Has the negative ever been as beautiful in anyone else's writing? To me, some of his sentences seem suitable as an elegiac apocalypse of the bourgeois age.

Having failed to reach their goal, the benefactors could no longer sleep in peace. If everything can be expressed as deprivation, then language has for once exhausted its possibilities. After all, that is the purpose for which language arose in the first place. Robert Walser makes no reproaches—he loves, and loves, and loves again. So he arrives as if by himself at his unrelenting mildness: "The vouchsafers are out in search of supplicants." This is Jesus, despecialized. The last days of a class that set out alongside the declaration of human rights. But something must have then gone wrong. Maybe domination. Once again, domination. Once again, humanity—well not quite. But the apocalyptic mildness of that sentence stores and preserves completely the splendid first steps of this class: "The vouchsafers are out in search of supplicants." I want to bring one final sentence of his into play; I have already marveled at it a hundred times, and each time it has rewarded me. It arose out of the author's experience, out of his utterly clear recognition that he was born to mediate and that mediation is work that does not survive the second in which it is accomplished. The sentence comes from his prose piece "Sketch" ("Skizze"): "The garden somewhat resembled a thought fortunately never thought to a conclusion; and my sketch I compare—although I have no idea where I get the effrontery to do so—to a swan, singing with unheard-of ardor, who gives voice screechingly to unmediated things." So, with the simplicity of a Hölderlin and the beauty of a Robert Walser, he expresses his work as a writer. The fact that he compares his activity, which is stronger than he, to a swan giving voice screechingly to unmediated things tells me how wrong it was earlier to suggest that there are those who can simply fashion what has been inflicted upon them into their own work. I wanted to redeem our author from the fate of having to be pitied. But that emphasis underlines the notion that the prose piece just completed can affect his consciousness retroactively and stabilize it for what is to come. This is precisely not the case. The distress, which individual prose pieces mediate, passed away with them. The author then had to confront the next imposition without any particular stability. If I say that, through his assent, he succeeded in conquering all adversities, then, just like those who thought the Kocher boy merely naïve, I have been taken in by his irony. Perhaps, at times, even the author himself fell for his own unrelenting, stronger-than-he-was form of writing. True irony always wants to be involuntary.

The sketch that screeches about unmediated things makes me realize that with this author one can never reach solid ground. He himself never reached it. The sketch screeches out loudly and beautifully that the poet's business of mediation never achieves permanent success. Writing means to make necessities look like freedom. But the like remains a like, and needs to be sung and screeched with ardor. Let us briefly recall that Robert Walser by no means undertook to mediate everything. He had a deadly serious precondition for creativity: Freedom from other work. His being dismissed so often as a clerk in Zurich attests that, in order to write, he always first had to make his "out-ofthe-way thoughts" come true. Only when "occupied to the highest degree" at "being unoccupied" could he write. At such moments he had the heat turned off, "for I didn't want to have it easy, I wanted to freeze." Here we find him already in the midst of mediation. To be free, however, in the sense of unoccupied, was his axiom, so to speak. All distress occurring thereafter he accepted as a task, and began to rewrite it unrelentingly into something beautiful, something right, something welcome. If I'm to die, then better willingly. But mediating, after all, means to create not another condition, but only a different consciousness about the same condition. For Robert Walser the situation is no different than for Fichte, who was, as it were, unable to derive a single second of truly stable self-awareness from his lifelong "I-not I" billiards—and thus had to keep on playing a lifelong game with the theory of science. For Robert Walser it is no different than for Kierkegaard, who could not for a single day call off the dialectical hunt in which skepticism roused faith out of the bushes and faith in turn roused skepticism; otherwise his existence would grind to a halt and become undetectable. So too it may have been with the other saints of movement: Saint Hegel, Saint Marx. So it was, as has been noted often enough, with Kafka, the only ironist in the German language comparable to Robert Walser.

Irony leads to nothing. The unrelenting hunt itself is the only bearable situation, a situation comprised of nothing but movement. And this movement supplies the sensibility with a sound that can be experienced—an almost perceptible rustle of identity. If the unrelenting dialectical hunt were to come to a stop, so would life; one would get lost in the disequilibrium of distress. So long as it is possible to rewrite every incoming grain of distress into a grain of freedom—that is, to mediate it for consciousness as the sweetest, most welcome of experiences—then the movement may continue; one can believe in equilibrium, can almost hear the yearned-for rustle of identity. But if one is then put against one's will into an asylum, the mediation, the writing itself, is no longer possible. There is no irony that could transform this asylum into a freely chosen home. Freedom, the precondition for writing, is totally absent.

Don Quixote has to surrender. His only name now, it turns out, is Cervantes, or Robert Walser. He is no longer a boy, or a page, or a servant, or a lackey, or Jesus, or a child—in other words not an author, either. Only a quite healthy man of fifty-five, one who can defend himself no longer and, from now on, for another twenty-three years, will make no attempt to defend himself—i.e., to write. Truly, to welcome this inmate's existence, with unrelenting irony, as a fate imbued with freedom—to do that, a person would really have to be sick. But since he is healthy, he lets the asylum be an asylum, lets himself be a patient. The swan becomes an inmate, and screeches about unmediated things no more, enduring them instead, silently, it seems, and probably also patiently. His twenty-three-year-long silence denies us any right to speculate. But if you please—we can be truly happy with what the swan from Biel gave us, while still a swan.