SOURCE: "The Walk' as a Species of Walk Literature," in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol 12, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 87-94.

[Here, American writer and educator Lopate ponders the act of walking as a literary theme and as a source of inspiration and muse and indicates its importance to Walser as a basis for meditations, observations and of freedom—which the language in "The Walk" demonstrates. Lopate also attempts to discern if the naivete and tone in "The Walk" is intentional or the result of mental illness.]

A curious literary phenomenon, the walk story. In roughly the same era, the surrealists Louis Aragon (The Night Walker), Philippe Soupault (Last Nights of Paris) and André Breton (Nadja), the Irishman James Joyce, the American Henry Miller, and the Swiss writer Robert Walser were all composing epics of perambulation. What was it about the times that led authors to pick the walk, that most transient, most seemingly formless of activities, as their subject matter? Was the walk's very shapelessness an inviting challenge to the fragmentary, lyrical, stream-ofconsciousness aesthetic of early modernism? Or was this outpouring a twilight celebration of the flaneur (whose profile Walter Benjamin was busy working out on a theoretical plane), in the last decades before urban public space would become privatized, and lose much of its theatrical/agoric resonance? Finally, how significant was it that these writers were still relatively young men, whose restless, feet-conquering relationship to the city compensated in part for their bohemian poverty and powerlessness? Whatever the reasons, the streets beckoned as a free, inexhaustible source of entertainment and inspiration—a muse.

"The Walk" is Robert Walser's longest and arguably greatest story; certainly it is one of the best pure walking-around stories ever written. Unlike the other aforementioned samples, it takes place not in a metropolis but a small, unnamed city (Zurich?) which shades into suburban countryside. Just as the setting meanders from urban to semirural and back, so the mood traverses a continuum of emotional inscapes, each brightly lit. The "plot" (such as it is) consists of the narrator leaving his claustrophobic writing room for "the open, bright and cheerful street"; commenting on various passersby; entering a bookstore and asking to be shown the most successful book of the season, then walking out without buying it; stopping at his bank (where he learns that a thousand francs have been deposited by philanthropic ladies to support "the existence of a poet held repeatedly in contempt"); lunching with a patroness who frightens him with her teasing demands that he stuff himself; arguing unsuccessfully with a tailor; visiting the tax bureau to protest a raised assessment; having various epiphanies and anxiety attacks along the way; and finally settling into night, with its concluding personal illumination (which we will get to later).

"The Walk" begins (in Christopher Middleton's translation in Selected Stories):

I have to report that one fine morning, I do not know any more for sure what time it was, as the desire to take a walk came over me, I put my hat on my head, left my writing room, or room of phantoms, and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street. I might add that on the stairs I encountered a woman who looked like a Spaniard, a Peruvian, or a Creole. She presented to the eye a certain pallid, faded majesty. But I must strictly forbid myself a delay of even two seconds with this Brazilian lady, or whatever she might be; for I may waste neither space nor time.

This opening locks in the self-reflexive tone of a twofold dialogue: (1) between the narrator and reader, and (2) between the main character and himself. The self-command to "waste neither time nor space" is particularly ironic: as Susan Sontag has astutely noted in her introduction to Walser's Selected Stories, "he had the depressive's fascination with stasis, and with the way time distends, is consumed; and spent much of his life obsessively turning time into space: his walks. His work plays with the depressive's appalled vision of endlessness: it is all voice—musing, conversing, rambling, running on."

Depressive or not, a person who walks is compelled to talk to himself, to carry on a soliloquy in his head. The walk itself is a continually changing field for meditation. It does this partly by throwing up one problematic stimulus after another. Thus, at the start of his walk Walser's narrator sees the unsmiling Professor Meili and, invoking the topsy-turvy principle that appearances deceive, concludes that "men who do not smile in a sweet and beautiful way are honorable and trustworthy." Many of the observations are paradoxes like this, which serve Walser's perspective that the first shall be last. He declares himself the enemy of everything that is "morbidly puffed up, offers a ridiculous tawdry show of itself." This antagonism extends to the "clumsy triumphal" automobile, which Walser is prescient enough in 1917 to see as the foe of walkers and nature:

To people sitting in a blustering dust-churning automobile I always present my austere and angry face, and they do not deserve a better one. Then they believe that I am a spy, a plainclothes policeman, delegated by high officials and authorities to spy on the traffic, to note down the numbers of vehicles, and later to report them. I always then look darkly at the wheels, at the car as a whole, but never at its occupants, whom I despise, and this in no way personally, but purely on principle; for I do not understand, and I never shall understand, how it can be a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of misery and despair. In fact, I love repose and all that reposes. I love thrift and moderation and am in my inmost self, in God's name, unfriendly toward any agitation and haste. More than what is true I need not say. And because of these words the driving of automobiles will certainly not be discontinued, nor its evil air-polluting smell, which nobody for sure particularly loves or esteems. It would be unnatural if one's nostrils were to love and inhale with relish that which for all correct nostrils, at times, depending perhaps on the mood one is in, outrages and evokes revulsion. Enough, and no harm meant. And now walk on. Oh, it is heavenly and good and in simplicity most ancient to walk on foot, provided of course one's shoes or boots are in order.

This passage, simple and lucid as it appears, is characteristic of the difficulties Walser poses to the reader, who is always kept off-balance. The sentiments seem unassailable (particularly to an urbanist like myself), yet the voice is slightly "mad." The narrator is part scamp, part Holy Fool. What is most noticeable is the artless tone, the complete absence of worldly expertise with which most professional belles-lettrists would armor themselves against the charge of naive cliché. Quite the contrary: Walser uses terms such as "beauty," "truth" or "simplicity" without qualification, almost as a challenge to the jaded literary establishment. I think it would be a mistake to assume that his childlike candor is merely another ironic pose. What makes reading Walser so tricky is the knowledge of his subsequent severe mental illness. Thus, the temptation to call various passages of his faux-naif must be tempered by the possibility that he was genuinely naive, naive in the way that emotionally disturbed people often are who hold on for dear life to some banally simple truth during those instants when the fog clears. At the same time, one does not want to release from considerations of literary standards—i.e., treat as a primitive—a writer whose narrative strategies were so complex and sophisticated.

Throughout the story, Walser addresses the reader like a paid companion trying to keep a bored dowager's attentions from wandering. These "digressive" asides to the reader are actually a unifying element in a genre desperate for them (the walk story); and he manages the technique with a comic, exaggerated politeness bordering on cheekiness:

Now, as will soon be learned, I shall on account of this haughty bearing, this domineering attitude, take myself to task. In what manner will also soon be shown. It would not be good if I were to criticize others mercilessly, but set about myself only most tenderly and treat myself as indulgently as possible. A critic who goes about it in this way is no true critic, and writers should not practice any abuse of writing. I hope that this sentence pleases all and sundry, inspires satisfaction, and meets with warm applause.

Here is Walser having his cake and eating it too: the grown man asserting that he has mastered literary manners and the claims of maturity, while the child-self (always obstinately strong in Walser) laughs at the rhetoric of responsibility as just another self-serving mask. As elsewhere in "The Walk," a comic effect is achieved by excessive loquaciousness (reminiscent of Gogol's runaway speakers) and a slightly archaic tone that presents the author as someone out of fashion and the hustle, amiably harmless, marginal. In this sense, Walser's patented brain-fever style is part of a tradition, which looks back to Sterne, Lamb, Dostoyevski's White Nights, and forward to Thomas Bernhard's hyperventilating narrators.

A walk, described on paper, becomes an opportunity to chart the movement between interiority and outward attentiveness, like the rack focus in movies that pulls first the background, then the foreground into sharpness. Many modern poets—Whitman, Apollinaire, Neruda, Frank O'Hara, Charles Reznikoff, Paul Blackburn, among others—have recorded this mental shift in walking-around literature as a keystone in the art of perception. Walser goes them one better, by approaching the walk not just as a perceptual but a spiritual exercise: a meditation in the Eastern religious sense, dissolving ego and promoting surrender and compassion. Of the good walker, Walser writes:

He must bring with him no sort of sentimentally sensitive self-love or quickness to take offense. Un-selfish and unegoistic, he must let his careful eye wander and stroll where it will; only he must be continuously able in the contemplation and observation of things to efface himself, and to put behind him, little consider, and forget like a brave, zealous, and joyfully self-immolating frontline soldier, himself, his private complaints, needs, wants, and sacrifices. If he does not, then he walks only half attentive, with only half his spirit, and that is worth nothing. He must at all times be capable of compassion, of sympathy, and of enthusiasm.

On the one hand, Walser has his narrator think that "perhaps the inward self is the only self which really exists." On the other hand, to fall "away from the surface, down into the fabulous depths" of the inward self, one must first attend faithfully to the external world. This entails pulling oneself out of solipsism into sympathetic awareness of others. Walser shows himself quite willing, exhibiting a kindheartedness toward all living creatures, though there are moments when a skeptical reader may be inclined to wonder whether the person or thing being tenderly apostrophized is indeed concretely seen, or is merely a pretext to release the author's tenderness. There is a sort of syrup of sad-eyed oneness which Walser seems willing to pour over landscapes, cows, houses, children, etc., which—to my mind, at least—does not entirely contradict a solipsistic position, or at least a distortingly aestheticizing one. But this is one of the dangers of the peripatetic genre, which invites a walking eye to bestow reactions willynilly on perfect strangers and any and all phenomena.

Another problem for the recording walker has to do with the inexhaustible detail presented by the external world. Walser faced this daunting infinitude of sense-details headon—both by copious lists (see the page-long sentence that begins "Perhaps this is just the place for a few everyday things and street events, in turn: a splendid piano factory and also other factories and company buildings; an avenue of poplars close beside a black river, men, women, children, electric trams croaking along"), and by defending himself against further inventory-taking with the statement, "If one were to count until everything had been accurately enumerated, one would never reach the end." However, his main defense against cornucopic dizziness was to turn up the volume of receptivity, giving all his observations such a powerful emotional thrust that everything falling under his scrutiny seems germane—if only as the record of borderline hysteria.

One moment he comes across a gloomy giant, straight out of a fairy tale ("His woeful, gruesome air, his tragic, atrocious appearance, infused me with terror and took every good, bright and beautiful prospect, all joy and gaiety away from me"); two paragraphs later he confesses to "an inexpressible feeling for the world .. . a feeling of gratitude." These whiplash changes between rapture and terror do help keep the reader on his toes. It is interesting how frequently words like terror, fear, courage, bravery, misery, dread occur in the text, often about daily events one would not think required much heroism. When the walker is not delighted or ecstatic he is frightened to death—so much so that he seems almost boastful of his capacity for cowardice. The scene of lunching with his patroness, Frau Aebi, with its undertones of cannibalism and anxious erotic avoidance, illustrates Walser's tendency to give descriptions of normal social occasions a grotesque, Grimm-like twist: 'Obviously, it moved her deeply to watch how I helped myself and ate. This curious situation astonished me. . . . Quite secretly I began to be terrified in Frau Aebi's presence." This fear extends even to "the reader, of whom I am honestly afraid." One is tempted to think he is pulling our leg. But again, who is to say what is appropriate grounds for fear in a writer who was "probably the victim of a quietly paranoid 'mixed state'" (Martin Seymour-Smith)? If he seems less frightened in the open street than indoors, he has moments of sidewalk panic as well. It must be said, though, that Walser was not alone in this street-paranoia, which infuses the paintings of Munch and Kirchner, and German silent films of the era.

Walser placed an immense importance on walking: nowhere is this made clearer than in the crucial scene where the narrator appeals to the tax inspector not to raise his rates. After pleading poverty as an impoverished, hardworking author, he is told by the inspector: "But you're always to be seen out for a walk!"

This offhand remark unleashes an eloquent defense of walking which is unique even in peripatetic literature. "'Walk,' was my answer, 'I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world, without perceiving which I could not write the half of one more single word, or produce the tiniest poem in verse or prose. Without walking, I would be dead, and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed.' " Walser goes on for three more pages to spell out the necessity of walking: it is crucial for gathering literary material, for ensuring his mental health, joy and pleasure, for putting him in contact with edifying Nature, for inspiring him to philosophical heights, for teaching him spiritual surrender. Moreover, these walks are a form of study which "touch the fringes of exact science. . . . Although I may cut a most carefree figure, I am highly serious and conscientious, and though I seem to be no more than delicate and dreamy, I am a solid technician!"

From the passion of this peroration, it would seem that the bourgeois inspector's comment has touched a narcissistic sore point: we see how connected the activity of walking is with the amour-propre, the very identity of the writer. (In this respect, Walser resembles another proud, touchy literary loner given to monumental walks, Cesare Pavese.) Walser almost seems to be trying to elevate walking into an independent profession.

All along the author has shown signs of conflating writing and walking in his mind. This is not surprising; countless writers have testified how the rhythms of walking released their composing mind (think of Gertrude Stein working out the elephantine paragraphs of The Making of Americans in her jaunts through Montparnasse.) Walser escapes his writing room, which he calls the "room of phantoms," only to enter another fantasy milieu, with its giants, beautiful milliners, and so on. "All this," he tells himself as he strolls, "I shall certainly soon write down in a piece or sort of fantasy, which I shall entitle 'The Walk'" (my italics). At one point Walser directly compares the two: "But one realizes to be sure to satiety that he loves to walk as well as he loves to write; the latter of course perhaps just a shade less than the former." It was to be his fate, once he entered the mental hospital, to give up the weaker of the two habits.

Walking also stood for freedom. In this story, the walker has no sooner completed his defense to the official and continued on his walk, when he declares: "Raptures of freedom seized me and carried me away." Walking is the activity of the free human being—particularly when one is without destination or time-limit. Released from bureaucracy, Walser's narrator experiences a sudden effusion of "sorrow's golden bliss" and rhapsodizes: "Spirits with enchanting shapes and garments emerged vast and soft, and the dear good country road shone sky-blue, and white, and precious gold. Compassion and enchantment flew like carven angels falling from heaven over the gold-covered, rosey-aureoled little houses of the poor, which the sunlight delicately embraced and framed about. Love and poverty and silvery-golden breath walked and floated hand in hand."

The sugarcoated euphoria of this long passage resembles accounts of people on LSD, mescalin, or some other chemically induced high. Such a passage also suggests how close Walser felt himself personally to be (however much we try to make him out a modernist) to the nineteenth-century German romantics. Indeed, he is soon meditating on Brentano, medieval castles, the poet Lenz, and other lofty romantic subjects.

The tax inspector scene is essentially the climax of the story, and after that the piece begins to lose steam: the descriptions of rosey-aureoled landscapes, architecture, street events and inns, the arguments against cutting down trees, the raptures over poor children, seem redundant, water-treading. Walser is enough aware of this to feel obliged to defend his right to repetitions: "The serious writer does not feel called upon to supply accumulations of material, to act the agile servant of nervous greed; and consequently he is not afraid of a few natural repetitions." Walser seems to have lost his way, to have gone on too long—typical pitfalls in walking-around literature. Then, suddenly, it all comes together.

However amusing or poignant the observations along the way have been, there would still be a thinness to the story if it did not plunge to a deeper level. The end brings a thematic darkening, consonant with the actual arrival of night, and the walker comes to terms with what he has been evading. It is a truism of meditation practice that the mind will first throw up all manner of petty worries and sideshows before settling down to the heart of the matter. In this case, the digressive reverie that went before has helped clear the field for thoughts that the walker had been resisting:

It was now evening and I came to a quiet, pretty path or side road which ran under trees, toward the lake, and here the walk ended. In a forest of alders, at the water's edge, a school for boys and girls had assembled and the parson or teacher was giving instruction in botany and the observation of nature, here in the midst of nature, at nightfall. As I walked slowly onward, two human figures arose in my mind. Perhaps because of a certain general weariness, I thought of a beautiful girl, and of how alone I was in the wide world, and that this could not be quite right. Self-reproach touched me from behind my back and stood before me in my way, and I had to struggle hard. Certain evil memories took control of me. Self-accusations made my heart deeply and suddenly a burden to me. . . . Old, long-past failures occured to me, disloyalty, hatred, scorn, falsity, cunning, anger, and many violent unbeautiful actions. Uncontrolled passion, wild desire, and how I had hurt people sometimes, and done wrong. Like a packed stage of scenes from a drama my past life opened to me, and I was seized with astonishment at my countless frailties, at all unfriendliness and lovelessness which I had caused people to feel.

He thinks again of the girl he knew, who had probably loved him, while his own doubts

had obliged her to travel, and she had gone away. Perhaps I would still have had time to convince her that I meant well with her, that her dear person was important to me, and that I had many beautiful reasons for wanting to make her happy, and thus myself happy also; but I had thought no more of it, and she went away. Why then the flowers? "Did I pick flowers to lay them upon my sorrow?" I asked myself, and the flowers fell out of my hand. I had risen up, to go home; for it was late now, and everything was dark.

In this powerful ending, note the quiet tone of voice, the complete absence of giddy hysteria, or undercutting mock addresses to the reader, or florid language. Note, too, the collapse of that system of defensiveness, so endearing in its way, by which Walser elects to portray himself as one of life's powerless victims, too childish and madcap ever to hurt anyone. Finally he is taking responsibility for his misdeeds. Finally, too, after so many confessional throatclearings, he is giving us something truly personal.

It remains to ask whether this beautiful final passage is the crowning touch of a carefully controlled artwork, or a last-minute trick—pulling the Lost Love out of the hat, as it were, thereby rescuing a composition verging on shapelessness. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. In any event, Walser has managed to solve in his idiosyncratic way some of the problems endemic to walk literature. The very fact of his narrator seeming slightly "cracked" keeps us suspensefully engaged through the otherwise random events of the walk. By presenting a voice of such charm and panicked surprise that we are willing to follow it anywhere, by handling the alternation of inward and outward focus in a rich, self-aware manner, and by structuring the meditation as an emotional arc with a payoff at the end, Walser convinces the reader that the trek has been worthwhile.