I remember the first time I saw the well-known photograph of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow, flat on his back, with two onlookers in the distance behind him. An artist friend had sent me a photocopy - it was before the internet made such things instantly available - and I was taken aback by its impact and rawness. Then, on reflection, I began to think that it wasn’t such a bad way to move into the next world: suddenly, unexpectedly, on a Christmas Day walk. It was a kind of radical disappearance.
I regularly return to Robert Walser’s short stories. They employ all manner of ruses to ensure that nothing ever comes to a firm conclusion, and as a consequence there is something ambivalent and open-ended about them, which is part of their appeal. I also enjoy Walser’s quietly ironic Romanticism, often expressed in his descriptions of nature, as well as his obsession with walks, which seemed to be not only an opportunity to observe the world but a form of surrender and effacement, a way of reducing self-consciousness, just as his apparently childlike wonder at the glory of life may have been an escape from the torment of self-awareness. Walser’s writing is oddly humble, his humour, perhaps driven by despair, serving to undercut its earnestness. The characters in his stories are often out of step with society’s conventional values and pace, yet he can be sharp in his observations about those he considers pompous and foolish.
Walser had few possessions and was generally distant from other people; once described as ‘the most unattached of solitary poets’, he appears to have suffered from anxiety. After his early years he led a precarious existence ‘with emptiness blowing through every part of it’, as someone else once remarked. A tendency towards self-erasure is reflected in his so-called ‘microscripts’, the multitude of texts realised in tiny and nearly unintelligible handwriting, but as W.G. Sebald observed, Walser’s writing also seem to dissolve as one reads it, just as every footstep on a walk is immediately forgotten and replaced by the next. His ideal, it has been said, was to overcome the forces of gravity.
Walser’s gentle writing has attracted much commentary, some of it surprisingly forceful. Walter Benjamin, for instance, once commented that his characters ‘come from insanity and nowhere else’ and that they ‘have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality’. Susan Sontag proposed that Walser’s writing assumes depression and terror in order to accept and lighten them, just as he ironizes pretence and insincerity but leaves us with something sincere and unpretentious. In recent years he has become widely read and admired, and it is worth reflecting on why this should be so. It may be partly because Walser’s liminal world, somewhere between the real and the fictitious, the laughable and the solemn, is especially resonant in postmodern times, but his appeal is surely more timeless than that. Something analogous might be found in the poignant 18th century French painting by Watteau, known as ‘Gilles’. The pierrot stands alone, apart from his companions, and although uneasy he has no self-pity. On the contrary, he has inner stillness.
I recently thought of Robert Walser while reading 5th century Chinese ‘rivers and mountains poetry’, which is remarkable for its profound sense of emptiness and silence. The practice of living as a recluse in the hills was the physical equivalent of the ‘empty’ awareness so prized by Taoism, as David Hinton explains in his introduction to Mountain Homes: the Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. In our culture, when we look out at the world, we assume that that we do so from the ‘I’, a centre within ourselves; in Taoism, however, the ‘I’ exists only a an opening of consciousness. There is a story about Wu Tao-Tzu (or Wu Daozi) an 8th century painter of the Tang Dynasty, that nicely illustrates the point. One day, it is said, he stood looking at a mural he had just completed. Suddenly he clapped his hands and the temple gates in the picture opened, whereupon he walked into the painting, disappeared, and the gates closed behind him. He was never seen again. In The Myth of Wu Tao-Tzu the Swedish writer Sven Lindquist uses the tale to illustrate his conviction that art should not be a form of escapism in which we can lose ourselves and disappear. He goes on to explain that when he first encountered poverty and suffering on his travels in China and India he fell into a state of despair, wondering if beauty and harmony, in which he hitherto had such faith, had any purpose at all. He decided, perhaps a little reluctantly, that they didn’t, and most of the book describes how his interests and sensibility became more politically engaged. There is a certain irony in the fact that I recall the early pages, in which he writes about the myth, as by far the most enjoyable and enlightening in the book.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/robert-walsers-disappearing-acts
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/pierrot-formerly-known-gilles
https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/hinton.html
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-art-of-escape-on-sven-lindqvists-the-myth-of-wu-tao-tzu/