The Double Fiction in Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten1

The Swiss author Robert Walser earned his place in the modernist canon posthumously. Although he was praised during his lifetime by several noted writers-among them Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, and Walter Benjamin-he did not achieve fame until the 1960s, when the texts he wrote in an astonishingly tiny script began to be published, first in facsimile form and then in deciphered versions.2 The micrograms, as these texts are known, not only generated renewed interest in Walser, but also legitimized his work after the fact. They gave the heroes of his fiction a written or graphic form that seemed more appropriate to them than the printed letter. The protagonists of Walser's fiction are invariably drifters and ne'er-dowells who never cease to proclaim their insignificance, indeed who seem to relish their marginal status. At the same time, they exert a magnetic force over others, who are drawn to them precisely because in them they see the innocence of their youth and a freedom they long ago surrendered. "Dir gegenuber erlaubt man sich alles" (GT 175) exclaims a character in Die Geschwister Tanner in a remark that is typical of the response Walser's heroes elicit from strangers. The character continues, "Dein Betragen erlost anderer Betragen von jeder Art Unfreiheit" (GT 175), in a comment that suggests the curious liberating power of Walser's impoverished protagonists. His heroes are free by virtue of their detachment from institutions of any kind. They have no familial, religious, or social obligations but also, and more disturbingly, no fraternal bonds. The protagonists in Walser's stories are incapable of forming attachments or returning the affection directed at them since they have no defining traits save that they mirror the characters they meet. They pass through the world with nothing but a mirror in their hands which conceals them, even when they are open, by turning their face into a mask. As this brief sketch indicates, indecipherability was always an issue of Walser's work. The micrograms, however, gave it another dimension that resonated with literary critics throughout the 1980s and '90s. The texts drew attention to the materiality of writing. More specifically, they drew attention to Walser's miniscule script, which was interpreted as the basis for his indecipherable or unreadable protagonists.3 Few critics at the time asked if this was true for all of Walser's works, most of which were written before he arrived at what he called the "Bleistiftmethode" in a now famous letter to Max Rychner.4 Whether or not he consistently wrote in tiny letters cannot be verified here.5 Certainly, though, the assumption that he used the "Bleistiftmethode" throughout his life led to his rehabilitation as a modernist. From that point on, Walser was not merely a fanciful author, obsessed with trivial objects and marginal figures, but a writer who experimented with form, indeed who made form into the substance of his work. Walser gained his place in the 20th-century canon through a reversal of terms whereby the indecipherability of his protagonists came to be viewed as nothing but a reflection of the indecipherability of his script. The paradox of this approach is that it denies what makes it possible in the first place, namely the narratives in which impenetrability is explored as a character trait. Only because Walser's protagonists are indecipherable at a thematic level, can his manuscripts be appreciated in turn for their indecipherability at a graphic level, i.e., at the level of their script. Two factors of varying importance have led to this confusion. The first concerns the breadth of Walser's work, which includes three completed novels, the unfinished draft of a fourth, several short stories, lyric poems, novellas, dramas, and lastly numerous one-page sketches written for the feuilletons. Producing an overview of such a vast and heterogeneous oeuvre is a difficult task at best, especially when the only consistent feature seems to be the author's handwriting. …