Speaking To The Rose

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Sovereign Insignificance: Review
of Speaking to the Rose: Writings,
1912-1932 by Robert Walser
Tom Whalen

For the feuilletonist everything is an occasion for a prose piece: a walk in the Berlin
Tiergarten, a new hair or dress style, ladies’ shoes, an old fountain, a Parisian newspaper,
an hour of the day. Historical figures might also attract him—Bismarck or Jesus or “Ramses
II” or“The Cave Man”—or ones from myth like “Hercules” (“The boy gave early proofs of
remarkable strength. Probably he preferred sport and that sort of thing. We know nothing
of his schooling”) or “Odysseus” (“He spent years in the vicinity of a lady who had the
wicked habit of transforming men with apparently good reputations and solid ways of life
into what is best not closely described”), or thelives and works of other artists—”Brentano
I,” “Brentano III,” “Something about Goethe,” “A Note on Van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne” (“In the
picture, many questions find their finest, most subtle, most delicate significance—which
is that they cannot be answered”). However, it is the rare feuilletonists, no matter how
fine a quick-sketch artist, who can bestow permanence to reality’s ephemera, which isone
reason we tend to ignore miniaturists in prose—to our great loss, in the case of a genius
like Robert Walser. In Speaking to the Rose:Writings, 1912 - 1932, from which the above
titles come, Christopher Middleton has selected and translated fifty such sketches, stories,
rambles, essays, improvisations—writings, yes, that’s the right word—by Walser.
Born in Biel, Switzerland in 878,Walser left school at age fourteen to apprentice
as a bank clerk. Walser’s primary cities of residence during his active writing career
(898 - 933) were Zurich, Berlin, Biel, and Bern, though he also worked for a time in
Basel, Stuttgart, Thun, Wädenswil, and as an assistant butler in Castle Dambrau in Upper
Silesia. The pattern of his life was one of short-term jobs, mostly of a clericalnature, and
short-term stays in furnished rooms—between 896 and 905, he changed residences
seventeen times. Before the end of the century, his poems and short prose began to appear
in literary journals and in the feuilleton sections of newspapers, and in 904 his first
book, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (Fritz Kocher’s Essays), was published. More than a dozen
others followed, including the novelsGeschwister Tanner (The Tanner Siblings, 907), Der
Gehülfe (The Assistant, 908), and one of the twentieth century’s master-novels Jakob von
Gunten (909), whose eponymous narrator is a pupil of the Benjamenta Institute, a school
for butlers (Walser himself attended one in Berlin) where “the educators and teachers are
asleep, or they are dead, or seemingly dead, or they are fossilized, no matter,in any case we
get nothing from them.”
 A shorter version of this article appeared in Bookforum (Feb/Mar 2006) under the title “Written
on a Whim.”
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Admired by and an influence upon Kafka, but generally ignored when first published,
Jakob von Gunten, though subtitled “A Diary,” is more a journal or dream journal of a life in
a dream school where the only class is “How should a boybehave?” and whose staff consists
only of the principal, Herr Benjamenta (“a giant”), and his sister, the mysterious, sad,
beautiful Lisa Benjamenta. Even Jakob, in keeping with the world both outside and within
him, has “contrived to become a mystery to myself.” The novel is bathed in unreality and
shimmers with contradictions. Jakob is a dreamy, benevolent rascal, a sort of King Midas
whoturns everything he touches into riddles. It is his willingness to embrace the ordinary
and the contradictory that allows him to thrive in the stultifying, rule-ridden atmosphere
of the Institute. “Everything that’s forbidden lives a hundred times over,” he writes; “thus,
if something is supposed to be dead, its life is all the livelier. As in small things, so in big
ones. Nicely put, in...