Not rebellion but self-imposed exile
Jaime’s comment to this post below caused me to take Guy Davenport’s Da Vinci’s Bicycle off my shelf and reread his lovely Walser-inspired story, “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg.” When I opened it up I discovered, tucked into the book, an article from the front page of the July 21, 1961, issue of the TLS. I was three years old in 1961, but somehow despite my rudimentary reading skills this paragraph leapt out at me:
Improvisation, in Walser’s and Kafka’s sense, must be distinguished from the deliberate experiments of a self-conscious avant garde. What is particularly striking about many of the most genuine innovators of that period, including Joyce also, is that their dedication to a highly personal art involved not only a revolt against accepted canons but the complete rejection of literature as an institution; not rebellion but self-imposed exile. Each in his way, these highly skilled writers aspired to the status of amateurs.
I’m just kidding. I didn’t read this when I was three. I got it off the microfiche at the library a few years ago. But how insightful this anonymous writer is. It’s a view of Walser to which we’re only slowly making our way back, almost half a century later …
February 5th, 2008 21:49
[...] In my search, I was also able to locate a more complete text (though not yet the full-text; see “ineptly” above) of the July 1961 TLS cover essay on Walser which I’ve quoted previously. Turns out the author of the essay was poet and translator Michael Hamburger, who passed away just last year. I still think this is one of the best essays on Walser ever written. [...]