A joy to awaken
From the Winter 2008 Issue of the Sewanee Review, Mark Harman, editor of the wonderful 1985 volume Robert Walser Rediscovered, reviews Speaking to the Rose: Writings 1912-1932:
Walser was a one-man avant garde, and in the late twenties the increasing rejection of his work forced him to articulate the aesthetics underpinning his high jinks. In a revealing piece entitled “My Endeavors” (1928-29), he describes his short pieces as experiments, which, though perhaps “a bit comical to deadly earnest people,” he conducts in the hopes of producing in the language an “unknown livingness, the arousal of which is a joy.” In creating this verbal music he relies on intuitive connections comparable to those that William James, who of course coined the term stream of consciousness, describes in “The World of Pure Experience”: “experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges.” Though Walser’s aesthetic is inimitably homespun, it does bring to mind that of English-language practitioners of stream of consciousness, writers such as Virginia Woolf or even Joyce.
I enjoyed seeing this 2005 volume of Walser prose, selected and translated by Christopher Middleton, get some of the attention it deserves. It certainly is mandatory reading for Walser admirers, not least for the wonderful introduction, microscript images, bibliography, footnotes, and other elements that mark this book a labor of great love and respect.
I’ve had this book for three years and intentionally never read it front to back, mostly for the delight of extending my “discovery” of individual items in this trove of previously untranslated works. In the paragraph above, Harman alerted me to “My Endeavors,” which had previously escaped my notice, and particularly to a line that I first saw in Robert Calasso’s essay collection The Forty Nine Steps, from the which the “unknown livingness” phrase is drawn. Here’s the complete sentence from Middleton’s translation:
If I sometimes wrote at a venture, on impulse, it looked a bit comical to deadly earnest people; but I was experimenting with language, hoping that it contains an unknown livingness, the arousal of which is a joy.
I’ve misplaced those pages from Calasso, but I recall that the translation there was something like this:
… I was experimenting with language in the hopes it contained a hidden liveliness which it would be a joy to awaken.
Anyhow, this struck me as the best brief account of Walser’s aesthetic, and the best way too to describe what it’s like to read him.
(Thanks to JT for the tip on this article and to Dave for text, which isn’t available online.)
Sam :: Apr.24.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 4 Comments »
