A duty to whimsy
A couple of excellent Walser-related items this week, both, as it happens, from friends of mine.
First, Ron Hogan’s Beatrice blog offers a brief essay by Walser translator Susan Bernofsky:
I’ve been publishing translations for over twenty years now, and still love trying to hold two languages in my head at once. I’ve also been very fortunate in the books I’ve been invited to translate, particularly in the case the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser. I’m currently at work on my sixth volume of his prose. This extraordinary writer was largely forgotten for many years, though there was a brief flutter of interest in the early 1980s when Susan Sontag championed his work, writing a foreword for the gorgeous collection Selected Stories of Robert Walser (translated by Christopher Middleton and others). New Directions has recently published Walser’s two early novels The Tanners and The Assistant in my translation, and in Spring 2010 will be bringing out a volume of his stories entitled Microscripts in conjunction with Christine Burgin Gallery. These late works by Walser include some of his most mysterious and challenging short prose—I think of these texts as the equivalent of Beethoven’s late string quartets. In his late work, Walser, the master storyteller, plays with the conventions of storytelling, often chopping up his narratives into odd cubist collages that tend to be hilariously funny as well as moving.
“Sixth volume of his prose”? Let’s count: Masquerade, The Robber, The Assistant, The Tanners, Microscripts. What’s the sixth? Read on:
This winter I’ll be translating a new book of Walser’s early stories for New York Review of Books Classics—stories written in (and largely about) Berlin, which was already one of the most interesting metropolises in Europe in the first decade of the 20th century when Walser lived there.
Nice! The Berlin years produced some of my favorite Walser stories, including “Kleist in Thun,” “Green,” “The Walk,” “Trousers,” and many others. It will be fantastic to see more. So, with Microscripts, we have two wonderful books to look forward to over the next year or so. Cheers to Ron for sharing the news.
The second piece this week was a long, thoughtful, positive review of The Tanners, appearing in The Quarterly Conversation and written by the TQC’s editor, Scott Esposito. (You may recall that I reviewed The Assistant in TQC back in 2007.)
It is the mark of a novel’s necessity when it hangs so strongly together, feels so absolutely essential in every last, smallest chunk, despite the fact that it offers the reader very little of what is generally construed as novelistic. In Search of Lost Time is perhaps the best example of this: it is a novel that is seven times as long as any novel should be, a heavily digressive work packed with belabored extended metaphors and absent all but the slowest plot momentum. Nonetheless, this bulky, misshapen beast continually takes flight before our unbelieving eyes, we have scarcely sat down with Proust than we have grown immersed, not so much for the ever-widening world or the vivid characters as for the singular logic of the prose.
So it is with Robert Walser’s first novel, The Tanners.
Scott’s review prompted many thoughts for me. When he notes the “long-winded but nonetheless somehow elegant speechifying that all of Walser’s characters adopt as the preferred mode of discourse,” I was reminded of the vague feeling I had that all the characters in The Tanners were speaking in Simon’s voice. I have nowhere to go with that; I just think it’s interesting.
Also, like Terry Pitts’s review, Scott’s reminds me that an obvious point of reference for The Tanners is the Bildungsroman, the story of a young person’s progress to maturity. Except that Simon in The Tanners doesn’t really mature. (Interestingly, the only author Simon is seen reading in the novel is Stendahl, also a master of the coming-of-age story.)
In fact, thinking about this a bit, The Tanners actually resembles a specific variety of the Bildungsroman known as the Künstlerroman, or artist’s story. Yet, although Simon is shown dabbling at an essay, he’s not (correct me if I’m wrong) specifically portrayed as an artist. It’s a odd thing for Walser to omit, given how close the events of the novel seem to follow Walser’s own life. For example, Walser abruptly quit jobs just as Simon does, but his reasons were less mysterious — but he did so, he explains, because he wanted time to write.
But omitting it does lend the novel some of its puzzling force. It makes a “duty to whimsy,” in Scott’s phrase, from what would otherwise be a duty to art.
Sam :: Dec.06.2009 :: Review, The Tanners :: No Comments »
