Greatness Amidst an Atmosphere of Disintegration: On Robert Walser’s "Little Snow Landscape"

Robert Walser | Little Snow Landscape | New York Review Books | March 2021 | 188 Pages | Translated by Tom Whalen

Writers are defined in retrospect. The perils of posthumous fame, the late ascent or early decline, the inevitable madness or close call with fate can only be seen as such after the fact. These terms describe the shape of a life or a career. Franz Kafka’s tragic life of broken off engagements and his tortuous job he cannot escape seem like destiny, but Kafka died relatively young from illness. And there is no Kafka without the fateful decision of Max Brod to not burn his writings! A more contemporary example: Anna Burns, 2018 recipient of the Man Booker prize, was not just launched into fame with the award, but solvency. Nearing 60, Burns was struggling to make ends meet in the years leading up to 2018. Now she is a widely known and respected author, but it is only this late fame that allows us to tell such a story. A life is defined in retrospect.

When it comes to the works of Swiss writer Robert Walser, the question of life hangs over his works and our attempts to grapple with them. There are two things to reconcile here.  The first is Walser’s own comments that his prose pieces – his short stories and vignettes – form “a long, plotless, realistic story,” a “cut up or disjoined book of the self [Ich-Buch].” The second is that Walser went mad in 1929. Walser was, in fact, always a little mad. It is what adds a sense of chaotic delight to his stories. More accurately then, he was committed to the Waldau sanitarium near Bern in 1929. In 1933 Walser, after being transferred to another sanitarium near Herisau, stopped writing altogether. He famously quipped to a visitor: “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad.”  Yet this is not the end of Walser’s life, merely his writing career. Walser would live until 1956, when on Christmas Day, he would die of heart attack while walking in the woods around the sanitarium.

Little Snow Landscapes is the first collection of Walser’s stories in English that includes his very final stories or, as he called them prose pieces. The first story is from 1905 and the very last is Walser’s last, from 1933. This fact means Little Snow Landscapes forces us to re-examine what Walser’s life means, what it is his Ich-Buch tells us, and what his mysterious madness and his long silence might signify.

It is not a case of untangling a single causal determination of Walser’s condition. Much of what has been said about his madness is true: family disaster, a history of mental illness, a lack of literary success all are perfectly reasonable explanations. Yet the idea that Walser went mad in some normal way cannot be entirely accurate. Not only was Walser always a little mad, but he remained remarkably lucid during his time in the sanitarium. Walser’s quip that he went to Herisau to be mad and not to write is perhaps ironic.

W.G Sebald, in his celebrated essay on Walser, describes him as a “clairvoyant of the small.” The moniker is apt – and indeed is the title of forthcoming biography of Walser by Susan Bernofsky – but not given sufficient treatment by Sebald. Sebald wants to suggest the Walser, or Walser’s novels are, cut off from his historical context: “External events, such as the outbreak of the First World War, appear to affect him hardly at all.”

Sebald, however, will later cite the rise of Nazism in Europe as something Walser had given considerable thought to. “There can be no doubt that had Walser persevered for a few more years he would, by the spring of 1933 at the latest, have found the last possible opportunities for publication in the German Reich closed off to him. To that extent, he was quite correct in the remarks he made to Carl Seelig that his world had been destroyed by the Nazis.” Sebald wants Walser to be both the great recorder of 20th century modernity, a man whose eyes miss no details, physical or spiritual, but also a man somehow inattentive to the defining events of the 20th Century. For Sebald, Walser is a clairvoyant, but he is a blind clairvoyant, the one whose true vision comes precisely from a lack of vision.

There is another form of this paradox at work in Walser. Susan Sontag famously called Walser a “wonderful, heartbreaking writer.” Wonderful here should be read literally, Walser is full of wonder. And it is wonder, play and delight that characterize his early works. Consider the opening story of Little Snow Landscape, ‘To My Home’, which I quote in full below:

The sun shines through the little hole into the little room where I am sitting and dreaming, the bells of my homeland chime. It is Sunday and on Sundays it is morning and in the morning the wind is blowing and in the wind all my cares fly away like shy birds. I feel too much the harmonious nearness of home to be able to brood over any sorrow. In the past I wept. I was so far away from my native country; so many mountains, lakes, forests, rivers, fields and ravines lay between me and her, the beloved, the admitted, the adored. This morning she embraces me and I lose myself in her voluptuous caress. No woman has such soft, such imperious arms; no woman, not even the most beautiful, such tender lips; no women, not even the most tender, kisses with such infinite ardor as my native land kisses me. Ring, bells; play, wind; roar, forests; glow, colors – and it’s all embodied in the single sweet kiss of my homeland that in this moment captivates my language, in the sweet, infinitely delicious kiss of home.

There is a touch of melancholia here certainly. Yet the narrator also declares to he is unable to brood over any sorrow. There is an immense reflective and powerful sense of beauty, a sense of wonder. Walser does not always write like this, and more and more, as the years progress, as modernity disintegrates, wonder shifts to heartbreak and melancholia dominates. After World War I we can see this shift. ‘Frau Wilke’ from 1915 is a much sadder story, and the 1927 ‘A Village Tale’ (both appear in Selected Stories) opens like so:

I sit down somewhat reluctantly at my desk to play my piano, that is to say, to begin to discourse on the potato famine which long ago struck a village on a hill that stood about two hundred meters high. Painfully I wrest from my wits a tale that tells of nothing of more account than a country girl. The longer she labored, the less she was able to do for herself.

There is a shift in Walser’s stories, in their subject matter, in their tone as Europe hurtles towards catastrophe. Is Walser then a prophet of the horrors of Nazism? This is the kind of claim sometimes made of Kafka, who deeply admired Walser. As Theodor Adorno says in his Notes on Kafka: “In The Castle the officials wear a special uniform, as the SS did – one which any pariah can make himself if need be. In fascism, too, the elites are self-appointed. Arrest is assault, judgment violence.” In this case Kafka really would be, as Robert Musil claimed “a peculiar case of the Walser type”. It is, however, implausible to understand either as prophets, regardless of parallels. What Walser tracks just as much as Kafka is what Hannah Arendt calls the ‘atmosphere of disintegration’ that dominated Europe between the two world wars. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she writes:

It is almost impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. The days before and the days after the first world war are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after the explosion. Yet this figure of speech is as inaccurate as are all others, because the quiet of sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass. The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. The first world war exploded European comity of nations beyond repair, something which no other war had ever done. Inflation destroyed the whole class of small property owners beyond hope for recovery or new formation, something which no other monetary crisis had ever done so radically before. Unemployment, when it came, reached fabulous proportions, was no longer restricted to the working class but seized with insignificant exceptions whole nations. Civil wars which ushered in and spread over the twenty years of uneasy peace were not only bloodier and more cruel than all their predecessors; they were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere…Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented. Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some irredeemably stupid fatality.

It is this that Walser charts. Walser’s status as a clairvoyant of the small is only significant because in the small all the horrors of the large exist. Rather than an inward turn to solipsism, a move away from the social and political to the personal, Walser tracks the changing mood of the times, and how it is refracted in everyday life. The jubilation of his early writings gives way to the grief of his later works. This too is an atmosphere. Melancholia still inflects the earliest stories, and powerfully, joy still creeps into to those last tales.

This perhaps leaves unanswered the question of Walser’s silence. All Little Snow Landscape offers us – apart from a collection of lean and sharp stories – is the confirmation of an inference any initiate could have made. And there is another problem. The final story in the collection, ‘Childhood’, the last story Walser wrote, is free of any melancholia. Nostalgic and sympathetic, it ends in reaffirmation of the wonderful world that Walser spent his writing career so carefully observing and recording. The key to these questions is provided by a story from 1915 including in this collection, ‘Hölderlin’.

Hölderlin is required, by force of circumstance, to give up his freedom and seek work. He lands a job as a private tutor, but the loss of his freedom drives him insane. In his torments, a wish emerges: “Morbidly he longed to return to his childhood, to be born anew and become a boy again; he wished he were dying. He wrote “When I was a boy”… One knows the glorious song.” The return to childhood as symptom of madness. And of course the final story Walser wrote is called ‘Childhood.’ Yet Walser, despite his institutionalization, had his wits about him. The records of his conversations with Carl Seelig show a man who is, at least not in any ordinary sense of the term, insane.

In ‘Hölderlin’ Wasler recreates a conversation between the titular protagonist and the ‘mistress of the house.’ In it another key to understanding Walser emerges:

‘Why don’t you let go of your passion and rise above yourself? How beautiful, warm, and great you could be if you made a determined effort to do that. But your audacious fancies are killing you, and the dream you make of life robs you of life. Listen couldn’t the renunciation of greatness not also be greatness?’…Thus she spoke to him. Then Hölderlin went forth from the house, continued to wander about in the world for a while, and thereafter sank into incurable madness.

In 1933 Walser made a decision. When a life has passed, a moment occurred, it appears in retrospect to us like fate, it appears entwined with the force of destiny. In doing so it obscures the relationship between choice and decision. Every decision becomes a choice after the fact. Walser decided to put down his pen, to rescind from greatness. Such a decision is ordinary, quotidian. That does not mean it is not imbued with significance. There is a tendency to assume greatness lies outside the realm of the ordinary. And of Walser, the surveyor of the everyday, Elias Canetti once said that nothing could be more alien to him than greatness. Yet such a division between greatness and the ordinary cannot hold. For the everyday is imbued with the ripples of the world historical, with the consequences of the action of the great and mighty and we must tangle with this significance in our own lives. This uneasy division leads to the question the mistress of the house asks Hölderlin. Does it not take a certain greatness to reject greatness?

 In the face of world historical circumstances, in the face of a fate that would crush and obscure the lives of millions, Walser made a decision to no longer write. This decision, to become silent, was his release from madness, as the calm of his final story demonstrates. And it demonstrates to us that in the ordinary, in the atmosphere of disintegration that defines world history, one can decide on greatness, if only one, like a clairvoyant staring into crystal ball, has the power to perceive such a decision. The ordinary is exceptional, all life is immense and all life struggles in and against the tide of history. These are truisms that are easily forgotten, that quickly become devoid of force and meaning. But Walser always knew this and never forgot it. Walser was always mad and the decision, of course, is always the moment of madness. Such moments pass, however, and it is only afterward, in retrospect that we or those around us – watching us or god forbid writing about us – will determine if we decided on greatness or chose contrivance.