Shame, On the Language of Robert Walser

Walsern ist das Wie der Arbeit so wenig Nebensache, daß ihm alles, was er zu sagen hat, gegen die Bedeutung des Schreibens völlig zurücktritt. Man möchte sagen, daß es beim Schreiben draufgeht. Das will erklärt sein. Und dabei stößt man auf etwas sehr Schweizerisches an diesem Dichter: die Scham. Von Arnold Böcklin, seinem Sohn Carlo und Gottfried Keller erzählt man diese Geschichte: Sie saßen eines Tages wie des öftern im Wirtshaus. Ihr Stammtisch war durch die wortkarge, verschlossene Art seiner Zechgenossen seit langem berühmt. Auch diesmal saß die Gesellschaft schweigend beisamen. Da bemerkte, nach Ablauf einer langen Zeit, der junge Böcklin: "Heiß ist's," und nachdem eine Viertelstunde vergangen war, der ältere: "Und windstill." Keller seinerseits wartete eine Weile; dann erhob er sich mit den Worten: "Unter Schwätzern will ich nicht trinken."¹

As clearly humorous as it is, it is not immediately evident that there is anything necessarily shameful to be found in Benjamin's anecdote, which has become the unavoidable point of departure for any consideration of Walser's language. If there is shame here, however, it would appear to be that of someone breaking with custom and disturbing the stillness of the air by daring to utter a word. Keller puts his friends back in their place, returning them to silence, but he does so, of course, only to repeat their transgression and thus judge himself even as he pronounces judgment upon them. For he has to break the silence in order to call for it. In fact, according to the logic of this anecdote, not to mention simple arithmetic, Keller himself is the worst offender, the biggest Schwätzer. It is no accident that his sentence is twice as long as those of his friends, for he does not simply talk, but talks about simply talking. The shame Benjamin writes of here, then, is not simply that of idle talk in any conventional sense. Talk becomes Schwätzen, SchweizerSchwätzer, language shameful, not only in its idleness, but even more in its inability to talk about that idleness without repeating and regenerating it.²

To read this language, then, can no longer be understood in the conventional terms of sifting through what a text has to say. On the contrary, reading relinquishes any such hermeneutic claims and registers their very impossibility. For what characterizes Walser's language as Benjamin understands it is thus the withdrawal of what he has to say. It is not simply the case that content ("everything he has to say") is usurped by the formalism of a refined style ("the how of the work"), as those critics suggest who stress the nothingness of Walser's content and thus understand at once nothing and everything about him.³ And though there is, to be sure, a certain duplicity in this writing, it is not that of bad faith or double talk. For if we at least provisionally take this sentence at its word as saying what it means, then it resists any such conception of language insofar as it asserts that in Walser what language says is not what it means. This meaning is only reinforced by the fact that Benjamin's sentence is little more than a paraphrase of Walser:

Ich schreibe über alles gleich gern. Mich reizt nicht das Suchen eines bestimmten Stoffes, sondern das Aussuchen feiner, schöner Worte. Ich kann aus einer Idee zehn, ja hundert Ideen bilden, aber mir fällt keine Grundidee ein. Was weiß ich, ich schreibe, weil ich es hübsche finde, so die Zeilen mit zierlichen Buchstaben auszufüllen. Das "Was" ist mir vollständig gleichgültig.⁴

Clearly, then, what Walser writes is of little consequence, except of course when he writes that what he writes is of little consequence. In this instance, the "what" that says that what is said is inconsequential must be taken at...