"As Long as Something Is, It Isn't What It Will Have Been": A Reflection on "Who Speaks?" in Martin Walser

On the occasion of the thirty-year anniversary of Qui Parle, its editors invite past contributors to reflect on the question "Who speaks?"—on the "act of speech, the conditions of its practice, and its political and aesthetic ramifications." In responding to this question, one might feel inclined to invoke Michel Foucault's assertion that "all discourses," when viewed from a certain perspective, "develop in the anonymity of a murmur," thereby leaving one to ponder, "'What difference does it make who is speaking?'"⁴⁵ Another way of responding to the invitation is to reflect on the "who" that engages in speaking by contemplating the far-reaching implications of the fact that one never knows exactly which "who" speaks at any moment, whence the speech emanates, or at what time in a particular personal and historical consciousness it emerges. Perhaps no one in contemporary German literature has made this problem more palpable than Martin Walser in his autobiographically inflected coming-of-age novel from 1998, Ein springender Brunnen, translated into English as A Gushing Fountain. The novel asks the question "Who speaks?" in the sphere of both the aesthetic and the political by chronicling a boy's German childhood and the haunting ways in which his small southern town on Lake Constance, for all its apparent quotidian mundanity, slowly but steadily sinks into a new and rather different kind of normalcy, German National Socialism. What aesthetic and epistemological framework could serve as the basis for engaging the question "Who speaks?" in and of this time? Who speaks when one speaks—even when one is not speaking specifically of the past or of a specific past—and who or what will have spoken? Who are we now—at this very moment of speaking, but also in any of the nows in which we speak?

Casting these questions into sharp relief, Walser's novel commences with the following remarkable sentences, which will have left none of the many sentences that follow it untouched:

Solange etwas ist, ist es nicht das, was es gewesen sein wird. Wenn etwas vorbei ist, ist man nicht mehr der, dem es passierte. Allerdings ist man dem näher als anderen. Obwohl es die Vergangenheit, als sie Gegenwart war, nicht gegeben hat, drängt sie sich jetzt auf, als habe es sie so gegeben, wie sie sich jetzt aufdrängt. Aber solange etwas ist, ist es nicht das, was es gewesen sein wird. Wenn etwas vorbei ist, ist man nicht mehr der, dem es passierte. Als das, von dem wir jetzt sagen, daß es gewesen sei, haben wir nicht gewußt, daß es ist. Jetzt sagen wir, daß es so und so gewesen sei, obwohl wir damals, als es war, nichts von dem wußten, was wir jetzt sagen.

[As long as something is, it isn't what it will have been. When something is past, you are no longer the person it happened to, but you're closer to him than to others. Although the past did not exist when it was present, it now obtrudes as if it had been as it now presents itself. But as long as something is, it isn't what it will have been. When something is past, you are no longer the person it happened to. When things were that we now say used to be, we didn't know they were. Now we say it used to be thus and so, although back when it was, we knew nothing about what we say now.]⁴⁶

What position does the literary work of art assume in relation to the mnemonic labor of a speaking self as it evokes and transforms a past that suffuses its very speech? The narrative unfolds in a certain ruptured temporality, a time that is "out of joint" as Hamlet might say, because its historical inscription retroactively imputes a consciousness to the time that it narrates, when, in fact, no such consciousness could have existed at the time in which the narration takes place, and no attendant interpretation can be...