Robert Walser

More Snippets IV –
Robert Walser


(Picture: bielersee.ch)

Since we have recently spoken of the Mikrogramme by Swiss poet Robert Walser (see here), I’d like to give two examples of interesting ways to write about art here – invented by Walser and deposited, like geocaching treasures, in his (miniature) writings.

(Picture: wgsebald.de)

Below to the left we see a Mikrogramm by Walser. I have slightly sized the picture up (including my left thumb) to show what is also called the »Bleistiftgebiet«, and it makes sense to think of the Mikrogramme, in sum, as of great plains in pencil writing, of extremely small pencil writing.
Now, as the Walser philologists, especially Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang, have done great work over the years, we find, as we fly high above these plains, a poem, inspired by and dedicated to the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, that, like being hidden in a fox hole somewhere out there in these great plains, actually reads quite charming in its funny sarcasm, and I’d like to quote a few passages here, only to give examples of the poem’s tone. It may be called Schimmernde Inselchen im Meer, dates of the years 1926-1927, and the beginning of the poem goes (source: Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet, Band 4, p. 286f.):

(Picture: srf.ch)

»Schimmernde Inselchen im Meer,
Fregatten kommen von irgendwoher,
auf den Inseln gibt’s anscheinend viel Kultur,
so gegen neunzehn bis zwanzig Uhr
abends mag’s sein,
doch nein,
noch nicht so spät, denn ein Ackerer,
so ein emsiger Batzenzusammenrackerer,
arbeitet noch auf seinem Feld
als landwirtschaftlicher Held […].«

(Picture: DS)

(Picture: unlibrocadadia.es)

One might now go through this surprisingly funny poem by Walser, to note how, only by rhyming rather sarcastically, he stages himself as a sarcastic beholder of the painting (and of the world), but I’d like to leave it here with saying that it would be interesting to compare the strategies of a painter and a poet, who, as only to amuse themselves, were in the habit to deposit small things, details, small poems, in these vast landscapes of theirs, to the risk that many of these small things never would get any attention.
Or did Walser, did Brueghel rather amuse himself by thinking that future philologists and art historians might be inclined to play (miniature) geocaching – and that these details and miniature works of art would, in the end and despite provocative miniature scale, be noticed and finally find their audiences and beholders?
And we might listen in again to hear Walser, sarcastically, recite, for himself, the end of his poem:

»[…] was ich hier schrieb,
verdanke ich einem Brueghelbild, das im Gedächtnis mir blieb
und dem ich die höchste Achtung zahlt’,
weil mir schien, es sei vortrefflich gemalt.
Allem Streben,
über das gemeine Leben
uns emporzuheben,
ist ein Ziel gesetzt im Leben.«

*

The second example is a feuilleton called Das Ankeralbum that was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1926. The narrator who is guest in a house with a mother and four (married) daughters (with the father and the husbands being absent) does not exactly enjoy being a guest, since the atmosphere at table is tense. As a seeming withdrawal (but in truth as an attack, or a piercing into that tense atmosphere, the narrator requests the album with pictures by Swiss painter Albert Anker and performs – this is the very notion – a seeming soliloquy. The clou of this soliloquy which is at the same time an intelligent and multidimensional critique of Anker is of course that it is directed to the table and at the same time can be read for itself. But the two settings, the critique and the table of six, five women and a narrator, do interact. And one may hear a critique of Anker, an indirect referring to the table, or also Robert Walser giving a key to his own writing, if he says for example that Anker got stuck in being all too cautious as a painter (for example in not addressing such tensions at a table with guest that the narrator is addressing right now; but the picture of Anker is differenciated and not simply negative; the Gotthelfleserin by Anker is one picture of the album, which is why we show her here).
The second clou of this also surprisingly funny text is that the family table, as it were, was of course enlarged, since this feuilleton (not a Mikrogramm) appeared in the most important Swiss newspaper in 1926 and was dedicated to one of the quintessential Swiss painters. A modernized version of which one might think of would be set in New York, at a diner party whose atmosphere is tense, so that one of the attendees decides to request a notepad and to perform a provocative critique of the painter that is appreciated the most and in this very room, while the performance can also be understood as being directed to (and maybe broadcasted for) the art world as such.

»Allem Streben,
über das gemeine Leben
uns emporzuheben,
ist ein Ziel gesetzt im Leben.«

(Picture: wgsebald.de)

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