night rpm

Robert Walser & Maira Kalman… and Ekphrasis

On top of my to-do list this fall is the Robert Walser/Maira Kalman Exhibition at the Christine Burgin Gallery. Accompanying Walser’s actual microscript “texts” (which were recently translated by Susan Bernofsky - excellent, as always - as Microscripts and published by New Directions) will be Maira Kalman’s paintings depicting Walser’s life. I can’t imagine anyone other than Maira Kalman for such an exhibition; not only is she a well-documented admirer of Walser, her paintings and drawings often seem inseparable complements to the words they accompany (more on Kalman in a future post).

Walser had many admirers, from Kafka to Walter Benjamin in the past, to Coetzee and Sebald in these times (for a good intro to Walser: Coetzee’s NYRB piece). Microscripts consists of prose pieces which were written in a medieval German script called Kurrent. It seems that when Walser reached a creative impasse after his brief initial success as a writer, he resorted to writing in this microscript - a system of tiny flicks and dashes - in pencil. Apparently, on twenty-four sheets of paper no bigger than common napkins, Walser could compose an entire novel. Below is a collage-image of some of the pages from Walser’s microscripts:

I, like some other people, thought Walser had written in a secret code and that no one could decipher what he’d written in microscript. Obviously, that was just a myth; they just needed patient transcribers and translators, and Susan Bernofsky’s translation is remarkably agile and witty, catching Walser’s formalistic turns of phrase sliding into slang-y felicities.

What Microscripts confirms for me: it is a mistake to single-mindedly dwell on the “madness” of Walser’s art because in doing so, it becomes almost too easy to overlook the methodical and rigorous aspect of his craft. A strong theme runs through seemingly disparate pieces in Microscripts, which is Walser’s obsession with the mechanical aspects of the world - objects, physics, technologies - and in turn, with the mechanical process of the words making or unmaking the world. Consider this seemingly hasty ending to the prose piece, “Usually I put on a prose piece jacket” -

And then this little mat. This reality. This treasure trove of in-fact-having-occurred-nesses. This car drove off, and he and she were sitting in the back. How do you like my “trove” and “drove”? Make a note of these words! They’re not my invention. How could such delicate expressions have originated with me? I just snapped them up and am now putting them to use. Don’t you think my “trove” is ben trovato? Please do be so good as to think so. Accept my heartfelt greetings and do not forget the pride of that silly little dog. He was adorable.

Forget about the incidental details for a moment, i.e. pride of the dog, etc. What’s remarkable to me about the passage is Walser’s deliberate manipulation of the reader’s gaze and mind - from the concrete object (“little mat”) to the semantic artifice (“drove” and “trove” etc.), then back to the self-contained world of the fiction.

As a matter of fact, the prose piece begins in the same way; in the opening sentence, Walser says he’s putting on a prose piece jacket to write something (what an odd phrase) - pointing us to the banal, mechanical process of creating something with words - then before the sentence ends, he has our minds somehow trained on the image of “beer coasters as round as plates.” Just like that: we have slipped into his fiction, shedding our disbelief even before the sentence ends. Via beer coasters for godssakes. 

It’s as quick a process of ekphrasis I’ve seen in fiction - worlds and images are created with quiet but rapidly hypnotic strokes. And just as quickly, Walser dismantles those pictures and worlds and exposes the barren structures of words and language. Back and forth, the pendulum swings, throughout Microscripts: words become pictures, then unbuilt to mere words again.

Have I seen other writers do that? Perhaps so, but none that I’ve read had achieved such an effect with such a disarming elegance. Ekphrasis in Walser’s prose is as quick and stealthy as an evening shadow invading a wall lit by the day’s last light… I’ve never read anything like it. 

By the way, below is a photograph of Walser upon which Maira Kalman based her painting above. Walser had wandered from the sanatorium in Waldau; they found him dead in a field of snow on Christmas Day, 1956 -

4 August 2010 ·

• Tags
• Robert Walser
• Maira Kalman
• ekphrasis
• microscripts
• fiction
• prose