The Tanners

Against this background, Walser's legendary "pencil system" takes on the aspect of a preparation for al ice underground. In the "microscripts," the deciphering of which by Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte is one of the most significant literary achievements of recent decades, can be seen — as an ingenious method of continuing to write — coded messages of one forced into illegality and documents of a genuine "inner emigration." Certainly Walser was, as he explains in a letter to Max Rychner, primarily concerned with overcoming his inhibitions about writing by means of the less definitive "pencil method"; and it is equally certain that unconsciously, as Werner Morlang notes, he was seeking to hide, behind the indecipherable characters, "from both public and internalized instances of evaluation," to duck down below the level of language and to obliterate himself. But his system of pencil notes on scraps of paper is also a work of fortifications and defenses, unique in the history of literature, by means of which the smallest and most innocent things might be saved from destruction in the "great times" then looming on the horizon. Entrenched in his impenetrable earthworks, Robert Walser reminds me of Casella, the Corsican captain who, in 1768, alone in a tower on Cap Corse, deceived the French invaders into believing it was occupied by a whole battalion by running from one floor to another and shooting now out of one, now out of another firing slit. Significantly enough, after Walser entered the asylum at Waldau he felt as if he were perched outside the city on the ramparts, and it is perhaps for this reason that he writes from there to Fräulein Breitbach that, although the battle has long since been lost, now and again he "fires off" the odd small piece at "some of the journals of the Fatherland," just as if these writing were grenades or bombs.

At any rate I am unable to reassure myself with the view that the intricate texts of the Bleistiftsgebiet reflect, either in their appearance or their content, the history of Robert Walser's progressive mental deterioration. I recognize, of course, that their peculiar preoccupation with form, the extreme compulsion to rhyme, say, or the way that their length is determined by the exact dimensions of the space available on a scrap of paper, exhibit certain characteristics of pathological writing: an encephalogram, as it were, of someone compelled — as it says in The Robber—to be thinking constantly of something somehow very far distant; but they do appear to me to be evidence of a psychotic state.