Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter
an older post I wrote before some people died
Sadly, a few of my people died in the years after I originally wrote this post.
Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter by Samuel Frederick; Paperback, 256 pages; Published August 31st 2012 by Northwestern University Press (first published August 31st 2011); ISBN: 0810128187 (ISBN13: 9780810128187); Edition language: English
The very day I finished Thirty Poems by Robert Walser is the same day, an hour later actually, that I completed the screening of Quentin Tarantino’s DJANGO. Not that this particular book has anything to do with my viewing of the film, but the way in which the forty or more fifty-gallon drums of fake blood used to kill almost everybody left me with an exhausted view of Tarentino’s world as well as an equally emerging comfort level with Walser’s verse. I miss his Tanner family already. I haven’t enjoyed reading Walser’s The Tanners more since I finished Franny & Zooey by J.D. Salinger. It is easy to compare the Glass family to the Tanners as both are extremely interesting, intelligent, and struggling with the commerce of their lives. But the charm of both families is what keeps me engaged and wanting the books to never end. It seems both Salinger and Walser could have gone on forever with their focus on the family and we all would be better for it. But both men were only human I suppose, so we might never know what could have been unless another person of literary talent takes on the family text in the same clever way that these two did. And most likely it would take a poet to accomplish this.
But what is even more abrupt for me today, more anxiously scrambling in my brain, is that there is always a shit storm happening somewhere, and I am so glad it hasn’t happened for me. Yes, I have had my share of catastrophes but none like my wife losing family and friends to death, or an insidious disease that wipes a loved one away from this earth. Other than my wife’s family members, I have buried nobody that didn’t really belong dying as they had lived a long life and finally succumbed to something they knew they had coming. But all my brothers and a sister are still alive, my parents are alive, my kids are all alive, but it still doesn’t make living any easier. Not all of us have comfortable lives and I am fortunate to have come through the bulk of mine with a pretty good ending thus far.
Of late it upsets me to struggle as I do these days during the early morning hours after a typically good sleep that certainly isn’t quite finished but nonetheless results in my getting up out of bed earlier than I planned and preparing for my day. Lately my dreams are shattering my much-needed morning sleep. I am having nightmares of the most dreadful kind. My retired job, in addition to bad memories of my old bosses, lately keep haunting me. These dreams have been going on for days. And have been ever since my wife and I, with the help of our youngest son, began planning the construction of a new home in a town or state we have never lived in before. All the drawings and placing of rooms we need, the spaces necessary to live in comfortably, a design meant to please us no matter what the new neighbors are inclined to think or do or say about us. In other words, we are attempting to build a sacred sanctuary no matter the state of the potentially awful world outside. It has been fun. And the relationship with our young adult son has never been better. But I am reliving in my nightmares old pressures from a job I excelled at and took on more responsibility than I was ever completely compensated fairly for. The owner of the company is an ass. But I chose a position of autonomy within the company and pretty much did as I liked beyond their scope of general commercial practices. I not too humbly submit that I was beyond them in the brains department and my previous building experience offered me additional opportunities to provide other materials outside our general scope for doing things. I was one of seven of the company’s salesmen. So these past few nights I have been dreaming of virtual jobs where I have provided steel beams to carry the weight of the floors, walls, and roof of the home and having to solve problems because of wrong dimensions, errors in fabrication, or the concrete basement foundation walls having been poured not according to plan. The irritation and frustration involved in correcting the problem no matter the fault or who was responsible for it gnaws at me through the early morning hours making my pillow less than comfortable and my bed a mattress of nails. I wake and ask myself why I do this? None of what I dream is true. It is a nightmare. But still I persist in flogging myself to the point I finally get up and relieve myself, brush my teeth, and tend to my young dog before I begin ingesting my typical two and one half cups of very strong coffee. I like to add cream. But the nightmares aren’t so much about the trouble on a specific job. It is more about the phone calls to my home office. The perpetual volleying on the telephone to people within the company who either don’t care or are too dumb to explain things to. This morning it was the CEO answering the phone and instead of taking a message from me to pass along to one of his subordinates he gave to me, like a dictator, another telephone number in which to call and to leave a message. That was it for me. I really hate him. And for over twenty years I put up with his bullshit by playing nice and treating him with respect. But now he haunts me in my dreams and all because my loving family is trying to move on with its life and attempting to build a new home in a town far away from this city where we have been residing comfortably for the last thirty years. It makes me want to fold up our plans and put the building on hold. But instead, I decide to take a break from thinking and planning about these things and grab a book to escape this current insanity. It seems to have helped.
Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter is important as it focuses on three writers (one of which I was not at all familiar with until now) and their narratives that were absent a plot. What is significant about this treatise by Samuel Frederick is how it presented these writers as taking details from life that are for the most part insignificant and monotonous and making them, for us and even themselves in their writing of them, significant. It is important to note that the treatise presents all our lives as ultimately insignificant and what these writers provide for us all is a temporary flight from that truth by making what is insignificant significant for the periods involved in reading these narratives. Of course, the book is about much more than this and completely fascinating to read.
Over the past several months I have devoured almost the complete oeuvre of Robert Walser. Previously I had focused my attention on the work of Thomas Bernhard and have been looking for another writer similar in some respects to this great Austrian. Robert Walser has been the answer to my existential prayer and certainly a blessing. Between these two artists I find myself satisfied with life as it is for they were both on the fringes of their societies and could find much to find fault with. But in reading them both there is a balance made between these two. As much as Bernhard hates, Walser joyfully plays. And neither had much luck with women but grew to admire and adore the ones who did give them any slight attention or recognition of their importance as presented in their world. They both certainly loved and delighted in women in spite of what they could not have. In retrospect it is easy for me to consider them both highly successful in the living of their lives though they personally would have no proof of this officially except for Bernhard who garnered many prizes and accolades in the face of his own denouncement of his country. But in their own hearts and minds they had to know that what they were doing was important and necessary for humanity in the long term. Similar to the American poet Emily Dickinson who worked on in spite of no official recognition of her talents and continually prepared her manuscripts for the immortality she must have known would come.
It also does not come as any surprise to me that the author of this book on narratives, Samuel Frederick, is on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University. He has written such an intelligent and useful book on this subject while using the resources available to all of us through the works of Gilles Deleuze and other great philosophers attempting to get to the bottom of what counts. This is the same academic institution that the renown Alphonso Lingis operates his brilliant life of the mind from and he is similar to Deleuze and Frederick in the artifice involved in the quests his own work has engaged in.