Holes begin to appear in this retelling of the story as soon as we ask: Did the count really rape the marquise? Furthermore, what does ‘really’ mean when whatever did or did not happen occurred offstage, during a clearly demarcated gap in the narration; and when one of the putative participants claims not to know what did or did not happen because she was unconscious; and when the other has an extraneous motive for asserting that it did happen? Yet further complications arise when we ask: Is it possible not to know whether one has had sexual intercourse? (This last question is particularly pointed because the medico-legal orthodoxy of the Germany of Kleist’s day was that a woman could not become pregnant if not sexually aroused.)
Already in 1807 Kleist had written a play, Amphitryon, that raised analogous questions. During a night of unutterable sensual bliss the virtuous Alcmene is impregnated by someone she thinks is her husband but later turns out to have been the god Jupiter assuming her husband’s form. If not only Alcmene’s physical senses but her innermost heart failed to tell her who was with her in bed, can she be sure of anything? Can she even be sure she is herself?
The narrator who tells the story of the marquise suggests obliquely that the author of the lady’s pregnancy may be supernatural (the origin of the child, ‘precisely because it was more mysterious, seemed all the more godly than that of other people’ – words added when Kleist revised the story in 1810), and thus that beneath the banal mystery of who did the deed may lie a more profound mystery.5 Having hinted at these depths, Kleist veers away. But behind the happy solution proposed by the story to the riddle of the child’s paternity, the marquise’s obscure air of disquiet suggests that the comic genre in which she finds herself may not be where she truly belongs.
Kleist came to maturity when German literature, dominated by the figures of Schiller and Goethe, was at its apogee. Though Goethe and Kleist never met, they did have an unfortunate clash. Goethe, in his role as theatre director, put on a production of one of the younger writer’s plays which was hissed off the stage. The fault was Goethe’s – the production was poorly done – but Kleist’s quickness to take umbrage (it was said that he had to be restrained from challenging Goethe to a duel) lost him Goethe’s support.
There were also political reasons for bad feeling between the two. Goethe was unsympathetic to Prussian nationalism and ambivalent about Napoleon: it was no bad idea, in his eyes, that Germans should continue to live in a loose confederation of culturally autonomous states. But the ultimate root of the hostility between the two playwrights was Kleist’s vaulting Oedipal ambition to supplant Goethe.
Hostility to Kleist did not prevent Goethe from having a shrewd insight into the way his plays were constructed, an insight that can be applied to his fiction too. Kleist had a tendency to locate important events offstage, said Goethe, then to base his dramatic action on the repercussions of those events. He criticized the result as ‘invisible theatre’.6
The theatre of ‘The Marquise von O-’ is indeed invisible: whatever it is that gives rise to the marquise’s pregnancy, and thus to the action of the story, takes place not only offstage (that is, outside the narrative) but (it would seem) unbeknown to the marquise herself. Kleist’s originality lies in creating a vehicle in which the invisibility and indeed inscrutability of the originating action becomes the engine of the narrative, as the characters onstage struggle to work out what has truly happened.
8. Robert Walser, The Assistant
In 1905 Robert Walser moved from his native Switzerland to Berlin. He was twenty-seven years old; with a book already behind him, his ambition was to build a literary career. Before long his work began to appear in prestigious magazines; he was welcomed in serious artistic circles. In faraway Prague he was read and admired by the young Franz Kafka; indeed, on the basis of his early stories and sketches Kafka was taken to be a Walser epigone.
But the role of metropolitan intellectual was not one that came easily to Walser. After a few drinks he tended to become rude and aggressively provincial. Gradually he withdrew from society to a solitary, frugal life in bedsitters. In these surroundings he wrote his first four novels, of which three have survived: Der Geschwister Tanner (The Tanner Children, 1906), Der Gehülfe (The Assistant, 1908), and Jakob von Gunten (1909), all of which draw for their material on his own experience.
In 1913 he gave up on Berlin and returned to Switzerland, ‘a ridiculed and unsuccessful author’ (his own self-disparaging words), where he made a precarious living contributing to the literary supplements.1 In the collections of his poetry and short prose that continued to appear he turned more and more to the Swiss social and natural landscape. He wrote two further novels. The manuscript of one, Theodor, was lost by his publishers; the other, Tobold, was destroyed by Walser himself.
After the First World War, taste waned for his kind of writing, easily dismissed as whimsical and belletristic. Though he prided himself on his frugality, he had to close down what he called his ‘little prose-piece workshop’.2 His precarious mental balance began to waver. He felt more and more oppressed by the censorious gaze of neighbours, by their demand for respectability. He moved from lodgings to lodgings. He drank heavily, heard voices, had anxiety attacks. He attempted suicide. Since his siblings would not take him in, he allowed himself to be committed to a sanatorium. ‘Markedly depressed and severely inhibited,’ ran the initial medical report. ‘Responded evasively to questions about being sick of life’.3
Institutional routine gave him some stability. He declined opportunities to leave the asylum, preferring to pass his time in chores like gluing paper bags or sorting beans. He remained in full possession of his faculties; he continued to read newspapers and magazines; but, after 1932, he did not write. ‘I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad,’ he told a visitor.4 On Christmas Day, 1956, children stumbled upon him in a snowy field, frozen to death.
Handwriting was one of the sites where Walser’s psychic disturbance had first manifested itself. During his thirties he began to suffer from psychosomatic cramps of the right hand. Attributing the cramps to unconscious animosity toward the pen as a tool, he abandoned the pen in favour of the pencil.
Writing with a pencil was important enough for Walser to dub it his ‘pencil system’ or ‘pencil method’.5 The pencil method meant not only the use of a pencil but also a radical change in his script. At his death he left behind some five hundred sheets of paper covered from edge to edge in delicate, minute, pencilled calligraphic signs, a script so difficult to read that his executor at first mistook it for a secret code. All of his later works, including his last novel Der Räuber (The Robber, 1925) (twenty-four sheets of microscript, some 150 pages in print), have come down to us via the pencil method.
Although a project to bring together Walser’s writings was initiated before his death, it was only after the first volumes of a more scholarly Collected Works began to appear in 1966, and after he began to be read in England and France, that he gained widespread attention in Germany. Today Walser is best known for his four novels, even though these constitute only a fraction of his literary output, and even though the genre of the novel was not what he felt to be his forte. His own uneventful yet, in its way, harrowing life was his only true subject. All of his prose pieces, he suggested in retrospect, might be read as chapters in ‘a long, plotless, realistic story’, a ‘cut up or disjoined book of the self [Ich-Buch]’.6
The Assistant has been overshadowed by its successor, the more wildly inventive and radically subversive Jakob von Gunten, with which it shares a basic plot: a young man enters the household of a couple who are going through a crisis, takes what he wants from them, then moves on.
Jakob von Gunten is set in a big city, in the Benjamenta Institute, a school for butlers, where the teaching is done by Fräulein Lisa Benjamenta, sister of the principal. The Benjamentas are a forbidding pair, but the young hero Jakob soon penetrates their mystery, then sets about imposing his will on them. Lisa Benjamenta conceives a passion for hi
m. When he thwarts her, she pines away and dies. Herr Benjamenta closes down his school, pleads with the boy to be his friend and come wandering the world with him. The tale thus ends in the triumph of the malice-driven provincial upstart, with his delight in nasty pranks, his cynicism about civilization and about values in general, his contempt for the life of the mind, his simplistic beliefs about how the world really works (it is run by big business to exploit the little man), and his elevation of obedience to the highest of virtues.
Walser’s emotional involvement with the class from which he came, the class of shopkeepers and clerks and schoolteachers, ran deep. Berlin had offered him a chance to escape his social origins, to defect to the déclassé cosmopolitan intelligentsia. Having tried that route and failed, he returned to the embrace of provincial Switzerland. Yet he never lost sight of – indeed, was not allowed to lose sight of – the illiberal, conformist tendencies of his class, its intolerance of people like himself, dreamers and vagabonds.
In The Assistant, the young hero, Joseph Marti, is hired as clerk and general factotum by the inventor Herr Carl Tobler. During the year that he holds the position, Joseph is in a good position to chronicle the slow decline of Tobler’s enterprise and the loss of his splendid home.
Walser is not interested in the tragic aspect of these events – the bourgeois tragedy of the fall of the house of Tobler. Nor is he interested in turning Tobler into that figure of comedy, the hare-brained inventor. Tobler’s inventions – the Advertising Clock, the Bullet-Vending Machine, the Invalid Chair, the Deep-Drilling Machine – are no more absurd than real-life devices that caught the fancy of the public of the time and made fortunes for their inventors: the safety bicycle, the air rifle. Nor, finally, is Walser concerned to chart the moment in history when the inventor as man of ideas gives way to the inventor-entrepreneur, who in turn will give way to the inventor as salaried employee of big capital. Joseph’s role in the Tobler establishment may be secondary, but it is Joseph, not Tobler, who is the hero of the book, and the overcoming of the Toblers by Joseph that is Walser’s theme.
Though Joseph’s salary never gets paid, he does receive, as part of the deal, a comfortable room and all his meals chez Tobler. Thus, unavoidably, he comes into close contact with Frau Tobler.
A vigorous, unattached young man thrown into the company of an attractive, dissatisfied older woman is a situation rich in narrative possibilities: the young man can be made to suffer the pangs of unassuaged love, for instance; or alternatively can have a guilty affair with his mistress. But although Joseph is without a doubt sensible of Frau Tobler’s charms, and although Frau Tobler seems at times to be leading him on, when the moment arrives for Joseph to reveal his feelings, it is not love that he expresses but disapproval: disapproval of Frau Tobler’s cold-hearted treatment of her little daughter Silvi.
Joseph is too much of a child himself to have parental feelings. Of the four Tobler children it is not the boys with whom he indentifies, nor with vain, golden-haired Dora, but with Silvi, a disturbed child who regularly wets her bed and is then harshly punished by the housemaid, with the mother’s approval. It would be wrong to say that Joseph is fond of Silvi: as Frau Tobler pleads in her own defence, it is hard to be fond of so unattractive and indeed animal-like a child. Rather, what disturbs Joseph is that for failing to meet the Toblers’ expectations Silvi has in effect been expelled from the bosom of the family and turned over to the merciless regime of the servant class. In Silvi’s fate Joseph fears he may see his own.
Toward the Tobler couple Joseph’s feelings are profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand he can barely believe his good luck in landing in such a comfortable situation, which for its duration lifts him out of the class into which he was born and provides him with the home he has never had. On the other he resents his subordinate position and the indignities to which he is continually exposed. For although the Toblers have rescued him from manual labour they have not raised him to their own social level. Their household turns out to be little different from the Benjamenta Institute, preparing its graduates for membership of the ill-defined interclass of butlers and scriveners and governesses, a rung or two higher on the social ladder than labouring folk or domestic servants, meagrely paid yet expected to observe middle-class norms of dress and deportment. Like Jakob von Gunten, Joseph Marti is full of inchoate, ill-concealed resentment toward the people who give him orders and whose manners he imitates.
Joseph’s ambivalence expresses itself in various ways: in the alternating fits of diligence and indifference with which he carries out his duties; in his behaviour toward Tobler, sometimes obsequious, sometimes insubordinate. None of this is calculated. Joseph is a creature of moods and impulses. He may speak in well-formed periods, but what he says is barely under his control. In the course of a single address to Tobler he reproaches his employer for daring to remind him of the comforts of his situation, then retreats and apologizes for his insubordinate tone, then withdraws his apology and defends his insubordination as vital to his own self-respect. Tobler replies by bursting into laughter and issuing a summary command. Transformed at once into his timid everyday self, Joseph obeys.
The currents of feeling between Joseph and Frau Tobler are equally volatile. Frau Tobler’s behaviour veers between seductiveness and haughtiness; Joseph is sometimes captivated by her, sometimes coldly critical.
The Toblers, under incessant stress from creditors, staring ruin and social humiliation in the face, are as unstable as Joseph in their moods. Living with the Toblers is like being onstage in an Italian opera. There is enough of the Swiss–German in Joseph to make the experience uncomfortable for him. Yet the Toblers provide him with a more satisfying experience of family life than anything he has known (his own family has only the most shadowy presence in the book: a psychologically afflicted mother, a father a slave to routine). The Tobler’s villa, with its expensive copper roof, has become not just his residence but his home. It is thus a huge step he takes at the end of the novel, when – asserting his return to his social origins – he demands his unpaid wages, bids farewell to the site of order and passion, of comfort and tumult, where he has spent the past year, and goes out to face the future.
During his year with the Toblers Joseph evolves and matures in one important sense: he learns to be part of a family, a less than perfect family, it must be admitted, in which he is required to give rather more love than he receives, and in which his place is always precarious. But in another sense he remains constant. The constant part of his character is what is deepest and most mysterious about him, making the ignoble side of him – his blindness, his vanity, his self-satisfaction – irrelevant. That constant part emerges in his relations with the natural world, and in particular with the Swiss landscape during the cycle of the seasons. Joseph is not religious in any normal sense, nor does he have interesting thoughts (his diary is banal), but he is capable of a profound, almost animal immersion in nature, and through him Walser is able to express what lies at the heart of this book: a celebration of the wonder of being alive.
What days these were, wet and stormy, and yet there was still something magical about them … The yellow and red leaves burned and gleamed feverishly through the foggy gray of the landscape. The red of the cherry tree’s leaves had something incandescent and aching and raw about it, but at the same time it was beautiful and brought peace and cheer to those who saw it. Often the entire countryside of meadows and trees appeared to be wrapped in veils and damp cloths, above and below and in the distance and close at hand everything was gray and wet. You strode through all of this as if through a gloomy dream. And yet even this weather and this particular sort of world expressed a secret gaiety. You could smell the trees you were walking beneath, and hear ripe fruit dropping in the meadows and on the path. Everything seemed to have become doubly and triply quiet. All the sounds seemed to be sleeping, or afraid to ring out. Early in the morning and late in the evening, the slow exhalations of foghorns could be heard across the la
ke, exchanging warning signals off in the distance and announcing the presence of boats. They sounded like the plaintive cries of helpless animals. Yes, fog was present in abundance. And then, now and again, there would be yet another beautiful day. And there were days, truly autumnal days, neither beautiful nor desolate, neither particularly agreeable nor particularly gloomy, days that were neither sunny nor dark but rather remained consistently light and dark from morning to dusk, so that four in the afternoon presented just the same vision of the world as eleven in the morning, everything was quiet and pale gold and faintly mournful, the colors withdrew into themselves as if dreaming worried dreams. How Joseph adored days like this. Everything appeared to him beautiful, light and familiar. This slight sadness on the part of nature banished all his cares, even his thoughts … The world looked so peaceful, so calm and good and pensive. You could go anywhere you liked, it was always the same pale, full image, the same face, and this face was gazing at you earnestly and with tenderness.7
Walser wrote a lot of poetry in the course of his lifetime – it occupies hundreds of pages in the collected edition – but no single poem can have the resonance of a passage like this one, embedded as it is in the history of the experiencing subject. We see and smell what Joseph sees and smells; but we also know what the seasons mean in Joseph’s life, and what cares and anxieties they so strongly counterbalance. Rapt, celebratory prose like this allows us into the mind of a man to whom the landscape of Switzerland, in its changing moods, is an ever-present benign presence, yet who can feel an equal gratitude for the comfort of a warm bed.
9. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is the story of an unimportant little woman from the French provinces, who, bored with marriage to a bumbling rural physician, embarks on a pair of extramarital liaisons, neither of which goes well. To indulge her taste for fancy goods she gets hopelessly into debt, then in desperation takes rat poison and kills herself.
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