Robert Walser's The Brueghel Picture

 

Rosemarie Trockel - Triple Bob

Yesterday, I read Robert Walser’s “essay” on Brueghel pictures – in German, Das Brueghelbild, first published in the Prager Press of May, 1927, reprinted in the Zarte Zeilen, the 18^th volume of Walser’s works, and translated in a little book I have yet to get ahold of, Looking at Pictures, some of which was translated by the ever industrious Susan Bernofsky, and some by the English poet Christopher Middleton, who I knew in the 80s in Austin, where he taught.

But this is fill in. Or is it? Walser has an uncanny ability to make one ask: what is fill in and what is important?

What is the topic?

Talk about topics sound either scolding – the teacher criticizing the student for not having a clear topic sentence – or linguistic, where the classics come from the seventies: Teun A. van Dijk’s Text grammars and H.P. Grice’s Some Models for Implicature especially, disturbing the analytic’s proposition-mania by reminding philosophers that truth (truth-finding and truth-making) is merely one of the many purposes of language – or sensemaking in the largest sense.

And at this time, the whole rhetorical/linguistic approach to literature can feel demodé. Van Dijk is not exactly anybody’s cause, anymore. But I’m embracing being an old man in a dry month/being read to be a boy/waiting for rain as my persona of the month.

So fuck it.

The text grammar approach attempts to map the governance of discourse – a governance that is not, of course, directly referenced by most discourse. Although, as any arguer knows, there comes a moment in the argument when one side or another asks the question: what are we arguing for?

But it is the rare arguer indeed who asks: how are we arguing? Send that person to a philosophy class right away!

Walser’s “The Brueghel picture” is built on a certain defiance of what topic structure we expect from a text so named. However, the defiance – a certain aggression – is of a, if you will, non-ideological kind.

In the reviews I’ve read of Looking at Pictures – it piqued the interest of a number of reviewers when it came out  - the decision about the topic of Walser’s piece was that it was about the familiar painting of the Parable of the Blind.  This painting, and Walser’s way of seeing it as representative of our not-seeing, our brawling selves, is indeed within a possible abstraction of the topical focus. But once we are “inside” the essay, we find that the Parable of the Blind is not the “subject” of the essay. It is rather a node in a much stranger passage from one topic to another.

Topics are not just my interpretive gift to this piece. At the very beginning of the essay, we find that the subject of the essay is in question, is commented on before it quite begins.

“THE BRUEGHEL PICTURE: “All of the other things that may be understood under this introductory phrase need hardly concern me, I think, and this will become only a wee, vanishing little essay-ette about an imprisoned, naked man from some…something. From that time.”

This is a masterpiece in promising that what we are about to read is no masterpiece. That is, the mastery in the masterpiece is to be avoided, the great references, the tracked down dates. At the same time, its very désinvolture seems uttlerly designed, to leave us with a question that we want to stay to have resolved: what about this imprisoned, naked man?

The essay is, in a sense, a kind of ekphrastic homologue of those Brueghel paintings that scatter across the canvas a thousand small scenes, thus diffusing our sense of a painting as having a center, even if that center is not at the physical center of the square of the picture. The center is what the painting builds its purpose out from – it can be Mona Lisa’s smile, or it can be Van Gogh’s bandaged ear. But in Brueghel, some dysfunction in the world itself makes the center something that doesn’t hold – even as that dysfunction – an apocalypse, a village, children playing a game, blind beggars falling in a ditch – gives us a strong sense of theme.

Susan Bernofsky’s Biography of Robert Walser is, I am finding, a sort of essential nearby for reading the man himself. The man’s strange, crippled sexuality. The man’s lack of standing as a writer in his lifecourse, in his own mind and that of others. His enigmatic shiftlessness. His mental demons. His seeming innocence.

The Brueghel picture contains a digression that turns it upside down, as far as the topic structure is concerned. In the second paragraph, when one expects the painting of Brueghel, or the painter Brueghel, to be treated in some way, we are instead treated to the author thinking about writing about Brueghel but having other thoughts as well – just as, writing this, am thinking about the bag of Doritos on the table, the noises outside of workers drilling on the building, and of getting up and going to take a pee.

Here's the digression: “I’m dealing, quite otherwise, with a quasi-adventurous question, which is even the small or great question of the day, to wit, whether a masseur would be allowed to kiss the woman he is massaging into an entrancingly beautiful shape. Couldn’t it occasion surprise, drama, and unpleasantness of the first order? Mister, what are you doing? Could be said to the body artist to whom it thus occurred to extend himself beyond the limits laid down by the definition and obligations of his profession.”

This digression is in line with certain letters Walser would write women who he was, in his manner, courting, especially as he moved past his fortieth birthday and found himself a bachelor. The fantasy of the masseur is, evidently, sexual, but it is an eroticism that censors itself into a very tame, and for that very reason very creepy,  paraphiliac fantasy, the fantasy of a timid frotteur.

What role does this digression play? It leads us, for one thing, into a ditch – like the blind men in Brueghel’s painting. The ditch is a topic-ditch – we are, with the masseur, way off topic. But it asserts an unconsciousness in the selection of the Brueghel pictures Walser wants to talk about that lends them a very personal pathos – these are pictures as seen by Walser. And we are not going to see the Brueghel picture without going through a sort of interior exposition, a memory show.

In particular, the picture of the naked man:

“Yet back to my poor man, who stands there completely naked. Might one speak, in relation to this creature, of an unparalleled abandonment? I hope that one might speak so. Today the sun is shining on a day that could be called Wetnurse day. A girl, as young as a bud, asks me if I have thought about doing something to this humane end. Can I refuse to? That seems impossible to me.

A famous poet, in book form, sits next to a loaf of storebought bread in the larder in my dressing closet. And now there will come something peculiar of me from this laughing mouth, which I owe to my Father and Mother; the erect prisoner stands in a sort of container or iron cabinet completely isolated and upright. By the least movement he may make, he will be pricked by a dagger. He is imprisoned between their sharp points. He is crowded into a space by them. What loneliness this means for him! One can hardly conceive it. The thing with this poor, upright, lamentable man is he has let something for which he is guilty build up to this point, he’s made himself unloveable in the most emphatic way; as a punishment for his sin he is shamed, here, in this relatively narrow cage, where he exists in unspeakable discomfort. “

This passage again tears us from the apparent topic signalled by the title of this essay-ette. Where, one might ask, is this picture in Brueghel? 

Walser drops the imprisoned man in the next paragraph and muses on a painting of Brueghel’s he seems to have seen in an exhibition in Berne in 1926: The Parable of the Blind. Where the usual art historical version of this painting describes it as blind men with their sticks leading each other into a ditch, Walser sees those sticks as cudgels, and sees their party as a brawl. In truth, that they are brawling and following each other seems a valid way of looking at this painting. But why, we want to know, have we been haunted by this abject man, upright in a cage? What does he have to do with Brueghel?

Walser returns to the man after thinking about the blind men hacking at each other in the night on the edge of the village. It turns out that the naked man is a memory. Walser writes that he came upon this picture as a boy, turning over the pages of a magazine that might have been Kunst für Alle.

Here, then, is the essayette – we move from a fantasy about a masseur kissing one of his patients, or daring to, to a naked man upright – his erection is emphasized – in a cage that has been penetrated by a multitude of daggers, giving him little space in which to remain unpricked, to Brueghel’s blind men. These associations constitute a sort of insurrection against the usual topic that would be expected from the title, ‘The Brueghel Picture.’

It is an association that brings us back to the writer. It is as if the haunting image of the man, burdened by a guilt he has never atoned for, naked and in a dangerous cage, is the real topic of this essay or revery. By way of Bernofsky’s account of Walser’s love life, it is hard for me not to see something magical here that I want to resist: if Walser saw this striking image when he was a boy going through an art magazine, the image did not curse him, give him the evil eye, condemn him to suffer a painful fate of loneliness and abandonment. Pictures do not enchant, nor do masseurs create “enchanting beauties” out of the women they massage.

Yet I love this associative lure, somehow.

I love it and fear it.