anecdote and essay

 Mood tugs at the essay with a stronger hand than it does at other genres. Poetry has all its armored prosody to protect it; fiction has narrative, the monograph has method. But the essay absorbs proof, rhetoric and story into what is eventually, what is inevitably, whim. Which is, itself, not one thing but one thing and another. The wind bloweth where it listeth, said God in an essayistic mood.

The wind, though, is, to our human vision at least, a shapeless thing. For an essay to give shape, to shape its reason to exist, it needs technique. You don’t need a weather man to have weather, but if you are a weatherman, you need some way of depicting and even predicting the weather.

Benjamin, I think, has a certain genius for the essay, and for that moment in which the essay makes its strong play for the readers attention: I am talking about the anchoring anecdote. The essayist is most at home, is a citizen even, of literary culture – a culture of books, pictures, music and gossip. I think Benjamin learned the power of the anchoring anecdote from reading Kafka. That at least is my sense. Kafka’s anecdotes have a certain judicial quality, as though they were really decisions handed down by some supreme, invisible court. And so it is with Benjamin’s best anecdotes.

For instance, this one, from a brief essay on Robert Walser. Benjamin’s take on Walser is that even if Walser’s claim that he never changed a sentence is not, technically, true, it is a key to Walser’s manic stroller style. Manic, but quietly manic – a simple inability to stop, so that it goes past its point and into the fields, so to speak.

This inability to stop is curiously paired with the inability to start. Both moments require a decisiveness that the stroller is afraid of, shy of. Not wanting to make a fuss. And to illustrate this, Benjamin tells an anecdote:

“This story is told about Arnold Bröcklin, his son Carlo, and Gottfried Keller. One day they were sitting at their usual table at the café. Their table was famous for the way, among these comrades, they were unspeaking and closed off. So here, again, the three sat together in silence. After a certain amount of time had crawled by, the young Bröcklin said, “it’s hot.” And, after fifteen more minutes of silence, the older said: “and no wind.” Keller, for his part, sat there for a piece. Then he rose up and said: “I don’t drink with chatterboxes.” This peasant shame of talk, which is underlined by the excentric punchline, is Walser’s thing.”

That anecdote opens up, to me, a whole line of inquiry, stretching from Swiss peasants to Robert Wilson’s legendary play, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a seven act, twelve hour piece in which, or so I’ve read, one of the characters advances by very slow footsteps from the wing to the center of the stage, which takes twenty minutes, stands there as though about to speak, and then, doesn’t, and then makes his way to the other wing of the stage, taking twenty minutes.

Slowness, silence, a certain terrific glue that seals in the human product: these are the anecdotal partners of Blake’s book, Proverbs of Heaven and Hell. Proverbs slowed down to the barest, syllabic beat.