On Irrelevance: Part II

A taste for topical relevance is cool. There are better places to look than fiction. Newspapers maybe. On TV, pundits speak provocatively on topics of the day. Fiction can handle these topics too, but I suppose people will always argue whether it’s the most appropriate tool and/or for how long the relevant topic will remain relevant.

My suggested irrelevant writer, Robert Walser, comes from beautiful, irrelevant Switzerland.

From what little I know, he lived what might have been a conscientiously irrelevant life, cultivating few friendships, accruing few possessions, more or less homeless, until children found him, frozen on the snow, not far from the mental institution where he was staying—a death, oddly, he had written for his character Sebastian in The Tanners.

New Directions has published some great English-language translations of Walser's books in the last few years. There's a long introduction by W.G. Sebald in The Tanners. He references what Walter Benjamin noted about Walser's work: "The point of every one of Walser's sentences is to make the reader forget the previous one, and indeed after The Tanners—which is still a family memoir—the stream of memory slows to a trickle and peters out in a sea of oblivion."

Sebald continues: "'Indeed,' Walser writes about ash, 'if one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice that your foot has stepped on something."

My favorite bit of Walser's writing is in The Assistant:

Silvi was incapable of asking for things, she was too shy and disingenuous, she never quite dared; in order to ask for something, one must have an irrepressible, powerful trust both in oneself and others. If one is to find the lovely courage to utter a fervent plea, one must from the outset be firmly, indeed adamantly convinced that the request will be fulfilled, but Silvi was convinced of no one's kindness, as she had been all too soon and incautiously inured to quite a different sort of treatment. A beaten-down slovenly little creature like Silvi can easily become more disagreeable to endure and more unsightly to behold with each passing day, for a small person like this will not only abandon all self-discipline and care, but indeed will exert herself—motivated by a secret, painful defiance no one would expect of such an undeveloped child—to goad the antipathy and disgust of those around her to ever higher levels by means of ever more loathsome conduct. In fact the case of Silvi was most peculiar: it was almost impossible to feel love for her when one was looking at her. One's eyes always condemned her at once. Only one's heart, provided one had one, would later speak in her favor, saying: Poor little Silvi!

We learn little more of Silvi, other than she's a bed wetter.

Tim O'Sullivan's story "Father Olufemi" appears in APS 10.