German Literature after 1945 Archives

The Writer’s Vision – Peter Handke’s Afternoon of a Writer

Peter Handke’s Afternoon of a Writer (Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers) is my fourth work by the controversial Austrian Nobel laureate and the second which I have succeeded in squeezing a blog post out of, after his Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. I certainly don’t return to Handke because I enjoy reading him. Rather, I keep giving in to the aura of importance created by his prizes and his praises, in particular the curious assertion by native speakers, one I am unable to verify although I am reading in the original German, that Handke was one of a few writers who rescued the German language from the degradation that Nazism forced upon it. What I can say, and what was obvious at once with The Goalie’s Anxiety, is that Handke created what felt like a new way of writing about subjective experience, about consciousness, that was neither free indirect discourse nor the full interiority of the first person, stream-of-consciousness.

In The Goalie’s Anxiety Handke used this approach to question and probe the state of mind of a chance murderer as he increasingly lost touch with the world. In Afternoon of a Writer, by contrast, Handke represents the state of mind of a writer, who can stand in for perhaps any artist, as they go about their day. The morning’s work of creating is over, and now is time for the living. But living, for an artist, (all of this post must be silently caveated by saying this applies to some, not all creatives), is not the same as it is for the rest of us. For an artist, their subjectivity is changed, their living is charged and crackling with the absorption of material and impressions. Handke, particularly through his language, shows the full intensity of this subjectivity in his short novel as his writer goes for a walk.

It is on this language that I want to focus today, because language is the centre of this work, and observing its effects is the main source of excitement as we read. But there is also a space for judgement too. As we observe the writer and his consciousness it is impossible to avoid judging him, just as he judges his own self and relationship with the world. But to get to that judgement one must first make it through the language and what it does.

Plot

A writer finishes his writing for the day and goes for a walk. (Welcome to the world of Peter Handke.)

Clarity and Details

Perhaps it is best to begin with a paragraph, from when the writer enters his garden:

Despite the winter it still flowered, here and there, in his surroundings. It was precisely from their littleness and isolation that the campions, the daisies, the buttercups and the dead-nettles brought life to the carefully dug landscape. The buttercups, shining like enamel, for a moment even deceived him into believing he saw some sunshine. In the crown of an apple tree, eaten up by birds, there still hung a few fruits, their flesh likely frozen to glass. The last few leaves, heavy with hoar frost, fell, one after the other, almost vertically, with a crackle. The catkins were colourless, as if lamed by the cold. On the picket fence and next to the house door there was even a bluebell, frost blue.

Trotz des Winters blühte es noch hier und da in dem Umkreis. Gerade in ihrer Kleinheit und Vereinzelung belebten die Lichtnelken, die Gänseblümchen, die Hahnenfüße und die Taubnessellippen das starr gerippte Gelände. Die emailleglänzenden Hahnenfußkelche täuschten für Augenblicke sogar einen Sonneschein vor. In der Krone des einen Apfelbaums, von Vögeln angefressen, hingen noch einige Früchte, das Fleisch wohl glasig gefroren. Die letzten Blätter, beschwert vom Reif, stürzten eins dem andern zu Boden, fast senkrecht, mit einem Krachen. Die Haselkätzchen waren farblos, wie gekrümmt von der Kälte. Am Palisadenzaun und neben der Haustür stand je eine Glockenblume, frostblau.

Once, when I was at school, an English teacher I much admired made us do a test. We had to identify, from pictures, about twenty different common plants in our surroundings – I mean things like oaks, elms, birches. I think the high score was about seven. Today I would be no better, but I have always found it funny that I can name more plants or birds or fish in German or Russian than I could ever identify with my own eyes. The knowledge of the natural world that is needed to give specificity to our impressions is increasingly absent among us, but not with Handke’s writer, who pins down each of the flowers’ names. There’s also a richness to them that the English cannot quite convey, though my own attempt could be improved. Daisies are literally “little geese flowers”, buttercups are “hen feet”, nettles echo the word “Taube”, for a dove, while catkins at least manage to carry over the association to English. In short, the flowers are not static, but by Handke’s choice, perhaps, are each associated with living animals, giving them still further liveliness. We can almost see the writer (and his author) noticing this and smiling to himself.

The leaves falling – how clear this is, how precise, how mechanically, the writer notices them! First – that there are not many leaves left, then, the hoarfrost, then the order of falling, then the way they fall, and finally the sound. In short, he captures the whole thing, a series of impressions forming a whole. Then we end with a single word in German, “frostblau”. It sounds like a breath on a wintry afternoon with its open vowel ending. Its purpose again is to show the artistic vision focusing in. A bluebell’s colour is obvious, known, in its name. But the writer must be clearer than that, must note to himself exactly what the right word is – and that is precisely why that word is there, the follow up that caps the impression. It confirms that he knows how to look.

We can notice another characteristic element of Handke’s style – the relative absence of images that are not the things present. In a story, a writer has to decide whether to see what is there, or what is not. And here Handke has the writer seeing what is before him, yet with just a hint of looking beyond. The glassy apples are an example – it’s like the beginning of an image, the first thought before its elaboration. The German is also softer than my rendering. “Frozen glassily” is softer than “frozen to glass” or even “like glass” because it keeps the wordcount low and lets us pass by, barely registering it. Instead, we notice the image, the apple itself. It’s about prioritisation, framing.

This is a section of Afternoon of a Writer from before the man begins his walk. It hangs on the page, surrounded by white space. It is a noticing, a thing of beauty to me, a word person. It is not merely the background to some other impression or emotion, or that concealed boast of botanical erudition that I remember feeling while reading someone like A.S. Byatt – here, this noticing is all there is. What is normally the background has become the foreground, even if one day, perhaps in the writer’s work, it will need to move back into the background once again. We are simply made to see.

Imagine

The novel is so rich with details, with noticings, that it is almost a shame to move on. Besides noticing, besides detail after detail, about light, about eyes, about landscape, we also see another aspect of the artistic vision, when the man imagines, rather than merely seeing. The autobahn suddenly causes him to feel, for a moment, “a vibration in his arms, as if he were sitting with the driver in the cabin” of a truck. He then sees a stationary train, and seems, instantaneously, to create characters from afar. He imagines how “a child’s hand searched for the hand of an adult.” He sees the waiter, the dishwasher, each with their actions and their distinct being. And all of this from just a “Fernbild[]” – a distant image.

We learn very little about the writer’s work in Afternoon of a Writer, but one of the few things we learn is that it is set in the summer. At another moment, looking at some birds, his mind shifts from the detail into the imagination, and then into the work. We observe this process again, directly, in the text:

“Motionlessly sat the tiny birds up in the branches, just like the crows in the crown of the next tree along, and the even the gulls, otherwise so unruly, sat motionless upon the railings of the bridge. It was as if snow were falling upon them all, even though there were no flakes in sight. And just here, at this living image with the rain of wings, hardly noticeable, the gaps of the beaks as they opened, with the eyes like little dots, there arose before the observer that summer landscape where the story played out which he was writing at that moment.”

The first sentence gives us the real, with the second we begin to see the artistic mind look beyond the real, and with the third we arrive at the destination – the image of the story, entirely different from what he is seeing. In this way we see the process of creation yet again.

To be a successfully writer, Handke might argue here, we play many different roles. Hence the use of that word “Beobachter” (observer) instead of the “Schriftsteller” (writer) of the novel’s title. At another point he is the “Beschatter”, or shadower. One thing that I have just noticed as I write this is these two examples contain the passive “be” prefix in German. Compared to the activity of writer, they suggest a much more receptive role. This is appropriate. If the novel begins with the man having finished his writing, for the rest of it he is primarily receiving, experiencing. At one point he grows anxious while reading the newspaper because he feels it is stopping him from thinking. Instead, he wants perhaps to be that transparent eyeball which Emerson described in his essay “Nature”. He takes things in and reflects while we watch.

Hence the use of questions in the novel. They are not the fake questions of a stream of consciousness, but the questions we can imagine the artist asking themselves as they reflect: “Wasn’t it curious that it was only during the hours of writing that his living space could lose its boundaries in this way?” It’s a note to self we are privileged to see, but nothing more. It may have a future use, but we will not be present to see it.

Judgement

The one role that the writer does not give himself directly in the text is “mad”, but it is not so far away from his experience for him to be entirely safe from it. For just as the writer experiences the world with the aim of gathering material, of making it “beschreiblich” (describable), we can also see him facing other consequences of that particular tuning. Early on, and in a beautiful (in the original) phrase about his hopes for his writing, he thinks “the shadows of a bird twitching over the wall should, instead of distracting him, accompany the text and make it transparent.” The word “accompany” is the one to focus on. For we soon notice that the writer has no family except a cat, and no real social life to speak of. He believes, indeed, that he cannot truly connect with others anymore. Stopping in a pub, the people he meets are reduced to their artistic use – “turns of phrase, exclamations, gestures and cadences.”

In short, we could say he has made himself stunted, stranded. He can create, we must assume, and he can absorb from the world far more than most of us can. Yet for all that richness, what poverty! To gain every shade of green he has eliminated all red from his world. He refuses to go onto his own balcony except to do the washing because the impression of the view is too overwhelming. When he goes for a walk he feels no “joy” until he has placed his movements within a plan. Handke is not a writer for judgements, but it is probably telling that the novel ends with the word “Schauder” – awe. “He wondered at himself, near to a long-forgotten awe.” Such a word redeems him, even if it does not do so to us. Just as with earlier use of the word “entrücken” (translate), in the biblical sense of going from earth or hell to heaven, we have a sense that we ought not judge him. His life is different, higher, even if it seems strange to us. He, himself, appears happy – he is at work.

Certainly, I can sit here in judgement, but I am jealous really. I mentioned a few posts ago that I wanted to start carrying around a notebook precisely for such noticings – I need to learn to experience the world around me in the way the writer does here. While I may not wish for myself the isolation this writer has, (at least on a full time basis), there’s no denying that this novel portrays a way of life that is far closer to what is necessary for the kind of art I might want to make than the way of life I currently lead. And what is hardest to avoid is the sheer clarity of Handke’s work as it describes that way of life. We spend the novel standing next to the writer as he perceives. We observe his observations. We see exactly what he sees, how he processes his material and reflects upon it, even the questions he asks. In short, and probably far better than any guidebook, Afternoon of a Writer is a guide to precisely that – being a writer, being in the world and finding in it what you need to create.

I would like to be more critical, but I can’t. I don’t enjoy reading Handke. Yet each time I return I learn something I seriously think no other writer would be able to teach me. Some of it can only be done in German, of course. His use of separable verbs (especially the word “fort” for a continuing indicated only at the end of the sentence) to freeze an image for an extended moment of observation, or his long adjectival phrases which maintain the connection between a thing and its surroundings thanks to forgoing commas in a way that is difficult in English, for example. But the rest – the details, the details, all of the wonderful details – we can take away, whoever we are, whatever language we write in. I don’t want to read more, but I know I must. He surely is one of the greats.

Interrogation as a Way of Life – Max Frisch’s Bluebeard

Like a suicide, a crime well investigated makes even a lazy reader pay attention, looking for clues that might explain what happened. In the Swiss writer Max Frisch’s tale Bluebeard (Blaubart), our attention is rewarded with a short but rich exploration of the consequences of one man’s experience of being under investigation for murder. Though he finds himself “acquitted for lack of proof”, the accusation of murdering his ex-wife leaves Dr Felix Schaad stuck in a kind of self-interrogative mode of thinking long after he walks free. In this way, Frisch’s tale becomes both a kind of parable about identity under threat, a challenge to all investigative legal systems, and finally a story about the relationship between truth and conviction in a world of unreliable and confused memories and witnessing.

The Crime

Dr Felix Schaad, a doctor and respected member of Zurich’s upper-middle class, is informed that his ex-wife Rosalinde was found strangled with a menstrual pad stuffed in her mouth and a tie used to finish her off. Rosalinde, now an escort, had seemingly remained on good terms with Schaad and the two had met on the morning of the crime at her house – he had been seen by two witnesses. Most importantly the tie, we learn immediately, is his. Schaad has no alibi because his excuses – walking, or being in his office – cannot be corroborated. For the courts, the question is simple – why did he do it? For the reader, inhabiting something approximating Schaad’s mind, there’s a different question – did he do it?

Interrogation as a way of life

The first thing we notice with Bluebeard is the narration. This is a short, dense book, but also a divided one. On the one hand we have Schaad, brief flashes from his own mind as he tries to play billiards or go for a walk, and on the other we have the world of his intrusive thoughts, coming in the form of memories of his time at court. This dialogue is delivered using dashes rather than quotation marks, which gives it a formal quality, as if we are reading a transcript or report. Neither section lasts more than a page or at most two before we shift into the other. At one point Schaad plays billiards. The clicking of the balls can keep his attention focused, but when he stops to use some billiard chalk on the cue, these memories burst in. Their very shortness on the page makes them feel sudden and, as it were, diegetic.

More important than the division of the text into interrogation and narration is the relative weighting of the two. Schaad is utterly dominated by the remembered, then later imagined, world of the court. “Acquittal from lack of evidence – how can anyone live with this? I am fifty-four.” This is the entirety of his introduction to us. Then we return to the dialogue. As a portrait of a man, we get very little of who Schaad is through these sections. Rather, we get a sense of how he lives – entirely in the shadow of the remembered trial. He cannot take his own life or leave Zurich, for either of these would be considered a tacit acknowledgement of his own guilt for the murder. Even as the months pass, and Schaad sells his medical practice, the trial remains in his own mind. He has left the interrogation, but it hasn’t left him.

At some point we notice that we are moving on from memories into something stranger. Schaad’s dead parents are questioned as witnesses, even Rosalinde herself is brought forth. Though he is now free, the fantastical prosecutor continues to challenge Schaad’s every action. In a way, this makes me think a little of that famous philosophical injunction to know oneself. In Schaad’s case the self-questioning becomes so dominant that it totally destroys his ability to live. He wants to be free of it, but nothing seems to help – alcohol, walking, travel. At the end of the book he is finally so broken by the questioning that he actually does the one thing that he imagines means it should stop – he goes to a police station and admits the guilt that feels is his own but, as it turns out, never was.

In Bluebeard interrogation becomes a way of life, just as the court drama changes Schaad’s life. His friends are called in to bear witness against him, his name covers newspaper headlines, and he loses his livelihood as people no longer want to be treated by him. On a simple level we can read this as a fair complaint about how being accused of murder works. Yet on another, it’s about identity and how hard it can be to maintain. All of Schaad’s secrets are placed in public view and this leaves him unable to allow himself any privacy again in case he should once more be subjected to judicial scrutiny. No independent life remains for him. He becomes fearful, trapped within the biting thoughts of his own mind.

Truth, Guilt, and Certainty

If the effect upon someone’s identity of being dragged through the courts is one key thematic aspect of Bluebeard, another is its treatment of the matter of truth. We might want to say that the judicial system aims at truth, but really this is a desperately idealistic suggestion. Much fairer is to say that it aims at a relative certainty – a “good enough” reading of the facts that can convince the court of one thing or another. Nothing higher, no matter the evidence marshalled, is in the end determined. If truth was something so simple to establish, the philosophers would be out of a job.

Just as a narrator wants to present his or her version of events, not the truth, so too does the prosecution in a legal environment. But this is a bias, an interpretative lens, that barges in and pushes truth out of the way, whenever it is inconvenient. Schaad, for at least some of the people in the court room, has murdered his ex-wife, and all that remains is to find the smoking gun. As Bluebeard comes from a time before omnipresent CCTV or DNA testing, instead the goal of the investigation is to find a psychological justification for Schaad’s actions. If the goal were interpreting physical evidence like fibres or fingerprints, perhaps Schaad’s mind might have emerged relatively unscathed. Instead, the evidence is mental, personal, psychological.

Schaad’s many ex-wives are interviewed to find proof that not only was the man subject to fits of jealousy, he also took out this rage on others. (They deny it, stating that his violence was only ever directed towards himself). Schaad’s drunken comments to a friend that he could strangle Rosalinde appear as clear evidence of his intention. But if he did not kill her nor did ever truly intend to they mean nothing except that he should watch his language better. The same can go for the notes that Schaad made or his diaries, which are likewise trawled through. Eventually, even his dreams are interpreted. (At this point we have moved beyond memory of the trial into imagined persecution, I hope). None of these pieces of evidence confirms that Schaad did it, but they aim at building enough certainty that they might ultimately displace any question of the truth.

Yet all these pieces of evidence are inherently unreliable. Just as the court tries to find its truth, or rather certainty, we see how flaky it is – which is why Schaad ultimately gets acquitted. Schaad himself cannot remember what his tie is doing in Rosalinde’s home, or account for his every movement. A witness who claimed to have seen him that morning later admits that it was actually his wife who saw him, because he himself was in the cellar. Another witness is just a child. “As witness you have to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. You know that false witness is punishable by time in prison, and in serious cases by as many as five years there.” This phrase is repeated over and over as witnesses are introduced. But it’s hard not to read it ironically, when there’s so little truth reported, and so little accurate witnessing.

Conclusions

The power, though, of institutions like courts is that they can determine, at least to a certain extent, what is true. They get inside the head, as they do to Schaad. They turn chance remarks into dark intentions, and leave him unable to live his life. I found myself thinking as I read of another person faced with the overwhelming power of truth-determining institutions, Nellie Bly. The American journalist visited the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on today’s Roosevelt Island after posing as insane, but dropped the act once she was already in there. Yet “the more sanely I talked and acted, the crazier I was thought to be”. Just as with Schaad, all action and speech becomes refracted through the idea that a person is guilty – of murder or in this case mere madness. To protest that one is innocent, as Schaad does, is proof that one is guilty. An innocent person, of course, has nothing to hide.

Bluebeard is short but intense. In a way, it feels like Kafka’s The Trial, in that both works are both real and both parables of justice. Both works end with their central characters admitting to a guilt that is not really there, though Frisch’s tale, being situated in something closer to the real world, is kinder, and leaves Schaad alive. To me the interest in the work lies not in the crime itself, but in the light the work throws upon those human fallibilities of memory and motive, and especially in that very real-feeling form of madness as Schaad turns his own interrogation into a way of life.

Bluebeard was the last work of fiction that Frisch published in his lifetime. Reading it, you can see how it might have felt like an end for him. What it says about the possibilities of narrative and truth-finding are just too negative, the impacts upon a life from this fact are just too stark. Still, it makes for a work worth pondering.

A Midlife Crisis Novel – Martin Walser’s Runaway Horse / Ein Fliehendes Pferd

Based on the way I was taught German, it was hard to avoid the manifestly silly impression that Germany is made up entirely of old people and people “with a migration background”. This novella, Runaway Horse (Ein Fliehendes Pferd), by the German author Martin Walser, does admittedly deal with the first of these groups, so at least my knowledge of Germany’s aging society was not entirely wasted. As societies everywhere are aging, I suppose we simply have to get used to the increasing ubiquity of the midlife crisis novel. This one, from 1978, considers the effects of meeting someone whose life choices are completely different to our own not quite too late for us to turn things around if we decided theirs were actually better.

The novella follows closely a schoolteacher, Helmut Halm, and his wife Sabine as they enjoy a holiday on Lake Constance. There, an old schoolfellow of Helmut, Klaus Buch, likewise on holiday with his own much younger wife Helene, encounters them one day. This sets the stage for a clash of values, because the two couples, in particular the two male figures, have very different ideas of life. Both, however, are middle aged and having to consider the shapes of their lives, both what has passed and what is to come.

The Halms are bourgeois. Helmut has brought a five-volume set of Kierkegaard’s diaries with him on holiday, and he and his wife can think of nothing better to do of an evening than drink wine and smoke. He is detached from the world, “his dream became to be unreachable”. There’s a sense that he enjoys the irony of the difference between his inner world, which filters the novella’s action, and the perception of him that others have. The Halms as a pair do not represent passivity so much as a resignation from the ambition of trying to sit at the centre of the world. Gladly on the margins, they enjoy what life has to offer them – good food, good wines, predictable holidays (they have been visiting Lake Constance for eleven years), and the life of the mind.

Klaus Buch and his wife are the opposite. Successful writers, they seem all action and good health. They avoid sugar, only drink water, and are always out running. They embody that German passion for aktiv holidays and the great outdoors. Several of the book’s set pieces take place on the boat that Klaus sails, or else in nature. If the Halms have given up on participation in life in their middle age, Klaus Buch resolutely refuses the same course. He memorably describes having “had to part with [his first wife] because he did not want, like a plant, to keep growing in a pot that was too small for him.” His new wife Helene, eighteen years younger, serves to keep him younger.

Seeing Helmut and Sabine at a café, Klaus and Helene decide to join them (and ruin their holiday). Helmut remembers next to nothing about the past, which in Klaus Buch’s telling becomes “more alive than the present”, and where Helmut was a considerably more impressive a figure than he has now become. (“Klaus Buch said… how happy he was to see that Helmut was no petit bourgeois. / Helmut thought: if there is anything I am, it’s a petit bourgeois”) Thus begins a story of incredible awkwardness, of sailing trips, hikes, and dinners, as Klaus Buch explains who Helmut was and how amazing he was, and Helmut is forced to keep up a kind of mute pretence that it was indeed so.

One of the elements of ein Fliehendes Pferd’s formal mastery is that this is all that the story works with, this opposition of worldviews and two couples. There literally are only these four characters with speaking roles – Helmut and Sabine, Klaus and Helene. Yet the whole thing becomes rich through an intensity of language created out of its apparent simplicity. The word “adventure” is repeated like a mark of shame for Helmut, whose life lacks so much of it. Likewise, the mineral water that the Buchs drink versus the wines of the Halms are obvious symbols of their two attitudes to life. “You don’t like me anymore, eh?” Klaus says to his wife so many times that eventually it becomes more performance than affection, and then there are the references to “flight” or “trotting” that mark Helmut’s own thoughts, as the fleeing horse of the title.

By being so normal in content – a fairly standard lakeside holiday – the text elevates what it does say into something almost mythical. Everything becomes intense and symbolic. The German here relies heavily on reported speech, which is its own grammatical construction in the language, requiring no “he said” or similar verbs to keep us aware that we are deep within someone else’s words (and world). Like in Thomas Bernhard, we are immersed in another’s world for pages at a time, but unlike in Bernhard, (with the possible exception of Correction), we are shifting from consciousness to consciousness as they battle. First Klaus Buch will speak for pages, with us trapped in his vision, then Helmut will go home with Sabine, and spend a few pages musing in his own mind. Finally, near the novella’s end we get to see a little of Helene’s thoughts too.

The ruination of the Halm’s holiday is less significant than the shaking of their world, once Klaus and his wife step onto the scene. With their enthusiasm, zest, pep, or however you want to call it, the Buchs are dangerous. Klaus talks a lot about sex – Helmut and his wife don’t even do it anymore. (“How often do you bang your wife, eh?” Being one of the more crass things Klaus says when he and Helmut are alone.) At first Helmut is just grumpy, but gradually he realises there is real danger here. He quite likes Helene, whose breasts he keeps stealing furtive glances at, just as he realises Sabine quite likes Klaus. There’s no risk that either of the Buchs is interested in an affair, but there is a risk that just by being there they reveal the weaknesses of the Halms’ lives. Beauty and energy always have their attractions.

For me they certainly do. At first, it was hard not to prefer Klaus, with all that inner drive. Perhaps he will get Helmut out running and ditching the fags and booze, I thought. Sure, Klaus is annoying, but he’s not wrong to be living life the way he was. (Just as Helmut wasn’t wrong either, just less exciting to read about). When Klaus quite literally leaps onto a wild horse dangerously attempting to flee a field, it’s an obvious representation of him saving the moping Helmut. Why seem and be passive, I thought, as Helmut does, when you can be?

It may be true that Klaus undermines himself by seeming something of a parasite. He claims he needs Helene to remain physically young, just as he eventually admits he needs Helmut to remain mentally young. However, ultimately, when he and Helmut go on a sailing trip alone and the weather becomes stormy, the overall impression is that Klaus is a heroic, Nietzschean (a name mentioned in the text) figure, while Helmut is a coward who wants to go home. As the weather worsens, Klaus “laughed and danced towards the mast”, truly Dionysiac. Then, moments later, the waves catch him and he is lost overboard, leaving Helmut to make his way back to shore however he can. So much for the other’s worldview, eh, triumphantly though it is lived even at the end.

The final chapter of the novella provides the necessary correction to our idea of Klaus. Helene joins Helmut and Sabine the next day and she decides to drink as much wine as she can with the other woman. Now, for the first time, the dominant consciousness of the novella is not Klaus or Helmut’s, but rather Helene’s, as she presents the private version of her husband. In this portrayal, Klaus is obsessed with his writing while utterly unsuccessful at it, controlling towards his wife (he practically tries to turn her into his daughter and literary inheritor), and a total “fantasist.” While readers go through ein Fliehendes Pferd thinking that it is Helmut who loves the distance between his inner world and appearance, ultimately Klaus seems the one who lives this disjuncture. Until they saw Helmut and Sabine, Helene says, Klaus talked about his idea of living far more than actually living it.

While all this is going on, Helmut himself is wracked with guilt over Klaus’s death, even though he bears no responsibility for it. He doesn’t drink with the women, and before Helene had turned up he had actually gone with Sabine to get activewear so they can change their lives. In other words, taken as a clash of ideologies, it appears that Klaus, dying, had won.

But then he actually turns up, having miraculously survived the storm at sea in something like a tragicomic moment of brilliance, and drags away Helene back into the hell of her life with him. Sabine and Helmut throw off their sports clothes and light up new cigarettes. It’s a very strange ending, insofar as it leaves us right back where we began. This connects the story to the novella’s epigraph from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, where Kierkegaard, behind one of his typical masks, asks whether we could write a story between clashing worldviews where an “event” is not used to provide the grounds for the victory of one or the other of them. Because the story ends up right back at the beginning, with the Halms and the Buchs separated, and neither pairing having changed their views, we can say that Walser has delivered just that.

The problem is that nobody likes reading a story only to get back to the beginning. Even if the externals are the same as before, many cyclical stories imply a kind of internal revaluation of things. But here we have two worldviews that clash, are bruised, but then reconfirmed on each side. There’s not really a sense that anyone has learned anything. The novella has this obsessive normality to it – you can sit on a bench at a national park, like I did yesterday in my part of Germany, and imagine the whole thing playing out among the middle aged couples you see walking past with their dogs – and then at the last moment Walser delivers Klaus incredibly from the jaws of death. It’s quite silly.

The idea of stasis or stagnation is one that I think does make for interesting literature, and the topic of how our decisions shape our lives, including from middle age onwards, can never not be important to people who have to deal with questions like that during their own time on earth far more than they have to consider, for example, how they would react if they woke up one morning and discovered they were a bug. But I find Walser’s treatment of his topic here, his sudden renunciation of the exploration of the ideas, a little sad in the end. To go back entirely to where we began as perfectly as Ein Fliehendes Pferd does, (whose last words are the novella’s first words), at least when trying to tell this story, all seems to say the story was not worth telling to begin with.

It’s a sharp contrast with the obvious mastery of the nuts and bolts of writing which Walser displays, from his careful use of symbols to his powerful portrayals of contrasting consciousnesses in the narration, and does leave a bit of a bitter taste in the mouth. I am glad it was only a novella.