On style and language(s)

On his article on Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin says, "...what we find in Robert Walser is a neglect of style that is quite extraordinary..." I have been fascinated by Walser's works for quite a few months now and I finally had the joy of reading his Microscripts. I wondered, upon reading Benjamin, as to whether I was missing something. I had not noticed a lack of style, and I asked myself if that lack was more visible in the original German. I wondered, in other words, if the translator had made the text smoother. Or, if style is ultimately a matter of taste. Or as to whether in 1929 the idea of stream of consciousness as a paradoxically conscious choice of style was not very widely diffused. As I grew up reading the likes of Allen Ginsberg, I found punctuation a very odd beast that parsimoniously came into my life very late. Walser said that he never reread himself, never made any changes. We cannot know if this is true or not. What I know is that it took scholars quite a few years of hard work to decipher his microscripts, a form of writing that he adopted during the final decade of his writing life. I find these scraps of paper, with their tiny tiny handwriting, objects of outstanding beauty. But the thought occurs to me that perhaps they weren't that easy to decipher for Walser himself. Although he did transcribe some for publication.

I have been battling with the dilemma of two languages ever since I deemed my English good enough to be used creatively. Because my Italian is certainly smoother, richer, more precise. And authors write in their mother tongue, there are very few exceptions to this. Conrad, of course, and Nabokov (I didn't know). I happen to be reading his autobiography Speak Memory at the moment which, I believe, was written in English. And I find similarities with Walser, perhaps the synesthesia, or the freedom of style, coming, in the case of Nabokov, from using a second language. I don't know if anything I am saying is true, but I find in it validation for the adoption of a language or a style that is jagged, bumpy, awkward, but ultimately perfectly capable of conveying images, emotions, atmospheres. Even, perhaps, more so than if it was smooth and grammatically perfect. 

Serendipity

It all started with a Time Out card that offered a discounted membership to the ICA. And there I saw the film All This Can Happen. I found the film absolutely amazing, old footage, but the way it was put together was sheer magic. A voice-over was reading The Walk by Robert Walser. I kept on trying to remember the name Tomzack, until I came home and forgot it. I borrowed Walser from the library, though, and read The Walk, and remembered the footage, and found Tomzack again. A writer friend of mine mentioned that Walser died during another walk, in the snow. And also that W.G. Sebald liked him. Sebald being one of my favourite writers. One of the short stories in Walser's book is about Heinrich von Kleist, another author new to me, another solitary person, like Walser, like me. I was also watching a BBC programme yesterday about still life and they were talking about Cezanne, who became a solitary person and just painted objects from his studio. All of these magical people, though, were somewhat connected to other great artists and writers of the time. Now we are all connected through social networks, the good the bad and the ugly, and it takes up an extraordinary amount of time to get back what seems to me very little. Everything is so vast and time consuming, so, although all of these networks are supposed to bring us together, we are in fact more isolated, I believe, than before. It takes too much time to sift through what is original and refreshing and real. It seems to me that now it is all down to serendipity, islands you mysteriously bump into while lost at sea.