A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

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“SECRETLY, I love art,” declares the young Fritz Kocher in one of his school essays. “But it’s not a secret anymore… because now I’ve been careless and blabbed it. Let me be punished for that and made an example of.” Robert Walser’s narrators are always praising obedience and punishment: “I want to be industrious and obey whoever deserves to be obeyed”; “A firm command and silent obedience — that would really be much better”; “Anything forced on me, whose necessity has been mutely insisted upon from every side, I try to approach obligingly, and like it”; “We are cowards; we deserve an Inquisitor to discipline us”; and so on. At the same time, however, Walser’s narrators — especially his schoolboys, and there is something of the schoolboy in all of his narrators — are possessed by a levity that borders on giddiness. Walser’s writing has an energy that exceeds or undercuts or otherwise complicates its own demand to be disciplined.

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