Becoming Nobody

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On Christmas Day, 1956, children playing in a snowy field in eastern Switzerland stumbled upon the body of an old man. 78-year-old, frozen to death, eyes open. He had walked out of the nearby mental sanatorium, as he did on most days. His walks used to be long, sometimes 20 km at a stretch. This time the snow did not let him return.

The man was Robert Walser, once a writer of some standing in Switzerland and Germany. He was admired by eminent writers like Kafka and Hesse. Yet for the last quarter century of his life, he had written nothing for publication. “I am not here to write, I’m here to be mad,” he told a visitor.

I had not heard of Walser until I read a short story with him as the protagonist in a Malayalam periodical this morning. The story struck me more than it should have in the normal course of life because I’ve been spending my days last week walking in and out of a hospital where my brother lies utterly unconscious after a massive stroke incapacitated his brain. When a person becomes merely a body that does nothing more than breathe with the help of many attached wires, Walser’s longing to be nothing becomes poignant.

In one of Walser’s novels, the narrator who is a boy training at a school for servants wrote: “How fortunate I am … to be small and to stay small.” And: “I only want to be a zero, to have almost no impact on the world.”  

Watching someone shrinking away on a hospital bed, tethered to a dozen electric plugs supplying life artificially, makes you wonder about the immense energy we expend trying to enlarge ourselves.

Walser was erasing himself in the asylum. He was a writer whose greatness was probably not understood enough by most people. Sitting in the asylum, he wrote on small pieces of paper in pencil. The writing became smaller and shorter as days went by. Finally, when he died, there were about 500 pieces of microscopic pencil scripts, so tiny and so abbreviated that people thought it was written in a secret code. It was not code, however. It was simply Walser, disappearing into his own sentences. Susan Sontag called him the most passionate of self-effacers.

Walser wrote on discarded paper scraps, receipts, calendar pages, wrappers, or whatever he could get hold of. A writer cannot but write. Even if nobody reads. Even if nobody cares.

In a microscript poem titled ‘Doll’, he wrote: “Please look at me for once, do you not find me dignified? I am a doll; I have very interesting eyes that are made of glass and hence are not good for much. My limbs are full of sawdust. Walking is simply impossible, sitting works somewhat better, and I am very good at lying down… To a child’s mind, however, I am absolutely alive: I eat, drink, go on walks, lie down in bed just like a real person… It is they who know how to live.”

We can’t return to a childhood view of the world. If you try to do that, you will end up in a sanatorium, writing microscripts whose letters become smaller and smaller until they vanish altogether.

Walser erased himself by making his writing smaller and smaller.

He wanted to vanish in spite of his spirit that refused to do that.

Ironically, later, professional academics built comfortable careers by making this man an image, a brand, a subject of conferences. Erasure is an interesting academic topic.

Erasure is what I want in the end, I say to my wife. Don’t ever put me on a ventilator. When the time comes, I should go without becoming a spectacle for onlookers.