Against this background, Walser's legendary "pencil system" takes on the aspect of a preparation for al ice underground. In the "microscripts," the deciphering of which by Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte is one of the most significant literary achievements of recent decades, can be seen — as an ingenious method of continuing to write — coded messages of one forced into illegality and documents of a genuine "inner emigration." Certainly Walser was, as he explains in a letter to Max Rychner, primarily concerned with overcoming his inhibitions about writing by means of the less definitive "pencil method"; and it is equally certain that unconsciously, as Werner Morlang notes, he was seeking to hide, behind the indecipherable characters, "from both public and internalized instances of evaluation," to duck down below the level of language and to obliterate himself. But his system of pencil notes on scraps of paper is also a work of fortifications and defenses, unique in the history of literature, by means of which the smallest and most innocent things might be saved from destruction in the "great times" then looming on the horizon. Entrenched in his impenetrable earthworks, Robert Walser reminds me of Casella, the Corsican captain who, in 1768, alone in a tower on Cap Corse, deceived the French invaders into believing it was occupied by a whole battalion by running from one floor to another and shooting now out of one, now out of another firing slit. Significantly enough, after Walser entered the asylum at Waldau he felt as if he were perched outside the city on the ramparts, and it is perhaps for this reason that he writes from there to Fräulein Breitbach that, although the battle has long since been lost, now and again he "fires off" the odd small piece at "some of the journals of the Fatherland," just as if these writing were grenades or bombs.
At any rate I am unable to reassure myself with the view that the intricate texts of the Bleistiftsgebiet reflect, either in their appearance or their content, the history of Robert Walser's progressive mental deterioration. I recognize, of course, that their peculiar preoccupation with form, the extreme compulsion to rhyme, say, or the way that their length is determined by the exact dimensions of the space available on a scrap of paper, exhibit certain characteristics of pathological writing: an encephalogram, as it were, of someone compelled — as it says in The Robber—to be thinking constantly of something somehow very far distant; but they do appear to me to be evidence of a psychotic state.
On the contrary, The Robber is Walser's most rational and most daring work, a self-portrait and self-examination of absolute integrity, in which both the compiler of the medical history and his subject occupy the position of the author. Accordingly, the narrator — who is at once friend, attorney, warden, guardian and guardian angel of the vulnerable, almost broken hero — sets out his case from a certain ironic distance, even perhaps, as he notes on one occasion, with the complacency of a critic. On the other hand he repeatedly rises to the occasion with impassioned pleas on behalf of his client, such as in the following appeal to the public: "Don't persist in reading nothing but healthy books, acquaint yourselves also with so-called pathological literature, from which you may derive considerable edification. Healthy people should always, so to speak, take certain risks. For what other reason, blast and confound it, is a person healthy? Simply in order to stop living one day at the height of one's health? A damned bleak fate … I know now more than ever that intellectual circles are filled with philistinism. I mean moral and aesthetic chickenheartedness. Timidity, though, is unhealthy. One day, while out for a swim, the Robber very nearly met a watery end. […] One year later, that dairy school student drowned in the very same river. So the Robber knows from experience what it's like to have water nymphs hauling one down by the legs." The passion with which the advocate Walser takes up the cause on his client's behalf draws its energy from the threat of annihilation. If ever a book was written from the outermost brink, it is this one. Faced with the imminent end, Walser works imperturbably on, often even with a kind of wry amusement, and — apart from a few eccentricities which he permits himself for the fun of it — with an unerringly steady hand. "Never before, in all my years at my desk, have I sat down to write so boldly, so intrepidly," the narrator tells us at the beginning. In fact, the unforced way in which he manages the not inconsiderable structural difficulties and the constant switches of mood between the deepest distraction and a light-heartedness which can only be properly described by the word allegría, testifies to a supreme degree of both aesthetic and moral assurance. It is true, too, that in this posthumous novel — already written, so to speak, from the other side — Walser accrues insights into his own particular state of mind and the nature of mental disturbance as such, the likes of which — so far as I can see — are to be found nowhere else in literature. With incomparable sangfroid he sets down an account of the probable origins of his suffering in an upbringing which consisted almost exclusively of small acts of neglect; of house, as a man of fifty, he still feels the child or little boy inside him; of the girl he would like to have been; the satisfaction he derives from wearing an apron; the fetishistic tendencies of the spoon-caresser; of paranoia, the feeling of being surrounded and hemmed in; the sense, reminiscent of Josef K. in The Trial, that being observed made him interesting; and of the dangers of idiocy arising, as he actually writes, from sexual atrophy. With seismographic precision, he registers the slightest remorse at the edges of his consciousness, records rejections and ripples in his thoughts and emotions about which the science of psychiatry even today scarcely allows itself to dream. The narrator does not think much of the therapies the mind doctor offers to the Robber, and still less of the universal panacea of belief, which he terms a "perfectly simple, paltry condition of the soul." "For," he says, "one achieves nothing by it, absolutely nothing, nothing at all. One just sits there and believes. Like a person mechanically knitting a sock." Walser is not interested in either the obscurantism of the medicine men or of the other curators of the soul. What matters to him, like any other writer in full possession of his faculties, is the greatest possible degree of lucidity, and I can imagine how, which writing The Robber, it must have occurred to him on more than one occasion that the looming threat of impending darkness enabled him at times to arrive at an acuity of observation and precision of formulation which is unattainable from a state of perfect health. He focuses this particular power of perception not just on his own via dolorous but also on other outsiders, persons excluded and eliminated, with whom his alter ego the Robber is associated. His own personal fate concerns him least of all. "In most people," the narrator says, "the lights go out," and he feels for every such ravaged life. The French officers, for example, whom the robber once saw in mufti in the resort town of Magglingen, three thousand feet above sea level. "This was shortly before the outbreak of our not yet forgotten Great War, and all these young gentlemen who sought and doubtless also found relaxation high up in the blossoming meads were obliged to follow the call of their nation." How false, then, the rolling thunder of "storms of steel" and all ideologically tainted literature sounds, by comparison and with this one sentence with its discreet compassion. Walser refused the grand gesture. On the subject of the collective catastrophes of his day he remained resolutely silent. However, he was anything but politically naïve. When, in the years preceding the First World War, the old Ottoman Empire collapsed in the face of attacks by the reform party, the modern Turkey constituted itself with one eye on Germany as a potential protector, Walser was more or less alone in viewing this development with skepticism. In the prose piece "The Farewell" (Abschied) he has the deposed Sultan — who is under no illusions about the shortcomings of his régime — express doubts about the progress that has apparently been achieved. Of course, he says, there will now be efficient folk at work in Turkey, where chaos has always reigned, "but our gardens will wither and our mosques will soon be redundant … (and) railways will criss-cross the desert where even hyenas quailed at the sound of my name. The Turks will put on caps and look like Germans. We will be forced to engage in commerce, and if we aren't capable of that, we will simply be shot." That is more or less how things came to pass, too, except that in the first genocide of our ill-fated century it was not the Turks who were shot and put to death by the Germans, but the Armenians by the Turks. At all events, it was not an auspicious start, and one could say that in 1909, looking through the eyes of Haroun al Rashid, Walser saw far into the future; and he will hardly have been less far-sighted as the 1920s drew to a close. The Robber, whose whole disposition was that of a liberal free-thinker and republican, also became soulsick on account of the looming clouds darkening the political horizon. The exact diagnosis of his illness is of little relevance. It is enough for us to understand that, in the end, Walser simply could not go on, and, like Hölderlin, had to resort to keeping people at arm's length with a sort of anarchic politeness, becoming refractory and abusive, making scenes in public and believing that the bourgeois city of Berne, of all places, was a city of ghostly gesticulators, executing rapid hand movements directly in front of his face expressly in order to discombobulate him and to dismiss him out of hand as one who simply does not count. During his years in Berne Walser was almost completely isolated. The contempt was, as he feared, universal. Among the few who still concerned themselves with him was the schoolteacher (and poet) Emil Schibli, with whom he stayed for a few days in 1927. In a description of his meeting with Walser published in the Seeländer Volksstimme. Schibli claims to have recognised, in this lonely poet in the guise of a tramp and suffering from profound isolation, a king in hiding "whom posterity will call, if not one of the great, then one of rare purity." While Walser was no stranger to the evangelical desire to possess nothing and to give away everything one owns — as in The Robber—he made no claim to any kind of messianic calling. It was enough for him to call himself — with bitterly resigned irony — at least the ninth-best writer in the Helvetic Federation. We, though, can grant Walser the honorific title with which he endows the Robber and to which in fact he himself is entitled, namely the son of a first secretary to the canton.