This month features Institute Benjamenta, Robert Walser, Serpent's Tail, 1852425059, £8.99 |
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The title of this edition is wrong but also, in several important ways, more right than the correct one – which, when it was written in 1908, was Jakob von Gunten.
Jakob, with his semi-aristocratic surname, is the novel’s narrator; he writes the day-by-day journal we read. (The original subtitle was ‘Ein Tagebuch’.)
Late in the novel, a fellow student at the Institute Benjamenta says to him: ‘Kraus doesn’t need any of your von Guntenish jokes.’
By this time, we know exactly what ‘von Guntenish’ means; it is the strangest paradoxical concoction of arrogance and modesty – a hauteur of servitude, a servile egotism.
‘To be supposed not to do something is so alluring that one cannot help doing it. Therefore I love so deeply every kind of compulsion, because it allows me to take joy in what is illicit. If there were no commandments, no duties in the world, I would die, starve, be crippled by boredom.’
Californian psychoanalysis would diagnose and hence delimit him as ‘classic passive aggressive’. Yet he is aware that his identity is, essentially, self-contradicting. He disagrees with himself, and is never more resolute than in changing his mind back again to what he already knows is an untenable position.
But although Jakob is the novel’s heart, he is not its soul. That is the Institute Benjamenta itself – a wildly disciplined school for boys. This is why the wrong title is also right.
‘We pupils, or cadets, have really very little to do, we are given hardly any assignments. We learn the rules by heart. Or we read in the book What is the Aim of Benjamenta’s Boys’ School?… There is only a single class, and that is always repeated: “How should a Boy Behave?” Basically, all our instruction is centred on this question.’
The Institute was founded and is eccentrically run by an elder brother and younger sister, Herr and Fraulein Benjamenta. He is an irascible and enigmatic giant; she, an inscrutable and ailing princess. Or this, at least, is how Jakob sees them. And his eyes cannot see without transforming:
‘With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propogation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.’
The dull routine of the Institute becomes a religious discipline; its inner chambers, which Jakob does not for a long long time visit, are a phantasmagorical castle.
Of his fellow students, it is Kraus who Jakob respects and loves – Kraus, the ideal servant. Fraulein Benjamenta catches him:
‘Actually, one never praises Kraus, and one is hardly grateful to him. One only asks of him, Do this or Do that. And one hardly notices that he’s been of service, and how excellently so, his service is that perfect. As a person, Kraus is nothing, Kraus is something as a doer…’
This quality self-effacement is exactly what Jakob says he above all things desires, but he knows he doesn’t really:
‘Feelings like those with which I confront the world will never lead to great things, unless one snaps one’s fingers at the sparkling grandeurs and calls that great which is quite grey, quiet, hard and humble. Yes, I shall serve and I shall always accept duties whose fulfilment is anything but a glitter, this will happen over and over again, and I shall blush with utter stupid joy if anyone says a flippant word of thanks.’
(This should be as good an example as any of how alive and intelligent Christopher Middleton’s translation from the German is. He also writes a useful Afterword.)
The novel is simultaneously one of great slowness and great speed. For a long time, the surface is mesmerizingly still; beneath, all is whirr.
As Jakob’s time at the Institute draws to an end, the stifled passions of its inmates – for him and against him, and often both simultaneously – begin to break through; violently, tragi-comically.
Up until this point I have deliberately avoided mentioning the film Institute Benjamenta or This Dream People Call Human Life – directed by the Quay Brothers, starring an austere Mark Rylance and a radiant Alice Krige. This is one of the two or three most beautiful apparitions ever to have flickered across the Silver Screen (if you’ve seen it, you’ll realise why I’m using that fusty old term). Their adaptation is very free, taking off from the miraculous paragraphs describing the inner chambers:
‘And with her small white familiar cane she touched the wall, and the whole horrible cellar disappeared and we found ourselves on a smooth, spacious, narrow track of ice or glass. We floated along it, as if on marvelous skates, and we were dancing, too, for like a wave the track rose and fell beneath us. It was delightful. I had never seen anything like it and I shouted for joy: “How glorious!” And overhead the stars were shimmering, in a sky that was strangely all pale blue and yet dark, and the moon with its unearthly light was staring down upon us skaters. “This is freedom,” said the instructress, “it’s something very wintry, and cannot been borne for long. One must always keep moving, as we are doing here, one must dance in freedom. It is cold and beautiful. Never fall in love with it! That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer. Look how the wonderful track we are floating on is slowly melting away…’
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