The Tanners Read Online Free PDF Page A

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