• Review on "Jakob von Gunten" • Book Club • Book World • Talk: Books and Reading message boards • Live Online Transcripts

Welcome to the online meeting of The Washington Post Book Club, a monthly program presented by the editors and writers of Washington Post Book World. Book World Editor Chris Lehmann will be leading the discussion on this month's selection, Robert Walser's "Jakob Von Gunten". Read Lehmann's review of the book.

Lehmann is the senior editor of non-fiction books for the Washington Post Book World. He was the former editor of Newsday's Sunday opinion section, "Currents," and former managing editor of "In These Times." Lehmann has also written for Harper's, Salon, Feed, The Baffler, and Newsday. He has an M.A. in History at the University of Rochester.

The transcript follows.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

crofton MD: Mr. Lehmann it seemed to me that Mr. Walser's intention in writing Jakob Von Gunken was to portray a clever sociopath. I wondered as I read the novel if the school had any larger significance as Mann's Magic Mountain?

Chris Lehmann: Greetings, and apologies (on washpost.com's behalf) for the scheduling delay. I'm not sure I would go along with the characterization of Jakob as a sociopath, since I think sociopaths are supposed to be amoral, type-A sort of wrongdoers, whereas Jakob is such a dissociative, inert and dreamy type. You may, however, be picking up on a theme that escaped me. As for the setting, yes, there's little doubt that the Benjamenta Institute is supposed to be symbolic, but I don't think it's as grandiose a symbol as Mann's sanitarium was; it strikes me more as (again) more an interior dreamscape. It would seem (among other things) to signify the puniness of subjective experience amid the various historical rampages of modernity; the involuted, obsolescing world of German romanticism and kindred protests against the modern world; and (more creepily) the very unknowability of core truths we customarily take for granted, eg., the nature, intent, even the identities, of the other actors in our social world. One could get carried away with this allegorizing (as others have done with Mann) and note the ways that the turns of experience recorded in JvG foreshadow the social order of fascism. Which, I suppose, comes around again to your original point re. sociopathy--though I'm more inclined to see Jakob, for all his delusions and clear self-absorption, to be more a victim than a perpetrator of social ills.

Centreville, Va.: (Submitted on Monday at 2 p.m.) I really enjoy the Book Club. Each month I read something I would not otherwise have read (particularly Jakob von Gunten, to be honest), and I really look forward to sharing my impressions and seeing what others think of it.

For what it's worth, I agree with the reviewer -- I wonder if Jakob isn't really in a mental hospital. His contradictory thoughts, his desire to be humble, obedient and dependent, his apparent estrangement from all his family except one brother lead me to feel he is a quintessential unreliable narrator.

Chris Lehmann: Thanks for writing (and again, apologies for the delay in my response). I (obviously) agree that Jakob is an unreliable narrator--and certainly the ways he perceives and interacts with his keepers and fellow students suggests that he occupies a world of his own. And you're certainly right to pick up on his conflicting emotions, social postures and thoughts--to say nothing of his flights of self-aggrandizing fancy--place him in a very different world from the one that those around him apparently inhabit. I raised the possibility that he could be interred in an asylum precisely because these themes struck me with much greater force this time through the book--particularly in his curious, fawning interactions with Kraus, who clearly detests him. But I'm still not sure myself--so much of the book is so deliberately elliptical that you can talk yourself into multiple interpretations. I would caution, though, that just because Jakob is an unreliable narrator, that doesn't make him (in my view, anyway) an unsympathetic one--anymore than Kinobe (sp?), the not altogether dissimilar narrator of Pale Fire is. What's compelling to me about this novel is precisely the way it lurches from intensely particular and fussy inventories of the self into entirely different registers of writing, summoning up truly poetic visions in the unlikely precincts of a decrepit, failing school for butlers.

Bethesda, Md.: Does the limited setting of the story focus too pointedly on every nuance, many of which could be considered as minor details? How does Jakob give hints of his growth as he relates his experiences in the School for Butlers? Does he really change that much from the beginning to the end of the story? How are his dreams used as literary devices to illustrate his struggle between freedom and authority? What message does the author seem to want to leave with the reader as a result of describing Jakob's experiences in the School for Butlers?

Chris Lehmann: Well, one reply to your initial question is that Jakob's whole world is minor details--"minorness" if you'll pardon the coinage is Jakob's lot, and he's acutely aware that most of the basic elements of his daily life fail to signify into any larger compass of meaning (a consideration that the more psychologically inclined might note is the very fount of his delusional flights of fancy). As for his changing over the course of his stay, I think it's quite clear that he does--though not necessarily for the better. When we take leave of him, he's gearing up to be Herr Benjamenta's boon companion over an unspecified tour of high romantic wandering--something that, if the Institute's apparent fate is any indication, scarcely seems to bode well for the future. But he believes he has achieved a kind of freedom well beyond what the Institute had to offer him: "I just want to see if one can live and breathe and be in the wilderness too, willing good things and doing them and sleeping and dreaming at night." He has also achieved a kind of liberation from what he's stated early on was his sole ambition in signing up with the institute--to be "a perfectly spherical zero"--or rather, he realizes that such an ambition has left him feeling he has little to lose: "And if I am smashed to pieces and go to ruin, what is being smashed and ruined? A zero. The individual me is only a zero." There's something oddly, well, Buddhistic about such reflections, and they suggest, to me anyway, that Jakob has come into a self-realization and is mounting some (no doubt feeble, likely delusional) resistance to the conditions that have so straitened his life.

Lenexa, Kans.: Mr. Lehmann,

I found Robert Walser (Jakob, to whatever extent) to be a clever, delightful iconoclast. The allegory-rich narrative would seem to bear more than one reading. No wonder Kafka liked his writing.

Roethke speculated in a poem that being committed to an asylum wouldn't be so bad knowing people like Christopher Smart and "that sweet man, John Clare" might be there. I think the same holds for Walser--walking the institution grounds with the aged Walser (had he deigned to take you along) might be incentive enough.

QUESTIONS: What other Walser have you read and what else might you recommend? Also, do you have any favorite allegory interpretations of the novel you'd like to share? Thanks.

Chris Lehmann: So glad you liked the novel--a good deal of the appeal of the Book Club format is sharing enthusiasms like Walser with readers who may not have yet encountered him. As for recommendations of other works of his in translation, the best single volume is the "Selected Stories," now lamentably out of print, published originally in 1982, and translated by Christopher Middleton, who so deftly translated Jakob von Gunten. The Univ. of Nebraska Press just issued a translation of a short Walser novel, The Robber, which I haven't yet had the chance to read (J.M. Coetzee reviews it and the reissued Jakob in a recent New York Review of Books essay, which should be available online via nybooks.com). Other collections include "The Walk" and Other Stories, which if memory serves was published by Quartet and turns up rather regularly as a remainder, and another volume of stories called "Robert Walser Rediscovered." There's a good deal of overlap among all these--"The Walk," a very haunting novella-length story appears in all three. There's a great deal more of Walser's work in German, yet to be translated, but as the fortunes of all these books attest(I think only The Robber and JvG are officially in print) the market for English translations is regrettably small. As for allegorical interpretations, I mentioned a couple in a reply to another reader; though as I note to that correspondent I'm not definitively persuaded of any. I think it's Walser's gift (like Kafka's) to evoke in his readers a supple range of associations without ever feeling secure and comforted that they've briskly digested his intended message.

Chris Lehmann: I've been instructed by the keepers of the Post's web page to fill some virtual dead air here with some remarks to keep the discussion going--an exercise, it strikes me, that is not altogether unlike Jakob's own extended interior monologues. (The Post resembles the Benjementa Institute in a number of other suggestive respects, but we'd best take up that subject offline somewhere...) Anyway, one thing that's struck me in the discussion thus far is the number of other writers that Walser has brought to other readers' minds--from Mann to Kafka and (if I may count myself among my correspondents) Nabokov. What's suggestive to me about these associations is that all these figure are fairly mordant modernist types, whereas I see Walser as a more transitional (or perhaps more aptly, conflicted) figure. I do think he credits human nature with a certain core good will or generosity--all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding--and find him a more hopeful writer than many whom we count in the company of moderns. I think it was Guy Davenport who referred to Walser as "Kafka inside out"--an apt characterization that I take to mean he summons up a certain spiritual fortitude that I find otherwise conspicuously missing in the house of literary modernism. I wonder further, in this connection, how he might look alongside another of my favorite, stubbornly complicated modern Germanic writers, the Austrian master Robert Musil.

I've since been informed by the keepers of the Web here to bring down the curtain on this book club. I want to thank again the correspondents who took the time to post amid formidable logistical obstacles; I salute their Walserian fortitude in a world of postmodern absurdity.