The early-twentieth-century German-speaking Swiss novelist Robert Walser was prolific, schizophrenic, taciturn, and humble, a composer of tales Walter Benjamin called “extraordinarily delicate.” W. G. Sebald dubbed Walser a “clairvoyant of the small,” and nowhere is this smallness more evident than in the author’s tiny script. As Benjamin Kunkel wrote in this magazine, Walser’s “life and work played out as a relentless diminuendo,” and over the course of his career

his handwriting diminished; he was able to squeeze a last novel—a short one, but still—onto just twenty-four sides of octavo-size paper. For years, some scholars believed that the script in which Walser composed this novel, “The Robber,” and many other later works was an uncrackable private code.

The “code” consisted of real writing, but remained a mystery until 1972. One can see why: his minute marks, one to two millimetres high, were made further inscrutable by a kind of eccentric shorthand. As Susan Bernofsky tells us in the introduction to a remarkable new volume of “The Microscripts,” which reproduces the cramped rows of the author’s handwriting alongside more legible translations, “an e is represented by a simple pair of vertical ticks like a quotation mark, an s by a mere slash.” This system enabled Walser to write with incredible economy of space: a poem could fit on a business card, or he could pour a long text into the spaces on the cover of a penny dreadful. In a way, the microscripts seem like letters from a lost civilization—amazingly archaic, runes of a remarkable mind. Yet they also establish Walser as a modernist of sorts: the recycling of materials can make the texts look like collages, modernist mashups toeing the line between mechanical and personal production.

Most amazing? Bernofsky reveals that Walser developed the tiny print as a means of evading writer’s block. In a 1927 letter to a Swiss editor, Walser claimed that his writing was overcome with “a swoon, a cramp, a stupor” that was both “physical and mental” and brought on by the use of a pen; adopting his strange “pencil method” enabled him to “play,” to “scribble, fiddle about.” “The Microscripts” proves that this odd counter-thrust to the deadening stroke of blankness produced surprisingly beautiful objects in their own right.





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(Robert Walser microscripts courtesy of Robert Walser Archive, Bern courtesy New Directions and Christine Burgin)