Robert Walser’s narrators are always praising obedience and punishment. “Secretly, I love art,” declares the young Fritz Kocher in “A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories,” a new collection translated by Damion Searls to be published this week. “But it’s not a secret anymore … because now I’ve been careless and blabbed it. Let me be punished for that and made an example of.” “I want to be industrious and obey whoever deserves to be obeyed”; “We are cowards; we deserve an Inquisitor to discipline us”; and so on. At the same time, however, Walser’s narrators—especially his schoolboys, and there is something of the schoolboy in all of his narrators—are possessed by a levity that borders on giddiness. Walser’s writing has an energy—you’ll feel it crackling in Searls’s translations—that exceeds or undercuts or otherwise complicates its own demand to be disciplined.

The relatively little we know of Walser’s life—he was born in 1878 to a German-speaking Swiss family—reads as a tragic journey of self-negation: his failed attempt to become an actor, his matriculation in a school for servants, the winter he spent as a butler in a Silesian château, his entry into a mental hospital, how children discovered his frozen body in a snow-covered field, on Christmas Day, 1956. (Soon, we can expect a biography from Susan Bernofsky, one of Walser’s brilliant translators). “A Schoolboy’s Diary,” which includes his first stories, is an exciting addition to the expanding English-language Walser canon, centered as it is around schoolboy life, which not only anticipates the theme of his greatest novel, “Jakob von Gunten,” but also introduces Walser’s unmistakable combination of insight and (faux?) naïveté, poetic license and (mock?) servility. Consider how the associational flights of Fritz’s class assignments escape the teacher’s authority even as they appeal to it:

Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff. Colors are too sweet a muddle, nothing more. I love things in one color, monotonous things. Snow is such a monotonous song. Why shouldn’t a color be able to make the same impression as singing? White is like a murmuring, whispering, praying. Fiery colors, like for instance Autumn colors, are a shriek. Green in midsummer is a many-voiced song with all the highest notes. Is that true? I don’t know if that is right. Well, the teacher will surely be so kind as to correct it.

No teacher is in a position to say whether midsummer green is a many-voiced song, at least not without assuming a position of absurd literality, and so Fritz’s evocation of the teacher’s corrective power is a way of revealing its limits. Still, it would be wrong to say that this passage only mocks or ironizes submissiveness. There is the typically Walserian statement “I love things in one color, monotonous things.” Praise for the monotonous, the uniform, the mundane, the insignificant—such sentiments are everywhere in Walser’s work, and maintain a crucial ambiguity. On the one hand, they are expressions of poetic attunement to those aspects of the world we too readily overlook, and for which writers concerned with heroic exploits often have no time. On the other hand, Walser’s celebration of the monotonous or uniform returns us to his fascination with subservience, with relinquishing all personality to imposed order: “Modestly stepping aside can never be recommended as a continual practice in strong enough terms.”

The force of Walser’s writing derives from this simultaneous valorization of irreducible individuality and of sameness, smallness, interchangeability. In the most various terms, Walser praises monotony; it makes it wonderfully difficult to read his tone. When is he serious? When is he mocking the will to conform? Susan Sontag wrote that “the moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power; of domination.” And yet, paradoxically, part of the power of Walser’s art lies in how that refusal of domination interacts with his narrators’ demands to be dominated. Walser’s voice is a strange mix of exuberance and submission, lyrical abandon and self-abnegation. His refusals are anti-heroic, wavering; they reveal—sometimes comically, sometimes tragically—how the desire to be ruled enters the subject, the son, the servant, the pupil.

How can a writer refuse even the power of refusal, preserve his freedom while falling all over himself to give it away? Maybe the answer has to do with how Walser’s singular sentences themselves “step aside”: one of the most notable effects of his prose is how it seems to evaporate as you read. Walter Benjamin said of Walser’s “garlands of language” that “each sentence has the sole purpose of rendering the previous one forgotten.” This is not to say there aren’t depths of meaning and memorable passages, but Walser’s genius often involves a kind of disappearing act. W. G. Sebald has remarked that Walser’s writing “has the tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, events and things of which it spoke…Everything written in these incomparable books has—as their author might himself have said—a tendency to vanish into thin air.” The content of Walser’s sentences can vanish, I think, because Walser is often less concerned with recording the finished thought than with capturing the movement of a mind in the act of thinking; it’s the motion that stays with you, not a stable set of meanings.

Perhaps this is why Walser was drawn to the conceit of schoolroom essays for his first book: Fritz is always worrying about managing his time, or running out of it, or having to force himself to write in the absence of an idea, allowing Walser to emphasize the present tense of composition. But even outside the schoolroom, Walser’s other narrators frequently break off, interrupt themselves, or explode the fictional frame altogether: “In the bright, hot midday sun I would stop for a moment to rest under a fir, beech, or oak tree, stretching out in the moss or grass…But where am I? Am I actually on a hike right now? How is that possible?” Walser’s digressive immediacy is as important as what his words denote. “The present time, surrounding you, singing and making noise, cannot be put down in writing in any satisfactory way,” Fritz claims—and yet that’s precisely what Walser repeatedly accomplishes, registering the rhythms of the present in the action of his sentences. Fritz again: “It is as though you could hear Thought itself softly whispering, softly stirring. It’s like the scurrying of little white mice.” Walser’s sentences might declare the need for obedience, order, subservience, but those declarations are dissolved in the agitations of his syntax. If it’s true, as Fritz says, that “style is a sense of order,” then we could say that a style that evaporates is a method of escape. The meanings of Walser’s meandering sentences scurry away—right under the nose of the teacher or Inquisitor. The schoolchild is at that critical juncture where indoctrination intensifies, where pedagogy shades into penality, but the child nevertheless possesses unconquered territories of freedom and feeling whose topography Walser’s sentences describe so beautifully even as they disappear.