Queering the Benjamenta Institute: Laughter in Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten

While scholars have focused extensively on philosophical and pedagogical disruption in Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten (1909), laughter has remained an underexplored element, presumably because it would serve only to highlight the text’s often-commented-on disobedience. The novel’s laughter is, however, not always evidence of disobedience. Showing how the authority figures instrumentalize laughter, I argue that a simultaneity of obedience and disobedience marks the novel’s laughter. More critically, Jakob and Benjamenta’s laughter is a practice of queer cheekiness, operating as a code to tactically communicate homoerotic desire and pleasure, ultimately enabling the text’s queer relationship.