Robert Walser's ‘Bleistiftweg’: Poetics of Attention as Craft

ABSTRACT This article examines Robert Walser's entry into what he called his ‘Bleistiftgebiet’ in the early 1920s, when in response to a profound crisis as a writer he began to produce manuscripts in minuscule size, the so‐called ‘Mikrogramme’ (microscripts). Intertwining the analysis of the short prose form with Walser's reflections on the short‐lived nature of public attention, my article shows how Walser aims to recover poetic attention through a precarious process of recycling poetic materials and memories. Walser managed to go on writing by using a pencil which, due to its softness and ease of use, became his preferred writing implement for his later prose sketches. The decisive switch from pen to pencil occurred as an act of opposition to the nationalism of the First World War, the prevailing bellicose masculinity and the attention economy of the publishing industry. In the domain of the pencil, Walser could experiment with an anti‐mimetic, non‐representative and revitalised language away from the public eye. The writer's hand plays a central role in this process: as Walser's custodian, it leads him along the ‘Bleistiftweg’ into the micro‐province of the ‘Bleistiftgebiet’. And so it is that Walser's poetics turns attention into a manual craft.