“Where do [Walser’s characters] spring from? They come from the night at its blackest— a Venetian night, if you will, illuminated by the faint lamps of hope— with a little party spirit shining in their eyes, but distraught and sad to the point of tears. The tears they shed are his prose. For sobbing is the melody of Walser’s loquaciousness. It reveals to us where his favorite characters come from— namely, from insanity and nowhere else. They are figures who have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality. If we were to attempt to sum up in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny element in them, we would have to say: they have all been healed. Admittedly, we are never shown this process of healing, unless we venture to approach his “Schneewittchen,” one of the profoundest products of modern literature, and one which is enough on its own to explain why this seemingly most fanciful of all writers should have been a favorite author of the inexorable Franz Kafka.” 

((walter benjamin on robert walser)) 

(Source: mutationwaltz, via aubreylstallard)