The Good-for-Nothing

Abstract Forty years after Susan Sontag aptly called the great Swiss Modern Robert Walser “a good-humored, sweet Beckett” the writers’ affinities remain unappreciated, even as they both achieved belated recognition in the same year, 1953, Beckett of course with En attendant Godot and Walser with Carl Selig’s edition of Dichtungen in Prosa . In terms readily applicable to the author of the Trilogy, Nouvelles and Textes pour rien , Walser described his work as “a multifariously cut-up or ripped-apart book of the self.” This self-dismantling narrative self is typically a socially inassimilable good-for-nothing, a Taugenichts who reappears in Beckett as the deadbeat or propre-à-rien . The feverishly self-editing, impudently contradictory and provisional idiom of such later fiction as The Robber ( Der Räuber , 1925) strikingly presages L’Innommable/The Unnamable .