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• Title: Guilty: Of Nothing (Jakob Von Gunten) (Critical Essay)
• Author : English Studies in Canada
• Release Date : January 01, 2006
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 226 KB

Description

WITH AN ECONOMY THAT WILL. COME TO MARK his entire oeuvre-the proliferation of short pieces, the seeming self-erasure of manuscripts written in penciled strokes so small as to remain long undecipherable (1)--a single sentence at once sums up Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten (1909; translated as Institute Benjamenta) and opens it beyond itself. Like so many others in Walser, this sentence seems to offer itself as a statement of such self-evidence and quotidian simplicity that it requires no further mention. A kind of philosophical contraband seemingly slipped into the novel's first paragraph, it nonetheless threatens to alert those authorities whose surveillance of the novel's characters is as unremitting as it is invisible: "Since coming to the Institute Benjamenta, I have already managed to become an enigma [Ratsel] to myself" (5). As though there were some doubt about this, as though one might deny the very uncertainty of Jakob's lack of self-knowledge, thinking instead that he knows, at the very least, that he is an enigma, the statement is repeated, more or less, in the same paragraph: "To me, for instance, wearing a uniform is very pleasant because I never did know, before, what clothes to put on. But in this, too, I am an enigma to myself for the time being" (6). Yet what can it mean to be an enigma to oneself? And who could ever pronounce such a statement? What kind of an "I" is this that can be at once enigma, that which undoes every position and possibility of (self-)understanding, and the knowledge of that enigma, at least the knowledge of its status as enigmatic? In the mode of every Bildungsroman, Jakob writes from the far side of a process that has succeeded in educating him about, or forming him into, himself. But rather than solving the puzzle of the self in the manner of a latter-day Oedipus, he learns merely that he is, precisely, an enigma; better, he has learned to become an enigma to himself. Yet even this minimal and self-contradictory (non-)knowledge supposes the position of an "I" stable enough to support and even appropriate its impossibility. The "I" that speaks of having completed a task--even that of having become an enigma to itself--assumes a position that is immediately undone by the very proposition in which it asserts its knowledge and history. "I am an enigma to myself," as the minimal form of Jakob's autobiography would read, or even "I have become an enigma to myself," describes the impossibility of self-knowledge, for an enigma that could say "I" would no longer be an enigma, at least to itself. To the extent that it could know itself as enigma, it would have resolved itself into something else--an individual, a subject, or the object of its own representations, for instance. And conversely, an "I" that in good conscience (but what would conscience and consciousness, good, bad, or other, be here?) could call itself an enigma would no longer be an "I" in any rigorous sense.

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