I sat in the gallery of the comedy playhouse in Z—, my half-consumed glass of beer beside me, a cigar stalk between by teeth, next to college girls, laborers, and fat womenfolk. Already the air was nearly suffocating. The plaster angels on the ceiling of the theater seemed to languish and sweat. From time to time I leaned over the balustrade to see what was going on below. Down there, wedged together at tables, sat the young upper crust, bank clerks, university students with distinguished dueling scars on their high-collared countenances, elegant old life-loving gentlemen, and ladies from, apparently, good families. In the loges the beau monde occupied red velvet armchairs; I thought I recognized a few more or less venerable literati, including an editor, a fellow always going about on his “belletristic walks.” I knew him slightly. He looked like a good, honest hog butcher, but may have ranked among the elite after all. Splendid ladies’ hats were present, also long, aristocratic gloves that hugged the wearers’ arms all the way up past their supple, voluptuous elbows. A chandelier cast radiant light upon the public. Then someone thundered with short, hard claps on the piano, making it boom out like a powerful, sonorous organ. The piano player had long, black, wavy curls on his head and a handsome profile. The privilege of regarding it didn’t cost a cent. This superb piano playing was an invisible, huge-winged, solemn angel softly buffeting the senses of the onlookers and listeners with its feathers. And now the curtain went up, and the comedy was reeled off like a skein of cotton stretched for winding between someone’s hands. The acting was fantastically lively. The manager himself played the lead role. Each time an intermission came, I sank into resounding reveries. I had the impression the bold, naked stone figures on either side of the stage had come to life on their pedestals. Actually none of this was necessary. Damned if the piano player didn’t keep sprinkling me with notes; I watched the slender hands of the pounder and player dance up and down the white keys; I’d have been absolutely delighted with a half-hour intermission. In the mezzanine beneath me, an elderly lady blew her nose with a ferociously lacy handkerchief. I found everything beautiful, enormously bewitching. “Care for a beer?” the waiters asked. There was something so odd about this peculiar question. What sort of people were these to walk right up to you and ask if you wanted a drink? One of the waiters had an out-and-out bristly moustached face, you couldn’t see a thing besides the big waxed moustache and a pair of big, darkly glowing eyes. They glimmered like lights in the gloom of a forest. A second waiter was beardless and sickly pale, with such a dreadfully gaunt face that his cheekbones stuck out like the cliffs of a rocky shore. I bough a glass of beer from him, paid up on the spot, and stuck a fresh cheroot in my mouth. Then the piano hurled a fresh, mighty wave in my face and against my chest and up my coatsleeves; it seemed I’d have to hunt up a handkerchief to dry myself off. But the glimmering yellow rays of the chandelier had already taken care of this, nothing to worry about. And then there were moments during the intermission when I fancied my eyes had become long, thin poles capable of touching the hand of one of the ladies sitting below. But she seemed not to notice, let me go right ahead and do it, outrageous as it was. Close beside me sat an aristocrat’s maid, a sweet, delicate little thing; when I asked her name she pronounced it softly. She said it more with her eyes and her two burning cheeks than with her mouth. Her name was Anna. I had them bring her a glass of beer and blew smoke in her face to make her laugh. How her eyes shone, wet and black, two glittering little orbs of black silver.

—Robert Walser, “Comedy Evening” [excerpt]

i’m kind of amazed by the passage beginning at “then the piano hurled…”. the bit about the stone figures is kind of dreamy, but not too ominous—”actually none of this was necessary” brusquely elbows in, a sudden jolt about the piano player—abruptly his focus shifts to a woman down in the mezzanine; a weird alienating effect about the waiters—the first part, “what sort of people…”, is the oddest, but his dark readings of their faces are unsettling too. then for a moment, he seems grounded again: buys a beer, gets a fresh cigar—but swept away again; there’s an ambiguity in the “wave”—it plays on the beer mentioned in the previous sentence; “splashed”↩beer;beer=liquid, a sensible read by normal continuity and realism standards, but it could just as well be linked to “sprinkling” earlier on—but this is brushed away quite quickly, awkwardly, with a weird vague explanation that would either suggest the figurative reading or that the narrator is losing his grip and is pretty foggy on it himself. then, the bottom falls out: the eyes line, which is just so fucking strange that it would feel as if it came out of nowhere no matter where you put it. when i first read this story that line made me stop in my tracks. i got this feeling like, you know how it feels when you “lose” a sneeze? a shudder, like that. such a vivid image, at the same time a totally surreal one, and creepy—just exploding in the middle of the story…then it regroups and goes on its way (restlessly, mind; the whole story is great, i could say more, i just excerpted the part that i was the most impressed by). the restless mood; that lightness, where the focus can float off at any moment; how that ominous dreamworld creeps in and eventually cracks it open—basically the whole uneasy footing of its narrator as expressed through its prose: it reminds me of a certain state you get in after a rather brutal, gradual deprivation of sleep. i always find it really remarkable when writing can feel genuinely unstable. when writers approach it messy, like stream-of-consciousness or something like that, i usually find it feels too self-conscious. i think walser’s might work because of how carefully—to the point of archness—composed it is; as if something is bubbling up from under, and he’s trying to keep the surface parts in check, and then even that begins slipping out of his control…