ABSTRACT
The literary work of Swiss outsider modernist Robert Walser provides one example with which to assess Brooks's model critically, an example that offers both an alternative to Brooks and to the more conventional notion of digression as narrative interruption. It is, therefore, an unresolved and irresolvable dialectic. It is precisely in this movement that digression sets in motion, one that counters plot while insisting on its own intrinsic narrative value, that story is continually both negated and preserved — and out of which a new, plotless narrativity can be seen to emerge. The pleasurability of Walser's work lies firmly in its narrativity, one freed from plot and its determinations; just as the pleasurability of his notion of desire is freed from its fixation on a single object, turned in on itself in a proliferation of excess. Digression, Walser teaches us, can be a narrative mode that insists on its own pleasurable indulgence.
