This works argues that Robert Walser’s literary production, and many of the aspects that make it unique and capture the attention of his readers, stems from a hyperreflexive mind that is acutely conscious of the world around it. The argument is underpinned by the cognitive theories of the psychiatrist Louis Sass, who suggests that both schizophrenia and modernism may derive, in at least some of their forms, from a hypertrophy of consciousness that leads to compulsive reflexivity, lengthy modes of intense observation, and something akin to an apophanous mood, in which the world appears to undergo some consequential change and is revealed to the viewer as never before.
Hyperreflexivity, and its corresponding aesthetic manifestation narrative observation, are established as a source and defining feature of Walser’s semantics and language experiments, the stasis of his landscape descriptions, his anti-labyrinthine stories, and his inclination towards servitude and the theater. Throughout, it is shown that Walser’s descriptions and language use seem both emptied of meaning and ineffably significant. This quality can be traced back to an aesthetic process that is seen manifested throughout his oeuvre, and which closely parallels the schizophrenic cognition of the external world.