BookMonkey's Reviews > Sweet Days of Discipline

Rating: 4.25🍌

Despite not being widely read in the US, the Swiss writer Robert Walser was an enormous influence on major literary figures such as Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and WG Sebald. Walser suffered from mental illness throughout his life; he spent most of the last three decades of his life in Swiss mental institutions, where he wrote and took long walks through the mountains. In 1956 he was found dead after suffering a heart attack on one of these walks in the canton of Appenzell, leaving behind dozens of stories, novels, and plays whose narrators, according to a New Yorker essay by Ben Lerner, "are always praising obedience and punishment."

Walser looms heavily over Fleur Jaeggy's SWEET DAYS OF DISCIPLINE, a slim novella of boarding-school life translated into English from the Italian by Tim Parks in 1992. Indeed, Walser is mentioned on the first page, when Jaeggy's narrator tells us that the girls' boarding school she attended was located in Appenzell, very near where Walser "died in the snow." Like Walser, Jaeggy's narrator enjoys taking long walks through the surrounding mountains, early in the morning before the other girls are awake; like Walser's narrators, Jaeggy's narrator in SWEET DAYS OF DISCIPLINE is obsessed with obedience, submission, and, of course, discipline, the operating principle of the boarding school that serves as the setting for the novella.

Told in a retrospective, prismatic style tinged with melancholy, the plot, such as it is, revolves around the unnamed narrator recalling her boarding school days and the intense friendship she forged with Frédérique, an austere French girl with almost preternatural discipline. Frédérique folds her plain clothes with eerie precision; she plays the piano beautifully; she follows the rules exquisitely and displays virtually no human emotion. The narrator, who hates boarding school and can't wait to get out to begin her "real life," is attracted to Frédérique's ascetic nature and embarks on a friendship that she describes as an attempted (but unsuccessful) “conquest.”

The intense dynamic with Frédérique consumes the narrator until a new girl, Micheline, arrives at the school. Micheline wears colorful clothes and is carefree, nearly sybaritic -- the opposite of Frédérique in every way. Frustrated by her inability to “conquer” Frédérique, the narrator drops her for Micheline; soon after, Frédérique's father dies and she is taken out of school. The narrator spends the rest of her life regretting having ended their friendship.

Meanwhile, death lurks everywhere in the novella -- even in the cloistered world of these privileged boarding-school girls: "there is a mortuary look somehow to the faces of the boarders, a faint mortuary smell even to the youngest and most attractive girls.” And in the pretty shops and cottages of town, "if you look at the small white-framed windows and the busy, fiery flowers on the sills, you get this sense of tropical stagnation, a thwarted luxuriance, you have the feeling that inside something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on. It’s an Arcadia of sickness. Inside, it seems, in the brightness in there, is the peace and perfection of death."

And yet there is a current of nostalgia that runs through the narrator's recollection of that severe era in her life. Despite detesting her boarding-school life, despite her impatience to get out and begin her real life, she discovers that, years later, she misses the regulation of the school bell and the disciplinary structures against which she defined her self and her dreams. Then again, nostalgia is a kind of death, too, isn't it?