At the Limits of Reading

I want to see them with my own eyes – the scraps of paper and notes that are normally kept in the Swiss Literary Archives. Right at the start of the tour, I am greeted by the grey, sealed cardboard box containing Dürrenmatt’s mysterious estate. It must not be opened until 2032. The secret lies dormant right in front of me in the glass display case.

I step into the exhibition rooms. And into an experience of what everyday life for archivists might feel like. The search for clues in manuscripts gnawed away by insects. My breath fogs up the glass of the display case as I peruse the scrawled handwriting. Hands on the filing trolley bring the delicate manuscripts into the spotlight. Then they slip into white cloth gloves. And they examine one of Robert Walser’s famous micrograms.

The lines are written in painstakingly tight script; the spaces between them are barely legible. I cannot decipher them at all. Nor are they meant to be. For, as the director of the archive explains in a video clip, they were never intended for my eyes. They are a strategy employed by the author. It is precisely for this reason that one feels such intimacy when looking at the meandering, illegible characters.

What can be said when it remains incomprehensible? What shimmers through the fragments of our world when we do not break them down directly into their meaning? Perhaps it is only at the limits of reading that seeing begins. And on the fringes of understanding, a feeling emerges.

One of the stations invites me to scribble my own secret language onto a piece of paper. If the secret can be deciphered, we become initiates. If it remains closed to us, it quickly becomes nonsense. Leaning deep over the tabletop, I find myself longing here for the end of my own legibility.

The exhibition ‘unlesbar’ is on display at the Strauhof Museum until 3 January 2027.