In Kafka's novels, we encounter creatures who are referred to as Gehilfen, "assistants" or "helpers." But help seems to be the last thing they are able to give. They have no knowledge, no skills, and no "equipment"; they never do anything but engage in foolish behavior and childish games; they are "pests" and even sometimes "cheeky" and "lecherous:' (...) And yet they are attentive observers, "quick" and "supple"; they have sparkling eyes and, in contrast to their childish ways, the adult faces, "of students almost" with long, thick beards. Someone, it's not clear who, has assigned them to us, and it isn't easy to get them off our backs.
In sum, "we don't know who they are"- perhaps they are "emissaries" from the enemy (which would explain why they do nothing but lie in wait and watch). But they look like angels, messengers who do not know the content of the letters they must deliver, but whose smile, whose look, whose very posture "seems like a message."
Something about them, an inconclusive gesture, an unforeseen grace, a certain mathematical boldness in judgment and taste, a certain air of nimbleness in their limbs or words- all these features indicate that they belong to a complementary world and allude to a lost citizenship or an inviolable elsewhere.
In this sense, they give us help, even though we can't quite tell what sort of help it is. It could consist precisely in the fact that they cannot be helped, or in their stubborn insistence that "there is nothing to be done for us." For that very reason, we know, in the end, that we have somehow betrayed them. (...)
Robert Walser's assistants are made of the very same stuff- these figures who are irreparably and stubbornly busy collaborating on work that is utterly superfluous, not to say indescribable. If they study- and they seem to study very hard- it is in order to become big fat zeros. And why should they bother to help with anything the world takes seriously? After all, it's nothing but madness. They prefer to take walks. And if they encounter a dog or some living creature on their walks, they whisper: "I have nothing to give you, dear animal; I would gladly give you something, if only I had it." (...)
The assistant is the figure of what is lost. Or, rather, of our relationship to what is lost. This relationship concerns every thing that, in both collective and individual life, comes to be forgotten at every moment. It concerns the unending mass of what becomes irrevocably lost.
