Weiss died in 1987, three years after finishing the final page. He never submitted it for publication. His will contained one line about the manuscript: "Burn it or read it. Both are the same act of violence."
And you’d be half right. But I think Weiss stumbled onto something profound—accidentally, recursively, over 4,782 pages. longest essay in the world
Weiss invented a form he called the Spiral Footnote . A normal footnote points to external information. A spiral footnote points to another footnote later in the essay . That footnote points to a previous one. That previous one points to a passage in the main text that no longer exists because Weiss deleted it in a later draft. Weiss died in 1987, three years after finishing
The literary executors did neither. They donated it to the archive. And for forty years, almost no one has read it. A handful of doctoral students have made the pilgrimage to Marbach. Most give up after Volume I. I have not read the whole thing. I am not sure anyone has. The archivist at Marbach told me that the only person who might have read it cover to cover was Weiss himself, and even he probably skipped around. Both are the same act of violence