1
W. G. Sebald
‘The journeys of men should lead to
where they have come from.’ – Shlomo of Karlin
In recent years, there are few
clearer examples of the misunderstanding between culture and culture industry
than that of Peter Handke. Around the time of his return to Austria it was
considered as a given that this author, who from the very beginning has stood
at the centre of public scrutiny, represented the highest class of
contemporary German-language literature. The specific narrative genre he developed
succeeded by dint of its completely original linguistic and imaginative
precision, through which – in works such as The
Goalie’s Anxiety or A Sorrow Beyond Dreams – the author
reports and meditates upon the silent catastrophes that continuously befall
the human interior. It is particularly worth noting, retrospectively, the ways
in which these texts manage to satisfy the demands of the book market, without
giving up any claim to ‘literary’ status. The secret of this success, I
venture, is that Handke’s narratives – though doubtlessly formed
Across the Border:
Peter Handke’s Repetition
2
from high artistic understanding
and true feeling – are hardly at odds with an idea of literature which critics
are ready or able to understand. Handke’s texts were accessible; even after a
quick perusal, all kinds of progressive observations could be applied to them.
Handke likewise laid no overlarge obstacles in the way of literary criticism.
In the shortest time, numerous essays, analyses and monographs were written up 1 and Handke’s work was subsumed into the canon.
Already with the appearance of the
three books of Slow Homecoming, however, the
engagement with Handke become more hesitant.2 Far more
her-metic, far more difficult to describe, these works, which observe the world
in a different manner, almost seem to me to be conceived in order to put a stop
to this critical and scholarly game. The author clearly paid a dear price for
this insolence – whether unintentional or strategic – through which the author secured
for his writings a claim to a certain discretion after publication. What
unsettled critics more than anything else was Handke’s new and, one could say,
programmatic design for the visualization of a more beautiful world by virtue
of language alone. Neither critics nor scholars managed to come up with much to
say about the many wonderfully-built textual arcs of ‘Child Story’ or ‘The
Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire,’ except to designate them as examples of the
abstruse extravagance of Handke in his latest phase. Since then readers have
retreated, scholars have for the most part liquidated their interests (if I’m
not mistaken), and as for the critics, who were naturally the most exposed,
some have felt compelled to publicly rescind their confi-dence in Handke.3 In recent years it
has come to a point where Handke’s new works may still be reviewed, but these
reviews are as a rule formed by animosity, either open or concealed. Even the
few positive commentaries exhibit a strange perplexity and a palpable discomfort.
In every case, the metaphysic developed in Handke’s newer books, which aims to
translate the seen and perceived into language, remains undiscussed. There is
obviously no longer a contemporary discourse in which metaphysics may claim a
place. And yet art, wherever and whenever it may take place, bears the closest
ties to the realm of metaphysics. In order to explore this proximity, the
writer requires a courage which should not be underestimated; for critics and
scholars who see metaphysics as a kind of junk closet, it is naturally easy to
be satisfied with the general admonishment that, in the higher realms, the air
is thin and the danger of falling great. What I want to do now is not to
discuss the particularities of this distancing from Peter Handke – nor do I
want to be tempted by the considerable task of sketching the psychology and
sociology of the parasitic species that takes literature as its host; instead,
I simply want to experimentally process a few things regarding the book Repetition, which upon first reading in 3 4 5
1986
made a great and, as I have since learned, lasting impression on me.
Repetition is the report of a
summer journey to Slovenia, undertaken in 1960 or 1961 by a young man named
Filip Kobal, on the trail of his missing older brother Gregor. The reporter and
narrator is Filip Kobal himself, who looks back on the time from a distance of
a quarter century. As much as we learn from him about the young Filip Kobal,
the currently middle-aged narrator is unwilling to give us much information
regarding his present identity. It’s almost as if he, who we can recognize only
by his words, is the missing brother himself, whose trail the young Filip Kobal
is following. The beneficial effect that this search for clues, described by Handke,
has on the reader, is rooted in the following constellation: that the young
Kobal is lead by the older, for whom he is searching, and that protagonist and
narrator, separated from each other only by passed time, relate to each other
like the two brothers who are the subjects of Handke’s story.
Directly
upon passing his final exams, Filip Kobal leaves his home – his old father, his
ailing mother, and his confused sister – and travels across the bor-der to the
country on the other side of the Karawanks, whence came the Kobals, and where
Gregor fled when he was drafted into the German army in the mid-thirties, in
order to study the cultivation of fruit trees at the agricultural school in
Maribor. The crossing of the border opens up a new kingdom for Filip. Although
the industrial city of Jesenice, the first stop of his journey, ‘grey on grey,
squeezed into a narrow valley, shut in between two shade-casting mountains,’ in
no way corresponds to the picture Filip had imagined to himself of this
neighbouring empire as a collection of ‘cities resplendent with colour,
spreading out over a wide plain, […] the one merging with the next all the way
to the sea’ – nevertheless, as the narrator specifically remarks, the city
‘fully confirmed my anticipation.’ Jesenice is actually the entryway to a new
world. Filip notices how the droves of people going about their business,
unlike in the small cities of his homeland, ‘took notice of me now and then but
never stared,’ and the longer he observes his surroundings, the more certain he
be-comes ‘that this was a great country.’ In the train-station tavern he dreams
of being accepted into the population of this great country, amidst a people
that he envisages as being ‘on an unceasing, peaceful, adventurous, serene
journey through the night, a journey in which the sleeping, the sick, the
dying, even the dead were included.’ The normally mostly light-flooded empire,
in this passage drowned in darkness, which Filip Kobal sees himself entering,
is qualitatively as far removed as is thinkable from the false homeland from
which, according to the synopsis of his previous years, he escapes ‘after
almost twenty years in a non-place, in a frosty, unfriendly, cannibalistic
village.’ As the narrator remarks, Filip Kobal’s feeling of freedom is
completely concrete, 6 7
for
in contrast to his ‘so-called native land,’ the country on whose threshold he
stands lays claim to him not ‘in the name of compulsory education or compulsory
military service,’ but rather, as the narrator in turn states, it lets itself
be laid claim to, ‘as the land of my forefathers, which thus, however strange,
was at least my own country.’ ‘At last,’ the narrator recalls from his
memories, ‘I was stateless; at last, instead of being always present, I could
be lightheartedly absent.’ Outland, the country of ancestors and of absence:
these passages strangely invoke the coincidence between the ‘kingdom of
freedom’ and that of the dead, which may initially prove perplexing. Yet there
is something to this, since both the kingdom of freedom and that of shades are
sites of expectation, where no living being has yet been. The narrator recalls
how his mother, when-ever speaking of her Slovenian homeland, would recite the
names of the major towns of Lipica, Temnica, Vipava, Doberdob, Tomaj, Tabor,
Kopriva, as though they were settlements in ‘a land of peace where we, the
Kobal family, would at last recapture our true selves.’ The land of peace
envisaged by son and mother is not only a metaphysical, but also a political
concept. Without doubt, the metaphysics of an ‘other world’ where one goes to
meet one’s an-cestors point towards a position of resignation, in which
liberation can always only be a liberation from life; yet at the same time the
utterances of the mother, remembered by the son, are defined by their reso-lute
resistance to coercive assimilation, and their clearly pronounced resentment
against Austria. Thus, talk of a possible alternative situation leads not only
to a quiet demise: it also has a real social significance. The country of
peace, evoked by the pretty-sounding Slovenian names, is the absolute opposite
to the false homeland of Austria, as well as to the malignancy of a society
organized by confederations and associations. The text makes this unmistakably
clear. What is beneficial for Filip Kobal about the crowd in which he finds
himself, walking the streets of Yugoslavian cities, is primarily ‘what it
lacked, the things that were missing: the chamois beards, the hartshorn
buttons, the loden suits, the lederhosen; in short, no one in it wore a
costume.’ Thus, for Filip Kobal – in a foreign land, amid the passing shades of
Jesenice – it is less the resigned absorption into an anonymous other that
communicates the feeling that he is finally among his own kind, as it is the
absence of all costume, of all insignia, of anything over-determined. The
dialectical mediation of metaphysics and politics enables a change of
positions: namely, that as the bent shades of Jesenice come to life, the
costume-wearers take on the appearance of evil, unredeemed, dead souls. The
‘costumed’ is in no way identical to an orientation which aims to conserve the
homeland; rather, it is the unmistakable indication of an opportunism, by which
the propagation of the concept of ‘homeland’ becomes allied with the
destruction of homeland. Additionally, the 8 9
‘costumed’
also signifies the negation of every foreign country. If the concept of
homeland comes about in the 19th century in response to the evermore ineluctable
experience of the foreign, the ideologisation of homeland in the 20th century,
similarly inspired by a fear of loss, develops into the attempted expansion of
the homeland, as far as possible and employing force when necessary, at the
cost of other homelands. The word Austria, as the name for the Alpine republic
left over after the dissolution of the empire, is a paradigm for this paranoid
concept of homeland, whose gruesome consequences reach far into the post-war
years during which Filip Kobal grew up. At the end of his wanderings, as he
returns home through the Karst, he is at first happy to see Austria again –
inspired, perhaps, by the hope that he would be able to bring home his various
foreign experiences. ‘On the way from the border station to the town of
Bleiburg […] I vowed to be friendly while demanding nothing and expecting
nothing, as befitted someone who was a stranger even in the land of his birth.
The crowns of the trees broadened my shoulders.’ Yet barely arrived in the city
with the ominous name [Blei: lead], he is met
once more with the ‘guilty, hangdog ugliness and formlessness’ of his Austrian
compatriots – ‘fashionably dressed, they had gleaming badges on their lapels’ –
constituting a suspicious people, whose sidelong glances prompt the
20-year-old to reflect on how ‘not a few members of this crowd were descended
from people who had tortured and murdered, or at least laughed approvingly, and
whose descendants would carry on the tradition faithfully and without a qualm.’
This remembered realization, as well as the narrator’s complete silence
regarding his subsequent experiences in his unaccommodating homeland, clarify
why he must repeat his voyage out of Austria, twenty-five years after he first
left.
The
departure for the imaginary true homeland, lying across the mountains, is an
attempt not only at self-liberation, but also at the breaking-through of exile,
in the widest meaning of this concept. Despite being long-time residents of
Rinkenberg, where they are accepted as natives by their fellow villagers, the
Kobal family – comparable in many ways to the Barnabas family of Kafka’s Castle – have retained, due to their own
obstinacy, a feeling of their own foreignness. Unlike their fellow
Rinkenbergers, they possess and protect the memory of a way of life more
dignified than their present one, oppressed by a corrupted Austrian populace.
Thus the father and mother constantly and involuntarily think back to past
times, as though they were both cut off from their Slovenian provenance, and
condemned against their will to an existence in Austria, as ‘prisoners or
exiles.’ The family legend which recounts the story of the Kobals’ exile, said
to be rooted in historical events, tells of a Gregor Kobal who had led the
Tolmin peasant revolt, and whose descendants had been driven out of the Isonzo
valley following his 10 11
execution.
Since this far-off past, the Kobals have been a clan of farmhands and
foresters, migrating across large distances, ending up in Carinthia. The text
makes it no secret that the mythological conjecture, by which the oppressed
family claims the ancestry of a rebellious forefather sentenced to an
ignominious death, is geared towards a new rebellion against ‘their exile,
their servitude, and the suppression of their language.’ It is primarily the
father who, ‘with all his strength, especially the strength of his obstinacy, […]
was intent on redemption for himself and his family,’ although he had ‘no
idea, and never uttered any proposal to us con-cerning the form the redemption
of his family here on earth might take.’ According to the mythological model,
the task of redemption falls also on the shoulders of his sons. In his
thirties, Gregor, the missing brother – who bears the name of the rebellious
ancestor, and who was represented in the stories of his mother as ‘a king
cheated out of his throne’ – was the first to set out to discover anew the land
in the south; now it is up to the younger brother, considered by the mother as
‘rightful heir to the throne,’ to resume long-lost affairs, and to go where
there are cities which are nothing like ‘our Klagenfurt’ – cities like Görz,
where, according to the father’s memories, ‘there are palm trees in the parks
and there’s a king buried in the monastery crypt.’ The path out of exile is the
path towards Jerusalem, and he who is meant to follow it, the young Filip
Kobal, must be innocent. Unlike his schoolmates, almost all of whom have at one
point survived a bad accident – losing a finger, an ear, or an entire arm – he
is still unmarked: ‘during my years at the seminary my youth had passed but I
had never for one moment known the experience of youth.’ Now this holy fool,
who recognizes ‘the mentally deranged and feebleminded’ as his ‘guardian
angels,’ is sent out above the unhappiness of his family in order to report
back from the other side as to whether the other world, which appears in the
dreams of the exile, exists also in reality.
It cannot be ignored that the
Kobals’ secret royal family exhibits some traits which are known from Handke’s
own family history, as it is reported in A
Sorrow Beyond Dreams. The fictional transpositions carried out in Repetition can in turn be read as the author’s own
redemptory wishes. What is deci-sive in Handke’s rewriting of his own family
history in this work cannot simply be equated with the concept of idealization
– the Kobals are in many respects a gloomy and self-destructive association –
rather, the rewriting is more concerned with the elimination of a single
specific element in order to achieve the farthest possible distancing from the
German descent of Handke’s paternal side; this appears to me to be one of the
heaviest burdens on the psychological and moral development of the author Peter
Handke. The Kobals have nothing in common with the Germans, nor even anything
12 13
fundamental
in common with the Austrians. It is their privilege and sovereign right to be
the others, who take no part in the violence that stems from paternal fear and
spreads out across all of Europe. The ideal of human cohabitation, which can be
extrapolated from the passages where the family unity of the Kobals is
presented in a somewhat sunnier light, is that of a society in which fathers
play at most a diminished role. The mother’s dream, as reports the narrator,
would have been ‘to run a big hotel, with the staff as her subjects.’ The extensive
household of this dream, like the narratives inherent utopia, is of a clearly
matriarchal nature. In the narrator’s memory it also appears as though the
mother had spoken ‘with the voice of a judge,’ and the maxim that Filip Kobal
makes his own, after having apprenticed as a kind of day labourer for the old
woman who gives him shelter in the Karst, commands: ‘Get away from your
father.’ Whereas under a patriarchal order each feels as alone as the narrator
can’t help but feeling, under a matriarchal regime, in which relations are
woven more loosely and more extensively, each individual would almost be a
brother to the next. This can be seen in Filip Kobal’s encounters with
masculine figures in the ancient landscape of the Karst. Figures like the young
soldier Vipava, appearing to Kobal as his own doppelgänger, or the waiter from
the Bohinj, who Filip guesses to have been the child of a smallholder, like he
himself was. This waiter, whose portrait is drawn with great devotion, is a
veritable imago of the ideal of brotherhood. Brimming with constant
attentiveness, and only ‘seemingly lost in some far-away dream,’ he surveys, in
truth, ‘his whole realm.’
Handke’s shaping of the story of
the waiter from three or four sides belongs to the most beautiful passages of
the past decade of German-language literature. Deeply impressed by this
individual who embodies true civility – even giving a light to a drunkard with
utmost gravity – Filip Kobal thinks only of him the following day. He knows,
according to the narrator, that ‘it was a kind of love’ that draws him not into
contact with the waiter, but into proximity to him. The story takes a strange,
thoroughly remarkable turn with the silent meeting of the two young men –
wherein not a single word is exchanged – on the last day Filip Kobal spends in
the ‘Black Earth Hotel.’ On the way up to his room, around midnight, Filip
Kobal passes by the open door to the kitchen, and sees there ‘the waiter
sitting by a tub full of dishes, using a tablecloth to dry them. Later,’
continues the text, ‘when I looked out of my window, he was standing in his
shirtsleeves on the bridge across the torrent, holding a pile of dishes under
his right arm. With his left hand, he took one after another and with a smooth
graceful movement sent them sailing into the water like so many Frisbees.’ This
scene is simply recounted, without commentary, and left in its own right. Due
to this unquestioning representation, the figure of the waiter, finishing his
14 15
daily
work in the strangest way, impresses itself deeply on the reader’s mind. And
the plates sailing out into the darkness, like the no less beautiful sentences
describing arcs across a dark background, become dispatches of brotherhood.
Consoling dreams, in which a
lengthy procession of messianic figures emerge from the unredeemed world,
belong to the narrative tradition of exile literature. Even in the worst of
times, there must be a righteous person walking somewhere in one’s country. The
task is to recognize him. Different than the dogmatic Christian histories of
the Saviour – systematically suppressing hopes for redemption, which in turn
gradually grow virulent – the messianism of Jewish provenance, always ready to
see the hoped-for redeemer in each stranger or foreigner, contains not only
theological, but also political poten-tial. Even when the father has no idea of
‘the form the redemption of his family here on earth might take,’ this much is
nevertheless clear: that it must be a redemption taking place in the here and
now, as well as a redemption of an entire community. It is no coincidence that
the mythical ancestor of the family was an agitator. The rebellious
disposition, setting itself against all authority, determines the messianic
fantasy from the ground up – which doesn’t, however, imply that the figure of
the redeemer is established from this model. The redemptive figure of
messianism is characterized more by the ability to transform multifariously.
Due to his one-eyedness, Gregor, the older brother, having preceded Filip in
his journey to the other country, is the king among the blind of the exiled. As
the narrator informs us, Gregor ‘never actually became an insurrectionary,’
even though he often stood on the threshold of becoming so; yet in this he
embodies a certain type, which the narrator believes to have otherwise seen in
only a few children: namely, the pious. Necessitated by the war, the
disappearance of the son in whom the hopes of the Kobal family were kept alive
– for whom the favourite word ‘holy’ referred ‘not to the church, heaven, or
any other place outside the world,’ but rather with everyday life and getting
up early in the morning – the loss of this bearer of hope spells an almost
unbearable trauma for the exiled. Even ‘twenty years after my brother’s
disappearance,’ the narrator remembers, ‘our house was still a house of
mourning,’ in which the missing brother left his family ‘no peace; every day he
died again for them.’ From this unappeased and unappeasable mourning, the
otherwise independent parents develop communally the wishful dream of their
son’s return home. As the text recounts, the parents worship their missing son
ardently, each in his or her own way: ‘At news of his coming she would
immediately have prepared “his apartment,” scrubbed the threshold, and hung a
wreath over the front door, while my father would have borrowed the neighbour’s
white horse, harnessed it to the spit-and-polished barouche, and, 16 17
with
tears of joy running down his nose, driven to meet him.’
The strong self-assurance of the
exile is represented in the character of the Kobal family. In the future, the
mother is certain that ‘after our return home, our resurrection from a thousand
years of servitude,’ the village of Kobarid in the Isonzo Valley, from which,
according to lore, the Kobals originated, will be renamed Kobalid. Nothing
more is required for the messianic adjustment to the world than the tiny
displacement of a syllable. The fact that the village is called Karfreit in
German is a further symbol for the redemptory mission of the son [-freit: -freed], which would see the family’s
oppressed existence transform into a proud indomitability. According to their
family mythology, the Kobals are the designated representatives of the
Slovenian people, who like the Jews, the exemplary exilic race, ‘had been
kingless and stateless down through the centuries, a people of journeymen and
hired hands.’ As Filip walks among these people through Yugo-slavian streets,
he feels an anti-authoritarian power emanating from this anonymous populace,
who ‘had never set up a government of their own.’ ‘We children of darkness,’
the narrator states, counting himself as one of this group, ‘were radiant with
beauty, self-reliant, bold, rebellious, independent, each man of us the next
man’s hero.’ The exclusivity that the narrator ascribes to the Slovenian people
is a reflection of the changing consciousness of Filip Kobal, who, like Amalia
from Kafka’s The Castle, learns to bear
the imposed destiny of the exile as a mark of honour. One of the least
understood attributes of the Jewish diasporic people is the fact that, as
Hannah Arendt makes clear, ‘Jews neither knew what power really was – even when
they almost had it in their hands – nor were they especially interest-ed in
power.’ 4 Repetition makes similar claims about the Slovenian
people: that as a powerless people, ‘without aristocracy, without military
marches, without land,’ they remain uncorrupted, ‘their only king’ – again
almost like the Jews – ‘being the legendary hero who wandered about in
disguise, showing himself only briefly.’ It is clear that Filip Kobal, like his
brother before him, is expected to fill this role of the secret king. His messianic
disguise is that of the guest, entering the household anonymous, unsuspected.
The role was assigned to him early on by his mother and sister, who would set a
cup of tea before him upon his return home from school, with the obliging
attitude that becomes second nature to wo-men, as though he were ‘an unexpected
noble guest.’ And in his wanderings, the smallholder’s son, actually someone
with ‘no origins at all,’ becomes conscious of his enormous task. Similar to an
early version of the beginning of Kafka’s Castle, where the
prince’s chambers are prepared for the wanderer K. when he appears in the
village, Filip Kobal is offered a large room in the ‘Black Earth Hotel,’ ‘with
four beds, enough for a whole family.’ And evenings, 18 19
when
he sits in the hotel restaurant, ‘no one, not even the militia on its constant
rounds, asked me my name; everyone called me “the guest”.’ Filip, whose home
has become travel and transportation, already during his school years – and
who, wandering southwards with his blue sea bag and walking stick, moves
towards the fulfilment of his predestined role – is here, as the silent guest,
the one from whom redemption is expected. It takes a long time – a quarter
century – before the task he carried out at that time becomes, on repetition,
clear to him. At first he is simply looking for his brother. Significantly,
when he glimpses a vision of his brother in a sort of ancestral invocation, he
is unable to bear it. The hallucinatory apparition, with eyes set so deep that
their ‘white blindness remained hidden,’ completely overwhelms Filip, forcing
him to immediately leave the sight of the apparition, and to find rescue taking
up his own way in the stream of the passing crowd. In the messianic tradition,
it is not a matter of the separated falling into each other’s arms; more
important is that the effort be sustained, that the younger succeeds the elder,
the student becomes the teacher, and that the redemptory ‘pious wish’ – the
wish, expressed in one of Gregor’s letters from the front, to enter the Ninth
Country in the Easter vigil carriage – be given earthly fulfilment, ‘in
writing.’
The text of Repetition constitutes this fulfil-ment. The book is
the Easter vigil carriage, in which the separated members of the Kobal family
may sit together once more. The composition of the text is thus no profane
matter. From the outset, the storyteller is aware of the difficulty of the
task set before him. He remembers, significantly, how his mother, ‘whenever I
had been out of the house for any length of time, in town or alone in the woods
or out in the fields, assailed me with her “Tell me!”’; and how at that time,
before she fell ill, he never succeeded in telling her. We can assume, from the
fact that his mother’s illness helps him to overcome his narrative block, that
one of the principal tasks of storytelling is to soothe. One of the
requirements for the administration of such an artistic practice, so closely
related to that of medicine, is the readiness to stay awake through the night.
Already for the schoolboy Kobal, ‘the one lighted window in the teachers’
house’ – and not ‘the trembling little flame beside the altar’ – was the true,
eternal light, which would not let hopes for redemption be extinguished. In
Handke’s work, learning and teaching are ways of conserving the world. This is
exemplified in Repetition by his brother’s
notebooks, written in Slovenian and dealing primarily with the cultivation of
fruit, which Filip brings with him on his travels, and which become a textbook
for his approach to life. On the example of his brother’s writings, he realizes
that those ‘who, unlike the great mass of those who speak and write, had the
gift of bringing words and through them things to life,’ and who are prepared
to devote themselves unceasingly to this strange art, 20 21
are
able to produce a healing effect on others. The traceless disappearance of his
brother in the Second World War also symbolizes how cruelly circumstances
almost infallibly curtail that which, in a nicely worked out story, is laid out
as possibility. The narrator’s fear that he could similarly be snuffed out, as
his brother was before him, haunts his written-down memories as a feeling of
powerlessness. All the same, the temporal structure of his report shows us
that he has managed to survive for a good number of years. A quarter century
has passed since the young Filip Kobal found his inner storyteller. Looking
back, it becomes clear to the forty-five-year-old that, at the time, he would
not have been able to tell the story of homeland to anyone. It is a lengthy
process of gestation by which indifferent scraps of one’s own life transform
into thought-provoking images; and even when the ancient fragments seem to be
gathered into a sensible pat-tern, the storyteller is plagued by doubts, never
to be fully assuaged, as to whether what he holds in his hands are only a
matter of ‘the last remnants, left-overs, shards of something irretrievably
lost, which no artifice could put together again.’ The fact that, despite this
difficulty, and despite such scruples, Repetition
presents
us over and over with passages – like the one cited above, recounting the
waiter at night – which almost communicate a sense of levitation, seems to me
a mark of the exceptional quality of this story, whose secret ideal, so it
seems to me, is one of lightness. Not that the narrator is carefree or
lighthearted; but instead of talking about his burdens, he turns to his senses
in order to produce something that could help him and his reader – who may also
be in need of comfort – to resist the temptation of melancholy. The
professional role model chosen by Filip Kobal for his own narrative work is
that of the roadmender, who is responsible for the upkeep of the roads in the
area, and who, like the author in his hut, lives in a one-room house which
resembles the porter’s lodge of a manor – despite there being no such manor in
the vicinity. This road-mender, who, like the writer, carries out his laborious
work day after day, on occasion transforms suddenly into a sign-painter,
standing high upon a ladder outside the entrance to the inn at the centre of
the village. ‘As I watched him,’ recounts the narrator, ‘adding a shadowy line
to a finished letter with a strikingly slow brushstroke, aerating, as it were,
a thick letter with a few hair-thin lines, and then con-juring up the next
letter from the blank surface, as though it had been there all along and he was
only retracing it, I saw in this nascent script the emblem of a hidden,
nameless, all the more magnificent and above all unbounded kingdom.’ I don’t
know if the forced relation between hard drudgery and airy magic, particularly
significant for the literary art, has ever been more beautifully documented
than in the pages of Repetition describing the
roadmender and signpainter. It is also important that the work of this 22 23
man,
chosen by the narrator as his preceptor, is done outside: that it does not
place the landscape in a frame, as is otherwise the case with art, but instead
brings the landscape into alignment with itself. The extraordinary openness of
the text of Repetition arises from its
presentation of the external as something much more important than the
internal. Ac-cordingly, the model for the true place of the narrator, as Filip
Kobal realizes in hindsight, is the shed in his father’s field: ‘I’ve gone
directly to the fields from school, and I’m sitting there at the table with my
homework.’ This shed, as he now knows, was and is ‘the centre of the world,
where the storyteller sits in a cave no larger than a wayside shrine and tells
his story.’ The field shed the narrator has in mind here, like the sukkah of a
different tradition, is a place of rest on the journey through the desert, and
its peri-odic reconstruction, in a civilization which sets ever sharper limits
upon what is appropriate for human nature, is a ritual of remembrance for an
outdoor life. In Repetition, Handke allows
the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent
canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and
precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge
amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by
day. The book of the journey through the Karst, over which the infamous bora
wind blows, resembles thus the dolinas: sink-holes which lie beneath the wind,
islands of stillness, surrounded by trees, all bent at the same angle, where,
as the narrator reports, the stubbly grass hardly trembles, bean or potato
plants hardly sway, and on whose ground therefore, ‘without fear of one
another, the beasts of the Karst could assemble, a stocky little roe deer along
with a hare and a herd of wild pigs.’ To this image of peaceable unity,
animated by reference to the ark, is inscribed the hope that, despite prevalent
unfavourable conditions, something of our natural homeland may yet be saved.
1 By
1982, the list of secondary literature contained around two-hundred entries.
2
The stream of secondary literature has certainly not dried up in the eighties,
yet it relates what Handke has written in the past decade mostly to his earlier
writings. To this is added the fact that most of what is published on Handke’s
newer work is of a distinctly polemic character. For a long time now, there can
be no question of an objective study of one of the most important authors of
contemporary literature. [Cf. J. Lohmann, ‘Handke-Beschimpfung oder Der
Stillstand der Kritik,’ Tintenfaß H. 2, 1981.] Characteristic of the
increasing distanciation of literary schol-ars is Manfred Durzak’s Peter Handke und
die deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur, published in 1982. Clearly
unconvinced by the ideas developed by Handke in the three books of Slow Homecoming, Durzak criticizes the
roguishness, the lack of a connection to social reality, and in particular the
‘stylistic pointillism, which endlessly compiles details with no appa-rent
necessity, and misses the vision of a poetic image which brings all together.’
My translation; originally cited from N. Honsza (ed.), Zu Peter Handke –
Zwischen Experiment und Tradition (Stuttgart, 1982) p. 108.
3
Cf. B. Heinrichs, ‘Der Evangelimann. Glücksmärchen, Wanderpredigt, Lesefolter:
Die Wiederholung,’ Die Zeit, 3. X. 1986.
4 My
translation; originally cited from H. Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totalitärer
Herrschaft, Vol. 1: Antisemitismus (Frankfurt, Berlin,
Wien, 1975) p. 54.
Translated
from the German by Nathaniel Davis.
Typeset in Bradford Medium,
designed by Laurenz Brunner.
Originally published in Unheimliche Heimat under the title ‘Jenseits der
Grenze’ (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995, pp 162–178).
This
translation was commissioned and published by The Last Books on the occasion of
‘Postremo’, an event by Francesco Bernardelli on 25 February 2013, and prior to
the release of the third issue of Cannon Magazine – a complete reprint of Peter
Handke’s Repetition – in April 2013.
thelastbooks.org
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