HANDKE-SCHOLAR

2011-10-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

"Ein klarer Blick für das soziale Oben und Unten"

Evelyne Polt-Heinzl über ihren "schrägeren Blick" auf Handkes Werk, lebenslange Lese-Bindung und ihr Bedürfnis nach Diskretion.

Die Literaturwissenschaftlerin Evelyne Polt-Heinzl hat Peter Handkes Werk einer systematischen Relektüre unterzogen. In 23 Kapiteln spürt sie in "Peter Handke - In Gegenwelten unterwegs" seinen Erzählwelten nach und öffnet neue Zugänge - etwa zum bisher vernachlässigten Humor in Handkes Werk.

Was war Ihre Ausgangsthese?
EVELYNE POLT-HEINZL: Der Ausgangspunkt war der Eindruck, dass auf Handkes Bücher gerne mit einer ganz bestimmten, vielleicht ein wenig verkrampften Herangehensweise reagiert wird. Das Erdrückende seines umfangreichen Werks, sein eigener Anspruch der "Wahrhaftigkeit" und auch die irgendwie starre Ernsthaftigkeit als Person - das nimmt man leicht mit in den Lesevorgang. Ich wollte versuchen, sein Werk mit einem etwas schrägeren Blick neu anzusehen, um so vielleicht ungewohnte Perspektiven zu öffnen.
Eine eher neue Perspektive ist jene der Komik in Handkes Werk. Ganz blöd gefragt: Müssen Sie beim Lesen seiner Bücher tatsächlich lachen?
POLT-HEINZL: Sehr oft schon. Gerade in jenen Büchern, die Handke den Vorwurf des "Hohepriesters" und "Dichter-Künders" eingebracht haben - das begann 1979 mit "Langsame Heimkehr" -, macht er sich über diese Geste auch lustig, lässt sie immer wieder kippen und bringt sein verzweifeltes Bemühen, mit poetischen Mitteln der Welt, den Dingen und den Menschen Würde zu erschreiben, bedachtsam zur Kollision mit der prosaischen Wirklichkeit. Das enthält ein großes Potential an Slapstick-Komik, ähnlich wie bei Franz Kafka, und auch hier wurde das lange nicht wahrgenommen.
Sie beobachten in Handkes Werk einen kritischen Kommentar zu gesellschaftspolitischen Entwicklungen. Wo ist Ihnen das besonders aufgefallen?
POLT-HEINZL: Handke hat ein sehr feines Sensorium für die großen und kleinen Schräglagen unserer Gesellschaft. Und er hat einen klaren Blick für das soziale Oben und Unten, was von der Kritik selten bemerkt wurde. Eine persönliche Erfolgsgeschichte - zumal wenn sie so früh einsetzt wie bei Handke, von der "Publikumsbeschimpfung" 1966 bis zu "Wunschloses Unglück" 1972 -, bedeutet oft, dass die eigenen Anfänge in der Selbstpräsentation wegfallen. Handke hingegen hat beharrlich seine Herkunft aus dem sozialen Abseits zum Bezugspunkt gemacht, der bis heute seine Welt-Sicht prägt. Mit diesem Blick hat er immer wieder Dinge wahrgenommen, bevor sie als gesellschaftliches Problem ausformuliert waren. Sein Weg vom "Popliteraten" der Frühzeit zum poetischen Sinnsucher begann in einer Zeit, als Beschleunigung und Durchkapitalisierung unserer Gesellschaft noch ungebrochen als Fortschritt wahrgenommen wurden, das Unbehagen darüber kam erst später.
Sie haben sich quer durch Handkes Werk gelesen. Haben Sie selbst so etwas wie ein Lieblingswerk?
POLT-HEINZL: Überzeugte Handke-Leser, so würde ich einmal behaupten, haben prinzipiell keine Lieblingswerke. Wer Lesen als lebendigen Kommunikations-Akt versteht, für den ist im Verhältnis Buch/Leseralles in Bewegung. Man könnte es vielleicht anders herum formulieren: Wenn man ein umfangreiches Werk systematisch wieder liest, stellt sich leicht ein gewisser Überdruss ein. Das ist mir aber bei Handke an keinem Punkt passiert.
Im November bekommt Handke für sein Stück "Immer noch Sturm" den Nestroy. Haben Sie das Gefühl, dass er nach diversen Medienhetzen in den letzten Jahren etwas "rehabilitiert" wurde?
POLT-HEINZL: Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob das nicht einfach bestimmten Mediengesetzen folgt, etwa der Logik einer Premiere bei den Salzburger Festspielen. Fast könnte man darin eine späte Wiedergutmachung der radikalen Missverständnisse rund um Handkes erste Salzburger Premiere vor drei Jahrzehnten sehen: Das "dramatische Gedicht" "Über die Dörfer" wollte damals keiner als Fortsetzung der "Publikumsbeschimpfung" mit anderen Mitteln verstehen und als frühe Radikalkritik an der Zerstörung von Lebenswelt und Lebensqualität im Furor der Modernisierung.
Können Sie sich an Ihre erste Begegnung mit einem Text von Peter Handke erinnern?
POLT-HEINZL: Mein erster Handke war "Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter", und so wenig ich damals wohl verstanden haben werde, war mir doch klar, dass dieses Buch mit der Lektüre nicht "ausgelesen" ist. Jedenfalls war es der Beginn einer lebensbegleitenden Lese-Bindung.
Haben Sie Peter Handke persönlich kennengelernt?
POLT-HEINZL: Ich habe Peter Handke nie kennengelernt - und ein Vermittlungsangebot für eine Kontaktaufnahme abgelehnt. Ich bin eine Verehrerin seines Werks, habe aber persönlich und als Literaturwissenschaftlerin auch ein starkes und wohl unzeitgemäßes Bedürfnis nach Diskretion.

INTERVIEW: MARIANNE FISCHER

Evelyne Polt-Heinzl über ihren "schrägeren Blick" auf Handkes Werk

HANDKE ARCHIV SALZBURG

2011-08-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

Presseinformationen mit Pressefotos
der Universität Salzburg - Büro für Public Relations

09.08.11

Peter Handke und Salzburg – Eine literarische Spurensuche

Die Universität Salzburg widmet ihrem Ehrendoktor eine Ausstellung in der Edmundsburg am Mönchsberg.

Peter Handke lebte von 1979 bis 1987 in Salzburg. Auf die Beziehung zwischen Autor und Festspielstadt geht eine große Zahl literarischer Dokumente zurück.
Die beiden Literaturwissenschafter Manfred Mittermayer und Hildemar Holl haben Fotos und Manuskripte aus der Stiftung Salzburger Literaturarchiv, Aufführungsdokumente der Salzburger Festspiele sowie persönliche Leihgaben von Salzburger Freunden Peter Handkes zusammengestellt, um den Ausstellungsbesuchern besondere Aspekte der Salzburger Zeit des Autors näher zu bringen.

Bild oben: Ausstellungsort Edmundsburg
Bild unten: Rektor Heinrich Schmidinger (mitte) mit den
Kuratoren Manfred Mittermayer (l.) und Hildemar Holl.
Fotos: Universität Salzburg

Peter Handke und die Salzburger Festspiele

Hauptanlass der Ausstellung ist die Uraufführung des Handke-Stücks Immer noch Sturm bei den Salzburger Festspielen 2011. Zu diesem Stück sind Dokumente ausgestellt, die Handkes Arbeitsweise auf dem Weg zum fertigen Buch erhellen.
Szenenfotos und Entwürfe aus dem Festspielarchiv erinnern an vorangegangene Festspielproduktionen, darunter das „Dramatische Gedicht“ Über die Dörfer (1982) und die Übersetzung des Aischylos-Stücks Prometheus, gefesselt (1986 mit Bruno Ganz und Angela Winkler).

Salzburger Beziehungen, Salzburger Ehrungen
Handkes Salzburger Zeit ist durch eine Reihe persönlicher Beziehungen geprägt, die zum Teil bereits vorher bestanden und nicht zuletzt zu seiner Ansiedlung in Salzburg geführt haben. Das dokumentiert die Ausstellung mit literarischen Dokumenten aus privaten Sammlungen. Erinnert wird auch daran, dass eine Reihe wichtiger Handke-Bücher in Salzburger Verlagen (Residenz, Jung und Jung) erschienen sind.Salzburger Institutionen haben Handkes Bedeutung als Autor anerkannt, etwa durch den Literaturpreis des Kulturfonds der Landeshauptstadt Salzburg (1986) oder durch das Ehrendoktorat, das ihm die Universität Salzburg 2003 verlieh.

Peter Handkes Salzburger Jahre: reale Topographie wird literarische Landschaft
Während Handkes Salzburger Zeit entstanden einige seiner bekanntesten Werke. Manche Passagen in seinen Texten können als poetische Topographie der Stadt und ihrer Umgebung gelesen werden: Schauplätze sind etwa der Mönchsberg, die Getreidegasse, der Almkanal, Leopoldskron, der Flughafen oder Taxham.
In der Ausstellung wird am Beispiel der Erzählung Der Chinese des Schmerzesgezeigt, wie der Salzburger Aufenthalt in Handkes Schreiben ihren Niederschlag gefunden hat.

Manuskripte aus dem Salzburger Literaturarchiv

Peter Handke hat die Entwicklung des Salzburger Literaturarchivs stets mit Wohlwollen begleitet. Deshalb ließ er ihm auch durch die Jahre eine Reihe wertvoller Manuskripte zukommen.

Die Ausstellung zeigt eine kleine Auswahl dieser handschriftlichen Textfassungen, darunter der umstrittenen Essay Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien(1996), der zu Handkes zentralen Texten über den Krieg auf dem Balkan und die damit verbundene Medienberichterstattung gehört.

Ausstellung

10. bis 28. August 2011, täglich 14–16 Uhr, am 13., 14., 16., 18. und 19. August auch 18–19.30 Uhr (anlässlich der Veranstaltungsreihe „Jenseits der Grenze“, Salzburger Festspiele / Universität / Stefan Zweig Centre).

Ort:

Stefan Zweig Centre der Universität Salzburg, Edmundsburg

Mönchsberg 2, 5020 Salzburg

Kontakt:

Hildemar Holl

Fachbereich Germanistik der Universität Salzburg

0662 / 8044-4372

hildemar.holl@sbg.ac.at

Dr. Manfred Mittermayer

Fachbereich Germanistik der Universität Salzburg

0664 / 5222826

Manfred.mittermayer@sbg.ac.at

Wandel der Handke Rezeption? Wandel Handkes? nach und vor “Der Wende."

2011-06-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

Wandel der Handke Rezeption? Wandel Handkes? nach und vor “Der Wende."

Der Handke Empfang en gros, vom Anfang 1966 -Publikumsbeschimpfung, Die Hornissen – bis 2010/11 - Immer noch Sturm, Der Große Fall [1] - im allgemeinen, in Deutschland sowie in dem ausländischen Sprachgebiet, eine von zehn Besprechungen werden - er ist da kaum der einzige – ihm, den Werken - gerecht [2]. Die meisten Besprechungen sind selten mehr als Geräusche die auch den Autor interessieren könnten – das ist der Test, ist eine Rezension ein Gespräch mit dem Autor, denn nur dann lohnt sich eine Rezension auch für den Leser. En gros kommt es seltensterweise zu intelligentem Empfang, so daß der dann im Gedächtnis steckt: aber z.b. ein Kritiker im Cosmopolitan [Cosmo ! Hort, hört! ] hat In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus in der U.S.A.. verstanden, was der Handke Magier da macht! Außer in der Germanistik, wo es dann andersartige Unverständnisse gibt; aber auch schönes: besonders in den letzten zehn Jahren der beinahe unübersichtlich gewordenen Handke Sekundär Literatur - die den Rezensenten ein Dreck wert ist, sonst würden sie bemerken was sich auf überlegterem Niveau abspielt. [3] Momentan – Frühling 2011 – löst der Roman Der Grosse Fall nicht nur allgemein liebe sondern auch intelligente Geräusche aus [4]- aber der Groll den Handkes zwanzig Jahre langes pro-Serbisches Engagement hervorruf ist auch jetzt noch als der abflauende Donner in der Pastorale zu hören – das heißt: plötzlich hört’s sich an als ob das Gemetzel wieder neu anfängt. [5.] Und man sollte nie vergessen wie provokant Handke auf die Weltbühne getreten ist in Princeton 1966 – ich war dabei - und lange Jahre wurde immer wieder geschimpft; und wie er, wie er’s selbst nennt „im Bild bleibt;“ und das Handke ab Anfang gefundenes Fressen für die Medien: die gebrauchen ihn genau so wie er sie.

Trotz aller Entwickelungen Handke’s sich stolz nicht wiederholenden Werks ist beinah jede Erzählung oder Stück nicht nur eine beispielhafte Lösung eines künstlerischen Problems sondern auch ein besonderes Ereignis, happening, welches eine Antwort, mindestens ein so wahrhaft wie mögliches Echo oder Beschreibung dieses Erlebnisses erstens von der Rezeption und dann von den Lesern hervorrufen sollte, sei es nur ein Stöhnen. Ein dieser Ausrufe, von einer Chicago Theater Rezension des Ritt über den Bodensee steckt im Gedächtnis: „Just experience it.“ Daß Handke mit diesem wirklichen Spiel und seiner Stunde, vielleicht auch nur im nebenbei, Brechts Anliegen eine nicht-Aristotelische Katharsis zu schaffen auf positivistische aktivistische Art gelingt, geht einem Brechtianer erst auf wenn er sich Gedanken macht um wenigstens sich selbst zu vergewissern, daß die Aufführung dieser Stücke – die Erzählungen auch -geistigen Zustände verwanden [6]. Daß Handke sich nicht wiederholt, also nicht kategorisch abgehandelt werden kann, macht’s schwer für Rezensenten. Ausnahmen gab’s ganz am Anfang: Verständiß für das Dekonstrurierende in den Hornissen, und zwar in der F.A.Z. die ihm später sehr zusetzte, insbesonders der von Handke früh persiflierte Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Humorlos, sucht dieser jahrelang Handke Werke zu zerstören , was Handke ihm dann in noch böserer Münze heimzahlt [7]. Hier in der U.S.A. gab es Richard Gilmans sofortige Einordnung Handkes in die Masters of Modern Drama , ein Essay das darunter leidet daß Gilman die Stücke, als er es schrieb, nicht aufgeführt erlebt hat. Es dauerte bis Handke Dramen, ab 1982, Über die Dörfer , selten aufgeführt wurden und er diese auch als Lesedramen schrieb. Auch einige Sammelrezensionen im englischen Sprachraum, anfangs, von Frank Kermode und William Wood, in der New York Review of Books waren mehr als brav. Aber in all den 40 Jahren seit Handke in der U.S.A. verlegt wird gibt es nur eine Rezension eines ihm ebenbürtigen, von William Gass, über die Niemandsbucht [ One Year in the No-Man’s-Bay]. [8] Die Wiederholung [The Repetition] bekam eine ausgezeichnete Rezension im Guardian, aber dann landen wir bald in den 90zieger Jahren, nach der “Wende,” als Handke sich auf seine Art gegen die einseitige Verteufelung der Serben wendet. Dann wird er ununterschiedlich mit allem Dreck der Welt verunglimpft, und da er sich auch in den Kosovo Krieg einmischt und dann später noch in das Milošević Gericht und bei dessen Begräbnis in Pogarovic eine Rede hält, gibt’s bis jetzt eine dreimalige Wiederholung des Donnergrolls , z.b. das Neue Deutschland, damals und jetzt als PDS-fördernde Zeitung, Handkes Vorgehen aus sozialistischer Richtung befürwortet. Ditto andere Organe selber Provenance in allen Sprachbereichen. Also ist diese Debatte aus der Sicht verschiedenen Interessen geführt worden.

Auf Anhieb ist Peter Handkes Werk noch seine Rezeption aber mit dem Wandel nach “der Wende” nach dem Abbruch der Berliner Mauer und der Wiedervereinigung in Zusammenhang zu bringen, jedenfalls nicht oberflächlich, mit dem gemeinen ‘allgemeinen Geist’, und wie der sich da niederschlägt, rieselt. Überlegt man sich die Chose , dann aber vielleicht doch, und zwar mit zwei Schachzügen, den eines Springers, also um einige Ecken, “catty-corner” wie man auf Amerikanisch sagt, herum - aber auch ohne Katzensprünge landet man in Berlin, eine wichtige Stadt für die Handke Biographie. Als die Mauer niedergerissen, 1989, war Handke in Soria, Spanien, und schrieb an dem zweiten der Drei Versuche [9], dem über die Jukebox. Jukebox [1991] enthält glaube ich eine Anspielung auf die historischen Vorgänge [ob ich die noch finde?]. Berlin ist für die Handke Biographie bedeutungsvoll nicht nur weil er den Wim Wenders Film Himmel über Berlin Texte zugesteurt hat und dort die Mauer eine Rolle spielt, sondern weil in Berlin das Verhältnis zu der Mutter Maria Sivec 1944 tief gestört wurde als Maria, der Slowenischen Minorität angehörige Kärntenerin, von Griffen, Kärnten nach Berlin reist zu ihrem verwundeten Mann, dem Deutschen Wehrmachts Gefreiten Bruno Handke, Handkes Stiefvater, den er aber lange Zeit als eigentlichen Vater empfand; das zwei Jahre alte Liebeskind, wird ab dann vorbildlichen Schlägereien und Vergewaltigung seiner Mutter ausgesetzt. Handkes leiblicher Vater, ein Herr Schönherr, Thüringer, beide - Vater und Stiefvater - waren in Handkes Geburtsort, Griffen, Kärnten, 1942 als Deutsche Soldaten stationiert. Also, wenn Handke schreibt - “mir ist etwas passiert” - was mich lange auf ein Geburtstrauma tippen ließ [10] – denke ich nicht nur an die Bomben-Hornissen, die da kindlichen Qual und Erschrecken auslösten - Anfang der Wut, des dreimal am Tag Amoklaufen möchten, die die „Jukebox Musik“ später lindern wird - sondern daran daß das Liebekind ab seinem zweiten Jahr den Kämpfen zwichen der vergewaltigten Mutter und dem Schläger Stiefvater Bruno Handke, ausgesetzt gewesen ist, zehn Jahre lang, das genügt beinahe einen Stein zu traumatisieren.
In den frühen 60ziger Jahren lebt Handke in Berlin mit seiner ersten Frau, der Schauspielerin Libgart Schwarz, dort hat auch seine erste Tochter, Amina, ihren ersten Atem Berliner Luft geschnappt, und dort haben die 68zieger versucht Handke für ihre Sache zu gewinnen, aber kein Aug übrig für das Kind. [11] Also, vielleicht gibt’s da Notizen in den an das Marbacher und Wiener Literatur Archiv verkauften Tagebüchern was Handke zu diesen historischen Ereignissen einfällt, vielleicht wie mir, daß den Bananenfreßern, anstatt drei Bananen an die Nase, eine anderer Art ihnen in ein anderes Loch gesteckt wurde. Die Armen die dann an DDR Nostalgie leiden würden. Würfel der Geschichte! Aber daß Handke die Heldin seines 2003 Romans Bildverlust - die Bankierin Personae für Handkes Erleben und Phantasieren - die “Sorben”, eine Sklavischen Minorität in Sachsen - in dem Roman aufkommen lässt: als Östreicher wäre es ihm kaum schwer gefallen mit denen noch vor der Wiedervereinigung Bekanntschaft aufzunehmen. Trotzdem, nehme ich an, hat das Verhältnis zu den Sorben eher mit Handkes Pro-Serbischer Haltung nach dem Zerfall Jugoslawiens zu tun, also mit der ziemlich ewigen Verhunzung alles Serbischen. Und da treffen Handkes Sklavische Vorfahren [der Name Handke stammt aus dem Polnischen] und die meinen aufeinander - zu der Zeit der Merowinger als die Alvenslebens in Sachsen-Anhalt als Grenzschutz angesiedelt wurden. Beweise mir jemand, daß das nicht der Fall war!

Was Katzen angeht die da schachzughaft um Ecken springen: Diese wären eine emphatischere Betonung nach der “Wende” als noch vorher des “Menschenrechtlichen.” Per Handke gibt’s “Menschlichkeitrechts Hyenen”, meine Ansicht nach ist das überhaupt der die heikle Auschwitz Punkt/ Linse die da brennt, überall, und mehr oder minder sich selbstgerecht aufbäumt instrumentalisiert geworden ist, die Milch menschlicher Güte die sich in Paul Celans “Schwarze Milch” verwandelt hat, vom Fernsehen, den Zeitungen sowie Regierungen und Gerichten, dem Literaturbetrieb die auch den Empfang Handkes trotzigen Essays, Reiseberichterstattungen über und ab des Zerfalls seines so-genannten “neunten Landes” begleiten. Angefangen mit Abschied des Träumers vom Neunten Land [1991 - (12)]– Slowenien – hat sich dieses Friedensland für Handke auf eine Jugoslawische Einheit ausgedehnt. Diese Ausdehnung ist wohl auf Handkes Großvater Sivec zurückzuführen der schon 1919 die erste Jugoslawische Föderation wählte als gewünschte Nachfolge zu der kaputten K.u.K. Aber wer paßt so genau auf die Handke Metamorphosen auf daß er sich erinnert daß Handke in der Wiederholung [die im letzten Satz des Wunschlosen Unglücks versprochene Wiederholung] sich vom Slowenischen Großvater Sivec ein Vaterbild gezimmert, verinnerlicht hat – der Otolith des Erzkonservativen! - und ein Slowenisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch - so daß ich ganz froh war daß Handkes Deutschen Hass und Östreich Ekel sich vielleicht legen würde. “T’ja, Handke ist also jetzt Slowene,” entschied ich mich als ich Die Wiederholung 1987 las. Und da verwandelt sich der Bursche nach einen halb Dutzend Jahren in einen Jugoslawischen Nationalisten! Der reinste Wahn in einer solchen seit Jahrtausenden blutgetränken Landschaft sich ein „neuntes Land” zu erträumen; woraufhin man sich vielleicht erinnert daß Handkes Protagonist Sorger sogar nach Friedenszeichen in den Geologie von Alaska sucht, sich sehnt, wo dann ein Kette-schleudernder Indianer auftaucht [in Handkes Werk taucht Gewalt oft plötzlich auf]: bedenkt man, daß Handke gewalttätig, leicht irritiert, überempfindlich, von Geburt an depressiv, drei mal am Tag amokleifen möchte – dieser Drang, diese tiefe Sehnsucht – suchen und sehnen - friedliches zu finden, wenn auch nur beim flanieren in der Natur, beim Schreiben: welcher Psychotiker macht das schon? Ein produktiver Konflikt, jedenfalls für die Literatur. Der wahnwitzige Wunsch Jugoslawien in ein Land des Friedens zu verwandeln wird damit, mindestens mir, verständlich. (13), und wo man sucht da findet man, und besonders Handke, auch Zonen des Friedens, sowie es auch im 2ten Welt Krieg diese Zonen gab. Daß Handke aber dort Friedliches findet wo die allermeisten nur die Pornographie des Gewalttätigen berichterstattet haben möchten, ist der Zündstoff für einen Ausbruch des psychotischen Kerns der Menschheit. Das große Karthago war zwar nach seinem dritten Krieg nicht mehr aufzufinden, Peter Handke, nach seinem dritten Media Gefecht nach dem Begräbnis von Milosevic aber um so mehr!

Der andere „springende Punkt“ wäre der sich verbreitenden Ekel an dem in Osteuropa misslungenen, ausgehöhltem korrupten Sozialismus – beide Katzentatzen übten einen alles anderes als weichen Druck auf den Empfang auf Handkes ekel-erregende Position in der Jugoslawien Angelegenheit, bäumten sich selbst-gerecht als er nicht in die selbe Propaganda Kerbe hieb . Wir erinnern uns aber auch an des Dichters mächtige geile Formulierung, in Wien: “Steckt euch eure Betroffenheit in den Arsch.” [oder waren es sogar die Leichen die man da stecken sollte?] und daß er die NATO Bombenangriffe auf Belgrad 1999 mit Auschwitz verglich, ein schnellstens zurückgezogener Vergleich der aber den Schmerz Handkes an der Zerstörung seines “Neunten Landes” mit der unvergleichbaren Authentizität des Schmerzes besiegelt. Da gaukelte Handke nicht wie die von ihm einmal verhassten Fernseh- Politiker: “Die Politiker, die ich bis jetzt erlebt habe (in Fleisch und Blut) erschienen mir fleischlos und blutleer, im Brustton gespielter Überzeugung quäkende Puppen.” [14]; und da kokettiert Handke auch nicht wie er’s oft mit hilflosen Interviewern tut.

Als die Mauer niedergerissen, 1989, war Handke in Soria, Spanien, auf Suche nach einer alten Jukebox, in der er, metaphorisch gesprochen, den jugendlichen Kopf steckte um nicht mehr entweder an Tobsucht oder Müdigkeit oder Ekel in Begleitschaft der Eltern zu leiden. Sein 1987 erschienener Versuch über die Müdigkeit - der schwächste der drei - Fraß für psychoanalytisch geschulte Biographen - kam gut an in Deutschland; die - am konkretesten dargestellte der drei - die Suche nach der Jukebox, noch besser, schnellstens nicht nur vom Rezensenten Gesindel gepriesen - hier dann von keinem einzigen [15] - sondern auch von der Germanisten Zunft schön abgehandelt, z.b. Daniel Guttman . Der dritte Versuch, über die “Linie der Schönheit” - welche die Wunde am besten lindert und als “Lockvogel” für den Dichter von Gefahr sein kann [und er für sie]... Nein! Versuch über den geglückten Tag heißt das Essay! Die “Linie” wird erwähnt im Zusammenhang mit Hogarths Bild davon - war schon so virtuos, man kann behaupten, daß Handke sich wahrlich auf den größten seiner Versuche, das Niemandsbuch(t) [1993] Gewebe eingespielt hat. [16] Das Versprechen der Fantasien der Wiederholung [1987] sich bewusst zu verirren, war eingelöst, löste reichhaltige Erdzählweisen aus, und zwar parallel zu den Eingriffen in die Jugoslawien Misere die selbst insgesamt aus sechs Werken, mitsamt einem großen Stück. Diese alle bleiben nicht immer getrennt voneinander : schöne Beschreibungen von Hornissen Bombern im Del Gredos [2003], Wanderungen in Jugoslawien im Jahr in der Niemandsbucht; eine großartig wütende Kosovo Fahrt in Morawischer Nacht [2007]. Die Tagebuch Auswahl Am Felsfenster Morgens [1982-87] erwähnt wie „kalt“ es geworden ist bei Handkes Wanderungen durch Jugoslawien. Gestern unterwegs [Aufzeichnungen November 1987 bis Juli 1990] handelt von Handkes Reise rund um die Welt. In Niemandsbucht [1994-(16)] wird ein Krieg Deutscher gegen Deutsche erwähnt, spielt im Hintergrund, und muß man dann deuten, vieldeutig gedeutet werden kann. Dieses Kriegs Thema durchzieht und wird um einiges konkreter - auch Handkes nach öffentlicher Darstellung drängen [„Bleib im Bild“] - in Jugoslawien und Jugoslawien-Ersatz, Spanien; durchzieht, durch Anspielungen, Kleinaufnahmen oder sehr direkt, die folgenden Romane [17] -bis zu dem 2011 erschienenen Der Große Fall [“Der Blitzmoment, der die Erkenntnis des Irrtums begleitete, hätte den Blick geschärft, und die Irrtumsgegenstände würden zu Neuigkeiten, unbekannten, bisher jedenfalls nicht so gesehenen.” Morawische Nacht [2007] enthält Handkes phantasierte Begegnung mit dem Amerikanischen ex-Justiz Minister Ramsey Clark in einer Dominenmulde in dem Karst Grenzbereich Kärnten-Slowenien. Dem bin ich auch begegnet, aber nicht wie Handke in Scheveningen bei dem Milošević Gerichtsverfahren, sondern bei dem P.E.N. Club in New York, zusammen mit dem Handke so verhassten Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Ramsey Clark befindet sich in der Roman Mulde im Jahre 2027 [!] so stur und trotzig wie Handke nach Gerechtigkeit für Serbien und Milošević fordernd wie ich nach Gerechtigkeit für mich! Handke Gegner sind genau so stur; z.b. die jetzige ausgezeichnete Amerikanische Übersetzerin seiner Prosa, Krishna Winston, will auch sich gar nicht unterhalten über ihre feste Meinung, daß Handke da falsch gehandelt hat. Fest im Glauben, fest in der Ideologie schreien meine heiß geliebten coyotes in den Schluchten wenn ihnen der high desert zu heiß und sie in die Berge ziehen und lachen uns in unserem in die Canyonwand gebautes Schlafzimmer aus. Auch das objektive Stück Die Fahrt im Einbaum [1994] – objektiv im Vergleich mit Innenwelt/ Außenwelt Projektionen von Handkes Reiseberichten - fiel der Meute zum Opfer, die wohl wenn sie nicht an Gott glaubt, alle glauben ans Fernsehehen, und die, die sich selbstgerecht Betroffen fühlten, verzeihen Handkes Verpöbelung ihrer Gefühle kaum, und daß er nicht in die selbe genügsame Kerbe hieb die die Medien den Freiwilligen eingebläut hatten, und er wurde, besonders in Frankreich – die dortige einseitige Jugoslavien Berichterstattungen waren es die ihn zu seiner ersten Fahrt besonderen Antrieb gaben - der Scotomie, des Verneinens von Srebrenica beschuldigt [18]. Das kam mir besonders komisch vor in dieser ewig Breughelschen Landschaft, denn Handke war diesen Untats Ort zehn mal anwesend und sein Surrogat schreit dort “ich will nie wieder Serbe sein!" [‘Wer hat eigentlich Handke gebeten sich als Serbe zu identifizieren,’ viel mir dabei ein, sollte der sich nicht eigentlich um näherliegendes kümmern? Als da mit einer Amateur Mannschaft auch noch auf Heiratsreise zu sein? (19)]. Handke ist sich [manchmal] seiner Tendenz zu verneinen und zu verschönern und Schuld-zu-unterdrücken und selbstgerecht zu sein immerhin bewußt [vide Die Tablas des Damiel ]. Der dann dafür alle Handke Sachen beschimpfende noch selbstgerechtere Hubert Spiegel in der F.A.Z. vernichtet Handke noch jahrelang danach, alles; die Zeit Füllotinistin Iris Radisch entpuppt sich auch als ausgezeichnete Menschenrechts Hyene. Noch 2010 warnt ein Professor Brockhof in der F.A.Z., zum Jahrestag des Srebrenica Massakers [20], vor der Gefahr die Handke Texte ausüben könnten, Die Kuckucke von Velica Hoca, Handkes Beweis, daß er , beschuldigt nicht bericherstatten zu können, es besser als alle andere kann! Also wer hat da nen Kuckuck im Kopf und nicht nur im Gebüsch wenn jemand denkt Handkes Texte seien auf diese Weise gefährlich? Ein bisschen rütteln an der Propaganda Facade und sie bricht zusammen? Genau wie damals in den 90ziger Jahren in der N.Y.R.B. J.L. Marcus [21] nicht nur Anstoß nimmt an Handkes Verteidigung der Serben aber deswegen das ganze Werk gefährlich findet ohne auch nur eine Spur von Verständnis woraus das Werk besteht. Wie all Redakteure dieser Zeitschriften, lassen weder Robert Silvers [N.Y.R.B.], Sam Tannenhaus [New York Times Book Review] oder Marty Peretz [New Republic] u.a. einen Leserbrief zu. Rufmord! Die Verpöbelung Handkes in der USA, angefangen mit Susan Sontags Spruch “Handke is finished here” - die einst von mir heiß-geliebte Susan hatte sich in Sarajevo in Gefahr begeben, ihre Authentizitätsausweis erworben, zückte ihn - Touristen des Autenthiszismus! - in der Heimat zurückgekehrt, in dem sie “vor den Kugel Schutz suchen” spielte. Salmon Rushdie, auch einer der bis 1993 nicht das geringste Verhältnis zu diesem Landstrich hatte, nannte Handke den Idiot des Jahres. Man kann Handke zwar als „Idiot Savant“ bezeichnen, der mit wirklichen Idioten sich viel und oft Verwandtschaft fühlt, als autistischen [22] überempfindlichen mehr als genialen Künstler, aber nicht in der Hinsicht des ihm bekannten Jugoslawien. Diese Misere wird dann wiedergekäut bis zum niedrigsten Rang des Betriebs [23] und es ist bemerkenswert, daß in der U.S.A. sowie in Deutschland in dieser Hinsicht besonders die kriegswilligen Right Wing “think tanks”, die “American Interest” und „Weekly Standard“ Werke wie Del Gredos des Skandolons wegen als Schund bezeichnen, daß er einmal was von Robbe-Grillet gelernt hat wird gegen ihn angewendet von Leuten die unbeeinflussbar sind, und nur wegen seiner Haltung zu den Jugoslawien Kriegen. Handke hat den Schwanz der Menschlichkeitrechts Hyene gekniffen, die wohl auf was in ihr alles steckt und was man mit ihr machen kann seziert werden sollte: wahrlich ein höchst explosiver Kern diese Mischung aus Identität, Nationalismus und Selbstgerechtigkeit! Den Kriegsmachern kümmerts nicht einen ökonomischen Krieg zu führen, da kann sich die Hyene die Kehle wund schreien [Passiert unmetaphorisch aber nie!] aber wenn eine fragile Konstellation wie die 2te Jugoslawische die Stämme auf Nationalistisches und Religiöses setzen während der ökonomische Grund unter ihren Füßen zerbricht, und da dann Demagogen und “Independent Operators” aller Art auftauchen, dann darf die Hyene plötzlich kreischen, besonders im Fernsehen und den Zeitungen. Daß wusste ich auf Anhieb als Jugoslawien anfing zu zerbrechen! NEIN, nicht im geringsten, nischt wusste ich: warum der Zerfall, und warum Handke, aus verschiedenen Gründen, seinen Minoritäts Standpunkt verteidigte, über diese äußerst hitzige Angelegenheit, habe ich mir den Kopf lang zerbrochen und einige ungeheuer vorsichtig tastende Versuche geschrieben, und hab Zeit gehabt diese mühsamen Themen langsam zu durch-forschen, besonders was Handke und sein Werk betrifft, wodurch ich dann auf vieles anderes aufmerksam wurde und mir dann darüber Gedanken machte.

Handkes Anliegen, seine Gründe, die Serben auf seine eigenartige Weise zu verteidigen – zuerst war ich eher skeptisch, der Handke, der da in die Öffentlichkeit loslegt war mir suspekt als Exhibitionist – “Na, was hat der so ruhige Schreiber aber Halslaute diesmal vor um alle Aufmerksamkeit auf sich zu lenken?” Aber wenn Handkes Motive auch nach dieser langen Zeit mir nicht als vollkommen lautere erscheinen, bin ich wirklich glücklich daß er dies gemacht hat. Es hätte leicht anders kommen können: z.b. eine Größe wie Jürgen Habermas [24] hätte seinen Marx nicht vergessen und wäre nicht auf seine eigene bürokratische Art zu den Hyenen übergelaufen. Wer versteht den lakonischen Handke schon wenn er z.b. einen Stein wütend über die Drina schlittert als er von den Leichen hört die da runter geflossen? [25] oder der den “Jugoslawischen Tank Kommunismus” nur erwähnt? [26] Habermas hätte die Zusammenhänge uns sauber öffentlich und überzeugend darstellen können in der Sprache der Politischen Ökonomie die scheinbar verständlichere [!] Münze, der hat da wohl auch mehr als schwer geschlafen. Auch der H.M. Enzensberger, der die KLA bewaffnen möchte zu einem Zeitpunkt als Frau “Ganzhell” [wie Handke Frau Körbel in Morawischer Nacht nennt, die ihre Jüdische Herkunft in Vergessenheit geraten ließ , U.S. Foreign Secretary Madelaine Albright, wohl nicht Handkes gelungenster Witz!], schon längst mit Raketen-Zähnen ausgestattet hatte, wird von Handke daraufhin beschimpft, [24] grundlos, aus überschnappendem Neid, un act gratuit wie so viele [27] : Schmutzfink Handke beschimpft Präsident Clinton als Schmutzfinken; es regnet gegenseitige Projektionen wie man solche nur in Wut von sich gibt. Peter Schneider schnallt sich die Hose extra scharf an beim schreiben, Handke extra-locker, Handke spricht Habermas das Philosophentum ab, Susan Sontag fertigt Handke ab, und wir befinden uns in dem Dickicht der Gräuel - dieses nur einige Höhepunkte des literarischem Gemetzels, das Gegenstück zu dem leiblichen in dem zerfallenen Landstrich wo besonders die Amerikaner viele Stämme dann bewaffneten. Und ich denke an den schönen Satz aus Der Fahrt im Einbaum über die Medien “Ihr macht uns alle schlechter als wir es sind“, und an meine Verwandtschaft mit General Sturm von Bordwehr als er das ideologische Schlachtfeld besichtigte - einige der blutigen Leichen zucken immer noch! [28]

Für mich dauerte es ein wenig bis ich mich in der Propaganda Lawinen Luft schnappte. Das hat bei mir etwas gedauert da ich drei Jahre der frühen 90ziger Jahre in Mexiko auf dem Zeitatem des 17ten Jahrhundert lebte, bis mir was Handke da machte und warum, und die Kontroverse und die Machthebel die da schon in den 80ziger Jahren geschaltet wurden um an der ökonomische Basis der schwerfälligen aber fragilen Osteuropäischen Staaten zu rütteln, etwas klarer wurden, , der ausgehöhlte Sozialismus und seine zentral-geleitete Wirtschaft, auch wenn das viel liberaler in der Jugoslawischen Föderation war; der Einfluss des Neo-Liberalismus und der Globalisierung , die Identität Sucht der Stämme, ihrer Kulturen, Religionen um den ein Vakuum hinterlassenden zerbröckelndes Osteuropäischen Sozialismus auszufüllen; daß er überall Demagogen und Mörder gibt. - Eine Kaspar Geschichte ‘en gros.’ Weswegen ich Antwort auf mehrere Fragen suchte : [a]-Handke, warum?; [b] was ist da wirklich passiert und warum & [c] inwiefern, wenn überhaupt, haben diese Beschaffenheiten miteinander zu tun – und die hundertfachen Nebenfragen die dann beantwortet und halbwegs richtig formuliert werden müssen. Aber der schärfste und den Dichter am tiefsten treffende Angriff stammt pro domo, von Handkes einstiegen ehemaligen, in den 80ziger Jahren in Salzburg, Gefährtin, der Schauspielerin Marie Colbin, die, wie auch ich, die selben Vorbehalte zu Characterologischem des vom Bruno Handke verhexten Peter hat [29], und diese treffend äußert, und das hat nischt mit der Wende noch der Mauer zu tun, auch nicht daß Marie Colbin sich mit Handke in Berlin in den 80zigern verkuppeln ließ; und dann trotzdem oder deswegen weil Handke sie so verdroschen [30], ihn in Salzburg aber jahrelang und bis jetzt noch verfolgt und bis in diesen 2007 Roman Morawische Nacht hinein, so daß man denkt vielleicht lügt der Dichter gar nicht, hat nur keinen Schlüssel gehabt um die Colbin sich vom Leib zu halten, auszuschließen.

Des ehemaligen “Bewohners des Elfenbeinturms” [31] wider erwarten Engagement in Tagespolitik wurde und wird immer noch begleitet von engem Kontakt mit Größen in diesem Bereich, Milošević, Karadics, Östreich Präsidenten und Minister aller Art, Milošević Begräbnis, öffentlich photographiert werden, Hände schütteln des nationalistischen der Serbischen Präsidentschaft Kandidaten, eine jetzt schon angewohnte Art im „Bild zu bleiben“ und auch bald in der Bild Zeitung, [32] macht auch nichts aus, beeinträchtigt seine Kunstfergikeit nicht im geringsten, schadet ihm wahrscheinlich ein bißerl bei dem Nobel Preis, die das übersehen sollten bei so einem Idiot-Savant, dessen Werke von ungeheuerlichem Wert sind für den Logos und das Lesen. Denn wenn die da sich alle Raufen kann man sich wenigstens in die ruhige, Freude- und Friedenstiftende [33] Magie der Prosa von Peter Handke flüchten.

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1] Die Links zu den Verlagen Suhrkamp, Jung & Jung benachrichtigen über alle Handke Werke, auch die nach diesem Versuch verlegten.

http://www.suhrkamp.de/autoren/peter_handke_1738.html http://jungundjung.at/content.php?id=3&a_id=19&ag=d

2] http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html  & http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html  und insbesonders die je drei Handkeprosa.scriptmania & Handke.drama.scriptmania Sites sowie http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-revista-of.html sind die Eingänge zu einer reichhaltigen Sammlung Deutscher, Englischsprachiger, Französischer, Spanischer, usw.. Rezensionen und wissenschaftlicher Beiträge

3] Herausragend find ich die Handke Arbeiten von Fabjan Haffner, Hans Höller, Volker Michels, Georg Pichler, Karl Wagner. Auch andere waren mir wichtig, besonders solche die literarische Hintergründe erläuetern.

4] eine Sammlung der meisten Deutschen Rezensionen von Der Große Fall  gibt‘s hier: http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html

5]  http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/links-page-for-pages-of-this-blog.html enthält ein große Sammlung zu dem Thema Handke & Jugoslawien.

6] vide: http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/ zu Ausführungen dieser These.

7] vide: Die Lehre der St. Victoire, die Beschreibung der Dogge auf der Piste. Ich als Reichs-Ranicki hätte Handke geschrieben: „Wenn sie mir vormachen wie ich dreimal in der Woche ‘ne neue Art zu rezensieren finde, teile ich die Tantiemen.“ Malte Herwigs Biographie Der Meister der Dämmerung enthält einen wütenden Verabschiedungsbrief Handkes an Siegfried Unseld als dieser Reich-Ranicki verlegt, wonach Handke sich aber mit dem fait accompli abgefunden hat. Die Niemansbucht enthält auch Wutausbrüche über Unseld in dieser Beziehung.

8] vide: http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/william-gass-review-ofmy-year-in-no.html

9] Die Drei Versuche http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/essay-on-juke-box-daniel-gutmann-etc.html

 10] Haslinger, Die Jugend eines Schriftstellers enthält den Hebammen Bericht der eine gewöhnliche Geburt Handkes schildert, was ein nicht-offenbares Geburtstrauma nicht ausschließt, aber eher unwahrscheinlich macht da die Bomben und die Bomberei im Schlafzimmmer mehr als genügen  Handkes Traumata auszulösen, besonders wenn man diesem ein Jahrzehnt lang ausgesetzt ist.  Vide:  “Wounded Love Child: Peter Handke” at: http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

11] vide: Kindergeschichte [1980]

12] Handkes Schrifttum zu Jugoslawien besteht aus folgendem: [1] Abschied des Träumers vom Neunten Land - Eine Wirklichkeit, die vergangen ist: Erinnerung an Slowenien [1991]; [2] Eine Fahrt an die Flüsse.. (Gerechtigkeit für Serbien) 1994; [3] Sommerlicher Nachtrag 1995; [4] Unter Tränen fragend [1999]; [5] Die Fahrt im Einbaum: Oder das Spiel zum Film über den Krieg [2001]; [6] Rund um das Tribunal [2005]; Die Tablas des Daimiel [2007] vide: http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/lead-page-periodically-updated_10.html zu einer Sammlung von Jugoslawien/ Handke betreffendes Material, darunter Interviews, etc.; und Link zu Daimiel. Es gibt auch ein Interview Buch vom Wieser Verlag: “Nochmals zum Neunten Land.” Außerdem ist ein Beitrag von Lothar Struck im Begriff zu erscheinen, der sicherlich lesenswert sein wird, und eine kleine Bibliothek von Artikeln über das heikle Thema.

13] Auch Handkes Tagebücher und die drei Bände der gedruckten Auszüge, nicht nur die Interviews, Gedichte und Romane erwähnen seinen Impuls Amok zu laufen. Libgart Schwarz, Malte Herwig gegenüber [22], erwähnt das plötzliche Ausbrechen von Handkes Wut. Der Große Fall – 2011 – hat einen Protagonisten der einen Amokläufer in einem Film spielen soll.

14] Das Gewicht der Welt [1974]. “Die Politiker, die ich bis jetzt erlebt habe (in Fleisch und Blut) erschienen mir fleischlos und blutleer, im Brustton gespielter Überzeugung quäkende Puppen; in immer währender, gestikulierender, lippenbewegender Kommunikation befangen wie Debile, der Mund und die Augen vom permanenten Vortäuschen von Aufmerksamkeit für immer zu schiefen Parallelogrammen verkrüppelt, von Leibwächtern grundiert, deren stumpflauernde Teilnahmslosigkeit eher an Irrenwärter denken ließ, während die von ihnen Beaufsichtigten weiterhin der frechen Beteuerung ihrer wohlwollenden Offenheit nachkamen, vom Selbstmord so unendlich weit entfernt.”

15] Man muß sich, z.b. nur die Rezensionen von Benjamin Weissman [L.A. Times Book Review], Margot Jefferson, [N.Y. Times], Sven Birkett [New York Times Sunday Book Review] lesen um zu sehen was für Unverständnis die Sammlung Three Essays im Amerikanischen Sprachraum hinterließ. Das selbe ist der Fall für den Empfang vieler Texte, auch des 2010 auf Englisch verlegten Don Juan (as told by himself). http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/07/catastrophic-handke-reception-in-united.html

16] Niemansbuch[t], welchem auch der Hauch eines dieser scheinbar notwendigerweise aber unüberzeugend, in Zukünfte versetzten artifiziellen Handke “Als-Ob” Mären anhaftet, eine Placenta bei jeder dieser Geburten, schon von Anfangs an. Ein kleines Essay ist dieses wert “Ueber das ‘Als-Ob’ bei Handke.”

http://handke-scholar.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-scholar-and-all.html

17] Nachfolgende Romane: In einer Dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus -1995]; Del Gredos -2003] ; Don Juan -2005]; Kali -2006]; Morawische Nacht [2007]; Immer noch Sturm [2010]; Der Große Fall [2011];

18] Handkes Rede beim Milošević Begräbnis löste ein wahres Lauffeuer von Konsequenzen aus. Erstens sagte die Comedie Francaise die Aufführung von Die Kunst des Fragens ab; daraufhin entschied sich das Gremium der Stadt Düsseldorf das Geld für den von Handke durch Siegried Löffler gewonnenen Heine Preis nicht frei zu geben; woraufhin Handke Regisseur Peymann es erreichte einen Berliner Heine Preis in selber Höhe von 50 K Euro zu stipendieren, den Handke und Peymann dann einem Dorf in dem Kosovo überreichten. Bei all diesem “im Bild bleiben” sollte man nicht vergessen, daß Handke dem Wunsch Milosevic als Verteidigungsexpertzeuge zu dem Verfall Jugoslawiens nicht gefolgt ist. Des “im Bild bleiben” zuviel? Vide: http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/links-page-for-pages-of-this-blog.html

Ein hundert Französische Intellektuelle haben die Absagung des Handke Dramas von der Comedie Francaise beglückwunscht! Nur ein oder zwei unterstützen ihn.

19] Sommerlicher Nachtrag [1995] Bemerkenswert ist wie amateurhaft diese Reisen gelaufen sind: Die Reise an die Flüsse…Gerechtigkeit fand statt zusammen mit dem Serbischen Übersetzer, und einem Serbischen Hausmaler Freund den wir aus der Kneipe im Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers kennen, Zarko und Darko, und der zweiten Gattin, Sophie Semin, als Hochzeitsreise. Spätere Reisen haben auch immer das Ziel des Serbischen Übersetzers an der Morava aber finden statt auch unter Begleitschaft des Nova Chefredakteur Thomas Deichmann und andern Freunden. Nach dem Handke der Heine Preis nicht von der Stadt Düsseldorf aber dann von Peymann gestiftetet bekommt, unternehmen Handke und Preisgeber Peymann und Fernsehen eine Reise in ein Dorf in Kosovo dem das Preisgeld übergeben wird. Nachdem Handke Gerechtigkeit für Serbien schrieb, hat er seinen Bericht – so Malte Herwig in seiner Handke Biographie Meister der Dämmerung – den drei Freunden Luc Bondy, Peter Stephan Jungk und Sophie Semin gezeigt, die ihm von der Publikation abgeraten haben sollen.

20] J.L. Marcus http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2009/12/letter-to-robert-silvers-ny-review-of.html enthält den Marcus Artikel sowie ein pünktliches Kommentar dazu.

21] http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/07/brokoff-germanist-is-decimated.html enthält Brockoff’s Artikel sowie die Kritik an ihm.

22] Malte Herwigs Meister Der Dämmerung enthält nichts was darauf hinweist, daß ihm das Werk bedeutungsvoll ist. Da Herwig aber in den Archiven gestöbert, aber unordentlich, höchst interessante Auszüge, auch selbst ergattertes vom Handkes leiblichem Vater, sowie Gespräche mit Leuten die Handke nah stehen oder standen geführt hat, ist das Buch wichtig in dieser Hinsicht.

http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/12/full-length-review-of-herwigs-handke.html

23] Ich habe nicht die geringste Idee woher Handke’s Bezichtigung stammt er sei Autist der immer noch an autistischen Zuständen leidet [ in dem buchlangen Interview mit Herbert Ganter

Aber ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen ]- Wohl kaum von ihm selbst, ich bin auch bis jetzt auf keinen einzigen Wissenschaftler gestoßen der sich darüber Gedanken gemacht hat und die Konsequenzen aus möglichen Überlegungen zieht.

 http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

24] Habermas, Jürgen in Die Zeit [1999] vide: http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/links-page-for-pages-of-this-blog.html

25] Der niedrigste Rang des Betriebs erreicht man mit Adam Wilson, Deputy Editor of the Faster Times: http://www.bookforum.com/review/5350 der erstens kaum lesen kann aber dann ganz “natürlich” Handke’s pro-Serbisches Engagement als Schatten bezeichnet.

26] Gerechtigkeit für Serbien.

27] Unter Tränen Fragend

28] http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/04/interviews-with-handke-about-his.html] Süddeutsche Interview http://handke-watch.blogspot.com/2010/11/handke-steinfeld-interview-jugoslavien.html

http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/links-page-for-pages-of-this-blog.html

29] Colbin

http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/12/marie-colbins-offener-brief-peter.html

http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/12/marie-colbin-review-of-herwigs-meister.html

30] Man lese das nach in Morawische Nacht wie Handke das Verdreschen, sogar töten wollen, formalistisch begründet so daß dem Leser weder Ausrede noch Sauerstoff noch Widerspruch übrig bleibt - daß Dichter auch im gewissen Sinn Lügner sein müssen kommt ihm in diesem Fall zum Schlechten. http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/long-piece-on-handkes-moravian-night.html

Colbin liest auch noch aus Handke Stücken öffentlich! Krächzt! Ihr Angriff ging so weit, daß sie sogar das Werk verhunzte, das große Stück Die Fahrt im Einbaum und sich weigert in irgendeiner Weise, genau so stur wie alle anderen, ihren Standpunkt zu ändern, so daß ich mich entschied beide Menschen seien einfach unmöglich, jedenfalls in dieser Hinsicht, ich natürlich nie, Hand aufs Herz! Einige Salzburger und die Tochter Amina, z.b. sein ehemaliger Hauswirt ,wissen vielleicht genaueres. http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/12/marie-colbins-offener-brief-peter.html

31] “Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms” ist ein früh berühmtes Manifesto von Handke, daß sich gegen Gefühlsduselei und ewiges Engagement richtet. On line at: http://www.gleichsatz.de/b-u-t/begin/handke2.html

32] vide:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#

33] Peter Strasser: Der Freudenstoff: Zu Handke eine Philosophie

A Time Capsule: Peter Handke's 1989 Yugoslavia- by Scott Abbott

2011-05-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.literarytraveler.com/literary_articles/peter_handke.aspx

A Time Capsule: Peter Handke's 1989 Yugoslavia

This article was written by Scott Abbott


Hay harps Photos by Scott Abbott & Zarko Radakovic

14 May 1989
In Peter Handke's novel Repetitions Filip Kobal rides a train through a Karawanken Mountain tunnel to get from Villach, Austria to Jesenica in Yugoslavia. Out of the cultural terrorism of Europe into the fabled "Ninth Land" of Slovenia. We can't exactly duplicate Filip's trip with our Opel Kadett; but Zarko Radakovic and I decide to drive through a parallel tunnel.
Somewhere near the tunnel we make a wrong turn and find ourselves driving along a long lake parallel to the mountains. Only fifteen minutes away, through the tunnel, is the promised land. Back and forth we drive, sometimes sure of where we are because of correspondences between countryside and map, then suddenly, inexplicably, repeatedly lost. The tunnel is carefully marked on the map, as is the Autobahn leading to it, and the name "Karawanken Tunnel" stands in tiny red letters next to the marks that mean "mountains." We can see the mountains. We can see the lake. We can drive through the streets of St. Jakob. But the map's promised 7.6-kilometer tunnel ("toll required") is simply not there.
Finally we throw away the text and ask an Austrian policeman how to get to the Karawanken Tunnel. When he understands that we want to drive through a tunnel to get to Jesenice he smiles so broadly that his thin moustache quivers. No such place, he says, not until the Yugoslavs finish their half.
We'll have to drive over the Wurzenpass.
At the border in an alpine meadow at the top of the pass, Zarko speaks with the guard and pulls the car into a parking lot. You need a visa, he tells me, and leads me into a low, dark, dirty monument to bureaucracy. Zarko answers questions put to him by a uniformed official. I watch several men pay what looked like huge amounts of money at another counter. How much will a visa cost? There are long silences while the official flips through several old notebooks. Habsburg vintage? Josef K. and the Castle? The official reads my passport page by page. My ears register the tiny sounds of a burocrat's radio playing somewhere in the building, broadcasting the immortal voice of Engelbert Humperdink: "Please release me, let me go, I don't love you any mo." With a flourish the official stamps my passport.
Now the border is crossed, Jesenice just ahead, and Filip Kobal's first experience awaits our retracing. Zarko is home. And yet not home, he explains. This is Slovenia, and the people here speak Slovenian. They learn Zarko's native language, Serbo-Croatian, in school.

http://handke-watch.blogspot.com/2011/05/time-capsule-peter-handkes-1989.html

Easing out of, Winding down the 25 year plus year young Handke Project…

2010-10-03T22:01:00.000-07:00

Easing out of,

Winding down

the 25 year plus year young Handke Project…a saga nearing its end…a round-up of sorts… musings… ruminations… a final ramble!

For Karl Heinz Braun, Marie Colbin, myself, and I imagine for Klaus Peyman, too, now… and les autres……

Names cited in this communication: Marie Colbin, in extenso, Erich Wolfgang Skwara =in extenso , Hans Hoeller, Karl Wagner, Raimund Fellinger, Peter Hamm, Michael DiCapua=in extenso, Roger Straus, Steve Wasserman, Edmund Caldwell, H.M. Enzensberger= in extenso, Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Peter Weiss, Hans Werner Richter, Jürgen Becker, Lothar Struck= =in extenso , Sophie Semin, Libgart Schwartz, J., Fredi Kolleritch, Fabjan Haffner, Elisabeth Schwaegerle, Klaus Kastberger, Tom Barry, Scott Abbot, J. Brokhoff , Heinrich Detering, David Coury, Frank Pillip, Donald Daviau, Neil Gordon= in extenso, William Gass, Robert Silvers, Oh Tannenbaum, Jim Krusoe, Dennis "The Mutton" Dutton, Robert Wilson [editor of American Scholar], Michael McDonald,[of The Amurrican Interest], Krishna Winston, Siegrid Loeffler, J.l. Marcus, Hubert Burda, Siegfried Unseld, Mr. and Mrs. Milosevic, etc.

“The world is discoverer.” WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, Peter Handke

What would I have done without Handke’s work, Handke my “tit-bird,” my passerine, the past 20 some years it occurs to me as I try to summarize the involvement in such a huge body of work? To some extent with the author himself. Traveling the Handke high and byways… from trembling heights to the most horrific, gold leaf… and dung beetles reviewers… [ ";mais une marée de merde en bat les murs, à la faire crouler."]

Little could I have imagined, even if I’d thought in those terms, that in May 1966, in Princeton, I would behold a kid looking like a fifth Beatle destined to become an Austrian postage stamp in his life time:

The now count von und zu Griffen whom I encountered while trying, successfully I might say, to get out of those reaches, except of course linguistically where the more the better, both high and low.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#

And now easing out of a twenty some year involvement in writing about it, championing it, criticizing it too, decimating swinish reviewers, linking up with some wonderful scholars, with at least one more play to read and the recent Nachtbuch [jottings of the first thoughts as you wake up at night, one finger still in the forever dream dialogue world:

[„Am Ende werde ich etwas sagen, ein bißchen“

[At the end I’ll say something, a bit.]

„Manchmal, wenn man redet, redet man immer weiter“ [Sometimes when one talks one goes on talking.]

„Die Woche über spielen sie Ping-Pong, am Samstag spielen sie Pong-Ping.“ – „Ja, die Wespen leben in Ketten“ [During the week they play ping-pong, on Saturda the play ping pong. ‘Yes, the wasps live as a series of chains.]

„Sind Sie der, der hinter der grauen Holzhütte mir ein Gedicht vorgetragen hat?“ [Are you the person who recited a poem to me behind the grey wooden hut.]

„Der Papst weiß sicher, daß er verdammt ist“ [The Pope must know that he is damned.“

„Die Kinder haben sich über ihn lustig gemacht, aber nicht zu sehr“ [The children made fun of him, but not too much.]

„P. H. im Neunten Land?“ – „Neunmal kennt er das Land nicht“ [P.H. in the Ninth Land?“ „He does’t know the land mine times.] The reference is to Handke’s book “Farewell to the Dream of the Ninth Land” – the land of peace – his reaction to Slovenia’s becoming an independent country.

an enterprise it must take considerable grandiosity to peddle, excerpts from the dialog forever on-going interiorarity, albeit here the foam of the unconscious, and do so without elaborating the fantasy or dream underlying. I.e. from the excerpt that Jung & Jung has posted as a teaser it does not appear that our genius spouts genius brilliances as the first thing on waking. Reading 500 of them may of course reveal a pattern. 50 dreams of Handke’s would have been a lot more interesting! And analyzed by the man who can write in dream syntax and images if need be! Lothar Struck who has gone a bit soft in the noodle [see the end for an elaboration of this statement] reading so much Handke has an appreciative review of this trivia at Glanz & Elend which I have also put on the page devoted to the Nachtbuch at:

http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html

And no doubt there will at least be one other narrative of whatever order of difficulty – the 25 k Don Juan, the Handke book most recently published in the United States, as they say, “hat es in sich,” which means it got only stupid reviews… and I have one more ramble to write, on Handke’s poetics. Handke is no esthete but he certainly has an aesthetic. In the Kastberger/ Schwägerle interview in the Kastberger edited collection of mostly first rate essays and fascinating primary material Freiheit des Schreibens [Zsolnay, 2110] Handke says he does not have a poetics. He articulates his poetics in their sufficiency in the 1981 Walk About the Villages. Perhaps Handke forgot, Handke is quite good at forgetting, just the way he is at turning guilt feelings off, or perhaps he was waiting whether the interviewers might remember Villages as I haven’t come on a one scholar that notes its influence on the work that follows… as far and recently as the 2003 Del Gredos. I am not planning to check to what degree if any Handke hoes to these poetics, but am interested in the change in narrative procedure from 1964 Hornissen to the present, perhaps I will come up with something. But that would seem to be it, yes there will also be an assaying on what I call “the psychoanalysis of reading,” which would be inconceivable without having looked closely at Handke’s prose, its entrancing capacities… and then to go on servicing the blogs and the scriptmania sites:

http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html

http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

having one page devoted to each title at the

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-revista-of.html

and to each play at the

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

and the endless trivia which pours from the star’s publicity machine:

http://handke-trivia.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

I have the load of another life-time’s work left… am being granted only half of one even though I am just growing another set of teeth.

Let me say right off that I could not have imagined that Handke might write anything as magnificent as some of the prose works, both short and long, and the plays he did after his richest work, the last of which of his I had the fortune to translate [no matter that Villages then became a most interesting kind of Albatross and all around heart test, failures nearly all around], the 1981 WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES… which also mattered a lot to Handke so that the correspondence over that piece, and the way Handke made suggestions to my wrestling match with the text also proves the only interesting part of our correspondence [see the postscript to the Ariadne Books edition which quotes the relevant passages]. I had thought one might stop with that… I certainly hoped that it would be my “swan song” to translating, but then some things were offered that I liked, say the work of Josef Winkler.

Among the works subsequent to Villages, each masterly in its own way, but none as rich sometimes so in a different way, I number The Repetition [1986], The Afternoon of a Writer [1987], the 1988 Absence film as novel as film rewrite of Parsifal that introduced the filmic element into prose writing - an underlying filmic feature which again becomes prominently experiencable by the good, that is a reader in the 2003 Crossing the Sierra Del Gredos [the protagonist, bankieress, like her author, constantly sees herself as actress in a film] thus enabling the kind of manifest precision between reader and text that occasionally transpires in the dream screen dyad analyst analysand, fantasies meshing, in a to and fro; and the 1984 novel that set me off on this trek, Der Chinese des Schmerzens which ever so unfortunately is titled Across in English, instead of, say, The Chinese of the Water Torture. That Handke would write not only in dream images [Afternoon of a Writer] but in dream syntax in the 1995 One Dark Night I left my Silent House… [Edmond Caldwell also has an interesting note on what he, in analogy, calls “the Handke effect” at:

http://thechagallposition.blogspot.com/

is perhaps not all that surprising coming on the heels of brilliant innerworld outerworld projection screen beginnings and knowledge of how deep syntax works [1]. One way or the other, Handke remains a verbally, textually activist author. It would be quite something to organize a year long course just around Handke’s work, going back to Thucydides, Euripides, Aeschylus and working your way up the present in hopscotch back and forth kind of way.

Anyhoo, these kinds of writerly communicative matters I have mulled since my early days as a kind of Joycean Jamesian who still thinks James’ prefaces to his novels are the best things that have ever been written on that subject…

http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/

and it is for these innovations, for the sake of the logos and what Handke has contributed to it that he deserves the Nobel, the availing of new utensils, the ability to communicate inner states, spell the reader into reading. Virginia Wool I imagine might not commit suicide if she had those means at her disposal. As a person, scarcely. Unfortunately. You’d have to extirpate the “Bruno Handke” part, that metempsychosis that possesses him, too.

Subsequent the just cited achievements comes a more serious change than the prior actually rather gradual one from works such as Der Hausierer 1967 [“The Panhandler,” as it might be called in English, it exists in some Romance languages], Short Letter long Farewell 1971, Goalie’s Anxiety 1969 and A Moment of True Feeling [1971] to Left-Handed Woman 1974 and A Slow Homecoming [1978], the latter two belonging very much together in their mood of withdrawal and direct turn toward the mytho-poeic. As I just wrote Karl Wagner: “aber ich lass mir doch nicht das ‚Sein’ noch ‚die Natur’ von Heidegger verderben.“ Ernst Bloch said something similar about the Left’s leaving nature to the Nazis.

One of Handke’s published notebook excerpts, Fantasien der Wiederholung, 1988 – Wiederholung does not just mean to repeat but to retrieve – announces this more important change, departure; and with respect of these kind of pronunciamentos Handke can be trusted not to be too fickle. [Udderwise, the fellow who berates “facts people” on the occasion of Suhrkamp Verlag’s – his chief publisher’s - move there from Frankfurt, proclaimed, just the other month in Berlin, “facts win!” Handke wins, it’s a fact!

First results from this change from over-reliance on impressionist phenomenological serial notation and extremely well-crafted prose - to different narrative procedures – if Across [1984] and The Repetition [1986, the counter-part to the 1972 Sorrow beyond Dreams] aren’t already way signs toward that change - are the late 80s early 90s assayings of Tiredness, the Juke Box and The Day that Went Well: circling and interrogating his subjects, incorporating the settings where they are composed [something done incidentally by many writers is here as a compositional principle]. Getting his feet wet in a new mode, Handke quickly mastered it to his usual virtuoso capacities: Day. “The line of beauty” – isn’t it really the line of the breast? The new tack eventuates in that great weaving of the six sides of his artistry on the canvas-ground on which he then lived in the Chaville woods outside Paris, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay [1993]. [After all, from the beginning Handke has created conscious literary works of art, the “as if” of fantasy realized as text or play, a little too real for comfort at times.] There follows the somewhat mixed bag One Dark Night I Left My Silent House [1994] – I say “mixed bag” because aside its many marvels I could well do without Handke’s recit’s on “the modern” woman or that narcissism means that at least you love yourself! Wow! Whoopeedooda! If you know your Handke texts you read of his affinity for idiots, and sometimes the autist truly is daft and not just in the Greek “everyman” sense of the word.

Unique, too, are Crossing the Sierra Del Gredos [2001], Don Juan [as told by himself] a juicy, taut rope that holds the strains of an aging conflicted sneaky Eros, both dark and light, with an easy and very playful left wishfulfilment hand [2004], and the somewhat Wagnerian – so it strikes me - Kali [2007] a kind of operatic film, that I need to reread once more, it is so strange, so different from anything that has gone before; the reportage The Cuckoos of Velica Hoca [2008] where Handke shows that he has that stuff, too, - read Hans Hoeller’s essay on Velica in Freiheit - after a lot of superfices along those lines – that is one of the great pleasures of reading Handke, he neither bores himself nor his readers by repeating himself, he explores the formal possibilities of a way of doing things, develops - altogether, the whelming distinctive works prove a consternation to no end of lazy moron reviewers who cannot even describe a book as they try to peg it for their pittances.

Some of the most extraordinary writing Handke has done is in the 2005 novel Moravian Nights – at a few moments, around its tunnel section, this seismograph felt the earth tremble within the act of reading classical prose, a first for me, a book that yet I find both formally and morally dubious [See “Tough Love for Peter Handke”

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-revista-of.html

morally dreadful for its lying way to dispose of Marie Colbin’s charge that has been facing him all these years [2], formally since, overall, it does not live up to his own previously demonstrated abilities, and I am someone who is quite willing to assess Handke within his own terms, unless to be sort of Larry Rivers sketchy on such a big canvas is something he had in mind: I find no evidence of such an idea, which doesn’t mean that I am not missing something. Moravian is basically a big hotch-potch loosely held together; a kind of ramble such as this; if it weaves it does so by happenstance; some sections such as the defense for beating the bejesus out of Marie Colbin or one the Congress on Noise are formalized to the fare-the-well, others are paltry, one in Cordula/ Split, where Handke wrote his first novel, in 1964, Die Hornissen/ Los Avispones/ The Hornets t’would be in English] and where it appears he abandoned his first girl friend, and with child, creating a bastard as his own father did creating him, who however took care to stay in touch with the mother Maria Sivec, which old G.F now haunts him, an old crone, this section is stupendously well rendered, realized, visually, dramatically… past and present merging, very filmic too… El Greco, Dostoyevsky come to mind… The section of a trip to the Kosovo and the bus driver’s fury in the form of his iterating the song Apache and you become part of the throb of deep dark fury. – But, as I wrote one of his two editors, Raimund Fellinger, at Suhrkamp Verlag, the other is the critic Peter Hamm, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the model in the novel for the house-boat hotel, the hotel boat “Luna” on the Morawa River in deepest darkest south-east Serbia, on which Morawian Nights is allegedly told, if the “Hotel Luna/ Morawa” unloosed during a Spring flood from amongst the reeds where it is tethered and washed into the Danube and down into the Black Sea – ample time to bring a few sections and the whole up to Handke’s usual snuff – and we can have Marie Colbin running alongside on the shore and have her get stuck in a moor! - But what an overall continuous performance! Since early on! As an analyst I would posit since earliest bed time days in Berlin early winter 1944 !

And then there are the plays: The Hour We knew Nothing of Each Other, the summa of every aspect of his early dramatic work [I know I am right in thinking of Handke as a kind of Schubert who found himself in the world of words], the second time – the first is Ride Across Lake Constance, the ultimate inversion of a boulevard piece - that he cleans out an audience’s clock and makes them see the world anew as does his verbal magicking in the Sierra del Gredos novel;

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

the great 1987 Art of Asking not yet done - I nearly say of course - in that desert the Unites States of self-involved Philistines and clothes horses and miserable artistic directors, that disneyfied garbage pit, what would Joyce put into Leopold Blooms stream of consciousness these days is a thought I have entertained; biggest island on the earth no matter all that globalization. The 1991 Voyage by Dugout: The Play about the Film about the War, which finally exists in a fine translation by Scott Abbott, too, is crying for a performance; the 2008 Till the Day that Parts Us is about to be published by Seagull/ University of Chicago Press. Not that some of the less successful work, say The Essay on Tiredness or the play Preparations for Immortality - it starts off like gangbusters but its formalism quickly and oddly turns hollow, like Phillip Glass - or the plays Traces of the Lost, which strikes me, who has only read it several times, as a redo of Hour, or the 2004 Subday Blues - I find it a monotonous read no matter how perfectly and incrementally-timed formally [and I find monotony in this instance of little use] - which appears to “play” well, I may be wrong because of having got used to Handke writing “Lese Dramen,” [dramas just to be read], these would be stellar works by others who do not set their own expectations as high as our versatile pro, Peter Handke.

I am leaving out the cumulation of diary volumes, [its inception is the 1974 Weight of the World - “for those to whom it matters” is its epigraph, and boy would it ever prove found meat for this analytic wolf! - and the 1983 Geschichte des Bleistifts, the 1988 Am Felsfenster Morgens, the 1988 Fantasien der Wiederholung, the 2001 Gestern Unterwegs, the 2100 Nachtbuch as well as the forthcoming Unterwäsche {Verbrecher Verlag, 2111] is a body of self-involved self-exhibitionism and self-discovery – with little consequence but for the work – that, if this trove can be judged at all, only in the forthcoming many years when they are compared with the now archived notebooks [whence they were sold for five hundred thousand Euros each to a German and an Austrian archive, whence these edited selections derive; by the time of the second German edition, Gewicht/ Weight had been edited down, t’was a little too much nakedness after all of the frequently hideous self, some beauty marks allowed but not the entire horror show. At any event: Scholar mice, get on your marks!

Ullrich von Buelow has a fine introduction to this material in Kastberger’s Freiheit.

Also left out from this list is the handful of texts occasioned by Handke’s involvement in the disintegration of the 2nd Yugoslav federation. Though I obviously regard the 1999 play Voyage by Dugout and the 2008 reportage Velica Hoca among Handke’s premier works, and much like the non-travel Abschied vom Neunten Land [written on the occasion of Slovenia becoming independent in 1991, “Leavetaking from the 9^th Land”] no matter in disagreeing with its perverse contra-factual argument, and find lots to like in the three travel books the 1993 Justice for Serbia, the 1994 Sommerlicher Nachtrag [A Summer’s Postscript] and the 1997 Unter Tränen Fragend [Questioning in Tears], I find wretchedly arrogant and sloppy the 2003 Rund um das Tribunal [Circling the Tribunal – in Scheveningen/ DeHague, the Yugoslav war crimes trials] and especially the 2004 Die Tablas des Damiel [The Ponds of Damiel, in southern Spain, drying out, analogously, to the now no longer federated mutually fructifying Yugoslav states] especially so coming from someone who nearly completed his Dr. Jus. in 1964 because the sought-after sinecure of Austrian cultural attaché had been obviated, Handke felt so confident as a writer after his first novel had been accepted by Suhrkamp Verlag. Not that Tribunal and Daimiel are devoid of all merit, or of interest and of all kinds of gems; the worst of course is that you realize: here is someone who made himself notorious in an odd kind of defense of the Serbians against an idiotic mass media attack – indeed the world made it so easy that he actually ought to have taken the trouble to speak the language of political economy and the psychology of identity, say, have become a Michel Chossudovsky

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/62/022.html ]

- Handke visits Milosevic in jail, has been a friend of the family for years, has had his plays done in Belgrade, including Voyage, as he has been keeping the company of the powerful since his earliest days, from actual princes to the Caesars of Industry like Hubert Burda, Handke becomes even more infamous by attending and displaying himself at the funeral and playing mourner to the hilt as only someone who is now an actor who mouths the requisite obscenities in the Quodlibet of the World Stage can, and as someone who purports to be an expert on the disintegration of Yugoslavia [and Voyage convinces the reader that he is quite expert indeed] then refuses to testify as an expert witness for the defense, nay, even to write a simple letter! For reasons of personal experience to which I will come, I was not all that surprised at my ultimate exhibitionist prima donna’s copping out on that score, ugh, a witness at such a trial is pretty well boxed in, he cannot come and go as he pleases; he is in the cross fire; that would be a bit too much of the sought after lime light, it would singe the wings of the fink. As Erich Wolfgang Skwara [the “Don Juan” who appears “with the same woman” in No-Man’s-Bay], a wonderful tattle-tale, once said to me, in the early 90s, while we both expressed our confidence that the genius would bring off that great weaving performance: “Let’s see what he’s up to now.” – It was walking arm in arm with Umberto Ecco at the Frankfurt Bookfair on publication of that wonderful book. - Something you can count on is Handke popping off to the media, whose darling for copy he has been since his earliest days, when a possible competitor for the limelight is in the news. The latest of this, as of this writing, September 2010, our careerist calls fellow Austrian novelist Grstein… “a careerist.” I actually am no longer all that annoyed, but like a patient dog owner who laughs or shrugs at a spouse’s tick. Moreover, these proclamation are made, as of old, under a righteous aegis, no matter that Handke in Die Tablas des Daimiel even makes fun of how in the court of night conscience he manages no matter to come out ahead, and uses Ivo Andric’s: “Mistakes by others that highlight equivalent errors of our own precipitate a moral disappointment that permits us to assume the strict and noble stance of both judge and victim and gives rise to an inner state of moral euphoria. This euphoria distances us swiftly and surely from the process of personal moral perfection and makes of us terrible and merciless and even bloodthirsty judges. “ Signs by the Wayside as an epitaph to Voyage by Dugout, but subsequent to writing Daimiel quickly berated Günter Grass for allowing himself to be inducted into the Waffen SS at age 17 [a well known matter already in the 60s, may the day come that your volunteering for the Marines or the Special Forces of all kind acquire that kind of iconic obloquy] because “everyone knew what the Waffen SS” was, to which I once said and will say again: “and at age 30 one knows not to smack one’s two year old crying daughter’s head if one is in irritated rage because there is a flood in the basement and she is bawling, rape one’s supposed friend’s girl friends and keep beating up women.” When Handke, asked about Enzensberger’s position on the Kosovo war, replies: “Hans Magnus Enzensberger redet wie ein Politiker und moechte die UÇK bewaffnen. Der weiss immer, wo’s lang geht, ein grinsender hoehnischer Zuschauer, der menschgewordene Hohn. Der islamische Sufi Djalâl-ud-Dîn Rûmî sagt: „Sie tragen bedruckte Seiden nicht als Ornament, sondern um ihre Schoenheit zu bewahren. Enzensbergers Sachen sind das Gegenteil, Ornament zur Verhoehnung der Schoenheit. [Hans Magnus Enzensberger talks like a politician and would like to arm the UÇK. He is someone who always knows what side to take, a grinning, derisive observer, derision in human form. The Islamic Sufu Djalâl-ud-Dîn Rûmî says: “They wear printed silk not as an ornament but to retain their beauty.” Enzensberger’s stuff are the opposite, ornamentation to deride beauty.” then Handke, in this instance, not only manifests his extraordinary envy of a Suhrkamp compadre who displaces a bit of the limelight and is indeed an enviable essayist, but also ever so unfortunately it seems to me, a certain extreme hatred of his own compulsion to dress up like a beauteous Modepuppe since his appearance on the world stage, and who certainly has adjusted himself with the changing times; that is, such extrojective projections smack of self-hatred, a narcisstic conflict on the deepest level [it is always good to re-read the end of The Afternoon of a Writer [1987], if you seek first hand evidence of the split, the conflict that is so productive, it manifest itself in these projections which are entirely lacking in truth-content of any other kind; and in that sense are quite naïfly, unself-consciously uttered, is my guess. Or perhaps there is even malice aforethought as in the well-prepared knife for H. M. E. As predictable as the midnight hooting of my pair of great horned owls, not as pleasant. That description of Enzensberger, however, must have been lying rehearsed on the tip of the tongue for years, it indicates a conflict within Handke about his own narcissism, and points to the grievous narcissistic wound [s] he suffered as a child. See:

http://handke-trivia.blogspot.com/2009/05/enzensberger-footnote.html

for the full of this. Such projections only tell you something about the projector! Alas!

However, the public Handke is not only a better self advertiser than most others in that field; after all, there really is something to advertize, to show off, compared to say two American mama’s boys like Alan Ginsberg or Norman Mailer, by the compensatorily competitive exhibitionist, or to sulk and not show off if something has made him petulant. One very funny instance occurred a few years back when Handke had a Croatian magazine and T.V. crew to his place in Chaville. Normally Handke now takes even the closest friends immediately for a walk mushroom hunting or at least out in his garden. Without my dwelling on Handke’s plethora of symptoms I am still more than uncertain why he cannot bear to have, especially men, in a room with him, especially his room, for any length of time, whether this is due to the persistence of nausea at other bodies that he says he experienced first at the Tanzenberg seminary, or nausea in combination with other determinants. However, once a camera is present the nausea apparently is overcome by the love of self-display, and he cooked up a wonderful meal for the crew. This was also the instance where, rather touchingly he refused to believe that Dubrovnik/ Ragusa had been shelled during the wars, a matter that a quick look at You-tube will confirm. - The legions of others who are so euphoric, in Ivo Andric’s terms, stretches across the political spectrum and what a horror it was to behold, and still is, what the disintegration of Yugoslavia elicited along those lines. Lice and bedbugs with pony tails. The more ignorant the more media possessed the more righteous the more euphoric. Handke felt that the 68ters really always wanted to have a fight. My guess at the near unanimity of righteousness among a port a prêter intellectual class that might have informed itself was the relief in not having to confront its own immense criminal glass house in which they live more or less comfortably.

Handke’s involvement in the disintegration and my trying to sort out the reasons for it, and then the reasons of why the way that Yugoslav cookie crumbled as it did, altogether took up about a year of my life, and although I would have rather devoted it to other matters, and other matters Handkean, I must say that ultimately I am glad I did. Had it not been for his involvement I might have gone along with the media generated consensus - after all what can I or could I have done about any of it, that must be one reason why the millions tune out, that sense of over-whelming impotence - and not taken the time to really sort out why the Hutsies and the Tutsies savaged each other, and I might say with Hennery the K. of Wurstburg on the Hudson “Let them kill each other.” One question that bugs me is that if the media is allowed to be as entirely sloppy and righteous in finding devils in this dark age for the pool of hatred to attach to, why must Handke be perfect in each and every instance, why is it dangerous – to whom – if he might be a bit parti pris? The unending low level skirmishes in that area: e.g. Professor Brokhoff and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s recent attempt to tie Handke to Srbrenice at the anniversary of that massacre that put that town on the map. For all this see

http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/links-page-for-pages-of-this-blog.html

During the course of my puzzling out Handke’s involvement and following that parallel war “Handke versus the Media” [my first attempt at on-line nearly “real time” pursuit of a story] I had my friend, the physician Franz Angst, send Handke my first ruminations on the subject that you can now find on line at the site that collects a lot of material relating to it:

http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/links-page-for-pages-of-this-blog.html

I made it a point to change one citation from Handke’s texts to make it appear as though he were taking sides against one of the tribes, to test whether he had actually read the text. Surprisingly he liked it, found my misinterpretation, nonetheless if my effort didn’t elicit one of Handke’s usual insults! Yup, I’d caught the guy, and he can’ handle being caught out, the man who said that as soon as he is caught he lies, honest in that respect at least.

Nonetheless, I continue to be puzzled: in 1987 I was appreciating the immense effort Handke had made to install his Slovenian grandfather as a father figure, to acquire a Slovenian identity to displace the hated German Bruno Handke Stepfather experienced as father, the preparation of his own Slovenian-German dictionary, learning the language well enough to be able to translate from it, and I am someone who can really appreciate the great intra-psychic effort that that entails, laboraverimus! And what if he had done so while also being with a good enough psycho-analyst? After all, the trouble with most analyzands seems to be that they do not work. They either remain attached and passive or go from shrink to shrink, and many turn into bullshit artists of the worst kind, or believers in one or the other father or mother figures of the discipline, disciples, the earliest disciples really were useful, Freud’s, but no more are are needed.

“Travailler come un bête!” However, within the last decade Handke has become a Serbian nationalist, with a piece of Serbian land, is awarded the Kosovo’s St. Lazarus prize! Is holding hands with the ultra-nationalist candidate for president, says that “if I who have never voted were allowed to vote in this election I would vote for Nikolaic.” With all the other prizes and the many showy trips to that region and to the Kosovo we then did not have the time to receive that particular one in person. I was really looking forward to that photo – Handke holding the Cross of St. Lazarus with a blackbird perched on top of it! Perhaps it’s just orneriness. You can take the kid of Carinthia, but you can’t get the Carinthian out of him?

Had Handke not gotten off in London on his trip to Scotland in 1987 thus missing the continuation of the flight, been one of the dead of Lockerbie, is a reminder of what such a life cut short would have meant, let us also bethink Walter Benjamin’s 1941 suicide and the death of all those talents whose lives were snuffed by the Nazis and Stalin and their everywhere successors. In the event of Handke being mourned as one of the victims of Lockerbie I would certainly have written the several essays on what became involved in translating his early plays and how much of myself became involved in translating Walk About the Villages during critical, heightened circumstances in the early 80s. See

http:www//handketrans.scriptmania.com/

for that and for some great essays by Fabjan Haffner and Elisabeth Schwägerle on that wonderful subject - and I would certainly have written my “case history” of Handke since, as timing would have it, I was reading the 1984 Chinese des Schmerzens [Across, 1987], the year of its American publication, and I would have been alerted to Handke’s “caseness” as he describes its protagonist ‘Loser’, “a case” – how great or interesting and complicated and unusual a “Wounded Love Child” case I could not have imagined…

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

http://www.handke-psychobio.scriptmania.com

&
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

what an education tracking down his profusion of symptoms provided!, a plethora, to explore: the after -effects of the long term exposure to violent primal scenes; a few weeks on what might produce Handke’s occasional color blindness; all his nausea’s including of the eye balls; eventually an exploration of the whole spectrum of autism; all this in combination with being his depressive mother’s love child: perhaps writing all the time is the chief symptom??? That would be incredible: a symptom seeking to cure itself? Actually that makes sense! Since he is the master of his realm then, moreover writing has calmed his anxiety from early on, it worked until his panic attacks subsequent to being left by his wife; thereafter, he also needed valium, everything that is regarded as “die Wende”, the big change can be attributed perhaps valerian?

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

Tilman Moser in his essay on Handke’s 1973 A Moment of True Feeling in Romane Als Krankheitsgeschichten [Novels as Case Histories – 1975] certainly failed to tease out the origins of Handke’s problematics, didn’t even discover why the protagonist Keuschnig was so distraught, remains puzzled, wants to help, much less delved into Handke’s past to at least speculate on possible connections or avail himself of the “process notes” as which Handke’s spontaneous notations in the 1974 Weight of the World can be regarded. Doing so myself for that monograph I found sufficient reasons for my deep ambivalence about Handke as a person, it didn’t really require Wim Wenders’s telling me that Handke invariably hurts those closest to him, reading Weight of the World suffices:[Amina Handke appears at the father’s side and wants to go potty: Handke notes that he then merely waited for what would happen then. Which might be what? Certainly it was utterly predictable to the father that she would soil herself and feel hideous!] You must have seen how intimidated that child was by age 6 to appreciate the wages of such fatherly mothering. A three month old Amina Handke was first shown to me in Spring 1969 or 1970 in Berlin, and I thought it was perfectly normal for a father to show his translator his daughter before we headed out from his dank newspaper piles filled Prince’s apartment on the Uhland Strasse to the Ku-Dam to discuss the translation, subsequently you are then glad not to have been one of the revolutionaries who came calling on Handke who lacked the interest to look at a child [See: A Child’s Story]. I can look and go gaga with babies for hours on end! Women who berate Handke for his educational methods are derided! And this is the man who then in another half dozen years or so will compose the “Song of the Child” “When the child was a child” that exists in several dozen languages now; and a link to which my Google spiders bring me at least once sometimes twice a day. “Der hat gut schreiben!” It must have been in 1974 that Handke gave me Als das Wuenschen noch geholfen hat, the book that contains the three long fugueing poems in the American Nonsense and Happiness. I started to scratch away at a translation at the Luxembourg airport, I was flying Air Icelandic, and not only because it was the cheapest flight, and doing so got an inkling of a troubled being, but did not conceptualize what troubled Handke in all the books of that period until I became seriously interested in psychoanalysis. http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

Or: he is one great copy writer! Handke not only deserves the Nobel Prize but also the United Copy Writers of the World Association Prize! In the later seventies he wrote me a few things that have stuck in the mind: “I am nothing but a writer.” – And: “I am capable of achieving any effect I want as a writer.” Coming from a composer whom you know to be a genius such statements would be comparatively unexceptional, coming from such a one who is a writer they are more memorable, put the watchman on the alert.

In the early 90s I hear from Erich Skwara that Handke is berating himself for the treatment of his first daughter, writing after all was easy, meanwhile he had had a second daughter, instead of the wished for son, but for once psychological-minded, foretell in No-Man’s-Bay how grievously Oedipal that relation would have been.

The timing is about right: in about 20 years certain matters dawn on Peter Handke who is not known as a Trottel. In the early 80s I receive a letter saying “thank you thank you thank you” … for the work I did in the 60s introducing his work into the US against opposition within the firm that took him on, on the part of one little stiletto man by the name of Michael DiCapua, meanwhile [then] I’ve pretty well forgotten all about these labors and also about Handke’s utterly boorish behavior when he and his buddy Kolleritsch and wife to be about disparu Libgart Schwartz appeared in New York in 1971 as a piece of Austrian cultured representatives on a 21 cities in 28 days tour [that Handke had thought he might be fit to be a cultural attaché has always been one of the more amusing fantasies], all around tachycardia but for Handke who at once went to nearby Rizzolis to check whether any photo of his had appeared in a German magazine. In a way it is nicer to be thanked that late after the effect, so this becomes the one time I recall being thanked, it strikes me as so odd and touching and amusing. Actually, it also the only time, by any of these authors, German or American! The fine once St. Martin’s Press and University of Chicago Press editor Michael Denhenny had it right when he wrote me a few year’s back: “What we do is written on water.”

In the 2005 directly semi-autobiographical ficciones – aren’t we ever coy! – we allow our runaway second married wife to call us “cold as a salamander” “mama’s boy.” Self-understanding zilch a New Yorker would say. Personal experience of all kinds sufficed at that point in the late 90s in Seattle for Wim not to need to make his observation. The bastard son of a bastard of a stepfather, Bruno Handke, witnessing that violence prone rapist, regarded as his father figure for many years, from the age of 2 until Handke left for boarding school at age 12. See Sorrow beyond Dreams and read it closely, slowly, and for its details, the dirty tails will come alive, and on a superficial reading you would never guess that Handke followed in his stepfather’s footsteps, you would assume that he’d be a chief feminist, rather than the opposite - that Handke was not an entirely damaged person, if you wanted reasons, I told myself that I found those in his having been his mother’s love child, already intra-uterine, albeit suffused by her depressive state [Thanks again, Dr. Werner Schimmelbusch for that heads-up!]. However, Handke’s tragedy is that he had Bruno Handke for stepfather, for a father model whose behavior as a man towards women imprinted itself on his step-son, and at night [also take a look a the Essay on Tiredness and note how irritated, infuriated and tired Handke becomes when subjected to the cat on the hot tin roof behavior adjacent his student quarters in Graz; no doubt Baby Peter was also enraged at his mother abandoning him after he had been the exclusive lover child while she carried him to term and during his first two years extra-uterine; one manifestation of possessiveness is that he cannot bear when one of our would-be pasha’s extra-marital lovers has another lover; how all the adolescent fatigados are traceable to over-powering anger], evidently it was Marie Sivec’s tragedy more directly, and that of Handke’s two half siblings that Bruno fathered with Maria. On the basis of Sorrow, unless your read closely, you would be astonished to find out that Handke, too, beats up women… and if further proof is needed that hating your German stepfather, as Handke ultimately acknowledged was also a form of self-hatred, that that kind of hating is in every respect useless, will not dispossess, exorcise, this would seem to be classic proof of that proposition. Although the search for father figures appeared to reach a kind of closure with the incorporation of the grandfather in The Repetition [1968] the search for literary fathers, their accumulation has certainly proved fruitful, ultimately finding grandfather ancestral figures in that realm as well – Goethe, Stifter, Flaubert, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Grillparzer, Eichendorf, Hermann Lenz – but the envy-driven hatred of most contemporary near greats or near contemporary greats such as Grass, Enzensberger, Bert Brecht, Thomas Mann persists. Handke had the opportunity during his somewhat breakdown in Paris to avert, in the early 70s, when he saw a therapeutician [see W.O.W.] We are not responsible for having been traumatized but perhaps for not perpetuating them by subjecting those closest to us to the same traumas. Psychoanalytic trauma theory and PTS treatment are in excellent shape. Ah, the stories, the dramas I could I tell thee about myself! The children of WW II… each family with its own disintegration [s]. Fortunately, together with a kind of ineradicable nonchalance, I also inherited my grandfather’s sense of humor who was laughing again two weeks after he had been liberated from his fourth concentration camp. Old man Sivec unfortunately did not bequeath anything like that to his grandchild Peter Handke, but a stellar ability to cuss or to re-inforce the autist’s Tourettish proclivities, or Handke and I could have laughed our heads off about the time that I, on reading Across, set out on this odd venture; friends as never friends have been. Thus my ambivalence about Handke as a person became more deeply anchored and articulated. However, the genius work scarcely ever falters, the 250 k words No-Man’s Bay has a few beauty spots, and there are some dead stretches in the even longer 350 k Del Gredos, but its sustained Berg and Tal ending is worth the occasional slog and its three topes [speed bumps] or it does at least for me and a few other folks I know. What a payoff! Yes, the world is the discoverer all right, not just of swine as reviewers but of real readers along the roadside. At that ending I realized how utterly Handke loved to write, I can’t say I ever came on anything proximate in the nearly 70 years I have been reading. Lucky fellow, if he’d not been able to write in that masterly a fashion – if he’d not been able to, long prison terms for sure, for the fellow is also a Josef Bloch and the Bankieress’s terrorist brother, with three nearly epileptic fits a day and near ready to run amok at any moment; and if you read, say, Walk About the Villages, halfway closely, and are halfway awake, or perhaps know that Handke’s works are also projections of his Yoknapatawpha-sized Self, there are stretches, at least during his writing, that he seems very much aware of the dark sides of the moon - representationally if not conceptually. And I have become, occasionally, “the dark sister” to his faults and follies.

Aside the experience that the translation of Walk About the Villages provided, I cannot forget that with the 1978 Alaska Chapter of the title novel of the American volume entitled A Slow Homecoming Handke proved to be, at least for me, a totally unexpected medium of my experience of the totality of having been for nine months in the fairly pristine interior of that region, along the Yukon, working in the Brooks and Alaska ranges, the immensity of that, from which I returned with hands full of anecdotes, and a latent sense that the immensity of the whole might be articulated, but not by me, and then the Handke seismograph appeared to have done so, after just a couple visits of a few weeks each – the Handke seismograph as good as Virginia Woolf’s that knows the state of mind your are in from every letter. I could account for a lot of things and, as compared to Handke, loved to ask “when and how and why, etc.” and am fascinated by the mechanisms of the spirit, and in making such accountings, had slithered absolutely deliciously on answers for years starting in the mid-80s [“Travailler come un bête!”], but have not been able account for that whelming re-experiencing - that remained, remains mysterious, inarticulatable. - I had had that wonderful experience of a complete regression to birth in my analysis and had shed all [?] the many modes of denial, ah how wonderful: “all defenses down” [with some really interesting consequences], and knew what the appearance of a “new canvas” in a dream signified: still, Handke as seismograph via that first chapter, I, this analytically now fairly well trained critter, keeps scratching his head; that experience dates back to 1980, Vienna, I was on my way back from four weeks in Bulgaria and visited Handke on the Mönchsberg:

http://www.van.at/see/mike/index.htm

Perhaps it was the rich air from the rich alluvial soil, the loam that the Danube had deposited in that region, near Plodviev.

In the St. Monica Mts. in the later 80s, I too was becoming a “king of slowness” as I walked the dusty paths in the chaparral and tread the heart of a book on Handke out of my being the way a baby cat treads on its mother teats… slowly, and grown up cats will continue to re-experience that pleasure when they think you might be their mother cat as they use your chest as a tread way, and for Handke it appears writing is the greatest pleasure, the pleasure of the paws, not only in tearing prey apart, and I fell under the influence of the rhythms, not only of the slowly pounding, long intervals – such long intervals - surf of the Pacific on the south-facing beach in Ma-li-bu [ “loud pounding surf” in Cochimi] all the way from the storms near the Antarctic, the south Pacific, and indeed felt closer to being than I had… for a long time… but of the rhythms of The Repetition, and part of the original heart of the undertaking was then accommodated in a long piece on Himmel ueber Berlin for Jim Krusoe at the St. Monica Review, whom I allowed to tamp down some of the very long periods in which I was then writing, although we then agreed, after people had such difficulty accommodating to them, that he might as well have spared himself that effort.- Thus I continue to be in some awe of Handke as a writer, how his being communicates itself to you, how he alters states of mind, of his well honed genius, the person he is when he writes, since I now know a considerable amount about the threshold state he is in and what he draws on, and how laboraverimus he is, what a virtuoso he trained himself to be as of his childhood, a terror of the whole family, L’Idiot de Griffen! Less awed by the fellow who “scratches himself at the same spots,” no not merely less so, aspects of the man as a person make me wretch. See anon unless you have already gathered enough wool.

At that time in the late 80s when I began this work, now winding down - a few plays still to consider, at least one more prose work I expect - on reading the 1984 Chinese des Schmerzens [Across, 1987], I was surprised that though Handke appeared to have become a far better writer than in the 1973 A Moment of True Feeling, or at least a very different one, the sentences were more carefully anchored in images, better joined, carpented, he seemed to have pretty much the same unhappy consciousness, to put it into “phenomenological” terms… of the Keuschnig of the 1973 novel, murderously inclined, no longer suicidal. In sections of Across toward the end, when the protagonist-lens-personae now called Loser is in a bad way, the writing is very much in the same manner as the poems in “Nonsense & Happiness”, which I translated with great pleasure – “Life without Poetry,” after all, could be rendered most poetically! – in that section the narrative method is not all that different from A Moment of true Feeling, and the true feeling here would seem to be the act of murder, but where it does not differ at all is when it takes recourse to the same dissociated state of mind phenomenology as in “Life without Poetry”

“As a boy when a feeling of the world overcame me I only felt the desire to WRITE something

now a poetic desire for the world usually

only occurs when I write something)…

“This fall time passed nearly without me

and my life stood as still as then

when I had felt so low

I wanted to learn to type

and waited evenings in the windowless ante-room

for the course to begin

The neon-tubes roared

and at the end of the hour

the plastic covers were pulled back over the type-writers.

I came and went and

would have not been able to say anything about myself.

I took myself so seriously that I noticed it,

I was not in despair merely discontent.

From Life without Poetry

[October/November 1972, Kronberg]

the fugeing poems of the stormy period that followed the death of his mother and being left by a highly neglected and multiply insulted wife, Libgart Schwartz, what he said was the worst thing that ever happened to him, panic attacks, hospitalization, valerian then did the trick. Alas. “Poor baby” you might say to such a one – the once lay-abroad laid low with one fell swoop and all those broads waiting to get laid again! But would miss what understanding affords. Some folks learn their lesson from such an experience, some don’t and are merely even angrier and punish the next broad; or vice versa. Handke would have wife and live-in partner troubles forever. I am so glad I spent some time with the Touhamares later. What analysis had made clear was really driven home there.

I am just now re-reading Across, going back to the beginning of the project and I notice not only the resemblances to the distraught period of the early 70s, ten years prior, and it occurs to me if the work is “meant to be the death mask of the experience” [Walter Benjamin] why we need a second death mask, albeit one written in a less suicidal state of mind, and more carefully in the way it builds from its violent beginnings… A murderous state of mind instead of a suicidal one, quelle difference? And the “moment of true feeling” is a murderous one! However, it occurred to me on first reading already that one purpose of the book was to memorialize, patiently, the surround of Salzburg, and that certainly is well done, as Stifter would have, and it occurred to me to think when I was alerted to Handke’s taking the Stifterian turn – probably way back in 1973 when he completed They Are Dying Out and monopolist Quitt has his factotum Hans – perhaps also meant as a wonderful riff on Puntilla and his Servant Matti - read a section from Stifter’s Bergkristalle and then emotes how it would be to live in that world. Thus back to “restoration Hardware” Austrian style. And eventually the beater of women is to write: “
„An den morgen
aufgewacht von dem morgenhellen Himmel
über den noch dunklen Dächern
treib aus den den Kaminen schon langsamer Rauch
Die Vögel: sine fine dicentes
Und all Liebe leben.“

Dissociation! Defense! Handke is a master of it! is I posit since early childhood days! A necessity too! Artistically this differs not at all form Stephen Deadalus using Rembrandt’s painting of an old woman paring her fingernails; dissociation, too, has a deep affinity with “the scientific method.” Analysts become trained in it, at the same time as they are to focus their empathy in a laser like manner. Handke is so good at dissociation he can string the observations into musical arrangement, after all, he is a composer at heart. At empathy not. That is what his analyst told him in Paris and he happened to agree that he was dissociated from his feelings. Then he became instead of “too cold” “too hot,” at least for a while. Across has one of Handke’s great beginnings, which book does not, “Close your eyes and…” Scotomization here we come – eventually, say by the time of Del Gredos he has realized that structural re-arrangements a la Cezanne do not suffice for his kind of realism, that the world can be made magical again at least in words. Reading the prose of Del Gredos you realize what magical realism is - old time pot heads and mushroom eaters might think that the guy had to be high to write that: they cannot imagine what coldness and love it takes the word chemist to write in a fashion that they are made high and perhaps re-experience the world as a child does. Nor is the chemist in the lab who mixes their meds on any kind of high.

Loser is an imagined character I quite realize, and I quite realize that the problem really starts when Handke tells Herbert Gamper in their mid 80s book-length interview that these books can all be unraveled [aufgerollt] from an autobiographical perspective, that the author all along has been his own material. Perhaps the problem is just one of thinking in stupid one to one identity relations, and failing to account for the transformative, compressing act [s] of the imagination. At any event, the hankering, the naïf belief in the truth of the autobiographical speaks more to the loss of a sense of reality, which may indeed have to do with the all around dissociation engendered by the “scientific attitude” and commodification and monetarization of everything. It appears to have escaped reviewers notice what a fine Marxist the Bankieress of Del Gredos is, the Handke of They Are Dying Out who followed the sometimes very sophisticated Marxists arguments of the 60 and 70s is alive and well.

Toward the mid-80s, having a good drift on my own problematics and some ways of dealing with their consequences, the great writer did not just become his own “case” but also my great case that I then examined as is possible with someone who has been a life long pretty much “compleat exhibitionist,” a competitive compensatory one at that, since early childhood. What a profusion of denials riddles Across! That’s what got me going. Mystifications! On the basis of A Slow Homecoming and Walk about the Villages I had anticipated a changed being. He only adopts different personae, no matter that the couture, the fabric has improved! Better coloring, more solidly grounded. Handke as a writer is also a great couturier, the person remains pretty much the same, in later writing you keep running into frequent longings for a second metamorphosis, a second moment of “true feeling” perhaps… Analysts also practice gerontology is the only suggestion along that line that I have. Judging by the evidence of Moravian Night calling yourself or having an ex calling you “cold as a salamander” and “mama’s boy” is not too promising of self-understanding coming from an author now well into his 60s.

How might matters proceed Chez Handke after we have dragged the pretty one home after we have met her on the bridge from “A Touch of Evil” or she has appeared of her own accord out of the nowhere of our daydreams, for a while we are still quite in love and even write love letters, but soon enough we are back at work, involved in our love of what we love most, another great writing project that demands utter concentration, the beloved is neglected in every which way, we emotionally withdraw, the beloved becomes confused, enraged. Moreover, on our walks and trips we encounter no end of pretty ones who can’t wait to be bedded by the famous poets, some even become serious squeezes, meanwhile the beloved is only useful representationally, a kind of accessory. Given the first good opportunity the trophy runs away or has an affair of her own… or as in the case of Marie Colbin, starts to make scenes. Handke’s friend and the recipient of Handke’s Buechner Preis money and now editor of Die Welt’s literary pages, and quite good at that and a good writer himself, Herr Heinrich Weinzierl in reviewing Moravian Nights in its pages, alluded briefly to the there admission of having… not just beaten the shit out of but – a la la- actually having wanted to kill the pretty beasty, an admission, long in coming, about ten years that albatross has been dangling, that is then followed by the most hideous thing Handke has ever written, a formalist fare-thee-well on the why he had wanted to kill Marie Colbin, she did not leave him alone for a single second anywhere… it appears the Widrich residence in Salzburg where Handke was staying lacked housekeys? – nay, she pursues him in that book as a previous great love pursued the “German writer” did in A SHORT LETTER LONG FAREWELL, where the physical representation of pursuit is of an emotional longing. And one reason Handke certainly fled Salzburg in 1987 was Ms. Colbin who, after she had been beaten up, would show up at all his venues so that, like the writer in THE AFTERNOON OF A WRITER, the writer had to head out town a ways to a comfy pub with a good juke box and some Serbian buddies. Weinzierl’s review passes over this entire section dealing with the beating and the super-formalist compleat lie with word to the effect, a former girlfriend who interfered with his narcissistic preoccupation, whereas this is one of the main entry points into that book which, after all, as do quite a few other works of the last decade hint at a rapprochement of the wounded love child with the feminine [the end of SUBDAY BLUES, even the BEAR SKIN WOMAN in VOYAGE BY DUGOUT, most certainly the 2007 UNTIL THE DAY US PART and the end of MORAWIAN NIGHT, although it isn’t clear whether that woman isn’t just the kind of good cook and obedient servant such as Lothar Struck would be; after all, if you really feel that women present such a danger to your work, as Morawian makes utterly clear once again especially in the section where Handke’s great predecessor dramatist Ferdinand Raimund appears and they contemplate that problem, why keep getting yourself entangled and into no end of trouble over them? The truly great short novel DON JUAN of course gives Handke’s complicated answer to the conundrum “prisoner of sex.” However, if anything has made me wretch it is when Handke is like Bruno Handke, when he beats up women and lies and is upwardly mobile. Not someone I would take into the maquis with me, although he might indeed write a good play on that theme; we shall see what the self-celebratory Still Storm [Immer Noch Sturm, 2010, Suhrkamp Verlag, to be premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2011] and its discourse on Slovenian minority Carinthian Partisanen activities – talking about late-comers! - amounts to. A bit more on that and Handke’s abrogation of the original plans for the premier, anon.

I went back to Handke’s birth and retraced the first few times I had seen and talked to the fellow. Amazing how much material is available about a living person, thank you Herr Haslinger for writing Jugend eines Schrifstellers. At Princeton, in May 1966, sitting next to the journalist Erick Kuby, whom I had met in Hamburg in 1964 [3], it was Kuby who knew the name of the upstart who made as I would find out typical wholesale, rabble-journalist-rousing condemnation – in this instance of the texts that had been read at that meeting of the Gruppe 47. [“Why did you leave the Verlag der Autoren?” I once asked, referring to the authors’ collective, one useful offspring of all those leftist activities of the 60s. “They are fascists!” Alas. Handke did not want to be just a primus inter pares, but # Uno, and Siegfried Unseld could make him such a one.] At Princeton, on leaving the auditorium, I noticed the kind of look fleet over Handke’s face that tells you – without needing psychoanalytic training – here is someone who will “über Leichen gehen”, that kind of ambition, a recollection that is connected with the name of Max Frisch, either the figure of that Frog Prince or a book of his lying on a table. It was a look I’d seen maybe once before, and recently too then in literary quarters where shark’s blood flows freely, and it too would be confirmed, and later I would have one such as a partner in Calcutta on the Hudson, the city of thieves, whose beard and a certain fawning initially concealed his voraciousness. This recollection receded, as the one of Handke’s sadism of which I had got a good whiff at a party in New York receded, but once you have the smell down it sticks if only way in back of the nasal passages. Friend Ted Ziolkovsky [a Hesse expert], who had met Handke at Princeton, then mentioned that the fellow said, as he would also announce to the German media, that “he was the new Kafka” – never mind that K. never announced anything of the kind, but difficult to combine with this schnippisch, happy go lucky image of the Beatelish Rockstar images that the photogenically so generous exhibitionist has left behind of his 60s and 70s days:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#

Let us take a look at two prize related events to check on the development of the publicity machine. About 15 years ago, after Handke had returned the Büchner to that Committee because of German support for NATO during the disintegration of Yugoslavia [as though that committee was in any way responsible] but apparently not the money [which he had given to his friend the fine Austrian writer Weinzierl], Handke said he would accept no further prizes. Meanwhile he has accepted another half dozen and turned down a half dozen. I want to focus on just two prizes, one the Thomas Mann Preis that is given by the Bavarian Academy, the other the Heine Preis of the City of Düsseldorf. A few years earlier Handke had called Thomas Mann a "really lousy writer" on the occasion of reading Mann's "A Man and his Dog" - not a book on which Mann's reputation rises or falls; along the lines of Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley." First Handke doesn't want to accept that prize, then he does and gives the money back to the academy to give to someone else. Shortly after he calls the Thomas Mann "a shit prize." The point is that each and every step of the way is widely reported, publicity that might just be worth more than the prize. Returning the money makes you look even better.

The speech and the photo-op at the Milosevic funeral turns into the most extraordinary saga of them all:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#

Doesn't Handke ever play "mourner" to the hilt!
As a consequence a true bozo, Bozonett of the Comedie Française cancels a truly great Handke play, The Art of Asking, Handke gets an apology from the French minister of culture, but 99 out of 100 Frogs support Bozonnet's decision not to have anything to do with a monster who attends the funeral of a monster. Handke wins a lawsuit against Liberacion or L'Observateur for defamation of character. My disgust with French intellectuals nearly tears out my intestines. Siegried Loeffler, the then still editor of Literaturen, and something of a literary power persuades {?}, the Düsseldorf jury to award Handke that city's "Heinrich Heine Preis" - Handke is not exactly a name that you would associate with Heine, but anyhow the name Handke is such that in the meanwhile it burnishes any prize awarded him. The prize is worth Euro 50,000 - and it turns out Handke actually needs the money, not for himself, but so that he can invite all the translators of his pretty great 350 K novel Crossing the Sierra del Gredos to go mountain climbing with him and the other mountain goats in self-same Spanish mountain range. There is the to be expected public outcry, the city council won't release the money, Handke very publicly withdraws his name; his partner in publicity making machine, Peymann, who runs the Berliner Ensemble, established a “Berlin Heine Prize” and it is awarded to Handke. Handke and Peymann travel to the Kosovo and award the 50 k Euros with great T.V. coverage, note the photos marked “Kosovo Enclave” at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE# ]
to a Serbian enclave there. Eventually Handke gets serious and writes the first rate The Cuckoos of Velica Hoca, which may have one or the other pro-Serbian accent, but is not a piece of work that either falls or rises with that accent, but on the merits of its powers of observation, empathy and condensation and representation [look at Hans Hoeller’s suberb essay in Klaus Kastberger’s Freiheit] Can't think of an American writer who might be capable of anything of the kind. That is, you can have your cake and eat it too and show it off and do good work at the same time! However, Handke’s sense of extraordinary self-entitlement only seems to grow with time, most recently evidenced in the breach of his agreement with Klaus Peymann to premiere his latest play IMMER NOCH STURM {Still Storm} at the Burg Theater in Vienna and then transfer the production to the Berliner Ensemble’s home turf; he thinks it should play longer in Austria… but no, the opportunity to have the play star in the lime light at the Salzburg Festival next year obviates all such agreements or sentimentalities about long affiliation, or, what might have been the proper venue for a play that entertains some Slovenian partisan activity in the frontera of Slovenia and Carinthia, say Klagenfurt or Graz. All that counts for this star is to shine in its own reflection at the most polished mirror. - And at the same time one of my Google spiders occasionally brings me a report that "the so withdrawn hermit-like author Peter Handke has deigned, gone out of his way to visit someone or shown some village the honor to show his face!" “Play the game!” it says in Walk About the Villages – Handke plays it better than most and has something to show for it. However, lots of other writers get short shrift – who is the “space displacer” I feel like asking the author of the wonderful characters by that name in “The Art of Asking”. Ms. Loeffler’s interceding indicates the corruption of the German/ Austrian literary establishment. The kid keeps getting his way, no matter what.

If you looked at the early work, looked at it closely, that is if you experienced a book as you read it, and what transpired during its writing you would see not only anxiety but that the writer by writing succeeded in conquering it, toyed with it, Handke has retained a certain coquettish quality all along, a very special economics that, which might just be an additional fillip to overcoming fear: I once found a perfect example of it in the poem Singular and Plural:

http://handke-scholar.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-scholar-and-all.html

and tried to demonstrate fear being overcome.

Being your mother’s love child during the first two years of your life; I would venture that having such a

beautiful mother delight in your being alive also assures a forever search of the line of beauty in the curvatures and not only of Mt. St. Victoire, and being able to conquer anxiety through writing certainly helped give you an even more swollen head! Besides, you knew your stuff, were a virtuoso in some respects.

At the party that Jakov Lind, Pannah Grady and I gave for Gruppe 47 members and American writers to congregate at Pannah’s splendid so benignly lighted apartment in the Dakota, Handke mentioned that he had eye problems as an explanation for wearing the kind of dark glasses in the evening that you associated, then, with gangsters at that time of night; and, possessing well tuned peripheral vision, and being aware of what my periphery gleaned, noticed, at one point, that the kid had a good shot of village sadism in him. That his behavior would not just be boorish but that of an idiot savant who suffered from autistic episodes with tads of Tourettism thrown in for good measure were experiences, and a lot of others, that stood very much in the offing! I hadn’t the faintest that here was someone whose wife and I would have run away with each other during their visit to NY in 1971, Handke seemed married to Fredi Kolleritsch just as in Short Letter Long Farewell, our only lacking money and opportunity; or someone who would rape a girlfriend and say to me the following week that he had not had any “women aventuras” for a long time, perhaps it wasn’t even an adventure, but a routine; nonetheless, it sort of took my breath away; and the girlfriend who had been something rarer than a great passion, but a “great fondness”, that turned out to be yet another moment in my “Midsummer Night’s Dream”; as did Mr. Handke’s thinking I was yet his friend; a lot of women love to be taken hard, a matter about which I feel more equivocal than Mr. Handke… Darwin, another who explains everything, would agree. However, Handke had successfully goaded me, and I would keep my distance except from the work. Thereafter Handke spooked me, and I tried as quickly as possible not to be alone with him. The writer Michael Brodsky who had come to Urizen Books via Patricia Highsmith and Handke served that foil at those times.

Excursus

At the completion of the intense onslaughts with which I translated Walk About the Villages around 1983 Handke felt that it was better than any translation he could ever have conceived. He also noted the “cutting” tone it had acquired, and, most astonishingly, seemed to forget, at least for a while, that without his original text nothing of the sort could have been translated. I might have my dreams, but nothing both that grand and intimate and rich could ever even have been conceived by them. Thus the original author remained the only one, by and large, the great exception is Scott Abbot, who has a notion of how good that work is and whence smithy it was fashioned. Yes, Kurt Beattie, who played Kaspar here in Seattle, sensed its richness, and I imagine that first rate director M. Burke Walker did too, in one of whose classes I once discussed it; oh yes, let me not forget Zeljko Djukic of the Tutatoo Theater in Chicago, but that would seem to be it. The J. of Handke’s and my mutual acquaintance merely admired the line “hefty taxes”, so much for heart on that score. It appears also to have been too rich for the vast majority of the German reading public.

If you regard the second volume of Handke’s published diary excerpts, Geschichte des Bleistifts, you will note how carefully Handke prepared himself for that work. Indeed, I was very much in a cutting mood, if you haven’t, read Kohut’s great essay on Narcissistic Rage. As fate would have it, my nemesis at Farrar, Straus, a spanieling stiletto faggot, Michael diCapua, had become editor in chief for his lying master, he had already tried but failed to sabotage the Handke project of mine back in the late 60s as he did so many others – a man not noted for a single author of import save Woiwode if you accord Woiwode that status. I might have told Handke that my persistence was laying the grounds for a law suit since Roger Straus had made certain promises but also managed to screw me out of half my royalties on the Hesse millions I had brought him. See my homepage for my unhappy adventures in that skin trade: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

In winter 1985, with the promise from another publisher, P.A.J. Press, I left New York for the city that has the bridge with that “touch of evil” to Ciudad Juarez, but all I lost was some street urchins stealing my hat, and another wife and we first spent three months in those two cities, then a year way up in Lincoln National Forest, a fix me up hunting lodge, I reverted to hunting and riding ways and M. and I also did a lot of traveling in the llano estacado all the way to Big Bend National Forest, all along the Rio Grande and across the frontera into the Carmen range, the right kind of wife for that, and, knowing that “nature was his measure,” kept writing Handke little postcards with nature scenes from every hamlet along the way. On returning to New York about a year and a half later the NY publisher who had committed themselves to Villages reneged on their promise, and I - no longer in a rage but back in hunting mode after that year in the wild, wrote them a fine drop dead letter, with copies to the PEN club and to Handke. That finally elicited a response from Handke, I hadn’t heard from him in about 18 months, to the effect that “It was nice to hear from me again” and that such a letter as I had written to P.A.J. was something “one could not do to him.” First thing that puzzled me was this “nice to hear from you again” – might he not have received any of the postcards and letters in the interim? Then I tried to imagine what it might be that was being done to him? What I was doing was for our mutual work. I imagine now that he must have been referring to his precious self-image – of course he took care of that himself a few years later during his intercession in behalf of the Serbians.

Handke’s letter ended with the threat to abrogate our friendship. If you wanted to get my back up, all you needed was to threaten me, especially during that period, and so I made sure my retour postcards [it was a few] to a man who was not my friend, possible friendship had been averted already in the mid-70s, but of whose work I was more than a friend, were legibly typed on my brand new electronic Brother typewriter, the first with a bit of computer memory and plastic spool ribbon, and sent back something to the effect of: “Aren’t we lucky that L. and I in Spring of 1971, she sure would have suited me fine, and you and J. hasn’t interfered with this friendship.” And that was that, Handke might have laughed and we’d really be friends then, I myself had forgotten all about the injury during the translation of Walk About the Villages, had even been grateful for having ruined the relationship with the “great fondness” who had revealed herself to be a schmooze and a macher, no need for me to be a Leonard to her Virginia, as I forget his wretched, I call it his “Bruno Handke side” when reading or being under the influence of the best of him, his work. But no, unfortunately Handke remained true to form and as “humorless as death,” and my W.A.T.V. being the best translation he had ever seen did not keep him from going to Ralph Mannheim and having a second one made. Alas poor Handke is all I can say. However, the appearance of the Mannheim translation, prior to mine, for once totally infuriated me. You find a distorted [the usual distorted I would say of matters of this kind] aspect of part of these events in The Afternoon as a Writer about the alleged former friend who is traveling from one sierra to the other as he goes mad. Humorless as death, Handke appears not to have known, hated being caught, lied, and thus ever so regretfully I must concur with Marie Colbin’s every single point on the estimate of Handke’s character [2], except that he was “just a narcissistic writer” as she evidently herself does no longer as she keeps performing his work, now no longer fails to appreciate what it takes to become that great a couturier of the language he is to whom self-image yet seems to matter more than anything, how he appears on stage, and whose self-image is so wounded and tetchy; and except, hearing and seeing her perform Handke texts, she certainly is still pretty, but how Handke could have stood her presence for even one night without putting duct tape over her mouth is beyond my ears, who knows perhaps he did but she won’t tell us about having been a victim in a sick relationship for some years:

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/09/links-to-videos-of-handke-plays-that.html

I imagine the part of my derisive reply to Handke’s threat that got to him was the bit of L. and I having run off together, a reminder of the “worst thing that ever happened” to him. I had yet to appreciate the devastation that that act wrought by looking closely at the works of the period 1971 to 1976, Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Nonsense & Happiness, A Moment of True Feeling, Weight of the World and how Handke imaginatively writes his way out of his injury by several acts of withdrawal, Left-Handed Woman and A Slow Homecoming. And if I had appreciated the devastation then, I might have left out that part of my reply, I would certainly have been a bit more thoughtful than on automatic fury. Handke commented on my poems in my Headshots that I still seemed to be in a fighting mood, I imagine he didn’t think I might fight him, too. At any event, I was now free of the relationship to the person, of course not to the texts, to marry those is fine. Lucky me in that respect, in many ways. I was in a position to remain a getreuer Korreptitor to his texts, sell our correspondence when I needed to, which would fetch far more now I imagine, be a tough on idiot critics as I liked, etc.

Villages was eventually published by Ariadne Press, but is now out of print. That stellar firm managed to sell 500 copies in about 15 years, little Urizen and Continuum Books sold about 5,000 copies of Innerworld and Nonsence & Happiness in a few years, of course we submitted galleys to Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal so the world might know of the existence of these books instead of the cellars in which Ariadne Press’s books molder. There was only one more brief letter from Handke indicating that he had nothing against the publication of the translation being published, to the word and the text we are true, to not much else. When it devolved that no one seemed to be or want to translate the great 1999 VOYAGE BY DUGOUT: THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR I contacted Dr. Hardt at Suhrkamp, who is in charge of foreign rights, and indicated that I would be willing to translate the text at no charge, and prepare a translation and a playing version, since I felt that the text a whole would overwhelm the attention span of my local gnats. Via Hardt Handke communicated that “I should accept” – little did he seem to know that the last thing I needed was yet another albatross to shlepp. If we had not been on the outs this getreue Korreptitor would have gone on translating all the plays:

http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/index.html/

http://www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com/index.html/

http://www.handkedrama3.scriptmania.com/index.html/

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/

got a few of them published and only a single one of the late great plays performed in English, The Hour we knew nothing about each other, which works so well because it is, on one level, as unchallenging as dance theater, and no one really understands it and its movement, or grace – can’t say that I’ve run into a single review that comments on that line of beauty that most Handke texts have.

However, unbeknownst at least to Dr. Hardt, Scott Abbott, the translator of JOURNEYS TO THE RIVERS [JUSTICE FOR SERBIA] not yet the friend he is now, was already translating VOYAGE, Conjunctions was even going to run an excerpt until the J.L. Marcus crime appeared in the NYRB, a task he completed a few years ago, first rate work, and neither his or my after all fairly connected attempts to get it staged show any results so far in this garbage heap culture. Here in Seattle I had initially found interest in Richard White at Cornish, who then never got back to me for a second date – he was too busy giving away money from the local arts fund, to matters that never never never will get beyond the borders of these philistine surrounds. Ditto for all the ones who once claimed “Oh Handke I love his work.” Bullshit artists, lazy bones, it’s not the system, a better system with these people would re-create the same culture. I.e. matters are entirely hope-less. The few are far too few.

One instance of Handke appearing and I availing myself of Michael Brodsky as a foil is the worm hole to matters becoming novelistic and truly worm eaten. The year must be 1977. Handke did not have Amina along as he once did as well, and I decided to go to my, one of the two watering holes in our downtown then urban pioneering idyll, Barnabus Rex, which was on the north side of that very short block of Captain Duane Street between Hudson Street and West Broadway, two blocks north of Chamber, half a dozen of the then still erect WTC, the other was Puffy’s at Jay and Hudson, with author Jim Stratton as part owner. At Barnabus that night the head bartender of that shoebox of a bar that had a bar pool-table and a famous juke box and a postage stamp to dance on, was “Ace”, Andreas Nowa, and I will always recall the way Ace’s face opened gradually into the most welcoming broad happy smile – Ace had studied directing but found that directing the extraordinary goings on at B-Rex, then Mickey’s and ultimately “The Raccoon Lodge,” quite slaked his directorial thirst – when I introduced Handke to him, whose work he knew of his own accord. Handke and Brodsky talked, I played pool and danced a bit, I noticed that the two of them made attempts in that direction, awkward shuffles. The evening was notable for two matters, one that Laurie Spiegel, with whom I had taken a loft and lived in Duane Park for two years appeared at the threshold and promptly fainted at the sight of me happily with friends instead of being two-by-four tossed by her after I had moved out from her harridans fifth floor , the strapping Aussie sheep farmer’s son the Maoist Tim Burns carried her home; and Handke whispering to me out of the nowhere that if I needed $ 10,000 for Urizen Books I should call on him. [5] An observation of Handke’s from that evening has made it into Die Geschichte des Bleistift’s to the effect that he had seen someone who was both playful and serious. Certainly those were the qualities that had also attracted me to his work initially, who would eventually call himself, accurately, “the melancholy player.” If Handke had one actress after another because he said actresses were “lighter” [I would say the company of a pretty actress make Handke look better is the reason, and if he feels better he feels less depressed], all my marriages and marriage-like living arrangements were with artists, two painters, two writers, one dancer, one daughter of a painter on the way to becoming a painter herself, and Laurie, the composer, music touched me most deeply of all, and love of Spiegel Musik, their work exceeded love of their fleshly presence. From such delusions many a “La Bohéme” is born. Even now I can fall in love with a poetess just reading a fine translation of a poem, thank you for laughing Basheva. The fatalities of sons of beautiful mothers.

Let us now fast forward to the early 90s and UC Riverside where I met “sie sind bei Erich Wolfgang Skwara” is how his answering machine greets you who had met Handke at Martin Walser’s place at the Bodensee, which I had once visited in 1969. He needed someone to bring the translation of his wonderful Don Juan novel THE PLAGUE OF SIENA up to snuff and it sure was a pleasure to do so. Udderwise, as became quickly clear, Skwara was a decadent, which did not faze me except that he, too, seemed to be one of those Don Juans who were intent on injuring women. An interesting relationship might ensue, not a close one ever, I was a bit more awake. In a conversation between Skwara and Handke which this absolutely wonderful tattle tale gossip reported Handke explained that his and mine relationship was on the rocks because I had not repaid the 10 K loan he had made to Urizen Books. Well no, it was because I had insulted him with my letter, and I recounted Handke’s proclivities with the fairer sex, roughness of which Skwara himself had gotten good wind off, and Skwara mentioned that he would take care not to afford Handke the opportunity to have any of his women! Men! Just like me: in the later 70s I had a really precocious girlfriend who was studying in Paris and who it turned out was a double for the young Marie Colbin, who was only in Handke’s future then, I had made it a point never to take Rachel to visit Handke, who had moved out of the dark, nicely mysterious extensive semi-basement on the Rue Montmorency to a small Gründerzeit castle in Meudon, the very one where Left Handed Woman was filmed, but only to the man who became my favorite author ever, the aging United Front War reporter Wilfred Burchett and his Bulgarian very peasant sturdy wife, in Clamart, the quartiér one over from Meudon.

When the firm, Urizen Books, had gone down and I started on what seemed like a god-send, the translation of WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, in the course of that correspondence, Handke had brought up the subject of the outstanding loan and wrote that at the time he had made good on the promise this was a considerable sum for him - and in retrospect I thought if I had known that I would not have called on it, and he also wrote that it did not seem to be enough, indeed it was not, $ 500,000 would have been [see FN # 5], but I wondered whether Handke had any idea of the finances involved in that curious business of book publishing where you pay advances it can take many years to recoup, have to pay salaries and printers and buy paper and afford book sellers credit… If my father’s example as an extraordinarily capable but pathos drenched businessman had not made business of any kind such an unattractive proposition I might even have decided to get myself trained in all aspect of that business in my 20s, opportunities certainly afforded themselves, and not learned the trade by the seat of my pants and, but for the hideous partner ship, business was both fun and surprisingly clean: one bookshop once did not pay up at all during those seven years, one typesetter once held me up and demanded twice the agreed on price on final galleys for Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize play Buried Child, the mob stole the first ten boxes of self-named play from a loading dock and a “used” book shop downtown had copies before I did. By and large, I could not even complain about reviewers as I now do about the treatment Handke has been receiving the past 25 years in this country. Sure, there were these curious events when a marvelous book such as Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama of the 19^th Century or Gavino Ledda’s Padre Padrone fell entirely through the cracks, no matter what you as the midwife had done, and you then scratched your head.

At the time, in the early 80s, I replied to Handke that I had an inheritance, as I then did, and my will would mention the debt and consigned the sum to him or to Amina whoever happened to be alive. Later, when it devolved that Suhrkamp owed me $ 10 K from my representation work for them from 1969 to 1971, I also wrote him that since Unseld – as usual I might say – did not honor agreements with the “small people” might put an extra 10 K on Handke’s Suhrkamp issued American Express card: Indeed if you are an A-list Suhrkamp author, at least at that time, you got your own Suhrkamp American Express card and your quarterly royalty statements were accounted in that fashion; i.e. since you could as it were draw ahead, these statements were meaningless. Siegfried Unseld basically was a holdup artist, who if he had done what he did on a street, would have spent time in jail; since he, however, only did it to a fellow publisher, Roger Straus – I want a larger share of the mass paperback rights for Hesse – we are talking hundred of thousands dollars – or we will not permit any other such sales, moreover we will not sign the second ten book contract – you get away with it, since you need to continue to be in business with each other, and the only not very serious consequence is that the agency, Lantz-Donadio and I will stop repping you. I was touched to read in the recently published Unseld-Bernhardt correspondence how Bernhardt seemed to know the vulture and held him up the way an artist can a besotted vulture, I could sympathize with poor Siegfried’s merciless addiction to genius and culture. Again see my home page http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

for the depth of criminality in that field. I would not drift into it again, but follow my childhood love of flora and fauna and try to work as much as possible in the field.

Since I had translated WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES for Handke, at his request, I might have brought that up. What amounted to six months intense work over a three year period eventually earned me $ 650.00. $ 500 from the publisher Ariadne Press, $ 150.00 from Partisan Review, and a fine bottle of California Red from Jim Krusoe at the St. Monica Review, who also published an excerpt, minus hundreds of dollars in postage and Xerox to find a publisher. In other words, Handke was lying to Skwara about the cause for his and mine being personally on the outs. What might a real man have said? [a] “When I told him that I didn’t like the way he was going about finding a publisher for the work he insulted him.” Would have been close enough to the truth. Or [b] I screwed his girlfriend back in the 70s, it never seemed to bother him then, now he brings it up and claims he and Libgart would have run away. I and my work don’t need it.”

Lie only when your existince seems to depend on it, something I have had to do only once. Handke appears to have learned lying early in life, he even claims that as soon as he is caught he lies like the dickens, perhaps it is a part of his general feeling of overall entitlement. In an amazing interview with Rene Mueller, Handke at one point voices the opinion that he’d like to be a real “Schuft” at some point in the future, and Mueller, rather wittily, replies that there is certainly ample time left for that – who as an investigative reporter interviewer seems to leave something to be desired as he places another Handke interview in the pages of a feuilliton. Thus poor Marie Colbin could not be more right about Handke’s character, wrong about his being exclusively a narcissistic writer; and since Handke is such a split being, his lousy character does not effect his work too often, not at all when he is as honest as he is in, say, WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES or DON JUAN; in a mixed bag such as MORAWIAN NIGHTS, severely. As to Kultchur, don’t necessarily reach for your side arm on hearing the word, but do keep one in your holster when dealing with the vultures.

End Excursus

After Princeton and the party in New York in 1966, you might conclude that the fellow had made an impression, that you would read his first novel and look at his plays, Unseld was certainly happy that a young author had risen to the occasion, in the background would remain these hints of darkness. That the dark would manifest itself then also in the work and in the way the person lived his life might have come as an unhappy realization, but what of course came as ultimately by far greater a surprise was the range of the talent and what it could elicit in me and that there was that much love in the fellow, that he could also be a sweetheart of a guy, and generous, and helpful, and that he turned out to be a genius, and a hardworking, well trained one – that came as one of the more pleasant surprises in my life which would be a far emptier than it is without that encounter; and I am speaking not just for myself. And that he then afforded me the opportunity to get off the Handke bus and merely report on what I had experienced and sell our correspondence of maybe 75 letters for far less than they would fetch now.

In 1966 I certainly had not the faintest that Handke was someone whose work I might want to translate, personally he was not someone I was attracted to spend time with. As fate or whatever would have it, a few years later with a job at FSG I persuaded the powers that be, with Susan Sontag’s endorsement, to take on a novel of his and the early plays; playing with translating the plays to see who might be the right translator – some pages of Self-Accusation - found it a lot of fun. Thus you became involved, not finding anyone to produce the plays… you [I] became involved more deeply.

I eventually realized that I was one of those someones for whom Pound seemed to have said in his ABC of Reading that one needed only to know a few things really well. The first instance of that was becoming a Joycean during my senior year in high school [thank you Yoshira Sonbanmatsu!], although, as I think back, I had also been one of those German kids who then read each and every 50+ book by the German writer of adventures set in the Middle East, Central America and the United States Indian country, and retained a lot of its pretty good geography and knowledge of the flora and fauna of those regions – although evidently not well enough not to pursue a big black and white bushy- tailed what I thought cat when, newly arrived, I found myself living at the edge of the woods in West Orange, New Jersey in 1950, with unpleasant consequences as the cat raised its tail and sprayed. Joyce was succeeded, the idea of spending time with Joyceans did not appeal to me, by a year’s complete involvement with Faulkner, then a year of Kafka and Co., the idea of becoming a Kafka nut did not prove attractive either, although Kafka scholars are a nicely variegated lot and he certainly had great initial responders in Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Then came Brecht and Lukacs, Brechtians for a long time either smoked cigars and wore their hair the way Brecht did, but again: a variegated lot. Goethe scholars I have found to be the humanely richest and congenial of that kind, starting with Harry Pfund at Haverford; and Pound, the idea of being a Poundian was even less attractive then being a Joycean, he seemed to attract the genuinely mad and fanatical or soft skulled, and I actually never ploughed through the Cantos in their entirety, or had the slightest desire to trek to St. Elizabeth, although certainly everything else was of real benefit I think, especially to my ear. Faulknerians I never met except for William Styron with whom I had the one really good conversation about Faulkner after my Freshman year, Conrad, Henry James, I ought to thank my stepfather, Colonel Richard Weber who must be getting out of limbo just about now, for having been an utter Shakespeare nut, one of several endearing qualities, which obviated any further Shakespeare nuts down the line and certainly helped avoid some serious gaffes translating Handke who is a kind of Shakespearean talent. Musil… has fine scholars quite a few of whom I admire greatly, sanity prevails. At any event I carried these affairs pretty well to the limit and then went on. Later would come Adorno, who must have the greatest pain-in-the-ass schoolmasterly followers; and eventually Freud whose complete works I read three times, and his disciples. What a wealth there! Handke scholarship, best as I can tell, has attracted some truly talented translators and scholars and fine minds – Scott Abbott, Karl Wagner, Fabjan Haffner, Hans Höller, Georg Pichler [the one who is at the University of Alcala in Madrid] Krishna Winston [despite her failure to read the early work and the idiot advice she gave to Farrar, Straus on KALI], Tom Barry, David Coury, Frank Pillip, Schmidt-Dengler and some of his students, to mention far too few of those who then make up for what the reception leaves to be desired… Some scholars are now so indebted to Handke,
not just in my postage stamp, so much is invested in him,
that a differentiated assessment, that is an interesting
assessment, instead of the building hagiography... will be difficult, these are the pendulums... to come…

In the U.S. Handke has received a single review from a peer, William Gass, who then regretted that Steve Wasserman at the L.A. Book Review only afforded him half the space he wanted [see the handke-revista-review blog for the Gass’s piece on MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN’S BAY.

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-revista-of.html

I was going to make my decimation of Neil Gordon’s criminally incompetent NY Times Book Review of this round-up, you can find it at:

http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

as you can the even more detailed job I did on J.L. Marcus equally stupid but far more damaging piece in the New York Review of Books. Then there are the sweet nothings that sweet thing say, the great exception, as mentioned before, was the apparent comprehension of ONE DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE – J.L. Marcus, desperately looking for signs of pro-Serbian sentiment even there, missed Handke’s surrogate, the pharmacist’s nasty insert on some damaged NATO vehicles being pulled north along the Autobahn of the improbably named Taxham, a kind of Salzburg suburb. Among introductions, let me not fail to mention Greil Marcus’s fine one to the NYRB Books edition of SHORT LETTER LONG FAREWELL.

Then there are the Juergen Brockhoffs, I imagine that there
must be others of that ilk in the discipline, who feel as he does, not that all of them are for sale to the FAZ.

Heinrich Detering, someone whose specialty is the productive conflict of bi-sexual impulses, Handke might be a fit subject for his approach if he took the trouble to research what psychoanalysis avail in that respect, preferably doing one himself so as to be able to speak with some authority, has an oddly idyllic take on that wonderfully dark DON JUAN, which might just become, nay already has become my favorite Handke short novel, his piece can be found at:

www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com/photo5.html

and I have devoted a page to Don Juan at:

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/04/review-of-peter-handkes-don-juan-short.html

I had a similar experience to the Handke reception during my Freshman year in college in reading the swinishness to which Faulkner’s work was subjected prior to his winning the Nobel Prize and, optimistic fool I continue to be, did not think I would ever encounter anything along those lines again. Ah, but if there isn’t that super-swine J. L Marcus in the NYRB whose infamy I took the trouble to decimate point by point at:

http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2009/12/letter-to-robert-silvers-ny-review-of.html

Neil Gordon, who is even head of a writing program and who is mentioned individually only because he appears to have some power is decimated point by ugly stupid point at:

http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/09/neil-gordons-review-of-handkes-del.html

But it is not Gordon who is to be blamed, it is editors like Oh Tannenbaum, Bob Silvers, Robert Wilson of the alleged American Scholar who avail themselves of the likes of Gordon, J.L. Marcus and Michael McDonald, literary counsel to the American Interest, and I blame perpetuators such as Dennis “The Mutton” Dutton of “Artdaily” an adjunct of the Chronicle of Higher Education for such perpetuations to the exclusion of balancing counter-argument. Nay, after I complained to the Chronicle about his doing two Michael McDonald idiocies and nothing else, the sweet Mutton me know a few months down the line that he’d run into something positive but because I had complained would not do me the favor. And that poor sheep then complains when I call him petty, and what that has to do with me anyway, or the conveyance of halfway credible information

As to the Handke’s publishing career in the U.S., you can lay blame, and squarely at the graves of Roger Straus and Michael diCapua. Handke collections were in semi-mass paperback with Avon and Collier Books in the 70s, the New Yorker had devoted an entire issue to Left-Handed Woman and run a huge especially tailored except from The Repetition. The plays were done all the time in colleges. Then F.S.+G. waited approximately 10 years and brought out a collection of three very different book under the title of its lead novel A Slow Homecoming which three books might have been published in sequence, as they were written, subsequent to Left-Handed Woman. The transition to a somewhat changed Handke was lost; even though Weight of the World had done well FS&G did not follow up with Geschichte des Bleistifts [The History of the Pencil], and though Kaspar + other Plays went through no end of re-printings and Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays sold out, F.S.G. did not publish a single of his later greater plays. For that Steve Wasserman during his tenure as editor of the FSG subsidiaries Hill & Wang – where plays are published - and Noonday Books deserves some of the blame, or blame the avariciousness of the quarterly statement. And then in the 90s Roger Straus writes Siegfried Unseld that he has a problem and its name is Handke! No, whatever circle of hell you dwell in Roger, the name and problem is Roger Straus, and that Handke must have had near a dozen editors at Farrar, Straus over the incremental now forty years. Currently F.S. & G. relies on his chief prose translator Krishna Winston as advisor on what Handke to publish and not. For reasons of wanting some time to herself and thinking that the truly very different novel Kali is like other Handke she turned it down. Not only is this evidence of translator’s megalomania, I can think of at least a half dozen translators from the German who could do a fine job with that book, but also of pretense, since Krishna, first rate translator, has not read any Handke prior to the time she came aboard around 1990 with the death of Ralph Mannheim, nay I have been trying to prevail on her for years to read Walk About the Villages. Alas and alas and alas, the wrong kind of amateurishness of U.S. trade publishing will never cease.

Thus, what came as mostly an unhappy experience as of a certain point were matters incidental to being involved in Handke’s work, the reception, his mediocre publisher who had dropped the ball already in the early 80s and still hasn’t really picked it back up, the controversies… literary intramural food fights… German reviewer lack nothing in incompetence over folks like, e.g. David Siegel, that Ulrich Greiner and Iris Radisch are / were chief reviewers for my aunt’s Die Zeit, or that there is an idiot like Hubert Spiegel writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeine… Oddly enough, the re-invented Neues Deutschland, once the organ of the East German S.E.D. [Unified i.e. forcibly joined socialist and communist parties of the Peoples Republic of Germany] does some of the best Handke reviews there! My guess is because now, no longer a party organ, they still revel in their independence and their heart continues to beat on the left, and are under the delusion that Handke, the capitalist, is still a socialist!

Handke of course has his devotees that unhappily can be as uncritical as Hesse fans used to be. [4] H.M. Enzensberger has a nasty line about both kinds in one of his poems “first she read Hesse then Handke” – anyhow, a devotee such as Lothar Struck is what Handke ought to have as a mother French saint of a wife Portuguese cleaning woman for whom her son can do no wrong, devoted and soft in the noodle he starts to sorrow that there will be no more books at a ficciones such as Morawian Nights, thinks that Handke has never written in as childlike a fashion before [no child writes such formalist tour de forces, Lothar! as Moravian has them] is willing to overlook that her son beats the shit out of women, is astounded by Handke calling Madelaine Allbright “Ganzhell” and that Handke has some of his own characters make brief appearances in the book! Alas, what befuddlement will do in our respective Midsummer Nights Dreams! meanwhile as only mothers can be. Since there are so many that do wrong by Handke, why not someone who is besotted, like Lothar Struck the wife Handke never had! Yet his many reviews of Handke's work at his Begleitschreiben blog
http://begleitschreiben.twoday.net/

and at the first rate German on-line Literary Mag

GLANZ UND ELEND contains many fine and valuable insights

http://www.glanzundelend.de/startseite.htm
Struck thus can be forgiven for losing his mind over MORAWIAN NIGHTS, sorrowing that this might be the master's last work, on the one hand reading autobiographically but then refusing to do so overall. Lothar is forgiven for this mental lapse, after all if I dwell on the mistakes in love I made for all the pretty girls, never never never in literature, if only the wenches had been books I would not have lost my mind and read some of them better and even loved some of them better... Struck helps obviate some of junk perpetrated by German reviewers. It really is not those poor sods who ought to be blamed but the editors of these organs, one notable exception is the NZZ [Neue Zuricher Zeitung].

As noted at the beginning of what was meant to be only 5 k words long: Handke is nearly enshrined in Austria as a National Treasure despite or perhaps because he is such a unique Popanz; the National Archives there sprung for an equal amount to the German Marbach archives for their half of his manuscripts and notebooks; perhaps the Slovenian equivalent will get the future accumulation, and Handke’s leavings will then be distributed not to the winds but to the three countries in which he is rooted. Thus scholarship is taking a somewhat uncritical look at the treasure and making it ready to be exhibited as a marble statue. However, this photo, with which I will close, would seem most appropriate to his split nature. When Richard Grey that spectacular Kafka scholar asked me one day about an ambivalence he sensed in my feelings about my subject, I explained that you could hang up a lot of clothes on that clothes line, especially if you looked at all the different matters that you hung on it. But I can’t say that ambivalence has ever been like this, on the one hand the fellow elicits disgust on the other, next to my mother, I can’t say I love any one better.

One day I arrived at Montmorency, 1974 I think, and an Austrian Backfisch Groupie was there. I sat around for a while thinking what might be going on, but did not stay long. Calling Handke or his calling me, he mentioned that he had then exposed himself and that the girl had blushed, precisely of course the reaction an exhibitionist wants to elicit, and Handke said he did this when he felt “a bit diabolical.” About ten years later in the make love not war and love-making is like breathing but for God’s sake don’t fall in love and into possessiveness of downtown Manhattan of the 70s into the 80s I might even have asked the girl: do you like making love to two men? It would have been perfectly normal in Tribeca then. Handke I suspect would have grinned his famous shit-eating grin. But it wasn’t until I pursued Handke’s childhood tragedy that I understood why exhibition in all its manifestations was one of the forces driving his art – not that his so very chaste art elicits embarrassed blushes from the word, only verbally he does and can, and in his unceasing need to exhibit himself so competitively and compensatorily and vocally. However, I recall an analyst saying to me after a performance of PUBLIC INSULT at the Goethe House in New York that the piece had been as good as a great communal session in making the audience entirely self-conscious about being in the world and about language.

Meanwhile my man lives as a restaurateur of the finest language salad in the Forêt de Chaville, and this “bower bird” in an even finer retreat on Pheasant lane in a prairie by a lake:

[1] Early works: See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Handke#List_of_works

[2-A] Colbin

Handke introduces his admission to having beaten a woman, tactical concession defense, as a belated response to former lover and Lebensgefährte, collaborator on a film now Erinye Marie Colbin’s going public, during the Handke/ Yugoslavia publicity wars in the 90s, first in Der Falter, which was picked up

http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,24228,00.html

with a description of how Handke had nearly killed her. ["Ich höre noch meinen Kopf auf den Steinboden knallen. Ich spüre noch den Bergschuh im Unterleib und auch die Faust im Gesicht... Solange es Männer gibt auf dieser Welt - Männer wie Dich - einäugig, unnachgiebig, machthungrig und Ego-breit - wird es auch Waffen geben und somit Kriege... Wer bist Du denn, daß Du Dich so wichtig nimmst? Bist weder groß, noch edel oder gar bescheiden und aufrichtig. Ein eitler Schreiber bist Du, der sich sonnt in der Rolle des 'einsamen Rufers.'... Irgendwie wirst Du diesem Krieg dankbar sein, denn er befriedigt auf perverse Weise Dein unstillbares Verlangen nach öffentlicher Anerkennung." A translation of her statement reads: „I can still feel my head bang on the stone floor. I can still feel the mountain hiker boots hit my stomach and your fist in my face… As long as there are men in the world – men like you – one-eyed, unyielding, power-hungry and egomaniacal – there will be weapons and therefore war… Who are you, to think of yourself as so important. You are neither great, nor noble nor modest nor honest. A vain writer is what you are, who suns himself in the role of the solitary prophet… In some way you will be thankful for this war [The Yugoslav wars of 1994] because it will satisfy your insatiable longing for public acclaim.” –

I gives me little satisfaction [only some] to agree with most of Ms. Colbin’s assessment, who however herself would I think disavow her statement that he is just a vain writer – since she herself doesn’t seem to be able not to perform his work, that is let go. I cannot recall a single instance where Handke in what had been a 20 some year association where he expressed the slightest interest in who I might be, whence I came, my past, etc. Monomaniacal was fine with me once I got an inkling of what a genius he was. Yet what surprised me was that someone so quickly successful might yet be so lonely that he needed to ask me in the 70s to write to him – once I got a drift on how very different his autism made this idiot savant, I allowed that it was simply so, not that I necessarily understood all those equations. Colbin is of course more than right in finding that the Yugoslav wars afforded Handke a golden opportunity for self-display – yet some fine works, as detailed above, have resulted from it too. Perhaps we should just summarize it in your typical all purpose New York Times headline: “Some good, some bad.” !?

2 b- Colbin]

August 9, 2010

COLBIN READS HANDKE BACK AT HIM/ and i leave a six part commentar

"eine verschmitzte, herrlich sinnlose Lebenslust"- GENAU!

Festwochen Gmunden: Gedemütigte Frau und Richterin

Marie Colbin las Peter Handke im Gmundner MYTHOS.

In Peter Handkes Salzburger Jahren Anfang der 80er war der Schriftsteller der Lebenspartner der Schauspielerin Marie Colbin. Bei den Festwochen Gmunden las Colbin am Samstag im MYTHOS Handkes Text „Bis dass der Tag euch scheidet oder eine Frage des Lichts“.

Das MYTHOS in der Badgasse ist ein Ort, an dem nicht über Qualität diskutiert werden muss. In dem kleinen Geschäft mit großem Anspruch stehen Film-Raritäten herum, erlesene Literatur und fantastische Vinyl-Platten. Wer hier Kunde ist, der lässt sich nicht vom Zeitgeist schrecken, der steht auf Dinge für die Ewigkeit. Mit diesem Anspruch reiste die in Salzburg lebende Marie Colbin nicht in ihre Heimatstadt. Für die Ewigkeit – was ist das schon, geht das denn? Sie wollte Peter Handkes im Oktober 2008 entstandenen Monolog bloß mehr Leben injizieren, als es die blutleere Uraufführung bei den Salzburger Festspielen im vergangenen Jahr zu Stande gebracht hat. Das gelingt ihr, mitunter sogar ein bisschen zu lebendig. Sie gibt sich hin, als sei ihr die Anklage der namenlosen Frau selbst aus der Feder geflossen. Handke reagiert mit seinem Text auf Samuel Becketts „Das letzte Band“ und dessen Figur Krapp. Handke bewertete Becketts Werk als die Endstation des Theaters, weil noch mehr Reduktion nicht zu schaffen sei.
Schweigen ohne Widerrede
„Mit deiner Art Schweigen wolltest du bestimmen über mich, wolltest du mir dein Gesetz aufzwingen, ein despotisches Gesetz, gegen das es keine Widerrede gab“, liest und lebt Colbin. Im Raum entsteht eine Ahnung davon, wie es sich zwischen ihr und Handke abgespielt haben könnte. Colbin ist kleines Mädchen, gedemütigte Frau und Richterin. Sie stampft, sie marschiert barfuß auf dem eigens ausgelegten roten Teppich, der sich wie eine Blutspur durch den Laden zieht. „Neiiiiiiiiin“, schreit sie gellend und wehrt sich gegen die Bilder, die in ihr aufsteigen, gegen seinen „formvollendeten Gram“ und gegen seine „Leichenbittermiene“, in der sie „eine verschmitzte, herrlich sinnlose Lebenslust“ zu erkennen glaubt. Colbin mutet sich ungebremst zu, und als Adressat ist Handke an diesem Abend nicht mehr aus dem Kopf zu bringen.
Marie Colbin steht kurz davor, ins Filmgeschäft zurückzukehren, im Herbst wird über die Finanzierung von zwei Projekten entschieden. Bis dahin hat sie noch einen kleinen Teil ihrer Welt zu retten: das Postamt in ihrem Salzburger Stadtteil Morzg, das zugesperrt werden soll. Ein Salzburger Freibad hat sie schon vor dem Abriss bewahrt und damit verhindert, dass anstelle der urbanen Idylle ein Hotel gebaut wurde. Colbin: „Mit dieser Post ist es genauso, sie ist ein kleines Kommunikationszentrum, vom Uhu bis zur DVD kriegt man alles, und es wäre eine Schande, wenn sie es schließen.“ 1400 Unterschriften hat sie schon gesammelt, die Protestliste wird sie den Zuständigen in Wien zustellen – freilich per Post.
==============================================

[3-a] At one point I sat on the podium next to H.M. Enzensberger whom I had met in 1961 at Ruth Landshoff Yorck’s on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. H.M.E. seemed so bored he was teaching himself Chinese, which would take him probably less than a month. Aside from Enzensberger I knew a fair number of members of the Gruppe and their work, I had done long interviews with Uwe Johnson and Peter Weiss, unfortunately Günter Grass did not allow tape recorders, and I did not know stenography. The sergeant major of the group who made short shrift of Handke’s prohibited whole scale attack, only comments on individual texts were allowed, I had met in Berlin. If I had real personal affinity it was with Peter Weiss, but what a talented group of people had developed out of the ashes, and the East Germans were not represented, some Austrians, some Swiss. By Spring 1966 I had spent my Junior year at German Universities; had spent several years in Germanics in graduate school, which remained impervious to then current literature, had been a reader for a variety of U.S. publishers, had spent a year as a literary Scout in Germany with ample time to read, especially at an aunt’s bookshop in Berlin, even had become somewhat versed in the approved East German literature, typing was the one of the most useful thing I took away from high school, no one had mentioned stenography. Had befriended Jürgen Becker, Fritz Raddatz in Hamburg… had read most everything of the “Wiener Schule” and was developing a good dim sense of the lay of the different literary landscapes .

[4] I translated three fairly early Hesse novel in the 60s and it was a chore. I always admired Ralph Mannheim for bringing Hesse up to snuff in translation.

[5] At that time Urizen was in a bit of trouble, when was it not, started with $ 200,000 and what expertise I had and 25 books that I wanted to publish. At that time, 1977, I had just committed myself to contribute $ 50,000 in capital, but only had $ 20 k, ten from my father, and 10 that I had earned through some outside editing of the autobiography of a banker’s wife. Two friends, aside Handke, without being asked contributed the other twenty. I am still mystified how I might have emanated that need or been that well liked or at those expressions of confidence at a moment I was beginning to have some serious doubt about the firm, especially about the other active partner [the third, Leo Feldsberg, Oberon N.V. was by and large silent investor who ought to have and certainly had the funds to invest many a million or at least half a million and the firm could have established its backlist a bit more quickly and less arduously], Susan Sontag had just informed me that Wieland Schulz’s [the passport name] moneys derived from his partnership with a Mafioso in a pornographic dubbing firm, Vicland Productions. I had assumed until then that Schulz’s working capital of $ 100,000 derived from the little social documentaries he was making for West German television. Moreover, Schulz also was beginning to behave just the way Handke himself had described on meeting him ever so briefly at the premiere of My Foot My Tutor and Self-Accusation at B.A.M. in Spring 1971. Schulz was showing that he was a shouting nervous dictator, he had already screwed the other partner out of his $ 50,000 commitment in a venture to make a Midsummer Night’s Dream film where Judith Thurman received $ 5,000 to write the screen play. For me it became a question who of the two partner’s was the greater embarrassment, and THIS threesome had founded what was meant to be a firm “that shared profits with its authors and was owned by its employees”. [Feldsberg’ residence in Kali, Colombia was on a hill looking at a hill opposite that the Catholics ascended on Easter on their knees with Leo cackling as the devout idiots did so. Leo had one of the great collections of recorded opera, son of a Viennese wine merchant he had become a rich man courtesy of a $ 25,000 loan from the Danish consul in the early 40s. Now he wanted to be the impresario that he had dreamed of being as a young man in Vienna. Leo couldn’t bear to lose a buck on the simplest of bets, that I guess is how you become and remain a millionaire in this world.]

I did not see a way out of my predicament, but found ways of introducing moneys into the firm, and found several serious investors who took one look at Schulz and then passed. Here is the first of my two grievous errors that led to the demise to the firm. The second even more grievous and truly fatal one was when our sales manager Hyung Pak showed me that Schulz was using the firm to sluice money from his off-shore vehicle Princeton N.V. through Urizen, and that he was taking a salary even when he didn’t work, Schulz actually, clever [?] fellow, for an alleged investment of $ 100,000 managed to take out $ 300,000 from the firm during its approximate seven year existence. Not only that, he played Feldsberg and me off against each other, by telling our respective selves that the other wanted Schulz to run the firm, something that I didn’t find out until I met with Leo after the firm no longer even existed. At the end, Schulz sold the heart of the firm, its twelve most valuable titles, for $ 25,000 and kept that money for his Under the Volcano Venture, a project that he stole from my Spanish director friend Gonzalo de Herralde Grau one of whose films Schulz had produced out of the Urizen Office. It was that theft that finally made me see clearly and go into action, and it turned out that the crazy making Schulz was an utter coward, as evil so frequently is: served a subpoena he turned blue and fled and never even showed up in court, thus winning that suit turned out to be child’s play. Had Handke ever been right about how dark and also at least very German Schulz was, and discovered in what, five minutes, darkness it took me about half a dozen years to appreciate. No wonder you might say that I decided to see an analyst. During the course of the early years of Urizen Books a kind of sweet dumb and troubled fellow would occasionally show up at Urizen, progressively more distraught, Victor Bertini, and he supplied the “Vic” in Vicland [its German pronunciation is the joke], Schulz’s and his porno-dubbing firm, and he was subjected to the same financial razzle dazzle that also gradually drove me crazy, so that when I look back I can see myself behaving like Victor, who was just a soldati, not some smart mobster at all, until the last moment as it were, but at the last moment Urizen was a sick horse that had to be put out of its misery; thus it’s failure is entirely my fault, the fault of my grandiosity in thinking that my magic could make it survive no matter what. Schulz eventually fled NY and has gone on to acquire judgments galore in the European film business, a long trail of destruction lies in his wake:

http://www.schulz-keil.faithweb.com/photo.html

As someone who knows him observed: “He wants to be caught, and then he wants to do it again.” i.e. a miserable masochist, and where there is masochism there is sadism. However, I also felt obligated at the time, and since the fellow also added the dimension of social history to the firm, and doing it by myself felt too lonely… I failed to take action until it was too late. But such negligence and dithering and grandiosity has consequences. However, my failure at least was not as grave as my grandfather’s in not killing Hitler when he had the opportunity, as Schleicher’s go-between, and seemed to know what that man’s ambitions were. My grandmother said that she’s prefer not to have that gentleman in her house again, the same advice might be passed on to anyone contemplating having that charmer Wieland Schulz [Keil] over for lunch.

============================================

THE PRINCIPLE OF “LANGSAMKEIT” IN PETER HANDKE’S IN EINER DUNKLEN NACHT GING ICH AUS MEINEM STILLEN HAUS Margaret H. Jones

2010-09-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

THE PRINCIPLE OF “LANGSAMKEIT” IN PETER HANDKE’S
IN EINER DUNKLEN NACHT GING ICH AUS MEINEM STILLEN HAUS
Margaret H. Joneshttp://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green
State University in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
December 2007
Committee:
Dr. Geoffrey Howes, Advisor
Dr. Theodore Rippey
ii
ABSTRACT
Dr. Geoffrey Howes, Advisor
This thesis aims to explore the “difficult” nature of Peter Handke’s prose with
special attention to the author’s principle of “Langsamkeit.” Operating according to this
principle, the author aims to slow down the reading process and resist the reader’s tendency to
“devour” the text: a practice which often frustrates readers. Related to this aim is Handke’s effort
to resist the “burden of history” (i.e. the politically charged literary atmosphere of Post-World
War II Austria and Germany) by creating a self-referential text in which the author’s
Engagement lies almost exclusively in his ability to reflect on language and discourse.
Related to Handke’s principle of “Langsamkeit” is a more “classical” concern for form
and composition. Handke pursues an aesthetic agenda inspired by authors like Goethe and Stifter
and largely based on his study of various painters—especially Paul Cézanne. However, his
aesthetics can also be classified as typically postmodern in that he attempts to undermine the
temporality of the narrative. In Handke’s novels, static motifs are often foregrounded so that
description serves as more than a simple background to plot. In this thesis, an interpretation of In
einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus (1997) reveals the „untranslatable“
elements of the text—the descriptive events which cannot be grasped according to causal
relationships between narrative units. The goal is to demonstrate how visual and spatial motifs in
Handke’s prose undermine the traditional causality of the narrative structure.
iii
This thesis is dedicated to my father Ken Jones: the scientist who raised two humanities nerds.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION. THE “DIFFICULTY” OF PETER HANDKE ...................................... 1
CHAPTER I. POSTMODERN “PLAYFULNESS”.............................................................. 6
CHAPTER II. DISTORTION ………………...................................................…………… 15
CHAPTER III. PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTENT ................................................................. 19
CHAPTER IV. STORY......................................................................................................... 23
CHAPTER V. INWARDNESS? ........................................................................................... 32
CHAPTER VI.COMMITMENT ........................................................................................... 39
CHAPTER VII. DESCRIPTION AND SPATIAL FORM ................................................... 45
CHAPTER VIII. LANDSCAPE WRITER............................................................................ 56
CONCLUSION. THE LESSON ..……………………………………………..................... 62
BIBLIOGRAPHY. …………………………………………………………………………. 65
1
INTRODUCTION: THE “DIFFICULTY” OF PETER HANDKE
For the Austrian general public the name Peter Handke evokes a variety of different
associations. Many know him for the play Publikumsbeschimpfung, a piece which earned him his
initial notoriety as a young writer. Others remember the speech he gave in 1966 at a meeting of
Group 47, a highly reputable society of Post-WWII “avant-garde” authors, in which he rather
daringly accused certain senior members of “Beschreibungsimpotenz”—a sort of descriptive
ineptness. (The media attention he attracted with this speech earned him a reputation as the
“Popstar” of the German and Austrian literary scene.) More recently, the author has stirred up
controversy with his travelogue Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa
und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien, in which he criticizes Western media’s one-sided
portrayal of the events surrounding the war in Bosnia.1 Finally, when asked for their opinion of
Peter Handke, many are apt to express their outrage over the fact that he gave a speech at
accused war criminal Slobodan Milošević’s funeral. Others dismiss this gesture as the publicity
1 Handke’s ties to Yugoslavia stem from his mother’s Slovenian nationality. When asked in an interview with
Deborah Solomon of New York Times Magazine: “Why are you so moved by the former Yugoslavia?” he
answered: “I’m Austrian, but my mother was Slovenian. Her brother became a partisan of Yugoslavia between the
two World Wars, and when Hitler annexed Austria—my uncle was Austrian—he was forced into the Nazi army”
(Solomon, 1). Needless to say, the connection with Yugoslavia has had a profound influence on his life and career.
His novel Die Wiederholung is a fictionalized account of a teenage trip to the land of his mother’s ancestors. As an
adult he engaged in intensive study of Serbo-Croatian and eventually reached a level of proficiency which allowed
him to translate texts from Serbo-Croatian and hold speeches in the language. He made many trips to the former
Yugoslavia following the war there. His travel journals are an attempt to challenge the media’s portrayal of the
conflict by refusing to submit the images portrayed in his journal to the formation of any sort of meta-narrative. In
2002 former Yugoslavian president and alleged war criminal Slobodan Milosevic asked Handke to appear at his trial
before the UN’s ICTY. Handke refused, but attended the trial as an observer and published an account of the events
entitled “Der Tablas Von Daimiel.”
2
stunt of a writer who notoriously enjoys media attention,2 but few express approval for this act,
although most are not properly informed about the exact content of the speech.3
Not only do the author’s public appearances seem to attract controversy, but his work
itself seems at times to baffle critics. Few writers have met with such venomous critique from
scholars and readers alike as Peter Handke. Some readers find his work to be lofty, prophetic,
and fraught with conspicuous pathos, while others simply put down his novels because they are
too “tedious.” Marcel Reich-Ranicki is considered to be Handke’s most harsh critic. Of
Handke’s novel Langsame Heimkehr he writes:
Der beschwörende Prediger und raunende Heilsverkünder Handke schreibt—von
wenigen schönen Passagen abgesehen—eine hochpathetische, angestrengte und
umständliche Prosa, deren schiefe Bilder und preziöse Vergleiche die Dürftigkeit
der Gedanken nicht verbergen können ... (Pichler 131).
One may ask oneself how an author so valued by some readers could receive such a harsh
critique from the most influential voice in German literary criticism. It seems that when a critic
attacks Handke’s prose he does it passionately. In a New York Times book review Neil Gordon
calls his narrative techniques “punitive rather than exuberant.” He is bothered by the
2 Georg Pichler’s extremely interesting portrayal of Handke’s Group 47 appearance raises the question as to what
extent Handke’s appearance was purposely aimed at receiving media attention. The description of him with his
Beatles haircut and “Schirmmütze” certainly conveys the impression of a young “Popstar,” as the title calls him
(Pichler, 69-76).
3 Handke was criticized greatly for the speech he gave at Milosevic’s funeral in 2006. He gave the speech in Serbo-
Croatian and due to inaccurate translation, his words have been seriously misinterpreted by the Austrian media. He
was accused of disrespect for the victims who died at the hands of Milosevic when he allegedly expressed happiness
for being close to Milosevic, who defended his people. As Handke pointed out in a letter to a French newspaper that
published criticism of his speech, his words were twisted and taken out of context. The actual content of the speech
is as follows: "The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Yugoslavia, Serbia. The world, the so-called
world, knows everything about Slobodan Milosevic. The so-called world knows the truth. This is why the so-called
world is absent today, and not only today, and not only here. I don't know the truth. But I look. I listen. I feel. I
remember. This is why I am here today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia, close to Slobodan Milošević"
(d’Aymery).
3
“namelessness of characters,” the “constant, busybodyish rhetorical questions,” the “seemingly
endless digressions,” and the “profoundly and deliberately obscure asides” (Gordon).
There is no denying that Handke’s literary practices present a relatively high degree of
“difficulty” for the reader. Handke himself attributes the difficult nature of his prose to what he
calls “Langsamkeit.” As he points out, many readers want to “devour” the text; they are
accustomed to simply “skimming through” the pages of the novel—a practice that his prose
seems to resist: “Ich verstehe, dass diese Langsamkeit viele enerviert, die ein Überfliegen, ein
Verschlingen, ein bloßes Story-Aufnehmen der Bücher oder der Sprache gewöhnt sind...Nie, nie
schnell werden, nie suggerieren, immer Abstand halten zu den Dingen und Scheu sein!” (Pichler
129-130). For Handke “Langsamkeit” means maintaining a certain degree of distance to the
matter at hand; he consciously avoids “persuading” the reader. Those who are accustomed to a
highly consequential narrative that neatly finds its resolution at the end of the tale are bound to
be irritated or disappointed. Once the reader accepts the “Langsamkeit” of the text he no longer
finds it to be so tedious: Letting go of his desire to “devour” the text, he gives himself over to the
act of “observing” and begins to appreciate the rich imagery of the text.
It is the purpose of this thesis to demonstrate the “Langsamkeit” of Handke’s prose
through an interpretation of the novel In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus. I
chose this novel for three reasons. First because it greatly lacks scholarly response. Secondly,
because when I first picked up the book I was at once put off and intrigued by the highly
romantic (and lofty?) tone of the title. And thirdly because I was highly impressed with the
novel’s ability to capture the essence of certain objects, landscapes and localities. Whereas an
attempt to retell the plot left me tongue-tied, I was readily able to close my eyes and imagine the
various localities described in the novel.
4
This thesis can be divided into five interrelated sections. In Chapter One a discussion of
postmodernist literature will establish the terminology necessary for describing the ways in
which Handke creates an “open” text, thus avoiding what he calls “persuading the reader.” Key
terms such as “ready-made,” “self-reflexivity,” and “spatial form” will be described in respect to
their historical and theoretical significance. Next, the chapters entitled “Distortion,”
“Psychological Content” and “Story” will include an in-depth examination of the plot of Dunkle
Nacht. The goal of these chapters is to provide concrete examples of how narrative techniques
are employed to “slow down” and disrupt narrative flow in order to realize the principle of
“Langsamkeit” in the novel. The chapter entitled “Inwardness?” will argue that the author’s main
concern in respect to “character” has little to do with “psychological content.”4 As this chapter
will show, the author is primarily concerned with the protagonist as a vehicle of perception.
Embedded within this discussion of “inwardness” is an attempt to counter the arguments of
critics like Reich-Ranicki who accuse Handke of being “hochpathetisch,” self-centered or overly
romantic. Passages will be identified in which what may appear to be overly-romantic or selfcentered
language is actually a meta-fictional reference to the codedness of discourse. Chapter
Six is a discussion of Handke’s concept of “commitment” (in the sense of political engagement).
The section on “commitment” aims to demonstrate how the author succeeds in maintaining
distance (“Abstand”) to the matter at hand rather than attempting to form a specific argument or
thesis. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, chapters Seven and Eight explore the novel’s
imagery by discussing select descriptive passages in detail. This section aims to demonstrate how
4 See Barthes pg. 104-105
5
descriptive events or “static motifs” often hold more significance than temporal and causal
elements of the novel.5
In For a New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet writes: “We thus see the absurdity of that
favorite expression of our traditional criticism: ‘X has something to say and says it well.’ Might
we not advance on the contrary that the genuine writer has nothing to say? He has only a way of
speaking” (45). This thesis will attempt to bring a new perspective to Handke scholarship by
assuming that Handke’s “way of speaking”—his use of language, the descriptive passages, the
composition of his narrative, etc.—is more important than any sort of universal truths that his
work may appear to convey. Readers who recognize his spirit of “playfulness” will find
themselves challenged to think along with the author, thus experiencing what it means to be a
reader in the postmodern era: to be active and to view the text as an open process—as a living
dialog between author and reader.
5 Although the term “descriptive event” is my own invention, Christoph Parry introduces the idea that a descriptive
passage can be something more dynamic than a simple backdrop to narrative action (Parry, 109). The term “static
motif” was introduced by the Russian formalist Tomashevski (Kestner, 108).
6
CHAPTER ONE: POSTMODERN “PLAYFULNESS”
When asked in a 2006 interview with Deborah Solomon of The New York Times
Magazine if he would consider himself an “avant-garde” novelist and playwright Handke
responded with the statement: “Me? No, I’m a classical writer. I’m a conservative classical
writer” (Solomon). By describing himself as “classical” and “conservative” Handke emphasizes
his indebtedness to authors like Goethe and Stifter. By following in the tradition of these writers
and of the painter Paul Cezanne, he is able to find justification for the conscious decision to
distance himself from the burden presented by history (specifically the history of Austria and
Germany). Handke justifies his “Poetik der Verdrängung” by adopting the ideals of classical
literature (Zschachlitz 439).
In the same interview, Solomon asks Handke to clarify exactly what he means by
“conservative classical writer” and he says: “With a lot of air in it. With a lot of snow flurries
and summer breezes in the books” (Solomon). One can certainly sense a degree of irony to this
answer, for Handke is no doubt aware that the poet’s view of language has changed in the
modern/postmodern era.6 In Die Lehre der Saint Victoire he acknowledges this when he writes:
„der Himmel (wie Stifter in seinen Erzählungen noch so ruhig hinsetzten konnte) war blau“
(169). One could thus conclude that the term “conservative classical writer” reflects only
Handke’s idealized self-image. What really shapes his work is the knowledge that a conservative
classical style is only viable in this era as a function of the postmodern aesthetic: appearing as
part of a pastiche of various literary “artifacts,”7 or as a mere trace of the original. Just as
6 Due to structuralist and poststructuralist theories.
7 The term artifact is used by Barbara Theisen in Silenced Facts: Media Montages in Contemporary Austrian
Literature in describing how Austrian authors use the montage-technique to form a text out of ready-made language
(1).
7
postmodern architecture embraces historical forms, not as pure models (as was the case with
early twentieth-century historicism) but as objects of a composition marked by fragmentation
and montage, Handke looks to classical, romantic and even medieval literature as a “tool box”8
of possible styles and forms.
In the interview mentioned above, Deborah Solomon playfully asks: “Do you think a
conversation between two people can communicate anything?” Handke answers: “Sure, but you
have to know that this is a game. It can become at moments very touching and serious, but it
starts as a game and it should end as a game” (Solomon). When Handke emphasizes that this
“conversation” “starts as a game and should end as a game” he is drawing from both structuralist
and poststructuralist theory. Published after his death in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
Philosophische Untersuchungen discusses what he callse the “language-game” (Shawver).
Wittgenstein recognizes that linguistic expression is not an autonomous act, but takes place
within a system of rules which he likens to a “game.” Responding to notions such as this,
modern/postmodern authors tend to “make a statement” not by referring to reality, but by
drawing attention to the nature of the “language-game” of social, political and literary discourse.
As a result of modern/postmodern heightened awareness of the codedness of discourse, language
becomes not only a means of expression but also an object of reflection. Handke’s
“Langsamkeit” “makes a statement” in that it forces the reader to “consume” language
differently. This is not to say that a self-reflexive use of language is a new invention; rather it is
recognizable in the works of any good poet who views language as an object of reflection rather
than a simple means to an end. However, what distinguishes a typically modern/postmodern use
of language is that self-reflexivity becomes a principle of composition (through montage and
ready-made borrowing) rather than simply a stylistic feature.
8 Wittgenstein introduces the notion of the “toolbox of language” (Shawver).
8
Rather than trying to draw a definite distinction between modernism and postmodernism,
one could simply argue that there is a certain progression from a highly critical, antirepresentational
reaction to mass culture to a less pragmatic and more formalistic and playful
form of literature which actually takes advantage of the textual environment created by mass
culture. It is difficult to pinpoint an exact moment at which this progression occurs. Already in
the 1950’s Andy Warhol displays a rather “playful” gesture when he embraces pop culture as an
object of artistic reference. Furthermore, the precedent for creating what came to be called
“ready-made” art had already been established in the 1930’s with Duchamp’s “Fountain” which
was nothing more than a urinal found in a junk yard which the artist submitted to an exhibition.
However, Duchampt’s and Warhol’s art is inevitably more politically charged than later works
simply because they are the first of their kind. Warhol does something rather subversive by
adopting methods of mass reproduction into his art and suggesting that pop culture is a legitimate
object of artistic reference. In postmodernism, the modern subversive act becomes a well
established artistic principle.
James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s highly experimental poem “The
Wasteland,” both published in 1922, already display a self-reflexive awareness of narrative codes
and linguistic structures. However, in countries most effected by WWII, the highly experimental
projects of the pre-WWII period could not be fully realized until after the war. In Post-WWII
France, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman contributed to the deconstruction of the linear
narrative. Robbe-Grillet proclaimed the dawn of a revolution in literary practices in which spatial
considerations were to gain supremacy over character and plot. In Austria, members of the
Wiener Gruppe contributed greatly to experimental literature during this time. Authors like H.C.
Artmann and Friedrich Achleitner worked with montage techniques and created concrete
9
poetry—the purpose of which was to comment on the codedness of language, to question the
validity of language as a representation of reality (the “problem of referentiality”) and to
experiment with genre conventions (Theisen 18-33). This so-called “anti-representational”
literature—concrete poetry being perhaps its most extreme form—met with much criticism at the
time of its conception because of its so-called “apolitical” nature. The reaction was similar to that
of those who criticized Duchamp’s “Fountain,” claiming that it didn’t qualify as art (Theisen 1-
12).
When Handke was a student of law at the University of Graz he joined a group of writers
who were considered to be the successors to the Wiener Gruppe, the Grazer Gruppe. Among its
members are writers like Barbara Frischmuth, Elfriede Jelinek and Gerhard Roth. Authors of the
Grazer Gruppe maintained the Wiener Gruppe’s notion of language as the object of artistic
reflection and continued to emphasize the text’s formal significance over its representational
value. However authors of the Grazer Gruppe extended the Wiener Gruppe’s experimentation
with single words and phonemes to include the larger structures according to which literary
discourse operates (Theissen 18-32). This can be likened to Roland Barthe’s transition from the
study of words and sentences to the study of entire narratives. Barthes sees the sentence as “the
rough outline of a short narrative” and the narrative as a “long sentence” (84).
In regard to Handke’s work, the influence of the Wiener Gruppe’s formal experiements
reveals itself quite clearly in the author’s second novel, Der Hausierer. This novel is a kind of
postmodern detective story in which the author reveals the schema according to which a
particular chapter will operate and then realizes this schema quite literally. At the beginning of
the first chapter he notes the way in which the mystery surrounding the crime of the detective
story creates a state of hyper-signification in which every object described possesses a
10
disproportionate degree of importance, as it could possibly be an important clue (“[Die
Mordgeschichte] bestimmt ihre Gegenstände so, dass deren Verhältnis zueinander unbekannt
und rätselhaft bleiben muss” [8]). Until the murder is resolved the objects are suspended in a
“game of possible relationships” (8). In the novel, what follows is a literal realization of this
schema. The protagonist, a peddler, arrives in a new town and observes. His perception is
marked by hypersensitivity to otherwise banal objects and occurrences. He notices that the
sidewalk lies a bit too high off the street. Soap suds leak out from under a shop door. A tarp is
pulled over a car. The hands that rest on the steering wheel are in leather gloves. Details are
singled out from the whole so that the person pulling the tarp is absent from the description and
the hands in the leather gloves are described independent of the body (Are they his hands?
Should we suspect him?). Focus is shifted from the subject to the object of the action (as the
culprit remains unknown). Meaning is generated as the reader tries to create a syntax for this
fragmented text and engages in this “game of possible relationships.” Many postmodern authors
adopt the literary schema of the detective story because it is rather formulaic in nature and
presents the perfect model for an exploration of a particular “system of references” from which
the “language-game” draws its rules. Objects portrayed in the detective story automatically take
on a secondary significance determined by their possible role in the murder mystery.
The progression towards postmodern literature is marked by an increasingly fragmented
narrative perspective. Whereas the realist novel of the nineteenth century uses framing to
establish credibility, modern/postmodern authors often frame the novel in such a way that the
credibility of the narrator is undermined or brought into question. This technique was already
popular in baroque and romantic literature, but here it is more markedly an artistic principle than
a function of plot. Similarly, although one could argue that the subject is most fragmented in
11
postmodern art, the loss of a centralized perspective cannot accurately be attributed solely to
postmodernism. In the fine arts, for example, the central perspective began to dissolve as early
as the Impressionist period. Lines that usually designate position and depth are replaced by fields
of color, making it increasingly difficult to determine where the artist/viewer stands in relation to
the object (Parry 57-58). The equivalent of this in literature is a montage of different narrative
voices, or a subject who seems to jump from one perspective to the next. According to Lyotard,
“…the subject moves from position to position, now as sender, now as addressee, now as
referent, and so on. The loss of a continuous meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into
heterogeneous moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity” (Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
This concept is realized in Handke’s In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen
Haus. Because the story is being told by a narrator who interviewed the protagonist for the
purpose of writing a book, the perspective shifts from third person to first person as the narrator
occasionally inserts direct quotes which stem from his interview with the protagonist. It is not
clear what parts of the story are real, the invention of the narrator, or part of a dream. The
narrator comments on the fact that the protagonist purposely leaves out details of the story
because he believes that some things are best left ambiguous (165). Furthermore, the accuracy of
the narrative is undermined by several temporal inconsistencies. In a realist rendering the author
normally tries to portray nature as accurately as possible, making sure that birds appear during
the correct seasons and that leaves don’t fall to the ground in July. This narrative does exactly the
opposite—continually drawing attention to its own temporal inconsistencies. Sometimes this
gives the narrative a dream-like effect and at others the author seems to be commenting on
modern man’s lack of awareness of his natural surroundings: as if to say that the cycles of nature
12
no longer have the same effect on a person’s consciousness. As the protagonist swims in a river
he hears the “summer sound of crickets chirping,” while at the same time blackened red and
yellow fallen leaves float by, and a newly hatched chick chirps as if it were late spring (195). In
another passage the narrator states that, according to the calendar on the wall, it is full moon, but
then he finds out that the calendar is from last year—it is in fact a crescent moon (228).
Postmodern literature calls into question the concept that narrative is primarily a
“temporal” construction. In this case “temporality” refers to the logical succession from one plot
element to the next, just as in a sentence the rules of grammar dictate word order so that one
word logically follows from the other. In the essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1977)
Joseph Frank introduces a concept called “spatial form theory” which aims to describe the
techniques by which novelists can subvert the temporality inherent in narrative to create new
narrative structures (Daghistany 13). Completely violating the strict distinction between the role
of literature and that of the fine arts (asserted as far back as the eighteenth century by Lessing in
his essay “Laocoön”9), Frank argues that the “temporality” of narrative can be subverted to
achieve “spatial form.” He compares a work of fiction that has achieved “spatial form” to an
impressionist painting: “The impressionist painters juxtaposed pure tones on the canvas, instead
of mixing them on the palette, in order to leave the blending of colors to the eye of the spectator”
(Daghistany, 20). In a similar way a writer who successfully “subverts the chronological
sequence inherent in narrative” provides the reader with units of meaning, but not with a
“syntax”: “In the case of the reader, his alertness to reflexive reference, his ability to construct
9 When discussing the conventional view of narrative, drawing from Lessing’s Laokoon, Parry writes: “Epic
narrative and visual art, we have been told, are fundamentally incompatible…The visual media exist in space, the
epic unfolds in time. The visual media capture the moment, (epic) poetry captures movement in the succession of
moment…” (Parry, 22).
13
syntax for the work, creates a whole out of the discrete parts of the narrative” (Daghistany 21).
Thus, in order to achieve “spatial form,” a text must be “self-reflexive:” that is, it must make
reference to itself, to its own artificiality (Klinkowitz 43). In “The Novel as Artifact,” Klinkowitz
writes: “Successful spatial-form fiction must create its own meaning out of the artifice of fiction,
having compositional elements do the work otherwise assigned to externally imposed meaning”
(43). Thus, in a work of spatial-form fiction the author creates a degree of openness. “The reader
is no longer chained to the temporal succession of events noted on the page” (Klinkowitz 45).
Spatial form is not only related to narrative structure. It also has to do with the
composition of images. By subverting the chronological sequence inherent in narrative, the
author emphasizes form and description over temporality. He rescues objects from the “realm of
signification” by turning the image itself into the subject of discourse. Where the author of a
linear narrative reflects on the functional composition of the narrative (in terms of the succession
of events), the literary architect of “spatial form” turns his attention to the composition of
individual images or scenes, thus forcing the reader to pause and observe. “The organization is
not merely that of a story but of significant image patterns, of collocation and juxtaposition”
(Vidan 134). The chronological syntax is replaced by a spatial syntax which consists of
interrelationships between images. As is demonstrated in the final chapter of this thesis,
Handke’s use of motifs of color and locality creates a spatial syntax. Just as the painter composes
his painting in such a way that the eye is impelled to move from one image to the next, the writer
moves the reader from one object to the next by visually relating one to the other.
Being careful not to submit oneself to the “myth of progress” by arguing that postmodern
literature has necessarily “improved upon” earlier stylistic and formalistic concepts, one could
argue that modernism’s high valuation of “innovation,” which served as the necessary
14
prerequisite for a transformation in the relationship between author-reader-text, gives way to a
more romantic postmodern sensibility. A postmodern author like Handke can at once draw from
the narrative structure of the medieval epic romance, incorporate a classical appreciation of
aesthetics, and adopt the modernist spirit of experimentation.
15
CHAPTER TWO: DISTORTION
In For a New Novel Robbe-Grillet writes: “A novel, for most readers and critics—is
primarily a ‘story.’ A true novelist is one who knows how to ‘tell a story.’… Hence to criticize a
novel often comes down to reporting its anecdote … with more or less emphasis on the essential
passages: the climaxes and denouements of the plot” (30). As Robbe-Grillet argues, the emphasis
on “anecdote” is becoming a thing of the past: “… the plot itself has long since ceased to
constitute the armature of the narrative. The demands of the anecdote are doubtless less
constraining for Proust than for Flaubert, for Faulkner than for Proust, for Beckett than for
Faulkner” (33).
This assertion that the “demands of the anecdote” have become less constraining for
contemporary authors is quite intriguing, but requires clarification. Barthes recognizes an
interesting dynamic that exists between “function” and “discourse” in narrative. According to
Barthes, the lowest level—the foundation of the narrative structure—consists of “functional”
units. A “functional” unit expresses a concept that is “necessary to the story.” Of the various
“functional” units, the “cardinal function” is the most consequential in that it acts as the “hingepoint”
of the narrative; it opens, continues or closes an alternative that is “of direct consequence
for the subsequent development of the story” (101). Thus, we may think of the “cardinal
function” as a unit which creates narrative action. For example, the death of Cinderella’s father is
most definitely a “cardinal function” in that it “sets up” the later action of Cinderella becoming a
slave to her evil stepmother.
In a work of literature such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot there are very few
“cardinal functions”: in fact in this case there are only two: the “wait established” and the “wait
16
rewarded or disappointed.” The first, argues Barthes, can be “catalysed,” or drawn out infinitely
so that the audience never actually finds out what the object of this “waiting” is. Some would
argue that this is in fact what makes the play interesting. This act of disturbing the narrative at
the functional level is called “distortion” and is actually present—to varying degrees—in all
narratives. Barthes illustrates this point by comparing a real-life occurrence with its likely
portrayal in narrative. He writes: “On meeting in ‘life’, it is most unlikely that the invitation to
take a seat would not immediately be followed by the act of sitting down; in narrative these two
units, contiguous from a mimetic point of view, may be separated by a long series of
insertions…” (119). Russian formalist Tomashevsky distinguishes between between “static” and
“dynamic” motifs. Static motifs describe people, things, setting, color, and are “free” in the sense
that they are not a crucial part of the narrative sequence. Dynamic motifs describe the actions
and behaviors of the characters and are “bound” the chronological and causal sequence of the
narrative (Kestner 108). An abundance of “spatial motifs” creates distortion by disturbing the
narrative on the functional level.
Distortion is a natural occurrence in all forms of narrative, although certain forms of
narrative lend themselves better to this convention than others. For example, the level of
distortion that occurs in a novel can rarely be achieved in film. This is because film is a highly
temporal medium. Barthes writes: “… writing contains possibilities of diaeresis—and so of
catalysing—far superior to those of film: a gesture related linguistically can be ‘cut up’ much
more easily than the same gesture visualized” (120).
It has been established that the narrative structure of Beckett’s play lends itself
particularly well to “distortion.” This can also be said for In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus
meinem stillen Haus, a novel in which the narrative composition is based on the ready-made
17
structure of the hero’s cyclical journey (the odyssey). The idea of the “odyssey” is almost as
devoid of functionality as Beckett’s idea of “waiting.” It is less a consequential than a spatial
relationship which drives the plot, since the basic structure of the narrative is based on the
cyclical movement out and back. Thus the basic “story” of Dunkle Nacht consists of three parts:
the hero getting struck by lightning, which causes him to embark on a journey, the hero
travelling to the city of Sante Fe where he experiences many “adventures,” and the hero
returning home. Although there is a small degree of consequence attached to the lightning strike
it is almost impossible to speak of the plot in terms of the relation between “cardinal functions.”
It is not entirely clear why the hero embarks on a journey and there is no explicit motivation for
his return. The idea of a lightning strike as the necessary motivation for a development in plot is
rather obviously arbitrary and artificial. The pharmacist could have just as well been visited by a
ghost in the night or inspired by a rare vision. These motivations are equally as plausible as the
lightning strike. Whereas for Beckett it is simply the abstract idea of “waiting” which provides
the impetus for the creation of his narrative, Handke borrows an entire ready-made narrative
structure from the tradition of oral literature—more specifically from the Arthurian medieval
epic romance Yvain Knight of the Lion recorded for the first time by Chrétien de Troyes in the
12th century and later translated into German by Hartmann von Aue. There are many references
in Dunkle Nacht to Yvain—the most explicit being at the end of the novel when the narrator
explicitly mentions the tale’s title (“Das Epos von ‘Ivain oder der Löwenritter’ aufgeschlagen”
(293).
In “Spatial Form and Plot” Eric S. Rabkin refers to a plot based on the “memory of
conventional romance” as inherently “synchronic” and opposed to diachronic act of “reporting
events” (93). Through this “synchronic” act of borrowing, the plot of Dunkle Nacht becomes the
18
object of “composition” rather than being tied to the temporal sequence of events; the author
simply borrows motifs from the epic tale and places them within his narrative composition.10
Thus the intertextual relationship between Dunkle Nacht and Yvain contributes to the novel’s
“spatial form.”
10 In “Time Sequence in Spatial Form” Ivo Vidan talks about the “compositional” quality of the “spatial form” novel
(133).
19
CHAPTER THREE: PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTENT
By continually borrowing motifs from Yvain Knight of the Lion, Handke not only creates
the opportunity for distortion, but also liberates himself from certain conventions common to
what Barthes calls the “psychological novel.” According to Barthes, in the modern novel
characters possess “psychological essences” whereas characters in oral literature are often
“subordinate to the action” which they carry out (106-107). We don’t question why the evil
stepmother in Cinderella abuses her stepdaughter; we simply accept that she embodies the idea
of the “evil stepmother.” In Dunkle Nacht Handke’s protagonist corresponds to Barthes’s
description of oral literature in that he becomes an “agent of an action” rather than an individual
with a “psychological consistency.” This concept is obscured by the fact that Handke provides us
again and again with bits of information which appear to establish the protagonist’s individual
“psychological consistency.” However, a closer look reveals that these fragments are nothing
more than metafictional references to the language of the psychological novel.
At the beginning of Dunkle Nacht we are introduced to the main protagonist, a
pharmacist in a suburb of Salzburg called Taxham. Although the reader may notice that the
narrator is very much preoccupied with the portrayal of Taxham as a distinct locality as well as
of the pharmacist’s house and the general topography of the area, there is a relatively high degree
of psychological content in this first chapter. This fact is misleading, because this psychological
content hardly represents a genuine attempt to establish “psychological consistency.”11 The
pharmacist never actually becomes an “individual” operating independent of “actions.”12 The
fact that the pharmacist is often mistaken for someone else, or overlooked by members of the
community may be a reflection of this very circumstance. In the following passage the skier
11See Barthes, 106
12 See Barthes, 105-107
20
recognizes him as a man who had saved his life during an accident in the Rocky mountains,
claims to have seen him swimming in the Black Sea and then suspects him to be a an influential
government official working behind the scenes:
Später habe ich dich noch einmal gesehen beim Schwimmen im Schwarzen Meer,
ganz weit draußen, wir saßen mit Freunden auf einer Yacht und glaubten, du seist
ein Schiffbrüchiger, aber du hast uns nur ein Zeichen gegeben, wir sollten
weitersegeln, du hattest genau so ein Tuch um den Kopf wie das jetzt. Du bist hier
in der Regierung, im Hintergrund, ziehst die Fäden (95-96).
The pharmacist’s identity is constantly reinvented by other characters. His “psychological
content” is unstable. The poet claims to recognize a similarity between the pharmacist and his
own father (96-97), and later in the novel someone recognizes him as the actor from a Western,
while another mistakes him for a famous doctor (150).
Further adding to the deconstruction of the psychological novel, passages which express
psychological content are characterized by an overly dramatic, highly sentimental tone. For
example, in the following passage we learn that the pharmacist has disowned his son:
Der Apotheker dachte an seine Toten. Dabei kam ihm sein Sohn in den Sinn. Aber der
war doch gar nicht tot? Nein, er hatte ihn verstoßen. War das nicht ein zu starkes Wort?
Hatte er ihn nicht bloß einfach aufgegeben, aus dem Blick verloren, abgetan, vergessen?
Nein, ich habe ihn verstoßen,“sagte er. „Ich habe mein Kind verstoßen“ (28).
This sudden injection of psychological content by way of a father-son conflict appears rather
artificial. It seems to have been conjured up out of thin air and has little consequence for the rest
of the narrative. At the end of the novel, the father-son conflict is resolved in a quite contrived
21
episode as the son appears out of nowhere to drive by the father and say: “Du hast mich nicht
verstoßen” (263).
This having been established, it seems apparent that this passage is a reference to nothing
more than the psychological novel itself and its rhetoric. A reader who is aware of the selfreflexivity
of Handke’s texts may recognize this passage as a reference not to the psychological
content of the protagonist, but to the codedness of the word “verstoßen.” The pharmacist himself
questions the appropriateness of the word to express the conflict with his son, but can’t seem to
resist using this word, the mere mention of which creates a high degree of pathos. The word
occurs in excess in this passage. It is a code word which immediately establishes a dramatic tone
in the text: the pharmacist seems trapped within this linguistic code. Handke often experiments
with dramatically-charged words such as “verstoßen,” with the intent of proving that the mere
utterance of these words creates a sort of “instant meaning” so that their content becomes almost
irrelevant. Many of the negative critical responses to Handke’s works mentioned in the first
chapter of this thesis stem from a misunderstanding of this playful use of language. He often uses
the phrases “selbstlose Daseinslust“ or “Bedürfnis nach Heil“ and words such as “Glaube,“
“Seele,“ “Reich, “Sündigkeit,“ “Reinheit,“, “Erlösung,“ etc. with the intention of deconstructing
these words and exposing the highly coded role they play in narration (Graf 276-277).
The motif of das Wiedererkennen, or the idea of being “recognized” as oneself—often
after a long absence—is a common motif in epic literature. In fact this motif occurs at the end of
Yvain Knight of the Lion as Yvain and Gawain finally “recognize” each other after a long and
nearly fatal duel. The scene in which the pharmacist recognizes one of the musicians in the city
of Sante Fe as his long lost son, while seeming to represent an important development for the
pharmacist’s psychological person, is simply one of many realizations of this motif in the novel
22
and therefore exists more as a metafictional reference to epic literature than as “genuine”
psychological content.13 For example, not only does the pharmacist have a long-lost son, but the
poet has a long-lost daughter with whom he is also reunited (164), and the bartender in the
pharmacist’s Stammlokal is an old widower whose children have long since abandoned him (it
seems he has lost hope of a reunion) (204). At the end of the novel the narrator is recognized by
a child as “der Apotheker von Taxham” (289), mirroring Gawain’s recognition of his cousin
Yvain as the famed “Knight of the Lion” (187). The repeated motif of das Wiedererkennen
disturbs the narrative structure at the functional level by relativizing the importance of these
occurrences. There are so many similarities between characters that everything appears as a mere
copy of the original. Therefore, although the reader is likely to attach a high degree of
importance to the father-son conflict either because of the power of the word “verstoßen” or
simply because he is accustomed to searching for psychological content in a novel, this conflict
simply belongs to the category of metafiction. It is nothing more than a reference to itself, and an
interpretation of the novel that defines plot in terms of familial conflicts would do nothing more
than reiterate the highly sentimental rhetoric which Handke sets out to deconstruct.
13 See Dunkle Nacht pg. 51, 150, 164, 166 for just some examples.
23
CHAPTER FOUR: STORY
In Chapter One the narrator points out that the pharmacist’s daily routine in Taxham
forms a triangle as he goes from his house to the pharmacy and then to his favorite “hang-out,”
the Erdkellerrestaurant, for dinner (19). This routine is disturbed when the pharmacist is caught
in a rain storm in chapter two and is struck by lightning (although he is not sure if it was really
lighting: it could have been a blow to the head). This blow to the head changes the pharmacist in
some way so that he suddenly decides to embark on a journey—thus creating narrative action in
the novel. The motif of the sudden and violent storm also occurs in Yvain as a catalyst for
narrative action. In this case the source of the storm is a certain enchanted fountain, which
releases a sudden and violent storm if tampered with. Yvain journeys to the realm of the
enchanted fountain where he purposely unleashes the storm to attract the attention of the
fountain’s keeper, Lord Askalon, who defeated his cousin Gawain in a duel and must suffer
revenge.14
Whereas in Yvain the storm is an indirect motivator, in Dunkle Nacht the blow to the
head brings about a clear transformation in the consciousness of the pharmacist: “ab jetzt, und
das unbefristet, konnte er keinen Schritt mehr tun ohne das Bewusstsein dieses neuen Zustands,
welcher sich ihm aufdrängte als ein allseitiges Umstellen … Der Kampf konnte beginnen“
(Dunkle Nacht, 81-82). After being struck he seeks shelter in the Erdkellerrestaurant, where he
finds out that the strike has rendered him mute. The innkeeper bandages his wound and serves
him a hot meal. This is the beginning of the pharmacist’s journey out and back. He offers a ride
to two fellow guests: a previously well-known poet and a former ski champion. The three
continue southward in silent awareness of the adventure which lies ahead.
14 This could also be a reference to the storm in King Lear (Shakespeare).
24
This passage truly creates a disturbance on the level of functionality, not only because it
presents a sudden break with the pharmacist’s “triangular” lifestyle, but also because there is no
motivation for the actions of the protagonists. They become “agents of action” rather than
individuals operating according to a certain psychological motivation. They embody the idea of
the “knight errant” as it appears in Yvain. This means that the sole motivation for their actions
lies in this idea of the wandering hero, the hero in quest of adventure. They are overcome by a
strong desire to simply wander without any real goal in mind. In the novel this sensation is
described as follows: “ein Nicht-so-recht-Wissen-wohin, in solcher Richtungslosigkeit aber von
einer todesverachtenden Energie ... als seien sie nicht bloß Gesetzlose, sondern stünden zudem
über gleichwelchem Gesetz” (99).
The idea of the “knight errant” is what Barthes calls a “code of recitation”—a sort of
fixed narrative unit common to oral literature. As Barthes points out, oral literature is different
from written literature in that the mark of a good storyteller is that he be able to master the
“codes of recitation” which include plot elements as well as fixed phrases and metrical patterns
(114-115). These pre-formed codes act as a mental map as he must tell the story from memory.
By manipulating these codes he can alter his story in order to cater to a certain audience. A
medieval audience would be fluent in these “codes of recitation” and therefore immediately
recognize the motif of the “knight errant.”
In the medieval tale the ideal of the “knight errant” is what ultimately causes conflict
between Lady Laudine and Yvain. Yvain’s fellow knights convince him that, despite his happy
marriage, he must leave the court in search of adventure. Lady Laudine makes him promise to
return after a year’s time and when he breaks this promise she forsakes him (de Troyes 78).
Interestingly enough, this sort of marital conflict caused by the fact that one partner spends too
25
much time away from home also appears in Dunkle Nacht, but in this case it is actually the
pharmacist’s wife who is continually absent. At the beginning of the novel there is no trace of
her in the house, but the pharmacist finds a packed bag in the hall with a plane ticket on top (30),
and at the end he returns home to an empty house: “[sie war] wohl wie üblich ausgegangen”
(290).
The figure of the wildly passionate widow, who becomes the unlikely object of the
pharmacist’s desire, represents an obvious foil to his alienated and detached wife. The
pharmacist meets her during the first night of his adventure. She is an old friend of the ski
champion and accommodates them as they are weary of travelling. One might argue that the
widow in Dunkle Nacht is a direct reference to Lady Laudine, the wife of Lord Askalon in Yvain.
In the medieval romance, Lady Laudine lives in the realm of the enchanted fountain and in
Dunkle Nacht the widow lives in her own isolated “realm” next to two springs which are
channeled into one big fountain. When the travelers arrive at her house they find that her
husband has recently died. Similarly, in the medieval epic Lady Laudine becomes a widow as
Yvain defeats Lord Askalon in the duel.
One of the most puzzling passages of the novel occurs as in the middle of the night the
widow enters the pharmacist’s bedroom and beats him up so violently that he falls out of bed, at
which point she disappears. The absurdity of this passage stems not only from the lack of
motivation for this violent act, but also from the fact that the pharmacist actually finds pleasure
in being beat up (106). This embrace of violence is a motif uncommon to the psychological
novel (which often aims to show how violence causes suffering) and seems to stem from the
medieval epic with its concept of the brave knight who actually welcomes violence as an
26
opportunity to glorify himself.15 It is no coincidence that, earlier in the novel, the pharmacist
reads the following passage from a medieval epic: “In dem Mittelalterbuch auf seinem
inzwischen abgeräumten Tisch wurde ein Schwertstreich gegen jemanden geführt, von dem man
dabei das Herz in der Brust offen liegen sah” (90). Handke is obviously referencing the medieval
epic’s treatment of violence here.
The widow continually embodies this concept of violence, as on one occasion she
attempts to throw a boulder down from a cliff onto the pharmacist’s car, and on another appears
out of nowhere to strike him on the head (116, 267) In each case he is invigorated by these acts
of violence: “er beschloß … der Zeuge dessen zu werden, was ihn bedrohte … die Sinne
offenzuhalten, während dieses Tödliche nah und immerzu nah war …” (116-17). Here the figure
of the widow in Dunkle Nacht could also be seen as a reference to the figure of Dido in Virgil’s
Aeneid.16 Dido is also a widow (her brother having killed her husband) and the ruler of a
“realm.” She falls in love with Aeneas and they consummate their love in a grotto during a
rainstorm. She falls into a fit of rage when Aeneas leaves her.17 This drives her to commit suicide
by throwing herself onto a funeral pyre (83-108). Later in the tale when Aeneas encounters her in
Hades and begs for forgiveness she is still so filled with anger that she averts her eyes and says
nothing. In Dunkle Nacht the pharmacist encounters the widow in the city of Sante Fe and he
tries to greet her, but she simply stares at him as if she wants him to go away (172). Dido’s
stubborn silence is also referenced in the “muteness” of the pharmacist. At the end of the novel
the widow tells him that he can no longer remain silent, he must open his mouth and start talking
(266). This technique of synchronic borrowing, in which character traits from the referenced text
15 See Yvain, 184
16 The pharmacist is compared to Aneis by the widow at the end of the novel (287).
17 The widow’s frantic packing of belongings the night the pharmacist arrives could be a reference to Aneis’s sudden
departure (de Troyes 104).
27
distribute themselves among different characters in the primary text, undermines the traditional
concept of “retelling” by disturbing the linear relationship between subject and object of
reference. Thus the correlations: “pharmacist = Yvain” and “widow = Lady Laudine” are no
longer completely accurate. By disturbing this linear relationship, synchronic borrowing further
contributes to the “spatial form” of the novel.18
With the sort of “Selbstverständlichkeit” common to the fairy tale,19 the pharmacist is not
at all surprised as he later finds that the widow has sewn a letter into his jacket pocket, which
contains a map leading the three travelers to the city they are seeking as well as a personal threat:
“Du hast in einem unrechten Zorn deinen Sohn verstoßen. Dafür ist dir auf deiner Stirn ein Mal
gewachsen, an dem du sterben wirst. Zwar hat man es dir fürs erste herausgeschnitten. Aber ich
werde dafür sorgen, dass es dir nachwächst. Und wenn ich dich noch zehn Mal schlagen muss.
Denn auch mir hat es wehgetan ...“ (156) The motif of the threatening letter is also found in
Handke’s Der Kurze Brief zum langen Abschied, in which the protagonist’s wife Judith
continuously sends him death threats. Just as in Der Kurze Brief, the pharmacist feels compelled
to seek the widow despite her threats.
Dunkle Nacht is destined to frustrate those who judge a novel in terms of the climaxes
and denouements of the plot. The reader expects a denouement as the travelers arrive at the
destination of their journey: the city of Sante Fe, where the poet wishes to take part in a festival
and search for his illegitimate daughter. However, their arrival in the city actually presents
nothing more than the beginning of a series of new “fables.” This is consistent with the narrative
18 In “Secondary Illusion: The Novel and the Spatial Arts,” Joseph Kestner mentions “parallelism” as one of the
narrative techniques by which spatial form is achieved. According to Kestner, parallelism exists when different
characters are in similar situations (122). The idea presented here, which I call “synchronic borrowing,” is even
more radical (and more synchronic) than Kestner’s notion of the term.
19 Kunkel, 2
28
structure of the epic tale, which, as Barthes remarks, consists of a “whole made of multiple
fables” (104).
The arrival in Sante Fe represents a denouement only in the sense that the poet is reunited
with his illegitimate daughter, who happens to be the “Festkönigin” or queen of the city’s annual
celebration. The pharmacist experiences a similar reunion as he recognizes the boy playing the
accordion in a band of gypsies as his estranged son, but is unable to approach him and later
watches him leave the city with the “Festkönigin.” However, even this narrative sequence that
seems at first to find its resolution is disturbed once more by the daughter’s sudden and
unexpected arrest. Just as in Yvain the hero’s adventures are told in succession as independent
fables with little or no causal continuity, the events which occur in the city of Sante Fe appear as
independent vignettes. For example, there is a passage in which the travelers begin performing
manual labor along with the city’s blue collar workers: spontaneously painting walls, paving
streets, etc., and another in which the locality of the Herberge where the pharmacist is staying is
described in detail. One passage tells of the pharmacist’s frequent visits to an “out-of-the-way”
bar in the “Unterstadt” while another depicts the encounter with his two travel companions who
have become vagrants, spending the entire day wandering through the city and bothering
passersby. Each episode presents the possibility of a complete narrative sequence. For example,
the reader may expect that the description of the Herberge is the beginning of a narrative
sequence which traces the progression of a relationship between the pharmacist and the owner of
the Herberge, but this is not the case. The description of the Herberge does not serve as a
background for narrative action, but is itself the topic of discourse.
Handke’s artistic concept of “Langsamkeit” finds its realization here. The episodic
nature of this portion of the novel provides much occasion for “distortion” so that spatiality takes
29
precedence over temporality. The same episodic structure that allows the author of the medieval
epic to recount a series of heroic feats is used by Handke to create a series of descriptive
passages. This slows down the pace of the narrative considerably. However, the structural
integrity of the “story” is not at risk. Since the narrative is based on the cyclical structure of the
hero’s journey out and back the author can “close the circle” at any time simply by sending his
hero back home.
This is exactly what happens when at the end of the summer the pharmacist journeys
back west by foot through a sort of steppe landscape. Once again the episodic nature of the
medieval epic romance is realized in the narrative. Although he is out of reach of any sign of
civilization, the pharmacist encounters a group of cyclists, a stray dog, a group of fledglings, an
armed man in search of his wife’s rapist, and a medieval search party. The steppe is almost like a
stage where various characters appear and disappear.20
In the medieval romance, Yvain goes mad, tears off his clothes and goes to live in the
wilderness after being forsaken by Lady Laudine. His only companion is a hermit with whom he
trades meat for bread and water. Similarly, the pharmacist finds shelter during his first night in
the steppe with a hermit who inhabits an abandoned chapel. He also encounters a peddler, a
character from Handke’s second novel Der Hausierer, with whom he trades goods.
Just as Yvain returns to Lady Laudine at the end of medieval romance, the pharmacist
meets the widow at the end of his journey through the steppe. He is overcome by love and
regains his ability to speak. This presents yet another occasion for metafictional reference to the
codedness of language. The following passage clearly parodies its own sentimentality: “Sein
Herz beginnt zu bluten. Gibt es das also? Ja, das gibt es. Endlich blutet also sein Herz, und er
kann wieder sprechen, zuerst nur in einem Schrei: ‘Was wollen Sie von mir?’ Was willst du von
20 Like the heath in King Lear (Shakespeare).
30
mir? Sag, was willst du von mir?’” (280). A similar quotation of this overly sentimental language
occurs as the two lovers arrive in Salzburg and prepare to say goodbye: “…er sagte: ‘Bleib bei
mir.’ Und sie sagte: ‘Nein. Weißt du denn nicht, dass es zu spät ist, für uns beide jedenfalls—für
andere zwei vielleicht nicht.’ Und er sagte: ‚Du hast mich doch um Hilfe gebeten.’ Und sie sagte:
‘Du hast mir schon geholfen.’” (288). This dialog clearly mocks the language of an overly
dramatic romance. A reader who attaches too much significance to these words will inevitably be
led astray.
The novel ends in the autumn as the pharmacist returns home to find everything more or
less as it was. It seems at first as if his journey were all just a dream (“Sein Wagen stand vor dem
Haus, mit knackenem Motor, wie gerade erst da abgestellt” [289].) until a few small clues
suggest otherwise (290, 293). The expectations associated with both the road movie and the
Entwicklungsroman—namely that the protagonist returns home a changed man—are
deconstructed in the epilogue when the narrator asks the pharmacist if he has changed as a result
of his journey and he replies: “Zwischendrin habe ich mir einmal geschworen, wenn ich je
hierher zurückkäme, dann als ein anderer! Aber das einzige, was sich an mir scheint’s geändert
hat: ich habe größere Füße bekommen, mußte mir neues Schuhwerk kaufen” (302). However,
some closure does exist. Just as Yvain becomes famed as the “Knight of the Lion” at the end of
the medieval tale, the pharmacist finally becomes “recognizable” as the “Apotheker von
Taxham” (289). Of note is also the fact that the narrator “alludes to” the outward appearance of
the pharmacist here in the epilogue for the first time, commenting on the fact that such a
description makes him uncomfortable:
Ich weiß nicht warum es mir seit jeher widerstrebt hat, Leute, ihre Gesichter, ihre
Körper, zu beschreiben …Trotzdem ist das vielleicht der Moment, das Aussehen
31
des Apothekers anzudeuten: Er war nicht besonders groß, dafür breit, breite
Schultern, und das am auffälligsten Breite, überhaupt das einzig Auffällige an ihm
war seine Nase: deren Flügel ständig geblähte Nüstern (300).
This passage is rather comical in that it first claims to finally describe the pharmacist and
then simply focuses in on his nose, commenting that the nostrils are always flared. Thus the
seeming closure created by the narrator’s attempt to finally describe the protagonist is negated by
the fact that the one distinguishing feature described is more of a caricature than a
characterization.
32
CHAPTER FIVE: INWARDNESS?
A great deal of scholarship pertaining to Handke’s oeuvre attempts to describe the nature of what
most agree is a certain marked stylistic transition. The novel Der Kurze Brief zum langen
Abschied is generally considered to mark a turning point in this respect and the novel Slow
Homecoming is considered to be the culmination of this transition. Not all scholars agree on what
this transition consists of, except to say that Handke’s prose has evolved from a highly
experimental style to something more conservative or, in the author’s own words, “classical.”
Some attempt to position this transition in the context of literary history, viewing what seems to
be the increased importance of introspection in his later works as typical of “New Subjectivity,”
a trend in German literature which arose in the 70s and 80s and was characterized by a turn
inward towards the self (Klinkowitz and Knowlton 13).21 However, Christoph Parry offers a
more fitting approach to describing exactly what this transition consists of in his study
Landscapes of Discourse. Parry attempts to portray the transition in Handke’s work in aesthetic
terms, drawing parallels between literature and the visual arts (Parry 40-41).
Many critics are too eager to attach an external significance to Handke’s stylistic
evolution. As is evident in his aesthetic treatise Die Lehre der Saint Victoire, it is his
contemplation of the role of spatiality, perspective and form that motivates what has been
perceived as a turn inward. Handke is interested in the “self” merely as a vehicle of perception
and not as an object of psychological realism. In Dunkle Nacht the fact that the protagonist is a
“mushroom expert” says little about his psychological person, but positions him as a unique
vehicle of perception; unlike most people who are constantly looking ahead to reach their next
goal, the pharmacist looks down in search of mushrooms and perceives small details on the
21 Robert Halsall agrees that critics often misinterpret the nature of psychological content in Handke’s prose. He
cites the “negative reaction” on the part of German critics towards Handke’s “inwardness” or “subjectivity” (46).
33
ground. Thomas F. Barry acknowledges this fact in the article “‘Sensucht nach einem
Bezugssystem’: The Existential Aestheticism of Peter Handke’s Recent Fiction” when he says:
“Despite the sometimes classical, sometimes romantic vocabulary which appears in Handke’s
most recent works, the fundamental experience—the union or linking of consciousness to the
world—is the same as it always has been in his writing” (266). From Die Hornisse to Der Kurze
Brief zum langen Abschied all the way up to his most recent novels like In einer dunklen Nacht
ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus and Der Bildverlust oder durch die Sierra de Gredos Handke’s
primary concern lies with the varying perceptual paradigms of his protagonists.
It is interesting how the condition of the “self” in Handke’s prose presents a frequent
topic of discussion, even though, as some would claim, the author attempts to avoid references to
the psychology of the individual. In the article “Raumglück?” Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt
writes: “Die Anstrengung Handkes ist auf die Erledigung jeglichen Ich-Inhalts aus. Es muß
immer wieder betont werden: Kein Schriftsteller steht der Introspektion so fern wie Handke …”
(75). The mere fact that Goldschmidt feels the need to emphasize that no author is so
uninterested in introspection as Handke suggests a general ambivalence with regard to the nature
of psychological content in Handke’s prose. This ambivalence arises from the fact that what
appears to be a genuine attempt at “introspection” is often simply a metafictional reference to the
rhetoric of the psychological novel
A reader reviewer on “amazon.de” found Dunkle Nacht completely uninteresting except
for the following passage, which is fraught with stereotypes about the relationship between man
and woman, and resembles the drunken rant of a bitter and lonely man:
Zwischen Frau und Mann ist neuerdings Feindschaft gesetzt. Männer und Frauen
sind heutigentags untereinander zerfallen, ohne Ausnahme ... Nicht nur werden
34
wir nicht mehr geliebt, sondern sogar bekämpft ... Früher oder später wird die
dich liebende Frau, so oder so, von dir enttäuscht sein, und du wirst nicht einmal
wissen, warum. Sie wird dich, wie sie erklärt, durchschaut haben, ohne dir aber zu
sagen, worin sie dich durchschaut hat. Und sie wird dich keinen Moment mehr
vergessen lassen, dass du durchschaut bist. (Lassahn)
Though it is too long to be quoted here, the passage continues to bemoan the hostility of women
and perpetuates a series of stereotypes, which apparently speak to this particular reader quite
effectively. It is interesting that the reader should isolate this text as the only worthy passage in
the novel. This is a prime example of how Handke’s prose is often misunderstood by the
impatient reader: he fails to recognize the fact that this passage actually represents a metafictional
critique of the very sort of discourse he is praising. The subject of the hostile woman
does not arise from the author’s desire to comment on reality. It itself exists as yet another
“metafictional” reference to both the figure of Lady Laudine in Yvain and to Dido in Virgil’s
Aeneid. The personality of both figures is characterized by an unforgiving demeanor and the
potential to be rather hostile.
Even scholars who recognize the importance of spatiality in Handke’s prose seem
inevitably to revert to a psychological interpretation. In “‘Sehnsucht nach einem Bezugssystem’:
The Existential Aestheticism of Peter Handke’s Recent Fiction” Thomas F. Barry suggests that
Handke’s emphasis on description represents a sort of “therapy of images.” He writes: “…it is
(imaginative) fiction which allows him to see through his artificial world and to achieve a more
authentic sense of self. It is a therapy of images that Handke found in his reading and writing”
(262). To suggest that Handke’s unique aesthetic perspective is the result of a “therapy of
images”—an attempt to heal the alienated self—is to do the text a great injustice, for exactly the
35
opposite is true: the motif of the alienated self is nothing more than a means by which Handke
creates certain aesthetic paradigms in the text. For the author, the alienated self presents nothing
more than the occasion for a new perceptual paradigm.
In For a New Novel Robbe-Grillet discusses the changing concept of “character” in the
“modern novel.” In the traditional sense of the term, a character is more than a simple “banal
he.” He must have a proper name, parents, a profession, childhood memories, etc. He is more
than just “the simple object of the action expressed by the verb” (27). In the modern novel,
however, characters are nothing more than “puppets” which no longer display a dimension of
psychological realism (28). As Robbe-Grillet points out, the “K” of Kafka’s Das Schloß
possesses a mere single initial in place of a proper name, has no family, no face and is probably
not even a land surveyor at all (28).The protagonist of the “modern novel” accommodates many
different interpretations but is subordinate to none (28).
In the case of Dunkle Nacht, where “meaning” in the form of “psychological content” is
generated, it is also deconstructed so that the text actually “mocks” its own meaning. At the
beginning of the novel we learn that the protagonist prefers riding toward the sun so that he may
avoid the unpleasant experience of seeing his own shadow: “Es war dem Apotheker dann auch
recht, weiter eher nach Osten, der Sonne zu, zu fahren: so vermied er den eigenen Schatten vor
sich—ein Anblick, der ihm seit je unangenehm gewesen war” (32). This passage seems to be a
reference to the protagonist’s “existential angst,” the shadow being a metaphor for the sort of
“existential awareness” that makes the pharmacist uncomfortable. However, the author clearly
intends to uses this metaphor in an ironic fashion, for in a later passage he deconstructs this
ready-made system of references in which “avoidance of shadow = existential angst” by
reasserting the spatial significance of the shadow over its metaphorical connotation:
36
Was ihn beim Weitergehen zunächst störte, war, mit der östlichen Sonne im
Rücken, vor sich ständig den eigenen Schatten zu sehen ... Später aber betrachtete
er in seinem Schatten die Einzelheiten am Boden, die sich so deutlicher
abzeichneten. Und gegen Mittag war dieser ohnehin fast aus seinem Blick; ihn in
den Augenwinkeln zu haben, war ihm jetzt willkommen, denn das gab in der,
Horizont nach Horizont, eher gleichförmigen Savanne ein Gefühl der
Fortbewegung und des unauffällig Begleitetwerdens“ (239).
Where existential rhetoric bans the shadow to the “realm of ideas,” Handke restores to it
a certain degree of material “immediacy.” It is actually the aesthetic benefits of the dark-light
contrast (and not his own psychological growth) that allow the pharmacist to overcome the
discomfort of seeing his own shadow. With the shadow in front of him he can better observe
details on the ground and with it on his side (at midday as the sun is overhead) the vast openness
and monotony of the steppe becomes less intimidating.
Much of the “existential content” of Handke’s prose consists of references to ready-made
narrative structures borrowed from Kafka, whom the author names as perhaps his most
influential literary role model (Pilipp 117). Like Kafka, Handke often creates characters who
experience alienation in relation to the “outside world.” Both authors are interested in the idea of
a sudden transformation, a “crucial existential moment” in which the protagonist either
reconnects with or disconnects from everyday reality (Pilipp 126-127).
The “sudden tranformation” that occurs in the first sentence of Die Verwandlung: “Als
Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu
einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt” is referenced in the first line of Die Stunde der
wahren Empfindung: “Wer hat schon einmal geträumt, ein Mörder geworden zu sein und sein
37
gewohntes Leben nur der Form nach weiterzuführen? ” (Die Stunde 7). Handke’s Gregor
Keuschnig becomes disconnected from reality as the result of a dream in which he commits a
murder, and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa wakes up from a dream to discover the reality of his altered
state (Pilipp, 132-33).
While the examination of parallels between Handke and his role model Kafka presents an
extremely interesting topic of discussion, a better understanding of Handke’s concept of
“character” is best achieved through an examination of differences in regard to the role of the
“sudden transformation” in the prose of both authors. Whereas Kafka aims to comment on
certain social, familial, or psychological conflicts that lead to the protagonist’s alienation,
Handke uses this alienation as an occasion to explore the relationship between the self and the
“world of objects:” “Whereas an existential novelist might portray a character as alienated and
leave it at that, Handke finds such a predicament to be only one part of a complex semiotic
process from which true fiction can properly begin, not end” (Klinkowitz and Knowlton 66).
This is not to say that Kafka is not interested in aesthetics. In fact, when readers think of Die
Verwandlung the first thing that comes to mind are images of the gigantic cockroach, his little
black legs, the rotting apple sticking out of his back and the small dusty room within which he is
trapped. However, in contrast to Kafka, Handke never offers his reader the privileged perspective
of the omniscient narrator. The view of the world which he offers is completely dependent upon
the point of view of the protagonist, regardless of whether the story is told in first or third person.
Handke completely submits himself to the point of view of the protagonist in order to study the
world according to different subjective points of view.
In Dunkle Nacht the “sudden transformation” occurs after the protagonist receives a blow
to the head. This alters his perception in two ways: First, it renders him mute, thus establishing
38
his role as the silent observer or mystic. Second, it creates in him a sense of adventure that
mirrors that of the “knight errant.” This causes him to “wander,” which creates the occasion for
the kind of episodic rendering of causally unrelated scenes which dictates much of the novel’s
narrative structure. In both cases the “sudden transformation” brings about a new perceptual
paradigm.
In order to fully appreciate the aesthetics of the Handke’s novels one must recognize the
unique relationship between author and protagonist. Behind the author’s seemingly arbitrary
creation of character traits and character conflicts lies a rather consistent and purposeful aesthetic
agenda rooted in the careful, almost painterly, study of perception and perspective.
39
CHAPTER SIX: COMMITTMENT
Handke’s second novel Der Hausierer was criticized in the magazine Spiegel because of
its self-referentiality. According to the critic, the horror that the novel tries to create is too
removed from reality:
… im abstrakten Schema des Schreckens kann ich meinen Schrecken nicht
entdecken. Mein Schrecken ist konkret, der betrifft, was ich sehe, im Kino und
auf der Straße, im Fernsehen und in der Zeitung [...]—mein Schrecken betrifft
Bolivien und Vietnam, er betrifft auch Los Angeles und West-Berlin. (qtd. in
Pichler 84)
In a letter to the editor Handke responds facetiously:
Ich habe l’art pour l’art produziert, während anderswo Menschen an
Widersprüchen starben. Ich werde mich ändern ...Gerade habe ich mir schon ein
Plakat mit dem Bild Che Guevaras beschafft und es in meinem Zimmer an die
Wand geklebt, und wenn heute Abend die Tagesschau Bildberichte aus Vietnam
bringt, werde ich mir überlegen, wie ich aus diesen Bildern Literatur machen
kann. (qtd. in Pichler 85)
When under the subheading “Commitment” Robbe-Grillet writes: “The thesis-novel has
rapidly become a genre despised more than any other …Yet only a few years ago, we saw it
reborn on the Left in new clothes: ‘commitment,’ ‘engagement’; and in the East too, with more
naïve colors, as ‘socialist realism’”(35) he is criticizing the same sentiment expressed by the
critic above, who seems to believe that a work of art must necessarily comment on a political or
social issue. Thus it is no surprise that Handke looked to Robbe-Grillet in search of a model for
40
literature which avoids this problematic notion of “commitment” (Pichler 54).22 According to
Robbe-Grillet, the author’s “commitment” lies not in the realm of politics, religion, and social
conflicts, but in the realm of language: “commitment is, for the writer, the full awareness of the
present problems of his own language” (41).
This is not to say that it is the intention of the nouveau roman to ban anything and
everything resembling social, religious, or political discourse from the novel.23 For example if
we consider how this concept comes into play in Dunkle Nacht, we see that the social discourse
surrounding globalization is very much present even though Handke does not show
“commitment” to any sort of school of thought surrounding this phenomenon. Globalization is
not discussed overtly as a theme, but it manifests itself in the landscape and serves to lend a
unique quality to the setting. In the following excerpt the main protagonist, the pharmacist, has
embarked on a journey south-westward through Europe with his two travel companions. His
journey is shaped by postmodern changes in the landscape due to the phenomenon of
globalization:
Statt hoch auf den Pässen durchquerte man den Kontinent beinah ausschließlich
unten in Tunnels ... Obwohl sich die Staatsgrenzen vermehrt hatten—es gab so
viele wie noch nie—, blieben diese, sehr oft mitten in wieder so einem Tunnel,
unbemerkt, zumal auch alle Grenzkontrollen abgeschafft waren, nirgends mehr
ein Grenzer sich zeigte (120-121).
22 Scholars like Jerome Klinkowitz and Christoph Parry tend to discuss Robbe-Grillet only in relation to Handke’s
less recent works, but in doing this they are referring only to the connection with Robbe-Grillet’s novels and are
often overlooking the degree to which Handke’s later works also realize the concepts put forth in Robbe-Grillet’s
essays.
23 As sociolinguists would argue, social conflicts are infused in the language and an “awareness of the present
problems of language” automatically includes an awareness of the present problems of society (Kress, 33).
41
For Handke this new system of tunnels creates the occasion for a modern-day aesthetic
adventure. In the following passage, the tunnel exit appears as a miniature slide projection
against an enormous black background:
Daß es dort hinten hinaus ins Freie ging, war das nicht vielleicht sogar nur eine
Täuschung? So starr erschien das Bild des Ausgangs, auch so künstlich, mitsamt
dem gar nicht dämmrigen, vielmehr sonnenhellen Licht, daß es in ihren Augen,
und das bis kurz vor dem Durchsein, ein Teil des Stollens war. Ein Miniatur-Dia,
grellfarben, überbelichtet, stand da vor ihnen auf eine sonst vollständig finstere
Fläche projiziert, etwas wie ein Blattgrünflimmern und ein Felsflankenrotgelb.
(130-131)
In this passage the image of the “Miniatur-Dia” stands for itself as a sort of miniature
descriptive event. It exists independent of all social discourse and narrative action. In addition to
this, the carefully constructed nouns “Blattgrünflimmern” and “Felsflankenrotgelb” point to the
great importance Handke places on lighting and color. The words “grün” or “gelb” would not
have sufficed to express this aesthetic experience. Description clearly takes precedence here over
political discourse. This is just one example of an “untranslatable”24 narrative unit; a descriptive
event that does not serve as a background to the plot, but exists as a pure “spatial” phenomenon.
In fact the image of the tunnel belongs to the more general spatial motif of the cave. In
one passage the narrator uses the phrase “Untertunnelung des Erdteils” (121) instead of simply
“Tunneln,” which may lead the reader to think of certain myths or fairytales in which trolls dig
secret tunnels under the earth. The expression “Untertunnelung des Erdteils” also evokes the
“archetype of the cave” which is associated with darkness, mystery, and spiritual sanctuary and
occurs as an important motif in both epic and romantic literature. The word “Stollen” in place of
24 See Barthes, 120-121
42
“Tunnel” in the passage quoted above is also an infusion of romantic imagery into the text.
“Stollen” is a word used in connection with mining or “Bergbau,” which was an important
metaphor in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. For Novalis, the image of the solitary miner
who descends into the dark shaft to recover precious gems is a metaphor for the role of the poet
(Hardenberg, 90). Both Handke’s protagonist in Dunkle Nacht and Novalis’s Heinrich von
Ofterdingen dream of caves. In a passage at the beginning of Dunkle Nacht the protagonist
dreams that there is a network of subterranean rooms under his house:
[Er hatte] in der Nacht zwei ohne ihn, jenseits seiner Person, spielende Träume. In
dem einen grenzten an den kleinen Keller im Haus Fluchten von unterirdischen
Räumen, ein Saal übergehend in den andern, prunkvollst eingerichtet, feierlichst
beleuchtet, dabei allesamt leer, wie in Erwartung, bereit für ein herrliches,
vielleicht auch schreckliches Ereignis, und das aber nicht erst seit kurzem gerade,
vielmehr seit Menschengedenken (68).
The reference to Freudian and post-Freudian portrayal of the subconscious is quite
apparent here. At the end of the story the protagonist actually enters the basement—a part of the
house that he always avoided—and finally feels at home there: a sign that he has processed
certain suppressed memories.
As a part of the spatial motif of the cave, the reference to the tunnel clearly has more of a
spatial significance than a political one. What has the potential of being a critique of
globalization becomes an exploration of spatiality. The spatial motif of the cave occurs
throughout the novel and is so interesting that it merits one more reference in this thesis (even if
this represents a bit of a digression). The protagonist’s favorite “establishment” is the
“Erdkellerrestaurant” located by the airport in Salzburg. The word “Erdkeller” evokes the image
43
of an underground room, although the effect is somewhat lost in the English translation: “rootcellar
restaurant” (Winston 50). The protagonist visits the “Erdkellerrestaurant” after he is struck
by lightning. It is here that he finds shelter from the storm. This could represent yet another
reference to Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in which the poet is told a story about a
princess and her peasant lover who seek shelter in a dry moss-covered cave during a storm where
they ultimately consummate their union and conceive a child (Hardenberg 40).25 In Dunkle
Nacht the sentence “Stunden des Nachtregentrommels dann auf das Herbergsdach” (89) skilfully
creates this sense of being sheltered from the elements in a cozy cave-like space. The narrator’s
description of the Erdkellerrestaurant clearly evokes the archetype of the cave as a place of
sanctuary. Once again the importance of spatiality and of description becomes apparent here as
the carefully chosen words “Nachtregentrommel” and “Herbergsdach” emphasize the idea of
being sheltered from the storm.
For Handke, this intersection of romantic imagery such as that found in Heinrich von
Ofterdingen and the reality of the postmodern landscape is not just an aesthetic principle, but a
way of perceiving the modern world. The author has been living in Chaville, a suburb of Paris,
since 1990 and finds it to be a special place because of its proximity to the forest of Vélizy.
There exists an interesting contrast between the seemingly enchanted forest of Vélizy and what
he calls the “Türaufgehwelt” of the modern suburban infrastructure of Chaville:
Ich gehe eine Stunde durch den Wald—und es ist ein unglaublicher Wald, mit
Ruinen und Teichen und verborgenen Quellen und Füchsen—und dann gehen
automatisch die Türen des Einkaufszentrums vor mir auf, die Musik spielt, die
Warenwelt tut sich auf, die Militärhubschrauber landen mit ihren toten
französischen Helden. Ich will diese Türaufgehwelt nicht gegen die Igel oder die
25 The same motif occurs in Virgil’s Aeneid (Maro 89).
44
Steinmetze aufrechnen, die mir als ‚Kitsch’ ausgelegt werden—aber dieses
Ineinander ist ein genaues Bild der heutigen Welt. Das Rhythmische, Epische
dieser Welt ist in meinen Büchern, das bilde ich mir wenigstens ein (qtd. in
Pichler 187).
Here, Handke’s perception of the “postmodern” landscape consciously avoids an explicit critique
of modern technology. The word “Türaufgehwelt” itself has a mythical quality and eludes any
sort of absolute value judgement. Instead of condemning the bustle of the suburb and celebrating
the tranquillity of the forest he simply tries to capture the aesthetic quality of the “Ineinander” of
today’s world. In this way he lives up to Robbe-Grillet’s concept of the author’s “commitment”
without completely banning social and political discourse from his work.
45
CHAPTER SEVEN: DESCRIPTION AND SPATIAL FORM
The only critical response to Dunkle Nacht that comes close to constituting a scholarly
work appeared in the Catholic journal Lebendiges Zeugnis in 1998. The interpretation, written by
Mariano Delgado, is entitled: “Das Lied vom Namenlos—oder: Wenn Dichter Mystiker werden
(wollen): Zum letzten Parabel von Peter Handke.” Delgado’s interpretation hinges on various
intertextual references to the poem “La noche oscura” written by the Spanish mystic St. John of
the Cross. As is evident in the following excerpt, the language of the novel’s title was inspired by
St. John’s poem:
“In einer Nacht ganz dunkel,
erfüllt von Sehnsucht und entflammt von Liebe
- o du glückliche Stunde!
ging ich ganz unbesehen,
als es schon still in meinem Haus geworden ...” (Delgado, 3)
Delgado scolds critics for not recognizing such obvious references to mysticism and religion
which appear throughout the novel. He says: “Es war einmal eine (glückliche) Zeit, da waren die
deutschen Feuilletonisten gebildet ... da gedieh die Mystik in den Kirchenmauern und führte
doch kein Mauerblümchendasein” (1).
In the subsequent stanzas of “La noche oscura,” the narrator is possessed by a sense of
longing, and leaves his silent house. He searches for and finds the object of his desire (whether
sexual or spiritual) and becomes one with him, letting go of all his worries. According to
Delgado, the plot of Dunkle Nacht follows this same schema. For Delgado, a summary of “La
noche oscura” (combined with elements from another poem also referenced in the novel) more or
less describes the plot of Dunkle Nacht:
46
Da ist einer, der den Mut hat, in der Nacht sein stilles Haus zu verlassen, um sich
an einen einsamen Ort zu begeben, wo er dem—auch ihn in Einsamkeit aus Liebe
suchenden—Gegenstand seiner Liebessehnsucht begegnet und mit ihm eins wird.
Nach dieser „Auferstehungserfahrung“ wird er nicht mehr derselbe sein, denn er
sieht „stille Musik“ (musica callada), man lebt in einer „klingenden Einsamkeit“
(soledad sonora), mitten im Alltag. Dies vorausgesetzt, ist die Deutung der
rätselhaften Handkeschen Parabel ein Kinderspiel, jedenfalls in ihrer
Hauptsymbolik. (5)
For Delgado, knowledge of this basic schema is central to an interpretation of the novel’s
symbolism. Unfortunately, by attaching such a high degree of significance to this single poem,
he ignores the openness of the novel. Benjamin Kunkel’s short review entitled “Living in
Oblivion: Peter Handke On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House” clearly contradicts Delgado’s
notion that Dunkle Nacht is a novel primarily about spirituality. Kunkel writes: “In addition to
being a dream, On a Dark Night is a road movie, a metafiction, a mushroom trip, a Romantic
quest poem, and an abortive love story” (1). By assuming that the novel aims to “persuade” the
reader, Delgado fails to recognize the “Langsamkeit” of the text. He fails to appreciate the
importance of the “untranslatable” units of narrative.
Key to Delgado’s interpretation is a passage in which the pharmacist lies down at the end
of his journey next to a cliff wall, which forms a sort of “clay semi-grotto.”26 He watches the
light of the setting sun shining on the cliff wall and decides to “let go” and simply observe. The
cliff wall begins to “radiate” light and after he has spent some time observing his surroundings
the pharmacist’s “estranged son” drives by in his “Hochzeitsauto” and says: “Du hast mich nicht
26 The choice of the word “Grotte” clearly presents a reference to the motif of the “love grotto” which occurs quite
frequently in medieval romances. In the English version “Lehmhalbgrotte” is translated as “clay semi-grotto” (On a
Dark Night 155).
47
verstoßen.” The widow also appears, hits him over the head and demands that he put an end to
his “muteness,” at which point the pharmacist decides to get up and finish his journey through
the steppe (260-267). This passage provides the key for Delgado’s argument that the novel’s
“Hauptsymbolik” revolves around the desire for spirituality in postmodern society. He argues
that this passage refers to a sort of spiritual “resurrection.”
What Delgado leaves out of his interpretation are the “untranslatable” units of narrative:
the small descriptive events that occur as the pharmacist gives himself over to the act of
observing. As the setting sun shines on the wall it turns from reddish-grayish-yellow to
lampengelb. The narrator notes that the light appears artificial, as if it were coming from a
spotlight or a film projector (261). In quiet observation the pharmacist observes the way in which
tree roots protrude from the clay wall:
An den Baumwurzelfäden, die mancherorten herausstanden, hingen Lehmbrocken
und auch ein paar Moosflecken, von denen jetzt erst, das einzige Mal am Tag, daß
die Sonne hinkam, der Morgentau verschwand. (261)
The only thing that turns his eye away from the clay wall is the shell of a hunter’s bullet
cartridge, which is covered in spider webs. The image of the hunter’s cartridge becomes a
descriptive event independent of the narrative sequence. It is almost as if the image is based on a
carefully composed still-life:
Das einzige, was sein Zuschauen zunächst ablenkte, war jene eine
Jägerpatronenhülse, mit Spinnweben überzogen bis hinein ins Innerste—so lange
steckte sie schon in dem Sand. (261)
This is when the pharmacist seems to give himself completely over to the act of
observing: “Und er ließ dann auch sich selber. Er ließ sich. Und er lag erst einmal, ohne zu
48
atmen; brauchte das für eine Zeitlang gar nicht” (261). According to Delgado, it is almost as if
the pharmacist has “lain down to die.” He states that this “seeming grave” becomes the site of a
“resurrection.”
Und dort in dieser Nische ... scheint er sich auf dem Höhepunkt seiner „dunklen
Nacht“ zum sterben hingelegt zu haben: „Nicht an- oder ausgeleuchtet vom
Sonnenuntergang wirkte die einwärts gewölbte Lehmbahn, vielmehr
selbstleuchtend; selber das Ausstrahlende, die Lichtquelle; und der in allen
Gelbarten spielende Lehm das verkörperte Licht. Liebe Vorfahren. Lieber Vater.
Liebe Mutter“ (262). Adios oder auch Hola! Doch das scheinbare Grab wird zum
Ort der Läuterung und „Auferstehung“ in der Beziehung zum Sohn und zur Frau
(Delgado, 5).
According to Delgado, the seeming “grave” becomes a site of “purification” and of
“resurrection” in respect to familial conflicts. For him this scene brings closure to certain open
sequences in the narrative. However, there is no textual evidence to support the assumption that
familial conflicts are resolved. The notion of true reconciliation is negated as the guilt shifts from
father to son. (“Ich bin es, der von dir weggegangen ist” [263].) There is also no real closure in
respect to the pharmacist’s relationship with his wife. She is absent when he returns home and
the reader can infer that the couple will continue to leave separate lives (290).
Although Delgado’s interpretation is vastly flawed, it does contribute to a better
understanding of the novel in that it draws attention to the theme of mysticism, which is
significant less for its functionality than for the way it affects the aesthetic point of view of the
protagonist. The world of the mystic operates according to a similar principle to that of Handke’s
idea of “Langsamkeit” in that the mystic’s quiet contemplation involves a heightened awareness
49
of his surroundings. As the pharmacist traverses the steppe his point of view is informed by this
perceptive paradigm: “Schon seit jeher war er am stärksten ins Zuschauen geraten als Zeuge von
einfachsten, undramatischen Vorgängen und Abläufen, etwa, wenn ein Regen stärker oder
Schwächer wurde, oder einfach vor sich ging ...”(261). Through the eyes of the pharmacist as
mystic the minor details of the landscape gain importance The aesthetic perspective of the mystic
provides the context for the kind of descriptive events which appear again and again in the
course of the novel, especially in the steppe. These descriptive events or “static motifs” serve a
purely spatial purpose and have little or no consequence for the functionality of the narrative. An
example of one such descriptive event occurs in the steppe as the pharmacist begins, in the true
spirit of the mystic, to simply observe:
Distelblüten tief unten am Boden, schwarz, waren zugleich Seeigel … die hohen Gräser
da—einmal in der Steppe nur Gräser—nickten mit den Köpfen und schüttelten diese
zugleich. Ein Wolkenfeld, weiß, geriffelt, schaumig, in der Form einer Dünung. Flache
Ovalsteine hier und da oben auf dem Hochlandschutt, in der Mitte mit einem schwarzen
Kreis: Kiesel geschliffen von der Eiszeit, im Schmelzen dann abgesunken hier in das
Meer, mit Namen „Augensteine.“ (256)
Here the perspective shifts from the ground to the sky and again to the ground as the pharmacist
observes first the thistle flowers, then the grass, then the clouds and then the pebbles on the
highland scree. The usual sense of time, in the form of days, hours, and minutes, is replaced by a
geological sense of time evoked by the “pebbles polished by the Ice Age, which had sunken into
the ocean … as the ice melted” (153). The human perspective is imposed upon the “realm of
pure objects” as the narrator notes that the smooth oval stones with a black circle in the middle
are called “Augensteine.”
50
This is just one example of a series of descriptive events which interrupt the narrative on
the functional level. The forward-moving motion of the pharmacist’s journey through the steppe
is often put on pause and the reader’s eye diverted towards the ground or up to the sky. On one
occasion the pharmacist observes various insects. He sees an ant carrying the wing of a butterfly
on his back: “Ein einzelner Schmetterlingsflügel bewegte sich aufrecht, leicht schwankend und
im Zickzack, vielfarbig, standartengleich, auf dem Boden dahin: so getragen von einer
höhlenschwarzen Ameise” (257). These minumental images often comment on an issue of
monumental importance: but with a childlike playfulness that immediately negates any sense of
didactic intention. Just as with the “Augensteine” above, in the following passage the “realm of
objects” takes on a certain anthromorphic quality as it is viewed from the perspective of the
observer: “Und die Ameisen schienen im übrigen nirgends hier einen Staat zu bilden—höchstens
drei, vier kamen jeweils aus einem Loch; kleine Ameisendörfer, und –weiler also nur, die weit
voneinander entfernt lagen und nichts miteinander zu tun hatten” (257). This remark carries the
tone of a child’s musings while a faint reference to European geopolitics lingers in the
background.
The author creates spatial form by connecting various images through visual motifs. In
the following passage the grasshoppers appear to have the profile of a horse (as the Austrian
word for grasshopper is “hay-horse”), and the moths look like sheep (On a Dark Night 153-154):
… ein großes Heupferd einmal trug ein kleineres Heufpferd huckepack, worauf
dieses herunterfiel und in Luftsprüngen seinen Träger suchte. Beide hatten dann,
wieder aufeinander, in der Tat Pferdeprofile gezeigt—währen die Steppenfalter
Profile von Schafen hatten. (257)
51
Here the narrator displays a child-like imagination, infusing his own subjective point of view
into the image.
Another such minumental image occurs as the pharmacist is still in Sante Fe. He visits his
Stammlokal, an out-of-the-way “rincón” in the Unterstadt where he shares silent companionship
with a worn and bristly bartender who serves only one type of drink. Since there is no menu and
the two share no verbal communication, food is served according to the bartender’s whim.
One day it is olives, the next fried squid, partridge eggs, crayfish, or the pharmacist’s own
mushrooms. It is as if the bartender were a kind of “sorcerer,” making us of his exotic collection
of frog’s legs and newts’ tails. What the pharmacist experiences here is more a ritualistic
ceremony than a simple visit to the bar:
“Anzubieten hatte er ohnedies nur ein einziges Getränk, das in immer den
gleichen Flaschen von oben bis unten seine Regale füllte. Verschieden war nur, was er
mir dazustellte an Imbissen. Aber nach diesen, den Oliven, den Pistazien, den im Nu von
ihm gebratenen Zwergtintenfischen, den Rebhuhneiern, den Flußkrebsen, den Pilzen—
von mir gebracht, von ihm stumm zubereitet—, brauchte ohnedies nicht gefragt zu
werden; was er servierte, lag allein in seiner Macht!” (204)
The description of the “rincón” mirrors that of the “Erdkellerrestaurant” in that what is
portrayed here is the spirit of hospitality, the feeling of anonymous companionship, and the
overall calmness that is unique to such a locality. This is a theme that prevails throughout
Handke’s oeuvre. Almost every novel contains at lease one passage in which the lone protagonist
enters a restaurant, bar or café.27 In each case, small descriptive details serve to capture the
unique atmosphere of the given locality. Handke seems to hold these spaces to be sacred, not
27 For a few examples see: Der Kurze Brief zum langen Abschied: 18, 30-32, 35-37, 60, Langsame Heimkehr: 135-
140, Der Chinese des Schmerzes: 52-60.
52
only because they represent a place of refuge, but because the lone protagonist can go here to
find an intermediate state between the self and the outside world.28 He remains alone but enjoys
the presence of strangers. In the case of the pharmacist, he is able to share the silent ritual
involved in eating and drinking with the bartender without the necessity of verbal
communication.
The minumental image in this passage revolves around the small shallow basin in the
white marble counter where the bartender washes his shot glasses. Made of marble and without a
drain, this small hollow in the counter resembles the “baptismal basin.” The pharmacist watches
in silence as the bartender washes each glass, continually refreshing the water so that it remains
perfectly clear. The pharmacist remarks that the most peaceful moment in the “rincón” was when
all of the small, delicate shot glasses had been washed and the basin had been filled with fresh
water:
… am stillsten war es in dem rincón, wenn alle die sehr kleinen und feinen Gläser
gewaschen auf dem Marmor gereiht standen, die Mulde daneben neu mit Wasser
gefüllt, alles andere weggeräumt, keiner von uns beiden mehr trank oder aß, wir
vielmehr gemeinsam auf die sauber gereihten alten Nippgläser und das bißchen
Wasser, das so klare, in der lochlosen Vertiefung blickten ... .(206)
The interesting thing about this passage is that the shallow basin is so obviously a reference to
the Christian ritual of baptism and yet this reference is of secondary importance. It is the locality
itself that is referred to here. Rather than providing a “background” or “context” for a reference
to spirituality (as Delgado might argue), the locality of the “rincón” is actually foregrounded: the
image of the baptismal fountain serves only to inform the description. This passage is
28 The balance between the self and the outside world is recognized by many scholars as an important theme in
Handke’s works (Klinkowitz and Knowlton 94).
53
“untranslatable,” as it serves more of a “spatial” than a “functional” purpose. Here the
immediacy of the locality takes precedence over any “system of references” that might be
implied by the images.
There are two things supporting this argument. Firstly, it has already been established
that the locality of the café, bar, or restaurant as an intermediate space between self and outside
world presents a common motif throughout Handke’s oeuvre.29 This very fact suggests that the
locality of the “rincón” has a significance which goes beyond the particular details of this
singular description. Secondly, the narrator destroys any sort of seeming “signification” in regard
to Christian ritual at the very end of the passage as the pharmacist imagines the round miniature
pond with its white marble bottom as a temple garden in faraway Asia where: “ein Besucher und
ein Mönch auf einen Felsblock inmitten eines leeren, nur langwellig gerechten Sandbeets
blicken, welches zum Beispiel das japanische Meer darstellt” (206). Here once again the
narrative alternates between minumental and monumental images: the shallow basin in the
“rincón” transitions (in the mind of the pharmacist) into the image of a monk in a temple garden
sitting with a visitor in front of a bed of sand. This system of spatial references extends even
further as the pharmacist imagines this bed of sand as a representation of the Sea of Japan.
A mentioned above, this same spatial motif occurs again and again throughout Handke’s
oeuvre. The locality of the “Kanalstube” in Der Chinese des Schmerzes resembles that of the
“rincón.” In this case the protagonist, Andreas Loser, is a writer, teacher and amateur
archaeologist. Like the pharmacist he is estranged from his wife and son. He occupies an
apartment in a new development on the edge of the city of Salzburg in Leopoldskron. Leaving
the quiet isolation of his apartment for the first time that day, he takes a bus ride towards the
29Handke shows an affinity for “intermediate” localities such as the restaurant, the airport, the hotel and the theatre.
The “Schwelle” is an important locality in Der Chinese des Schmerzes.
54
Kommunalfriedhof. He gets out and walks along the Almkanal until he comes to a small café
called the “Kanalstube” where he is happy to share the anonymous company of strangers after a
day of working alone (“ein Tag des Alleinarbeitens”) (54). Like the “rincón,” the “Kanalstube” is
hardly a commercial institution: it resembles a private house more than a place of business. The
narrator remarks that, unlike the cafés downtown, there are no newspapers to be bought, but a
guest can request that the owner fetch his personal copy from his apartment above the café.
Further adding to the sense of Gemütlichkeit, the narrator describes the stacks of magazines on
the windowsills which are as high as the house plants. The banal commercial uniformity of the
downtown cafés clearly does not exist here (53). Like in the rincón, the protagonist enjoys the
anonymous company of strangers here. In this intermediate space he is able to reach a balance
between the self and the outside world: “Es gelingt mir dann … für alles im Umkreis jener
Schimmer von Teilnahme, der, so glaube ich, mich zugleich selber unscheinbar macht … Wenn
ich dann gehe, wird niemand von mir reden. Aber meine Anwesenheit wird geachtet worden
sein” (54).
At the end of this passage two boys—foreigners most likely from Yugoslavia—enter the
café to collect empty wine bottles. As they leave again, they activate the jukebox: playing
Macedonian folk music. As this music plays, a certain spatial transformation occurs in the mind
of Andreas Loser. The café becomes an empty garden terrace in West Jordan with a view of the
Dead Sea. A pregnant woman in the café who stands up and lifts her hair from the back of her
neck appears as a woman on the banks of this Sea:
Etwas, bis dahin ausständig, trat ein: die Gaststätte verwandelte sich in die
Gartenterasse eines Restaurants im Westjordanland. Diese Terrasse war leer,
erfüllt von knisternden Sandschwaden, dem Klatschen von Palmblättern und dem
55
Schall der Endlosmusik. Im Osten lag die Senke mit dem Toten Meer, und die
Schwangere, die sich gerade aufrichtete, mit den beiden Händen die Haare vom
Nacken hob und sich damit den Scheitel bedeckte, saß für die Dauer des Lieds
nun da als eine Frau am Ufer dieses Meeres; verkörperte das Meer selbst (58).
Here the archetypal nature of this locality becomes clear. The narrator is not simply referring to
this single café, but to a much larger spatial motif.
Considering the abundance of “descriptive events” described above, one can conclude
that Handke is often more interested in images and localities than in character conflicts and
metaphors. Unfortunately, these “untranslatable” units of narrative often become obscured as the
reader “consumes” the text. A reader like Delgado, who is too quick to “translate” the image into
an “idea,” engages with the text only to the point at which his own polemic agenda is reinforced.
56
CHAPTER EIGHT: LANDSCAPE WRITER
It was mentioned above that Handke’s evolution as a writer is best described in aesthetic
terms (rather than in terms of a seeming adherence to the practices of specific literary
movements such as “New Subjectivity”). In Landscapes of Discourse Christoph Parry calls
Handke a “landscape writer” and highlights the ways in which his study of the visual arts has
affected his literary philosophy. Handke’s aesthetic treatise Die Lehre der Saint Victoire
provides scholars with a large degree of insight into this relationship. In studying various artists
Handke attempts to find the ideal balance between subjectivity and objectivity, meaning and
form. The Dutch genre painter Courbet, for example, appealed to him because he seemed to be
able to capture the universal quality of simple everyday scenes (similar to Handke’s portrayal of
the “rincón” and the “Kanalstube”):
Courbet hat die tagtäglichen Genreszenen als die wirklichen, historischen
Ereignisse gesehen. Und so bilden seine Gestalten, nur indem sie Korn sieben, an
einem Grab stehen, eine Tote einkleiden, oder eben in der Dämmerung vom
Markt heimwärts ziehen (wie auch seine bloß Sitzenden und Ausruhenden,
Schlafenden und Träumenden) in der teilnehmenden Phantasie eine geschlossene
Prozession ... . (183)
Handke talks about “das Schweigen der Bilder” in reference to Courbet. He admires the
painter for the immediacy of his images (182). A parallel can be drawn here to the nouveau
roman in which the immediacy of the image takes precedence over “signification:” “In this
future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be there before being something; and they
will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own ‘meaning’”
(Robbe-Grillet, 21-22).
57
One way in which Handke lives up to the term “landscape writer” is that, like many
landscape artists, he experiences “phases” in which he studies a certain locality. In Dunkle Nacht
it is the steppe, in Langsame Heimkehr the Alaskan wilderness, in Der Kurze Brief zum langen
Abschied urban, suburban and rural America, in Mein Jahr in Niemandsbucht the Parisian suburb
Chaville and the wilderness of Vélizy, in die Wiederholung the Slovenian Karst and in Chinese
des Schmerzes a “Neubausiedlung” on the outskirts of Salzburg. In Die Lehre der Saint Victoire
Handke names Edward Hopper as a role model in respect to his awareness of the unique essence
of certain localities. The landscape paintings of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with their “in den
Föhrenwäldern verborgenen Holzhäuser” (175) inspired him to take a trip to New England to
experience the same locality first hand. Although not acknowledged by Handke, Hopper’s
interest in the restaurant, café, or bar as a locality seems to parallel Handke’s. He too seems to
capture the spatial motif of the restaurant, café, or bar as “refuge” and as an intermediate space
between the self and the outside world.30 Like Robbe-Grillet, the painter shows an appreciation
for the immediacy of objects and gestures, but he does more than this: he also achieves a certain
degree of universality in his paintings.
The title Die Lehre der Saint Victoire is a reference to Handke’s most important painterrole
model Cezanne. The mountain St. Victoire served as a sort of “object of study” for Cezanne
and it is this mountain that the narrator actually visits in the novel. The mountain is located just
outside of Aix-en-Provence, where Cezanne was born and spent most of his adult life. Cezanne’s
preference for Aix over the city of Paris demonstrates his appreciation of nature and his
independence from the Parisian art scene. Cezanne distinguishes himself from the impressionists
in that he achieves a balance between the realist portrayal of nature (with varying degrees of
30 See “The Nighthawks“ (1942), “Chop Suey“ (1929), “The New York Restaurant” (1922), “Automat” (1927),
“Tables for Ladies” (1930), and “Sunlight in a Cafeteria” (1958).
58
subjectivity) and an appreciation for abstract constructions. Handke writes: “In einem Brief
Cezannes las ich weiter, er male keinesfalls ‚nach der Natur’—seine Bilder seien vielmehr
‚Konstruktionen und Harmonien parallel zur Natur’“ (211). As Handke remarks, Cezanne’s
paintings seem to present the perfect balance between “nature” and abstraction.
Cezannes Bilder waren mehr als ... reine Formen ohne Erdenspur—sie waren zusätzlich,
von dem dramatischen Strich (und dem Gestrichel) der Malerhand, ineinandergefügt zu
Beschwörungen—und erschienen mir, der ich davor anfangs nur denken konnte: ‚so
nah!’, jetzt verbunden mit den frühsten Höhlenzeichnungen.—Es waren die Dinge; es
waren die Bilder, es war die Schrift; es war der Strich—und es war das alles im Einklang
(211-212).
The painting is at once a reference to the real object, a study of certain formal considerations
(color, shape, composition, etc.) and an expression of the artist’s own temperament (Medina, 93).
In his interpretation of Die Lehre der Saint Victoire Parry fails to effectively demonstrate
the ways in which the aesthetic “lessons” of Cezanne are realized in Handke’s prose. His study is
more of a survey of the role of spatiality in the narratives of various novels. He points out the
way in which color replaces “outline” in Cezanne’s paintings and compares this to Handke’s
prose which “[achieves] depth and color through a textual flow that avoids the kind of sharp
outlines that would for example arise from a conscious delineation of the various themes of the
book” (67).
As Parry fails to make clear, Cezanne’s artistic concept of “color” actually comes into
play in a much more concrete way in Handke’s prose. In Cezanne’s paintings color lends a
certain everlasting quality to everyday objects. Unlike the impressionist painter he does not
attempt to capture the “light and dark effects” of color as they appear before him, but looks to
59
external models (i.e. other paintings) to find tonal motifs. For Cezanne colors and color contrasts
become a sort of “abstract language” (Medina 92). In his paintings color possesses a
transcendent quality and exists as a motif without necessarily possessing a symbolic significance.
Cezanne’s colors lend an everlasting quality to everyday objects. The repetition of tonal motifs
counteracts the arbitrariness of “Alltäglichkeit” in the same way religious ritual creates a sense of
continuity and eternity (Die Lehre 215). Handke comments on this phenomenon at the very
beginning of Die Lehre der Saint Victoire: “Einmal bin ich dann in den Farben zu Hause
gewesen. Büsche, Bäume, Wolken des Himmels, selbst der Asphalt der Straße zeigten einen
Schimmer, der weder vom Licht jenes Tages noch von der Jahreszeit kam. Naturwelt und
Menschenwerk, eins durch das andere, bereiteten mir einen Beseligungsmoment, den ich aus den
Halbschlafbildern kenne ... und der Nunc stans genannt worden ist: Augenblick der Ewigkeit
(169).
Like Cezanne, Handke uses color to create harmony in his prose. Contrast and repetition
establish the formal significance of color, transcending the realm of symbolism and achieving
“spatial form” by emphasizing visual motifs over the causal sequence of events. Various color
contrasts occur as the pharmacist observes insects in the steppe: as a flying grasshopper takes
flight it reveals the blue hue of its wings under the gray shell (263). As it lands it immediately
becomes stone-gray again. In a later passage a stone-gray moth flutters by a gray cliff and is
visible only because at the same time its shadow is moving over the cliff (On a Dark Night 154).
In another passage a yellow jacket is hardly recognizable against the yellow of the clay wall as it
attempts to pull a “snail cadaver” from its shell (On a Dark Night 158). Here the insects’ ability
to camouflage themselves mirrors the medieval epic tale’s motif of invisibility, which is
60
repeatedly referenced in the novel.31 (“Im Salzburger Zentrum bewegte sich der Apotheker von
Platz zu Platz wie unter einer Tarnkappe” [50]).
The most prominent color in the novel is yellow. The color yellow appears in many
different shades and is often contrasted with the color black. As mentioned above, the light at
the end of tunnel through which the pharmacist and his companions pass before they reach Sante
Fe is a “Felsflankenrotgelb.“ This is contrasted by the pitch blackness of the tunnel.(131). In the
passage referenced by Delgado, the clay wall is first described as “lampengelb,” until this
descriptive event reaches its climax, at which point the wall seems to radiate its own light and
embodies every color of yellow (262). Furthermore, the pharmacist notices that the “lamp-light
yellow” of the clay wall’s smooth areas contrasts with the “shadow-black” of its fissured and
raised surfaces (262). In another passage, the pollen-covered legs of the bees glow a
“plustriggelb” and contrast with the dark holes into which they crawl (258).
For Delgado, the fact that the clay wall radiates light just after the pharmacist “leaves
himself behind”32 and stops breathing for a moment is a reference to “resurrection.” However, in
light of Handke’s thorough study of Cezanne’s aesthetics one could argue that this passage
realizes Cezanne’s idea of abstraction in the form of color motifs. In the passage quoted by
Delgado, the narrator is careful to note that the light comes not from the setting sun, but is
actually “selbstleuchtend:” “Nicht an- oder ausgeleuchtet vom Sonnenuntergang wirkte die
einwärts gewölbte Lehmbahn, vielmehr selbstleuchtend; selber das Ausstrahlende, die
Lichtquelle; und der in allen Gelbarten spielende Lehm das verkörperte Licht” (262). One could
31The ring given to Yvain by Lady Lunette’s handmaid allows him to become invisible and escape the wrath of
Lord Askalon’s subjects (de Troyes 33).
32 On a Dark Night, 156
61
view this passage as a sort of “descriptive climax” in that the color yellow portrayed here is not
an everyday yellow, but a sort of “eternal” yellow—the embodiment of “yellow.”
62
CONCLUSION: THE LESSON
The “lesson” that Handke learns from his great role model Cezanne in Die Lehre der
Saint Victoire is never explicitly stated. Instead the text is a montage of loosely connected
elements ranging from biographical information about the painter, to descriptions of particular
paintings, to the narrator’s first-hand accounts of his own visit to Mt. St. Victoire. Once again
realizing his principle of “Langsamkeit,” Handke continually resists the tendency to persuade the
reader. By refusing to lend a definite “outline” to his thoughts, he repeatedly reveals the text as
an open process: he juxtaposes various images, statements and impressions, thus forcing the
reader to create his own syntax (Parry 71).
The exact meaning of the “lesson” of the St. Victoire takes on clarity only in the context
of the last chapter, which presents a description of the Morzger Wald, a forest just outside of
Salzburg. In this chapter realist description continually gives way to abstraction: abstract forms
and colors imbue everyday objects with epic significance. From the unique perspective of the
“landscape writer,” the forest transforms into a palette of colors: lichtbraun, fahlgrau, Rostgelb,
fernblau and düsterweiß. Various time scales converge as the narrator encounters a cliff wall,
which eons ago was nothing more than single particles of gravel transported to this spot
(formerly a gigantic lake) by a mass of molten lava. An impression on the forest floor reveals
itself as a bomb crater from a past war. A normal woodpile at the edge of the forest becomes an
element of aesthetic composition as its lightness of color provides a contrast to the dim
background created by the twighlight. The colors of the woodpile reveal man’s first footprints, a
tree in a grove represents the “Anfangsbaum,” the symmetry of the beech tree’s oval leaves
exudes endless serenity (237-249). At the end of this passage the narrator returns to the city with
63
its common squares and bridges, streets and alleyways, sports arenas and news reports, church
bells and shops, golden glitz and fancy drapes (249). Handke realizes, in his description of the
forest, the “lesson” that Cezanne has taught him: that an artistic work must always seek a balance
between the subjective self (in the form of abstract forms) and the outside world (in the form of
everyday objects and occurrences).
The interpretation of In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus presented
in this thesis represents a similar sort of „lesson:” a lesson that reveals itself only through
practice—through the actual act of reading Handke’s “difficult” prose, allowing oneself to
abandon the tendency to want to “devour” a text and giving oneself over to the act of
observation. The closer one studies the text the more abstract it appears, as visual motifs
transform objects into colors and colors into eternal forms.
However, Handke himself recognizes the danger of such abstraction. Like his many
protagonists, he too struggles to define himself vis-à-vis the outside world—searching for a
justification of his decision to disown the “burden” of history and instead embrace a
“conservative classical” sensibility. And yet this burden haunts him again and again, bursting
violently into his work in the form of a lightning strike, a sudden violent act, or a swastika
painted on a tree (in Der Chinese des Schmerzes). Furthermore, the reader repeatedly witnesses
the author’s awareness of the codedness of language—a sign of his postmodern sensibility.
Thus the author himself struggles to find a balance between classical harmony and
postmodern fragmentation, between form and meaning, inner-self and outside world. The author
as mystic seeks the tranquillity of his current residency on the outskirts of Paris where he seems
to be “zu Hause in den Farben und Formen,” but the author as adventurer feels compelled to
continually enter into the public eye. His travelogues, while remaining true to the principle of
64
“Langsamkeit” by continually emphasizing the importance of description and maintaining
“Abstand” in relation to the matter at hand, represent the author’s unavoidable compulsion to
continually embark on a journey in order to experience “reality” first hand and allow himself to
undergo a “sudden transformation” after which he must, once again, redefine himself vis-à-vis
his environment.
65
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'Weiter im Blues': Karl Wagners Aufsätze über Peter Handke

2010-09-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

Auf dem Weg ins andere Österreich

http://handke-scholar.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-scholar-and-all.html

14.09.2010 05:20

'Weiter im Blues': Karl Wagners Aufsätze über Peter Handke

Karl Wagner, Germanist an der Universität Zürich, legt hier seine Handke-Arbeiten aus dreißig Jahren vor, oder er 'legt' genau genommen gar nichts 'vor', sondern seine Freunde und Kollegen haben Wagners verstreute Aufsätze eingesammelt und zum Druck befördert. Das haben sie wahrscheinlich auch deshalb getan, weil sie Handke mögen und Wagners Blick auf Handke. Über diesen Blick lässt sich sagen, dass er anfangs ein kritischer war. Im frühesten Aufsatz des Bandes, aus dem Jahr 1979, kritisiert Wagner Handkes 'Rückzug in den geschichtslosen Augenblick'. 'Schwer frustriert', wie er später bekennt, vom Siebziger-Jahre-Handke und dessen Hang zum (damals sagte man so) Eskapismus, vermisst er bei Handke die Bereitschaft zur (noch ein Wort aus jener Zeit) literarischen Intersubjektivität.

Entweder hat sich Handke seit damals geändert oder Wagner, jedenfalls bekunden Wagners spätere Aufsätze eine große Sympathie für Handke. Unkritisch sind sie deshalb nicht, vor allem wenn es um Handkes öffentliche Einlassungen geht. Einem Journalisten etwa hat Handke gesagt, journalistische Sprache bestehe aus 'vorgefertigte(n) Sätzen', 'man weiß immer schon vorher, was drin steht'. Das will Wagner so nicht gelten lassen, aber Handke hat es vielleicht so auch nie gemeint. Man kann mit ihm schwer in eine Erörterung darüber eintreten, was journalistische Sprache gegebenenfalls mehr und anderes wäre als 'vorgefertigte Sätze'. Deswegen wird Wagners Hinweis, Handkes öffentliche Äußerungen unterschritten bisweilen sein eigenes 'Reflexionsniveau', auch kaum Einfluss auf Handkes Äußerungen haben. Zwischen Handkes poetischem Zorn und der moderaten Gemütslage einer argumentativen Literaturwissenschaft ist das Gespräch manchmal erschwert.

Für Wagner ist Handke, wie es aussieht, der allerwichtigste deutschsprachige Gegenwartsautor, und dies aus mindestens zwei Gründen: Handke weist der Literatur einen Weg hinaus aus der in Konvention erstarrten Avantgarde; es ist nicht der Weg der 'Postmoderne' oder einer simplen Rückkehr zu den Rezepturen des klassischen Realismus, sondern einer, der ältere, vormoderne und vorbürgerliche Weisen des literarischen Singens und Sagens behutsam wieder aufgreift.

Der andere Grund ist ein sozusagen innerösterreichischer: Handke hat, vor allem mit von Wagner und anderen als dessen opus maximum gepriesenen Roman 'Die Wiederholung' (1986) ein 'anderes Österreich' literarisch konstruiert, eine, wie Wagner schreibt, 'ebenso filigrane wie dezidierte Alternative zu der imperialen Vergangenheit und zum nationalsozialistischen Gewaltzusammenhang'. Handkes Österreich-Phantasie bezieht sich auf einen geographischen und Erfahrungsraum, der nicht an Österreichs Grenzen endet (deshalb war man in Slowenien über Handke nicht immer froh), und sie geht von Figuren aus wie dem Partisanen, dem Kleinbauern oder der Magd. Eine andere Sozialdemokratie könnte, das deutet Wagner an, in Handke einen Verbündeten haben, aber so weit wird es wohl doch nicht kommen.

Wagner ist ein gründlicher und subtiler Leser von Handkes Büchern und liegt mit seinen Beobachtungen fast immer richtig. Ein wenig neigt er dazu (was man ihm nicht verübeln muss), Handke zu mythologisieren: er ist bei Wagner schon fast zur Legende geworden, wie ein alter fahrender Bluessänger, oder wie Handkes eigene Idole Van Morrison und Bob Dylan.

Wagner sieht Handke wie Dylan auf einer 'Never Ending Tour': der alte Zorn ist verraucht (aber nicht ganz), die wichtigen Bücher sind geschrieben und die, die noch kommen, werden das schon Geschriebene 'wiederholen' (aber noch lässiger). Aber die Tour geht weiter, mit dem einen Unterschied zu Dylan, dass wir ihn fast jede Woche live hören können, wenn wir wollen, und Handke nicht. 'Weiter im Blues' heißt Wagners Buch. Also dann. CHRISTOPH BARTMANN

KARL WAGNER: Weiter im Blues. Studien und Texte zu Peter Handke. Weidle Verlag, Bonn 2010. 312 S., 21 Euro http://www.sueddeutsche.de/a5P38p/3581352/Auf-dem-Weg-ins-andere-Oesterreich.html

24.09.2010 | 18:25 | Von Karl Wagner (Die Presse)

Die zwei: Thomas Bernhard und Peter Handke. Über eini- ges Gemeinsame, viel Trennen- des, zwei gegensätzliche Schreibkonzepte und die große Verösterreicherung der deutschsprachigen Literatur.

Aus dem Archiv:

Als „Gestalt seiner Zeit“ hat Peter Handke sein Vorbild und später seinen Widerpart Thomas Bernhard wahrgenommen, als er 1992 dafür plädierte, von einer Ära Bernhard zu sprechen, statt von einer Ära Waldheim. Für diesen politischen Instinkt – nicht unbedingtdas, wofür Handke weltberühmt ist – spricht,dass Handke schon früh, im „Kurzen Brief zum langen Abschied“ von 1972, den zu jener Zeit erstmals für das Amt des Bundespräsidenten kandidierenden Kurt Waldheim,ohne seinen Namen zu nennen, beim grellen Wort nahm: Bei der Bundespräsidentenwahl, so die Mutter des Ich-Erzählers am Telefon, sei der sozialdemokratische Kandidat wiedergewählt worden, „der Gegenkandidat hatte auf einer Wahlversammlung die Unterstellung zurückgewiesen, er sei Nationalsozialist oder gar Jude. Es kam mir vor, als ob die Mutter Witze erzählte.“

Wenn damit der unrühmliche Anfang der Ära Waldheim bezeichnet wäre, so hätte die Ära Bernhard zu jener Zeit schon längst begonnen gehabt, spätestens mit „Frost“ aus dem Jahre 1963. Drei Jahre später, 1966, hat sich Peter Handke schlagartig einen Namen gemacht. Siegfried Unseld, der gemeinsame Verleger, berichtet Thomas Bernhard vom Treffen der Gruppe 47 in Princeton, wobei der Nachricht der Stachel des verlegerischen Rats und der Konkurrenz eingesetzt ist. Unseld schreibt nämlich an Bernhard, der zu dieser Zeit über dem noch titellosen Roman „Verstörung“ und seinem ersten Theaterstück, „Ein Fest für Boris“, sitzt – damaliger Arbeitstitel: „Die Jause“ –, wie folgt: „Lieber Herr Bernhard, Ihren Brief vom 19. April las ich nach meiner Amerika-Reise, bei der ich mich – insbesondere bei gewissen schwachen Lesungen der Gruppe 47 – fragte, warum Sie eigentlich nicht Teilnehmer solcher Tagungen sind, aber vielleicht ist in der Tat der Wert für Sie zu gering. Peter Handke hat sich glänzend geschlagen und sich noch einen Namen gemacht.“

Der Stachel soll auch Bernhards Auslegungseiner Dichterrolle reizen, wie er sie in den vorangehenden Briefen angedeutet und stilisiert hat: das Verschmähen aller Angebote, für Zeitschriften oder Anthologien zu schreiben – „man weiß ja, wie es in Schweinekobenausschaut und was ein Schwein unter lauter Schweinen bedeutet“. Der Vorsatz, sich möglichst nicht „an der literarischen Tombola“ zu beteiligen, wird mit entsprechenden Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit untermauert. Der neue Vierkanthofbesitzer schreibt: „Die Schläue des Fuchses besteht darin, den Fuchsbau auf keinen einzigen Fall zu verlassen“ – und bekundet eine Absicht, an deren Einlösung erwie kein anderer erfolgreich gearbeitet hat: „Ich mache es Ihnen schwer, so wie ich mir selber alles schwer u. immer noch schwerer mache. Darin besteht aber das einzige wirkliche Vergnügen am Leben.“

Die Jahre von, grob gesprochen, Mitte der Sechzigerjahre bis 1989, aber auch darüber hinaus, sind für die österreichische Literatur ein Glücksfall: Sie gehören literaturgeschichtlich zu einer ihrer produktivsten Epochen. Damals begann jene von dem deutschen Literaturkritiker Heinrich Vormweg so bezeichnete „Verösterreicherung“ der deutschsprachigen Literatur, die auch in der Schweiz wahrgenommen wurde. In einem Brief an Hermann Burger vom 25. Jänner 1973, der Thomas Bernhard als sein großes Prosa-Vorbild rühmt, schreibt Karl Schmid, seines Zeichens Literaturprofessor an der Zürcher ETH und Verfasser unter anderem des wichtigen Buches „Das Unbehagen im Kleinstaat“: „Es ist ja überhaupt sehr eigentümlich, welche Stelle nun plötzlich die Österreicher einnehmen: Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Franz Tumler u.a.“

Diese Epoche des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts ist, in literaturgeschichtlicher Hinsicht, mit zwei oder drei Eigennamen nicht zu bezeichnen, und auch nicht die Vielgestaltigkeit der österreichischen Literatur in jenen Jahren. Mit Walter Benjamin zu reden, wäre es zudem nicht minder aufschlussreich, davon zu sprechen, „was die Österreicher lasen, während Handke und Bernhard schrieben“ – und zum Glück schreibt einer von den beiden ja immer noch; auch wenn der Eindruck entstehen mag, dass Bernhard selbst nach seinem Tod Handke, jetzt allein rein quantitativ betrachtet, darin noch überflügeln möchte.

Nicht nur auf diese Weise wirkt Thomas Bernhard fort, fast schon oder nur mehr unheimlich erfolgreich, obwohl oder weil (?) mit seinem Tod 1989 seine „Ära“, die Ära Bernhard, zu Ende gegangen ist. Das wurde auch von anderen Autoren, schon in den Nekrologen, ausgesprochen. Elfriede JelineksNekrolog heißt „Der Einzige und wir, sein Eigentum“ und ist der bemerkenswerte Versuch, Elias Canettis Fundamentalsatz von der Macht des Überlebenden literaturstrategisch einzusetzen und aus dem Nachruf die eigene Nachfolge zu legitimieren. Das geschieht mit einer Würdigung der Radikalität Bernhardscher Kritik am Bestehenden, die aber paradoxerweise das Bestehende dadurch affirmiere. Jelinek liefert dafür eine Art somatische Begründung: Der Kranke, der Atemlose, hat das dauernde Sprechen zu seinem Lebensbeweis gemacht: „Ich spreche, also bin ich.“ Daraus folgt die Erkenntnis, dass dieser Dichter ein Dichter des Sprechens, nicht des Schreibens war. Das Formprinzip der Tirade leite sich davon her.

Handkes spätere Bernhard-Kritik steht im Zeichen einer Poetik, die auf der Differenz von Rede und Schrift besteht, aber eindeutig der Schrift für das eigene Schreiben den Vorzug gibt.

Die Überbietung des „Giganten“ Bernhardführt bei Jelinek über Ingeborg Bachmann, der bekanntlich auch Bernhard in „Auslöschung“ mit der Figur der Maria ein außergewöhnliches Prosa-Denkmal gesetzt hat. Dezent und dezidiert wird von Jelinek dem eigenen Schreiben so der Platz angewiesen.

H.C. Artmanns Nachruf beschäftigte sich dagegen mit Bernhards Dichter-Habitus im Österreich der Fünfzigerjahre. Thomas Bernhard wird von ihm als „ein Dandy bis in den Tod“ vorgestellt, und zwar als einer „wie Oscar Wilde, keiner im abgewerteten Sinn von heute. Dandy sein ist eine Zeremonie. Der echte Dandy ist ein strikter Ästhet – zwar ständig umgeben, aber kein Gesellschaftsmensch. Er düpiert die Leute, die ihm hinten hineinkriechen.“

Vor dieser idealtypischen Bestimmung des Dandy nimmt sich der konkrete Fall so aus: „Thomas Bernhard war – wie Rilke – gern in blaublütiger Gesellschaft. Er hat sich den leicht homophilen Aristokratenschmäh unseres gemeinsamen Freundes Gerhard Lampersberg kunstvoll zu eigen gemacht. Aber er war nie der Wurstel oder Clown der Aristokratie. Wir kannten einander seit den Fünfzigerjahren. Er war gerade zwanzig und der eleganteste Bursche von Wien. Wir sind wie die letzten Pariser Existenzialisten dahergeschlurft, in Schnürlsamt, selbergemachten Jeans und Herrgottsandalen. Er hingegen war ein Gent, fantastisch angezogen – eleganter als Wolfgang Hutter, und der galt als Maßstab. Er war eine fantastische Erscheinung.Nicht schön, aber einMensch von Haltung.Die literarische Szene in Wien war damals dreigeteilt: Die Gruppe um Hans Weigel, wir – Ossi Wiener, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Ernst Jandl und ich – und schließlich er, Thomas Bernhard. Absolut unabhängig, keinem Menschen als seiner Tante und dem Ehepaar Lampersberg verbunden.“ Einige der Wiener Surrealistengruppe hätten Bernhard gar einen „Exklusivsandler“ genannt, fügt Artmann hinzu.

Psychologisch ist es nicht allzu schwer zu verstehen, dass sich der als uneheliches Kind in armen und äußerst beengten Verhältnissen Geborene zu aristokratischem Habitus und einem entsprechenden Wohn- und Lebensstil hingezogen fühlte. Entscheidender scheint mir, dass Thomas Bernhard in seinem Werk entsprechende Interieurs großbürgerlicher-aristokratischer Lebensverhältnisse einsetzt, vor allem aber: dass seine Kritik der Massengesellschaft, des Durchschnittlichen demokratischer Verhältnisse, seine Verachtung des Kleinbürgerlichen und Provinziellen im Gestus des Aristokratisch-Elitären vorgebracht wird. Auch viele von Bernhards außerliterarischen Interventionen verdanken ihre Provokationskraft dieser Attitüde; bezeichnenderweise gab es die heftigen Gegenreden zu Bernhard nie aus ei-nem, sondern aus jedem politischen Sektor der Öffentlichkeit.

In literarisch-kulturhistorischer Hinsicht ist diese eingenommene Gegenwelt zur Herkunft auch als Rückkopplung an jenes jüdisch-liberale Großbürgertum zu verstehen, das die Trägerschicht der Wiener Moderne um 1900 war und vom Nationalsozialismus vernichtet oder vertrieben wurde. Nicht zuletzt diese Differenz speist in „Heldenplatz“ die Kulturkritik, die von den jüdischen, emigrierten Professoren der Mathematik und Philosophie bestritten wird.

Bernhards Kleinbürger- und Provinzialismusverachtung, dargeboten im Gestus des Aristokratisch-Großbürgerlichen, kommt es jedoch nicht in den Sinn, diese vornehme Gesellschaftsschicht moralisch-politisch oder in ihren Besitzansprüchen zu legitimieren. Nicht nur in „Auslöschung“ wird am Ende ein Akt der Abschenkung realisiert; der Alleinerbe Franz-Josef Murau – nicht von ungefähr auch vokalisch mit dem Fürsten Saurau aus „Verstörung“ verwandt – vermacht den feudalen Landsitz Wolfsegg der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde in Wien.

Bernhards Identifikation mit den Opfern gesellschaftlicher Gewalt – etwa den jüdischen Figuren in „Heldenplatz“ oder der einfachen Bergmannfamilie Schermaier – ist mit der versuchten Auslöschung seines Herkunftskomplexes, der mit dem Namen Wolfsegg bezeichnet ist, gekoppelt. Wolfsegg ist, ähnlich wie das Dorf Schweigen in Hans Leberts „Wolfshaut“, als Pars-pro-toto-Darstellung des katholisch-nationalsozialistischen Österreich zu lesen. „Frost“, Bernhards literarischer Durchbruch, ist ohne Leberts „Wolfshaut“ kaum denkbar; das im Schlosspark von Wolfsegg entdeckte Massengrab von polnischen Flüchtlingen, bei Kriegsende von „Deutschen“ erschossen, ist ein Sujet, das an Bernhards Erzählung „Der Italiener“ gemahnt und auch an die verscharrten Zwangsarbeiter am Rande des Dorfes Schweigen, umgebracht von den Bewohnern dieses Dorfes.

Bernhards „Auslöschung“ erinnert an die Verbrechen, die damals begangen wurden und die nach 1945 so schnell wie möglich vergessen werden sollten. Eine solche politische Lesart, wie sie erstmals Ulrich Weinzierl vorgelegt hat („Bernhard als Erzieher“), zeigt Bernhard nicht als Solitär, sondern einem Schreibanliegen verbunden, das zu den Verdiensten der österreichischen Literatur gehört und ihren Rang ausmacht: die Spurensuche nach der Gegengeschichte.

Mehr als all die Österreich-Beschimpfungen (von Bernhard undHandke zusammengenommen) gibt dieser Roman die genaueste Vorstellung von den Verletzungen, die sich beiBernhard wie bei Handke mit der Staatsgewalt verbinden. Es ist ein Elend der Kritik, dass die Unterscheidung von Staats- und Österreich-Kritik so oft unterbleibt, wo sie von den Autoren markiert ist, und dass sie erst recht dann unterbleibt, wo sie von den Autoren unterlassen wird.

Anders als Bernhard setzt Handke den kleinen Verhältnissen nicht das Großbürgerliche entgegen. Während aus dem Abstand das Provinziell-Kleinbürgerliche zusammenklumpt und so den Schwung der rhetorischen Abfertigung begünstigt, sucht Handkes Nahaufnahme und sein mikroskopierendes Erzählen die kleinbäuerlich-handwerkliche Welt vom Kleinbürgerlichen zu unterscheiden, also dem Typisierungsdruck, dem das Unscheinbare und Machtlose ausgesetzt ist, zu widerstehen durch eine familiäre Archäologie, in der übrigens der Großvater eine ähnliche Schlüsselposition einnimmt wie bei Bernhard.

Bei durchaus analogen philosophischen Orientierungen (Wittgenstein; nicht jedoch: Schopenhauer) arbeitet Handke je länger desto beharrlicher daran, seinen geschundenen und geknechteten, zum Teil slowenischen Vorfahren, durch ein Schreibprojekt gerecht zu werden, das diese Leute als Personal eines Epos vorstellbar macht. Dass sich Handkes Kritik – in seinem „Versuch über die Müdigkeit“ – gerade an Bernhards „Auslöschung“ entzündet hat, nämlich an der Lust an manischäischen Oppositionen, scheint mir aufgrund dieser Verwandtschaft nur plausibel. Es geht schließlich um nichts Geringeres als darum, dass und wie man die Erniedrigten und Beleidigten in der literarischen Darstellung nicht verrät.

Die beiden alternativen Schreibentwürfe von zwei Autoren, die fortwährend, ähnlich wie Frisch und Dürrenmatt, in einem Atemzug genannt werden, schließen im Konkreten naturgemäß ein schwieriges persönliches Verhältnis nicht aus. Das ist wohl der Normalfall, hier noch potenziert durch eine Konkurrenzsituation, in die persönliche Animositäten eingespeist und im journalistischen Echo mit entsprechenden Hall-Effekten wiedergegeben und so verschärft werden. Zu berücksichtigen ist auch, dass die beiden nicht nur denselben Verleger haben, sondern mit Peymann auch ihren wichtigsten Regisseur; in Handkes Salzburger Jahren neben dem Residenz Verlag auch noch die Salzburger Festspiele als gemeinsame Adressen oder Auftraggeber, nicht zu reden von der Nähe Gmundens zu Salzburg. Es ist eine kleine Welt für große Konkurrenten, die durch ein wechselseitiges Dauer-Beobachtungsverhältnis nicht größer wird.

Es ist nicht meine Aufgabe, alles zu kolportieren, was die Betroffenen selbst via Überbringer oder auch nur Erfinder dem jeweils anderen ausgerichtet haben – oder wie sie ihn ausgerichtet haben. Das senkt gewiss den Unterhaltungswert dieses Essays; das ist allein schon der schlichten Tatsache geschuldet, dass ich vieles nicht weiß oder auch nicht wissen kann und manches weiß, was ich, aus rechtlichen Gründen, nicht zitieren kann. Es gibt Dokumente, die, zum Schutz beider, mit Recht nicht veröffentlicht worden sind. Das, was die Korrespondenz Bernhards mit Siegfried Unseld freilegt, zeigt ohnedies eine persönliche Konstellation, die nach dem Prinzip der Eskalation in einem unauflösbaren Antagonismus sich verfestigt hat und dergestalt auch das Kleinliche und Paranoide in unfreiwilliger Komik offenbart. Das wechselseitige Belauern und Aushorchen machte Unselds Salzburg- und Gmunden-Aufenthalte zu diplomatischen Hochseilakten.

Diese dunkle persönliche Seite, die wohl zum Bestandteil des kreativen Prozesses beider gehört, hat auf der literarisch-ästhetischen Ebene dazu beigetragen, sich der eigenen Schreibregel bewusst zu werden beziehungsweise sie durch Abstoßung zu finden, wie das bei Handke der Fall ist. Es ist ein Verdienst der neuen Bernhard-Werkausgabe, dass sie zeigen kann, welch langer und quälender Prozess der Schreibarbeit und Selbstkritik Bernhards Romandebüt „Frost“ vorausgegangen ist. Diese mehrjährige Arbeit hat eine Schreibregel konstituiert, die Bernhard, etwas schematisch gesprochen, nach dem Virtuositätsprinzip perfektioniert hat. ImWiderstand gegen dieses Paradigma findet Handke nach einer mit allen Symptomen der Hysterie begleiteten Umstellung seiner Schreibweise in der Tetralogie „Langsame Heimkehr“ zu ei- nem gelassenen, freizügigen Erzählen, das mit seiner dezidierten Ausrichtung an der vorbürgerlichen Gattung des Epos die Möglichkeiten der Fiktion potenziert. Über die alten Formen gewinnt er neue Lizenzen für das Erzählen zurück; er sichert sich auch eine Pluralität der Gattungen, die mit dieser anderen Art zu erzählen und der in Handkes Schreibanfängen geleisteten Destruktion diverser Gattungsmuster die literarischen Artikulationsformen bereichern. Für Autoren wie Leser erzeugen jedoch gerade diese gegensätzlichen Schreibkonzepte Handkes und Bernhards neue Schreib-Räume und -Möglichkeiten, die jenseits von Imitation und Parodie zum Reichtum der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur beigetragen haben.

Karl Wagner, geboren 1950 in Steyr, ist Ordinarius für Neuere deutsche Literatur an der Universität Zürich. 2010 im Weidle Verlag: „ Weiter im Blues. Studien und Texte zu Peter Handke“. Im Oktober erscheint bei Picus sein Band: „,Er war sicher der Begabteste von uns allen‘. Bernhard, Handke und die österreichische Literatur“.
("Die Presse", Print-Ausgabe, 25.09.2010)

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Wandel der Handke Rezeption? Wandel Handkes? nach und vor “Der Wende."

23] Ich habe nicht die geringste Idee woher Handke’s Bezichtigung stammt er sei Autist der immer noch an autistischen Zuständen leidet [ in dem buchlangen Interview mit Herbert Ganter

Aber ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen ]- Wohl kaum von ihm selbst, ich bin auch bis jetzt auf keinen einzigen Wissenschaftler gestoßen der sich darüber Gedanken gemacht hat und die Konsequenzen aus möglichen Überlegungen zieht.

33] Peter Strasser: Der Freudenstoff: Zu Handke eine Philosophie

A Time Capsule: Peter Handke's 1989 Yugoslavia- by Scott Abbott

A Time Capsule: Peter Handke's 1989 Yugoslavia

Easing out of, Winding down the 25 year plus year young Handke Project…

August 9, 2010

COLBIN READS HANDKE BACK AT HIM/ and i leave a six part commentar "eine verschmitzte, herrlich sinnlose Lebenslust"- GENAU!

Festwochen Gmunden: Gedemütigte Frau und Richterin

In Peter Handkes Salzburger Jahren Anfang der 80er war der Schriftsteller der Lebenspartner der Schauspielerin Marie Colbin. Bei den Festwochen Gmunden las Colbin am Samstag im MYTHOS Handkes Text „Bis dass der Tag euch scheidet oder eine Frage des Lichts“.

THE PRINCIPLE OF “LANGSAMKEIT” IN PETER HANDKE’S IN EINER DUNKLEN NACHT GING ICH AUS MEINEM STILLEN HAUS Margaret H. Jones

'Weiter im Blues': Karl Wagners Aufsätze über Peter Handke

Auf dem Weg ins andere Österreich

http://handke-scholar.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-scholar-and-all.html

Aus dem Archiv:

Presseinformationen mit Pressefotos
der Universität Salzburg - Büro für Public Relations

COLBIN READS HANDKE BACK AT HIM/ and i leave a six part commentar

"eine verschmitzte, herrlich sinnlose Lebenslust"- GENAU!