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.
Ivo Andric, Signs by the Wayside
Dear Professor Durantaye,
Imagine this Handke specialist’s surprise on coming on
your piece on my subject in the London Review. What moral fortitude you show in
giving the Griffen kid yet another
really good spanking for having truck with those Serbians! You and the editors
of the LRB appear to take it for granted that Handke, as defender of the Serbs against exclusive culpability lover and as acquaintance
of Milosevic, is eo ipso part of a list of criminals such as Hitler,
Handke, Hirohito, Huftnagel, etc. on which all and one agree! And so I
congratulate you for being truly antediluvian yet fresh and original in your
approach for writing under the voluntary aegis of no less than the great immoraliste Jonathan Littell! On discovering that you are a
professor, and a full one at that! Who supplied the Botox?!
“Peter Handke began his career
insulting his audience,” you begin your piece, and have it
wrong from day one! Peter Handke uses musically arranged insults at the end as
bait to have an Haydn-like “Surprise Symphony. Einen Witz will er sich machen! Public Insult as I now call
a piece I would have preferred to call Abusing the Audience, like The
Ride Across Lake Constance (which instead of telling the audience what
being in the theater of life is like, destroys - in the course of two hours -
its categories of experiencing, and in Constance, by means of
Witttgenstein’s, it so happens, Socratic querying, or in The Hour We Knew
Nothing of Each Other – talking
about programmatic titles! – via a continuous change of imagery - mesmerizes
the audience into a cathartic, paradisiacal state.) That is the activist
theater of formalist happenings! I conducted the first itinerant rehearsed
readings of Insult of my translation in New York around 1969 and an
analyst at the Goethe House reading accurately commented that the audience had
received several hundred dollars worth of consciousness raising. What the so
exposed then does with its consciousness scrambled or exquisitely catharted – I
don’t know it’s supposed to be healthy and so other good things might come of
it, individually and for society.
Then Your Ignorance proceeds: “Thirty years later, after he took up the cause of Serbian independence,
condemned NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia, compared the Serbs to Jews
under the Third Reich, doubted the authenticity of reports of massacres in
Srebrenica… and gave a eulogy before
a crowd of 20,000 at Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral… Alain Finkielkraut called him an ‘ideological monster’, Salman Rushdie
nominated him ‘International Moron of the Year’ for 1999. Susan Sontag said
that there were many many people who would never pick up one of his books
again…” etc.
Where have you been since 1994 or 1999, the first two comings of
the Handke wars that paralleled the famous disintegration, worse than our
banana slugs in the Great Northwest, under what rock? Are you still wearing the
little pigtail braids of the righteously outraged busybodies? Because you sound
just like the ignorant
prêt a porter human rights hyenas of those days - Sontag, Fienkelkraut, et al -
who ganged up on Handke for not chiming in the anti-Serbian hue and cry of that
time, the progeny of an imperium that killed more people, overthrew and
destabilized more governments, was allied with more of “our s.o.bs” than any
other in the past sixty years; thus these saintly people might have busied
their inwits with outrages closer to home (or homeS since the outraged number
so many Frogs and Heinies amongst them) but whom I at least grant the
authenticity of their then ignorance, and impulsiveness, their equivocating if
they equivocated, of their being propagandized (although intellectuals of course
ought to be least of all), especially the Satanic Verses fellow, whose
European book tour the controversy and the war interrupted and displaced, might
of course have been more immediately reflective, also of knowing beans about
Yugoslavia. For Handke, though half-Slovenian, knew that bailiwick inside out
as the reading of certain texts of his might have informed his alleged readers
even then – that very great multifaceted portrait of an artist in situ, the 1993 My Year in the Noman’s Bay that has some lovely sections
set in Yugoland; or the 1991 Abschied des Traeumers vom Neunten Land that
disagrees in the gentlest way with Slovenian, the land of peace’s. severance
from the Federation; or the 1986 The Repetition, the fulfilment of the
promise that ends Sorrow Beyond Dreams, to get back to all of that once
more, and which traverses large stretches of the then still Federated Slovenia.
All I can grant YOU,
I’m sorry to say, is the cowardice of
piling on! You are a camp follower, you are the most bedraggled of
jackals, you pile on a corpse that has been squashed by a dozens just like you,
and I hope the name Durantaye will be used as a
verb to signify this kind of piling on - to
durantaye, and the efficiency of the genius of the tongue will abbreviate it
to “to drunt” and rhyme it with grunt - after all the other jackals are on top,
the last of the jackals drunts on top! –
Handke
manifests a nice and hard-won sense of humor about himself in the 2007 Moravian
Night
which
plays, whenever it is read, twenty years so the text alleges subsequent to the
reader’s time, and there Handke has the writer, someone very much like himself,
on his last round-about, near the end, and someone very much like Ramsay Clark,
whom Handke met in Scheveningen during his observance of the Yugoslav trials,
STILL demand justice for Serbia… that is, for all eternity. If I were to film
that scene I’d add have that twosome not only sit in one of those Dolminen, those lime-stone depressions
fit for any rabbit’s good and safe nite’s sleep, in Slovenia but add the camel from Road to Moroccoo that alternately kisses Bob Hope and Bing
Crosby with the two-some keep looking at each other in surprise. Oh what a
reader the “drunt” is!
Much time has passed and we now know that Handke was by no
means as wrong as he was made out to be in the matter of the disintegration of
Yugoslavia. However, as far as I am concerned we are all
wrong, simply for knowing too little (Thus the conclusion that the two
directors reach in his Voyage by Dugout, that it is too soon to make the
final film about the Yugoslav events), no matter how much we know, and so the
degree to which Handke’s first hand appraisals and the statements he based on
them are at least justified ought in fact to matter and not be held against
him. Of course he could
have gone about his defense differently once he had had his many look-arounds,
a Habermas or even someone like David Brooks speaking their kinds of
sociologeeze probably would have been more immediately understood. That was not
to be expected of someone as highly observant and linguistic as adverse to
cliché and platitude as Handke for whom the entirety of Yugoslavia was
evidently something of a heart-throb. He certainly was right about the way
the all-around propaganda was conducted (say Roger Cohen in the NY Times
Magazine making the big bad wolf of Pogarevic responsible for each single
domicile that was burned during those days!), and the neo-liberal and fascist
impulses that led to the disintegration. The NY Times did not let up until Steve
Erlanger became Belgrade bureau chief.
Handke had noticed Yugoslavia
getting colder well before the outbreak
of warfare (see the diary volume Am Felsfenster, Morgens), ethnic tribal
conflict was brewing, especially of course from Croatian nationalists, had been
for years, and the Kosovo Albanians. Comparatively ancient vengeances of all
kinds became “hot spots” again. The federation did not hold.
You, you lazy
ignoramus, write "After the facts about the massacres in
Srebrenica and elsewhere became clear, he kept calling them the ‘so-called
facts’” and are typically unaware of Handke's awareness of his own ever so
human tendency for denial (in Justice for Serbia Handke mentions his
wife’s saying “and you are going to
question Srebrenica too,” is how he handles that matter, or about the murdered bodies floating
by, Handke, typically laconic, mentions how he then skipped stones angrily
across the water of the river,(in Journey to the Rivers, Justice for Serbia)
or in the 1999 Unter Traenen Fragend he merely mentions the “well known
Yugoslav tank communism”. And independent operators like Arkan. In
SOMMERLICHER NACHTRAG (1994) he has himself theatrically exclaiming at the
sight of Srebrenica, over and over "I don't want to be a Serb." (Not
that anyone but he himself had asked him to be, but - it turns out - his
preference of that kind of confederation over the European/ NATO Union, that
disposition, may very well have its origin in his beloved Slovenian grandfather
voting for the First Yugoslav Federation in 1919, and the Serbs were the
keepers of the Confederation) Ultimately, Handke stated that of course
Srebrenica was the worst violation in Europe since WW II; and published Die
Tablas des Damiel (2007) which gives a proper account of the
controversy from his point of view and which you of course have read! What
slovenly totally lazy non-work on your part who claim to realize how precisely
Handke writes! And the great play Voyage by Dugout that he got of the
experience is in English! Oh the things a professor might have learned reading!
The violations in
Yugoslavia were mutual and
committed by certain parties on all sides, and incrementally increased, war is
war and is a crime as such, certainly Milosevic did not start the
conflagration, although Serbia next to Croatia then had the most powerful army,
neither tribe had great love of the converted. Moreover there was U.S.
interference in, typically, supplying the fascists, the Croatians and KLA, with
arms, and the Bosniaks with left-over Mujahidin from Afghanistan. Much and as
long as I have delved into that complicated disintegration that has left so
many refugees of all kinds and unsolved statuses, I have not read anything that
successfully describes the asymmetrical dimensionality of those conflicts, of
near-eastern discombobulation. The NATO expansion eastward - it constitutes a breach of the agreement between
Gorbachev and G.H. Bush - evidently played a role, and perhaps more ancient
Reconquista of Slavic lands impulses going back to the age of the Carolingians.
However, blaming I don’t think will foster understanding. McFarlane I recall
found Bakir Izetbegović the most impossible of the three
major leaders, Tjudmann was never brought to trial.
You have not read one of the finest reportages ever
written – perhaps since Handke kept being accused of merely writing travelogue
he put himself down in the Kosovo for a time and composed The Cuckoos of
Velica Hoca (2009).
There isn’t a writer
in English capable of the like. Whom do we have? The crude and simple-minded
George Packer! Your bio claims a specialty in German, no? And
be sure to read Professor Hans Hoellers magnificent essay on Velica Hoca! I have it in PDF form.
Of all this you are
unaware, you typically are
not only unfamiliar with Handke’s writing on that subject, but of several major
books such as Professor Fabjian Haffner’s on the subject of Handke and
Yugoslavia [Head of the Musil Institute in Klagenfurt], or of Lothar Struck’s Der und sein Jugoslavien that covers the
controversy from A through Z, available as an e-book, and of my http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/ where
you would find a host of material to either set you straight or at least set
you to puzzling instead of piling on with all that typically righteous
all-American certainty and wishes to kill. Ah, to be as Manichean as Robert
Lytell! Not that Handke’s equivocal relationship to power -since his initial
prominence in the late 60s- and to the powerful – frequent expressions of
disgust yet frequent truck stops – is not puzzling to say the least. Yet it is within
a European tradition. Handke also met Karadzic during one of those trips as
Malte Herwig found out, in company of his Suhrkamp editor Raimund Fellinger and
his ZZ Tops! We have a pretty good account of what transpired during the
conversation and of Handke’s reasoning for these kinds of meetings and
his trust in his own senses over newspaper reports
Although I find
Malte Herwig’s fine shoe leather biography severely deficient for its lack of
insight into Handke’s literary works, in the matter of affording the like into
Handke’s Yugoslav endeavors and his close friends thoughts about these matters
it is essential reading – but you remain innocent of interests of that kind and
pull out Robert Lytell’s’ blind and ignorant Manichean cudgel.
Your miserable piece
– and your miserable editor(s) in allowing it - comes on the heels of 20 years
of the shoddiest writing on the subject and on Handke in general by the likes
of J.L. Marcus in the NYRB
Of
Michael McDonald in the American Scholar,
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2007/03/b-c-reverse-of-initial-posting-of-open.html
of Neil Gordon the in the NY Times.
And an
endless list of the laziest of copy cats of lies and the sleaziest of readings.
We are in the world of the darkest of dark ages! Oh the
horrors revealed by a decades-long single-minded focus on Handke
(and the
few great pleasures of some fine scholarship!) A single solitary American
review during that period by a peer of his, William Gass.
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/william-gass-review-ofmy-year-in-no.html
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/william-gass-review-ofmy-year-in-no.html
The now
historical near uniform attack by American and French innelectuals (G.H. Bush)
on the Serbs and then on their sole truly prominent defender proved to me that
intellectuals are as easily propagandized as the rest of the sheeples, that all
they do is watch t.v. and gossip, that editors of left publications as well as
right wing publications at the time ganged up uniformly for once! Oh what an
abattoir on the right it was! The most grotesque being the self-congratulatary
comparison of the engagement against Milosevic and the Serbs to the pro-Rebulican
efforts during the Spanish Civil war. If I started to wretch I would
never stop and you know what that leads to!
II
Yet as
may surprise you in light of the foregoing, I had no particular reason to
come to the defense of the fellow whose work had become very important to me.
When the controversy irrupted in 1994 I had for three years retreated into a
rural idyll in Mexico and my Handke project, then seven years old and well
advanced in some respects (nearly completed what turned out to be an initial
version of a psychoanalytic monograph
was confined to an annual spring lecture or seminar at
the Austrians shindig at U.C. Riverside and I had no particular reason to rush
to Handke’s assistance, rather the opposite. The first thing I needed was to bone
up on the brewing controversy. Handke and Yugoslavia was not one of my themes.
I felt he had assumed his mother’s Slovenian identity with the writing of The
Repetition (1984)
When Marcus’s piece was published in the NYRB I wrote a
letter to Bob Silvers, then still a pal, who after all might have known better
all along since he published Kermode’s and Michael Wood’s pieces on Handke
(thus what Marcus said about Handke’s work would seem to be most
unlikely), and only defended Handke’s work from misrepresentation – I
was not ready to comment on the controversy. Silvers, like all the editors who
published these shoddy attacks on Handke, then never publish letters to the
editors. In that respect, there exist better opportunities now.
It had been great fun to translate Handke’s early plays and
see to get them on the board and him published (with Susan Sontag’s
assistance!), but Handke had proved also to me, as to all those closest to him,
gratuitously cruel (note Malte Herwig’s biography Meister der Dämmerung
which has instances of this kind), and so I kept a certain distance from our
genius as of the mid-70s, or made sure to have a third along. After what I thought would be my
swansong to translating, his richest work, Walk About the Villages
(Ariadne Press) in the 80s which he, the great translator from numerous
languages, regarded as the best translation that he had seen, I fought so hard
for it we had a final falling out (one couldn’t fight so dirtily for him!), I
who used to be pretty much of a pussy until threatened, Handke, a threatener,
threatened the abrogation of a (as far as I was concerned no longer existing) friendship (except to his
work) and I made a joke and it turned out that Handke can be seriously devoid
of a sense of humor – as was also the case at moments during the controversy in
one instance of which his gratuitous ugliness manifested itself, envy-driven in
that instance, of fellow lime-light hugger, Hans Magnus Enzensberger. He has a
temper! And there was at least one moment during which he totally lost it! This
controversy was not some nice Habermas debate during which the best argument
gets the 4-H prize! Also see
[dem
handke auf die schliche/besuch auf dem Moenchsberg, a book of mine about Handke]
for what
from early on was not all that uncomplicated a relationship between two people whom
Innocent III is not about to propose for sainthood!
I didn’t mind that abrogation at all, let the
devil stay in Miss Jones, I had had enough of dark people in New York, not that
Handke's dark side played into his Yugoslav engagement. The beaten, longtime
ex-girlfriend Marie Colbin, chimed in during those days
yet
despite her stinging piece, continued to perform Handke texts, but haunts the
stung writer even in his 2007 Moravian Night which also contain a
dreadful - if one of Handke’s typically brilliant series - misrepresentation of
what led to the beating, guilty overkill!. Handke does lie as she says, badly, not just
poetically, though there are only poetic truths – he lies I would say when
bereft of self-understanding, when he is obviously guilty as in A Child’s
Story. Spend some time with Handke and daughter Amina in the 70s and read A
Child’s Story to make acquaintance with profound levels of unawareness.
Subsequently Handke then felt guilty for having been a miserable father and
became an utterly indulgent one to his second daughter, Leocadie, vide Lucie in the Woods with the
Thingamajigs as which I would translate
as which I would translate the delightful Lucie in dem Wald mit den
Dingsbums. He lied - perhaps not all that gratuitously - at the end of Sorrow
Beyond Dreams where he claims that his real father during their
post-graduation jaunt was allegedly fearful that the twosome might be regarded
as a gay couple. Well, according to Malte Herwig’s discoveries there was no
such trip, but inventing it and hurting his real father in this fashion perhaps
only expresses Handke’s homophobia. And Handke said after he had written
Sorrow that he felt like lying again a little, apparently having already
forgotten that he just had! And if you delve into the reasons for the mother’s
suicide as these trickle out over the years, it was the prospect of the return
of her husband Bruno from a T.B. sanatorium that effected the decision – no one
in the Handke/ Sivec clan in very rural benighted Griffen appears to have heard
of separation and divorce, Handke himself was ever so fortunate to have been
picked by a priest to enter a seminary and escape that hidebound world. And
ever so fortunate that the entire family including the apparently monstrous
all-around hated stepfather appear to have realized from early on that the kid
was something extra special and afforded him The luxury of behaving like a
little dictator from early on – Handke has some delicious descriptions of what
he must have been like. Handke may be a very great artist in the most
unexpected ways, he will not go down as a great enlightener, except that his
art enters regions inaccessible it appears to enlightenment. As it says so
wonderfully, and then in chorus, in The Ride Across Lake Constance “Let
the drawer remain stuck,”, well, occasionally Herr Handke would obviously have
been better off waxing it. Self-understanding has come slowly, and usually in
the form of making fun of himself. The best of that kind I would say is the
figure of the Restarateur in No-Man’s-Bay who serves the world’s most delicious food but is just as
fussy about his customers and thus keeps going broke and moving his restaurant
deeper and deeper into the woods.
I was
glad to have some distance because in that fashion I could do my work both
intimately but also more objectively, so I told myself, the things one tells
oneself, I could be critical, and also defend and champion and, boy, is there a
lot of magnificent work to champion! And despite the personal reservations I
then had reading experiences like no other with The Repetition, No-Man’s Bay
(five times in a hovel of a donut shop here in Seattle in the company of Smerdiakov
and his ilk!) Crossing the Sierra del Gredos which must have the greatest
ending in the form of a pure language Berg
und Tal Fahrt than anything
written in any language that I know, of Absence
as of which point the filmic, experiencing prose as film enters Handke’s
technical repertoire, and not just for its own sake.
By then I had already had the great experience
of the 60s and 70s, and of A Slow Homecoming (the novel part) and of
translating Walk About the Villages, so how daft or not the fellow was
in defending the Serbians really did not much matter to me.
Initially
I found his engagement suspect, “what’s he up to now?” as others who are still
close to him will say. Handke the great exhibitionist in each and every respect
who has so many great works to show.
I spent
at least a year in toto over the course of a decade and a half trying to puzzle
out not only Handke’s involvement in the disintegration itself prior to being
conclusionary in any matter of that kind, and you find those pieces on the
handkeyugo.blospot. Not that that in itself is a guarantor of anything except
possibly time wasted, of an aging noggin misused!
Ah, the
easy life of the professor, all he knows is what the other jackals screech!
Handke’s
politically so cowardly American publisher Roger Straus Jr. was not to be
expected to publish any of Handke’s writings and travelogues on the subject,
and this big crook who fleeced me of at least 7/8th of my editor’s
and translator’s royalties of the wealth I brought Farrar, Straus + Giroux in
the 60s, indeed was frightened to death at the thought of the controversy
splattering egg on his $ 1,200
suit;
thus Viking Press published the one solitary title (of a total of six) in Scott
Abbott’s translation: Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia. Not
only did Straus not have guts, he was so foolish - that is, so incompetent - to
wait seven years to publish another Handke title after the huge successes of Sorrow
/Beyond Dreams & Lefthanded Woman, when Handke was really hot in this
country, and after ruining the success then wrote Dr. Siegfried Unseld that he
had a “Handke problem;” a problem of his own making, that is, after I left in
1969 Handke was handed to a succession of I think ten different editors each of
whom, and they were all fine the ones I knew and worked with, had to
familiarize themselves with his growing oeuvre – not that easy a thing to do.
Thus some important links are not in English, such as The History of the Pencil,
the successor volume to Weight of the World (which had done well),
and one of the great work books that shows the reader how, e.g. Walk About
the Villages developed, how Handke creates. Though Farrar, Straus had done
extremely well with both volumes of play collections, it then stopped
publishing his plays. And aside Straus’s unawareness of who he had as an author
I would say the churn of editors, Steve Wassermann’s incompetence when he
edited Hill + Wang, the subsidiary into which plays have been shoved, the lack
of continuity is to blame, as well as Michael DeCapua’s dislike of Handke and
any of my projects. Giroux might have stepped in. Apparently he only did at the
very beginning. - Oh how I rue the
day I saw that brute Roger Straus’s face the first time and let him cherry pick
me!
Here the
links to Handke available from his German chief publisher Suhrkamp
(another half dozen important titles are
available from Austrian Jung & Jung)
Here the
wealth that Gallimard, Allianza and Garzanti publish in translation
And what’s
available via Farrar, Straus/ MacMillan, USA/ Holzbrink.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/peterhandke
Six other Handke titles are strewn about.
You
begin to see why Anglo-American publishing has fallen into the hands of
continental conglomerates Bertelsmann, Holzbrinck and Hachette.
About
six years ago, I, who after all knew publishing, sought to find a
university press for an interesting volume of Yugotexts that Handke’s
translator Scott Abbott proposed to put together, where people could at least
read the work of someone who continued to be defamed so thoroughly by the likes
of you. No such luck. I stopped after about 50 I think. McCarthyism by another name
prevails on the subject. People don’t want to know, and that includes his
current prose translator Krishna Winston, who is first rate at that task, but
as an advisor on Handke to F.S.G. is both ignorant, how can she but not be with
all her other tasks and translations, and stupid, and thus incompetent.
She
advised that the extraordinary novel Kali (The Saltworks) was not
different (!) from other Handke works, and must also be responsible for their
passing on the 2011 Muehlheim Prize winning drama/novel hybrid Forever Storm,
which however already exists with Swallow/ U. of Chicago Press who have
successfully “rounded” out Farrar, Straus whom it takes a minimum of seven to
eight years to publish a Handke title. Swallow Press has not only published Forever
Storm but also his 2009 Beckett-complement play Until the Day. (see * for links to the wealth of material
for Forever Storm)
To get
back in focus: Handke at once took back his momentary comparison of
the suffering of the Serbians with the Jewish people under Nazism. However, his
so feeling testifies how deeply injured he was by the destruction of
Yugoslavia. He knew the Milosevic family prior to the disintegration and was
not going to judge him guilty without legal proceedings - that is Handke did
not take your or Lytell’s route of being judge, jury, prosecutor AND executioner
in one - he watched the trial and had looked forward to what the trial would
bring, and wrote about it in Rund Um das Tribunal and he and Harold
Pinter visited Milosevic in jail, and he wrote about how disgusted he was when
the tribunal’s chief judge subsequently expressed her regret that the
unconvicted M. "had got away”, and he had an invitation to the funeral and
he expressed his solidarity with the Serbians – I think ought to have with the
Yugoslavs (because in fact – though Handke in typically European fashion can
think in the terms of national ethnicities - I tested him once – he bears no
preference or dislike for any of those various tribes). Yet Handke I would
say has that third testicle of being aufmuepfig
as they put it in Austrian, uppity! And all the assholes hop up and down
and have the typical fit: Skandalon!
Skandalon!
As soon
as it became clear that the big bad wolf from Pogarevic would expire in prison,
who was so publically dying in prison, I knew Handke would show up at the
funeral. He used to have his own predictability and is equally guilty of
occasional irruptions of righteousness. - Everyone seemed to be permitted their
nationalistic moment but Milosevic and the Serbians who voiced it last, and who
were the sole defenders and upholders of the confederation.
Handke
has said that he was as proud of his engagement for the Serbians as of anything
in his life, and I must say the last thing I expected when I started to take a
look at all that was that I would be proud of that in a fellow I had personally
started to feel so ambivalent about.
Your
ignorance, your laziness and inability to read and apparently intentional
misreadings reminds me or J.L. Marcus misreading of Voyage by Dugout,
where Marcus thinks because one character says “what war” about the
disintegration, Handke himself denies it. Darling Susan Sontag, who rehearsed Endgame
during Sarajevo's worst days, then would play "being fired upon" when
back in the USSR, but certainly had only the most limited of narrow perspectives
of what transpired in Yugoslavia. All I can say, now that the milk of human
kindness - that once inspired human rights endeavors - has so thoroughly soured
for its instrumentalization, is for the hyenas to bay away in their home
precincts. Baying at the U.S. prison complex that holds one fourth of the world’s
prisoners ought to get them hoarse!
III
Then you
offer us a few statements about the early Handke and what I like to call his “assayings.” First,
you doodle on about what’s an essay and what isn’t but you are wasting our
time, if you knew Handke you’d know that already in Phantasien der
Wiederholung (1983) he announced an eventual attempt to change his
narrative procedures. Besides, from early on he’s been unable to write a
brilliant regular essay of the kind, say, that the envied Hans Magnus
Enzensberger can fashion. Thus “departures” would perhaps be an acceptable
designation, for these variations on proceeding, on approaching and circling a subject and
simultaneous exploration of a location, are indeed a considerable departure
from the foregoing fairly straightforward prose narratives - Goalie via Short
Letter, Sorrow, Moment of True Feeling, Left-Handed Woman, A Slow Homecoming,
Across, The Repetition, The Afternoon of a Writer - the difficulties of his
first two novels – the (1964) 1966 Die Hornissen, and the 1967 Der
Hausierer no longer obstruct. Handke plays by the standard rules, he wants
more than an avant garde audience.
You also
mope a bit about form – a matter Handke handles in exemplary manner without
need to mope. E.g. all his early plays, their form is comprised in their summa,
The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other – and that mental act might give
one pause to consider whether Handke on that level is not some kind of genius
like J.S. Bach. -Handke is a formalist, who explores forms until he needs new
challenges. He does variations on form. One might think of Handke as an unusual
manifestation of the romantic impulse to turn literary works or art into music,
and the formal solutions he finds usually have a musical form or forms as their
foundation, from early on folks have written papers on the subject, and the
“assayings”, too, are variations of that kind. The form that Noman’s Bay
takes, as a series of woven “assayings,” would be inconceivable the ones on Fatigue,
Jukebox, and The Day that Well,
which can also be regarded as preparations for the one year marathon. “Look,
Ma, no hands!” How do you become so form obsessed? So artful? Perhaps all it
takes is to be such a love-child, surrogate for the great absent love of
your life, and reverie on the beautiful breast of such a young woman!
The
weakest of the “assayings”, the one on Fatigue (it takes Handke a bit of
time to reach virtuoso mastery at each change of mode) is weak for not
accounting for other sources of fatigue (or its opposite, the energetic) than
of his own, easily done as that might have been, but of course provides deep
insights into the angry anaclytically depressed young genius. Prior, imaginatively cast, fictions such as Left-Handed
Woman or Moment of True Feeling are best approached I think with
Benjamin’s concept of “the completed work is the death mask of the experience”
although Moment induces some of the suicidal state of mind which the
writing overcomes, but the details are not necessarily that rich
autobiographically speaking, or as permissive of inference as the ”assayings.”
You are quite right in emphasizing the apparent autobiographical aspect in his
work, yet this in the course of my thinking has made me wonder whether such
thinking is not irrelevant chaff in evaluating and responding to the work.
Then you
noodle on about Handke’s interest in language, but noodling is about all you do.
You fail to note that the coming of Handke pretty much coincided with Chomsky’s
reiteration of certain ideas of Von Humboldt’s, and of McLuhan’s and of theater
turning into happenings.
Language
may indeed have been and continues to be a major pre-occupation, how can it but
not be for any writer, but Handke initially presented himself as the “new Kafka,
fear ridden, at a time that he wrote the fear-ridden Der Hausierer (1966)
which, however, is as noticeable for the reader’s ability to experience extreme
states of continuous fear as the author’s ability to expunge it by literary,
playful means, although even if Handke saw himself as surrogate it is most
unlikely that you will reach for Hausierer during an anxiety attack of
whatever duration instead of your meds. Certainly, he himself did not when he
started having panic attacks after his mother’s suicide and his severely
insulted and neglected wife split and Handke spat out the handful or sleeping
pills – no, he started to take valium and eventually wrote himself out of that
particular catastrophe and after a few more decades and marriage catastrophes
figured out a way of writing and having a wife in town instead of subjecting
her to the cold-blooded Salamander that he appears to be when at work on one of
his projects – and when isn’t he!
To have
the ability to conquer fear, and eventually put Kafka behind you, can sure make
you as sprightly conqueror as which Handke stepped out on the world stage.
Kafka as La vache que rit! Near
endless headlines “Handke lacht” and photos of a smiling Handke
For Goalie’s
Anxiety - the sliver of anxiety and paranoia that derived from the far
richer Hausierer - Handke investigated the linguistics of schizophrenia
and a real exposure to Goalie’s grammar will induce a similar state in
the reader (Handke’s innerwor[l]d outerworld Innerworld procedure at its
keenest), and here we are indeed in one of the mansions of the prison house of
language and what a master might be able to do with that prison’s machinery as
it then develops is one approach that I think is indeed useful in understanding
the power of his writing, and as he then did.
Handke
has also mentioned that he might have become a second Karl Kraus, and I think
we can all be thankful that instead he chose to simply write in an exemplary
manner and open up new possibilities for classical prose.
The
playful exploration of sado-masochism that is the play without words – that is,
the body language of - My Foot My Tutor (1967) is the first instance
where Handke induces S L O W N E S S, an ability that reaches its full
flowering in the 1986 The Repetition where the “king of slowness” he had
become writes a true “Sein und Zeit” that indeed brought me closer to pure
being – not that difficult of course if you live and shuffle through the dusty
paths of the chaparral of the idyllic St. Monicas.
Regarding
Handke’s Versuche, the term that Brecht, too, used for works in process, provisional, these
“assayings” indeed can be regarded as autobiographical accounts or particular
explorations invariably of locales that are turned into literary works of art,
but for the playful and more fantastical one on mushrooming. Handke has been
engaged in the project of self-memorialization and his venue in Chaville will
be a marvelous museum of and to “labora verimus.”
You feel
that solitude is a major theme of the late work. Someone who has such an excess
of pure nerves for each and every sense (or lack of buffers) I imagine is
destined to look for quiet places to not be besieged. Thus, he ought to have
put a sign on himself early on saying “do not disturb, nitroglycerine.”
For an
alleged Nabakovian I am surprised you fail to appreciate Handke’s Don Juan
(as told by himself), a gem that is similar to the “assayings” but as of
the Nth power in sheer artfulness, where women seek him out because they sense
his loneliness – that is then the problem of the man who secretes himself in
the loo, he gets lonely, and it appears that the once socially so inept Handke
then became famous for serving mushroom stew to his friends. People change! He
no longer just roams the forêt de la Chaville for mushrooms, these peaceful
beings as he calls them, as in Lucie in dem Wald mit den Dingsbums (you
notice the play of words on the Beatles song and intimations of possible hallucinogens),
an artificial fairy tale for his second daughter, Leocadie.
Claremont is said to
have as many trees as Ph.D.s Could you do us the favor of turning into a tree
so that all the dogs in Claremont will pee on you!? Or
maybe have a cultural revolutionary vaccaciones
with the tomatillo campesinos near
Colonet, just south of Ensenada!
(* FOREVER STORM links)
https://picasaweb.google.com/106505819654688893791/IMMERNOCHSTURMPHOTOSFOREVERSTORM
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-stormy.html
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/handke-immmer-noch-sturm-still-storm.html
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2012/07/an-extended-not-on-handkes-voyage-by.html
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2012/06/forever-storm-and-handke-win-2012.html
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/still-storm-introductory-thoughts-on.html
HANDKE
MAGAZINE RUBRICS
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Taking Refuge in the Loo
Leland de la Durantaye
•
Versuch über den Pilznarren: Eine
Geschichte für sich by Peter Handke
Suhrkamp, 217 pp, £14.70,
September 2013, ISBN 978 3 518 42383 7
•
Peter Handke im Gespräch, mit Hubert
Patterer und Stefan Winkler
Kleine
Zeitung, 120 pp, £15.36, November 2012,
ISBN 978 3 902819 14 7
Peter Handke began his career insulting
his audience, and it long seemed that he would end it with his audience
insulting him. In Insulting the Audience (1966), the play that brought
him fame at the age of 23, he called the audience ‘dirty Jews’, ‘Nazi pigs’ and
many things besides. Thirty years later, after he took up the cause of Serbian
independence, condemned Nato intervention in the former Yugoslavia, compared
the Serbs to Jews under the Third Reich, doubted the authenticity of reports of
massacres in Srebrenica and elsewhere, received various honours from the
Serbian government, and gave a eulogy before a crowd of 20,000 at Slobodan
Milosevic’s funeral, the vector of insult was mightily reversed. It seemed that
all the warmth and admiration that had fallen to Handke over the course of his
career had disappeared into thin air. Alain Finkielkraut called him an
‘ideological monster’. Salman Rushdie nominated him ‘International Moron of the
Year’ for 1999. Susan Sontag said that there were many many people who would
never pick up one of his books again. Presenting the matter in the starkest
possible terms, the human rights worker and novelist Jonathan Littell remarked
in 2008:
When a family is sitting in its house
in Foca and suddenly someone bursts in with a machine gun, chains up the
daughter to the radiator and rapes her in front of her family, this is no
laughing matter. Okay you might say, the world is like this. But you don’t have
to go up to these criminals and start shaking their hands. This is obscene and
yet it is precisely what Peter Handke has done … He might be a fantastic
artist, but as a human being he is my enemy. You have to keep things separate.
You can be immoral as long as you keep to art. But as soon as you leave it and
start talking politics, other rules apply. If you compare Handke with Céline, a
fascist who wrote anti-Semitic pamphlets, you will understand what I’m talking
about. Céline was a wonderful poet, and I can say today that I value him
greatly, because he’s dead. But had I lived in the 1930s, I would have tried to
kill him. Okay, Peter Handke is not killing anyone. But he’s an asshole.
Keeping things separate is harder with
a living writer, and yet another difficulty is introduced when the writer’s
work is as close to life as Handke’s is. The line separating fact from fiction
often disappears in his books. The blend of fact and fiction is confounding by
design, as it was with his fellow countryman, contemporary and sometimes rival,
Thomas Bernhard, and as it was with one of his finest critics, W.G. Sebald. In Essay
on the Jukebox, the second volume in the series Handke has recently
finished, he, or a narrator quite like him, tells of how, in writing, he moved
a cypress he’d seen in Cologne to Indianapolis, and a stable he’d visited from
Salzburg to Yugoslavia. But, he tells us, these changes from fact to fiction
were nothing in comparison to the shifting of ‘the whole place of writing’ into
the background of the book. Just as his early dramas – Insulting the
Audience is just one example –tried to pull down the curtain separating the
audience from the actors, his later experiments attempt to bring ‘the whole
place of writing’ into the story. None of Handke’s more than fifty works draws
this line between fact and fiction to greater effect than the Versuchen,
begun in 1989 and now just completed.
Handke’s five Versuchen present
a problem of translation. It stems from how exceptionally literal a writer he
is. His finest work, Wunschloses Unglück (1972), is an account of
his mother’s suicide. The German title is hard to translate but easy to explain.
It takes very literally an everyday expression, wunschlos glücklich,
which means to be so happy one wants for nothing, and then upends it. The
unhappiness is so profound and present-devouring that no room is left to want
or wish for anything (in Ralph Manheim’s translation it is rendered as A
Sorrow beyond Dreams). The translational trouble created by the cycle of
books Handke has just completed is less dramatic, but no less central. The
German term they all share, Versuch, means ‘experiment’ or ‘attempt’.
In this it resembles the term essai before Montaigne gave it a new
literary function. The problem with translating the first three volumes as Essay
on Tiredness, Essay on the Jukebox and Essay on the Successful Day,
as was done in 1994, is that it can give rise to misperceptions: the books are
in some very literal sense essays, but they aren’t what essays are expected to
be. They are fictions, but of a strange and intermittent sort.
Handke’s work of the 1960s had a
single, all-encompassing theme, one very much of its time: the coercive force
of language. Frank Kermode wrote of him in 1975: ‘language, as game or disease,
dominates the entire enterprise.’ At the outset of his best-known play, Kaspar,
Handke tells the reader ‘the play might also be called “Speech Torture”.’ The
figure of a young, solitary man of uncertain origin and means – a fictionalised
version of the historical Kaspar Hauser – clearly appealed to the young Handke.
His Kaspar has a problem (speechlessness) whose only solution is a still
greater one (speech).
The central theme of the early work has
since ceded to the two themes that dominate the final instalments in the Versuchen
series: solitude and form. Solitude is an easy enough theme to find in
Handke’s writing, form is not. Nietzsche wrote that ‘one is an artist by virtue
of experiencing what non-artists call “form” as content.’ This is literally
true of Handke: the search for form, both in literature and life, is the
explicit subject of a great many of his books. The five books in the series
present a stark contrast between how casual they seem in telling their stories,
and how precise they are in the construction of their sentences. Each tells at
least two stories – about fatigue, jukeboxes, happy days, still places,
mushroom hunting – and the story of the telling of the story. Some are written
in the first person; others introduce an unnamed ‘he’ around whom the story
revolves. All digress continually, and often enchantingly. Essay on
Jukeboxes really is about jukeboxes. The unnamed protagonist, a ‘he’ who
has much in common with Handke , pursues
his fascination with them largely in solitude. He says a lot about the history
of jukeboxes and where they were once found. He discusses the role of ‘juke
joints’ (although he calls them ‘juke points’) and the way artists such as
Louis Armstrong could be heard mostly on jukeboxes because radio stations in
many places wouldn’t play the music of a black man, no matter how gifted. But
there are many things in the Essay on Jukeboxes that don’t seem to have
anything to do with jukeboxes: ‘the curious role of hearsay in dreams’ (‘it is
neither said nor heard, it simply presses forward through the air’) and the
nightingale-filled ‘singing trees’ of the Spanish town of Soria. In Soria the
unnamed ‘he’ sees a strange light that seems ‘as though it were shining up from
the earth’. It’s arresting enough to make him want ‘immediately’ to ‘go off
somewhere and write and write and write – without a subject, or, as far as I’m
concerned, about something like a jukebox’.
The difficulties of translation don’t
end with the first word of the titles. The fourth book, published in 2012 and
coinciding with Handke’s 70th birthday, Versuch über den Stillen Ort,
‘Experiment on the Place of Stillness’, sounds reflective and removed, serious
and even spiritual. And so it is. But it’s about going to the bathroom, about
visiting what, in an antiquated euphemism, is sometimes called in German ‘the
place of stillness’. The narrator’s trips to the bathroom aren’t to use the
facilities, at least not in the habitual sense. The book is about a lifetime of
taking refuge in the loo as though it were an ever-present panic room where he
can wait out the storm of unhappiness, annoyance and anxiety that comes from
being with others. ‘Were my searches for those places of stillness,’ he asks,
‘in the course of my life, all over the world, so often without any special
need, perhaps an expression if not of a flight from society, at least of a
resistance to society, a social exhaustion?’ The question is not purely
rhetorical; there’s more to the story. He seeks shelter in the loo out of
insecurity and boredom, and to wait for his powers of speech to return. He
needs to regain the desire to speak. In Slow Homecoming (1979) the
protagonist, again sharing much with Handke, sees ‘a danger in his inner
muteness – as though he were an inert object whose sound had died away for ever
– and he longed to have back the suffering of speech’. The narrator of Versuch
über den Stillen Ort feels the same danger and longs for the same
suffering. He finds himself struck dumb by social pressure, social tedium, by
boredom and distraction, arrogance and insecurity. But in the stillness of the
bathroom something special can happen, and ‘the desire for speech’ can return.
In other words, it’s a private tale
about the need for privacy, about the forms this search for solitude has taken,
and about the forms seen in different places of stillness. And yet this very
private book has a public and political element. In the long list of bathrooms
recalled – in Handke’s childhood home in rural Carinthia, in Berlin, in Paris,
in Nara, Japan; one with a view of the Yukon river; one overlooking Central
Park – a nondescript Balkan loo which Handke photographed is given pride of
place. Studying the image, he recalls the spiders and flies and the straw broom
used as toilet brush, finding it ‘strange’ that it ‘didn’t bother me – on the
contrary’. A few pages later he will turn to pictures taken by others, one of
which contrasts with the themes of peace and solitude elsewhere in the book. It
shows ‘a young girl in a rented home in the city of Batajnica north-west of
Belgrade who, in the spring of 1999, during the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia’,
was killed by shrapnel. It’s the only story of death in the book. Handke has
said he wants to have done with people asking him about Serbia, but remarks of
this kind are hard to take seriously when he’s consistently sought to have the
last word on the matter. But this isn’t the last word. That’s reserved for the
final volume.
We have no reason to distinguish the
‘I’ of the bathroom book from Handke himself. But the last volume presents a
character who isn’t the speaker, a specialist in international criminal law who
defends individuals accused of human rights violations. Handke isn’t a lawyer
(though he studied law). But if we take this job description a bit less
literally, and recall Handke’s public defence of, say, Milosevic, then the role
of fact in the fiction changes. The book’s main concern, however, is mushrooms.
Or, more precisely, another literally untranslatable figure: the Pilznarr.
Pilz means ‘mushroom’ and narr means ‘fool’, and the term is hard to
translate because Handke wants us to take it literally: his lawyer goes mad in
his search for mushrooms. Like the earlier novel The Goalie’s Anxiety at the
Penalty Kick, the book is, among other things, a descent into madness.
Mushrooms become an all-estranging passion as wife, job and almost everything
else is abandoned in the search for them, or in the solitude the search
affords. Mushrooms can’t be cultivated. They are truly wild, and more than a
little mysterious, so there are no limits to their pursuit. The balance between
what Handke has called ‘introversion with its free, form-creating thought and
formless extroversion’ is lost, and what he has called ‘the great formlessness’
threatens to engulf the mushroom hunter. We follow him deeper into the forest,
and see a snake’s skin hanging from a winter branch, the remains of bunkers
deep in the forest, and ‘the serrated maple leaves that begin in a diving fall
before levelling to glide gently onto the ground’. He warms up by walking
through an area that’s unlikely to have any mushrooms to sharpen his vision. He
reflects on his passion and on passion in general; searching for the ‘foreign
form’ of the mushroom becomes an occasion for reflecting on the search for form
itself. We may know that a particular passion comes at a price, that it has
negative consequences for us or those around us, but it’s hard to say a passion
is all bad, or even bad at all. The mushroom hunter has ‘a feeling that was at
once also a certitude, that through such actions he was doing good to those
entrusted to him (including the accused he defends), he was doing his own good,
and doing good itself’. The sense that he’s doing not only the right thing for
himself, but the right thing in general, is part of the power of passionate
obsessions, and it’s rendered with rare conviction here. But his solitude isn’t
without the ghost of a desire for company. The mushroom hunter, like Beckett’s
Murphy, dreams of a social connection in the form of disconnection; he dreams
of a ‘society of the different – the fundamentally different’. What he finds is
something else.
In 1991, Sebald wrote that ‘the
particular storytelling genre which Handke created consisted in the completely
new linguistic and imaginative precision with which, in stories such as The
Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and A Sorrow beyond Dreams,
Handke reports and reflects on the silent catastrophes that ceaselessly follow
one another deep within us.’ Like Sebald, and like most Austrian and German
writers of his generation, Handke has uneasy feelings about his homeland. In
the first book of the series, he writes of not feeling part of a people, a Volk,
like the one he glimpsed as a child, on trips to Slovenia, ‘which I always in
later years wished for in my own country of Austria, and which I increasingly
missed’. In The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire (1980), he writes that
Austrian politicians, ‘like all artists engaged in politics’, appeared to him
when young as nothing more than ‘ham actors’; he listened to them, and his
‘only thought was of “failure to atone”’. In a later work Handke says of his
own child that she is ‘by birth and language a descendant of murderers who seem
condemned to flounder for all time, without aim or joy, metaphysically dead’.
In Essay on Tiredness he calls the Austrians ‘the first irretrievably
rotten, the first unbetterable … the first irreversible people in history’.
It’s not hard to see in his idealisation of the Serbs a longing stretching into
his unheimliche Heimat.
Handke has proudly
maintained his position on the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. After the
facts about the massacres in Srebrenica and elsewhere became clear, he kept
calling them the ‘so-called facts’. With a few exceptions (the comparison of
the Serbs to the Jews during the Holocaust), he wasn’t inclined to amend his
remarks because of new facts; they were made with professional precision, with
casuistic distinctions that were essential to him and meant little to his
detractors. For many, like Littell, the fundamental distinctions were the only
ones that mattered: you either speak at the funeral of a man you know to have
ordered the murder of innocents or you don’t.
