Extended Comments
&
One or Two I.E.D.s
on
Peter Handke’s
VOYAGE BY DUGOUT:
The Play about the Film about the War
====================
An attempt at a description of a text that, nearly 15 years after completion,
finally exists in American in Scott Abbott’s first rate translation,
and I say first rate since I looked it
over for Scott
and of my half dozen suggestions I am proud in
having succeeded in persuading
our “professor” to take the plunge
and call the wild woman
by her rightful American name:
“The Bear Skin Woman!”
And not “Peltchick”!
There in the deepest darkest Balkans!
Riding the heavy-duty oak or is it Beech
-wood dugout canoe
through
the foaming green mountain streams!
Down the Drina up the Sava! A bit of
rest in the Morava!
Flushed by the Danube
into the Black Sea!
======================
The conception for VOYAGE BY DUGOUT is more than ingenious: aesthetically
it could not be more honest or open:
Two directors,
a John Ford and a Bunuel type, have a
provisional screenplay acted out for them by a cast that itself consists of
local actors. Playfully they assume various roles:
chronicler, historian, mad woodsman, genuine madman, internationals who
themselves are militarists as well as journalists –
The “play” [and it certainly plays and plays around] concerns “a film”:
an international consortium has hired the two great directors to do the
ultimate 27th or 28th film about
“the war”, one previous film pops up, keeps popping up the way that calls for
mercy and help do from one catastrophic war to the other, featuring some kids,
a donkey, and wounded dog with a red cross bandage.
Just like Midsummer’s Night Dream.
However, the film, is also only incidentally about
Yugoslavia. The play, in as much as it is within the post WW II German
tradition of socially concerned epic and documentary theater
is also a model!
[Our two directors,
old leches since their days in the crib,
it goes without saying, instantly assent to the Bearskin Woman - as they cannot be said to do to many of the
other questionable critters that show up here.]
"The Cast" in its entirety - doublings and triplings of roles
and impersonations galore, masks and no masks, masks off and on –
JOHN O’HARA, American
film director
LUIS MACHADO, Spanish film director
AN ANNOUNCER [the stage manager as it were]
A TOURIST GUIDE
A WOODSMAN or VAGABOND/ FOREST MADMAN
A CHRONICLER or VILLAGE NEIGHBOR
AN HISTORIAN
A BEAUTY QUEEN or BEAR SKIN WOMAN
THREE INTERNATIONALS – as military enforcers as well
as journalists, alternately, on MOUNTAINBIKS (two men, one woman)
A PRISONER or CRAZY MAN
A MAN BLOWN IN WITH THE SNOW or A GREEK or AN
EX-JOURNALIST
A POET (from another film, with CHILDREN, DOG, and
DONKEY)
A PHILANTHROPIST (international, silent)
A PRESIDENT or WINNER (silhouette)
SEVERAL NATIVES and
INDETERMINATE CHARACTERS
presents the possible scenes for the film to the Two Directors:
One, an American, John O'Hara, appears to be modeled on what whiffs Handke has
got of the modus operandi and being of John Huston or John Ford.
Two, Machado, his Spanish counterpart, is modeled more closely on the author
himself and his own experiences directing in Spain, his surrogate Yugoslavia,
but also bears some resemblance to Bunuel [these resemblances are not entirely
insignificant; and "film director"
is of course a kind of iconic archetype - and they josh around, a bit
self-consciously as celebrities can. The
John Ford type wants to do the exteriors, the Bunuel type does the surrealistic
innerworld.
The directors help move the piece
along; that is, the presentation of what might be included in the film,
discussions of who might be its main character; occasionally comment
trenchantly on the art of presentation.
"O'HARA: That'll do. No commentaries. My films have no
commentaries.
MACHADO: And my films take nothing for
granted. "
The use of twin directors harks back to Handke's then most recent play Preparations
for Immortality for the purpose of playing with two sides of the same Juan coin, but at least on
my so far reading are not as diametrically opposed as they might be, nor need
to be in this instance...
A third director of sorts, a bit more pushy, The Announcer [a
stand-in-in for "the author" who has fled!], a kind of stage manager,
also moves the piece forward, and in fact has a kind of authorial control over
what is meant to be shown to the directors ["and now I am going to present the two historians."] but can also impersonate other characters, e.g. turns into one of the
locals who witnessed the war, presents the speech of a would-be president at
one point, and so, as in so many fortunate instances in the piece, is not
locked into a securely identifiable character-role…
How
usefully and artistically Handke exploits the economic need to double and
triple up roles is something playwrights might take note off.
Focusing just on how these three "Movers" weave the material
together, one notices that Handke's forte as a creator of flying carpets, he
our master weaver and cuckoo from Griffen, is very much intact, except for a
long stretch in Act II of what I regards as unstitchable cast iron…
Since Handke
writes his plays, being too rarely performed, also as Lese Dramen [dramas to be read,] some of the dissertation length
speeches are fine in filling in a reader,
but need to be condensed for performance. These do not to seem have daunted
Scott as you read in his comments.
However, in as much as they reference the disintegration of Yugoslavia they
need surrogate text if the play is to be used as a model in other such events.
As Abbott
notes in an introduction that he had to keep to a too-few 1000 words, DUGOUT
can be situated within the tradition of
Brecht’s epic theater – I would say most notably for being a model
that can be altered to adjust to events similar in their confusion and lack of
perspicuity as the disintegration of Yugoslavia was but to - pace Roger Cohen - those who designated
one tribe and the Big Bad Wolf of Progaravic as a culprit who personally set
fire to each homestead that burned there among the Benneton ads in the NY Times
Magazine! – But: The Sudan anyone? Is there an African in the house? Syria? Not
just Brecht, but Kipphardt, Peter Weiss, Guenter Grass and Hochhut’s work in
that tradition come to mind. Handke, of course, provides his very own twist, a
very vitalistic one.
In other
words, I find DUGOUT to be sufficiently elastic in conception to be adaptable.
All you need find is one major atrocity, and there invariably is, and the one
atrocity photo that invades the unconscious of the viewing masses. - Not only
adaptable do I find DUGOUT, but if performed in need of editing to be made
suitable for a performance – and not only because an English-speaking audience
can’t be expected to be intimately familiar with the history of Yugoslavia [no
need really, the references are fashioned in such a way as to be prehensible by
anyone with a whiff of knowledge of war, besides they aren’t familiar even with
their own history!] or the audiences ever more gnattish attention spans. –
Handke’s major plays have been what are called
“Lese Dramen,” since his personally richest and most powerfully poetic play,
the 1982 WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES [Ariadne Press], plays to be read – since
performance, as the author knows, will be at best far and inbetween and in most
case, but for the wordless 1992 HOUR WE KNEW OF EACH OTHER – never in ye old
U.S. of A. The last and most recent of
Handke’s major plays, FOREVER STORM, too, addresses history, the 2011 IMMER
NOCH STURM, which was presented as both play and novel on publication in 2010,
and premiered successfully in 2011 and - surpris surpris - became immediately
so well loved as to be succeeded by two further Inzenierungen. [1] Links to
considerable material about that play which Scott Abbott and I
assembled. [2- theatrical background]
I at least feel happy to report that I could not be happier by the way that the
author handles the introduction of the themes of the war, neighborliness, history… in feathering these [propeller! not
goose down fashion] the way the Two Directors, the Announcer, the Forest
Madman, The Chronicler and Historian toss the balls back and forth during the
first third of the play… even some of the longer speeches do not prove tiresome,
there, at any event not upon several readings…
cut no doubt though they, too, will need to be for
performances
in the dear old attention span of gnats U.S. of A.
Subsequent to the laying out of the mis-en-scene, the Tourist Guide has the first long
introductory speech that turns into a somewhat persiflage of the kind of borscht
about civilization that tourists might have their brain cells deadened with and
not just in the Balkans, which somehow or other includes the Serbians and
whoever else in the Greek City State Athens tradition via a grand extended
notion of the region, but which the Tourist Guide himself truncates with some
nice utterly cynical "Chinga su Madre" type remarks.
The Forest Madman – by far the most interesting
character and based on a famous German legal case of a Serbian who was tried
and convicted in Germany according to current! German military law for failing
to stop an atrocity in Yugoslavia [and at whose marriage in prison Handke was
best man! A stellar deed by a man who has done his share of dastardly ones!
More about him and “denial” anon] - now begins to intrude with some fairly
short comments, especially his "fuck the
neighbors refrain", making his
"primal sounds", the first notes as it were of what will become the
piece's most complex melody… but gradually turns into the piece's main
character, as the Two Directors discover him to be, becomes the most
multi-faceted because he has acquired - by accident more than design - more
historical brambles than any of the others: he appeared on International T.V.
as one bad guy among others [he's got touches of the paranoid/schizophrenic
Bloch the Goalie who resurfaced in W.A.T.V. as one of the three worker-clowns],
was arrested as the innocent by-stander, served five years in a German jail,
where he lost all sense of guilt, returns to live in the region, but instead of
being feted as a hero, is 86ed because he won't admit his guilt… is regarded as
mad… his only real relationship appears to be with the forest… at the end is
brow-beaten by "The Bearskin Woman" as one might to call "Die Fellfrau" in American [who doubles
as the "Beauty Queen]… and if one regards this telescoping of the Forest
Madman's qualities from a filmic perspective, this is not only some kind of yet
other genius notion, but potentially represents the "Mother Courage"
of the piece… though its kaleidoscopic layout of course has nothing of the sort
in mind…
And as “fate” would have it:
At about the time that Scott’s translation was finally published in
2012
Who would approach
And seek
to befriend me on facebook.
Why not? He seemed to be a Thechnik, someone who favors Yugoslavia’s
royal lineage
And a believer in the Serbian Orthodox church. What’s not to like? I
have far odder f.b. friends than that among old friends, schoolmates, scholars
–
Informing Scott of this
interesting new friend I then find out who he is, and I find it just a bit
spooky, but give Novo the links to a play where he now exists in English!
By the time of the appearance of the Three
Internationals on page 56 [German Edition], nearly
halfway through the play, a lot of matters have been put on display: the
Historian has despaired of history, half-comically so, the Beauty Queen has
appeared and The Directors feel that she deserves a bigger part than the script
envisioned for her; the Historian has sought to demolish the Chronicler's
heroic version of the origins of his tribe,
"Your first
king was a thief of swine, his opponent a horse thief. The horse-thief killed
the thief of swine and became king."
The
Chronicler has given a fine account of having been in the war himself, having
donned a mask,
"and I was
the one who took a mother and child and poured cement over them while they were
alive and stood the group as a memorial at the way cross. And someone whose
teeth I had just bashed in I showed to a group of International Observers with the remark that he was just
coming from picking strawberries."…
"Neighbors have turned into phantoms, the
most peaceful turned into murderers."
In short, we
have a fine mordant and earthy sense of the [a] war-time past… and the Forest Madman, too, has recounted part
of his crazy making story within the general to and fro.
The Internationals [who appear on mountain
bikes] do not know where they are any more, now that it is peace they recall
the land only from wartime, but they have their paranoid memories... The first
long speech by # 3, confesses that he never really knew where he was even then,
that he hated the damned land from the moment he set foot in it, could only get along with his translator
guide, but whom he had to import from outside since he couldn't trust the
native viewpoint; hates these people especially because they re-invented war "they are victims but not innocent ones", he hates them so much he wants to throw an atom bomb on all these
warriors and be done with them… which is why he doesn't really want to know
where he is… But after a couple of pages of this sort of thing their
self-immolating self-representations, for my taste, especially the
self-derisiveness with the alphabet acronym soup [KFOR type stuff], become so
excessively pointed as to be a caricature of the author's own hatred of them,
in speeches that present them to be mad hunters of war criminals, judges
with utterly closed
minds, self-righteous reporters… for The Internationals, too, transform
into or are interchangeable with representatives of the International News
Organizations…
Theatrically, this entire second act - News
folk + Internationals - within the three act play without pauses, is a remake
of a section from Handke's They Are
Dying Out. Extremely eery for me its translator to
find for one instance that a speech from
this 1973/4 text has been lifted rhythm for rhythm beat for beat with new but
not better wine in the vessel, and though I have some considerable admiration
for the "Johann Sebastian Handke" side of my man, the pulling of this
organ stop hints at something of a rush job or an act of vanity in thinking
that a particularly successful aria ought to be used twice, but perhaps Handke
with all the different melodies he sings has only one real attack aria in him,
it is used once more, in more modified form in the big mixed bag – some of his
greatest writing, some ugly lying, a lot of tour de force moments - of a 2008
novel MORAWIAN NIGHT.
Also, Handke has been feeding
off W.A.T.V. for nigh on 20 years now, in various plays, also in the fable No-Man’s-Bay,
and here too at moments… Handke "the pro" as his own cannibal! The
way the "Internationals" are then kissed off, too, is an exact
duplicate of how business tycoon Quitt punctures the businessmen. Handke's
hatred of the UN type forces and of reporters which exerted itself mutely
["dumpfe Wut"] through the two texts that he wrote upon his 1995/6
trips to Serbia, simply makes for some bad writing here, and what I consider a
hugely missed opportunity in driving the nail of the truth of the cannibalistic
self-reinforcing cultural industrial news cycle home. [Only in this instance,
see below, am I in some agreement with J.S. Marcus incredibly stupid take on
this play and on the rest of Handke in his notorious piece in the New York
Review [see my detailed decimation of
this idiot who hasn’t a poetic hair on his body at the handke-discussion blog
spot
The overly long "International" stretch cited just now also contains
some kind of tortured, basically incomprehensible account
of something like the Srebrenice massacre, on which Handke had a more accurate
take in Summer Sequel/ Reprise [Ein Sommerlicher Nachtrag 1994]
where it elicited a fearful wish not to be a Serbian [no matter that no one had
asked him to be! and that he was only half-Slovenian Austrian national and half
German with a German actual father and stepfather, [see # 3] whatever kind of
mongrel that is!]. Taken together
with the here perpetrated notion that "history" is a falsifier - in
the sense that a photo that elicits the memory of a German concentration camp,
ought not to be confused with something along those lines [a notion put into
the mouth of the International Historian and reiterated by a "total
madman" [who is merely a slightly more mad chap than the Forest Madman, a
"split-off part" of him] and of the The Greek Reporter] - the play, which I
think starts off as a comparatively even-handed attempt to entertain an
understanding of the Yugoslavian catastrophe,
turns into something too confusing to make heads or tails off for an
audience [although that may be the point!]
After all: in many ways a director could even
do the play from the point of view, suade the piece in the direction of the
INTERNATIONALS being right in their assessment, and that would be true to
Handke’s subsequently expressed opinion, in a Radio Interview with his daughter
Amina, that no matter what conviction an artist may have as citizen, as an
artist he must remain objective.
If one
approaches the play as a “model”, the atrocity would be made generic, for just
about any war has a major atrocity that develops out of the confusion and fury
of the action – and which is then argued about. Some are clear-cut, e.g. the My
Lai massacre as an act of utter frustration on the part of a troop that ought
not to have been there in the first place. Screbrenice appears to have been the
culmination of internecine warfare, taking a very drastic course, final
solution, final shock-treatment type course. Photos and news accounts have been
used for propaganda purposes at least since the U.S. Civil War, yet they never
appear to lose their effectiveness.
Just as the
story of the Forest Madman derives from Handke’s personal involvement, so does
the story of the photo of the concentration camp, a photo misused for
propaganda purposes, a dispute in which Handke’s friend Thomas Deichmann and
his magazine Novo became deeply involved, and ultimately won a British defamation
lawsuit. A more Brechtian cooler approach that used such an instance of misuse
in Brechtian fable fashion, would make I think a more effective drama.
A TOTAL MADMAN appears, he might as easily be the Forest Madman, who accuses the
Internationals of being the ones who set off the bombs, the poison in the bomb…
and that their images and voices on television have produced a monster child…
and goes into a kind of total denial reversal "the corpses from the massacre came from the mortuary… the national
library burnt of itself…" and claims to
have become a mass murderer because his
impulse to help was thwarted… “like mother's milk gone sour…” which is a very
interesting though odd idea indeed… and with considerable psychological truth
on its side [though it is he of course who needs the help which he claims to
have wanted to provide to others - not that there is any evidence to
corroborate the claim, at least in this instance; though someone here might
consider, examine the mechanism of frustration as being part of that equation.
However, the theme of the milk of human kindness going sour, or poisonous, is
one of the deepest themes coursing through the play, and on that score Handke
personally cannot be faulted.
The
Internationals claim that they own the language for
the war, and with the appearance of "The Greek" [a reporter who
hasn't toed the international party news line] there ensues a confrontation
about the manner of news-gathering and representation that is first rate and
makes up for some of the preceding: the Greek takes detours, recounts how he
hit on a village full of city refugees, who had nothing left but their outrage,
"the vanguard of the still and once
again unknown people - of an aboriginally hopeless but therefore that more
brightly continuing humanity that is walking its way through the night and
wastes of time." [ shades of similar sentiments from W.A.T.V. and
some of Handke's fine observations, say the way he sees passengers on buses in
No-Man’s-Bay]
The Greek Reporter:
You appear in the name
of goodness, yet you have never left behind the least goodness in this country.
Helpers? You’ve never helped yet. There is a kind of indifference more helpful
than your humanitarian gesticulating. Your right hand caresses some like Mother
Teresa while your left hand raises the sword of a criminal court against the
others. Puny devils of goodness. Humanitarian hyenas. Aloof and formal in the
face of suffering – you officious and public humanitarians. Mars corporations
masquerading as guardians of human rights. You claim to be humanitarian sheriffs
– and the humanitarian sheriffs in the westerns, isn’t it true, Mr. O’Hara,
were usually incompetent or secretly corrupt. They were the villains.
O’HARA: Aren’t those
prejudices, my son?
MACHADO: Let
him express his prejudices, John. Prejudices make good film plots.
GREEK: The war
has made the people from here bad, worse than they are. You carpetbaggers have
become bad with the war, like you really are. Deaf and blind – unfortunately,
not speechless, not speechless at all.
THIRD:
Medieval rhetoric.
GREEK: Those
who wield sentences as bludgeons have the power. In earlier despotic regimes,
that was the politicians. Now it is you. And while the small peoples here
fought for scraps of earth, you conquered the whole world. In word and image
the despotic lords over reality, you power rangers. Internationals?
Extraterrestrials. International court? Universal stingrays.
FIRST: You’re not imagining an
about face? We have to continue the way we began. We are now
prisoners of our initial opinion. We must continue more vigorously, more
shrilly, and above all in a monotone – monotone – monotone. That’s the way it
is. That’s the state of affairs. It’s true: We’re sick of what we do, so sick
of it. And we’re sick of each other. But what can we do? Should we suddenly say:
The other ones, the ones not from here, are also guilty? Guilty in a different
way? Impossible! That’s not the point. We must continue as we began,
in full voice and if necessary with empty hearts. That’s the way it is. That’s
the way it has to be. We are the language.
The First International [now transformed into the
"New York Review" reporter Mark Winner – George Packer! - Pulitzer
Prize], claiming to always have reported "both sides of the story"
talks quotes reads a piece which I imagine is meant to refer to the Srebrenice
massacre, in an interesting expressionist mish-mash of German and American… a
piece whose language resembles the kind of topsy-turvy of a massacre… There is
a further persiflage put into an I.T.'s mouth now claiming to be a reporter for
The New Yorker – Lawrence Wechsler- … but, as we say in Amurrican, by this time
these poor stooges are "over the top", they are like massacred paper
tigers… Brecht did it better in Arturo Ui the author will hate to hear! Yet a
mish-mash section there needs to be if the piece is used in model-like fashion.
Each of these accounts, the way news accounts appear and enter the mind,
becomes a mish mash there. The use of Packer and Wechsler texts here is one
other instance of a rush job as the deadline for the premiere approached. [4]
"The
Greek" confesses to his being filled with hatred "against known and
unknown. And since the hatred against a known quantity cannot be poured out, it
must be directed against unknown. And more and more is made unknown today
especially by means of the everyday revelation and information. And therefore
the hatred against unknown literally grinds away in us." [again shades of W.A.T.V.
not that that takes anything
away from the truth value of the observation of the prevailing world-wide
psychosis.]
THE
INTERNATIONALS thereupon have a nearly Brechtian little dance:
"You won't change it. That's the way it is.
That's the situation.
That's the way the world is. That's
the market. That's the price...
We are the market. We are the world.
We write history. And history
requires guilt, culprits,
retribution..." -- which gruesome chain the entire play, all of Handke's best endeavors
since W.A.T.V., have indicated the heartfelt wish to put a stop to…
A series of long speeches is given to The Greek, who basically
espouses views in words similar to those that Peter Handke has written over the past twenty years: "A mankind in a state of
whetted appetite to be a discoverer, not underway into the forced performance
called entitled 'history' but into [he stops a second'] -- inbetween
time..." He envisions "hopelessly quiet masses of people on the central plazas, who no
longer are intent on storming parliament”… and to the International Reporters he says: "For a decade now you've
been pissing your ready-made piss on the invariably same trees. All these
marvelous Dinarian woods are stinking to the high moon from your piss," truths of these observation being shared by
this commentator.
The newsmen are given ample space to reply,
but I will not try to summarize the to-and-fro but to say that the points
scored by both sides are lost in what strikes me as an overkill of verbiage, Geschwätzigkeit is the fine German word
for this, and most unusual logorrhea in the instance of our usually so laconic
author. And not state of the art in media analysis I might add.
The
play even manages to "work in" some typical Handke stuff about
"sacred rage" and puts it into the mouth of the I.T.s, as well as the
frequent charge against Handke, especially again then – around 1999 - that "he has flipped out" - and in
that fashion, I suppose, the play imagines that it inculcates itself against
such very charges, a variation on the tactic of tactical concession, but taken
well before entering the malaria infested territory of public discourse...
The IT.'s claim that they have nothing but good intentions is met by The
Greek's response: "There is an indifference that is more helpful than your blabbering
about being humane, as the right hand pets some of us like Mother Teresa, and
the left hand swings the sword of the tribunal against others. Little devils of
goodness. Humanity hyenas. There is no one
less open to suffering than you official humanitarians. Mars bodies that
appear as the protectors of human rights… The people here have become as evil
as they are not. And the war has made you tourists as evil as you are. [the verbal casting
resembles W.A.T.V.'s "the brown pistol holder is not but the blue sky
is."]
The Greek calls for an absence of
all reporting, of all media intrusion.. for a ten year period… but how would
Handke stand not being in the news for
that long? Not being photographed?
The upshot is that the I.T.s resolve that their view cannot be changed, they are unalterably locked
into their language, and that they are the language. And the bitter truth of
that can be seen in all the U.S. wars since and current preparations for more
of the same.
There is a nice moment, after the directors have inquired of The Greek what it might be that he sees beyond the apparently self-evident, and
he replies "The wind," and laughs and all the others laugh, too. And then the Greek has one
last speech in which he attacks the notion that photos speak in the sense that
the photos of Yugoslav camps, by being
reminiscent of German concentration camps, spoke falsely, or only seemed to
speak. [a notion to similar effect was broached by The Historian already early
on in the play and we have reached the nub of the rub of atrocities, and guilt,
and historical memories which
Handke, in the instance of Serbia
has had such a hard time stomaching, -
and which I comment on at greater length in some of my footnotes. [3]
By page 100, after approximately 40
pages devoted to the I.T.'s in their various guises, much of it in a shrill
tone, and much unGoethlike derisiveness, that already seeped into the
interchanges between The Historian and The Chronicler in the first 60 pages,
after a nice side-stepping transition, we come to the section devoted to the Forest
Madman and the Beauty Queen/Bearskin Woman during which the F.M. and B.M.
rediscover love and the simple things in life, in part a la the kind of lovely simple
interchanges, indirect discourse, that we find at the end of W.A.T.V.
The F.M. recounts his prison days in
Germany and how he lost his sense of guilt. "Peace, peace here means: the heart is
bleeding." And turns into a kind of complete mourner and only seeks the great
pure life of mourning; and recounts his life in the forest, rhapsodizes about
the taste of raspberries, and then
=B=
I made my first notes for DUGOUT in
1999, to get a grasp of the play, also so as to try to persuade a director in
Seattle to work on it.
Fat chance, here in Seattle,
the guy, Richard White at Corning
was too busy giving away arts money! Money
that never produces sees that sprout further than King County.
Corning had a fine venue to mount what
in Handke’s play is set in a war-damaged once resort hotel, entitled Acapulco.
“Hotel California,” though, would not
do as the accompanying music for
Handke’s most ascerbic play. The one
stringed ancient Balkan string instrument an the mouth organ are it.
Lucky me, I would have had another
translation on the six month belt and be even poorer but for that experience.
I’ve sent Scott’s translation to a lot of theater folks, no takers so far. And
even if my translation had been as good as Scott’s P.A.J. would not have
published it, for they welched on a signed contract for W.A.T.V. in the
mid-80s, an act with a lot of consequences which Handke knows all about.
Sometimes, after you work your way
through the town of Truth and Consequences up the Rio Grande, there comes
Elephant Butte with Rudolf Guiliani doing the cheering as…
[4]
In some stretches – now that I have reread
the play and in translation one more time, you sense Handke’s amok anger
throbbing through,
as it does, I think, most powerfully and
successfully in the great “Apache” section of the, forthcoming in English in
2013 novel, “Moravian Night”
[although there is also the somewhat
minor formalist piece Subday Blues where Road Rage is incrementally
sliced ever finer…]
a bus-driver listening to that song on
the way to the Kosovo
with a load of Serbians to visit a
grave site.
=C=
The
scaffolding is brilliantly set; as it is also physically in the huge foyer of a
ruined hotel ACAPULCO which itself is situated in a valley inside deepest
darkest SERBIA; a somewhat surrealistic fairy tale setting which, not so
incidentally, develops out of and within the dramatic & visual vocabulary
that Handke began to stake out starting in 1981 with WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES,
elaborated in the receding horizon line of The Art of Asking, brought
into intense whirling focus on the plaza of the 1992 HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF
EACH OTHER [the belatedly completed Summa
of all his early work], and elaborated
yet further in his next to last play, PREPARATIONS FOR IMMORTALITY, but which
achievement the l’il old u.s. of a. here has taken little note of, so-called
“contemporary theaters” and all, family fun and fare. Nor Richard Schechner’s
TDR any longer. The very conception -
two major directors - the grand hotel - are, characteristically strong Handke
strokes.
The play-space Handke has created
for himself [and us] in these works for the stage [and in a different fashion
in his prose work, a matter I won't go
into since I have done so at length in
pieces in the novels at the various Handke sites] allows for the existence of
"another world", for that hovering just a touch above the floor, it
is a space that allows for the freedom of serious matters to be gently [or less
so in this instance] entertained by the mind and heart - for the main actors to represent, externalize
themselves through spoken texts - not act out through naturalistic mimicry, or
present in other versions of what is known as epic theater, "action"
is always "offstage," in the imagination, something referred to, no
blood is spilled on Handke’s stage, the only thing that is real in Handke’s “as
if world,” is the playing, which thus becomes as it were far realer than any
naturalism ever can. In that Handke has remained true to himself since his
beginnings.
In the instance of Dugout,
the presentation and discussion of possible scenes from a prospectus allows for
some real efficiency, juggling, etc. and I recall becoming aware of Handke’s
collage method about 20 years ago when I analyzed the screenplay for Wings
of Desire. Compared to some of Handke's other 80s through 90s plays [whose
formal completion, rounding out, overwhelms, consummates their collage quality]
D.C.'s handling of the collage method allows for a lot of breathing room - at
times. This is my feeling: but translating and directing Handke's work can make
for some amazing discoveries
=D=
Dugout’s supposedly ten years
after the fact [then, at its
premiere in 1999, this “after the fact” would have made for a look back from
the perspective of the year 2009] is Handke’s
plus quam perfect procedure as we also start finding it in his novels as of the
1992 NO MAN’S BAY, to the 2007 MORAWIAN NIGHT, more or less “fairy tales”,
meant to hover in indefinite futures, so as to relieve the writer as he is
writing and us of too perfect-glue adhesion to the naturalistic. The “as if” made into a real experienceable as if
is the fine ambiguous line, the Zwischenraum/
Inbetween Space on which Handke continues to work as a formalist composer,
as he has since the start, and since, be it novel or play, the work imposes its
own time and presence upon being
experienced, Handke’s pretense that the matter be set in the future, I find to
be a tic, a tic that puzzles, a fly that buzzes and that I shoo away. Here we
experience a provisional screenplay enacted to two directors, certainly a most
ingenious idea if you wish to reach provisional judgment, hold judgment in
abeyance, as certainly is Handke’s wish, leave matters open for discussion in
the moral forum of the theater.
With that as your
basic concept, the table has been cleared, it is up to the playwright what
matters he wants to address. I myself would have addressed geo-political
monstrosities of all kinds, the two-faced manner in which Richard Holbrooke/
Galbraith proceeded, the U.S. arming of the worst S.O.B. of the lot, the “wrong
man at the wrong time at the wrong place” as Franco Tjudman of Croatia is
known, the sending of Mujahedim to help out Izetbegovich, the ravages wrought
by economic warfare – in other words, matters that address the question of
underlying causes why a series of tribes, sometimes intimately related, fell
upon each other – neighbor upon neighbor - to the extent that this must have
been a terror that does not leave these people’s bones for generations – and I
say this because in my fifteen years in Seattle I have run into about half a
dozen survivors, and it must be because I am as European as I am American that
I spot them on the bus, and try to talk to them. One even “lived”, that is
holed up for several years, in the prairie preserve near where I live, big-boned
ox of a fellow, I wake with the birds and so did he, carrying his bedroll to
the same coffee shop, just to wash up, couldn’t buy him a cup of coffee, where
are you from? “From here, Seattle” in the heaviest Slavic brogue! To see such
powerful big men frightened to death years after the event – at least I have
not seen it anywhere else. Perhaps it was that neighbors suddenly slaughtering
neighbors that did it, and Handke is great on the atavistic!
Handke, as compared
to my infinite interest in the monstrosities that the geological monsters can
perpetrate, takes a far more intimate and personal tack, and focuses, as he did
in his Justice for Serbia on the
role of the media and language.
And on the fate of one
particular fellow.
=E=
Par
ejamplo, "The Historian and The Chronicler" laying out their
different tacks on the matter at hand:
HISTORIAN: Yes, isn't that what
you wanted: to be by yourselves, each one for himself, as you are now, alone
with your plum tree whose crown has been blown off, your pig and lamb walking
on three legs, and the neighbor's rusty tractor now yours.
FOREST MADMAN: If you say "neighbor" one more time, I'll cut
your throat.
CHRONICLER: All this business about living together peacefully for
centuries on end was only invented by some of the warlords here, meant for the
tourists from the foreign capitals, a sales pitch for the politics of war.
Harmony between this guy and that guy over there? An idea grabbed out of thin
air, built on sand.
HISTORIAN: Why not build on sand? Can't such a construction sometimes
stand more firmly than any other? And why not grab the idea of belonging to
each other out of the air? Where else do you grab it from but from there.
CHRONICLER: And a historian says that? A scholar?
ANNOUNCER: [leafing around his grab-bag of notes]: At this point the
author is already hinting at the future statesman and visionary…
...anyhow into a more multifaceted,
poetic philosophical realm, fastened down to the very earthy though it is, too,
on occasion with very hands-on peasant
language, than the author's own public engagement in matters Yugoslavian might
make one expect; that is, the play is a delightful, mordantly funny,
extraordinarily graceful, juggling act… for long stretches anyway.
According to Handke’s and the play’s suggestion
"Ungleichzeitgemässigkeit" [a disjunction in contemporaneities] represents one of the
determinants for the occurrence of the war [Jürgen
Habermas might jabber about "second world".] and neighbors became
strangers to each other even before the onset of the carnage.
These differences in development [or,
if you like, perversion] make for the kind of surrealism that is one of the
delights in the play:
E.g. forest people confront
"Internationals" on mountain bikes; "natural" people go
mad, so that at the play's more poetic moments we have the impression we might
go off into a world of The Tempest; and a feeling that has been growing
in me, that the time for verse in serious drama is again upon us, is only
reinforced at this and many other moments, but I find only one contemporary
German playwright engaging in it successfully, not Handke so far.
The war in this piece is meant to be receding into the kind of fabled past that
all such wars have had no choice but to while they are very keenly still with
us, as they are in this piece. Dugout plays on that edge I would say...
threshold if you like... between forgetting and keen awareness: after all, it's
is the 29th film for which this screenplay has been prepared of which they are
doing a run-through… and in one of its fine mordant comic relief scenes, there
appear the stars from the previous internationally acclaimed
"masterwork": A POET with CHILDREN, a Dog and a Donkey, like some
Faulknerian / Shakespearean comic relief character; the dog has a bloody wrap
around its wounded belly, or is it the children, they are a team that raises
funds for UNRA, he's the poster child and the poster dog and donkey in person
as it were… some characters only appear "dimly": as seen as
silhouettes through semi-opaque windows… the silhouette play is creeping into
the artistic proceedings… if my grand idiot savant isn't always state of the
art! He also adds stage directions calling for SOFT FOCUS! I would say that
within a few pages we are also in some respects in a kind of madhouse of the
Vienna woods, visually all this is spectacular.
=F=
D.C. is prefaced by three significant quotes:
1] from Ivo Andric, who ponderously
addresses what we call the wages of self-righteousness, the fact that a wounded
judge can be especially vicious [a notion that the play's author in his own
controversial public statements might well have heeded!], the potential
Robespierre in so many... and one that could not be more true,
intra-psychically! The archaic super-ego. The question of "justice"
pervades the play. "I want to go to justice" is a Walk About the
Villages quote [as is "Everyone is in the right."] the former of
which, however, cannot be said to address the fact [or the series of facts] of the rational
irreconcilability of ethnic, religious and rurally rooted land ownership,
identity demands and demands for vengeance, in a landscape whose economic basis
is disappearing under their feet… or the by and large question of a vacuum that
arose in Yugoslavia/ [FILL IN THE BLANK] when the ‘center would not hold’ for a
host of reasons, though the play does bring to the fore the question of how
neighbors from one day to the other can become murderous, looting enemies
during the implosion… to which in this country our periodic riots during
"exceptional situations" provide the same kind of incendiary answers…
more on justice anon.
2] A Goethe quote that indicates what kind of piece we may expect:
"Poetischer Vortrag", where Vortrag
ought not to be translated as "lecture" as much as "presentation,"
a poetic showing, not entirely devoid of the didactic... but, here
surrealistically Volksstückhaft [rooted in the Austrian tradition of popular rural plays], mordant, highly theatrical presentation,
illustration… Goethe with a Viennese, graceful Horvarthian touch… a fine
prospect… and which in the proper kind of forum might actually make for a fine
post-play discussion.
One way of getting a purchase on the play, of situating it, might be to think
of how some other 20th century German playwrights have approached similar
subjects. Certainly Dugout does not entirely lack all qualities of Peter
Weiss' Oratorio The Investigation, a Heinar Kipphardt probably would
approach the same material much along the lines of a docu-drama a la The
Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer; a Hochhut with his penchant for focusing on
leaders might have an interesting time with that approach: Clinton - Handke of
all people called him a “Schmutzfink” - at the time of the Kosovo war,
Milosevic, Holbrooke, Galbraith, Margaret Albright suddenly remembering her
Jewish ancestry as Frau Koerbel and trying to use it as an extenuating
circumstance, Isobetgevic, Tjudmann locked-up in a fore-room to hell? Hochhut
would most likely condemn each and every one of them, including the leader of
the Kosovo Albanians to the gallows. Günter Grass’ The Plebeians Rehearse
the Uprising comes closest to Handke’s way of proceeding rehearsal like.
Heiner Mueller [or Brecht] would no doubt bring qualities just as biting to the
subject as Handke, but would have had their own poetic takes on this material,
the Brecht of the Post-WW-II Ensemble would have constructed, delineated,
worked out with his collaborators a fine fable for the story of the hapless
victim of new German military justice visited on an innocent by-stander who
failed to intervene; which no doubt would have been very different from Handke
since they would not have enjoyed, if that is the word, the same close and
madly intimate and contentious affiliation to the former Yugoslavia as has Handke,
who with his kind of Goethean Vortrag,
though not exactly trying to take some idiot Olympian perspective, succeeds in
trying to dis-engage himself a little from the kind of attack-dog close-quarter
infighting wounded love-child fit he so very publically threw as his beloved “9th
Land,” the imaginary land of peace, started to disintegrate – in Dugout
those familiar with the public controversy will note that Handke, sober pencil
in hand, is grimly skeptical of the two different united Yugoslavia’s viability
that existed during two stretches of the 20th century, and actually
also decimates someone who engages as he himself did. However, some matters do
get a lot more personal. After the premiere Handke had his daughter Amina
interview him on Austrian T.V., affording him the opportunity to insist on the
play’s objectivity – I imagine as compared to some of his own views; and I
would say that that is the case, the play cannot be tied to some of his public
comments or, but emotionally, even to his series of travelogue and other
writing on the subject, except perhaps in the one instance of conflating texts
by George Packer of the NYRB and Larwence Wechsler for the otherwise superb
section of journalistic mishmash that all the war reportages then amount to. There
are better examples than to use the work of educatable intelligent journalists
for that purpose. And this is the only instance where I share the otherwise
abomination of a review the play received from J.L. Marcus in the NYRB with its
knives out for anyone who failed to blame the Serbs. How fundamentally stupid
and literal-minded this no doubt the lowest Marcus in that family of enviable
intellectuals shows himself to be is when he berates Handke and the play for
the Bearskin Woman’s line “what war?” – as though Handke were denying it! - [the
query in its context means: it will be forgotten once we ride the DUGOUT CANOE
again, as all such wars eventually subside in memory – who, after all, in
Europe still has the 30 and 100 and Napoleonic wars ever-present in their minds
but their historians? Certainly not in the manner in which WW II is ever
present to Handke or me, or the Yugoslav disintegration for him. From one
generation of war babies to another as it were!.- Yes how abominable stupid can you get – well
if it is the case of flaunting Wilsonian moral superiority it appears to a very
deep degree.
3] As per the third quote "Da selo sa selom pase" [a village wants to
graze with another] from King Dusan's Codicils # 72,[???!!!*] indicates the
devoutly to be wished for trotting peacefully alongside of each other of the
occasionally vicious dogs, and for which idea the play towards the end has as
its metaphor that DUGOUT CANOE that however can unfold like the petals of a
flower, or anyhow unfold into several umbrella parts… with the assistance of an
absolutely Baroque Deus ex Machina, and is a transposition of a steadfast peace
angel magic notion of Handke's throughout the works of the past 20 years, and
for which he has found a variety of representation throughout this period…
especially in the plays; the author who has three near epileptic fits a day,
and prays so much for peace since he knows of his own propensity for violence.
[* so it is claimed - whereas this might as easily be some kind Handkean joke, a
la the Oracle of Dordona’s "stay in the picture" that prefaces Hour,
where Handke is quoting from his own W.A.T.V.! and acknowledging his own
competitiveness for the lime light, if you see a green apparition in the night
sky, that would be him!];
…but lacks a possible 4th quote, say from Freud's Why War, or one of
Freud’s other communications to Einstein, explaining why human beings can so
enjoy killing each other; or some 5th about what mad dogs human beings can turn
into during the course of hundreds of years of being fucked over and fucking
each other over in a balkanized world… Peter Brook's "The Icky Icks"
comes to mind! and then stake their wishes on notions of ethnic togetherness.
The Bearskin
Woman gets her sequence, during which The Announcer
informs The Directors that according to the script her ignorance, in this case
of the war of which she has no recollection, gives her a certain
strength, and strongly,
dictatorially if you like, with lots of hefty and funny new cuss words for those
who don't see things her way, she tells the tale of our title object the Dugout,
it preceded the Romans, occasionally is buried but resurfaces, and I imagine is
meant to represent the spirit of the Balkans the way it courses everywhere
through brook and dale… Where is it to be found: "At the threshold between sleeping and waking.
In the deepest dark. In the middle of winter..."
"Semi-sleep therapy; semi-sleep
spas as the future of the country?" asks The Announcer.
"But isn't everyone alone in a state of semi-sleep?"
Bearskin: "No, you ignoramus: at this edge there still exists a We
as nowhere else anymore." She directs everyone, since the D.C. barely holds one person, to form a
kind of super Dugout., which they do, a flag
or feather is put in front, the concretized mirage takes off, and a kind of United Nations flagship - our
author's Deus ex Machina - descends from the ceiling as the sonorous sound from
the Art of Asking or the Journey to the Sonorous Land begins to fill the
room.
While descending the machine opens
multicolored steel fingers that interject between the bodies that have formed
the huge Dugout, and pushes them gently apart. A literal illustration of the
author's wish for both separation
and individuation without the chain
of retribution, as ordered by our Lord
Peter Handke out of a the theatrical heavens! The machine ascends. Film light
is cut, leaving behind the Two Directors and The Announcer.
The Two Directors don't know what to make of what they've been
shown, call for a translator, new simultaneous translators, the opposite of the
inquisition, translators as pure understanding, and decide not to make the
film. O'HARA feels that he knows as little as he did at the beginning, but the
chief reason he doesn't want to make the film is because it is still to early
to make the film, or what they've been shown requires a different rhythm. Too
much pain. He doesn't like tragedies. And MACHADO doesn't want to make it
because, as a director of social works, he finds that there is no society left
here, and echoes some of the author's [then] recent statements in that there is
enough guilt to go around for everyone, guilty ones sitting in judgment of
other guilty ones, things have become too thuggish for him. [Directing the play
in the United States I would here use a
photo of that stupendously tongue-died moron our "National Security
Advisor" Berger – 1990]. As a matter of fact, he won't make any more films
at all. The world is too mad for him.
"But not mad as in antiquity
or in a Shakespearean sense," says O'HARA and inveighs
against the three great demythifications, disenchantments that lack counter
enchantments: that an individual's life-time counts as nothing as measured
against eternal time; the
second, that the planet Earth is lost in space,; and now the third, that we
humans are entirely the wrong ones for each other, that man is every man's
wolf... the dragon's seed of history has sprouted… it is the time after the
last days' of humankind…
I apologize for the length of these notes. It is my feeling that despite their
length they convey too little of the complexity and of what is really
interesting in the play.
MICHAEL ROLOFF, AUGUST 1999, SEATTLE [revised December 2009, July 2012
“Still Seattle.”]
FOOTNOTES:
1] It
ought to be noted that D.C. was written before the onset of the 1999 carnage in
Kosovo and the massive “vacation trips” that the Kosovars and also many
Metanoya Serbians, especially the children, will be able to look back upon one
of these days as the most interesting and adventurous memories of their lives,
as proving to them once again the uncertainties and insecurities that are part
and parcel of existence; but, subsequent to Handke's several texts
on matters Yugoslavian,
which involved him in serious intellectual controversies in Europe, and
to which his most complex response to date actually is Dugout. [Subsequently
Handke wrote several other text that pertain to Yugoslavia, Unter Traenen
Fragend – 2001] Rund um das Tribunal [2004], Die Tablas des
Damiel, and the extraordinarily fine piece of intimate reporting on the
Serbian village enclave in Kosovo The Cuckooks of Velica Hoca [see http://www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com
And http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/
for a long piece with quotes] and of course got himself into his kind of
picture pickle by appearing at the Milosevic funeral – the wages of being an exhibitionist,
now that’s “staying in the picture!” kid is all I can say to that.
I myself, initially, when I
became of Handke’s take opposite to most of the media’s on the dissolution of
Yugoslavia, took a waiting position. First of all, I found his exhibitionism
suspect, as I had since his appearance at Princeton in 1966, but I had
insufficient information to make any judgement. Equally suspect was the instant
unanimity in blaming the Serbians. See my pieces and a summary one in German on
all this at the
I’m still furious at him for taking at least a year out of my life in
trying to unravel all that. Yet, ultimately, I agree that it is a matter to be
proud of, as Handke cannot be said to be of quite a few matters aside his work.
The play received its Austrian
premiere at the Burg Theater under the direction of Klaus Peymann about the
time of the end of the Kosovo war, best as I've been able to ascertain with
great deference to the text [whatever that might mean, but apparently lacking
any cuts] at which point wife # 2, who had been taken along on the first famous
trek that resulted in Voyage to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia – 1994,
and who noted as Handke notes in Justice his propensity for denial, had
split with one of the actors, the second wife to leave our salamander cold
lay-a-broad, but not such a bad deal since Handke already had for a main
squeeze a Serbian girl; but Handke himself, by the premiere of the play, since
he fervently opposed the actions of NATO, had become something of a
battleground and very public one person performance act himself.
Whether the author will want to rewrite the play in light of a far more violent confrontation and its by no
means obvious consequences is something I have no knowledge of, but would
doubt, since I think the NATO actions only reinforced his feelings and views of
these
matters, as in that respect that it did mine.
What German reviews I have seen
provide little idea of the play, many simply dismiss it entirely in terms of
their aversion to the author's political
engagement, some allow that it provides a more complicated view of the matter
than their blindness can find in the other texts.
When I read these reviews I am
then not all that unhappy to be in Seattle with its cast of drudges who would at least take the trouble to try to
describe what they had seen, and exercise a civility which at other times can
be such a huge amorphous and phlegmatic drag.
2]
These
speeches by the "Internationals" and "Media" are meant to
be ironically self-immolating I suppose, but come across as shallow
[comparatively speaking so especially] a few touches of that sort of thing will
do, especially to a world audience that is not entirely unsavvy about its being
propagandized. And having delved at great length into Handke's Slavic
Connection and into his various text pertaining to the Yugoslav war, and
followed the current controversy, I know whereof I speak when I describe
Handke's public attacks on the media as
those of a madly sputtering livid attack dog. Usually, pencil in hand, Handke
calms down sufficiently so as to differentiate
and lighten up; here, for my taste, during one long stretch,
insufficiently so, and all I care about here is the play.
But I also think it is
unfair to dragoon friends and directors into one's own obsessed need at
denial... Anyhow, the fact that there at the very least are/were a lot of
murderous Serbs around appears to be
totally unacceptable to a nerve
in Mr. Handke. It gives him conniptions. As though if that were the case the
entire house of cards, his identity would disintegrate. Also the entire play's
drift to eliminate all feelings of guilt! A part of me empathizes with
him, I am reminded of the moments in A
Child's Story when some women
friends have talked to him about his relationship to his daughter using
therapeutic terms, and he calls their words "dog language." A similar kind of resistance, refusal at
acknowledgment is at work here [or a lot of other instances I could cite].
Whereas A.C.S. however, is an extraordinarily honest account, of a
relationship, the willful distortion of history here, no matter that The
Chronicler, in his role as "a
native" tells of being a participant in the killings, does damage to the play. Although this state of affairs
could not be more interesting psychologically, the point at which it begins to
intrude into the play, exert itself on
the text, the lovely scheme of the Vortrag,
[poetic presentation] at least for my taste, becomes a little too skewed, not
that I am someone who longs for our Gray Lady the N.Y. Times "Some Good
Some Bad" attitude to life, not that that even-handed attitude can be said
to have prevailed either among the majority of its by and large ignorant [or, worse, de-ethnizising]
reporters or even more ignorant editorial writers. About all of which I am
carrying on at too great a length
myself. The beginning of D.C.. in its even-handedness is like the even-handed
beginning of the Justice for Serbia, which then disappears as Handke is
enraged by the media and UNFOR or whatever these Martians are called.
main discussion page
SAMMLUNG BEIHNAHE ALLER REZENSIONEN/ REVIEWS
SAMMLUNG VON PHOTOS DER URAUFFUEHRUNG
BEI DEN SALZBURGER FESTSPIELEN.
[2- Theatrical Background]
Handke said recently, somewhat ruefully, that he wished his plays might
be done more in the “boulevard” style [now that he’s becoming a frigging
Austrian national treasure who may have a postage stamp during his life time].
However, if anyone has written the ultimate inversion of a “boulevard” piece it
would be Handke with The Ride Across Lake Constance and Hour
which also always “plays” so well everywhere, also as dance theater, because,
after all, it lacks all those words that people are so sick of hearing. They
Are Dying Out [1973] is a boulevard piece too, and continues the verbal
gymnastics as leftist jargon put into the mouths of young business folk; it has
some great stretches, but ultimately is top heavy, or badly weighted what with
the monopolist who puts his big self into play and beats them all, and then can
only beat his head to smithereens on the rock of nothingness.
Occasionally
- after WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, the greatest and richest work that Handke has
written and off which he continues to feed even in his 2007 novel MORAVIAN
NIGHT - Handke’s formalist drum runs dry [e.g. in stretches of Preparations
for Immortality] and he sounds like Philip Glass. Not so in Dugout.
And it is one of the great shames, one of the many major crimes committed
through omission and utter cowardice that no one in all of the huge u.s. of a.
has done his most important play that also plays, THE ART OF ASKING - VILLAGES
after all is done better as a recital, the way Elliot’s plays were done at one
time. ART OF ASKING became embroiled, in France, at the Comedie Francaise, in
Handke’s attendance at the funeral of the big bad wolf of Prograrevic.
Scott also
notes the precedent of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise for this kind of play,
and for all that someone who read Brecht and Lukacs instead of attending
Professor Allewyn’s class in 1957 at the FU, the tradition of socially
concerned plays that require communal attendance extends as far back as the
German Baroque. As the aforementioned writers all added their own twist to
socially relevant political drama, Handke adds his own: and it is a playful
hybrid between docu-drama and the poetic.
- It is that coarse canoe dugout of a Serbian oak and coursing down a
mountain stream with foaming green water! If you survive the course, the Bear
Skin Woman awaits and succors you!
Initially, at
the time of the 60’s Sprechstücke
Handke disavowed Brecht, eventually conceding that he had learned from him. We
note Handke’s understanding of power, master slave relationships, as early as
his first play without words, MY FOOT MY TUTOR, not that you need Brecht for
that. The relationship between factotum Hans and Monopolist Quitt in 1973/4
THEY ARE DYING OUT bears considerable resemblance to that between Big Time
Farmer Puntila and his servant Matti - but, it is not for matters of that kind
that there exists a relationship between Brecht’s and Handke’s theater: Handke,
after all, with THE RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE and THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF
EACH OTHER manages to complete Brecht’s project of non-Aristotelian drama and
cleans out our clocks, without the catharsis involved in blood and guts and awe
[only for the author’s genius!]; and you see afresh and feel all cleaned out. –
Perhaps going to see some Disney
monstrosity does the same trick to the nervous system in need of discharge. The
neurologists will tell us one day soon. The Oedipus dramas after all can
be regarded as the initiation of western science of psychology. Shakespeare
certainly is one other. However, Handke with the procedures employed in the two
cited plays – LAKE CONSTANCE, HOUR - is working within/on the threshold between
enchantment and enlightenment, perhaps {?} the most profound of this threshholder’s,
this Zwitter’s thresholds??? [“I live
entirely from my Thresholds” is the translated title of a book length interview
that Handke held in the late 80s with Herbert Gantscher]. DUGOUT has
this sort of clock-cleaning thing going on far more incidentally, in the
background, revolving, and it has some real clots, too. With its collage and
scenic shift procedures, at the opening there is a revenant of Heinrich George
“am I dreaming, am I asleep just waking up” when director John O’Hara is trying
to come out from under the jetlag and seeking to orient himself. Discontinuous contemporaneities here as well.
3] Packer/Wechsler. As noted above, I think to use texts of these two respectable American journalists for what I call the “Mish-Mash” section is not only not the way to go, but unjust, since benighted “Internationals” as they cannot help but be, one grants them the respect of doing better on closer acquaintance. My candidate are Roger Cohen’s texts of the time. As also mentioned in the second footnote, Handke’s The Cuckoos of Velica Hoca then, after all those travelogues with the laconic comments, is an exemplay piece of intimate reporting and of a kind that might set the standards higher than they are in the U.S. if writers of that ability could be trained.
4] To P.A.J’s “welching” on an agreed-upon contract after a year during which I thought I had put that project, Walk About the Villages, to bed, and had left the so distracting city and extracted myself from its sybaritic down-town life style, I responded with as tough a letter I could manage, and copies to P.E.N., because P.A.J., even though they felt they could welch wanted some other piece of work of mine and I wanted to make certain that nothing of the kind would ever transpire – the one principal who is no longer with P.A.J, Gautum Dasgupta, also was someone I myself at one time, as publisher of Urizen Books, had given work to, cc also to Handke.
In the mid-80s I was not someone you wanted to fool with, nor threaten. Handke’s response was that to write such a letter was something “that could not be done TO HIM!” and he threatened abrogation of a friendship. As far as I was concerned, Peter Handke had abrogate whatever possibilities for personal friendship existed with certain actions in 1975 and 1976, I realized the man lived in a delusion when we three all met at the Algonquin for tea one afternoon.
The upshot of all this was that [1] Handke turned to Ralph Mannheim to do a second translation of thetext, which Handke, in my translation, had called the “best he had ever seen,” and which was eventually published by Ariadne Press, an outfit that never sends review copies even to Publisher’s Weekly or Library Journal, and [2] that I was free to be even-handed and also critical of Handke texts, and eventually write a great length about him and his work, including a psychoanalytic monograph. [3] That Handke memorialized my sending him postcards from various hamlets all over the Chihuahua desert that I and my new wench loved our way through during the year 1985-8, prior to the blow-up.
When Alfred Kolleritch once published a critical piece about Handke in Manuskripte he, too, our Pasha also threatened that he would never get another Handke text if he persisted, as we find out in Malter Herwig’s Handke biography Meister der Daemmerung
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/12/full-length-review-of-herwigs-handke.html
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/12/marie-colbin-review-of-herwigs-meister.html
It appears it was a bit of a shock for Don Cuckoo from Griffen to find out that he had been a known quantity for a decade, and but for this act of dastardliness he might have had a happier time in NY while writing and coming acropper on the novel section of what is called A Slow Homecoming in American, since, though I worked late hours, I also did some downtown clubbing during those so musical years. Thus, though there are occasional instances when I am quite critical of Handke’s work, that is when I feel that he is not living up to his own standard of wanting to be judged within his own terms, I cannot be said to feel ambivalent about it, as I do about the person, who can also be a sweetheart of a darling and generous, as his ex Marie Colbin testifies as well, no matter that she blew him out of the water as well about at the time of the premiere of Voyage by Dugout. Marie and I considered getting married at one time, we thought we’d never get bored telling each other Handke stories!
5] Here a note from Scott’s diary:Several hours ago NATO and the Yugoslav Parliament came to some kind of agreement ending the bombing after 78 days. And, I'm just back from the world premiere of Peter's "The Play of the Film of the War," directed by Claus Peymann. I’ve never attended the world premiere of a play of this magnitude; and I’ve seldom been this moved, this challenged, by a work of art. Peter has filmmakers John Ford and Luis Buñuel in a Serbian town ten years after the war trying to decide how to make a film of the war. Characters who appear before the directors tell conflicting and complex stories as the play feels its way to questions about war and its aftermath. The really bad guys of the play, three "Internationals" who know all the answers, who dictate all the terms, who can think only in absolutes, appear on the stage as follows: "Three mountain bike riders, preceded by the sound of squealing brakes, burst through the swinging door, covered with mud clear up to their helmets. They race through the hall, between tables and chairs, perilously close to the people sitting there. 'Where are we?' the First International asks. 'Don't know,' the second answers. 'Not a clue,' the third says."American and European moralists, functionaries with no hint of self-irony or humor, absolutists who run the world because of their economic power – these sorry excuses for human beings were depicted this evening as mountainbike riders. Žarko, I said, Don’t you ever tell Peter I ride a mountain bike. No, he whispered, I’d never do that. Rich with thoughts, savory with sentences, the voyage by dugout was also a riot of comic action in Peymann’s staging. It was over before I even realized it was underway. The play drew on several incidents from our trip, including when Peter put his coat around the shoulders of the OSCE woman in Višegrad. The long sentences and long speeches of the play felt like well structured seriousness. The play trusted the audience to pay attention, and rewarded those who did with intellectual and aesthetic depth. But the play is playful too, and Peymann's direction brought that out impishly. The juxtaposition reminded me of the scene near the end of "Wings of Desire" where Peter's long and reflective sentences are being spoken against the sounds and rock staging of Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds.
After the
performance, flushed with enthusiasm and insight, I told Peter how well he had
integrated that real event into an imaginative play. “Dr. Scott,” he chided.
“Always the professor.”
to a photo
album devoted to my man.
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