22nd
September 2014
Karl
Ove Knausgård Peterhttp://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2014/09/celebrating-handkes-ibsen-prize.html Handke and singularity
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2014/09/celebrating-handkes-ibsen-prize.html
There
are few places where the problem of representation is so acute as in
Paul Celan’s poem The
Straightening [Engführung].
Neither places nor people have names, there is no time other than
that of the verbs, nor any narrative or overall structure to give the
words a setting or a coherent context. The words lie on the page like
stones on the ground, and at first glance the only thing which seems
to link them together is the fact that they are all German. On a
closer reading of the poem, the possibility emerges that it deals
with – or attempts to deal with – the fundamental abyss of all
literature: that between the world and language about the world,
rendered visible through an understanding of nothing, which, in the
very moment it is named, is no longer nothing, but something. What is
named in the poem, for example ‘a name’ or ‘lay’, can at the
next juncture be retracted; for example:
The place where
they lay, has
a
name – it has
none. They did
not lie there [...]
These
people, who both lie and do not lie in a place which both has a name
and does not have a name, did not ‘see’ but rather ‘spoke of
words’. Then, it reads, they did not wake, and sleep came over
them. This poem is so finely tuned and so immune to superficial
reading that it would be a violation to say that speaking of words –
which is likened to not seeing, which in turn is likened to sleeping
– is a metaphor for inauthenticity, that the words we use not only
to invoke the world but also to create it also prevent us from seeing
and experiencing it as it really is. Words such as authentic
and
inauthentic,
both of which are abstract and full of 2
historical
and philosophical connotations – and in this context, a poem by
Celan, also controversial after Adorno’s conflict with Heidegger
and his successors in Jargon of Authenticity –
are far removed from this poem since they represent a form of
conceptual thought which it evades at all costs. The poem comes
between between the name of the world and the world, but not in
search of pure being, understood as freedom from civilisation and
culture, that is, the so-called authentic;
for in the poem the absence of the name is a loss in the same way as
the absence of the discriminating power of the name is a loss,
something which is pleaded for but which is impossible. Therein lies
the merit of the poem, the fact that it cannot be referred to other
than by quoting it, cannot be retold, cannot be used for something
secondary, and points to nothing other than to itself; in other
words, it is singular, primary, the thing-in-itself, as a stone on
the ground is singular, primary, the thing-in-itself. That is to say
as close to the singular and the primary and the thing-in-itself as a
language can come, because even in a language which persistently
negates itself, representation is of course unavoidable. Where it
reads ‘Grass, written asunder,’ I imagine, in all its simplicity,
the grass that grows on the lawn in the dark outside the window by
which I sit and write, and by ‘written asunder’ I understand a
form of violence which perhaps – or perhaps not – has something
to do with the way in which it is seen or represented.
We
now know that Paul Celan was a Romanian Jew, and that he wrote this
poem in the wake of the Second World War, in German; the language of
the executioners who had destroyed it. Words such as ‘land’,
‘blood’, ‘family’, ‘labour’, and ‘fatherland’ were
filled to the brim with Nazism, and their totalitarian pretensions
and bureaucracy had seeped into every part of the language. It was in
this language, where morals, ethics, and aesthetics were perverted,
that Paul Celan said ‘I’. When he said ‘death’ in that
language, he said something other than absence of life, he said
something other than nothing – for Nazism was a death cult, so by
saying ‘death’ he did not say nothing, but rather ‘victim’,
‘fatherland’, ‘greatness’, ‘sincerity’, ‘pride’,
‘courage’. When he said ‘land’, he said ‘race’, ‘purity’,
‘victim’, ‘death’. Death in the gas chambers was another
death, its nothing was something else, named in the same way as one
names insect or pest control, an elimination of something unwanted,
non-human, and how does one name the death that had no identity
without invoking the waving banners or the swarming rats that lay in
the word ‘death‘?
The
opposite of the totalitarian is the unique, the isolated, the
singular. The
Straightening can
be read as a study of the nature of language itself and of its
borders with the incommunicable reality, and as an attempt to find a
way in the German language that had not been destroyed to in a way
create a new German language in order to understand that which
constantly casts shadows over the poem but which is
never directly represented, namely the Holocaust, without betraying
it. Like the names ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘Treblinka’, ‘Holocaust’
is something we refer to, something in history, where each incident,
each life, each moment is firmly attached to the emblem of the name.
The act of naming is another form of disappearing. Consequently, the
poem cannot mention Auschwitz; the diminution is too great, and it
describes nothing of what took place there. Such a description of the
type we associate with the word ‘Auschwitz’ – of prisoner
transportations, gas chambers, incineration furnaces – would reify
that which is nothing, would create ‘history’ from it and thereby
incorporate the incommunicable into the discussion.
The
Straightening is
so clearly no linguistic exercise, so clearly no academic exercise in
presence and absence; it is an elegy to and a requiem for those who
died in the Holocaust and to what was lost through their death,
namely ‘we’. It was in Celan’s own language, his native tongue,
German, that the Jews were first separated from its ‘we’ to its
‘they’ and subsequently, in the extermination camps, to its ‘it’.
The Jews were deprived of the name in which not only their identity
lay, but also their humanity. They became ‘it’: bodies with limbs
that could be counted but not named. They became nobody. Then they
became nothing.
That
nothing is what Celan’s poem tries to represent by invoking and
negating, ‘ash’, ‘night’, ‘light’, ‘sleep’,
‘sleeping’, letting that which always is
also
not be,
in a language in which almost all meaning is lost, since meaning is a
function of a ‘we’, which in this language had been destroyed,
hence the singularity.
*
The
Straightening is
a lament for that which was lost forever, but it is also the
opposite: a beginning, since it in itself was created, not destroyed.
And since it in itself communicates, it establishes a new ‘we’
which every new reader redeems. And although our own time is
radically different, the abyss between language and the world is the
same and the duplicity of language just as treacherous. It is still
through language that the world is created and we are connected to
it, yet language is also what distances us from it. Language is still
coercion, a mass system of conformity and socialisation that erases
the individual, yet it is only through language that we can express
individuality, the separate, the unique. One of the
best and most important books written in German in our time is – to
my mind – Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams [Wunschloses
Unglück] from 1972. The problem of representation is also a key
issue here, though it is presented in a very different way. The book
is autobiographical in the sense that it is based on an actual event
in Handke’s life: his mother’s suicide. The prose is sparse and
subdued; in other words, not novelistic, which in turn means
unbeautiful, perhaps because beauty instils hope, and this is a novel
about despair. Beauty, that is, the literary filter through which the
world is viewed, gives hope to despair, value to worthlessness, and
sense to meaningless. It is inevitably so. Loneliness that is
beautifully described lifts the soul to new heights, and then it is
no longer true; for loneliness is not beautiful, despair is not
beautiful, not even longing is beautiful. It is not true, but it is
good. It is a comfort, it is a relief, and perhaps it is where some
of literature’s justification lies? But in that case, it is
literature as something else, as something special and autonomous,
something valuable in itself – not as a representation of reality.
That is something Peter Handke tries to evade in his novel. It was
written a few weeks after the funeral, and in it Handke tries to see
his mother and her life in as true a light as possible. Not true in
the sense that it really happened – she was a real person in the
world – but true in his insight and in the way he imparts this
insight. He does not represent his mother in the text; that (I felt
when reading it) would be a violation of her as a human being. She
was her own person, lived her own life, and instead of depicting that
life, Handke refers to it, like something that lies outside the text,
never inside it. This means that he writes in general terms, about
the contexts in which she figured, about the roles she assumed or did
not assume, but these generalities can also present problems, he
writes, because they can become independent of her and take on a life
of their own in the text through his poetic formulations – which
would also be a betrayal of her. He writes: “Consequently, I first
took the facts as my starting point and looked for ways of
formulating them. But I soon noticed that in looking for formulations
I was moving away from the facts. I then adopted a new approach –
starting not with the facts but with the already available
formulations, the linguistic deposit of man’s social experience.”
That is where he searches, as it were, for his mother’s life. He
does this to protect her dignity and integrity, as far as I can
understand, but then something else also happens in the text: when a
person is portrayed through the eyes of her contemporary society,
through its culture and self-understanding, through its roles and
limits, her inner nature disappears, her individual and
characteristic existence, what used to be referred to as the soul,
and – I think – perhaps Handke’s book is also a story of
precisely that: society’s oppression of the individual, the
strangling of the soul. 5
Handke
steers away from all types of affects, feelings, anything anecdotal,
anything that might inject life into a text; he repeatedly insists
that it is a text he is writing, that the life he is describing is
elsewhere, or was elsewhere, and when after seventy-odd pages he
reaches the moment of death and the funeral (which takes place by a
forest), he writes: “The people left the grave quickly. I stood
beside it and looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time
it seems to me that nature was really merciless. So these were the
facts! The forest spoke for itself. Apart from these countless trees,
nothing counted; in the foreground an episodic jumble of shapes which
gradually receded from the picture. I felt mocked and helpless. All
at once, in my impotent rage, I felt the need of writing something
about my mother.” In other words, it was this sudden insight into
what death was that constituted the novel’s true starting point.
This insight led Handke to write a book about his mother and his
mother’s death in which she was not represented, only referred to,
shaped by her time and its formulations and insights, seen as an
individual who had a given number of types from which to choose,
socially and historically determined, but of course not without her
own personality, only that this was not shaped because then it would
become ‘typical’ for her and – paradoxically – lie, since she
always, all the time, was something else. In Handke’s universe,
death is merciless, and the life he describes is also merciless, so
obviously his book cannot deal with mercy. From a literary
perspective, mercy lies in the beautiful; that is, in the beautiful
sentence and in the invention, that is, the fictionalisation, the
secret alliance of events that criss-cross any novel, because this
criss-crossing in itself constitutes
a confirmation of meaning and coherence.
Handke
wrote: “The people left the grave quickly. I stood beside it and
looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seems to me
that nature was really merciless. So these were the facts! The forest
spoke for itself.”
When
I see a tree, I see its blindness and randomness, something which has
come into being and will die, and which in the intervening time will
grow. When I see a fishing net full of glimmering fish, I see the
same: something blind and random that comes into being, grows, and
dies. When I see pictures from the Nazi extermination camps, I see
human beings in the same way. Limbs, heads, stomachs, hair, genitals.
It has nothing to do with my gaze; what I see is the way in which
these people were viewed and represented at that time, and which made
it possible for so many people to know about those atrocities and
even to participate in them without lifting a finger. The idea that
such a gaze is possible is frightening, but it doesn’t make what
that gaze sees any less true. We could regard this as nothing, and
all thoughts that seek meaning in the 6
world
must relate to this zero-point. I see a tree, and I see futility. But
I also see life in its pure, blind form, that which grows and grows.
Its energy and beauty. Yes, death is nothing, simply absence. But in
the same way as the blind life can on the one hand be seen as a
force, something sacred and – well, why not – divine and on the
other hand be seen as something meaningless and empty, then death,
too, can be seen in the same way; death’s song can also be sung:
death, too, can be filled with meaning and beauty. This is what makes
German national socialism so infinitely significant to us, because
it’s only two generations since they held power, and under their
reign of terror – which was modern in every aspect – all three of
these perspectives prevailed alongside each other: life as a divine
force, death as beautiful and meaningful, humans as something blind
and random and worthless. This perspective, which prior to Nazism
belonged to art and to the sublime, became part of the social order.
Handke’s mother was a young women at the time, and after describing
her childhood during the interwar period in Austria, in comparative
poverty and ignorance, where her uncle’s wish to learn something –
just about anything – was considered totally unrealistic and
undesired, Handke outlines the new atmosphere that emerges in and
around national socialism, with demonstrations, torchlight
processions, buildings decorated with new national emblems, and
writes: “The historic events were represented to the rural
population as a drama of nature.” He writes that his mother still
had no interest in politics, because “what was happening before her
eyes was something entirely different from politics. Politics was
something colourless and abstract, not a carnival, not a dance, not a
band in local costume, in short, nothing VISIBLE.”
Nazism
was the last major Utopian political movement to date, and the fact
that it proved so destructive in almost every way has made all
subsequent Utopian thinking so problematic – if not impossible –
not only in politics but also in art, and since art is by its very
nature Utopian, it has found itself in a state of crisis ever since,
characterised by self-examination and suspicion, as expressed in
Handke’s novel and in almost all novels written by his generation
of writers.
How
do you represent reality without adding something it doesn’t have?
What does it ‘have’ and ‘not have’? What is authentic? What
is inauthentic? Where do you draw the line between the staged and the
unstaged? Does such a borderline even exist? Is the world something
other than our notions of it?
Language
has no life of its own, is not itself alive: it invokes life, and the
very primal scene for that, the source of creative literature, is
found in The Odyssey
when
Odysseus and his crew moor on the Oceanus River after
visiting Circe, and Odysseus offers a sacrifice on the beach to the
dead. Blood runs darkly down into the pit, and the dead souls begin
to flock around it. He sees young girls dressed as brides, young
warriors in blood-stained armour, and old men, their screams are
ghastly, and he is filled with fear. The first he recognizes is
Elpenor, who died during their stay with Circe and was never buried.
He tells his story, of how he drank himself drunk and fell head first
off a roof, broke his neck and died. The next one Odysseus speaks to
is Tiresias, the soothsayer, who foretells the future, then appears
Odysseus’ mother, who drinks of the blood. She recognizes him and
tells him of how she died. Odysseus goes to embrace her, and
approaches her three times, and three times she escapes him like a
dream or a shadow. She tells him that her sinews no longer hold flesh
and bone together, the funeral pyre has transformed her body to ash,
and that all that is left is her soul, fluttering around.
Literature
invokes the world as Odysseus invokes the dead, and no matter how it
is done, the distance is always insurmountable and the stories always
the same. One son loses his mother three thousand years ago, one son
loses his mother forty years ago. The fact that the one story is a
work of fiction and the other based on fact does not change their
basic similarity: both manifest themselves in language, and from this
perspective any attempt Handke makes to escape the literary proves
futile, there is nothing in his description of reality that is more
authentic than Homer’s. Nor is that what he seeks to do. Handke
wants to write about someone – his mother – without invoking her,
without giving her blood so that she can appear in something
reminiscent of her former, living character; in other words, deny her
a fictitious life that might create connections between the dead –
her existence in the past, and the living – the reader’s
consciousness. Instead, what language invokes is her environment, the
shapes of her life, and although her identity – that which was
peculiar to her – comes to view, it does not speak. Nor can what
language invokes be found on the other side of an insurmountable
abyss, for these shapes are themselves linguistic in a sense, though
not in a truly literal sense. Thus, Handke succeeded in doing what he
presumably set out to do, namely to represent reality in an authentic
manner.
Another
way in which to do the same thing could be to remove the narrator
completely and just present those documents in which the mother was
mentioned or which pertained to matters in which she had a part; the
relationship between the reality and the description of reality would
then be practically congruent. The as-if of art, that abyss
which separates it from reality, would then be completely removed, or
more correctly, could only be sensed as the will that tracked down
the documents, collated them, and arranged them in a certain order.
We could of course regard that order as manipulative; in reality, the
documents were arranged horizontally, in different filing systems in
different locations, and even a chronological principle of arranging
them would represent a violation and create an effect: the final
medical journal transcript is followed by the post-mortem report, the
reader wipes away a tear.
*
The
singular in A Sorrow
Beyond Dreams lies
not in the formation of an individual, in the account of that
individual’s particular life and unique manner, since the form of
the formation as we are used to seeing it in novels and films is
neither particular nor unique, but makes what it creates a part of
something else and, thus, betrays it. The singular lies in the form,
which is unique to this particular book, which is not found anywhere
else, and which cannot be transferred to another form without losing
is essence. By not forming the mother, the writer keeps her outside
the representation. The fact that something stands for something else
and in that way, by virtue of the book being what it is and nothing
more, the mother continues to be what she was in it: a separate and
unique individual. I find that same will throughout Peter Handke’s
oeuvre, and it is that which makes it so difficult to write about,
because his books resist interpretation, since to interpret is
nothing more than transferring the one to the other. Handke’s books
are their own interpretations. At the very beginning of the play
Kaspar from
1967, the stage direction reads that the stage represents a stage,
not another room in another place, and that the furniture in the
stage room should look like theatrical props by being placed
differently than they normally are, and that they should have no
history. It is theatre, and should not represent anything other than
theatre. Kaspar stumbles onto this stage. He is wearing a lifelike
mask with an expression of perpetual astonishment. His walk is
mechanical and contrived, as if he has never learned to walk, and
eventually he falls. Sitting on the stage, he repeatedly utters a
sentence: “I want to be a person like somebody else was once.”
This is a slightly modified version of what the real Kaspar Hauser
apparently said when he turned up in Nuremberg in 1828, namely: “I
want to be a cavalryman as my father was.” Kaspar’s character is
further anonymised by removing the specifics, cavalryman and father,
and only an unspecified future is mentioned in what he
says: “I want to be”, and an equally unspecified past in: “like
somebody else was once”, both associated with identity. The
question the sentence thus also raises is: who is he now? He wants to
be something, something which somebody else once was – but based on
what? This is the only sentence he can say, and it is unclear whether
he even understands what it means. Kaspar is without language or
culture, the fixed facial expression displays astonishment at the
presence of others. Is a person who has never seen others capable of
seeing himself? And what does it mean to be without language? What
affect does it have on thoughts, memories, the self? Does he have a
self? Without language, he is like an animal, but we know nothing
about animals’ thoughts, memories or self, since all these things
are communicated through language, which they don’t have. All we
can say about Kaspar as he comes stumbling onto the stage is that he
is without language. But he is not nobody. He has a physical
presence, he has a body, and he has a body language. We can read him,
but he can’t read us.
After
a while, someone begins to talk to him. There are three voices, and
they are impersonal, hold no warmth, no irony, no humour or
helpfulness, but nor are they the opposite; they are neutral.
According to the stage directions, they are reading a text which
is not theirs.
In the same way as the furniture props were furniture props and
should not represent a living room, these words should be delivered
as words which should not represent the speaker, only what is spoken.
This means that the voices are as anonymous and as bereft of history
as Kaspar, but likewise from the other side: where Kaspar’s
identity disappears into his body, where it is not articulated but
where it nonetheless is, since he is, somehow erased in singularity’s
utmost consequence, there where there are no others and therefore no
language, the identities of these voices vanish in the bodiless,
erased in generality’s utmost consequence, there where nothing
separate is found, only language, which is universal.
What do the
voices say?
One
says: “Familiarise yourself with all objects. Make all objects into
a sentence with the sentence. You can make all objects into your
sentence.
With this sentence, all objects belong to you. With this sentence,
all objects are yours.”
One
says: “You can no longer imagine anything without the sentence. You
are unable to visualise an object without the sentence.
One
says: “A sentence which requires a question is uncomfortable; you
cannot feel at ease with such a sentence.” One says:
“Everyone is born with a wealth of talents.”
One
says: “Everyone is responsible for his own progress.”
One
says: “Everyone puts himself at the service of the cause. Everyone
says yes to himself.”
One
says: “Work develops an awareness of duty in everyone.”
One
says: “One of the most beautiful things in life is a well-set
table.”
The
voices socialise Kaspar; through them he learns to deal with the
world, which is translated into language and acquires an identity,
but the cost is high, for communicating with everyone wipes out
everything peculiar to him, and the instrumental categorisation of
the world distances him from it. Finally, he talks of words, to
paraphrase Celan. The language in this play is therefore a kind of
prison; it restricts and reduces and closes at the same time as
organises, structures, and coordinates. Although the play was written
in 1967 and is clearly rooted in the currents of its time, with its
criticism of authority, its scepticism of conformity, and its
anti-bourgeois sentiment, it is so brutal and uncompromising and
essentially oriented that it transcends the spirit of the age and
exposes something beyond validity, the conflict which has always
existed between the independence of the individual and the community
of everyone.
I
was born in 1968, and have no experience of the society and culture
of the sixties, only of its repercussions in the seventies, which
already seems like a totally different world, with totally different
values and practices, undergoing radical transformation since the mid
eighties and at a steadily increasing rate, until we stand here now
in 2014, in the centre of our horizontal, unlimited reality,
steepeded in money and things, well-intentioned and more than
adequately provided for, and – perhaps most importantly – free.
Should language be a prison for us?
Should we be
oppressed? We, who are more individualistic than anyone one who has
gone before us? The likely truth is that we are individualistic in
the same way, and that this sameness is invisible to us because it is
not forced upon us, entails no element of violence or oppression like
Kaspar’s voices of authority, but is instead ingratiating,
affirmative, alluring, comfortable. No matter where I turn, I see
sameness. The newspaper reports, their language, are all the same, so
that what they report on – regardless of how dissimilar it is –
seem identical. The language of TV news stories is the same; the
language of films is the same; the language of novels is the same.
Even if what they are telling us is different, exceptional, it is
conveyed not as such, but as the same. We live our lives increasingly
through others, and establish distinctions and differences through
consumption, which is delusive, because they are acquired through
money – for what else is money than a vehicle for affording equal
status 11
to
the most dissimilar of things so that they can be sold? Money
converts everything into numbers; beauty as well as forests as well
as art as well as bodies. We even sell our dreams. This current of
sameness in which we all find ourselves is friction-free, it is
image-oriented, and it increases the distance to our physical,
material reality and to the moment in which we always find ourselves
but which we don’t endure and from which we run away as often as we
can. The singular in that reality is that which is not for sale; that
is, that which cannot be transferred. It is, for example, the boring.
It is the difficult. It is the idiosyncratic. It is the isolated.
This
says nothing about the work of Peter Handke, whose books, it seems to
me, evade precisely this type of general synthesis, refuse to
subordinate themselves to general reasonings and instead stick to
their own, rather like the narrator in My
Year in the No-Man’s-Bay [Mein
Jahr in der Niemandsbucht] who describes in detail the suburban
landscape in which he lives, which holds everything we normally don’t
see or value because it lies outside the beautiful and the
meaningful, but without making a big deal of it, and who, right at
the beginning of the book, writes:
“The
earth has long since been discovered. But I still keep sensing what I
call in my own mind the New World. It is the most splendid experience
I can imagine. Usually it comes only for the flash of a second and
perhaps continues to glow dimly for a while. I never see visions or
phenomena with it. (Inside me is distrust toward all those vouchsafed
illuminations with it being a necessity). What I see as the New World
is everyday reality. It remains what it was, merely radiating
calmness, a runway or launchpad from the old world, marking a fresh
beginning.”
We
see the world and ourselves through categories and forms, and since
these categories and forms are always already defined, the element of
creation so easily escapes us, as does the element of the unique,
which in reality belongs to every single second. Art and literature
have always known this. That’s why it has been and is in a state of
continual change; it seeks the eternal, the constant and
unchangeable, which are our conditions for life, for no matter how
modern we are, we are born and we die, the heart in our chest beats
and water runs down our throat, apples hang on branches, and creeping
plants creep up the stalks of other plants, the sun shines and the
moon gleams through continually new forms to represent that which it
also is, new to each generation, new to each human being. A good
example could be Cezanne’s art. In the realistic,
reality-representational art, the perspective is a form that already
exists: the room is already there, and is then dressed with walls, a
floor, a ceiling or with grassland, trees, skies. With Cezanne, it is
as if the things come in being first, and that it is their 12
interrelationships
that create the room. The room comes into being, is created each
time, is not a constant quantity, and we see it, suddenly. Nor is it
so that Cezanne represents these things, tries to create an illusion
of an apple on a table in a room. It is the painted that is the
authentic, these colours and this pattern in themselves, and in a
peculiar way it is as if this non-representation opens up the world
while the representation closes it, as if non-representation
intensifies intimacy while representation diminishes it. It is like
this, of course, because to paint is to see, it’s about the way
something is seen, and it is there the world appears, not as
something in itself, but as something that is seen, or met. The
meeting of the gaze and the thing was what Cezanne painted, not the
thing, and it is the meeting that makes it unique. Cezannes’
paintings have a central place in one of Handke’s books, The
Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire [Die
Lehre der Sainte-Viktoire] from 1980. Sainte-Victoire is a mountain
which Cezanne painted over and over again throughout his life, and
even though the mountain is the same, each and every one of his
paintings is different, exceptional, because they represent the
mountain from different angles and different times, based on
different moods, objectives, and ideas, in all kinds of weather, in
all seasons of the year. Another pre-defined category – perhaps
even more difficult to acknowledge and see but decisive for how the
world appears – is that of the values hierarchy, which elevates
something and lets it represent the superior and devalues something
else that represents the inferior. The opposite would be a gaze that
saw everything openly, that assigned equal status to everything,
whether it be blood, vomit, excrement, sunrises, lawns, lynx,
maggots, fish spawn, owls, hearts, crowds, apes, chairs, tables. The
unbiased gaze would be unable to see any connections between the
different objects, creatures, and phenomena, since perhaps the most
important bias we have has to do with what belongs together and what
does not. This is how we organise the world, and it is that which
enables us to live in it, but it is also that which charges it with
values and morals, often without us realising it, since our
pre-charged gaze implies self-evidence, that it goes without saying.
But nothing goes without saying, and if there is one recurring
insight in Peter Handke’s books, it is that. They seek out the
gaps, the perimeters, there where something can be seen for the first
time, and they insist on the details, on the small incidents, the
seemingly insignificant, precisely because they change everything
about that which is already seen, and reveal a world that is forever
in the making. One example could be the in every way fantastic short
journal Once Again for Thucydides [Noch
einmal für Thukydides] from 1995, which intimately describes the
most minor incidents outside a house. It deals with flowers and
insects, shadows that fall, the sun that shines, the snow that melts.
The journal opens with a dating, and ends as follows: “These were
the events of the morning of March 23, 13
1987.”
This in any other way insignificance and triviality is described as
if it were a major battle, and turns the hierarchy on its head: this
is also history-writing. The year after this book was released, A
Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia [Eine
winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder
Gerechtigkeit für Serbien] was published, and it is difficult not to
read it in light of Once Again for Thucydides,
as another form of history-writing, about what goes on outside of
public attention, the entire political-historical and generalising
system of concepts that has filled ‘Serbia’ with a whole bunch of
fixed notions, unalterable and unshakable, as if Handke also tries to
fill ‘Serbia’ with something else which is as true and as
important because it is human, belongs to reality just as much as the
other facts do. At the very end of the book, it reads:
“To
record the evil facts, that’s good. But something else is needed
for a peace, something not less important than the facts.”
Are
you bringing up the poetic again? Yes, when this is understood as the
opposite to the nebulous. Or, rather than ‘the poetic’, let me
say the connecting, the far-reaching – that which gives rise to a
collective memory, which is the only possibility for reconciliation
for an other, collective childhood.
How
is that? Besides different German readers, what I have written here
was intended for different Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian readers,
based on my experience that it is precisely through the indirect way
consisting of continually holding on to certain less important issues
rather than hammering in the key facts that one can keep alive a
collective self-remembrance, an other, collective childhood.”
*
Another
common, enduring feature of Handke’s books is precisely the
journeys, the wanderings, the constant hikes through different
landscapes – as in his most recent novel, The
Great Fall [Der
Große Fall], which begins with an actor waking up in a strange house
and wandering around the undefined no-man’s landscape outside a
large city, and which ends when he reaches the city centre in the
evening – and this feature of always being in motion, always on the
way to another place, belongs to the fundamental structure of the
Western epic tradition. I’m thinking, of course, of The
Odyssey and
of Odysseus’ long journey from Troy to Ithaca, nostos,
home. That book resonates in Handke’s most recent drama, Still
Storm from
2010, both because in that book he returns home to the area of his
childhood, in the Austrian province of Kärnten, and because it deals
to a large extent on what a home is and what it means, but also
because the narrator, who is sitting on a grassland in an undefined
time, which is time in literature, sees his dead mother appear before
him, and talks to her, precisely as Odysseus did with
his mother in The Odyssey.
Since the I-narrator shares many of Handke’s own traits and the
mother’s character many of those of the mother described in A
Sorrow Beyond Dreams, I don’t
find it unreasonable to read this as another picture of the same
woman, written by the same writer almost forty years later. She is
not represented as the person she was here, either, nor are we
allowed to share in her live as it once played out in so-called real
reality. The character we meet in this piece is the mother as she
appears to the narrator here and now – she is dead ‘in reality’,
and also in the book, and is portrayed as in a dream, in a vision, in
a memory, in a text. Yes, Handke depicts this mother as a character
in a play or a novel, nothing else, nothing more, nothing less. She
is surrounded by her parents, her brothers, and the narrator himself,
as an infant. Time has been suspended, as has the place: we are in
the book, we are in the theatre, we read or see an elderly man’s
portrayal of his family and his home town as it was before and during
the war more than seventy years ago. It is an elegy, for everything
that is described is now lost, is now gone. But, unlike the narrator
in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,
this narrator is reconciled with the loss, does not turn away from it
in disgust, but instead regards it with warmth and openness, perhaps
because the place that opens up not only contains what has been lost;
it is also the place where he came into being, for in Still
Storm it is as if death and
birth are circled in as the same, in some magical way. When I read
it, I thought: this, exactly this, is something I’ve not seen
exactly like this before. In this work, the language, which in
Handke’s writing is incorporated with so much ambivalence, is both
that which oppresses and liberates, is associated with the local,
with the minority Slovenian language of Handke’s maternal family.
The mother recognizes the narrator, now older than she was when she
died, by the language. She says: “Unfamiliar figure, familiar
language. I recognize you by your language, Ape-Son. All of us
gathered here can be recognized by our language, at the very least we
know recognize each other, each and every one of us can recognize
each other as one of us. While the linguistic ‘we’ in Kaspar
was oppressive and a threat to
identity, the ‘we’ here is identity-forming, a home – but not
without ambivalence, the work contains many voices, many
perspectives. The grandfather says that those who lose their language
lose their homeland. “What I am, what we are, begins with a home, a
house, with our house, and without a house we are nothing.” A few
pages later, the uncle, or the grandfather’s son, says: “My name,
my prison.” The mother says: “I have a need to reinstate our way
of speaking – whether it is out of love for our family or for our
language – I don’t know.” Again the uncle, in answer to the
question of whether he no longer understands his own language: “Oh
yes. But only when it expresses what I can see, hear, and smell. When
it gets more general, I no longer understand.” The abstract, which
the sister 15
wants
him to learn, that is the language of communism, of doctrine, of
ideology. And the language that threatens the local is German, in
which the writer himself writes. The uncle again: “Our language,
our power. Beyond language, violence and power break out. The chief
physician kills the language and, thereby, the individual – you and
me. To remain in the language. To insist on it! Language, mine, ours
– hen-coop ladder becomes Jacob’s ladder. Air – morning air –
Easter air – Jaunfeld air! That’s progress.”
Perhaps
it is the case that all writers write in a minority language, that
that is what writing is, making the language your own, because it is
only there, in the own language, that the own world can emerge, and
the own life – which is the only life – be articulated. But it
would be a misunderstanding to think that that is what ‘home’ is,
at least if what you mean by ‘home’ is a permanent place – if
Odysseus reached Ithaca and returned home, it didn’t last for long
– if we are to believe Dante – before he headed out again,
driving by his uncontrollably restless curiosity and thirst for
knowledge.
.
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