Handke likes the sound of Jew's harp throughout his books. Now Milosz has one already on page 13 of Amorous Initiation. Will DFW have one too in Broom of the System? What a strange book, so far, for Kaminski to feature on his site.
Terrific rain a few hours ago. Now bright and sunny.
14 walking backward ! the three deplorables of the palace
meanwhile in Broom luau party downstairs and joints upstairs
1910 and 1987 both books as opposite Handke as possible
fine article on Handke in Swedish site from 1994 and earlier---hindsight showing us even more so how much Handke has been writing "the same" story from almost the beginning---
Note: This is a slightly rewritten version of an article originally published in Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet of Sept. 23rd 1988.
This article is © Copyright Karl-Erik Tallmo, 1988, 1994
A son's long good-bye
About the writings of Peter Handke
(until Die Wiederholung, 1986)
ONLY A FEW, IF ANY, of those who attended the literary seminar at Princeton in 1966, probably believed in a literary future for this 23 year old Austrian newbie with a Beatles hair-cut, who had crossed the Atlantic to attack celebrities like Günter Grass, Peter Weiss and Siegfried Lenz. Peter Handke's talk about the "descriptive impotency" of literature seemed at the time to be merely a juvenile's urge for attention.
Handke's first novel, "Die Hornissen", had been published that same year, and after the visit to Princeton, his play "Publikumsbeschimpfung" ("Offending the audience", transl. Michael Roloff, London, 1971) was staged. Considering that this play belonged to the experimental scene, its success was tremendous. Handke had turned the communicative act of the stage ninety degrees, and all of a sudden, the actors were addressing the audience, they even commanded it and abused it. "These boards do not represent a world", the actors say at the beginning of the piece. Everything at the theater is just what it seems to be, the stage floor, the curtain; nothing needs interpretation. The absense of a door does not mean that this is supposed to depict some sort of "lacking door problem".
The early novels and plays all exploit this insight that language is actually the only reality literature truly may represent. Sometimes Handke combined texts in a concretist fashion, letting styles clash. For instance, he interlaced a law text with parenthetically inserted reactions from the audience - like when Lenin's or Stalin's speeches were published in the Soviet union: "thunderous applause", "amused laughter" etc.
In "Die Hornissen", a person keeps fragments of a novel stored in his memory. In such a way fiction is doubled and even self-revoking, since the reader constantly wonders what is the novel and what is the novel's novel. In "Der Hausierer" from 1967, the plot of a detective story is first outlined and later followed, the result, again, being a narrative, voluntarily abstaining from suggestive power, instead generously exhibiting its own mechanisms.
In November of 1971, Peter Handke suffered a personal loss. Maria Handke, his 51 year old mother, committed suicide. In a short letter she explained that it was "inconceivable to go on living". Only a few months later, Handkes grief after this blow resulted in a small book, "Wunschloses Unglück" ("A sorrow beyond dreams: a life story", transl. Ralph Manheim, New York, 1975). Handke shows us a both intimate and distant view of the emotional poverty that obviously prevailed in his family. Particularly his mother sustained an almost total lack of identity. The word "individual" was used as an invective only, to be "special" was to be odd.
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This is a good description of Handke's own literary project, as he explains it in the interview book "Aber Ich lebe nur von dem Zwischenräumen", published in 1987. Obviously, Handke now writes in a more and more intuitive way, he says the first sentence of the book took him three days to complete. This was, however, a necessary starting point for his account of the departure from Alaska, which was supposed to fill ten pages but grew to last for ninety. Sorger had to visit several places before he could return home. The plane had just descendend through the clouds covering Europe, when Handke suddenly realized that the book was finished.
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Kobal is also travelling the strange karst land of northern Yugoslavia, a world of subterranean torrents, caves and dripstones. The story almost loses its steerage-way at times here, and the reader's patience is severely tried. This novel is not one of Handke's best, although there are some very fascinating passages, e.g. the brother's annotations about how to graft different brands of apple trees, or the account of the Slovenian dictionary, which almost turns into a philosophical tract, yet with an unusual poetry budding out of the very raw material of language.
Those mystical, implicit understandings appear in this book too. First there is a servant, whose unbroken attention and incessant care become subject to Filip's adoration: "Once he stood in the night, in the unfurnished, empty room, stock still, gazing ahead, then he stepped forward, up to a remote niche, where he executed a small tender twist on the decanter, so that the entire house was filled with hospitality."
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Finally: The more glimpses you get from Handke's own biography, the more you understand of the apparently empty and formalistic experiments in his early plays and poems. Maybe they depict the childs lack of a functioning language within an aggressive adult world that is permeated by ambiguous messages and humiliation. If you read for instance "Publikumsbeschimpfung" as a family drama, where the grown-ups command the children in the same way as the actors try to control even how the audience is breathing, then almost every line becomes unbearably ambiguous and upsetting.
Too bold as it may sound, I still would like to introduce an even more specific reading. Should it not be substantiated in Handke's own biography, it is nevertheless an interesting angle that casts a different light on the bulk of Handke's ¦uvre. Publikumsbeschimpfung" and several other works, or parts of works, need not be interpreted as just any family drama, but as precisely that scolding which children most likely are subject to after having witnessed the Freudian primal scene; their parents having sexual intercourse.
Try to read Handke's books again with this in mind! Almost every closed room might be a bedroom, almost every enigma or unsolved problem could be connected with the mystery of one's own conception, which happened during such a primal scene. The goalie, Bruno, Keuchnig, Sorger and all the others - surely they were all witnesses!
In retrospect Handke's literary production through the years stand out as remarkably consistent, not to say persistent, and he spent the greater part of the 70's and 80's trying to define an independent role for his writing, outside of his dead mother's jurisdiction.
Her short suicide note certainly resulted in a long literary good-bye for him.
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well, maybe so, maybe some, maybe whatever, maybe less might be and more whatever, too neat and clever as with all commentary or much commentary closed doors too ready to hand
with Milosz and Wallace we're comfortably back farther away from biography or so we hope
