OF COURSE, I CAN ONLY SAY, AUNTIE'S BOOK REVIEW NEGLECTS"MORAVIAN NIGHT" THE BIG HANDKE NOVEL FORTHCOMING DECEMBER 2016
PAR FOR THE COURSE, I AM AFRAID TO SAY:
HOWEVER, IF YOU LIKE, GIVE ME A FEW OF YOUR PAGES & I WILL DEMONSTRATE TO YOU AS HAS NEVER BEEN DONE THERE HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE PARTI PRISYET ALSO DO A QUITE OBJECTIVE & CRITICAL ROUND-UP ON HANDKE'S ALL IMPORTANCE.
FELIZ NOVEDAD
SUMMARY ESSAY
ON READING HANDKE
&
HANDKE’S PROSE
THE OCCASION:
THE U.S.PUBLICATION OF
“MORAVIAN NIGHT”
HANDKE’S FINAL MAJOR EPIC:
-I-
What
kind of reader am I in 2016, seventy-five years after my mother initiated me
into deciphering signs (for vowels and consonants) that appeared on a wax
magic writing pad and disappeared as you stroked a finger across cellophane
(and what was that dark-gray, malleable mass of material beneath?), her
Christmas gift to four year extra-uterine me in 1939.
Once
I had the skill to summarize the letters into words and the words into
sentences I started to be “grammartilized,” “syntactfied” you might say &
began to be exposed to German newspapers at the start of WW II; that is, I
started to be politicized, militarized and nationalized; while yet in my
private quite isolated time, of which I had a sufficiency, I retreated into a
world of fairy tales and sagas, and dreaming, wishes, fantasies.
The
first great reading shock and projection, a few years hence, was Fridjoff
Nansen’s The Voyage of the
Fram, the account of that ship’s late 19th century imprisonment in Polar ice,
which I, on reading, felt would crush the ship, and me: I had had a crushing
and freezing experience at age nine months and felt imprisoned by a
governess.
Many
years hence I would get a powerful drift on the ramifications of projecting.
Yet what transpires in you and your unconscious during the act of reading does
not necessarily puzzle you, once it becomes “automatic;” these happenings, even
to the extent that they are concscious, tend to be taken for granted,
Reading
proved as much of an escape as climbing trees, and opened vistas.
Fairy
tales and sagas cannot be said to be unrealistic versions of the world, yet
they certainly are anything but naturalistic;
they are summary, deep interpretations of family configurations and human
animal qualities & afford discovery of yourself and of the world in those,
in their terms… as you dream the childhood puzzlement of the world you find
yourself in. Eventually you
encounter the word unconscious, to describe what has been transpiring in you,
and you wonder whether it might be related to the mass of grey material beneath
the cellophane that mystified you as a child & perhaps you concluded that
if processes can be unconscious there must be a realm that can be said to be
unconscious, the unconscious, which your conscious appears to be unable to
decipher and have little if any control
of, and which is as filled with surprises
as the rest of the world, a kind of special and especially intriguing realm.
Thus,
experiences in my childhood could be formulated in the following fashion: A
wounded B-17 four engine bomber plane swooshing about 100 feet above our house
was initially apprehended, its screeching engines and the shadow it cast, as
the mythical Griffin, the huge fairytale bird that might snatch children off
the ground the way raptors do small animals; inspection of its crashed
mechanical entrails, a hundred yards further off in the woods, seeks to
disabuse you of the persistence of the stubborn notion of the existence of
Griffens, no matter that the notion proves to be a powerful communicating metaphor
for what transpires in instances such as these, especially of course to those
who also live in a world where fairy tale signifiers avail. A further childhood
instance of this kind was when children were
told not to ice-skate too close to the forest at the flooded and frozen
meadows because there resided the man who devoured children; and so
we took the advice, but shortly found out that there had been a small camp in
those woods that devoured “undesirables” before delivering them to be consumed
at a larger camp, and by the time I started to write my first story, at age 12
- of how Devil’s Hill had
got its name – this way of sorting out the world in that kind of metaphorical
fashion had become second nature in the accessible part of my unconscious and
why about a decade later I would respond powerfully to Guenter Grass fairy
tales Cat & Mouse and The
Tin Drum.
My
first two sour years in the New Country again allowed for ample time for
reading, a new literature, from the local library and from drugstore shelves,
lots of material for a novice; and by the time of graduating from wonderful
Quaker prep Oakwood school, with first rate lit teachers, my being was pretty
much in tune with the then mainstream canon: Joyce, Lawrence, Hardy, Conrad,
James, Hemingway, Steinbeck, H. M. Forster, and what I had and was to apprehend
of Harold Bloom’s assembled Western Canon http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html#chaos Iwhich begins to look provincoially paltry once he ventures
into languages other than English. An aesthetic education was well underway. I
even knew the Anna Livia
Plurabelle section from Funagain Finnegan by heart and was never to be the
same! - Also, I happened to have the good fortune of a stepfather a
Shakespeare nut, with recordings of performances, also of Dylan Thomas, which
introduced a feel for pacing and musicality into what I read, a preference for
lyrical prose. – The darkness of Dostoyevsky was always within reach. but off
to the side.
Through
college and the acquisition of other languages and graduate school &
editing literature magazines and some acquaintance with the backwaters of
literature, subsequent to a lot, if no end of wonders, it was not until I came
on Peter Handke’s work, and happened to both translate and publish him and
eventually read his later texts, and closely, that I began to have absolutely
different and unique experiences, and not just with his plays but with certain
of these texts – enumerate GOALIE/ TREP/AOWRITER/ ASH/NMB/ODNIGHT/SDG/ -
experiences that alerted me to heretofore unimagined possibilities in the realm
of what might be feasible in literary representation and affecting of readers in a variety of ways and I felt that I was
at least fortunate in respect of these discoveries which I will now enumerate
prior to homing in on the occasion for this essay, a detailed review of
Handke’s last major epic, MORAVIAN NIGHT as translated into American English by
Krishna Winston.
II GOALIE
III-LEFT HANDED
IV-HOMECOMING
V – REPETITION
VI-AFTERNOON
VII-NO-MAN’S BAY
VIII-ONE DARK NIGHT
IX-SIERRA DEL GREDOS
X-MORAVIAN
Excursus on Reality
& Autobiography
X-a-CORDULA
X-b-KOSOVO
X-c-NORTHWEST SPAIN
X-d-THURINGIA
X-e-
