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Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach: Das
stehende Jetzt. Die Notizbücher von Peter Handke. Gespräch mit dem Autor und
Essays von Ulrich von Bülow.
Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, Marbach am Neckar 2018.
150 Seiten, 18,00 EUR.
ISBN-13: 9783944469393
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Das stehende Jetzt / Hic Nunc
for me is the Handke book of the year 2018, Handke
himself for once did not publish anything new but for that summa, his
Bibliothek
and my review of this treasure trove will be a gradual one @:
https://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2018/12/comments-on-von-bulow-handkes-das.html
ALSO SEE:
[1] First Posting: early December 2018
Von Buelow’s text consists of
[a] an interview with Handke about his notebooks endeavor, a conversation
I will not try to condense here - it makes for essential reading if you are
interested in deciphering the notebooks and their importance for the DIMENSION
of Handke’s oeuvre that consists of journal extracts:
WEIGHT OF THE WORLD/ DAS GEWICHT DER WELT
https://www.amazon.com/Weight-World-English-German/dp/0020514905
DIE GESCHICHTE DES BLEISTIFSTS [THE HISTRORY OF THE PENCIL]
https://www.amazon.de/Die-Geschichte-Bleistifts-suhrkamp-taschenbuch/dp/3518376497
AM FELSFENSTER, MORGENS/ MORNINGS, GAZING OUT THROUGH THE BOULDER WINDOW
https://www.amazon.de/Am-Felsfenster-morgens-Ortszeiten-1982-1987/dp/3423127430
/ FANTASIES OF
REPETITION
https://www.suhrkamp.de/suchen?s=FANTASIEN+DER+WIEDERHOLUNG&x=15&y=15
/ YESTERDAY, ON THE ROAD
https://www.suhrkamp.de/suchen?s=GESTERN+UNTWERWEGS&x=17&y=11
https://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/02/vor-der-baumschattenwand-nachts.html
that derive thence; and, of course, to see to what degree if any the
notebooks are work books, drafts - what have you - for the narratives, the
stage work and the essays. – Bon voyage to the scholar eyes that enter those
tickets!
Let me immediately note that I disagree with von Buelow in too readily
buying Handke’s claim that the notebooks, the 221 one it is I think now in the
Archive’s posession, which have their inception in 1975, are not diaries
– best as I can tell who appears in the journals and witnessed his note taking
and some of their locations
https://handke-scholar.blogspot.com/2018/08/notizbuecher-von-peter-handke-mein.html
the Notizbuecher are also Tagebuecher, no matter Handke’s
1975 wish to the contrary – as a matter how can they not also be diaries! – Hic
Nunc~– and this would seem to be one of many instances when the distinction- obsessed
Handke is unnecessarily but characteristically finicky.
Best to my knowledge such intense notebook keeping is unique among
writers, although one could maintain that literary culture, also in German
letters, has been building up to something as monumental as this endeavor, off-hand
and irrelevantly Robert Musil and Harry Graf Kessler come to mind. Some truths
are only to be found in these leavings – to sell such bulk and make most of it publicly
available – note Gregor Keuschnig/ Lothar Struck’s fine piece in
Literaturkritik that discusses constraints on access:
is testimony to Handke’s insatiable exhibitionism – but I don’t think the
world is a Backfisch who will blush in the wanted embarrassment from that kind
of contact, but - considering the marvel that much of the work affords - will
be grateful to the scholars that take the trouble to decipher and relate… And how multi-dimensional the
artist and person becomes by showing off so many sides of himself, and as
anything but a saint prevaricates not all that dreadfully or that often.
A shame that Handke did not ctd. to pursue work with the analyst he saw
in Paris in the early 70s and who confessed to Handke that, he, too, [a
Catholic analyst?], felt the weight of the cross at Eastertime, [vide Weight of the World] and we might have some
years of what the discipline calls “process notes,” to lend yet a further
dimension, aside how an analysis might have reflected itself in Handke’s
thinking or learning to think – after all, Handke, initially stood very much
under the influence of Wittgenstein’s linguistics, but as von Buelow shows,
especially while at work, preparatorily, for the prose text of Langsame Heimkehr, that is in Alaska,
was impressed by Heidegger, whose work he regarded at other times as resistant
as Beton
– and though the very name Heidegger elicits revulsion in me, I can
appreciate Handke thinking about the problematics of poetic endeavor in a
scientific age, and taking recourse to Heideggerian formulations about “being”
– formulations that Wittenstein would hoot at with a thousand owls!
I agree entirely with von Buelow when he notes Handke’s Deskriptor phenomenology – certainly
nothing new in literature at least since Stephen Deadalus availed himself of
the metaphor of the old woman in the Rembrandt painting paring her fingernails
as the proper – and scientific! – somewhat dissociated objectivist attitude,
though note how much gentler and kind and empathic Handke’s phenomenology
becomes, nay was as of the beginning. What needs to be kept in mind is that
Handke is twice as sensitive as the ordinary monkey, his autistic sensitivity,
which can lead to over-stimulation during stressful periods, a lack of the
equivalent dampers, during the period subsequent to his mother’s suicide nd the
first wife splitting – the three long ever more stormy poems in NONSENSE AND
HAPPINESS
https://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/2009/06/fugueing-section-from-part-ii-of-psycho.html
How much more precisely Handke sees was something I noted during his 1971
visit to New York, when he asked me how old I was, a matter on which I was not
dead certain at the time, having been born at the very end of 1935. His reply
to my answer was: “I thought you were a year older.” On getting hold of my
birth certificate he was proved right. Someone whose eyes are so eagle-like
also notices that the moon is one degree waxier or waner and is the spookier
for that! And this amplification holds true for all senses. No wonder that he
murders a few dozen suburban leaf blower each autumn!
Aside the interview, von Bulow after commenting on the the notebooks
focuses on two identifiable themes or obsessions of Handke’s that manifest
themselves ther:
[2] Heidegger makes an appearance during Handke’s Alaska trip that
produced the narrative of A SLOW HOMECOMING and von Buelow devotes some pages
to [3] Handke’s involvement with Spinoza’s materialism and his pantheistic
equivalence of nature and God, whic led me to speculate that Handke’s
involvement with a good pscho-somaticist – very much in Spinoza’s tradition - might
have a gone a long way to relieving his psychosomatic heart troubles, whose
symtom’s Handke over these decades appears to have sought to walk off.
So much, then, for the first installment of this commentary. Let me know
if you are interested in receiving a PDF of it and the thought I am devoting to
this wonderful book and to the Notizbuecher. Michael Roloff, December 3, 2018
Part II:
Prior to resuming my comments on the effect of A SLOW HOMECOMING on me in
resolving a profound transference developed during nine-month traipsing and
boating flying and driving all over the vast interior of Alaska….
# II-a of II a-b-c & I, II, III
See:
of my comments on Von Buelow’s DAS STEHENDE JETZT addresses what came as
the biggest surprise from Von Buelow’s perusal of Handke’s Notizbuecher:
For one, Klaus von Buelow’s reading of Handke’s NOTEBOOKS [p. 142-3]
leads one to believe that Handke does not believe in cause and effect – preferring
a kind if associative shadowing
procedure for his phenomenologically notating text; which strikes me as fine
for a text such as THE LESSON OF ST. VICTOIRE, where it manifests as a kind of
impressionism, which Handke demonstrates most thoroughly in the anxiety play
novel DER HAUSIERER
a consciousness registering all
around and specific ominousness – Handke’s phase where he regarded himself as
the “New Kafka” – mid to early 70s.
This is a wonderful poetic way of proceeding in giving intimations in a highly
aesthetic manner, pretty much in the same way as e.g.. Virginia Wolfe does in THE WAVES.
However, this way of proceeding got
Handke into deep hot water for his first Yugoslav war trip account A JOURNEY TO
THE RIVERS – see https://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/
for that Alpine Range of trouble
where he even made a point of saying that he was not doing anything
different from what he had been doing all along.
[I will not dissertate on the attacks that have been launched on the phenomenological
procedure} but the reception both in Europe and in the USA at the very least
wanted him to repeat, if possible in their own condemning language, that there
was only on responsible party and one particular evil perpetrator… and in fact
Handke might have made life easier for himself if he had defended his position
that it was premature to condemn Milosevic and the causes for the all around
mayhem were too complicated certainly for the blaming of a single tribe, that
is, the Serbs if he had proceeded within the continuum of accustomed rational
or standard polemic style.
Though Handke occasionally hinted
at the time - in this matter - that the
German recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence played a role in the
disintegration, Handke – who recently accused himself of being or having been hugely
stupid – at that time really paid no heed to cause and effect that might hav explained
if only to himself how he as Lothario got himself into so much hot water that
one morning he then wakes up and the neglected and insulted wife who has fled
the coop, providing a shock that leads to years of age and whose resulting
panic attacks land him in a hospital, but little waking in the matter that Lothario-like
being can have
until you’re up the Rio Grande at
Truth and Consequences
and start to kiss the Elephant’s Butte
or drown in it!
– I am speculating here, though
perfectly ordinary homo sapiens in some ways, yet with his ultra-high
sensitivity autism and childhood trauma as a ultra love child I cannot tell
what kinds of denial Handke might practice subliminally – thus, a mystery ensues
– why is or was the genius formalist writer so unnecessarily profoundly stupid –
arrogance????.
That Handke does not believe in
cause and effect also characterizes the absence of the usual psychological
motivation of his characters, say LEFT HANDED WOMAN, to which the NY Time’s Anatol Broyard objected so
violently – but which does not bother me, who once got himself trained as an
psychoanalyst who is absolutely happy not to know the why and wherefores of the
LHW’s sudden resolve to leave her husband – for as soon as I start to speculate
on the possibly highly complicated set of circumstances that leads to the
existential shock the shock and the fundamental mystery starts to be softened,
disappear. – and for whatever reason Handke wrote that particular novella at that
time – perhaps as gambit to counter his wife having left him. https://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/left-handed-woman-scott-abbott-and-few.html
But let me - as translator, and thus as close reader, of at least some of
his great texts – note that Handke, however, seems to believe and practice
artistic logic of all kinds, very much within the tradition of at least Western
if not literature in it entirety going back for thousands of years, and perhaps
exercising artistic logic and the requisite sensitivities I suggest might be at
least a kind of surrogate in everyday living to a constant awareness of the
constant operation of the myriad of cause and effects at whose mercy we exist.
Next, for the New Year, II-b HANDKE’S RECOURSE TO SPINOZA ETHICS
OF PRODUCING JOY, take a look at Peter Strasser’s Der
Freudenstoff: Zu Handke eine Philosophie
https://tinyurl.com/ybe4485j
