ROLOFF’S CASE WHY PETER HANDKE
THE BEST AND MOST IMPORTANT LIVING WRITER
Perhaps you will indulge my below brief? Not just for Handke’s sake,
but for literature, for the logos for whose sake, at least best as a not total
idiot like myself can tell, has done more in recent memory to salvage and
elaborate.
However, near invariably, ever since his intervention in behalf of
“justice for Serbia” in the early 90s, not just he but his work, initially well
if of course imperfectly received, has been defamed in the U.S, and
English-speaking domains for what I have come to regard not as just another
marvelous exhibitionist and defiant performance of his, but an act of great
courage – as a German-Austrian Slovenian he might well have left the matter
with Slovenia becoming independent. Folks basically keep reviewing the same “Journeys to the River” that upset them
so much in the 90s, and have neither read his preceding or subsequent Yugoslav-centered
texts. I myself, who feel ambivalent about Handke as a person, for cause, then
must have spent at least a year of my life mucking around the Yugoslav
troubles, not what I thought I would be doing.
Handke’s love - one cannot argue with love, can one? - for the 2nd Federation,
and its inheritor defender, Serbia, overcame whatever inhibitions, and what his
then closest friends in Paris advised.
Here two links that tell the story of the sorry U.S Handke
reception.
However, you may feel about the Yugoslav matter, or how differently
and less contentiously Handke might have dealt with it, his work, starting I
would say with his great 1981 dramatic poem WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES [Ariadne
Press] and the novel part of his “Long Homecoming” cycle, and his first walking
book, THE REPETIION [1985], provides its readers with increasingly richer
experiences, in the instance of Homecoming of an encounter
with Alaska as nature as such… see my
The walking rhythms of The Repetition induced in me a
profound sense of being. Mannheim does a creditable job in having similar
pacing in the translation, though in general I far prefer his current prose
translator, Krishna Winston except in those instances when she comes a cropper
at difficult critical instances.
I have friends who share my conviction that the end – the
Berg und Tal Fahrt of SIERRA DEL GREDOS - is the greatest
ending ever written; if you take a peak at the beginning of Gredos you
will find a few pages that describe the root system of one the trees that were
felled by the Orkan that hit Northern France in the late 90s – as finely
perceived as a Vermeer painting or as Eudora Welty describe matters in
her Oranges – her peeling
of her pear made a lasting impression.
The opening of the epic narrative Moravian Night manifest
the most extraordinary gradualness and artfulness – if only for his artfulness
ought the mature Handke be praised to the skies.
The most recently – summer 2018 - published translation of his
work, THE GREAT FALL
has a similar though equally powerful but shorter denouement to that
of Gredos.
What most likely – if we are to believe him – is the last of his five
epics – the 2017 Alexia, the Fruit Thief [following The
Repetition, the 1994 One Year in the No-Man’s Bay, the 2000 Across
the Sierra del Gredos, and the 2007 Moravian Night] is
a most joyous and adventurous exploration of the French Picardie.
I read large stretches of it with the same excitement that I read Karl
May’s adventure stories as a youngster. Handke being Handke and wanting to
assure future scholarly attention to his work – next to Goethe and Kafka he is
already the third most written about German author and his notebooks are shared
between the Austrian and German national archives and are accessible on line
– gets the scholar mice on their way by claiming, also in interviews,
that Wolfram von Eschenbach’s 13th century Willehalm stands
in back of Alexia! Such a sly bastard!
It turns out that young Handke practiced writing the way Yehudi
Menuhin did the violin & as a twenty-something reviewer for Austrian Radio
it looks as though he was possessed of all critical knowledge and instruments!
As dramatist
Handke has Shakespearean dimension; of especial to interest to you
might be the great political dramatic text, the best thing that he got
immediately out of his involvement in Yugoslavia, Dugout Canoe, the
Play about the Film about the War’; its first rate translation by Scott
Abbott can be found in the Spring 2016 issue of Performing Arts Journal -
Canoe is at least one step beyond Brecht in that it manifests the
awareness of media as god.
One first rate piece - 1997 Zurüstungen für die Unsterblichkeit. Königsdrama, (Preparations for Immortality: A Royal Drama), play is the only one
that remains untranslated and Handke, last time I saw him, expressed
reservations about Kaspar – which takes off from the Kaspar
Hauser legend - one of his most famous and often done major plays – and its
slavish translator then dwelled on what one might object to in such a
tour de force about language and politics [well worth doing again this point!]:
that it was a bit noisy, hysterical, the way Oedipal contentions with a father
can be, perhaps nihilistic in its ending, too anarchist?
For me the most fruitful approach to all his work, especially the
plays - in conscious disregard of the usual literary categories - is to regard
them as happenings and, thus, to dwell on the experiences that
they create. Several of the plays - THE RIDE ACROSS LAKE
CONSTANCE & THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER - achieve
catharsis, in mysterious – by Aristotelian or Brechtian/ non-Aristotelian, but
in seemingly positivist and therefore that is expected ways, Ride via the
use of Wittgensteinian language game-querying breaks down the resistance of the
audience, at least mine who as the translator of anything but a “reading play”
had really no idea what to expect from a performance: certainly not such a
liberating experience as I would not have
again until I had what are called “good hours” while doing a psychanalysis. - Hour,
the play – it is wordless - does something similar via an unending succession
of change of images of the personages that appear in different, often fairy-tale
garb; something subliminally mesmerizing occurs. Hour also manifests
Handke as a supreme linguistic virtuoso: He takes you by your syntax as though
it was your braid and does not let go until Z – it is one of the very great
texts!
The other great plays are the prize winning family resistance drama
2012 Storm Still, The Art of Asking, and of course his very
first and still amazing essay-play Offending the Audience. And
I think the last work I will have translated, the 2010 play that gets to the
heart of pornography and erotic love, The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez.
The work starting with the
greatest and richest play, the 1981 Walk
About the Villages and 1985 The
Repetition certainly came as a huge surprise to this translator who was
well aware that Handke initially presented himself as “the new Kafka” – justly
so it would seem if you take a look at the first novels and plays which on
first glance seem rife with Kafkaesque anxiety – yet there he was, a kid with a
Beatles haircut, cheerful and irreverent, and if you take a look at novels and
plays like My Foot My Tutor, Radio Play One, Goalies Anxiety and Die
Hornissen & Der Hausierer, rather amazingly - though they play
with anxiety they end up dispelling and overcoming it, in the most literary
ways! An odd use to which to put literature until you find out that writing
from his earliest beginning was a way for him to still his anxiety – and ample
reason for profound intra-psychic anxiety existed – an instance that once again
proves Freud’s conversion theory! - not just because of the bombing attacks to
which he was subjected in Berlin as of 1943 [I in Bremen had my initial
bombing trauma in Spring 1940], but because he – love child of love children if
ever there was - was exposed, as of age two, to a decade of brutal primal
scenes – his mother married a comrade of the married German soldier love of her
life and Handke became the surrogate love object – and I think mother love in
this instance then overcame and continuous to instill joy into his prose – the
Austrian literateur Peter Strasser even wrote a book to the effect of Handke’s
work instilling joy Der Freudenstoff: Zu Handke eine
Philosophie http://www.worldcat.org/title/freudenstoff-zu-handke-eine-philosophie/oclc/22723646
Not that an excess of mother love cannot get a young
layabroad into a heap of trouble. Subsequent the shock of his mother’s suicide
in 1971 [see Sorrow Beyond Dreams] his first wife left the
layabroad who if not neglecting her was writing or tarrying with broads who all
wanted to get laid! The twin abandonment nearly drove him to suicide: see the
three long poems of Nonsense & Happiness – where he
loved the word “humbug” I found for what was bugging him.
There is an early play,
Quodlibet, that points to what Handke is about, Quodlibet –
“the play that catches the conscience of the king” [the audience now is king!]
works on the principle of auditory hallucination – that is, it wishes to make
the audience aware of its own projections; activist as the plays are Handke’s
novels are projection screens – making you aware of aspects of yourself, while
Handke becomes a master narrator, perhaps that is all, but what an all it is, that literature can
achieve as well as to teach us to read by testing the limits of syntax and of the duree of reading. Goalie, as of page one, syntactically
involves the reader in the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic! Later, in the
90s One Dark Night I Left my Silent House he writes in dream
syntax, the novel Absence in being read is experienced as a
film! Del Gredos, whose protagonist is a bankieress who used
to be an actress, has sudden passages which are experienced as film – and I
recall shaking my head at the wizard’s sleight of hand. All this magic of
course is not only done to show “Look Ma, no hands” but has a kinesthetic
effect that induces renovating catharses. - Handke wrote me, around the time he
completed the mid-70s rather suicidal A Moment of True Feeling - redeemed
by the sight of a reminder that he had a child to take care of - that he now
was capable of doing everything he wanted with words, and I imagine that these
technical feats – the sort of thing that has always interested this aging
Joycean – proves that he was not boasting. His prose, initially influenced
by the nouveauists, even then warmer, has become the supplest
of instruments that shows how he has incorporated the great European and
American prose stylists, perhaps Arab too since he reads Arabic.
I should not fail to mention two further dimensions: his assaying work
as I call his novel way of exploring certain subjects – the Jukebox, fatigue,
being a fool for mushrooms, what it meant as boarding school kid to seek refuge
in the shithouse – by simultaneously anchoring these explorations in
examinations of place. Three Essays was published a few years
ago, and the remainder are in the works. To these assaying I would add Don
Juan, as told by himself, a gem that the Nabokovians ought to compare
with that master’s work. – In other words, Handke creates unique works of art.
The other important dimension is that Handke has published half a
dozen excerpts from his note books that show the writer constantly “cooking” a
jazz writer might say, of which unfortunately only the first, The
Weight of the World exists in English – as to exhibiting your self how
much else is there one might do? All translated into the Romance languages
which have been kinder to Handke.
Frank Kermode initially introduced Handke to the U.S and
English-speaking world as a model modernist
without deep knowledge of its Austrian variant. - I must say I, too,
was unreflectively so at one time, a Poundian ABC of Reading aficionado
who thought a “magazine” was the thing but who eventually gave thought to
what the modernism wanted after all its brush clearing; that is, to return to,
in Pound’s case, a large variety of beautiful past matters; that is, modernism
contained the germ not just of renovation but of deeply reactionary matters.- Handke’s chief director, the great Klaus
Peymann, teased him a few years ago by observing that Handke had become
touchingly conservative! It appears that his obsession with newspapers has
ceased but for the reading of Parisien & a soccer paper,
his TV broke down five years ago & has not been repaired, occasionally he
has friends over and they listen to a match! And in the matter of being at the
forefront of psychology, he continues to be a laggard, no matter how
progressive his prose innovations.
Handke uses his own life as the sources for his prose texts and drama
in the instance of the Slovenian resistance family play Storm Still,
and in that fashion exhibits what I call the Yoknapatawpha of his self.
Handke takes pride in not repeating himself, but only explores, I
would say, certain formal possibilities to their limits, the way a musician
might, and thus manifests his formalist origins, he regards himself as a
realist, and as a prose writer certainly stands in the great tradition, but he
is never a naturalist of any kind – which is part of the problem here in the
USA, which does not grow but merely keeps duplicating itself.
The play Walk About the Villages its rhythms
reverberate through his texts for many years; it became a touchstone of his;
unfortunately Farrar Straus did not see fit to publish his great diary
excerpt The History of the Pencil, which shows what thought he gave to Villages as it
developed and his recourse to Greek drama of which he, a great translator from
half a dozen languages, has translated several, as he has Shakespeare.
FSG - where he has had at least ten different mostly assigned editors in the 50
years that he has been their author - failed to do Pencil despite the success of the first of these kinds of
compilations, of Weight of the World, a depressive’s Nietzsche
title! Aside being a love child intra-uterine Handke absorbed, anaclytically,
his mother’s depression upon his actual father not marrying her – so one might
suppose if one considers mother and son’s similar dispositions. – I think Handke
knew fairly early on, upon deciding to live at the outskirts of a big city in
the early 70s, that he would be a classic; he has done all the things that the
great German classical and romantic poets have done, in original ways.
Handke is not a psychological writer – vide Left-Handed Woman
– and there are folks whom this bothers, but not psychoanalytically
trained me, who appreciates Handke’s kind of existentialism.
It is not that he does manifest moments, such as in the most recent
marvel that I call ALEXIA, FRUIT THIEF where this alleged world
traveling mid-twenties French sometimes runaway covets but one song and it is
rap by Eminem, a moment of daftness also characteristic of his
gauche behavior during his younger days which I put off to the left-overs not
of his provincial piss-pot poor origins but his highest order autism, to which
I also attribute the affinity he mentions throughout years of his texts, with
such autistic idiots – and to his autism I ascribe his ultra sensitivity, eyes
of a hawks, a bloodhounds nose, ears of a bat – I don’t know which animal had
most sensitive skin, a porpoise?
I love the guy most next to my heroic mother,
yet some of his action have made me ambivalent, which elicits the thought that
maybe that is why I haven’t become too parti pris. There are instances of
physical violence, he can lie, hates being caught with his hands in the cookie
jar [who does? After all!], and despite being one of the most generous can be
real-low-life mean; can lash out unthinkingly even against those closest to
him; suffers from certain features endemic to this enterprise - A mama’s
boy has in that respect got a bit too much of a good thing – and still lacks a
father figure but for his Slovenian grandfather, who voted for the first
Yugoslav federation in 1919. – Oh yes, by the mid-90s, as of the writing of the
magnificent portrait of six sides of an artist – My Year in the
No-Man’s Bay – the once “new Kafka” began to muse that he was the new
Goethe – in a number of respect that is indeed the case.
Enough already!
