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THE GREAT FALL
By Peter Handke
Translated by Krishna Winston
Seagull Books, distr. U. Of Chicago Press
https://tinyurl.com/y9om2d49
Has there ever been a writer
like Austro-German-Slovenian author Peter Handke? Or one approximating him?
Since 1964 Handke has published three dozen works of prose, two
dozen on the shorter side compared to half a dozen of epic-length; as well
as two dozen plays, and a few films, most of which work is available in
translation - yet Handke does not repeat himself. He has won just about
every prize for prose expect the Nobel and for the theater the Ibsen
Prize, the prize for drama. During the course of these
fifty plus years the great walker that Handke has become has explored
landscapes as varied as the French Picardie, the Spanish Del
Gredos, the Slovenian Carso and the region near Paris
where he has lived the past twenty five years and that he calls „No-Man’s-Bay”;
and a burgeoning self. The act of reading his oeuvre provides a
unique experience, that differs from work to work; reviewing Handke thus is
demanding, an effort that repays itself, most times, in the form of great
pleasure.
However,
if you did not know identity or nationality of the author of the just published
The Great Fall, chances are, reading
its first chapter, you would say that it was of French origin; if truly
well-read you might even consider that its hyper-observant, finely detailing
author might be Peter Handke, and not a French wench. For, The Great
Fall has a most misleading first chapter: a man wakes up in
a bed not his own,
"That day, the
one that ended with the Great Fall, began with a morning storm. The man, the
one who is to be the subject of this narration, was awakened by a powerful
thunderclap. The house, along with the bed, will have trembled and for a long
moment will have continued to shake. Moment: that had no connection to the man
lying there. Frightened out of his sleep, he kept his eyes closed and waited --
how would the event continue." {scott abbott’s tranlsation]
it is that of a long-time - it turns out -
sleeping buddy whom he claims not to love, and which seems fine with her; she
is already off to work; but, though the house still holds a few mysteries for
its long-time visitor – he busies himself putting it in order as though he was
the woman’s man-servant-house-husband.
It’s a wonderful chapter with a Handkean thunderstorm and rain, and fantasy can
imagine all kinds of erotic complications, especially if you know of the then
aging layabroad’s perhaps still complicated erotic life. – Great
Fall’s completion date is 2011, Handke was a nearly 70 year young
daily walker who is having fun claiming that the book was written in the
redneck town of Great Falls, Montana, a town that the world traveler visited
once when his friend Wim Wenders was filming there.
His chores completed, the protagonist – an actor, a star
actor, is Handke’s personae this time around – not an archaelogist or geolgist
- a fact that ought to alert the reader that more than the usual sleight of
hand business might be afoot - sets out on a big walk from its outskirts to
Paris, and he has the characterist shoelace problems of Handke’s
protagonists-personae; and, those familiar with Handke’s immense and varied
walking oeuvre, will not be surprised to have the surrogate Handke walk
backwards a few times, even up an incline this once. Moreover, the symbol
hunters among the readers will notice any number of minor mishaps, a lemon seed
becomes frustratingly lost under a bed, a coffee mug falls and shatters – ah
premonitions of a „big fall” – well let me clue you in right now, there is no
„great fall” as little as the books was written in „Great Falls” Montana.
However,
for the next seven of its nine chapters – that is not until near the end -
there is really no mention of the house or the woman, although she enchants him
at an eatery in Paris without his recognizing her at first – one of the actor’s
numerous foibles being the inability recognize those closest to him in an
unfamiliar setting. By the end of the book - that cuts short the imminent
consummation - great love it seems has set in for that woman. „The face of a
beautiful woman is a gate to paradize” the hater of veils states at one point.
The
Great Fall is one of Handke’s many
walking books, but a walking book of slow progress with many halts for fine and
thorough and succinct exploration of a dozen or so extraordinary incidents, and
near endless self-interrogating dialogue with himself, as he wends walks hops
gropes slithers his way in truly adventurous and at times near animalistic
fashion from the Paris outskits to the center of town – the book could lop off
the first chapter and substitute the wonderful opening of Alexia, the
Fruitthief
- with the protagonist’s bare foot receiving the first bee-sting
of the year - written six years later, also a summer book, that has for its
narrator Peter Handke as dweller of the Noman’s-Bay of My Year in the
Noman’s Bay and which refers to The Great Fall at a
significant moment. Would anyone object to Handke titeling Great Fall „A Peter Handke Walk to the Center of
Paris”? This strikes me as a summa of Handke Paris Walker’s best! The
strongest experiences not necessarily the most pleasant of course. And if you
want to interpret that walk – overll - as one to hell, or yet another of his
trek’s to Golgotha, don’t let me stop you.
Readers of Afternoon of a Writer,
Handke’s short projection-drenched projection-screen walking
novel of 1988, will be intrigued yet disappointed in the matter of Handke
projecting in Great Fall, but for a few moments; doing so
especially with the theme of helping and saving; that is, obviously, the actor
being in need to be saved himself, as has been the case for decades, or at
least since Tilman Moser noted as much in his piece on the 1974 A
Moment of True Feeling.
Not
that Handke had more but the briefest truck with the Tilman Moser’s of this
world as you can note in his Weight of the World.
Nor
does the incremental walk that is The Great Fall, - unlike
e.g. The Repetition
- induce any kind of walking pace in me, but is
an instance of Handke stringing together fascinating - initially unrelated -
incidents and observations accumulated during those many walks, and whose
cumulation as he penetrates further into Paris become darkly visionary. There
is a streak of violence and sense of a deeply frayed society running through
the incidents that culminates in a presidential address and mass demonstration
in the center city, but for an extraordinary lunch that the actor – accidently,
courtesy of a chapel’s oddly attractive one-note tolling - shares with a
working class mechanic priest. That scene itself is worth the price of
admission as is each of these self-contained and sufficiently dramatic
portraits. However, as one of Handke’s walking books – 60 k words long or short
- it therefore makes slow progress, and the progress - when described - can be
astonishingly grueling - unimaginable so to railway, plane or bus visitor.
As
the actor leaves the house he first has to work his way through a forest that
has a „forest madman” who will remind the Handke reader of a similar creature
in Handke’s great play Voyage by Dugout – The Play abobt the Film about
the War [fn] who stinks like a cadaver and emits vile curses for
everyone to shut up – I recognized him as one of these dispersed by the
Yugoslav wars living in a reconstituting prairie here in Seattle, a big Slavic
guy, scared like the proverbial little girl. „Where are you from?” – I wanted
to know his tribe - „Here, Seattle.” He and his single blanket wouldn’t even
let me buy him a cup of coffee. What those people did to each other! Civil wars
seem indeed to be the worst.
He
comes on the once refugium of a once carpenter apprentice, aged 16 like his own
son. He notes the changing sky. It is a transitional chapter and nature appears
to be in transition too. He also engages in some truly odd asides or mental
speculations, perhaps just
to keep himself from being bored: various items are transformed into what one
would generically call "fools gold" of every kind, meant to trick
potential fellow walker into being educated and accurately informed. Our actor
has a fine way of working his way directly over just about any kind of
obstacle. The immigrant he calls the last man on earth, but then forbids
himself such grim thoughts. This chapter, that contains no end of beautiful
observations of nature, ends on this fairly somber note.
Once
out of the forest the actor encounters, in one outlieing region numerous of the
aging demented being taken for their daily shuffle. He comes upon an old
acquaintance, once neighbor friend in a different country, who too has lost his
marbles, on the Gobi desert – but The Great Fall, for those in a
comparing frame of mind, is nothing like that projection screen for
readers Afternoon of the Writer where ample room is
left for the reader-writer to imagine himself on such an walk and where Handke
projects so much of his innerworld – his fears, his wishes, murderous impulses,
inverted grandiosity, very much in the subtly ironic manner of his favorite
Goethe’s Elective Affinit;, justfied satisfaction, as well of
course as the finest lyrical description of a walk down the Salzburg’s
Moenchsberg and through town and time spent in a grim dive and back up-hill –
an account of just a few hours.
There
are the juvenile gangs in districts closer to town. At a huge deserted railway
yard the actor is waylaid by two cops who pounce on him as only cops with too
liitle work can and who suspect and treat him, a foreigner, as a terrorist and
to the third degree – I have had similar encounters in the most deserted
strethes in an over-policed world – but the mere show of my out of date and
possibly fake – how could they tell? NY City Press I.D and they are gone
like the wind that brought them, no apologies.
The
star actor is on his way to Paris to receive an award from the nation’s
president [during the course of his ruminations he decides to skip the
ceremony] and to play, in a film, an
amok-running madman - a beserker character out of Handke’s psyche from as far
back as the three long fuguing poems in Nonsense & Happiness [fn]
analytic-comments.blogspot.com/2009/06/fugueing-section-from-part-ii-of-psycho.html
and recurring ever since, if you are familiar with his texts
and their marvelous surfeits, of the affinity Handke feels with the idiots he
runs into – a high end autist’s affinity it is. - At a significant moment,
the actor – described as being on the order of a DeNiro who „becomes the raging
bull” – sees an amok-runner staring at him from the Metro window and then
realizes that that amok-runner is a reflection of himself! It is one of those
great instances of Handke’s projecting, and realizing it, and perhaps merely
playing - though in a superbly convincing manner - will then extirpate that
impulse once and for all? - and Handke leaves it at that and does not, as he has
not in the past fifty plus years that I have been translating and reading
amok-running texts of his, seek to fathom the origin of or persistence of that
impulse. At another point, Handke’s supremely sensitive
antennae project world-wide imminent road-rage breaking out as even the
closest of neighbors turn on each other and Handke makes it a point to discount
what he terms the suggestion of „psycho-physicists” that the explosion of
aggression is due to a lack of inter-European wars during the past 75
years. Well no, „pscho-physicists”
in the form of those educated by Kohut in Self Psychology - which meanwhile has
indeed defined the quarks of the self to the same degree that modern physics
has sub-atomic particles - has far more refined notions why generation upon
generation of psychic deprivation in a world of capitalist competition and
the culture industry and political falsehood and the false promises of
advertising and their consequences have a dire effect on the emotional
household of the individual, creating powder kegs – across all class lines!
Handke, great activist writer, and descriptor, continuous developer of the
capacity of prose narration, one of the best antennae, once again shows
his backwardness in matters state of the art of psychology; it persists since
it manifested itself in some incredibly backward comments on narcissism in the
otherwise great One Dark Night I Left My Silent House. Adorno,
in other words, too would disapprove!
The
actor is a moody fellow. At one point a starvation artist’s hunger seizes him –
‘Hadn’t he had breakfast among all the stuff he was doing at that house?’
occurred to me – as well hunger to consume his woman whom he must have consumed
to previous night to wake up so well-disposed. All around horny
fellow you conclude. But soon enough there will be a down moment.
Great
Fall being the account of a single day’s walk one
is tempted to compare it to The Afternoon of the Writer. Moments
of misanthropism
to be sure as the sight of mindless groupings; wonderful
long descriptions of the light and dark of the sky as the day progresses and
the actor enters an equally light entrancing Paris and the heat-lightning
provides premonitions of a second thunderstorm. The actor’s maddening walkabout
there - after a frightful mass assembly that viewed the president’s
declaration of war has broken up - will remind all those who have wandered
about at night in a heavily peopled megalopolis and without a clear goal
and too much time on their hands - a sequence rendered in an astonishingly
film-like intense manner - I can’t summarize in any other way but to say that
it becomes an extraordinary experience for the reader; Handke at his best.
The
novel’s last sentence „and then there was the Great Fall” – as the actor is
about to I suppose marry this woman – the same woman as the previous night!-
seven years later in the Fruitthief Handke is – hear hear! –
starts to fancy the „marriage sacrement”! – is a true puzzle; until you
realize that Handke likes to sign off with „infinitely mysterious,” as he
does his Fruitthief and some other titles, and I think this
final sentence is just another most intriguing way of doing so – no need for a
fall of any kind.
Seagull,
now Handke’s second English language publisher have done a bang-up job with a
book on the same high order as all of Handke’s shorter novels.
Krishna Winston’s translation is a true
delight; and I only wish that Seagull issue some of the other importat titles
that Farrar, Straus has neglected. Handke’s second novel Der Hausierer, the
nearly socialist realist portrait of a saltworks Kali; and a
number of all important notebook condensations Geschichte des
Bleistift’s, Gestern Unterwegs [avaiblable in translation into Romance
languages], along the line of its sole exmaple that exists in English, the so
revelatory Weight of thre World.
-
NOTES
Fn] That forest madman is also a
real person and has become a Serbian facebook friend of mine and is an instance
where Handke’s impulse to „save” was successful. Novo was arrested in Germany
for having failed to prevent a human rights violation during the Yugoslav
wars - imagine that, the successors of
the Nazi Reich will arrest a foreign national for not stopping a war crime!
Handke, hearing of the case, managed to get Novo released and then was best man
at his wedding.
https://tinyurl.com/y8awptpz
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