FORTHCOMING ALSO WILL BE A LONG OPEN LETTER TO THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR RE MCDONALD'S PIECE ON HANDKE

by early next week, of the 19th of march, i will send a long open letter to the AMERICAN SCHOLAR re michael mcdonald's below idio-tack on handke.


Peter Handke "is the strongest, most inventive writer to have emerged in German literature since, well, Günter Grass". But should we, for this reason, forgive him his admiration for Milosevic? Michael McDonald thinks not and explains so in an essay (unfortunately not online), quoting, with a certain degree of bitterness, Grass, who said the genius was no excuse for dangerous nonsense. But what if Handke is no genius? Because truth, in McDonald's opinion, has little to do with Handke's romantic understanding of writing. "By concentrating with surgical precision on the physical details of life, Handke can paint a horrifying image of the mechanical numbness of everyday habit. But is what he describes really life? Literature is many things, but it wouldn't be worthy of our attention if it didn't have something to do with human psychology—from which Handke clearly wishes to escape. Literature that deals exclusively with the external forms of life ends up being repetitive and trivial—which is what Handke's writing often is. His reputation as a writer is unlikely to survive except in textbooks. Who reads (outside of the classroom) Robbe-Grillet and the other nouveaux romanciers from whom Handke has learned so much?" Maybe Handke would answer, cooly, that 2+2=5 and refer to an article by Robert Orsi. Orsi is Catholic and empiricist. And because of this, he longs for a radical, "abundant" empiricism of visible and invisible realities. The invisible real – such as the bloody tears of a Madonna statue – is embarrassing for Protestants. "The challenge is to go beyond saying 'this was real in her experience' to describe how the real - whether it's the Holy Spirit at a Pentecostal meeting or the Virgin Mary on a hillside or a vision of paradise so compelling that people will kill for it - finds presence, existence, and power in space and time, how it becomes as real as guns and stones and bread, and then how the real in turn acts as an agent for itself in history. An abundant empiricism of the real allows us to probe the conditions of such creativity in culture, where 2+2=5, for better or worse, meaning that the sum of 2+2 can also be cruelty and violence, cultural dissolution as well as cultural innovation."