Part A # 3/ Weller: HANDKE'S POETRY
The reading of one poem from THE INNERWORLD OF THE OUTWORLD OF THE INNERWORLD: Singular and Plural [a.k.a. "The Turk"] then, later this week, my take on Ms. Weller and the discipline's dealings with Handke's poetic texts. I use this poem sonata as the introduction to my handke drama lecture, since it is also a dramalet of sorts. It was published first in the New Yorker in English, when Howard Moss was the wonderful poetry editor. "
On a bench in the park sits a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: I am sitting on a bench in the park next to a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: We are sitting on a bench in the park, I and a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: A Turk with a thickly bandaged finger is sitting with me on a bench in a park. We are sitting on a bench in the park gazing out on the pond, and I see something swimming in the pond, and the Turk is gazing out on the pond.We are gazing at the pond, and I see an object swimming in the pond, and the Turk is gazing at the pond. We are gazing at the pond, and I see a tuft of grass, propelled by swimming ducks, making its way to the shore, and the Turk is gazing at the pond.We are gazing at the pond, and I see a tuft of grass swimming shoreward, propelled by swimming ducks, and then I see the tuft of grass floating away from the shore, propelled by ducks swimming in the opposite direction, and the Turk is gazing at the pond. We are gazing at the pond, and I see a tuft of grass that, propelled by swimming ducks, was about to be washed ashore and then, propelled by ducks swimming in the opposite direction, was about to be washed back into the middle of the pond and now, propelled by ducks intersecting the two groups of ducks that are swimming in the opposite direction, float suspended in place, and the Turk is gazing at the pond. We are gazing at the pond, and I see an object I took to be a tuft of grass or something I took to be an object that I believed was a tuft of grass suddenly disappear after it had moved in place, and I stop moving my head in time with the object on one and the same spot: that is to say, I am startled or, I am startled, that is to say, I stop moving my head in time with the object on one and the same spot, and no longer move at all, and the Turk is gazing at the pond. We are gazing at the pond, and I see a duck surfacing with a tuft of grass in its bill, and I am tired of gazing and am satisfied, and the Turk is gazing at the pond.We are gazing at the pond and, without seeing anything, I remember the sports writer who talked about death, and the Turk is gazing at the pond.
A Turk and I, we are sitting in the park on a bench and are gazing at the pond: I am sitting in the park on a bench next to a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: I am sitting on a bench in the park next to a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: next to me on the bench in the park there suddenly sits a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger which he is extending away from his other fingers: in the park on a bench sits a Turk with nine unimpaired fingers which he presses to the palms of his hands: on a bench in the park sits a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger and gazes out at the pond. "
This is what ought to be called a "self-state" text. The title of the collection THE INNERWORLD OF THE OUTERWORLD points in that direction. Elliot famously termed the phrase "objective correlative," correlative will do, objective? who is to judge? Seeming adequate, "good enough," getting close to, approximate to what?
The self and its many elves. Which and to what degree might have possessed the 26 year old Piotr Sivec-Schoenherr-Handke to put him in the state of mind to find and judge these several superficially same-seeming stanzas an adequate expression of his own self-state and sufficiently emblematic to serve as a projection screen for a potential reader? With a variety of dramas going on barely beneath, occasionally breaking through the attempt to maintain as near perfect virtuoso grammatical surface as that of the nearly unbroken surface of a pond... a state of revery.
To becalm himself in gazing, in reverying? To encorcel himself with grammatical variations. Language and body and eyes and what is beheld rocking moving in synchronicity, which breaks down on a few times...
This is a communicable state.
Self-states are grasped, conceptually, there are other graspings, most successfully by the rubric of psychoanalsis called "self-psychology."
What are the most noticeable immediate features of this text?
Well, let's start with this "Turk". He is clearly identified, the author tells us not whether he is wearing a turban as which a European or American reading this text 100 years ago might have outfitted him in their then cliche imaginations, his only real identifying feature is that he has a thickly bandaged finger [why not just a bandaged finger?], and that, as is often the case under such wounded circumstances, he is holding it away from the other fingers on that hand. He has nine unwounded fingers, two hands, at one point he is however holding his fingers away from both hands, either the pain is very great or he is as naive as a child, he might be of rural origin. Is he over-compensating? Can he not tell one hand from the other? Is this a species of imaginatively doubled pain?
We are not told which finger it is that is impaired.
Do I have a particular contemporary image of "a Turk" in my mind? Not really, but I do have a now no doubt dated one of Turkish guest workers in German railway stations.
But why not "a man", or "someone"?
Well that's not the drama of it is it? The drama would seem to entail a split, the "I" and "the Turk" who however are doing the same damned gazing, but sat down as we find out in the course of the text after the narrator was seated on the bench, next to him. Do we even need the Turk? Couldn't it just be I and my wounded finger sitting on the bench? Maybe the Turk is like the unwounded fingers that are being held at the greatest possible distance from the source of pain? Something seen, the seeing of a split. But "a Turk" might really have sat down next to Handke and then become a projection screen for his alter ego. However, the narrator is not engaged with him in the endless dialogue going on in fantasy, with one's alter ego [s].
Perhaps there really was a Turk by a pond [the poem was written in 1968 in Berlin, with a quickly increasing but then entirely un-assimilated Turkish guest worker population] whom Handke noticed and identified and empathized with [?]. It makes no difference, the very name, the pointedness of it makes him [Handke's Turk] an outsider, he is identified and identification differentiates him, he feels outside no matter what, he is different. What if instead of "the Turk" we had "A Lefthanded Woman" sitting next to the narrator, to the grammatical I? After all, linguistically, the poetic text points to the mind's involvement in grammatical formulations, their correctness adequateness, the world is being turned into language, we notice the very activity of this happening,
it fusses to try to get it right, for language not just to mimic what is going on but to be linguistically at one and the same place, language as a kind of snake skin:
and I see an object I took to be a tuft of grass or something I took to be an object that I believed was a tuft of grass suddenly disappear after it had moved in place, and I stop moving my head in time with the object on one and the same spot: that is to say, I am startled or, I am startled, that is to say, I stop moving my head in time with the object on one and the same spot, and no longer move at all,
As a matter of fact, the narrator is staring so fixedly at the tuft of grass being propelled this and that way by our delightful and delightfully distracting feathered friends that he becomes disturbed by disappearance of the tuft of grass that is being shoved around. Absence causes a disturbance. In him and in the grammaticality of the text. It is no longer declarative. Doubt, uncertainty disturb the perfect surface parallel to the disturbance that occurs in the pond with ducks diving and resurfacing. The idyll in the park is marred a little.
The reappearance of the tuft of grass resolves the disturbance; is followed by relief, the status quo ante has been achieved... A surface drama hinting at what larger dramas underwater?
Handke has said, and I believe him, that he does not revise. He does change the occasional last sentence in his texts, and as he has matured, makes alterations in galleys particularly now that he has written monstrums of the kind that he once said he never would. Whether he wrote pieces like Kaspar and Ride Across Lake Constance in full swoop? For a long time he never spent more than three months on a text, including, it appears, Die Hornissen, Der Hausierer, Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Short Letter Long Farewell, Sorrow Beyond Dreams. A Moment of True Feeling, The Lefthanded Woman... The fairly complex six-stranded [1994] 250,000 word novel "Nomansbay" was proudly woven together in one year, the sort of book that no end of U.S. authors are proud to complete by hook and by crook in 10 to 20 years, to hosannas, especially that of spouses if they have cheering spouses left, and Handke made some cuts in galleys, he could have made just a few more.
So one could fairly safely assume that "Singular and Plural" was written right there on the spot, its grammaticality points to its incidental nature, since Handke always carried a note book and pencil with him which he would produce from one second to the next. From writing so-called truly incidental poems to writing down involuntary associations in Weight of the World takes barely a half step. Incidental, occasional texts, even then tied to a place, an event.
What would you do if you sat next to someone with an injured finger? I myself, under similar circumstances, would have pointed to the finger and said: "Ola, Compadre [or "Amigo"], que pasa?" since it is far more likely for me to find myself sitting next to a homesick Central American, while I however, have little of Handke's then, homesickness left in me.
For I connect this, as per Handke, with the homesickness he felt when he went to his first boarding school, the Griffen Seminary, at age 12 I believe. Homesick for a gruesome home!? [well, not the mother wasn't, but the situation as a whole? for sure, yet there was the grandfather! The apparently monstrous stepfather]. With what Handke called "that hangnail feeling", the kind of feeling Freud's Little Hans must have endured when he thought he'd been bitten by that horse.
A gazing Turk, he keeps a thickly bandaged wounded finger away from his hand and his gaze peeled on the pond and its compliment of ducks; he is trying to distract himself, by holding the finger away from his hand, a customary act under the circumstances, and his gaze away from the finger. That the finger is wounded is an assumption, a projection. The looking away, the trying to focus on distractions is an act of defense as is the poem, the text in its entirety.
Who knows how he injured his finger? If Handke were writing a poem about a Turk who had cut his finger on a Berlin Weisswurst-making-machine, he would have told us. So there is just a wounded finger which might or might not be symbolic, but evidently sufficiently painful as to need to be disregarded as much as possible by extending the other nine unimpaired fingers away from both hands... an odd sight... is the pain that excruciating?
A wounded finger elicits some sympathy. All by himself it appears at a pond but lots of our feathered friends who during the course of the the stanzas prove more and more amusing and unpredictable, more of a distraction, worth watching. It will not be long they will come up to the two bench warmers and tug at the cuffs of their pants to be fed?
If it is symbolic and sufficiently painful, the injured finger might point to an injured sense of self. It might point to a state of continuous injury, it might or might not connect with the love child Handke's exposure, as of age two, to a decades' worth of violent drunken violations of his mother, during which he learned to cover his eyes, to look away, yet to peek, it might be what is called "a residue", a sequelae.
More specifically the injured finger might point in the direction of the castration anxiety that was induced during that exposure, but which bebe Peter overcame in his rage by masturbating, where the pleasurable and tension releasing elements of this activity would seem to be the least important within the internal psychic economy... mastery of the fright... which became Handke's special forte when he has a pencil in hand. The diary work book "The History of the Pencil" does not address that core component. But the famous sentence: "I feel so anxious but everything I the write is then so calm" ... this certainly is one instance of this action which re-occurrs within the mind of a genuine reader. The artist poet as surrogate on that level. These are possible associations of someone familiar with Handke and aspects of Psychoanalysis...
There are alternatives to writing, reporting this scene? Par ejamplo:
"You know the other day..."
But it was written, probably in one fell swoop. A further distraction away from the painful state, the act of writing itself an overcoming, a becalming. In the last paragraph a status quo ante has been achieved.
However, Handke ritualizes it through a variety of stanzas; once will not do, we need theme and variation; it ritualizes somewhat like a a rosary; the performance of the ritualization at the moment of competition and completion [for all we know, it was written in one draft] right there and then by whatever nameless pond in whatever nameless region.
Yes, there really would not have been anything wrong with writing "a pond in Berlin" [perhaps it was the Krumme Lanke?] But putting in the city name would have taken away from the singularity of "Turk", the pond, the bench with its two bench warmers and added a superfluous Berlin aura to the poem; delimited the clean focus, adding an unnecessary variable.
"Singular and Plura", the title, too, is a pushing away of fingers. The title could also be "The face of Mastrello Mastriano"... the perfect surface of the text is like a movie actor's mask... one eye brow twitches, a duck dives underwater... a mask... a projection screen for the audience...
It takes a fairly cool character to discotiate that successfully. that i think is what people mean when they regard the irascible handke as cold. that too was learned during that terrifying decade.
This short text could also be a 25 minute film.
The intention, after all, is not to write a report for a newspaper, the Krumme Lanke Weekly, it is meant to be a display, to be admired, of a particular performance, of the performance of writing oneself into something approximating an idyllic becalmed state. It is a small victory over fright. "Look, Ma! No hands!" It is also a virtuoso performance, the texts from "Innerworld" were written during Handke's virtuoso period, Kaspar, Ride, etc.
And so the pond, too, remains nameless. Ponds reflect of course, the author does not tell us whether this pond is muddy, considering those busy ducks and those tufts of grass one presumes at Duck Soup, not at the clearest of reflections. Still as the pond is... right, what is the need of those ducks, they could easily be edited out? just like the city has been. Then we would have looked, found our reflection in the pond for sure. But would have lacked a distraction. So, conceivably, with that wounded finger and feeling generally lonely and lousy we do not want to look at ourselves in the mirror.
Three stanzas with a good deal of repetition, fairly minimal variation. But if you were the kind of supercilious Philistine jerk that said to me that this is like a cuckoo clock you would incur my eternal wrath.
Sort of like a dream that is tried out a number of times, until it is acceptably formed to pass the governess well dressed into consciousness.
"The Turk" is nearly entirely becalmed, he has ritualized himself into a state of reverie... the state an analyst finds himself in when listening into his patient on the couch... and the killer sentence surges up out of the unconscious: "And he thought of the sportswriter who wrote about death."
Not just a writer, no end of writers have death on their minds. But a "sportswriter"...sports writers have the nicest of jobs, they have nearly as much fun as the lifelong kids they write about. So a "sportswriter" who writes about death, now it's getting serious; this is far worse than the wounded finger. Perhaps that is that whiff of longing of leaping into the pond.
Once more now...with some emphasis and internal added comments:
"
On a bench in the park sits a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: I am sitting on a bench in the park next to a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: We are sitting on a bench in the park, I and a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: A Turk with a thickly bandaged finger is sitting with me on a bench in a park. We are sitting on a bench in the park gazing out on the pond, and I see something swimming in the pond, and the Turk is gazing out on the pond.We are gazing at the pond, and I see an object swimming in the pond, and the Turk is gazing at the pond. [One eye seems constantly peeled on the Turk, as though we are looking both straight ahead and to the side at one and the same time. A split, peeking, the Handke of those days who always seemed to be looking out of the side of his eyes, why? his autistic hyper-sensitivities? ] We are gazing at the pond, and I see a tuft of grass, propelled by swimming ducks, making its way to the shore, and the Turk is gazing at the pond.We are gazing at the pond, and I see a tuft of grass swimming shoreward, propelled by swimming ducks, and then I see the tuft of grass floating away from the shore, propelled by ducks swimming in the opposite direction, and the Turk is gazing at the pond. We are gazing at the pond, and I see a tuft of grass that, propelled by swimming ducks, was about to be washed ashore and then, propelled by ducks swimming in the opposite direction, was about to be washed back into the middle of the pond and now, propelled by ducks intersecting the two groups of ducks that are swimming in the opposite direction, floats suspended in place, and the Turk is gazing at the pond.We are gazing at the pond, and I see an object I took to be a tuft of grass or something I took to be an object that I believed was a tuft of grass suddenly disappear after it had moved in place, and I stop moving my head in time with the object on one and the same spot: that is to say, I am startled or, I am startled, that is to say, I stop moving my head in time with the object on one and the same spot, [the disturbance reflected in the grammar] and no longer move at all, and the Turk is gazing at the pond. We are gazing at the pond, and I see a duck surfacing with a tuft of grass in its bill, and I am tired of gazing [something happened just now, to make the narrator tired and angry... what is it? is it the sentence in the following paragraph with the thought about the sportswriter?] and am satisfied, and the Turk is gazing at the pond:]We are gazing at the pond, and, without seeing anything, [ Handke, suffering from occasional color blindness, has he seen black just now?] I remember the sports writer who talked about death, and the Turk is gazing at the pond.
A Turk and I, we are sitting in the park on a bench and are gazing at the pond: I am sitting in the park on a bench next to a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: I am sitting on a bench in the park next to a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger: next to me on the bench in the park there suddenly sits a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger which he is extending away from his other fingers: in the park on a bench sits a Turk with nine unimpaired fingers which he presses to the palms of his hands: on a bench in the park sits a Turk with a thickly bandaged finger and gazes out at the pond. "
Of course I did not read the poem this way when I translated it in the early 70s. I found it intriguing, beautifully formed, it is also a finger exercise if you were a pianist, you are showing your mastery, and wanted merely to be adequate as I could do that. It is a virtuoso performance of trying to keep the world of perceptions, of perceived phenomena and the world of words in synchronous state, it is just that matters keep popping up from below! As in Ride Across Lake Bottom Lake There are these disturbances, wounded fingers, thoughts of death, if only it were just tufts of grass!
Michael Roloff
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Sunday, February 25, 2007
# 2 posting/ wefelmeyer, handke's drama/ coury + pilipp's THE WORS OF PETER HANDKE
#2] Some comments, several quite devastating I am afraid, on Fritz Wefelmeyer HANDKE'S THEATER
[in Coury/ Pilipp's THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE.
Numbering of the reviews of the indvidual contributions is in reverse sequence, i.e. scrolling down you will reach the preceding comment, right now only Scott Abbott's take on Handke's Yugoslavia texts.
[# 3 of the posting, end of February, will treat the essay on Handke's poetry. As translator of Innerworld and Nonsense and Nonsense & Happiness and Walk About the Villages [W.A.T.V .] I have a few things to say; these were important events in my life, W.A.T.V. one of the most, yes a translation can be one of the most important events, folks!, none done just to keep body and soul a unit, but with conviction. Just now looking at the first page of Christiane Weller's poetry piece, I notice the 'exterminating angel' begin to rustle its decimating wings. How is it possible, halfway consciously, to put forth such verbiage while writing about Handke as poet who writes critically about language? Ms. Weller, too, it appears, has a conceptual cutlery shop inside her that has been devastated by a tornado, Abu Ghraib here we come in another week or so!]
Musings, and apodictic comments..
1-a of 4]
Fritz Wefelmeyer is first rate in pointing out and elaborating the anti-illusionist and activist intentions of those artifices, the modernist early Handke plays, and he does an excellent job explicating something that explicates itself if any piece for the theater ever has, that is "Public Insult" as I now call Offending the Audience, for the social inability of being able to call it "Abusing the Audience" [no matter how much these audiences stand in need of, deserve all kinds of abuse, including the legal category "verbal abuse"]. I myself addressed some of these matters in a - "near posthumous" - long, tough piece on the translation of the early plays and necessary continuous updating of the insults in Public Insult in an online translation journal, which piece is most easily accessed at the site devoted to Handke as translator:
http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/
W. also covers the other early plays - instead of recounting the plot in tiresome fashion we now recount the events in happenings, but without responding interestingly, or anything but obviously to any of them, but just as tiresomely. The real deficiencies of this piece, however, consist of W.s neglect of nearly a handful of all important main aspects of Handke's theater and of Handke's post [1972] avant garde period [yes folks, nearly thirty five years have passed, not that one would think so by how stuck people are in the early Handke], with dire consequences.
1-b of 4] Wefelmeyer treats these early texts [Prophecy, 1965, through They Are Dying Out, 1972, as timeless, as I hope they will be, while failing to note their connection to topicalities of the 60s and 70s during which Handke, very much a babe of the period, sought to and did connect, very consciously, non-platitudiously, while also having that deep archaeological connection as Olaf Hansen pointed out many years ago, and which connection then led him to the later equally great but so different work: Master/slave + s+m = My Foot My Tutor, Free Speech [Public Insult]; Identity i.e. Kaspar, Ride Across Lake Constance, the Left's language game regulations given, so estrangingly, to the business folk in Dying Out, etc., etc. The early plays, up to and including They Are Dying Out [1972], were both profoundly and more or less very much attuned, in tune, antennae-sensed of the period of their creation, and so, looking back or forward into the past, are residues, pine-cones that can catch flame and.. Handke was engaged in a conversation with his generation. There has been a falling off as Handke has moved on, certainly not his fault alone; one of the few writers in the world worth following year in year out, since he scarcely ever repeats himself [his pride! one of many; but tire- and nettlesome for hacks of all kind, who want to push-pin you] pushing on into different territories...
For specific example - as apparently monotonous, five hundred hammers on the same spot piece as the 1965 Prophecy - even with all that intentionally painfully monotonous hammering of the same message that nothing is comparable to anything else except itself - failed to drive home the same point that Susan Sontag made a few years later in her essay Illness as Metaphor, in light of which Handke might have retitled his piece Metaphor or Simile as a Linguistic Mental Illness. - Handke is not so much a metaphysician of language as its physician. Language heal thyself! Just think of the consequences of the linguistic thicket that became known as the "Historiker Streit": what if either side had been prohibited from comparing, and just looked, nominally, at the singularity of this greatest atrocity of them all? [There, a comparison snuck in! Ineradicable it seems from the mind.] By the time of the dream state and syntax novel One Dark Night I left my Silent House, one matter that impressed itself most the first time round, was the resurgence of metaphor in Handke, just a few, powerfully chosen. The idea that he was a near Shakespearean talent was upon me.
Wefelmeyer - though he mentions the centrally important Quodlibet ["as you like it," another Shakespeare reference] - fails to appreciate its "the play to catch the conscience of the king" quality... The king these days being the audience which is paying to hold its Audienz for the players to instruct its conscience and consciousness - the kind of dialogue that fails to occur between stage and community in a theater that no longer makes news but puts the news posthumously on stage, making theater such an irrelevance [1] - Handke's conscientiousness being the reason why our inveterate "improver of central Europe", great artificer and sleight of hand, country priest, high priest of language keeps writing these damned things, these projection screens, even when he seems to have lost some of that twist of his wrist as in some recent [post The Play About the Film About the War, 1999] deliveries, aside to make a little money, exhibit himself to stay in the picture, and to keep meeting pretty intelligent actresses who scoot off in horror after a few years of living with St. Paul: all that the audience can see, hear, experience in the work [up until Dying, 1972] is itself,[explicitly in Public Insult, surreptitiously in Ride Across Lake Constance, participatorily in Kaspar, etc.]: these are mirrors, not fun house mirrors, more like mirrors with tentacles that reach into spaces you weren't sure anyone would reach in the theater, and they were, very icily at the time, devised by someone who knew, from positivistic knowledge, how to affect and effect an audience by subliminal linguistic means. - Quodlibet works on the principle of auditory hallucination, and does so, by Finnegans Wake type double and triple entendres; and you know into what depths associations lead, don't you?
What accounts for the resistance to these pieces, in the U.S. of A, is that like British Punk Rock, it they are a little too real; beautiful as they may be formally, their kind of anti-Aristotelianism can't be, or hasn't been, [but give America a chance - it's starting to do so with stage adaptations of Wings of Desire] turned into cabaret;
there is no veneer of style, no matter how stylish an inverted boulevard piece Ride Across Lake Constance might be; the dream, even the illusion that the players create for themselves in that play are too real. Well, Coke claims to be the real thing; and it has always been a real tasty douche. It is surprising, however, since there existed an audience for conceptual art in N.Y. during that period, that those artists, and their happenings, did not take up these early Handke texts.
2-a]
Apodictally speaking - for efficiencies and other sakes and shots of sake - Handke, as a neo-romantic who uses words, language, concretistically - as which bebé Handke I suspect experienced them, painfully, nauseatingly - yet wishes for them to approximate, resemble the earlier Romantics' wish to have the communicative capacities of music, lives within a maelstrom of syntactically orderable perceptual languages.
Handke's statement that he calms down as soon as he takes pencil in hand and starts to write, dutifully repeated by his commentators who fail to look at what this might signify, points to a constant creative state that can be approached as a psychosomatic symptom, a symptom is a compromise formation, and is chief reason why Handke feels condemned to write; that this mastery, of terror and fear, instills, reinforces his grandiosity is to be expected.
As late or as the early word- but not sound-less artificial, with rural adumbrations, My Foot My Tutor, [and its contrasting Colors for Susan by County Joe] it might occur to the foutres that this maelstrom of signifiers might be arranged in such a way as to make time flow like molasses or speed up like a bullet train, can be molded, kneaded according to certain either pleasing or disgusting [Werner Schwab] artistic ways. By the time of Walk About the Villages [W.A.T.V.] and Hour, Handke has the confidence to create a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that works entirely by phenomenological means ... within that large world of phenomena that includes spoken words, rhetoric, body languages, the language of silence...He verges on Dance Theater.
Handke's formalism - thus a certain affinity to Ionesco-like procedures in the early plays, though Handke is never quite as playful, nor is Handke, no matter some vergings, an absurdist of any kind - is a necessity for the sake of the efficiency of concentration, within Handke's by and large non-layered procedures - the exception is Quodlibet - linear, sentence by sentence procedures, of theme and variation, concentration and reiterations to impress, to get through the defenses of its audience, that invariably lethargic audience that arrives with its load of customs, those spiritual [or 'spittual'] whales in need of a cleaning of the accumulated dross.
Some of the poems in Innerworld illustrate in easily graspable manner the variety of matters that Handke can achieve in a fairly short text. For my drama lecture I use the poem Singular and Plural [a.k.a. The Turk with the wounded finger he averts from his hand while frantically keeping his eyes gazing at ducks on a pond] to illustrate the defensive nature of Handke's literary activity; its ritualizing form; the nature of the text as a projection screen; as drama, in as much as the thought of "the sportswriter who wrote about death" surges up out of the unconscious.] The source of Handke the dramatist, as in so many cases, is hysteria, and the source of male hysteria is what?... Handke may be a formalist, he is so for beauty's, for communication's sake, which arises from the right kind of precision, not for empty formalities.
2-b of 4] Formalism
For me Handke's entire modernist anti-illusionist period - [gradually changing in the course of his playful - yes, how is it possible to ignore Handke's all important playfulness? - didactic endeavors into a mode that not only alters the audience's perception, in short it "cleans out their clocks," but then, during his what I call "Mytho-Poeic" phase, allows the audience's imagination room, the space to dream, fantasize, and breathe, to move - the Handke troupe as it wanders around in so many Handke plays and novels and one film] - includes everything from the first Sprechstück, Prophecy [1965] to the piece that, formally, comprises the abundance of early even now continuously growing repertoire of aware-making instrumentalities of which Handke availed himself, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. Though conceived in the 70s, Hour was not completed until around 1990, and thus leapfrogs several "mytho-poeic" works, Walk About the Villages & The Art of Asking, and so segues between the two major periods. Looking back from that absolute high point, Hour, at the early plays, excepting that oddity Dying, one might easily come under the impression that Handke had explored a certain cache of formal possibilities inherent in the Sprechstück approach, and then resolved to comprise them within a work of a far higher order. But I don't think our genius was planning that far ahead as he then began to. But the cache was there to explore, and explore it he did, pretty much to the limit. The way that the painter Jawlensky explored the possibility of constructivist portraiture is what keep rumbling associatively with that speculation in my brain.
Once I started thinking seriously about the whole body of Handke's work, in 1986, after translating Walk About the Villages,[1982] and looking at the apparently total change between Hour and the previous play, the 1972 They Are Dying Out, I felt there was a piece missing. Well, perhaps the Handke Paris Crisis in the early to mid-seventies- the period I know in greatest dirty intimate details - had taken its toll; the film of The Lefthanded Woman was not it; Die Geschichte des Bleistift [L'histoire de crayon] provides ample evidence of the thought Handke was giving to Walk about the Villages; I had got used to my rabbit's yearly production, didn't think he sequestered anything in drawers, everything he touched had turned to gold for so many years, or ever undertook something that didn't come off. Meanwhile a couple of aborted attempts have surfaced. Hour then turned out to be the missing piece that comprises the entire avant garde period, an instance that might redeem the dialectic, and one of the great texts in the language, its sentences - in German - take you by the scruff of your syntax a pile driver that never lets go. The performance of this score then does something entirely different from the reading experience. Encorcelling like but more so than Ride, it has all the ambiguity and then some of W.A.T.V., the kind of seeing it demands leaves all your senses refreshed, reborn: yes, it cleans out your clock, you look new to me. A new kind of catharsis, a catharsis achieved by purely phenomenological means! Anti-Aristotelian as hell! Brecht will never stop turning over in his grave!
Because of its long gestation [according to Handke, feeling the text through to the end was one problem] Hour not merely straddles two very different periods in Handke's being in the world, but stands under the influence of the invasion of emotionality that we can find in his work as of a certain moment, in... A Moment of True Feeling. [The one thing we can find him agreeing to with his therapeutician in Paris in the 70s - Weight of the World - is his lack of emotional connection; otherwise, is it really the analyst who confesses to Handke that he, too, is carrying a Cross on Easter?] - If you fail to appreciate that great change, [ reread Weight of the World], never mind the host of reasons for the change, you will take the wrong approach to the work - Walk About the Villages, Art of Asking - that came as such an immense surprise to those who had not been watching or really reading... And the more so if they continued to approach these new works with the just learned critical habits. - If you look closely, the kernels for the change can be found sprouting in Dying. Also in the poem sequence Nonsense and Happiness.
In the 2007 off-shoot from Hour, Spuren der Verirrten/ Traces of the Lost, it just had its premier at the Berliner Ensemble, the narrator becomes surrogate for the audience that had always threatened to come on stage in Handke's plays since the very beginning, breaking down that last wall as well, at last], but I have not completed my third reading. Spuren starts just like Hour, events that instantly place you into a phenomenological state of aware-making closely noticing mind, which for me, used to Handke not repeating himself, was initially an unpleasantly disturbing deja vue, then some of the same Hour type figures [or Quodlibet type figures, screens] start to mumble a few words, a procedure that is feasible within the terms of Hour, but then the narrator/ author/ audience, the polarity goes on stage...joins... I am not certain that I have thought through the consequences of this fairly profound alteration, but I will post my usual detailed response in time at one of the two sites of http://wwww.handkedrama.scriptmania.com
The usual suspects that hate everything Handke - a fellow named Stadelmayer at the F.A.Z.- have given their usual burps; others have reached opposite conclusions [Die Zeit].
Wefelmeyer mentions the 2005 concatenation of hate and irritability, the so unbluesy, Subday Blues as I call Untertagblues, for the sake of its allusion to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," I discuss, nearly dismember, Subday Blues in a 3 k piece that can be found at the second of the
http://wwww.handkedrama.scriptmania.com
sites.
Subday Blues is a derivative of Handke's hyper irritable, misanthropic vein, it might be a leftover from an earlier period, no matter that it seems to connect with world wide road rage, even among unhappy S.U.V. drivers! However, Subday Blues, for me, is not served by Handke's employment of monotony, monotonous and unproductive as rage may be, its language, even on three readings, does not sparkle associations as the early happenings did. The Austrian performer, who did the premiere there, found otherwise.
Also, W. seems not to have read Geschichte des Bleistift where one can follow - as of a certain point where Bleistift stops reading like a second instalment of the involuntary associations that are the naked ego exhibition Weight of the World - in this great work book the thought that Handke was giving to the then forthcoming Walk About the Village, to Euripides and Goethe, the uses to which alternating discourse might be put, since Handke does not write what is called "dialogue" in the American theater, he is only willing to quote it. Not a hint of that in W.'s stunted discussion of the last 30 some years of Handke's work for the theater.
3 of 4] It appears that W. has never experienced any of the plays that he discusses. Otherwise he might have noticed that being subjected for some 90 minutes to Wittgensteinian philo investigational catch as catch can linguistic logistics - where the tenuous and nearly absurd but insistently logicality of the verbal combinations - that dismember all kinds of human activities - provide the tenuous straps by which consciousness keeps itself from crashing - are the "story", the experience, the happening that substitutes for "the story" which the audience came to hang on to, to see to be diverted from itself by - what I [but not most audiences] experience as a delicious dissociative experience, The Ride Across Lake Constance [which I meanwhile suggest to some young, mystified directors they call "The Ride Across the Bottom of the Lake" for what I hope are obvious reasons]. I connect this to the Handke, who disassociated during a ten year exposure to violent primal scenes, as an artist, at his desk, where pen in hand he produces calm, calming texts, can avail himself of some of the most powerful dissociative procedures as he creates these verbally activist assemblages; the Handke reading some of whose prose texts first puts you in a depressive state of mind before releasing you that you can breathe again; that so powerful self whose very being, in all its aspects, exerts itself through his texts and his plays. "My self of course is more than just myself" he said to an interviewer not long ago, pointing to... you compleat the thought.
The only interesting comment I ever read by an American reviewer about Ride was a Chicagoan writing: "Describe the experience." To do so would be to describe having experienced a dream. I had no idea how Ride would play when I translated it; what kind of effect it might have; as compared to the previous texts, it did not allow of that kind of rehearsal. It was just dialogue, albeit of a curious kind, I could translate dialogue by the ream during those days. Curious indeed, when performed you are transported into a Lewis Carrol world; it takes you down the rabbit hole the way you only go in a dream, and dreams seize you. And for real for once, not just as a damned over-used metaphor.
The use of Wittgensteinian syllogistic type question and answer, Handke might also have used legalistic formulations to achieve the same dissociative effect. Aside all the high-jinks that go on in the play.
Some stray comments
, before resuming, before administering the coup de grace.
I find it odd that W.s extensive German lit oriented bibliography fails, in a piece written in English, to cite at least Richard Gilman, the first important American critic to have written about Handke [T he Making of Modern Drama]. But German studies and its sub- rubric Handke studies, too, live in small German enclaves, self-sufficient pods that communicate only with similar pods also when they publish in English as they must, to publish or perish where no one else knows they even exist, when affiliated with institutions in English speaking parts of the world; which is one reason why their infertile seeds - these bibliographies, once you get the hang of them - are incestuous, pleasurable up close, unproductive genetically - daisy-chains - no matter all that multi-culti ideology - never fructify, come in productive relationship with whatever part of the cultural maelstrom the dry, self-contained little Germanicist pod happens to find itself in. [I am just completing a nicely devastating story entitled Sankta Klaus Nicolnietzcky comes to the Germanics X-Mas Bash. "Nietschte," quietschte the Doktorandin,"wirkerlich, ist est Nietzche?" peeing into her pants. "Wer hat die meisten Nietztche Schreine?" The department chair rushes in: "I just got funding for the Sankt Nicolnietzcky conference!"- The wages of having translated a Werner Schwab play!] Scholars might yet consult editors, translators, literary agents and directors to get to the nitty gritty of what is entailed in turning theory into practice, and what are called "process notes" from their subjects' therapeuticians.
The other of the equation, is that it is an utterly futile enterprise to try to connect with something as utterly self-absorbed, self-celebrating as official American theater, or the forever incompetent ignorant Kindergarten of the fringe, has become once again since its brief flirt with furriner stuff in the Sixties. Handke's work however, mostly in my translation, were once done by important theaters in New York and London and some off off type houses in the forever provinces. And so have an interesting record in that language, of which W. gives no evidence that he has much of a drift except when he gets it wrong via one of his second or third hand daisies. Public Insult never had real, reviewed performance in New York. There was a pick-up troupe of mine laying some seeds in the late 60s and four weeks at Herbert Berghof's private HB Studio. The first reviewed performances, very favorably, were of the duo My Foot My Tutor & Self-Accusation at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in 1971; then came the play that disturbed the subscription audience at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont, Ride Across Lake Constance , an audience that had come to be amused in the usual fashion, hang up their selves instead of trying to follow a real acrobatic language game with the most peculiar logical connections and sinister burps from the fertile underground slurp. Kaspar had its U.S. premiere, at B.A.M. [an Obey for best play and performer, Christopher Lloyd of future Taxi fame or infamy, a producer who struck it rich and had no further interest in Handke.]. Dying was done at the Yale Drama School in 1980, and scarcely ever after, Hour had some kind of performance at a minor venue in N.Y. during the 90s, Zejlko Ducik's Tutattoo Theater did a fine job of it in Chicago. The other truly great later plays - Art of Asking, W.A.T.V., The Play About the Film About the War, are waiting to be done by a theater that is so miserable in nearly each and every respect it is scarcely worthy of contempt... see an enumeration of dissatisfaction expressed about the culture industry as it manifest itself in provincial dress at:
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com
Some stray emendations on the early plays
:
Self-Accusation's
last sentence used to read "and I will never do so again" at a time that Handke may have had no intention for further pieces for the theater, but now ends with the once second to last sentence "I wrote this piece." S.A. contains the first instance that I am aware of a profound emanation of pathos in its final beautiful enumeration of all the ego's remisnesses: by pushing these "crimes" over the top, H. verges once again, but only verges, on the absurd, and is being funny. Funny! Funny! Funny! This is the most frequently performed piece in English right now, for obvious reasons, as that of the audiences preference for being able to stand in judgment instead of being judged, being entangled in questioning how it reaches judgment, at what mercies its superego is.[W. mumbles on about "the subject's loss of identity" in language. Good Gawd!]
In its movement to the final enumeration S.A. very much has a "line of beauty." That movement, of course on a far longer curve can also be found in Hour. Handke's works work towards a climax and then subside.
Wefelmeyer appears to have little appreciation of the early Handke's sense of humor, in S.A.'s mix of serious and ridiculously insignificant misdemeanors [the translation contains my favorite mistake I made as a translator]; an absence that leads to leaden readings, even of the farcical The Are Dying Out, throughout. Just as little as Ride or Public Insult are philosophical seminars, did or does Handke write for textual exegisists.
Kaspar's
last sentence used to be "I am only accidentally I", of which tendentious platitude Handke was disabused I forgot by whom, I think it was Martin Walser who was the in and ex-cathedra Suhrkamp editor for important plays those days. Thus Kaspar, ends with the thrice repeated King Lear imprecation "Goats and Monkeys", one instance of those verges on the sense of the absurd that edge Handke's work throughout; some characters become crazed, indicating that as one of many positions into which the mind-heart can be pushed.
I am glad that Wefelmeyer is intrigued by the entirely neglected Distress Calls as which my Farrar, Straus editor refused to let me improve, for the sake of memorability and impress, what is called, so lamely, "Calling for Help." Not only did I, do I have a sense of this being Handke's answer, formulation for a kind of existentialist Marxist Urtext surrogate response expression to the clamoring of the period during which it is written [oh yes, neglected also by me as a translator, director who never put in the work at rehearsals and testing in the mouths of actors to make it fit, Distress Calls, a kind of "looking for the lost chord" that hints at Handke's early knowledge of the importance of namelessness which then became one of the subjects of the title text of A Slow Homecoming , and derivatively of the entire notion of naming, of answering questions that maybe ought not to be answered at all [naming as a confining, delimiting, thus no end of names, languages letting qualities sprout] thus the states of paradisaical wordlessness into which plays such as My Foot My Tutor and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other transport the audience; states during which one is not only relievedly free of the gruesome racket that is human speech, so much more hideous among my nasal squawking North Westerners than that of my most steadfast well-fed! friends, the crows, but also of the apparent torture and nausea that words seem to have produced in bebé Handke.
For the idea that Kaspar's indoctrination is experienced by him as a torture, as this noisy piece subjects its audience to a similar demonstration, is of such subjectivity and so unusual that it, and Handke's once being nauseated by language [his autistically challenged nervous system was nauseated by just about everything that did not please his sense of beauty, and little pleased his sense of beauty more at the time than the sight of beautiful women] strike me as one of the connections to Handke's individual subjectivity as which he told Gamper one could "aufrollen" each and every one of his works.
I have found this statement to Gamper one of the most productive to follow up since Handke was not only talking [in 1986] about obvious biographical elements in his work or personal history as we find it in Child Story or Sorrow Beyond Dreams, but,conceivably, about terrified "states of mind" as we can find them in the early novels, eventually becalmed in Der Hausierer [but by what means of literary technique and filters!] turned into playfulness at the end of Die Hornissen, or in Radio Play One, a great piece that Wefelmeyer fails to mention, not that one needs to confine oneself to the plays when speaking of Handke as a dramatist it spills over into the prose texts. As does the hysteria.
- From hyper-states of the autistically hyper-sensitive to finding objective equivalents, distancing, defensive, projection screens. Distress Calls also has the quality of some other pieces, no matter their sense of completeness, or sufficiency, a sense that appears to have eluded Handke in the meanwhile, of the toss-off, the thrown, the nearly incidental, the nicely oblique, he had that unfailingly right twist of his wrist in his delivery... and has it again in the 2004 La Cuisine, a delightful piece written in Handke's serializing method, and in French, for Materic, a collaboration with this Yugoslav director, which Wefelmeyer and the editors and their list of Handke's works seems to be unaware of.
They Are Dying Out
I was glad to note W. seems to understand, on one level, as a continuation of the language games being played in Ride except of course in terms of apparently comprehensible - to those with minds infested by the business culture - logic of the language of the New Left, but put, estrangingly, self-estrangingly, into the mouths of a brother [and sister] horde of business folk. The various comedy routines hark back to the Viennese theater of Raimund, Horvarth, etc. I would disagree with W. that Quitt necessarily commits suicide: such successful monopolists usually end up as philanthropists; they only need to be killed off in plays. Handke married his own then suicidal impulses to the character. Perhaps it also contains a sense of humor about his own grandiosity. If Ride, on one level, is the perfect inversion of a boulevard piece, Dying, a boulevard piece for its first act, with the beginning of Act II turns into an unwieldy agglomeration, and thus, just as unsuccessful dreams are more susceptible to interpretation than perfectly formed ones, shows its seams, its sutures where force has been employed; that is, formally, Dying is somewhat of an abortion, it is an instance, there are other, especially the recits in some of the books, the Nova speech at the end of W.A.T.V. [Handke running not just for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but of that for Peace at one and the same time] where he forces something into a text, or adds on.
In Dying at the beginning of Act II, W. fails to mention, P.H. puts in a kind of intermission play discussion between Grand Mogul Quitt and his factotum Hans on their having seen a lower depth play, I think Handke was also speaking specifically about the buggering, inarticulate, violence-ridden Kroetz plays of the period. Then comes their discussion of the prophetic Stifter quote, prophetic of the recourse Handke would take to Stifterian idyllic transfigurations, also of his own Kroetz character like family, in W.A.T.V. [in this Handke is in some ways the usual upwardly mobile transformer of origins that seem in need of stylization]; Stifterian in the sense that the thunderstorm is always just off stage. This is I suppose also the first enunciation of the ultimately programmatic Nova announcement about "nature being her own measure" by someone who used to be nauseated by the merest hint of hay.
Dying is drenched in all kinds of Handke's own personal travails, there are deja vues of the sexual warfare from Ride, teetering as it does between emotionality but then falling back into the more accustomed derisive unemotional style. It is also Handke's only overtly Brechtian play with its talk - it IS a talky piece - about economics, and its Puntilla/ Mattei routines in several version, not that you need Brecht for that.
W. is quite right that some [but by no means all] the characters are mere types, one reason that U.S. reviewers - apparently with none in the streets and buses - asked, in their usual fashion, for real blood and real emotions on stage! This is a hugely important moment in Handke's theater, and noting the direction he took... away from the direction of becoming another Ferenc Molnar, or writing plays about the reconstituting German middle class... he was going to become a living classic!
Whereas the actors in Ride are young actors who try out roles of other actors, that is actors impersonating actors, in their "I want to be someone like somebody else was once", in Dying most of the roles, the exceptions are Quitt and Quitt's dolorous sick wife, are not, cannot be so defined within commedia del arte terms. In that sense, Dying, or aspects of it, has a realistic, referential to real life quality, as compared to totally artificial quality of Ride. Handke, in the 1999 The Play about the Film, will re-use the long attack speech that one of the businessman launches on Quitt... its melody that is, but with different set of words. [Handke the carpenter squirrel]. Yes, I see no mention in W. of Handke as a master carpenter, something I began to appreciate when taking a close look at the derivates from his own work of which his most of his contribution to the screenplay of Wings of Desire consists.
Preparations for Immortality
I would call Zuruestungen fuer die Unsterblichkeit, Scaffolding for..." might work and points into the right directions where W.s "Harnessing for.." does not; Abbott's Voyage by Dugout does not work since a dugout in common usage is a hole of various uses; thus to take a voyage in it...; A Summer's Postscript or Epilogue I suggest instead of W.'s "Summerly" [!], Nothing wrong with W.s's expat English except when he needs to translate from German. And for Handke's "Rund um das grosse Tribunal" I suggest
"The Handke cat slinking around the hot sauce but never even putting a paw into it."
4] Dire Consequences
At the latest when I read the opening paragraph, on page 215, of the final section, "From the Theater of Speech to the Theater of Narrative: The Later Plays," that treats of Handke's post 1972 work in the theater:
"Offending the Audience and Prophecy initiated a theater of language and Self-Accusation introduced the idea of the development of a de-individualized individual [sic! sic! sic!] self through language. Kaspar took this approach one step further and presented the process by which the adoption of social roles is transformed into a history of self-alienation,'[A deinvididualized self nonetheless alienated from itself??? the clanking conceptual horrors that this approach produces! M.R.] leaving the protagonist trapped in a web of language and actions..." I became 199 per cent certain that I was reading the writing, the typewriter crime, of an utter deadbeat; and little that you find subsequently about the later Handke in this section disabused me of that conclusion. A reader in German! How is it possible to write about W.A.T.V. and only write about the defectiveness of its characters and not respond to the stupendous generosity and affection which Handke in his "Rolling on the River" mood showers on this wide spectrum of his worker aristocracy, how is it possible to read and miss the entirely new form of discourse? How is it possible to fail to respond to Art of Asking. W.A.T.V., as thorough readers of Handke have noticed, becomes the source of two decades of great work, even in that monstrum novel, or perhaps because he was running out of steam, "Image Loss: Across the Sierra del Gredos " [Farrar, Straus, 2007] Handke will tap into that spring...
And Elonora Pascu's "Unterwegs zum Ungesagten", a piece of real work I really learned something from, appears in the bibliography... but certainly is not evidenced in W.s' reading of these texts.
Part of W.s problem of course is that he spends three quarters of his piece recounting the early plays, while short-shrifting equally though differently important but far more challenging work, a task I think I am not certain he is up to.
Aside the already listed failures, there is W.s apparent unawareness that Handke, starting with W.A.T.V. was writing and publishing Lesedramen, plays to be read primarily, the chances of their being performed being so slim for a variety, also of their demanding reasons. With his latest, Traces of the Lost, however, has Handke solved, or put his mind onto solving the seam that runs between these alternatives: reading Spuren is the reading of a text that is in its entirety a description of the performance, so the director of actual performance and the director reader become one and the same. The closing of that loophole was to be expected. How perfectly it was then done amazes me.
Short-shrifting everything from W.A.T.V. up to The Play About the Film W. then presents the latter as representative of the mytho-poeic work. Well, it is the least representative of the lot, and its connection with the alternating discourse and transfiguring and grand procedures of the previous four plays is most tenuous; mythic it can be said to be only in its emphasis on the wild forever primitive eternal "Serbian" spirit that courses through the rivers in a canoe carved out of a single tree trunk. In other respects, as W. must beware since he points out that the play is a kind of investigation and demonstration, nearly a court proceeding, The Play About the Film stands within the post-German tradition of near docu-drama presentations, a line that runs from Brecht, through Handke's friend Kipphart, Hochhuth, to Günter Grass's The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, the last of which it resembles in its having a film within a play, instead of a play [Cariolanus] within a play being rehearsed.
However, to be fair, W. is interesting and a quite perceptive in his take on the play. In other words, read the opening and the very end of his piece, don't bother slogging through the desert of the inbetween, it is nothing as interesting as a real desert where I always learned something. But once again, because he has no sense of the over-riding needs of the formal requirements within which an artist like Handke must work, he fails to understand that the use of a screen play, citing, discussing, acting out of scenes from a screenplay, affords Handke some extraordinary efficiencies, though one might not notice them in a play that is far too wordy and expository to play. However, W. picks up on it being the case that as a whole the play contains a large variety of viewpoints, perspectives, to none of which one ought to pin down the author, except possibly all of them. "Every one is in the right" prefaces W.A.T.V. [i.e. every individual is wrong] prevails here as well. I don't want to repeat what I said about this great concept since I already commented on Scott Abbot's take on it in his essay on Handke and Yugoslavia. [First review posting] Besides, I once wrote a long myopic, detail by detail dismemberment of it, for myself, as I was going to make a presentation of it to the usual local cop-out, so that I would be certain how it worked, and that can be found at one of the two handke drama sites:
http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/
Behind Play About the Film.. lies a musical structure as in most of Handke's plays. e-mail me or post a comment to let me know what it is and i will give your a prize if your answer is correct.
Play About the Film
is also a model of its kind, the way Brecht's plays were also always models, alterable within historical circumstances. Although Handke, I think, was just a tad cute when he told his daughter in a T.V. interview after the premiere that no matter his personal stance on the matter of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, The Play about the Film is an objective piece, a director could for example put a favorable emphasis on the mountain bicyclist, the foreign interventionists who arrive to clean up the ungodly mess that the various tribes have made with their forever fighting. But the play is not skewed in favor of his own personal sentimental romantic attachments.
To be fair, once again, among the few things W. does pick up in his state of ignorance and failure to have followed the progress of the transfiguring so protein and sovereign Count from Griffen, he notices Handke's search for peace-giving forms [ p.228], and that this requires the collaboration of audience and players, whose first surprising instance came in Sorger's search for them in geological formation in A Slow Homecoming. For me this appeal - its strongest articulation, the most deeply pathos ridden, comes in Nova's speech - is an indication of the violence prone Handke's profound longing to be free of these impulses.
February 2007
FN 1] In Seattle there were Handke performances in the 70s and early 80s at the now, relievedly defunct, Empty Space Theater, founded and run into bankruptcy by that first rate director M. Burke Walker. So that when I got to these soggy parts in the summer of 1994, via Dan Sullivan, then the Artistic director of the Seattle Rep, I was put in touch with Kurt Beattie, as of 2002 the artistic director of A Contemporary Theater in Seattle, who had been Kaspar in the Empty Space's production of self-same play. Kurt is a bright fellow who then put in yeoman's work as I tried to get a Handke festival going at the University where I became a visiting scholar for about ten years. However, I then noticed that Kurt, the assistant artistic director at The Rep, as it is referred to, was a kind of permanent assistant in his utter deferentiality to the powers above him, the sort of thing you notices at the way he answers a telephone call, in feeling it beneath the successor to Dan Sullivan to even come to see Handke's Hour when Steve Pearson, an occasionally first rate director, did it at the University in the late 90s. Indeed, on the job of artistic director of ACT falling into his lap upon ACT's imminent bankruptcy and its forthcoming director begging off from what appeared to be a thankless job, Kurt Beattie became an "I'll have my assistant call you" e-mail correspondent, and he quickly copped out on his dream... there's the telling phrase...of finally doing a Seattle Premiere of "Mother Courage." And all his dreams or whatever for doing some Handke at ACT were shelved for no end of short run forgettables of the most jejune sort.
From the Empty Space also derived a kind of butch gay Sasquatch, extremely bright, in a permanent state of narcissitic rage, a reviewer who might have become a critic of national note [not that difficult in this country or any country with the present lack of notables in that field] were it not for a number of severe characterological deficiencies, and for his primary avocation of being a food writer. But anyhow, Roger Downey, no matter his hatred of Brecht, for bedding many of his seductive collaborators, had some real intelligence and some real understanding of Handke and Heiner Mueller, and all it takes for promiscuoius me [or rather, now took] is just a tad of intelligence or beauty to tolerate characterological deficiences of his kind, at least for a while, or until it proves dangerous. Downey had looked forward to going with Public Insult from one theater to the other, surprise symphony visits to stir up the slugs in the minds.
Another fellow with Empty Space origins was Ret White of Cornish theater department, who never got back to me on my proposition of giving The Play About the Film About the War a try there, he was too busy raising and dispensing Public Arts funds...Alas, poor Yorick.
The last director of The Empty Space , a colleague of sorts since I too was at the Yale Drama School, at least for one years, said, at her taking on that position, that she, allegedly weaned on Space work in the 70s, wanted to continue to do work in that vein. I contacted her, pointing out that Public Insult had never been done, but never heard back, and, with few exceptions, saw nothing of the kind of a continuation being put on her boards. After what must be a million and a half of subsidies and fundraisers during my 13 years here, the far too fat misnamed Space finally gave up the ghost.
M. Burke Walker, now an itinerant director, promises to look at the latest Handke, but I never hear what his reaction might be, as he, ignominuous trouper, does one or the other play his heart is not in just to survive. It will wear out his heart as it has so many others.
There is the chief theater reviewer, Misha Berson, of the Seattle Times, who can make or break a play hereabouts, who recently described Handke's Public Insult as a "grenade"! She certainly never saw the play performed in Seattle, since Empty Space, if she was here then, did not put it on: the director fell ill. Alas, poor Yorick. A year or so ago Ms. Berson and I had an e-mail exchange during which she insisted strenuously not to be a philistine!
I contacted the third Artistic Director of the Rep at his coming to Seattle in 2006 whether he might want to discuss some of the later Handke plays, and never heard back. At a Civic Forum where this worthy was introduced to Seattle, he stated that he wanted to bring some foreign work and troupes to Seattle; asked during the q + a period what specifics he had in mind, he quickly retreated into saying that he really wanted to do the local talent first, not much of that I am afraid.
However, at the beginning of my stay in Seattle, Kurt Beattie and I seemed to be getting somewhere in putting on a Handke festival. And if Ms. Sarah Nash-Gates, who comes from the costume department to run the UW School of Drama, had not let not just me, but the group of interested parties, dangle in the wind while cutting us out from behind, the $ 300.000 that an Austrian Cultural attache type had organized from a variety of Austrian sources might not have been wasted. But, being the new kid on the block, I did not know then that nothing not initiated by Ms. Gates gets done at the U.S. Drama School. Hell, she could have put her name to it, for all I cared. And direcor Steve Pearson, who develops some fine acting talent, and allegedly "loves Handke" proves a weak sister too, another Bhuddist.
Downey never had anything like a successor at The Weekly once he started to write about food and wine; and now that The Weekly is part of a national chain of so-called alternative publications matters have only got worse there. The Seattle Post Intelligencer has a sweet ancient reviewer whose having that position embodies the irrelevance of theater. The Stranger, one independent publication with a little moxie, has two theater reviewers, Annie Wagner and Brendan Kiley, but they both need to get out of town for a while to acquire some perspective on what might be possible even in Seattle. But they as it were are the forever "buds of May."
[in Coury/ Pilipp's THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE.
Numbering of the reviews of the indvidual contributions is in reverse sequence, i.e. scrolling down you will reach the preceding comment, right now only Scott Abbott's take on Handke's Yugoslavia texts.
[# 3 of the posting, end of February, will treat the essay on Handke's poetry. As translator of Innerworld and Nonsense and Nonsense & Happiness and Walk About the Villages [W.A.T.V .] I have a few things to say; these were important events in my life, W.A.T.V. one of the most, yes a translation can be one of the most important events, folks!, none done just to keep body and soul a unit, but with conviction. Just now looking at the first page of Christiane Weller's poetry piece, I notice the 'exterminating angel' begin to rustle its decimating wings. How is it possible, halfway consciously, to put forth such verbiage while writing about Handke as poet who writes critically about language? Ms. Weller, too, it appears, has a conceptual cutlery shop inside her that has been devastated by a tornado, Abu Ghraib here we come in another week or so!]
Musings, and apodictic comments..
1-a of 4]
Fritz Wefelmeyer is first rate in pointing out and elaborating the anti-illusionist and activist intentions of those artifices, the modernist early Handke plays, and he does an excellent job explicating something that explicates itself if any piece for the theater ever has, that is "Public Insult" as I now call Offending the Audience, for the social inability of being able to call it "Abusing the Audience" [no matter how much these audiences stand in need of, deserve all kinds of abuse, including the legal category "verbal abuse"]. I myself addressed some of these matters in a - "near posthumous" - long, tough piece on the translation of the early plays and necessary continuous updating of the insults in Public Insult in an online translation journal, which piece is most easily accessed at the site devoted to Handke as translator:
http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/
W. also covers the other early plays - instead of recounting the plot in tiresome fashion we now recount the events in happenings, but without responding interestingly, or anything but obviously to any of them, but just as tiresomely. The real deficiencies of this piece, however, consist of W.s neglect of nearly a handful of all important main aspects of Handke's theater and of Handke's post [1972] avant garde period [yes folks, nearly thirty five years have passed, not that one would think so by how stuck people are in the early Handke], with dire consequences.
1-b of 4] Wefelmeyer treats these early texts [Prophecy, 1965, through They Are Dying Out, 1972, as timeless, as I hope they will be, while failing to note their connection to topicalities of the 60s and 70s during which Handke, very much a babe of the period, sought to and did connect, very consciously, non-platitudiously, while also having that deep archaeological connection as Olaf Hansen pointed out many years ago, and which connection then led him to the later equally great but so different work: Master/slave + s+m = My Foot My Tutor, Free Speech [Public Insult]; Identity i.e. Kaspar, Ride Across Lake Constance, the Left's language game regulations given, so estrangingly, to the business folk in Dying Out, etc., etc. The early plays, up to and including They Are Dying Out [1972], were both profoundly and more or less very much attuned, in tune, antennae-sensed of the period of their creation, and so, looking back or forward into the past, are residues, pine-cones that can catch flame and.. Handke was engaged in a conversation with his generation. There has been a falling off as Handke has moved on, certainly not his fault alone; one of the few writers in the world worth following year in year out, since he scarcely ever repeats himself [his pride! one of many; but tire- and nettlesome for hacks of all kind, who want to push-pin you] pushing on into different territories...
For specific example - as apparently monotonous, five hundred hammers on the same spot piece as the 1965 Prophecy - even with all that intentionally painfully monotonous hammering of the same message that nothing is comparable to anything else except itself - failed to drive home the same point that Susan Sontag made a few years later in her essay Illness as Metaphor, in light of which Handke might have retitled his piece Metaphor or Simile as a Linguistic Mental Illness. - Handke is not so much a metaphysician of language as its physician. Language heal thyself! Just think of the consequences of the linguistic thicket that became known as the "Historiker Streit": what if either side had been prohibited from comparing, and just looked, nominally, at the singularity of this greatest atrocity of them all? [There, a comparison snuck in! Ineradicable it seems from the mind.] By the time of the dream state and syntax novel One Dark Night I left my Silent House, one matter that impressed itself most the first time round, was the resurgence of metaphor in Handke, just a few, powerfully chosen. The idea that he was a near Shakespearean talent was upon me.
Wefelmeyer - though he mentions the centrally important Quodlibet ["as you like it," another Shakespeare reference] - fails to appreciate its "the play to catch the conscience of the king" quality... The king these days being the audience which is paying to hold its Audienz for the players to instruct its conscience and consciousness - the kind of dialogue that fails to occur between stage and community in a theater that no longer makes news but puts the news posthumously on stage, making theater such an irrelevance [1] - Handke's conscientiousness being the reason why our inveterate "improver of central Europe", great artificer and sleight of hand, country priest, high priest of language keeps writing these damned things, these projection screens, even when he seems to have lost some of that twist of his wrist as in some recent [post The Play About the Film About the War, 1999] deliveries, aside to make a little money, exhibit himself to stay in the picture, and to keep meeting pretty intelligent actresses who scoot off in horror after a few years of living with St. Paul: all that the audience can see, hear, experience in the work [up until Dying, 1972] is itself,[explicitly in Public Insult, surreptitiously in Ride Across Lake Constance, participatorily in Kaspar, etc.]: these are mirrors, not fun house mirrors, more like mirrors with tentacles that reach into spaces you weren't sure anyone would reach in the theater, and they were, very icily at the time, devised by someone who knew, from positivistic knowledge, how to affect and effect an audience by subliminal linguistic means. - Quodlibet works on the principle of auditory hallucination, and does so, by Finnegans Wake type double and triple entendres; and you know into what depths associations lead, don't you?
What accounts for the resistance to these pieces, in the U.S. of A, is that like British Punk Rock, it they are a little too real; beautiful as they may be formally, their kind of anti-Aristotelianism can't be, or hasn't been, [but give America a chance - it's starting to do so with stage adaptations of Wings of Desire] turned into cabaret;
there is no veneer of style, no matter how stylish an inverted boulevard piece Ride Across Lake Constance might be; the dream, even the illusion that the players create for themselves in that play are too real. Well, Coke claims to be the real thing; and it has always been a real tasty douche. It is surprising, however, since there existed an audience for conceptual art in N.Y. during that period, that those artists, and their happenings, did not take up these early Handke texts.
2-a]
Apodictally speaking - for efficiencies and other sakes and shots of sake - Handke, as a neo-romantic who uses words, language, concretistically - as which bebé Handke I suspect experienced them, painfully, nauseatingly - yet wishes for them to approximate, resemble the earlier Romantics' wish to have the communicative capacities of music, lives within a maelstrom of syntactically orderable perceptual languages.
Handke's statement that he calms down as soon as he takes pencil in hand and starts to write, dutifully repeated by his commentators who fail to look at what this might signify, points to a constant creative state that can be approached as a psychosomatic symptom, a symptom is a compromise formation, and is chief reason why Handke feels condemned to write; that this mastery, of terror and fear, instills, reinforces his grandiosity is to be expected.
As late or as the early word- but not sound-less artificial, with rural adumbrations, My Foot My Tutor, [and its contrasting Colors for Susan by County Joe] it might occur to the foutres that this maelstrom of signifiers might be arranged in such a way as to make time flow like molasses or speed up like a bullet train, can be molded, kneaded according to certain either pleasing or disgusting [Werner Schwab] artistic ways. By the time of Walk About the Villages [W.A.T.V.] and Hour, Handke has the confidence to create a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that works entirely by phenomenological means ... within that large world of phenomena that includes spoken words, rhetoric, body languages, the language of silence...He verges on Dance Theater.
Handke's formalism - thus a certain affinity to Ionesco-like procedures in the early plays, though Handke is never quite as playful, nor is Handke, no matter some vergings, an absurdist of any kind - is a necessity for the sake of the efficiency of concentration, within Handke's by and large non-layered procedures - the exception is Quodlibet - linear, sentence by sentence procedures, of theme and variation, concentration and reiterations to impress, to get through the defenses of its audience, that invariably lethargic audience that arrives with its load of customs, those spiritual [or 'spittual'] whales in need of a cleaning of the accumulated dross.
Some of the poems in Innerworld illustrate in easily graspable manner the variety of matters that Handke can achieve in a fairly short text. For my drama lecture I use the poem Singular and Plural [a.k.a. The Turk with the wounded finger he averts from his hand while frantically keeping his eyes gazing at ducks on a pond] to illustrate the defensive nature of Handke's literary activity; its ritualizing form; the nature of the text as a projection screen; as drama, in as much as the thought of "the sportswriter who wrote about death" surges up out of the unconscious.] The source of Handke the dramatist, as in so many cases, is hysteria, and the source of male hysteria is what?... Handke may be a formalist, he is so for beauty's, for communication's sake, which arises from the right kind of precision, not for empty formalities.
2-b of 4] Formalism
For me Handke's entire modernist anti-illusionist period - [gradually changing in the course of his playful - yes, how is it possible to ignore Handke's all important playfulness? - didactic endeavors into a mode that not only alters the audience's perception, in short it "cleans out their clocks," but then, during his what I call "Mytho-Poeic" phase, allows the audience's imagination room, the space to dream, fantasize, and breathe, to move - the Handke troupe as it wanders around in so many Handke plays and novels and one film] - includes everything from the first Sprechstück, Prophecy [1965] to the piece that, formally, comprises the abundance of early even now continuously growing repertoire of aware-making instrumentalities of which Handke availed himself, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. Though conceived in the 70s, Hour was not completed until around 1990, and thus leapfrogs several "mytho-poeic" works, Walk About the Villages & The Art of Asking, and so segues between the two major periods. Looking back from that absolute high point, Hour, at the early plays, excepting that oddity Dying, one might easily come under the impression that Handke had explored a certain cache of formal possibilities inherent in the Sprechstück approach, and then resolved to comprise them within a work of a far higher order. But I don't think our genius was planning that far ahead as he then began to. But the cache was there to explore, and explore it he did, pretty much to the limit. The way that the painter Jawlensky explored the possibility of constructivist portraiture is what keep rumbling associatively with that speculation in my brain.
Once I started thinking seriously about the whole body of Handke's work, in 1986, after translating Walk About the Villages,[1982] and looking at the apparently total change between Hour and the previous play, the 1972 They Are Dying Out, I felt there was a piece missing. Well, perhaps the Handke Paris Crisis in the early to mid-seventies- the period I know in greatest dirty intimate details - had taken its toll; the film of The Lefthanded Woman was not it; Die Geschichte des Bleistift [L'histoire de crayon] provides ample evidence of the thought Handke was giving to Walk about the Villages; I had got used to my rabbit's yearly production, didn't think he sequestered anything in drawers, everything he touched had turned to gold for so many years, or ever undertook something that didn't come off. Meanwhile a couple of aborted attempts have surfaced. Hour then turned out to be the missing piece that comprises the entire avant garde period, an instance that might redeem the dialectic, and one of the great texts in the language, its sentences - in German - take you by the scruff of your syntax a pile driver that never lets go. The performance of this score then does something entirely different from the reading experience. Encorcelling like but more so than Ride, it has all the ambiguity and then some of W.A.T.V., the kind of seeing it demands leaves all your senses refreshed, reborn: yes, it cleans out your clock, you look new to me. A new kind of catharsis, a catharsis achieved by purely phenomenological means! Anti-Aristotelian as hell! Brecht will never stop turning over in his grave!
Because of its long gestation [according to Handke, feeling the text through to the end was one problem] Hour not merely straddles two very different periods in Handke's being in the world, but stands under the influence of the invasion of emotionality that we can find in his work as of a certain moment, in... A Moment of True Feeling. [The one thing we can find him agreeing to with his therapeutician in Paris in the 70s - Weight of the World - is his lack of emotional connection; otherwise, is it really the analyst who confesses to Handke that he, too, is carrying a Cross on Easter?] - If you fail to appreciate that great change, [ reread Weight of the World], never mind the host of reasons for the change, you will take the wrong approach to the work - Walk About the Villages, Art of Asking - that came as such an immense surprise to those who had not been watching or really reading... And the more so if they continued to approach these new works with the just learned critical habits. - If you look closely, the kernels for the change can be found sprouting in Dying. Also in the poem sequence Nonsense and Happiness.
In the 2007 off-shoot from Hour, Spuren der Verirrten/ Traces of the Lost, it just had its premier at the Berliner Ensemble, the narrator becomes surrogate for the audience that had always threatened to come on stage in Handke's plays since the very beginning, breaking down that last wall as well, at last], but I have not completed my third reading. Spuren starts just like Hour, events that instantly place you into a phenomenological state of aware-making closely noticing mind, which for me, used to Handke not repeating himself, was initially an unpleasantly disturbing deja vue, then some of the same Hour type figures [or Quodlibet type figures, screens] start to mumble a few words, a procedure that is feasible within the terms of Hour, but then the narrator/ author/ audience, the polarity goes on stage...joins... I am not certain that I have thought through the consequences of this fairly profound alteration, but I will post my usual detailed response in time at one of the two sites of http://wwww.handkedrama.scriptmania.com
The usual suspects that hate everything Handke - a fellow named Stadelmayer at the F.A.Z.- have given their usual burps; others have reached opposite conclusions [Die Zeit].
Wefelmeyer mentions the 2005 concatenation of hate and irritability, the so unbluesy, Subday Blues as I call Untertagblues, for the sake of its allusion to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," I discuss, nearly dismember, Subday Blues in a 3 k piece that can be found at the second of the
http://wwww.handkedrama.scriptmania.com
sites.
Subday Blues is a derivative of Handke's hyper irritable, misanthropic vein, it might be a leftover from an earlier period, no matter that it seems to connect with world wide road rage, even among unhappy S.U.V. drivers! However, Subday Blues, for me, is not served by Handke's employment of monotony, monotonous and unproductive as rage may be, its language, even on three readings, does not sparkle associations as the early happenings did. The Austrian performer, who did the premiere there, found otherwise.
Also, W. seems not to have read Geschichte des Bleistift where one can follow - as of a certain point where Bleistift stops reading like a second instalment of the involuntary associations that are the naked ego exhibition Weight of the World - in this great work book the thought that Handke was giving to the then forthcoming Walk About the Village, to Euripides and Goethe, the uses to which alternating discourse might be put, since Handke does not write what is called "dialogue" in the American theater, he is only willing to quote it. Not a hint of that in W.'s stunted discussion of the last 30 some years of Handke's work for the theater.
3 of 4] It appears that W. has never experienced any of the plays that he discusses. Otherwise he might have noticed that being subjected for some 90 minutes to Wittgensteinian philo investigational catch as catch can linguistic logistics - where the tenuous and nearly absurd but insistently logicality of the verbal combinations - that dismember all kinds of human activities - provide the tenuous straps by which consciousness keeps itself from crashing - are the "story", the experience, the happening that substitutes for "the story" which the audience came to hang on to, to see to be diverted from itself by - what I [but not most audiences] experience as a delicious dissociative experience, The Ride Across Lake Constance [which I meanwhile suggest to some young, mystified directors they call "The Ride Across the Bottom of the Lake" for what I hope are obvious reasons]. I connect this to the Handke, who disassociated during a ten year exposure to violent primal scenes, as an artist, at his desk, where pen in hand he produces calm, calming texts, can avail himself of some of the most powerful dissociative procedures as he creates these verbally activist assemblages; the Handke reading some of whose prose texts first puts you in a depressive state of mind before releasing you that you can breathe again; that so powerful self whose very being, in all its aspects, exerts itself through his texts and his plays. "My self of course is more than just myself" he said to an interviewer not long ago, pointing to... you compleat the thought.
The only interesting comment I ever read by an American reviewer about Ride was a Chicagoan writing: "Describe the experience." To do so would be to describe having experienced a dream. I had no idea how Ride would play when I translated it; what kind of effect it might have; as compared to the previous texts, it did not allow of that kind of rehearsal. It was just dialogue, albeit of a curious kind, I could translate dialogue by the ream during those days. Curious indeed, when performed you are transported into a Lewis Carrol world; it takes you down the rabbit hole the way you only go in a dream, and dreams seize you. And for real for once, not just as a damned over-used metaphor.
The use of Wittgensteinian syllogistic type question and answer, Handke might also have used legalistic formulations to achieve the same dissociative effect. Aside all the high-jinks that go on in the play.
Some stray comments
, before resuming, before administering the coup de grace.
I find it odd that W.s extensive German lit oriented bibliography fails, in a piece written in English, to cite at least Richard Gilman, the first important American critic to have written about Handke [T he Making of Modern Drama]. But German studies and its sub- rubric Handke studies, too, live in small German enclaves, self-sufficient pods that communicate only with similar pods also when they publish in English as they must, to publish or perish where no one else knows they even exist, when affiliated with institutions in English speaking parts of the world; which is one reason why their infertile seeds - these bibliographies, once you get the hang of them - are incestuous, pleasurable up close, unproductive genetically - daisy-chains - no matter all that multi-culti ideology - never fructify, come in productive relationship with whatever part of the cultural maelstrom the dry, self-contained little Germanicist pod happens to find itself in. [I am just completing a nicely devastating story entitled Sankta Klaus Nicolnietzcky comes to the Germanics X-Mas Bash. "Nietschte," quietschte the Doktorandin,"wirkerlich, ist est Nietzche?" peeing into her pants. "Wer hat die meisten Nietztche Schreine?" The department chair rushes in: "I just got funding for the Sankt Nicolnietzcky conference!"- The wages of having translated a Werner Schwab play!] Scholars might yet consult editors, translators, literary agents and directors to get to the nitty gritty of what is entailed in turning theory into practice, and what are called "process notes" from their subjects' therapeuticians.
The other of the equation, is that it is an utterly futile enterprise to try to connect with something as utterly self-absorbed, self-celebrating as official American theater, or the forever incompetent ignorant Kindergarten of the fringe, has become once again since its brief flirt with furriner stuff in the Sixties. Handke's work however, mostly in my translation, were once done by important theaters in New York and London and some off off type houses in the forever provinces. And so have an interesting record in that language, of which W. gives no evidence that he has much of a drift except when he gets it wrong via one of his second or third hand daisies. Public Insult never had real, reviewed performance in New York. There was a pick-up troupe of mine laying some seeds in the late 60s and four weeks at Herbert Berghof's private HB Studio. The first reviewed performances, very favorably, were of the duo My Foot My Tutor & Self-Accusation at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in 1971; then came the play that disturbed the subscription audience at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont, Ride Across Lake Constance , an audience that had come to be amused in the usual fashion, hang up their selves instead of trying to follow a real acrobatic language game with the most peculiar logical connections and sinister burps from the fertile underground slurp. Kaspar had its U.S. premiere, at B.A.M. [an Obey for best play and performer, Christopher Lloyd of future Taxi fame or infamy, a producer who struck it rich and had no further interest in Handke.]. Dying was done at the Yale Drama School in 1980, and scarcely ever after, Hour had some kind of performance at a minor venue in N.Y. during the 90s, Zejlko Ducik's Tutattoo Theater did a fine job of it in Chicago. The other truly great later plays - Art of Asking, W.A.T.V., The Play About the Film About the War, are waiting to be done by a theater that is so miserable in nearly each and every respect it is scarcely worthy of contempt... see an enumeration of dissatisfaction expressed about the culture industry as it manifest itself in provincial dress at:
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com
Some stray emendations on the early plays
:
Self-Accusation's
last sentence used to read "and I will never do so again" at a time that Handke may have had no intention for further pieces for the theater, but now ends with the once second to last sentence "I wrote this piece." S.A. contains the first instance that I am aware of a profound emanation of pathos in its final beautiful enumeration of all the ego's remisnesses: by pushing these "crimes" over the top, H. verges once again, but only verges, on the absurd, and is being funny. Funny! Funny! Funny! This is the most frequently performed piece in English right now, for obvious reasons, as that of the audiences preference for being able to stand in judgment instead of being judged, being entangled in questioning how it reaches judgment, at what mercies its superego is.[W. mumbles on about "the subject's loss of identity" in language. Good Gawd!]
In its movement to the final enumeration S.A. very much has a "line of beauty." That movement, of course on a far longer curve can also be found in Hour. Handke's works work towards a climax and then subside.
Wefelmeyer appears to have little appreciation of the early Handke's sense of humor, in S.A.'s mix of serious and ridiculously insignificant misdemeanors [the translation contains my favorite mistake I made as a translator]; an absence that leads to leaden readings, even of the farcical The Are Dying Out, throughout. Just as little as Ride or Public Insult are philosophical seminars, did or does Handke write for textual exegisists.
Kaspar's
last sentence used to be "I am only accidentally I", of which tendentious platitude Handke was disabused I forgot by whom, I think it was Martin Walser who was the in and ex-cathedra Suhrkamp editor for important plays those days. Thus Kaspar, ends with the thrice repeated King Lear imprecation "Goats and Monkeys", one instance of those verges on the sense of the absurd that edge Handke's work throughout; some characters become crazed, indicating that as one of many positions into which the mind-heart can be pushed.
I am glad that Wefelmeyer is intrigued by the entirely neglected Distress Calls as which my Farrar, Straus editor refused to let me improve, for the sake of memorability and impress, what is called, so lamely, "Calling for Help." Not only did I, do I have a sense of this being Handke's answer, formulation for a kind of existentialist Marxist Urtext surrogate response expression to the clamoring of the period during which it is written [oh yes, neglected also by me as a translator, director who never put in the work at rehearsals and testing in the mouths of actors to make it fit, Distress Calls, a kind of "looking for the lost chord" that hints at Handke's early knowledge of the importance of namelessness which then became one of the subjects of the title text of A Slow Homecoming , and derivatively of the entire notion of naming, of answering questions that maybe ought not to be answered at all [naming as a confining, delimiting, thus no end of names, languages letting qualities sprout] thus the states of paradisaical wordlessness into which plays such as My Foot My Tutor and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other transport the audience; states during which one is not only relievedly free of the gruesome racket that is human speech, so much more hideous among my nasal squawking North Westerners than that of my most steadfast well-fed! friends, the crows, but also of the apparent torture and nausea that words seem to have produced in bebé Handke.
For the idea that Kaspar's indoctrination is experienced by him as a torture, as this noisy piece subjects its audience to a similar demonstration, is of such subjectivity and so unusual that it, and Handke's once being nauseated by language [his autistically challenged nervous system was nauseated by just about everything that did not please his sense of beauty, and little pleased his sense of beauty more at the time than the sight of beautiful women] strike me as one of the connections to Handke's individual subjectivity as which he told Gamper one could "aufrollen" each and every one of his works.
I have found this statement to Gamper one of the most productive to follow up since Handke was not only talking [in 1986] about obvious biographical elements in his work or personal history as we find it in Child Story or Sorrow Beyond Dreams, but,conceivably, about terrified "states of mind" as we can find them in the early novels, eventually becalmed in Der Hausierer [but by what means of literary technique and filters!] turned into playfulness at the end of Die Hornissen, or in Radio Play One, a great piece that Wefelmeyer fails to mention, not that one needs to confine oneself to the plays when speaking of Handke as a dramatist it spills over into the prose texts. As does the hysteria.
- From hyper-states of the autistically hyper-sensitive to finding objective equivalents, distancing, defensive, projection screens. Distress Calls also has the quality of some other pieces, no matter their sense of completeness, or sufficiency, a sense that appears to have eluded Handke in the meanwhile, of the toss-off, the thrown, the nearly incidental, the nicely oblique, he had that unfailingly right twist of his wrist in his delivery... and has it again in the 2004 La Cuisine, a delightful piece written in Handke's serializing method, and in French, for Materic, a collaboration with this Yugoslav director, which Wefelmeyer and the editors and their list of Handke's works seems to be unaware of.
They Are Dying Out
I was glad to note W. seems to understand, on one level, as a continuation of the language games being played in Ride except of course in terms of apparently comprehensible - to those with minds infested by the business culture - logic of the language of the New Left, but put, estrangingly, self-estrangingly, into the mouths of a brother [and sister] horde of business folk. The various comedy routines hark back to the Viennese theater of Raimund, Horvarth, etc. I would disagree with W. that Quitt necessarily commits suicide: such successful monopolists usually end up as philanthropists; they only need to be killed off in plays. Handke married his own then suicidal impulses to the character. Perhaps it also contains a sense of humor about his own grandiosity. If Ride, on one level, is the perfect inversion of a boulevard piece, Dying, a boulevard piece for its first act, with the beginning of Act II turns into an unwieldy agglomeration, and thus, just as unsuccessful dreams are more susceptible to interpretation than perfectly formed ones, shows its seams, its sutures where force has been employed; that is, formally, Dying is somewhat of an abortion, it is an instance, there are other, especially the recits in some of the books, the Nova speech at the end of W.A.T.V. [Handke running not just for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but of that for Peace at one and the same time] where he forces something into a text, or adds on.
In Dying at the beginning of Act II, W. fails to mention, P.H. puts in a kind of intermission play discussion between Grand Mogul Quitt and his factotum Hans on their having seen a lower depth play, I think Handke was also speaking specifically about the buggering, inarticulate, violence-ridden Kroetz plays of the period. Then comes their discussion of the prophetic Stifter quote, prophetic of the recourse Handke would take to Stifterian idyllic transfigurations, also of his own Kroetz character like family, in W.A.T.V. [in this Handke is in some ways the usual upwardly mobile transformer of origins that seem in need of stylization]; Stifterian in the sense that the thunderstorm is always just off stage. This is I suppose also the first enunciation of the ultimately programmatic Nova announcement about "nature being her own measure" by someone who used to be nauseated by the merest hint of hay.
Dying is drenched in all kinds of Handke's own personal travails, there are deja vues of the sexual warfare from Ride, teetering as it does between emotionality but then falling back into the more accustomed derisive unemotional style. It is also Handke's only overtly Brechtian play with its talk - it IS a talky piece - about economics, and its Puntilla/ Mattei routines in several version, not that you need Brecht for that.
W. is quite right that some [but by no means all] the characters are mere types, one reason that U.S. reviewers - apparently with none in the streets and buses - asked, in their usual fashion, for real blood and real emotions on stage! This is a hugely important moment in Handke's theater, and noting the direction he took... away from the direction of becoming another Ferenc Molnar, or writing plays about the reconstituting German middle class... he was going to become a living classic!
Whereas the actors in Ride are young actors who try out roles of other actors, that is actors impersonating actors, in their "I want to be someone like somebody else was once", in Dying most of the roles, the exceptions are Quitt and Quitt's dolorous sick wife, are not, cannot be so defined within commedia del arte terms. In that sense, Dying, or aspects of it, has a realistic, referential to real life quality, as compared to totally artificial quality of Ride. Handke, in the 1999 The Play about the Film, will re-use the long attack speech that one of the businessman launches on Quitt... its melody that is, but with different set of words. [Handke the carpenter squirrel]. Yes, I see no mention in W. of Handke as a master carpenter, something I began to appreciate when taking a close look at the derivates from his own work of which his most of his contribution to the screenplay of Wings of Desire consists.
Preparations for Immortality
I would call Zuruestungen fuer die Unsterblichkeit, Scaffolding for..." might work and points into the right directions where W.s "Harnessing for.." does not; Abbott's Voyage by Dugout does not work since a dugout in common usage is a hole of various uses; thus to take a voyage in it...; A Summer's Postscript or Epilogue I suggest instead of W.'s "Summerly" [!], Nothing wrong with W.s's expat English except when he needs to translate from German. And for Handke's "Rund um das grosse Tribunal" I suggest
"The Handke cat slinking around the hot sauce but never even putting a paw into it."
4] Dire Consequences
At the latest when I read the opening paragraph, on page 215, of the final section, "From the Theater of Speech to the Theater of Narrative: The Later Plays," that treats of Handke's post 1972 work in the theater:
"Offending the Audience and Prophecy initiated a theater of language and Self-Accusation introduced the idea of the development of a de-individualized individual [sic! sic! sic!] self through language. Kaspar took this approach one step further and presented the process by which the adoption of social roles is transformed into a history of self-alienation,'[A deinvididualized self nonetheless alienated from itself??? the clanking conceptual horrors that this approach produces! M.R.] leaving the protagonist trapped in a web of language and actions..." I became 199 per cent certain that I was reading the writing, the typewriter crime, of an utter deadbeat; and little that you find subsequently about the later Handke in this section disabused me of that conclusion. A reader in German! How is it possible to write about W.A.T.V. and only write about the defectiveness of its characters and not respond to the stupendous generosity and affection which Handke in his "Rolling on the River" mood showers on this wide spectrum of his worker aristocracy, how is it possible to read and miss the entirely new form of discourse? How is it possible to fail to respond to Art of Asking. W.A.T.V., as thorough readers of Handke have noticed, becomes the source of two decades of great work, even in that monstrum novel, or perhaps because he was running out of steam, "Image Loss: Across the Sierra del Gredos " [Farrar, Straus, 2007] Handke will tap into that spring...
And Elonora Pascu's "Unterwegs zum Ungesagten", a piece of real work I really learned something from, appears in the bibliography... but certainly is not evidenced in W.s' reading of these texts.
Part of W.s problem of course is that he spends three quarters of his piece recounting the early plays, while short-shrifting equally though differently important but far more challenging work, a task I think I am not certain he is up to.
Aside the already listed failures, there is W.s apparent unawareness that Handke, starting with W.A.T.V. was writing and publishing Lesedramen, plays to be read primarily, the chances of their being performed being so slim for a variety, also of their demanding reasons. With his latest, Traces of the Lost, however, has Handke solved, or put his mind onto solving the seam that runs between these alternatives: reading Spuren is the reading of a text that is in its entirety a description of the performance, so the director of actual performance and the director reader become one and the same. The closing of that loophole was to be expected. How perfectly it was then done amazes me.
Short-shrifting everything from W.A.T.V. up to The Play About the Film W. then presents the latter as representative of the mytho-poeic work. Well, it is the least representative of the lot, and its connection with the alternating discourse and transfiguring and grand procedures of the previous four plays is most tenuous; mythic it can be said to be only in its emphasis on the wild forever primitive eternal "Serbian" spirit that courses through the rivers in a canoe carved out of a single tree trunk. In other respects, as W. must beware since he points out that the play is a kind of investigation and demonstration, nearly a court proceeding, The Play About the Film stands within the post-German tradition of near docu-drama presentations, a line that runs from Brecht, through Handke's friend Kipphart, Hochhuth, to Günter Grass's The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, the last of which it resembles in its having a film within a play, instead of a play [Cariolanus] within a play being rehearsed.
However, to be fair, W. is interesting and a quite perceptive in his take on the play. In other words, read the opening and the very end of his piece, don't bother slogging through the desert of the inbetween, it is nothing as interesting as a real desert where I always learned something. But once again, because he has no sense of the over-riding needs of the formal requirements within which an artist like Handke must work, he fails to understand that the use of a screen play, citing, discussing, acting out of scenes from a screenplay, affords Handke some extraordinary efficiencies, though one might not notice them in a play that is far too wordy and expository to play. However, W. picks up on it being the case that as a whole the play contains a large variety of viewpoints, perspectives, to none of which one ought to pin down the author, except possibly all of them. "Every one is in the right" prefaces W.A.T.V. [i.e. every individual is wrong] prevails here as well. I don't want to repeat what I said about this great concept since I already commented on Scott Abbot's take on it in his essay on Handke and Yugoslavia. [First review posting] Besides, I once wrote a long myopic, detail by detail dismemberment of it, for myself, as I was going to make a presentation of it to the usual local cop-out, so that I would be certain how it worked, and that can be found at one of the two handke drama sites:
http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/
Behind Play About the Film.. lies a musical structure as in most of Handke's plays. e-mail me or post a comment to let me know what it is and i will give your a prize if your answer is correct.
Play About the Film
is also a model of its kind, the way Brecht's plays were also always models, alterable within historical circumstances. Although Handke, I think, was just a tad cute when he told his daughter in a T.V. interview after the premiere that no matter his personal stance on the matter of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, The Play about the Film is an objective piece, a director could for example put a favorable emphasis on the mountain bicyclist, the foreign interventionists who arrive to clean up the ungodly mess that the various tribes have made with their forever fighting. But the play is not skewed in favor of his own personal sentimental romantic attachments.
To be fair, once again, among the few things W. does pick up in his state of ignorance and failure to have followed the progress of the transfiguring so protein and sovereign Count from Griffen, he notices Handke's search for peace-giving forms [ p.228], and that this requires the collaboration of audience and players, whose first surprising instance came in Sorger's search for them in geological formation in A Slow Homecoming. For me this appeal - its strongest articulation, the most deeply pathos ridden, comes in Nova's speech - is an indication of the violence prone Handke's profound longing to be free of these impulses.
February 2007
FN 1] In Seattle there were Handke performances in the 70s and early 80s at the now, relievedly defunct, Empty Space Theater, founded and run into bankruptcy by that first rate director M. Burke Walker. So that when I got to these soggy parts in the summer of 1994, via Dan Sullivan, then the Artistic director of the Seattle Rep, I was put in touch with Kurt Beattie, as of 2002 the artistic director of A Contemporary Theater in Seattle, who had been Kaspar in the Empty Space's production of self-same play. Kurt is a bright fellow who then put in yeoman's work as I tried to get a Handke festival going at the University where I became a visiting scholar for about ten years. However, I then noticed that Kurt, the assistant artistic director at The Rep, as it is referred to, was a kind of permanent assistant in his utter deferentiality to the powers above him, the sort of thing you notices at the way he answers a telephone call, in feeling it beneath the successor to Dan Sullivan to even come to see Handke's Hour when Steve Pearson, an occasionally first rate director, did it at the University in the late 90s. Indeed, on the job of artistic director of ACT falling into his lap upon ACT's imminent bankruptcy and its forthcoming director begging off from what appeared to be a thankless job, Kurt Beattie became an "I'll have my assistant call you" e-mail correspondent, and he quickly copped out on his dream... there's the telling phrase...of finally doing a Seattle Premiere of "Mother Courage." And all his dreams or whatever for doing some Handke at ACT were shelved for no end of short run forgettables of the most jejune sort.
From the Empty Space also derived a kind of butch gay Sasquatch, extremely bright, in a permanent state of narcissitic rage, a reviewer who might have become a critic of national note [not that difficult in this country or any country with the present lack of notables in that field] were it not for a number of severe characterological deficiencies, and for his primary avocation of being a food writer. But anyhow, Roger Downey, no matter his hatred of Brecht, for bedding many of his seductive collaborators, had some real intelligence and some real understanding of Handke and Heiner Mueller, and all it takes for promiscuoius me [or rather, now took] is just a tad of intelligence or beauty to tolerate characterological deficiences of his kind, at least for a while, or until it proves dangerous. Downey had looked forward to going with Public Insult from one theater to the other, surprise symphony visits to stir up the slugs in the minds.
Another fellow with Empty Space origins was Ret White of Cornish theater department, who never got back to me on my proposition of giving The Play About the Film About the War a try there, he was too busy raising and dispensing Public Arts funds...Alas, poor Yorick.
The last director of The Empty Space , a colleague of sorts since I too was at the Yale Drama School, at least for one years, said, at her taking on that position, that she, allegedly weaned on Space work in the 70s, wanted to continue to do work in that vein. I contacted her, pointing out that Public Insult had never been done, but never heard back, and, with few exceptions, saw nothing of the kind of a continuation being put on her boards. After what must be a million and a half of subsidies and fundraisers during my 13 years here, the far too fat misnamed Space finally gave up the ghost.
M. Burke Walker, now an itinerant director, promises to look at the latest Handke, but I never hear what his reaction might be, as he, ignominuous trouper, does one or the other play his heart is not in just to survive. It will wear out his heart as it has so many others.
There is the chief theater reviewer, Misha Berson, of the Seattle Times, who can make or break a play hereabouts, who recently described Handke's Public Insult as a "grenade"! She certainly never saw the play performed in Seattle, since Empty Space, if she was here then, did not put it on: the director fell ill. Alas, poor Yorick. A year or so ago Ms. Berson and I had an e-mail exchange during which she insisted strenuously not to be a philistine!
I contacted the third Artistic Director of the Rep at his coming to Seattle in 2006 whether he might want to discuss some of the later Handke plays, and never heard back. At a Civic Forum where this worthy was introduced to Seattle, he stated that he wanted to bring some foreign work and troupes to Seattle; asked during the q + a period what specifics he had in mind, he quickly retreated into saying that he really wanted to do the local talent first, not much of that I am afraid.
However, at the beginning of my stay in Seattle, Kurt Beattie and I seemed to be getting somewhere in putting on a Handke festival. And if Ms. Sarah Nash-Gates, who comes from the costume department to run the UW School of Drama, had not let not just me, but the group of interested parties, dangle in the wind while cutting us out from behind, the $ 300.000 that an Austrian Cultural attache type had organized from a variety of Austrian sources might not have been wasted. But, being the new kid on the block, I did not know then that nothing not initiated by Ms. Gates gets done at the U.S. Drama School. Hell, she could have put her name to it, for all I cared. And direcor Steve Pearson, who develops some fine acting talent, and allegedly "loves Handke" proves a weak sister too, another Bhuddist.
Downey never had anything like a successor at The Weekly once he started to write about food and wine; and now that The Weekly is part of a national chain of so-called alternative publications matters have only got worse there. The Seattle Post Intelligencer has a sweet ancient reviewer whose having that position embodies the irrelevance of theater. The Stranger, one independent publication with a little moxie, has two theater reviewers, Annie Wagner and Brendan Kiley, but they both need to get out of town for a while to acquire some perspective on what might be possible even in Seattle. But they as it were are the forever "buds of May."
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
an incremental, eventually complete, essay by essay review of editors Frank Pilipp and David Coury's THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE
] Here comes an incremental, eventually complete, essay by essay review of editors Frank Pilipp and David Coury's THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE with essays by Professors Scott Abbot, Thomas Barry, Robert Halsall, Frank Pilipp, Karl Wagner, Maria Luisa Roli, David Coury, Fritz Wefelmeyer, Christiane Weller, John E. Davidson, Andrea Gogröf-Vorhees, Mirielle Tabah, and Frank Pilipp and David Coury, Ariadne Press, 2006
b] As I am in the process of completing a monograph on Handke's drama for the TDR Enactment series and have just completed my third take on Handke's involvement in matters Yugoslavian
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com [the handke/ milosevic controversy; also see
http://www.handkeyugo.scriptmania.com for my first two, more exploratory, takes on the over-all controversy] as well as just having written an odd vari-angled book on Handke, in German,
http://www.kultur.at/lesen/index.htm [prosa/ dem handke auf die schliche] I will first
[1] address Abbott's piece on Handke's Yugoslav texts;on-line as of this sending at:
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/
[2] Fritz Wefelmeyer essay on Handke's drama; and [3] the other contributions in whatever order strikes me as most pertinent in light of the preceding, or maybe not when I have nothing to add, or am too ignorant, all of which I hope will not amount to a review the length of the book under review, but provides me with yet a different tack form the many I have taken so far.
c] But first a word about the book's publisher, Ariadne, who sings obscurely in editions of 500 copies because none of its books are ever reviewed. It is not reassuring when one of their predictably clunky productions has on its back cover - 40 years after the fact of Handke's 1966 appearance at the Group 47 meeting in Princeton, the appearance that year of his first novel, Die Hornissen, and the premiere of Publikumsbeschimpfung [Public Insult as I now call it - that Handke achieved prominence in 1968.
Further, re this one of the worlds most dreadful publishers: Having signed more than a half dozen contracts with Ariadne, including the gift to these swine of my best translation, Handke's WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES , plus extensive postscript, I have never received a single statement of sales, not that sales are to be expected, since A. does not send out review galleys not even of the most elementary kind to Library Journal and Publisher's Weekly, which explains why, in ten years, they have not managed to sell even their first print run of 500 of W.A.T.V. [I get my figures from the original proprietor, Suhrkamp, to whom, when asked, A. eventually render their minuscules], whereas not a single book of Handke's twenty plus published American titles ever sold less than 5,000 copies, with many going into multiple editions and published in mass quality paperback.
Ariadne persists in its Austrian Culture funded spendthrift ways, using translation funds to subsidize themselves, under the safety net of the cost of 10 k just as a fee to file claim in Federal Court; so that unless you live in Riverside County, CA. you lack recourse, small claims court.
d] One further note, prior to medias res. Professors Barry and Abbott are contributors to the handke.scriptmania on-line project
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com
and its 12 + subsites.... drama 1+2, prose 1+2; scholar, film, translation, psychobio, bild, etc.
I have known Tom Barry for about 20 earth cycles round the sun. These affiliations I do not think will influence my assessment of their work, though I may put critical comments more kindly than my Ezraish side might otherwise.
e] However, let me signal, ahead of the time of getting down to specifics, my immediate pleasure at the reading that Scott gives Handke's Yugoslavia texts, no matter our interesting difference of opinions in some very important matters; and my dissatisfaction with Fritz Wefelmeyer's piece on Handke's theater. Not to address, in 2006, the extraordinary change that Handke's drama began to undergo, with the transitional [1975-1990] Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other , its first product being the Goethe-Euripedean drama of the "Rolling on the River" aristocracy of the working class, Walk About the Villages; to do an excellent job, once again, on "Public Insult" and a fair job on Handke's last major effort, The Play about the Film about the War [1999] but not to understand how "Ride Across Lake Constance" or Hour work, and to ignore Handke's "Faust", The Art of Asking, etc. etc., is not "what the world needs now." I will discuss the preface when I come to the editors own pieces. But let me note: why is it that full professors, exposed for decades upon decades to beautiful texts, end up writing like the most pedestrian of apparachiks.
f] You may think of me as the Franz Kilb of Handke studies, if you remember that gnat in the navel of the economy who owns one share of every every publicly traded stock and who throws a stink bomb at each stock holders' me eting - in that so revelatory Raimundian/Brechtian tragic farce, THEY ARE DYING OUT, and yourselves, Germanicists, combined, as Gerard Depardieu who takes the Kilb-Kalb into a "Schwitzkopf," [sweatbox]
who is proud not to "owe nobody nuttin'", no fealty to any German department now that my somewhat crimping 10 year stint as visiting scholar at the Udub has come to an end; with no interest in having a position of any kind in any department of that kind anywhere in the world; thus in a position to shoot my pigeons where I spot them and safeguard my sparrows. In short, I am an equal opportunity offender.
=======================================
[1-A]
Scott Abbott and I must be the two most expert in matters Handke-Yugoslavian in the U.S. In my own now 20 year long Handke project, Handke's involvement in this sub-rubric of Handke studies has proved a long and arduous but ultimately fascinating detour. Without the detour to a part of the world I have only the most superficial personal but pleasant acquaintance, I would no doubt think, like no end of halfway intelligent people who have a limited time to disgorge the junk that their brains absorb from the media, that the Serbs were to blame and that Slobo indeed was the worst kind of big bad wolf, first cousin to Saddam Hussein, or Hitler, Caucescou, or Stalin. I would know little more about that part of the world and what went down during its disintegration than I do about tribal warfare in the Congo, and its history, and the interests that prevail there.
The first coming of the Handke/ Yugo controversy in the mid 90s, on publication of his A Winter's Journey, was my introduction to doing research on line, in something like "real time"; by its second coming, during the Kosovo war in 1999, I was proficient; by its third coming, in 2006, at Handke's for me entirely predictable self display at the Milosevic funeral, each, often contradictory, Handke statements about his relation to the big bad woolf of Pozarevac, of whom he is so oddly protective, reached me within a day. Meanwhile, I think I know why Handke is so protective of Slobo, and who knows Handke may even be right that he is only a tragic figure, a failed Yugoslav Lincoln, no matter that he was condemned, for murder, posthumously, in Belgrade. I myself think that at least in part Handke's protectiveness is a question of transference from Handke's affection of his father grandfather figure, and yet another instance of wishful thinking. But see for yourselves, the
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com [the handke/ milosevic controversy] contains most quotes and links to the controversy as it played out in France and Germany. My own first two takes, which Handke rather liked, and which once again I withdrew from being published as a book... they can be found at
http://www.handkeyugo.scriptmania.com
I had a sense that that was not the end of it, as it wasn't though I think the Milosevic funeral and its consequences were it.
Abbott's piece is fine, first rate and useful to me in emphasizing Handke's ability - when he has a pencil in hand, as opposed to when he delivers himself of spoken tirades, righteous whole sale condemnations, or ejaculations of pain that testify to how to the quick the disintegration affects [ed] him - to allow contradictions, differentiations into his text, via phenomenological noted observations... that are then reflected upon, more defensively than what Scott calls "dialectically", starting in the reprieve A Summer's Postscript. As a trained analyst now, and warier than ever of the entire German school of irrationalist philosophers, Scott's venture into Nietzschean murkiness and Heidegger, once again makes me take preference in the system prcpt. , how sense impressions - both ex and internal, mediated by the brain, in collaboration with the generative language system, once the brain has grown that function, can put these impressions into communicable impressions, first as duh duh duh, then into syntactical order, leaving the entire exciting prior existence in and ex utero unverbalized, confined to the realm of the unconscious, unverbalizable except in the analytic deep sea diving experiment. The treasure that the sled brings up in this instance are not volcanic worms, but the gift of understanding. I come out as a nominalist who does not believe in inevitability although I am surrounded by birds and students who appear to move predictably as any herd animal. Actually, my crow friends' often unpredictable behavior surprises me more than that of the undergraduates.
I do not think it required, and Winter Journey's opening chapter makes that clear, a trip to the region to conclude that the word was out among the western media to find a single culprit [the Serbs] and one chief mover of evil [Slobodan Milosevics] for the voodoo doll hunt to be on. The only surprising thing about that is that you can, perhaps need to, find/create such a simple Manichean formula every few years anew, whereas an African native will have just one doll with him that he will stick with pins and needles all his life.
To my own great surprise I ultimately found myself in considerable agreement with Handke, despite the ugliness of his tirades, and despite the fact that his Yugoslavia text, the exception being the near great " The Play about the Film About the War," do not provide any kind of historical overview, or time line of the process of disintegration of the Federation. My chief dissatisfaction is with Handke's surprising - surprising for his having had two Partisan uncles killed during WW II - lack of appreciation [the twice repeated "We were never meant to be a union" of the "Canoe" play does not quite suffice] of the centrifugal forces that had built up, and not just during the past 100 + years, since the secession of the Ottomans [who converted some Serbians, the way that Turks say that Bulgarians do and vice versa], the accession and dis-accession of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the dreadful things that happened during and subsequent to the occupation by Hitler's troops. For I can well see why some of the tribes, whose federation agreement allowed for secession, wanted to go it on their own, at least try that way. However, Handke's "idiocy", coming out form under several years of self-imposed verbal monkishness in 2005 with the pronouncement that the Western Power "had committed a near perfect crime" in getting these tribes to chose an independent way, is not exactly what is called a differentiated, "third way" statement, is it? If the perfect crime was the Italian and then German take-over of the Dalmatian coast in 1941, German recognition of two provinces [Slovenia and Croatia] seeking independence would not to seem close to committing a crime. And Handke, let us not forget this, is a trained lawyer, and only did not take his exams because he knew he would succeed as a writer. The "Canoe" play at least alludes to Yugoslavia's odd status during the cold war, as the U.S. one communist s.o.b., whose economic assistance propped up a makeshift mixed socialist economy; sort of like a huge West Berlin along the Adriatic, wonderfully artificial indeed. The difference between Handke's essayistic, uncliched, non-platitudonous writing in the travelogue sections of the three travelogue books and his pronouncements make me once again away of the immense difference between the Handke with a pencil in Hand and the Handke with a mega or microphone and of the statement, in "No-Mans-Land" novel that it was the differentiations in the Roman penal code [he might also have mentioned Wittgenstein] that brought some order into his angry adolescent noggin. But see anon.
1-B]
I like Scott's piece, it is an extremely valuable careful reading of these texts, and it makes me want to go back to them once more: what greater compliment is there from reader to reader? However it is entirely wrong and sentimental, except in his elaboration of Handke's Thucidean phenomenological narrative procedure, in focusing, in opening with a quote from the Skopje section of For Thucydides {F.T.}, denoting Handke's wish, or observation that different feathered friends can live halfway peaceably together; he mistakes his own projection into one of Handke's projection screens; one only finds out what a nice guy Scott Abbot is. The various sometimes marvelous short pieces that make up F.T., as so many if not all of Handke's art products, are designed as projection screens, inference from these ambiguities to Handke's personal, momentary, or more enduring feelings opinions risk projecting the reader's, in this instance, Abbott's own wishes into the text. I think only artistic judgments about them are possible, the rest is inferential supposition. They produce states of mind, whether these are the same states, or approximate to Handke's, there can be no certainty on that score.
Handke, the extreme misanthrope, who even takes his oldest friends on instant mushroom searches so as not to find himself locked in a room with them; the Handke who opted his play rights out of the "Verlag der Autoren," the one socialist enterprise to survive the 60s, and called this grouping fascist, and threw in his own autocratic leanings with the autocratic Gauner Siegfried Unseld, first recipient nonetheless of the Siegfried Unseld Preis, to keep him tied to a disintegrating Suhrkamp Kultur, whom he portraits in such devastating fashion in several of his book, a not very good socialist or rainbow coalition makes, except wishfully I suppose. [Indeed, Slovenia has turned into another Andorra, you can follow its progress in the N.Y. Times travel section: Ph.D.s are now innkeepers. Yet in a recent interview with N.Z.Z. Handke surprisingly endorses western investments in Belgrade that are changing the city scape, and comes out sounding like a Western globalist investment banker with the primacy on economic development, unless he was leading his interviewer by the nose to test whether the interviewer knew his previous position; it is the same interview in which Handke stated that he felt Milosevic was innocent because of the way he had smiled when the charges were read to him in De Haag; and in which one comes away with the feeling that Handke is amazingly well versed and sophisticated in matters of internal Serbian politics.]
A great Thucidean indeed, equipped not only with great verbal, but, more importantly, unusual painfully acute perceptual powers, to note items in the forever moraine, the principle, as of early on, of "the innerworld of the outerworld of the innerworld" prevails. [I address Handkes capacities and abilities as a kind of regular American reporter in section K of dem handke auf die schliche in some real detail and so will only link to it here:
http://www.kultur ]
Also, let us not forget over his pure observational powers that Handke for decades on end expressed his utter hatred and contempt for matters German, for reasons of having had a German stepfather, and that he regretted his arrogant depiction of his real father, in Sorrow Beyond Dreams, only many years later. [see the biographer Pichler as compared to the other Pichler Handke scholars for this.]
Handke, moreover, is the great artificer of states of mind, most radically when he uses various procedures to create dissociations in the audience, say in Ride Across Lake Constance, or My Foot My Tutor , most powerfully in The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, but also in some syntactically ingenious prose texts, for didactic, linguistically moral purposes.
Handke quite knowingly creates "projection screens"[or vacuums!] in which we can find ourselves and come to our senses, also verbally. Although in some instances in these pure travelogue parts of these texts I not only come under the impression that Handke is somewhat defensive but that the doubting that he introduces is purposive, that is, is not dis-interested.This past year, the circumstance of the Milosevic controversy finally forced Handke to speak the unequivocal platitude that yes, Srebrenice was the worst war crime to have been committed in Western Europe since the end of WW II.
Although Handke expresses the occasional wish to return to a virginal state entirely devoid of opinions [vide Hour, which achieves this state in the audience], he never succeeds for long, in that respect is like most other Joe Does or Mary Janes. Not only does Handke create projection screens, but these constructions produce states of mind, most pleasurably I found in the case of The Repetition which - its long periods, its syntax - thus the title of my 1500 page opus: "Handke, the Master [sometimes dictator] of Syntax" - made me, too, walk about as a "King of Slowness" in the Chapparal of the St. Monica Mts. for half a dozen years from the mid 80s to early 90s, while training to be a psychoanalyst; i.e. any inferences as to Handke's predisposition to people living together peaceably that might be drawn from the Skopje piece, possibly at the moment of writing, could be contradicted by what for me is a further purposely ambiguous image, that of the tent of United Nation type flags collapsing at the end of The Play about the Film About the War. Also, for example, as a director who favored the NATO intervention in a part of the world whose often unending century old tribal warfare had to be put to a stop for no end of reasons, I might be able to skew a production of that play in favor of the three internationalists: by that I mean to indicate at once that Handke, as an artist, ever since Walk About the Village's ]W.A.T.V.] epigraph "everyone is in the right", in his art, as compared to his often violent, hurt to the quick, public pronouncements, ejaculations, his private ranting and cussing, remains as true as he can to hoeing the line of ambiguity. I would think that even the Socratic or call it dialectical process of the Essay on Tiredness is meant to achieve ambiguity as to the very idea of tiredness? For example, I was puzzled until just now why with the wide choice Handke had of citing Serb-hating pieces in the U.S. press he quoted the so excellent, one of the best American journalists, Michael Danner. It is not just I don't think that Handke took violent irritated umbrage at any representation other than his own of what went down in Yugoslavia, as he did, like that irritated
Wild Man in the recent play Subday Blues, as Handke the so over-irritable himself does, at a host of matters [that then make one ask what inside him, in his psyche, in his very brain so irritates him], but that the Danner quote serves the purpose of ambiguity better than numerous pieces from the New Republic, or most hideously those of Roger Cohen from the N.Y. Times ever could. The monstrously ignorant Stephen Marcus, the New York Review of Book's hatchet man for teaching Handke the lesson of pain of being politically incorrect, then came to the defense of Danner without having the faintest on what line of ambiguity Handke was writing, or what he was about. After the Vienna premiere of the piece Handke had himself interviewed by his daughter Amina, and I think only being just a tad cute, insisted on an ambiguous reading of his play, distancing it, salvaging it, from his personal opinions. Marcus I believe said that "The Bearskin" woman was Handke's own voice, it might as easily be that of "the Greek reporter" who wants to come back out of the cold, but it is also that of "the directors" and of the "forest madman" in an instance of a playwright with a grand self such as Handke's who refuses, and in an instance such as "Canoe" ought not to be pinned down to a single position except as creator for a piece of art that is criticizable only within its own terms. This being the long way round of saying that I doubt that Handke will hold it against Scott that Scott works his way up and down the treacherous Utah mountains on a mountain bike.
Deciding not to practice, some fair purchase on my own traumatic German childhood, and once you have purchase you can deal, my great test case, a case of cases if ever there was one, proved the one nearest at hand, the case of Peter Handke. It was while reviewing "Across"[ Chinese des Schmerzens - a kind of repetition of Moment of True Feeling - but now with Rusdealesaque Stifterian-Lenzian descriptions that honor the surrounds of Salzburg while the protagonist Loser's unhappy consciousness acts out no end of destructive matters] that Handke's "caseness" began to dawn on me: the moment I realized that when Loser said "no" he ought to have said "yes" between the "no" and the "yes" dawns the wide spectrum of ambiguity.
Loser's sadistic super-ego, the pulling out of the legs of harmless daddy-long legs; the so unproductive self-berating that was going on, the mystifications about yet another pursuing furious woman - which now that that woman has spoken up is anything but mysterious. As a matter of fact, around 1991 I had a case study which Donald Daviau, then of Ariadne, wanted to publish; but some matters did not wash: and did not until I came on Handke's mentioning to his Eckermann, Herbert Gamper, that he still had occasional autistic moments. A great deal fell into place at that point that had not made sense, Handke's being a kind of idiot savant, his untrammeled talent if and when he holds pencil in hand; but also his frequently oafish behavior, his proclivity for Tourettish verbal productions, which, if formalized as at the end of " Public Insult," are not really insulting but funny and awakening, whereas otherwise... only a trained analyst can handle psychotic production being tossed at him, hold them, and look, or rather "listen past them" into what is going on in the patient or between patient and analyst. However, prior to the so complicating factor of Handke's autism, I had become aware, as a researcher, reader, sleuth of the plethora of consequences to Handke's being in the world of a decade of exposure to violent drunken primal scenes [just read Handke's own enumeration in his Assaying of Tiredness]: all you need to - no one that I have read, including Tilman Moser, the only other person to concern himself with Handke from this perspective - is read between the lines of Sorrow Beyond Dreams . Forget about the ultimately unhappy life of Ms. Sivec-Schönherr-Handke [Handke's name might have been Schönherr, that of his biological father, a German Army paymaster from Northern Germany who fathered him while stationed in Griffen in 1942, but, though he was Ms. Sivec's love of her life, refused to divorce his first wife, leaving her depressed, ensuring what is called anaclytic - anlehnende - depression in her first born son, her love child].
All I did was look at these details a bit more closely, follow them up, cross reference within this huge body of self-display, Handke's mounting oeuvre, and follow them where they might lead, like a forensic scientist, or a lawyer, making a finding: without knowing in the slightest, initially, not the faintest where the material might lead me. But it is all there: including, most importantly, Handke description of putting something over his eyes during these scenes; the earliest instance of not wanting to know, and in this instance on the part of someone with the super-sensitive super-high-resolution that much more irritable sense of sight of the autistic eagle eyes, dog nosed, sonar eared who goes occasionally color blind and thus does not have a driver's license and is dependent on friends like Darko,Zarko etc. to drive him around, or who has taken no end of buses and provides amazing snapshots of passengers in buses [to put it this way instead of becoming hideously technical]: autism is a painful condition because, one important factor, the sensory input is far higher than the standard processor, modulator can accommodate. These are matters of the brain. The askewness in the brain manifests itself in the skewed behavior of idiots you meet as they used to be called, slightly different from the rest of us, for whom Handke expresses such frequent affinity, the great "Play about the Film About the War" has two of them, the "Forest Madman" and then a split-off part, "The Complete Madman."
Aside from the metaphor of "pillow over your head," the not wanting to see, but the peeking of the infinite voyeur Handke, a child, especially in a primal scene situation - in Handke's case, that of a love-child who had exclusive use of an infinitely doting exquisitely beautiful mother for the first two years of his life - will masturbate to remain whole, not to split. The birth of rage, Handke's difficult relationship with his wives. The birth of someone who needs to keep a pencil in hand to stay whole, productive, fated, condemned to write. Handke's productiveness is that of a symptom, so that when he is not writing he is translating.
I will stop here: but it is important I think to be very mindful of the "blanket over the eyes", the looking obliquely, and the oblique representation of the hideous, the fantasy of a different world, the creation of it in the world of words, the calming of anxiety as soon as he holds a pencil in hand of someone who used to say that he was "born into terror"... as indeed he was as of age two. I think that oblique representations of horror as we come upon them in Die Hornissen and Der Hausierer, a primal scene observation if there ever was one, buried within a host of defensive literary techniques [think the way fear is toyed with in Radio Play One] which of course are then so much more interesting than the obscene terrifying heart of the world; in Across, in Walk About the Villages where the horror, too, is only alluded to, it remains off stage as well; in My Foot My Tutor where violence could break out at any moment, in Singular and Plural , where the Turk averts his wounded thumb, but suddenly the memory of "the sportswriter who talked about death" surges up, and in similar instances in the travelogue parts of the three of his altogether eight Yugoslavia related books can be explained, fundamentally, from this near aboriginal ten year primal scene exposure, no matter the variety of literary procedures that Handke employs, literary procedures as defensive maneuvers, which, ever so fortunately, leave the reader's imagination freedom to roam. In perhaps his greatest text, the opening chapter of the novel Langsame Heimkehr we have an Indian appear, threatening Sorger with a set of chains... In that setting what Handke calls the "historical" of violence can appear for once, also in Across of course. For the Alaska book this has a rightness as those who have worked among the natives there will testify.
I-C
Handke was charged with two matters, one of being lyrical where he should have "implored in tears," which the official readers who ask him to keep saying "bad bad dog" seem not to notice when he does implore and you can hear the tears, and of denying the "Holocaust" being committed by the "Serbians": it is is on that background of the prohibition of that denial that the entire controversy played out. And which brought a host of worthies on to the stage to parade their humanitarian wherewithals. Worst of all the grand exhibitionist Susan Sontag, a splendid and splendidly important essayist, once friend, instrumental in helping me persuade Farrar, Straus to become Handke's American publisher; and first rate when it came to assessing U.S. moral culpabilities, doing her thing rehearsing Beckett's Endgame in Sarajevo; then miserably, unforgettably, writing, in the Serb eating NY Times Magazine, at the time of the Kosovo campaign "now the Serbs are the victims," saying that she would never read another Handke book because he did not inveigh, speak in the same platitudes in which she did; Salmon Rushdie a book tour inconvenienced by the Yugoslav war and the side war that Handke had started, not knowing the first thing about Yugoslavia, nominating Handke as "idiot of the year", the German author Buch who likes to cuddle Albanians; Ely Wiesel who instantly, ignorantly, ideologically expressed sympathy for the victims, the Albanians, who ate the likes of him as a young boy for breakfast not long ago. No end of foreign tourists of humanitarian sympathy... all for the show back home! The great exception Handke, no less a showboat, but one with expertise and affection, who instantly tried to retract his saying "The Serbs are the new Jews" or however he put this ejaculation that only manifested how injured his being was; so that you, thinking analytically, begin to dwell on, as I did, what in this affair might be able to injure his psyche so to the quick. At least to my own halfway satisfaction, the answer to this question is related to Handke's installation of his Slovenian grandfather Sivec as the father figure during the promised re-writing of Sorrow Beyond Dreams, that is during his acquisition of a second primary identity as that of Filip Kobal in The Repetition; and of course to Handke's two Partisan uncles who perished during WW II and whose wartime letters became heirlooms in Sivec household: the Handke who wishes to be a classic in his own lifetime many of whose works have managed to become an heirlooms during my battles! As an analyst who can crack some very difficult equations, I could not be made happier by Handke's Art of Asking, which refuses, tries not to ask in any or the usual fashions, and rids my mind of the constant querying, at least for a while.
On superficial glance there seems a bit of truth to both charges, of being too lyrical and denying, though if his accusers pursued his oblique travelogues texts they would realize that something else is going on as Scott enumerates and elaborates so much more patiently than I could. Handke doesn't deny though he admits to wanting to, the way you do when you don't want to admit to yourself that the bitch is cheating. Even recently, in an interview with a Croat paper he claimed once again, as he did in Winter's Journey [where he notes his the wife's asking him whether he wanted to deny everything] that the inner city of Dubrovnik could not possibly have been shelled, after all he celebrated his own 45 th birthday there, pointing not only to Handke's extreme self-involvement but to the wish that the dream continue to exist, and that he will be infuriated if it is disturbed.
====
So these beautiful travel texts - written in each instance shortly after his return to his desk, utilizing to whatever degree no scholar will be able to tell I hope for many years to come, recourse to Handke's extraordinary trove of daily diaries - indeed provide a highly individual record of visiting, revisiting those parts of the world... However, aside from keeping us mindful of the other events that unfold during war time, that you can manage to be calm during a storm... In that respect I do not think these texts are anything like or connect in any meaningful way to the Versuche, the Three Assayings, as I prefer to call them in English, which are formalized, highly focused narratives [Tiredness employing a Socratic dialogue form] or circular narratives [Jukebox + Successful Day] anchored in particularized locales, attempts to narrate around particular topics; although I tend to agree with Scott in the instance he quotes from Successful Day where a kind of Adornoesque procedure can be found too.
Wonderful, interesting as each of the travel texts and the 9th land book is, I think that The Play about the Film about the War is by far the most valuable thing to have come out of this venture, unless the recently promised novel on the tragic character of Milosevic is more than yet one another excuse pulled out of our rabbit's hat as reason for Handke's so exhibitionistic attendance at the funeral in Pozarevac. However, the just - February 2007 - published Vorwintererzählung Kali, would not seem to be it.
But the disintegration of that dream wish certainly accounts for moments such as "imploringly in tears" [as I would translate Unter Tränen Fragend] when Handke finds yet another surrogate to speak for him, as he did that Serbian, in Srebrenice in "A Summer Postscript" who keeps exclaiming over and over that he does not wish to be a Serb, which made me write: "Whoever has asked Peter Handke to be a Serb in the first place, except possibly the real father figure otolith of his identity, his Slovenian grandfather Sivec who already voted for the Yugoslav federation during the 1921 Plebiscite. [Slovenia was an independent country from 1919 to 1921]. Handke himself, in an interview with his friend Thomas Deichmann wondered whether his metaphorical and theatrical way of his writing in these travelogues had not militated against their comprehension.
===============================
* Among the Yugoslavia texts I include not only 9th Land, but also Noch Einmal zum 9ten Land, [Wieser Verlag], the three travelogues Winter's Journey, A Summer's Reprieve [as I would call it in American]; Imploringly in Tears [ditto says this translator who is keenly aware of titling], but also Rund um das grosse Tribunal [the Handke cat walking around but never confronting that hot dish]; and the 2005 Damiel, published in Literaturen, which details his interesting reason for then not appearing at the Milosevic trial. This text includes a wonderful section detailing how Handke keeps catching himself, in the play of conscience, ultimately always coming out in the right. Unfortunately his sense of humor about his own self-righteousness only holds at his desk, in not time he got on his big righteous horse and condemned Grass for the infamy of having been in the Waffen SS for 45 days as a 17 year old, no doubt without having read Grass' "Zwiebelschaelung." Alas.
b] As I am in the process of completing a monograph on Handke's drama for the TDR Enactment series and have just completed my third take on Handke's involvement in matters Yugoslavian
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com [the handke/ milosevic controversy; also see
http://www.handkeyugo.scriptmania.com for my first two, more exploratory, takes on the over-all controversy] as well as just having written an odd vari-angled book on Handke, in German,
http://www.kultur.at/lesen/index.htm [prosa/ dem handke auf die schliche] I will first
[1] address Abbott's piece on Handke's Yugoslav texts;on-line as of this sending at:
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/
[2] Fritz Wefelmeyer essay on Handke's drama; and [3] the other contributions in whatever order strikes me as most pertinent in light of the preceding, or maybe not when I have nothing to add, or am too ignorant, all of which I hope will not amount to a review the length of the book under review, but provides me with yet a different tack form the many I have taken so far.
c] But first a word about the book's publisher, Ariadne, who sings obscurely in editions of 500 copies because none of its books are ever reviewed. It is not reassuring when one of their predictably clunky productions has on its back cover - 40 years after the fact of Handke's 1966 appearance at the Group 47 meeting in Princeton, the appearance that year of his first novel, Die Hornissen, and the premiere of Publikumsbeschimpfung [Public Insult as I now call it - that Handke achieved prominence in 1968.
Further, re this one of the worlds most dreadful publishers: Having signed more than a half dozen contracts with Ariadne, including the gift to these swine of my best translation, Handke's WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES , plus extensive postscript, I have never received a single statement of sales, not that sales are to be expected, since A. does not send out review galleys not even of the most elementary kind to Library Journal and Publisher's Weekly, which explains why, in ten years, they have not managed to sell even their first print run of 500 of W.A.T.V. [I get my figures from the original proprietor, Suhrkamp, to whom, when asked, A. eventually render their minuscules], whereas not a single book of Handke's twenty plus published American titles ever sold less than 5,000 copies, with many going into multiple editions and published in mass quality paperback.
Ariadne persists in its Austrian Culture funded spendthrift ways, using translation funds to subsidize themselves, under the safety net of the cost of 10 k just as a fee to file claim in Federal Court; so that unless you live in Riverside County, CA. you lack recourse, small claims court.
d] One further note, prior to medias res. Professors Barry and Abbott are contributors to the handke.scriptmania on-line project
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com
and its 12 + subsites.... drama 1+2, prose 1+2; scholar, film, translation, psychobio, bild, etc.
I have known Tom Barry for about 20 earth cycles round the sun. These affiliations I do not think will influence my assessment of their work, though I may put critical comments more kindly than my Ezraish side might otherwise.
e] However, let me signal, ahead of the time of getting down to specifics, my immediate pleasure at the reading that Scott gives Handke's Yugoslavia texts, no matter our interesting difference of opinions in some very important matters; and my dissatisfaction with Fritz Wefelmeyer's piece on Handke's theater. Not to address, in 2006, the extraordinary change that Handke's drama began to undergo, with the transitional [1975-1990] Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other , its first product being the Goethe-Euripedean drama of the "Rolling on the River" aristocracy of the working class, Walk About the Villages; to do an excellent job, once again, on "Public Insult" and a fair job on Handke's last major effort, The Play about the Film about the War [1999] but not to understand how "Ride Across Lake Constance" or Hour work, and to ignore Handke's "Faust", The Art of Asking, etc. etc., is not "what the world needs now." I will discuss the preface when I come to the editors own pieces. But let me note: why is it that full professors, exposed for decades upon decades to beautiful texts, end up writing like the most pedestrian of apparachiks.
f] You may think of me as the Franz Kilb of Handke studies, if you remember that gnat in the navel of the economy who owns one share of every every publicly traded stock and who throws a stink bomb at each stock holders' me eting - in that so revelatory Raimundian/Brechtian tragic farce, THEY ARE DYING OUT, and yourselves, Germanicists, combined, as Gerard Depardieu who takes the Kilb-Kalb into a "Schwitzkopf," [sweatbox]
who is proud not to "owe nobody nuttin'", no fealty to any German department now that my somewhat crimping 10 year stint as visiting scholar at the Udub has come to an end; with no interest in having a position of any kind in any department of that kind anywhere in the world; thus in a position to shoot my pigeons where I spot them and safeguard my sparrows. In short, I am an equal opportunity offender.
=======================================
[1-A]
Scott Abbott and I must be the two most expert in matters Handke-Yugoslavian in the U.S. In my own now 20 year long Handke project, Handke's involvement in this sub-rubric of Handke studies has proved a long and arduous but ultimately fascinating detour. Without the detour to a part of the world I have only the most superficial personal but pleasant acquaintance, I would no doubt think, like no end of halfway intelligent people who have a limited time to disgorge the junk that their brains absorb from the media, that the Serbs were to blame and that Slobo indeed was the worst kind of big bad wolf, first cousin to Saddam Hussein, or Hitler, Caucescou, or Stalin. I would know little more about that part of the world and what went down during its disintegration than I do about tribal warfare in the Congo, and its history, and the interests that prevail there.
The first coming of the Handke/ Yugo controversy in the mid 90s, on publication of his A Winter's Journey, was my introduction to doing research on line, in something like "real time"; by its second coming, during the Kosovo war in 1999, I was proficient; by its third coming, in 2006, at Handke's for me entirely predictable self display at the Milosevic funeral, each, often contradictory, Handke statements about his relation to the big bad woolf of Pozarevac, of whom he is so oddly protective, reached me within a day. Meanwhile, I think I know why Handke is so protective of Slobo, and who knows Handke may even be right that he is only a tragic figure, a failed Yugoslav Lincoln, no matter that he was condemned, for murder, posthumously, in Belgrade. I myself think that at least in part Handke's protectiveness is a question of transference from Handke's affection of his father grandfather figure, and yet another instance of wishful thinking. But see for yourselves, the
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com [the handke/ milosevic controversy] contains most quotes and links to the controversy as it played out in France and Germany. My own first two takes, which Handke rather liked, and which once again I withdrew from being published as a book... they can be found at
http://www.handkeyugo.scriptmania.com
I had a sense that that was not the end of it, as it wasn't though I think the Milosevic funeral and its consequences were it.
Abbott's piece is fine, first rate and useful to me in emphasizing Handke's ability - when he has a pencil in hand, as opposed to when he delivers himself of spoken tirades, righteous whole sale condemnations, or ejaculations of pain that testify to how to the quick the disintegration affects [ed] him - to allow contradictions, differentiations into his text, via phenomenological noted observations... that are then reflected upon, more defensively than what Scott calls "dialectically", starting in the reprieve A Summer's Postscript. As a trained analyst now, and warier than ever of the entire German school of irrationalist philosophers, Scott's venture into Nietzschean murkiness and Heidegger, once again makes me take preference in the system prcpt. , how sense impressions - both ex and internal, mediated by the brain, in collaboration with the generative language system, once the brain has grown that function, can put these impressions into communicable impressions, first as duh duh duh, then into syntactical order, leaving the entire exciting prior existence in and ex utero unverbalized, confined to the realm of the unconscious, unverbalizable except in the analytic deep sea diving experiment. The treasure that the sled brings up in this instance are not volcanic worms, but the gift of understanding. I come out as a nominalist who does not believe in inevitability although I am surrounded by birds and students who appear to move predictably as any herd animal. Actually, my crow friends' often unpredictable behavior surprises me more than that of the undergraduates.
I do not think it required, and Winter Journey's opening chapter makes that clear, a trip to the region to conclude that the word was out among the western media to find a single culprit [the Serbs] and one chief mover of evil [Slobodan Milosevics] for the voodoo doll hunt to be on. The only surprising thing about that is that you can, perhaps need to, find/create such a simple Manichean formula every few years anew, whereas an African native will have just one doll with him that he will stick with pins and needles all his life.
To my own great surprise I ultimately found myself in considerable agreement with Handke, despite the ugliness of his tirades, and despite the fact that his Yugoslavia text, the exception being the near great " The Play about the Film About the War," do not provide any kind of historical overview, or time line of the process of disintegration of the Federation. My chief dissatisfaction is with Handke's surprising - surprising for his having had two Partisan uncles killed during WW II - lack of appreciation [the twice repeated "We were never meant to be a union" of the "Canoe" play does not quite suffice] of the centrifugal forces that had built up, and not just during the past 100 + years, since the secession of the Ottomans [who converted some Serbians, the way that Turks say that Bulgarians do and vice versa], the accession and dis-accession of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the dreadful things that happened during and subsequent to the occupation by Hitler's troops. For I can well see why some of the tribes, whose federation agreement allowed for secession, wanted to go it on their own, at least try that way. However, Handke's "idiocy", coming out form under several years of self-imposed verbal monkishness in 2005 with the pronouncement that the Western Power "had committed a near perfect crime" in getting these tribes to chose an independent way, is not exactly what is called a differentiated, "third way" statement, is it? If the perfect crime was the Italian and then German take-over of the Dalmatian coast in 1941, German recognition of two provinces [Slovenia and Croatia] seeking independence would not to seem close to committing a crime. And Handke, let us not forget this, is a trained lawyer, and only did not take his exams because he knew he would succeed as a writer. The "Canoe" play at least alludes to Yugoslavia's odd status during the cold war, as the U.S. one communist s.o.b., whose economic assistance propped up a makeshift mixed socialist economy; sort of like a huge West Berlin along the Adriatic, wonderfully artificial indeed. The difference between Handke's essayistic, uncliched, non-platitudonous writing in the travelogue sections of the three travelogue books and his pronouncements make me once again away of the immense difference between the Handke with a pencil in Hand and the Handke with a mega or microphone and of the statement, in "No-Mans-Land" novel that it was the differentiations in the Roman penal code [he might also have mentioned Wittgenstein] that brought some order into his angry adolescent noggin. But see anon.
1-B]
I like Scott's piece, it is an extremely valuable careful reading of these texts, and it makes me want to go back to them once more: what greater compliment is there from reader to reader? However it is entirely wrong and sentimental, except in his elaboration of Handke's Thucidean phenomenological narrative procedure, in focusing, in opening with a quote from the Skopje section of For Thucydides {F.T.}, denoting Handke's wish, or observation that different feathered friends can live halfway peaceably together; he mistakes his own projection into one of Handke's projection screens; one only finds out what a nice guy Scott Abbot is. The various sometimes marvelous short pieces that make up F.T., as so many if not all of Handke's art products, are designed as projection screens, inference from these ambiguities to Handke's personal, momentary, or more enduring feelings opinions risk projecting the reader's, in this instance, Abbott's own wishes into the text. I think only artistic judgments about them are possible, the rest is inferential supposition. They produce states of mind, whether these are the same states, or approximate to Handke's, there can be no certainty on that score.
Handke, the extreme misanthrope, who even takes his oldest friends on instant mushroom searches so as not to find himself locked in a room with them; the Handke who opted his play rights out of the "Verlag der Autoren," the one socialist enterprise to survive the 60s, and called this grouping fascist, and threw in his own autocratic leanings with the autocratic Gauner Siegfried Unseld, first recipient nonetheless of the Siegfried Unseld Preis, to keep him tied to a disintegrating Suhrkamp Kultur, whom he portraits in such devastating fashion in several of his book, a not very good socialist or rainbow coalition makes, except wishfully I suppose. [Indeed, Slovenia has turned into another Andorra, you can follow its progress in the N.Y. Times travel section: Ph.D.s are now innkeepers. Yet in a recent interview with N.Z.Z. Handke surprisingly endorses western investments in Belgrade that are changing the city scape, and comes out sounding like a Western globalist investment banker with the primacy on economic development, unless he was leading his interviewer by the nose to test whether the interviewer knew his previous position; it is the same interview in which Handke stated that he felt Milosevic was innocent because of the way he had smiled when the charges were read to him in De Haag; and in which one comes away with the feeling that Handke is amazingly well versed and sophisticated in matters of internal Serbian politics.]
A great Thucidean indeed, equipped not only with great verbal, but, more importantly, unusual painfully acute perceptual powers, to note items in the forever moraine, the principle, as of early on, of "the innerworld of the outerworld of the innerworld" prevails. [I address Handkes capacities and abilities as a kind of regular American reporter in section K of dem handke auf die schliche in some real detail and so will only link to it here:
http://www.kultur ]
Also, let us not forget over his pure observational powers that Handke for decades on end expressed his utter hatred and contempt for matters German, for reasons of having had a German stepfather, and that he regretted his arrogant depiction of his real father, in Sorrow Beyond Dreams, only many years later. [see the biographer Pichler as compared to the other Pichler Handke scholars for this.]
Handke, moreover, is the great artificer of states of mind, most radically when he uses various procedures to create dissociations in the audience, say in Ride Across Lake Constance, or My Foot My Tutor , most powerfully in The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, but also in some syntactically ingenious prose texts, for didactic, linguistically moral purposes.
Handke quite knowingly creates "projection screens"[or vacuums!] in which we can find ourselves and come to our senses, also verbally. Although in some instances in these pure travelogue parts of these texts I not only come under the impression that Handke is somewhat defensive but that the doubting that he introduces is purposive, that is, is not dis-interested.This past year, the circumstance of the Milosevic controversy finally forced Handke to speak the unequivocal platitude that yes, Srebrenice was the worst war crime to have been committed in Western Europe since the end of WW II.
Although Handke expresses the occasional wish to return to a virginal state entirely devoid of opinions [vide Hour, which achieves this state in the audience], he never succeeds for long, in that respect is like most other Joe Does or Mary Janes. Not only does Handke create projection screens, but these constructions produce states of mind, most pleasurably I found in the case of The Repetition which - its long periods, its syntax - thus the title of my 1500 page opus: "Handke, the Master [sometimes dictator] of Syntax" - made me, too, walk about as a "King of Slowness" in the Chapparal of the St. Monica Mts. for half a dozen years from the mid 80s to early 90s, while training to be a psychoanalyst; i.e. any inferences as to Handke's predisposition to people living together peaceably that might be drawn from the Skopje piece, possibly at the moment of writing, could be contradicted by what for me is a further purposely ambiguous image, that of the tent of United Nation type flags collapsing at the end of The Play about the Film About the War. Also, for example, as a director who favored the NATO intervention in a part of the world whose often unending century old tribal warfare had to be put to a stop for no end of reasons, I might be able to skew a production of that play in favor of the three internationalists: by that I mean to indicate at once that Handke, as an artist, ever since Walk About the Village's ]W.A.T.V.] epigraph "everyone is in the right", in his art, as compared to his often violent, hurt to the quick, public pronouncements, ejaculations, his private ranting and cussing, remains as true as he can to hoeing the line of ambiguity. I would think that even the Socratic or call it dialectical process of the Essay on Tiredness is meant to achieve ambiguity as to the very idea of tiredness? For example, I was puzzled until just now why with the wide choice Handke had of citing Serb-hating pieces in the U.S. press he quoted the so excellent, one of the best American journalists, Michael Danner. It is not just I don't think that Handke took violent irritated umbrage at any representation other than his own of what went down in Yugoslavia, as he did, like that irritated
Wild Man in the recent play Subday Blues, as Handke the so over-irritable himself does, at a host of matters [that then make one ask what inside him, in his psyche, in his very brain so irritates him], but that the Danner quote serves the purpose of ambiguity better than numerous pieces from the New Republic, or most hideously those of Roger Cohen from the N.Y. Times ever could. The monstrously ignorant Stephen Marcus, the New York Review of Book's hatchet man for teaching Handke the lesson of pain of being politically incorrect, then came to the defense of Danner without having the faintest on what line of ambiguity Handke was writing, or what he was about. After the Vienna premiere of the piece Handke had himself interviewed by his daughter Amina, and I think only being just a tad cute, insisted on an ambiguous reading of his play, distancing it, salvaging it, from his personal opinions. Marcus I believe said that "The Bearskin" woman was Handke's own voice, it might as easily be that of "the Greek reporter" who wants to come back out of the cold, but it is also that of "the directors" and of the "forest madman" in an instance of a playwright with a grand self such as Handke's who refuses, and in an instance such as "Canoe" ought not to be pinned down to a single position except as creator for a piece of art that is criticizable only within its own terms. This being the long way round of saying that I doubt that Handke will hold it against Scott that Scott works his way up and down the treacherous Utah mountains on a mountain bike.
Deciding not to practice, some fair purchase on my own traumatic German childhood, and once you have purchase you can deal, my great test case, a case of cases if ever there was one, proved the one nearest at hand, the case of Peter Handke. It was while reviewing "Across"[ Chinese des Schmerzens - a kind of repetition of Moment of True Feeling - but now with Rusdealesaque Stifterian-Lenzian descriptions that honor the surrounds of Salzburg while the protagonist Loser's unhappy consciousness acts out no end of destructive matters] that Handke's "caseness" began to dawn on me: the moment I realized that when Loser said "no" he ought to have said "yes" between the "no" and the "yes" dawns the wide spectrum of ambiguity.
Loser's sadistic super-ego, the pulling out of the legs of harmless daddy-long legs; the so unproductive self-berating that was going on, the mystifications about yet another pursuing furious woman - which now that that woman has spoken up is anything but mysterious. As a matter of fact, around 1991 I had a case study which Donald Daviau, then of Ariadne, wanted to publish; but some matters did not wash: and did not until I came on Handke's mentioning to his Eckermann, Herbert Gamper, that he still had occasional autistic moments. A great deal fell into place at that point that had not made sense, Handke's being a kind of idiot savant, his untrammeled talent if and when he holds pencil in hand; but also his frequently oafish behavior, his proclivity for Tourettish verbal productions, which, if formalized as at the end of " Public Insult," are not really insulting but funny and awakening, whereas otherwise... only a trained analyst can handle psychotic production being tossed at him, hold them, and look, or rather "listen past them" into what is going on in the patient or between patient and analyst. However, prior to the so complicating factor of Handke's autism, I had become aware, as a researcher, reader, sleuth of the plethora of consequences to Handke's being in the world of a decade of exposure to violent drunken primal scenes [just read Handke's own enumeration in his Assaying of Tiredness]: all you need to - no one that I have read, including Tilman Moser, the only other person to concern himself with Handke from this perspective - is read between the lines of Sorrow Beyond Dreams . Forget about the ultimately unhappy life of Ms. Sivec-Schönherr-Handke [Handke's name might have been Schönherr, that of his biological father, a German Army paymaster from Northern Germany who fathered him while stationed in Griffen in 1942, but, though he was Ms. Sivec's love of her life, refused to divorce his first wife, leaving her depressed, ensuring what is called anaclytic - anlehnende - depression in her first born son, her love child].
All I did was look at these details a bit more closely, follow them up, cross reference within this huge body of self-display, Handke's mounting oeuvre, and follow them where they might lead, like a forensic scientist, or a lawyer, making a finding: without knowing in the slightest, initially, not the faintest where the material might lead me. But it is all there: including, most importantly, Handke description of putting something over his eyes during these scenes; the earliest instance of not wanting to know, and in this instance on the part of someone with the super-sensitive super-high-resolution that much more irritable sense of sight of the autistic eagle eyes, dog nosed, sonar eared who goes occasionally color blind and thus does not have a driver's license and is dependent on friends like Darko,Zarko etc. to drive him around, or who has taken no end of buses and provides amazing snapshots of passengers in buses [to put it this way instead of becoming hideously technical]: autism is a painful condition because, one important factor, the sensory input is far higher than the standard processor, modulator can accommodate. These are matters of the brain. The askewness in the brain manifests itself in the skewed behavior of idiots you meet as they used to be called, slightly different from the rest of us, for whom Handke expresses such frequent affinity, the great "Play about the Film About the War" has two of them, the "Forest Madman" and then a split-off part, "The Complete Madman."
Aside from the metaphor of "pillow over your head," the not wanting to see, but the peeking of the infinite voyeur Handke, a child, especially in a primal scene situation - in Handke's case, that of a love-child who had exclusive use of an infinitely doting exquisitely beautiful mother for the first two years of his life - will masturbate to remain whole, not to split. The birth of rage, Handke's difficult relationship with his wives. The birth of someone who needs to keep a pencil in hand to stay whole, productive, fated, condemned to write. Handke's productiveness is that of a symptom, so that when he is not writing he is translating.
I will stop here: but it is important I think to be very mindful of the "blanket over the eyes", the looking obliquely, and the oblique representation of the hideous, the fantasy of a different world, the creation of it in the world of words, the calming of anxiety as soon as he holds a pencil in hand of someone who used to say that he was "born into terror"... as indeed he was as of age two. I think that oblique representations of horror as we come upon them in Die Hornissen and Der Hausierer, a primal scene observation if there ever was one, buried within a host of defensive literary techniques [think the way fear is toyed with in Radio Play One] which of course are then so much more interesting than the obscene terrifying heart of the world; in Across, in Walk About the Villages where the horror, too, is only alluded to, it remains off stage as well; in My Foot My Tutor where violence could break out at any moment, in Singular and Plural , where the Turk averts his wounded thumb, but suddenly the memory of "the sportswriter who talked about death" surges up, and in similar instances in the travelogue parts of the three of his altogether eight Yugoslavia related books can be explained, fundamentally, from this near aboriginal ten year primal scene exposure, no matter the variety of literary procedures that Handke employs, literary procedures as defensive maneuvers, which, ever so fortunately, leave the reader's imagination freedom to roam. In perhaps his greatest text, the opening chapter of the novel Langsame Heimkehr we have an Indian appear, threatening Sorger with a set of chains... In that setting what Handke calls the "historical" of violence can appear for once, also in Across of course. For the Alaska book this has a rightness as those who have worked among the natives there will testify.
I-C
Handke was charged with two matters, one of being lyrical where he should have "implored in tears," which the official readers who ask him to keep saying "bad bad dog" seem not to notice when he does implore and you can hear the tears, and of denying the "Holocaust" being committed by the "Serbians": it is is on that background of the prohibition of that denial that the entire controversy played out. And which brought a host of worthies on to the stage to parade their humanitarian wherewithals. Worst of all the grand exhibitionist Susan Sontag, a splendid and splendidly important essayist, once friend, instrumental in helping me persuade Farrar, Straus to become Handke's American publisher; and first rate when it came to assessing U.S. moral culpabilities, doing her thing rehearsing Beckett's Endgame in Sarajevo; then miserably, unforgettably, writing, in the Serb eating NY Times Magazine, at the time of the Kosovo campaign "now the Serbs are the victims," saying that she would never read another Handke book because he did not inveigh, speak in the same platitudes in which she did; Salmon Rushdie a book tour inconvenienced by the Yugoslav war and the side war that Handke had started, not knowing the first thing about Yugoslavia, nominating Handke as "idiot of the year", the German author Buch who likes to cuddle Albanians; Ely Wiesel who instantly, ignorantly, ideologically expressed sympathy for the victims, the Albanians, who ate the likes of him as a young boy for breakfast not long ago. No end of foreign tourists of humanitarian sympathy... all for the show back home! The great exception Handke, no less a showboat, but one with expertise and affection, who instantly tried to retract his saying "The Serbs are the new Jews" or however he put this ejaculation that only manifested how injured his being was; so that you, thinking analytically, begin to dwell on, as I did, what in this affair might be able to injure his psyche so to the quick. At least to my own halfway satisfaction, the answer to this question is related to Handke's installation of his Slovenian grandfather Sivec as the father figure during the promised re-writing of Sorrow Beyond Dreams, that is during his acquisition of a second primary identity as that of Filip Kobal in The Repetition; and of course to Handke's two Partisan uncles who perished during WW II and whose wartime letters became heirlooms in Sivec household: the Handke who wishes to be a classic in his own lifetime many of whose works have managed to become an heirlooms during my battles! As an analyst who can crack some very difficult equations, I could not be made happier by Handke's Art of Asking, which refuses, tries not to ask in any or the usual fashions, and rids my mind of the constant querying, at least for a while.
On superficial glance there seems a bit of truth to both charges, of being too lyrical and denying, though if his accusers pursued his oblique travelogues texts they would realize that something else is going on as Scott enumerates and elaborates so much more patiently than I could. Handke doesn't deny though he admits to wanting to, the way you do when you don't want to admit to yourself that the bitch is cheating. Even recently, in an interview with a Croat paper he claimed once again, as he did in Winter's Journey [where he notes his the wife's asking him whether he wanted to deny everything] that the inner city of Dubrovnik could not possibly have been shelled, after all he celebrated his own 45 th birthday there, pointing not only to Handke's extreme self-involvement but to the wish that the dream continue to exist, and that he will be infuriated if it is disturbed.
====
So these beautiful travel texts - written in each instance shortly after his return to his desk, utilizing to whatever degree no scholar will be able to tell I hope for many years to come, recourse to Handke's extraordinary trove of daily diaries - indeed provide a highly individual record of visiting, revisiting those parts of the world... However, aside from keeping us mindful of the other events that unfold during war time, that you can manage to be calm during a storm... In that respect I do not think these texts are anything like or connect in any meaningful way to the Versuche, the Three Assayings, as I prefer to call them in English, which are formalized, highly focused narratives [Tiredness employing a Socratic dialogue form] or circular narratives [Jukebox + Successful Day] anchored in particularized locales, attempts to narrate around particular topics; although I tend to agree with Scott in the instance he quotes from Successful Day where a kind of Adornoesque procedure can be found too.
Wonderful, interesting as each of the travel texts and the 9th land book is, I think that The Play about the Film about the War is by far the most valuable thing to have come out of this venture, unless the recently promised novel on the tragic character of Milosevic is more than yet one another excuse pulled out of our rabbit's hat as reason for Handke's so exhibitionistic attendance at the funeral in Pozarevac. However, the just - February 2007 - published Vorwintererzählung Kali, would not seem to be it.
But the disintegration of that dream wish certainly accounts for moments such as "imploringly in tears" [as I would translate Unter Tränen Fragend] when Handke finds yet another surrogate to speak for him, as he did that Serbian, in Srebrenice in "A Summer Postscript" who keeps exclaiming over and over that he does not wish to be a Serb, which made me write: "Whoever has asked Peter Handke to be a Serb in the first place, except possibly the real father figure otolith of his identity, his Slovenian grandfather Sivec who already voted for the Yugoslav federation during the 1921 Plebiscite. [Slovenia was an independent country from 1919 to 1921]. Handke himself, in an interview with his friend Thomas Deichmann wondered whether his metaphorical and theatrical way of his writing in these travelogues had not militated against their comprehension.
===============================
* Among the Yugoslavia texts I include not only 9th Land, but also Noch Einmal zum 9ten Land, [Wieser Verlag], the three travelogues Winter's Journey, A Summer's Reprieve [as I would call it in American]; Imploringly in Tears [ditto says this translator who is keenly aware of titling], but also Rund um das grosse Tribunal [the Handke cat walking around but never confronting that hot dish]; and the 2005 Damiel, published in Literaturen, which details his interesting reason for then not appearing at the Milosevic trial. This text includes a wonderful section detailing how Handke keeps catching himself, in the play of conscience, ultimately always coming out in the right. Unfortunately his sense of humor about his own self-righteousness only holds at his desk, in not time he got on his big righteous horse and condemned Grass for the infamy of having been in the Waffen SS for 45 days as a 17 year old, no doubt without having read Grass' "Zwiebelschaelung." Alas.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
About Me
- SUMMA POLITICO
- MICHAEL ROLOFF http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name exMember Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html "MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce} "Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben] contact via my website http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html