Scott Abbott's, a Handke Translator's, letter to The American Scholar

Michael McDonald opens his essay on Peter Handke by calling him “The Apologist” (The American Scholar, Spring 2007). He points out that the Austrian writer appeared at the funeral of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Then he poses a question: “Should we forgive him?” The answer for McDonald and others more interested in controversy than in thinking, is obviously no.
As the translator of Mr. Handke’s A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (Viking, 1997), a book at the heart of the debate McDonald discusses, and as author of half-a-dozen articles about Handke’s work, I don’t even recognize the “Peter Handke” McDonald vilifies. He has given readers of this journal a conveniently evil creature of his own heated imagination. I hope he doesn’t use this evidence to justify going to war with Austria.
A century ago, Gustave Flaubert collected examples of clichéd ideas in France, calling his work The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (translated for New Directions by Jacques Barzun). The entry for “America,” for instance, reads “If it weren’t for the discovery of America, we should not be suffering from syphilis and phylloxera. Exalt it all the same, especially if you’ve never been there.” And the accepted way to respond to the name “Machiavelli”? – “Though you have not read him, consider him a scoundrel.”
Michael McDonald considers Peter Handke a scoundrel without having read him. Consider a couple of entries from the catalogue of accepted ideas that make up his “argument”:
Milosevic, “a man most disinterested observers believe to have been responsible for a series of wars that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people during his 13 years in power.”
Milosevic, “the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’”
Justice for Serbia, “part political harangue and part travelogue”
Handke, “has never abandoned his bedrock faith that language is merely a set of debilitating fictions used to mask reality.”
The “essay” is a naïve catalogue of such popular ideas, asserted as common sense, even in the face of obvious contradictions like the one that has Handke believing that language is only debilitating while attacking him for his argument (in language) that Serbia, like Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo and Montenegro, ought to be dealt with justly.
McDonald is unable to think that the civil war that destroyed Yugoslavia had multiple perpetrators, including Milosovic, Izetbegovic (Head of Muslim Bosnia), and Tudjman (head of Croatia) – (accepted ideas necessarily simplify, and who can remember that many foreign syllables anyway?).
McDonald proves that Milosevic was alone guilty by reminding us that people called him the tellingly alliterative “Butcher of the Balkans.”
McDonald denigrates the beautifully provocative Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia with words that better describe his own blunt thinking: “political harangue.” Compare, for instance, the following self-reflexive, self-doubting sentences from the end of Handke’s book with McDonald’s rigid and certain prose:
But isn’t it, finally, irresponsible, I thought there at the Drina and continue to think it here, to offer the small sufferings in Serbia, the bit of freezing there, the bit of loneliness, the trivialities like snow flakes, caps, cream cheese, while over the border a great suffering prevails, that of Sarajevo, of Tuzla, of Srebrenica, of Bihać, compared to which the Serbian boo-boos are nothing? Yes, with each sentence I too have asked myself whether such a writing isn’t obscene, ought even to be tabooed, forbidden -- which made the writing journey adventurous in a different way, dangerous, often very depressing (believe me), and I learned what “between Scylla and Charybdis” means. Didn’t the one who described the small deprivations (gaps between teeth) help to water down, to suppress, to conceal the great ones?
Finally, to be sure, I thought each time: but that=s not the point. My work is of a different sort. To record the evil facts, that=s good. But something else is needed for a peace, something not less important than the facts.
Michael McDonald does not record the evil facts, nor does he provide readers of The American Scholar with ideas that promote peace. He wants Peter Handke to be and to remain punished.
When Günther Grass, whom McDonald champions as a moral counterweight to the guilty Handke, supported Germany’s actions against Serbia during the wars, some Serbs decided to burn the copies of Grass’s books they had collected and read before the war. Peter Handke suggested that they keep the books, that they wrestle with the ideas, that they respect the work of a fine novelist.
Grass’s ideas are important. As are Handke’s. McDonald’s are a disgrace.
Scott Abbott
Woodland Hills, Utah

LETTER TO PHI BETA KAPPA MEMBERS RE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

# 5 SENDING OF 6.
Dear Phi Beta Kappans:
Your preamble states that:
"The ideal Phi Beta Kappan has demonstrated intellectual integrity, tolerance for other views." It is in light of this standard that I want to call your attention to a heinous short fall, a travesty of travesties, an assassination of character and work that appears, of all unexpected places, in the Spring 07 issue of The American Scholar where it takes the form of a most primitive and meretricious attack - both political and literary - by a certain Michael McDonald, counsel for "The American Interest," on the by no means infallible but uniquely great writer Peter Handke; a political attack based on Handke's "being soft on Milosevic", a literary attack based on a single paragraph whose function within the [1974] novel "A Moment of True Feeling" that the assassin has not read.
It is my feeling that an editor who allows publication of a travesty such as Michael McDonald's ought to be forced to resign, he has lost all credibility and scholarly standing. McDonald is of little concern to me; he is one of those uniquely vile beings, albeit an untalented member of this species, that began - under the conditions such as they are - to appear in droves in all walks and works of life in the early 80s, that entire range from "Diego Cortez", Adam Gopnik [a talented member], Milken, Newt Gingrich, Stephen Schwartz to name just a few representatives of this class.

Below you will find links to my open letter to Editor Wilson. The three-part letter [A-B-C] and my detailed critique, in entirety, can be found at:
http://www.handke-discussion.blogspot.com

Below the letter in its entirety A-B-C

A-B-C [REVERSE OF INITIAL POSTING OF OPEN LETTER TO "THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR"

PART A OF AN OPEN LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF "THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR" RE M. MCDONALD'S PIECE


http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.html


Dear Editor Wilson,Here comes a detailed letter about Michael McDonald's atrocity "THE APOLOGIST The Celebrated Austrian writer Peter Handke appeared at the funeral of Serbian Dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Should we forgive him" [pages 59-69 of the print edition Spring 07 issue of the American Scholar.http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.html ]. It is but the latest, albeit crudest and most ignorant and distorted, baffled as much as baffling self-righteous libel to appear in the United States on the same subject; and if it had not appeared in the medium that bears the title scholar and is sponsored by the crossword puzzle champs I can't imagine anyone paying it the least heed. McDonald's piece is but the latest installment of the forever same caricature of Handke's political position on Yugoslavia which is then employed to cudgel the work of an author that one misreads just as badly. It's the old two sucker punches in a row. As an editor you failed to exercise due diligence, or were/are a partner in crime. Since McDonald appears unable to read, I am not surprised at his misuse of language. And whoever carved his piece from whatever cutlet he presented to you, produced a most disjointed text.I have little confidence that you will publish the devastation that I will visit on Counsel McDonald's - a lack of confidence due to the failures of editors of The New Republic, the New York Review of Books or The New York Times to respond to my, Handke's first translator into American [see my bio athttp://roloff.freeservers.com/about.html ] and other's letters objecting to gross and ignorant misreadings of Peter Handke's fallible work and political positions and person - thus I post this missile on-line at:http://www.artscritic.blogspot.comThere you can also find posted, six months ago, a detailed take on Peter Handke's association with the late Slobodan Milosevic, plus all pertinent links. A good source for pertinent information on the unfolding of the controversy has been online, in English, for more than half a year, good time for McDonald not to need to distort the most elementary matters, if that had not been his intent from the git-go:http://www.signandsight.com/features/809.htmltI myself, cleaning up after the stupidities perpetrated by the corrupt U.S. literary culture, feel like one of those old women that Hans Magnus Enzensberger keeps seeing knocking the mortar off the bricks from the buildings destroyed after men have gone to war. Many of those in Belgrade, Iraq and Afghanistan, and metaphorically in desperately provincial Seattle.PART ONE- POLITICSMcDonald opens and closes his mugging with tendentious and not pertinent quotes, to lend some kind of pretend weighty frame to his drivel, so let me, too start off with a few quotes, from Handke, and others, which are to the point.Handke: " "What I did not say" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "I have never denied or played down, not to speak of sanctioned, any of the massacres in Yugoslavia from 1991 – 1995." ... "When it comes to the wars in Yugoslavia, let us forget all comparisons and parallels. Let's stick with the facts of a civil war that a disingenuous or at least unknowing Europe instigated or at least co-produced, and which are terrible on all sides. (...) It is a fact that between 1992 and 1995, in the Yugoslavian Republic, and in Bosnia in particular, prison camps existed where people were starved, tortured and murdered. But let us refrain from mechanically linking these camps with the Bosnian Serbs. There were also Croatian and Muslim camps, and the crimes committed there will be punished in the tribunal in Den Haag."Botho Strauß [first rate playwright, and someone who might be described as a "stylist" - as which McDonald describes both Grass and Handke, which neither are - writes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "What remains today of Bertolt Brecht, a poet who valued the revolution over human life and whose only opposition to the bloody Stalin was a spot of dialectics? What remains is someone who changed the theatre more lastingly than any other European author... What remains, at the end of the day, of the alleged bard of the Greater Serbian Empire, Peter Handke? Not just the most gifted poetic craftsman of his day, but an episteme-creator (to use Foucault's term) as only the most outstanding minds can be, a milestone of seeing, feeling and understanding in German literature. Those who fail to see guilt and error as the stigmata (or even as stimulants in some cases) of great minds, shouldn't busy themselves with true poets and thinkers."Frank Schirrmacher, editor in chief of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the paper that gave Handke the hardest time for his position on Yugoslavia, on the fiasco of the Heine Prize:"Honouring someone, regardless of how controversial he may be, and then openly declaring him unworthy of that honour, without anything else having happened, is the ultimate form of social backslide. It turns the literary critic into the henchman of the politician. With the politicians' interference, the critic's objections to Handke now sound like a denunciation to the police."Martin Mosebach writes in Die Zeit on the Peter Handke affair: "Too bad the American ambassador who encouraged Slobodan Milosevic to wage war in Bosnia didn't come to his funeral in Belgrade. Someone like Handke who remained faithful to the dead Milosevic is much more worthy of admiration than all the Western politicians who made it possible for Milosevic to commit his crimes while he was alive."Handke in the Neue Zuricher Zeitung:"Where is there any order from Milosevic? How can you bring him together with Srebrenice? I don't know. And on top of that Milosevic was no dictator. He was an autocrat who exercised a semi-authoritarian regime. The press was free, but the television was state-controlled. I don't have any opinion about Milosevic. None. I can't find him either good or bad. I don't want to compare him with Ceausescu or Saddam Hussein, for me that's wrong. Setting Milosevic up as the major evil of the Balkan Wars is a simplificationhttp://www.signandsight.com/features/819.html [for the entirety of this fascinating interview]Aren't the scholarly often the worst deadbeats! What a chump you are Editor Wilson to be mining the same dead vein, and with the likes of McDonald as your Kumpel! As you continue, you will see the story that you missed!I ask the several thousand recipients of this communication to comment, if they wish, at the http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com site or reply directly to me and to join me in my call for the resignation of Editor Wilson. But if editor Wilson wishes to run this response in his pages, too, or on the American Scholar web-site, be my guest. I link to you, you link to me, and then you will be on life-support!For stretches I simply quote McDonald and comment, finding that the most efficient way to decimate his assertions. I quite realize that I am that "chien Andalusien" baying at the moon but, that way, I can at least "bark my way!" as old "Blue Eyes" used to sing. From the beginning now, point by point:1] The "we" in the rhetorical "Shall we forgive him"... ": are "we" using the royal "WE", what assumptsionary accusatoryness, what band of McCarthyite vigilantes might this "we" comprise? Is that your editoral board, the Phi Beta Clan, the heavy exercises of the right frontal lobe, or the 100 French "innelectuals" [George Herbert Walker Bush's pronunciation] that endorsed "Bozo" Bozonet's canceling of the greatest play of the past 50 years, Handke' s Faust, 1998 "The Journey into the Sonorous Land: or The Art of Asking".[Not "recent" really, as McDonald, who has no idea of the progress of the rake's work, has it: subsequent and far more recent the second in a great sequence of three amazing plays is "Hour" 1991, Handke's Yugoslavia play: "The Play about the Film about the War" [1999] that provides the full range of his takes on the subject; "Subday Blues" [2005] "Traces of the Lost" 2006/7 ] which entire series starts with Handke's richest work WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES [1992, Ariadne Press], a dramatic poem whose language reaches Shakespearean grandeur, Handke's Euripedean/ Goethen [alternating discourse] pean to the "Rolling on the River" aristocracy of the working class... Perhaps the "we" refers to the same 100 French "innelectuals" who are demanding the criminalization, in analogy of German criminalization of denial of the Shoa, of denial of the Turkish genocide on Armenians, whose 100 strong intercession in behalf of that idiot Bozonnet McDonald fails to mention but with whose dismissal at the end of this sorry affair he commiserates, whereas they might actually look to the denial of French colonial atrocities and collaborations with their occupiers, those French whores. [Handke's position vis a vis Yugoslavia and Milosevic had been well known in Yugoslavia prior to Bozonnet's dermarche].Yes that "we": You and Mr. McDonald? Mr. McDonald and all the other McDonalds? Or does Counsel McDonald comprise and presume to speak for some consensus of U.S. "innelectuals"? I can't imagine, except perhaps certain reviewers for the Weekly Standard and henchers for the New York Review. As to the rhetoricals of "forgiving", which McDonald thinketh we ought not: Who is doing the accusing? Where forgiveness exists as a possibility there must be a conviction? Or is this sorry "counsel" - for that presumption "The American Interest" - judge jury and executioner and insinuator of the deep lie all in one? Poor, ill-served "American Interest" that numbers at least one huge war criminal in its midst.For on a level of true world historical, truly unforgivable criminality shall we forgive his employer client Zsigismund Brezinksy, the initiator of the "destabilization of Afghanistan" [now a "failed state" in "tink thanks" language]. Shall I forgive the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter for signing off on Brezinki's brilliant idea, an idea with malice aforethought if ever there was one, or Reagan Casey for following up the organizing the Mujahadeem and providing these proxies with Stinger Missiles, and then betraying these legions to their own flukish [Ossama bin Fluke and his millions that could buy 1000 Toyota four wheelers at the drop of a Turban] devices? The thought is enough to give poor forever obsequious Hennery the K of Wurstburg on the Hudson a break from being lambasted haunted hunted for endorsing, enabling Pinochet. I doubt that you want me to go on as I could for pages along the same line. A country of 25 million human beings! Big time crime! Very cute. Let counsel take care of Ziggie before he sticks it to Handke, let all American rights hyenas turn their attention to U.S. prisons, to the wages of 200 years of U.S. imperialism, inland and in Central America. Or does this all go "without saying"? Yes, poor Handke, he has a screw loose, if only he'd get of this Serbian kick he is on!On a level closer to the crimes of association and ideological artistic confusions: there is poor old wonderful Pound's overvaluation of the aesthetic; Elliot's hideous anti-semitism; the head wound Celine suffered during WW I; Hamsun an apparent Quisling though I do not know the details and allow that his ill repute in may be ill founded; no end of other politically engaged who run afoul of politics, if Handke in fact did, which is not clear to me at all no matter that he is the biggest showboat of them all [which makes him suspect in some respects]. Will not the time come if it has not come already that the words "Special Forces" and the "U.S. Marines" strike as much terror into hearts as the words "Waffen SS" still does in some?I followed the entire controversy from its inception in the early 90s to its current status,[see early long takes of mine at the sitehttp://www.handkeyugo.scriptmania.com ] and also Professor Scott Abbot's rejoinder to Michael Schneider's review of "Journey to the Rivers" as "Justice for Serbia" is properly called, which the New Republic refused to run]and as someone engaged in a very long term Handke project knew of Handke's deep, very deep intra-psychic affiliation to Yugoslavia [read Hornissen, his first novel, its accessible repetition THE REPETION for comprehension of this] and his great familiarity with the Dalmatian and considerable sophistication about the in and outs of Belgrade and other politics [he is not fooled in the least by the ultra nationalists]: and what struck me most was how to the very quick its dissolution injured him, most manifest in petulant public outcries, violent verbal counter-attacks: when I see and hear something of the kind, it makes the me, the me who I am mostly now, sit back and listen and become puzzled... and not rage back.Do I forgive Susan Sontag for writing in the New York Times Magazine on the occasion of the Kosovo bombardments "and now the Serbs are the victims". Yes, I do: because it proved to me how utterly ignorant she still was, ignorant say of the half million Serb who had to flee Croatia, even after acting out some kind of human rights scenario film in Sarajevo [is she one of those "disinterested" observer of the kind that McDonald invokes into his fictitious tribunal that convicts Milosevic?]. I forgive her because of her essays, for the gutsiness of the position she took after 9/11; for her essay on U.S. Torture, for many many things, certainly not because she was a sorry novelist no matter the NYRB's attempts to prop up that part of her reputation which seemed not have convinced her insecurity in the matter; but because she really was a spectacularly good egg as only American girls can be: for that is a what struck me the first time I saw her, in Princeton at the Gruppe 47 meeting that May 1966, "why that's the kind of American girl that you want with you in an American car", and "oh my Gawd, you could really talk to that formidable head, that real intelligence, that didn't jibe with that bod!"I do not forgive the simple minded Serb and Milosovic blamers such as Roger Cohen of the NY Times, or any cowardly simpleminded vigilantes or any of those who make life easy for their heads...I can't really forgive the NYRB, which really knew better for the previous reviews they had run if not for many other reasons, for unloosing a certain Marcus on Handke [see http://www.handkeprose.scriptmania.com + http://www.handkescholar.scriptmania.com for a point by point emendation of the literary points in Marcus's piece] and then using the political disagreement to lay waste to Handke's work. Most amusing was Marcus gunning for pro-Serb sentiment in Handke's then latest book in English, "One Dark Night I Left My Silent House," dismissing it as "just more dream-writing" but then failing to note the dream wishfulfilment of some damaged blue and white trucks being towed westward on the Salzburg Autobahn. A dreambook all right, never before had a writer succeeded in engaging the reader in the syntax of a dream, how much closer can the transmission of one innerworld into another innerworld get, in literature? What amazing literary possibilities are opened up - never to be further used! [On the couch it can make you think that telepathy is for real!] No blood of course as McDonald seems to prefer, well there must be enough of that on the streets in D.C. and at Walter Reed, and if he wants to have it written about, I think bodice rippers might just be his style. I could go on, but I expect you notice in the matter of my forgiveness the rarity of it.Handke's exceptionalism where McDonald uses Günter Grass to attack Handke: why not let Handke bear the consequences of regret for his personal crimes and derelictions - over the years he has expressed his heartfelt regrets for any number of matters, for which the once supremely arrogant and still hot tempered and sometimes quite pathetic takes responsibility, and if he was mistaken in his evaluation of Milosevic [see anon] I expect that he will not wait as long as Günter Grass did to own up to his act of [perhaps convenient]cowardice.As a matter of fact, on Grass's admission that he had spent 45 days at the end of WW II as a member of a troupe so desperate for members that it created foreign divisions in its name, if Handke's most unattractive side, his righteousness did not spring forth with alacritous cries of "shame", the same Handke who a year before had, at his desk, written with fine self-deprecating irony about that streak of his. seehttp://begleitschreiben.twoday.net/files/Die-Tablas-von-Daimielhttp://for the entire wonderful piece where Handke explains why he won't appear as a witness for the defense. My thinking on his explanation for this refusal is that it does not jibe: although Handke of course was not present at any of the occasions during which Milosevic might have ordered or failed to prevent crimes from being committed, nonetheless the appearance of someone who visits heads of the Austrian state, as a character witness... if you see what I mean. I also thought of Handke's once saying that he did not think he would hold up well under cross examination if ever accused of anything. Perhaps that was said during a time the he was more down on himself. But, conceivably, the idea of being in the limelight for perhaps some days on that kind of hot seat then thwarted his exhibitionistic impulses.Your Mr. McDonald, and yours and "The American Interest's" he is, feeds into the sheeps' wish for the simplest of the simplest being the case: that the big bad wolf from Progarevic [and that is where the funeral was permitted not in Belgrade, McDonald] in as much as the sheep are interested or go the immense labor to get some drift of what really went down: it isn't just the distortions and the propaganda, but the sheer mass of information that your scholarly mouse needs to chew through; you need, literally, to become a historian in short order in order to have some idea how something like the disintegration occurred within the span of 20 years. Who might these disinterested be in McDonald's:"Even accepting Handke’s version, his having taken respectful part in the burial services could not be interpreted as anything other than a sign of his support for Milosevic, a man most disinterested observers believe to have been responsible for a series of wars that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people during his 13 years in power."I ask: who might any just one of these of the "most disinterested observers" be?Stephen Schwartz, the once estimable Christopher Hitchens; Neal Acherson whom I recently caught burbling that it was all Milosevic's fault; Roger Cohen; the judges of the tribunal; the millions whose solitude has been muddied by the falsifications that they have absorbed?No, there were no "disinterested" parties [if McDonald means to say "objective" or whatever disinterested might mean coming from him] only interested parties; Handke's was for peace and as McDonald seems to have realized the continued existence of the federation; my guess is also because as of the mid-80s Handke adopted grandfather Sivec's identity who had voted for the federation as a contiuance in some form of Austro-Hungarian federation in 1921, not that this wish of Handke's for a dream federation did and does not contradict his once feeling that there ought to be tough borders between small countries each with its own treasured language, among no end of contradiction in the "Swiss Cheese" that Handke has become. Once the federation devolved into ethnic and religious strife, as compared to conflict within the several states, it became M.s's task to defend, first of all, the Serbian minority in Croatia that was given 2nd class status; something that led to Vukovar; which led to Galbraith calling for us.arming.... Each stage brought, brings, a whole new set of equations into play. Yes, and each of these then small nation states is permitted its nationalism, has it endorsed by the West, but Serbian nationalism is found heinous, why might that be the case?But I don't think that this way of proceeding will get anyone anywhere. And no: it does not appear that it was McDonald "overflow crowd of some 20,000 radical Serb nationalists" at the funeral; I trust Handke's differentiated report that yes there were some, but that the mood chiefly was one of somber mourning. McDonald is intent it appears to turn the Serbians into Nazi type fascist: it is he who is the fascist in being a fitting writer for a new "Der Stuermer."McDonald also uses "disinterested" in claiming [how would he know?] that M. preferred Handke as a "disinterested" observer than a witness in his defense. No, Handke felt M. was innocent, that the case had not been proven ; and, to my considerable amazement, Handke bases his conclusion [but perhaps he was joking, you can't quite tell, always, when he is pulling some idiot reporter's stupid leg] on the smile he saw cross M.'s face when the court prosecution threw everything including the kitchen sink at him in its list of crimes: on the principle, I suppose, well all we need is one count, and we'll find one among those thousands. Handke felt that this tribunal was not appropriate, that the cards were stacked, with which I tend to agree in as much I was able to follow the trial at this remove [and I did not just rely on the hopeless Marlise Simon and the somewhat better Nicholas Wood of the N.Y. Times] and Handke felt that though M's underlings were fit subjects for the court, including the two chief Srbska Bosnian Serb accused, Mladic and K. that M. ought to have been tried in Belgrade by his own people. McDonald with his "most disinterested observers"thus sets up something that does not exist, another fictitious consensus following on the heels of his fictitious "we" of parties that have concluded, and in a "disinterested" state of mind that M. was guilty of Srebrenice... Some counsel! I can see him disbarred, getting thrown out of court in short order! Based on what I managed to get of the De Haag trial, I could not convict beyond a reasonable doubt. If Mr. McDonald's has some specifics: please share them with us! Hey, he might even convince Mr. Handke that he had it wrong.Most disinterested observers agree that squirrels like to consume nuts. An observer has been there, he or she has seen, it makes no difference whether they are interested or disinterested. If McD. had read Handke's Sommerlicher Nachtrag [A Summer Sequel], the second of his travelogues he might have noticed that surrogate Serb that Handke has exclaiming at the sight of Srebrenice "I don't ever want to have been a Serb" [or words to that effect] which made me, initially write: "who the hell asked Peter Handke who just gone through the hard earned task of becoming a Slovenian to turn into a Serb." Well, if you repeat a lie often enough, like Ronald Reagan, enough people will believe you and and you will win the election.What troubles me most in the whole affair is that Handke hasn't said a peep about M.s' posthumous Belgrade conviction for murder of his predecessor. I can see no real interest in Handke's being served in stubbornly insisting on M.s innocence, on his being [merely !] a tragic figure [definition]. Obviously,it brings the Bozonnets the Mcdonalds out of the wood works. Since I used to be acquainted with Mr. Handke and translated most of his plays I myself have good reason to give some real cred to his opinion, his instant x-ray vision of ugly people, not only physically ugly but "dark" people; that he might be right about M. If I had the confidence that I have now with respect to his judgment in that respect my life, my "career" in publishing might have been very different. Handke nearly throws up at ugliness. M. was a nice block head of a Serbian, but it is not merely a matter of looks, though I think Handke has as much of a blind spot when it comes to feminine beauty as I do, he with all his actresses, who he imagines to be as light as when they dance across the stage; I myself was brought up so protected as to have been the most gullible of critters, meanwhile one of the nastiest much bitten Kettenhunde!Unless, Handke just has a stick up his ass! Which he can too. Handke calls them as he sees them, also in his books, quite unsparingly. Also, the powerful. Including his own now deceased publisher, Siegfried Unseld. No matter that he is an upstart if ever there was one.Anyone who reads Handke's autobiography of everything that is in him - WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES - will also make acquaintance with Handke's self-acknowledged "dark" side. Nor does Handke "gloss" anything over. My findings find that the hyper-sensitive autistic Handke since the inception of his exposure to violent primal scenes at age 2 [the born to terror] has only represented the horrors glancingly, and refuses to do so in the usual cliches. It is all there in the travelogues, just off stage or underground in the plays, in an observation, to his friend Thomas Deichmann, the editor of Novo, who has featured Handke on three covers, Handke mused that maybe he ought not have written these travellogues so metaphorically and theatrically. Yes, for sure: who understands anything but a sledge hammer? Certainly not Michael McDonald.That is not what the bloody minded McDonalds of this world want: they want real t.v. blood and they demand it all the time. And instead of taking care of the wages of imperialism in the United States or in Central America they turn into human rights hyaenas in every other part of the world.As to Handke's appearance in P. [not Belgrade as McD. has it] I bet and won: put a camera an interviewer within Handke's sight... He is what he accuses others of being in that respect, a space displacer... He has to hog the limelight! He is a media darling. On receiving his honorary doctorate at age 60 he promised to remove his "idiocy" as he called it, from the public sphere for the rest of his life. That rest lasted about two years, and he crept back in with an interview on publication of his "Del Gredos" novel in France, a big interview with Greiner of Die Zeit, and his refusal to ever accept any further prizes when it looked as though he would not win it for his weakest play ["Subday Blues"], and a fine piece in Literaturen on why he would not appear as a witness in Milosevic's behalf, and with a new play and new book coming out in 2007, the Milosovic funeral made for the kind of media orgy that allowed my man to "Play the game. Stay in the picture" as he calls it! As a youngster he dreamed of appearing on the cover of Der Spiegel, and I know what the pathos of his deprivations and the many reasons that made him so. But doesn't he ever have something to display aside his Carinthian "Schwanz" when the groupies used to show up in Paris! More importantly, without that overpowering drive to display himself we would not have the great works. But the closest and oldest friends are instantly taken mushrooming in the Chaville primeval forest, whereas if an interviewer or a T.V. crew show up: the great chef Handke [he ought to link up with the Handkes in Ohio who have a famous restaurant!] holds forth: perhaps the access to the mirror makes him overcome his nausea of other bodies a place of his own.The U.N. court recently absolved the Serbians of genocide in Bosnia but found it responsible for failing to prevent Srebrenice. The chief culprits for this well planned massacre are Karadic + Mladic, by all accounts. If Milosevic knew that this massacre was being planned, did he wink for it to proceed? Could he have prevented it if he knew it was being planned. I lack the information. So does McDonald. Handke, the last I heard, evidently feels that M. could not have prevented it. If the opposite proves the case I expect we wil hear from Peter Handke. He knew the family, visited with M. jail, was invited to be a witness for the defense, to the funeral?Who is more responsible for the mutual crimes in Kosovo? M. had to secure a minority ethnic; some of the Kosovo Albanian leaders, Madelaine Albright's pals, are now on trial in de Haag. Perhaps Handke misjudged, was deluded, his judgment impaired by sentiment. But that M. ought to be known as "the butcher of the balkans" is the conclusions of simple and ugly minds."Did Handke believe that, because of his prestige, people would shrug off his act of solidarity with the “Butcher of the Balkans”? McDonald asks.One] among many reasons Handke gave for attending to funeral was precisely to make a demonstrative gesture [as I knew this great exhibitionist would when given the right opportunity, oh how well my Vegas bet in that respect turned out!] to disavow the moniker "dictator" that is invariably affixed [in the so monotonous US of A.] to the name Milosevic. Milosevic was elected three times and lost his last election, and then, albeit rather reluctantly, gave up his position. [see Handke's words at the beginning of this section]. Eventually M. was delivered over to the Court in Scheveningen as so many monsters have not been. An autocrat for sure, as Handke, who has occasional autocratic flourishes of his own, acknowledges numerous times in the several important statements and the host of interviews he gave subsequent to his notorious attendance, and a great majority of which have been online collected athttp://www.signandsound.comfor nearly a year; or more recently, amplified by me with a long thoughtful finding athttp://www.artscritic.comBut which, though the McDonald cites Handke's words in P., and have been online, fails to provide.Additionally, in various numerous interviews in his now again media orgy, Handke provided a few further reasons for going. To absorb the athmosphere for a book about a tragic character, although his most recent, the 2007 Kali is not it.What gives me pause is M's posthumous conviction in Belgrade, where Handke felt was the fit place for a trial... I have sought to find out... perhaps H. would say, to be condemned posthumously without having had the opportunity to defend himself...I suspect that P.H. is giving Milo a bit of a break, that M. is part of the dream that refuses to disappear entirely, that M. has a bit of grandfather transference going on; but that is just a guess of mine based on what I know about how Handke finally wrested a father figure out of the grandfather. Perhaps my guess makes too much sense I tell myself. It's the best that I, who loves answers, can come up with. Handke's little book Rund um das Grosse Tribunal, strikes me like the Handke cat sneaking around the hot sauce but refusing to put as much as a paw into it. Handke is a trained lawyer, who did not take his final exam because he felt he could make it as an independent writer. If not he might have become what he envisioned as a career that could be combined with writing: an Austrian cultural attache - and with his touces of Tourettism might have been the exception to the rule of an excellent crew; and as which cultural attache personae he appears in several books.Handke also defended M. against the accusation of being an "autist", pointing out that this painful condition ought not to be used as a pejorative. Handke, the savant, knows whereof he speaks. He has the nose of your best hunting dog, the eyes of a cat, the ears of a bat! The skin sensitivity of a Virginia Woolf.What is that paragraph about the history of Austrian enthusiastic welcoming for Hitler about? Why is it in this piece? I myself would connect Maria Sivec enthusiasm for German soldiers... to that enthusiasm. Otherwise it would seem to be another instance of dreadful editing on your, Mr. Wilson's part.Although Handke writes like an angel he is nothing of the sort. My chief objecting to him is that meanwhile writes so well, that I can abide little else that I set my eyes on. He is both the most loving man I know, and a man who can be as "humorless as death.""bad when i am bad, very good when i am good." True enough. Now on to Michael McDonald, literary critic!
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Monday, March 26, 2007

PARTS B [of REVERSE ORDER C-B-A] OPEN LETTER TO THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, RE MICHAEL MCDONALD
=B=II McDonald the Literary RockerPertinent quotes from McDonald on Handke's works and my commentary:It appears the few if any U.S. reviewers and critics have realized - exceptions are the late Richard Gilman and Frank Conroy, and the still living great William Gass and the near great John Rockwell - that no matter that Handke has gone trough approximately six stages as a writer and dramatist since his appearance of the world stage in 1966, he has remained true in his fiction and his drama to the knowledge that all you can do with words is to create independent works of art, artificial creations, projection screens in which the innerworld of the author poet in play with the outer world affects the innerworld of the reader; the longing for authentic communication through and approximations of states of mind. Handke is a formalist in the sense that the romantics thought all works ought to approximate music, and the laws of formalism, with its themes and variations, from Bach to Hip Hop, is the most efficient way of doing so.Deriving from an initial experience where everything material, including the sheer materiality of words, nauseated Handke's senses that, e.g., he needed to wear dark glasses at all times during those days - "nausea of the eyeballs" was the most extreme expression that someone, who I think still suffers from occasional bouts of color blindness, found for this experience, a matter I decided to trace to its complicated vari- and over-determined origin. And what a great learning educational experience it has been. The vagic nerve which produces the feeling of nausea to defend us against ill-making interior and exterior matters of all kinds is also irritated by sheer excess of information, in the case of someone with Handke's autistic hyper-sensibility it does so with much greater ease, since the autistic may have far greater input but, let me put it this way, have only the standard processor and modulator - the words "sensory overload" makes a kind of everyday language sense.Although Handke initially - the Handke who had had eight years of Greek and Latin, whose acquaintance with law and its fine distinctions had brought some clarity into his angry adolescent noggin [read "The Essay on Tiredness" to see the plethora of his symptomatology as a young man], as he would later write - despaired at getting out of what is called "the prison house of language," it is of course astonishing to note with what perfection he operated to create works such as his first "Sprechstuecke" to make an audience aware, by means of these "happenings" of the imprisonment, these social lattice works, in which they reside, how painfully self-conscious the experience of "Offending the Audience" can make that audience as it becomes more and more aware of itself. [McDonald: "The most remarkable attribute of these works [the early plays] is a total absence of action... Other than language itself, nothing happens."] is McDonald on the subject writing from D.C in 2006/07 who evidently never underwent any of these experiences at the well reviewed, by the Washington Post, shows of these plays by "Fraudulent Productions" in that city]. Nor that of the dissociating experience, magical, the "cleans your clock" experience of "Ride Across Lake Constance"[ 1970] or that of the play without words, consisting of nothing but beautiful stage directions, so much approximating musical notations or those for dance, "My Foot my Tutor", [1969] and one of the great texts, in German, also consisting of directions only, for "The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other" [1991], a mesmerizing series of tableaux that leave all of your senses freshened, leave you reborn because it makes you see that much more keenly, nearly as keenly as the autistic Handke sees perhaps, until you have to deal with one too many nauseating idiot like Michael McDonald. That, say, the 1971 "Goalies Anxiety at the Penalty Kick", by means of syntactical legerdemain, for which Handke had prepared himself by reading in the field of paranoid shizophrenia, purely by mean of syntax, puts the reader into the same paranoid schizophrenic state of mind as its protagonist/ personae/ projection screen of the eventual murder ["Hey, McDonald, there is some blood for you!"]Josef Bloch; or that a real reader, who does not look for an experience above and beyond what he is reading, whose mind has not become cluttered with notions that words ever loose their material quality, will experience the novelistic fairy tale, "Absence" [1987] as though he were seeing a film.What Handke achieves is to make the prison house playful, more and more inhabitable, as he has absorbed, slurped up in his insatiability, for language to fill the void, the entire classic tradition; but, finding especial use not just for Flaubert but for Goethe, Eichendorf and Stifter and the one contemporary writer Handke and Thomas Mann agreed on, the fairly recently deceased Hermann Lenz; Francis Ponge Francis Ponge, Grillparzer, etc etc. It is amazing what Handke has absorbed and then transformed to his use. There are dissertations or long scholarly pieces, few showing evidence that their writers as writers have been influenced by such intense exposure, on Handke and Nietzche, Handke and Stifter, Handke and Rilke, you name it.That oddly cheerful, astonishingly vigorous person, that idiot, who announced in 1966 "I am the new Kafka", meanwhile presents himself as the "anti-Kafka" which is closer to the truth once he accessed what lay prior to the terror, fear inducing experiences of his childhood.I don't think McDonald has read more than one single Handke novel, and even that not to completion or he couldn't write: ""Who reads (outside of the classroom) Robbe-Grillet and the other nouveaux romanciers from whom Handke has learned so much?" and some of the other matters for which I will take him to task. Nor do I think he knows German though his talk about "the early novels" might lead the ignorant to believe that he does. McDonald is a fraud, a worse fraud than the fraudulent critic Lee Siegel; he is either a hired or self-appointed literary assassin who however with the fifty pot shots he takes at Handke not once hits the barn.The object of his exercise is to ride a blind easily mounted high moral horse, and to hell with what is trampled along the way. He's a Stryker Brigade in one. If he at least knew Handke's early work! He does not mention a single one of the 30 plus works Handke has produced since 1974.He cites a single paragraph from the 1974 novel "A Moment of True Feeling", and probably does so only because Updike refers to it, and so he feels he has some kind of backup:"As though the sky now partook of an alien system, it became too high for the high towers of civilization in the foreground of the picture, and against the compact, menacing background the human landscape degenerated into a junkyard. The deep blue with which a time grown plethoric weighed on the world was the essential—the scattered leaflets down below, in which only fear of life or death could beguile him (or anyone else!) to find the slightest meaning, were a secondary, minor factor. Keuschnig saw the sky arching over the Place de la Concorde as something incongruous and hostile. "as being typical. This is the novel into which Handke dissociated the suididal state he was then in. The then young lay-abroad, whose mother had recently committed suicide, couldn't handle being left by his first wife, finding him the trapped house-husband to a toddler daughter, for cause I might say in the way sleep walkers come together and abandon each other with as little sense as the would be famous actors of "Ride Across Lake Constance" have. Handke began to fugue, as you can read the three great fuguing poems in "Nonsense and Happinesss", he noted every involuntary thought that popped up in his noggin in "Weight of the World," and, as we can read there, ended up hospitalized, for tachychardia attack it looks like, started to ingest valerium, the anxiety inducing nausea softened, and he experienced that "Moment of True Feeling" that is the object of that novel, which Gunner McDonald never got to, even that one book, that McDonald appears not have read through to the end: love burst through, disproving in advance what an idiot, a complete moron who does not even know that linguistically he contradicts himself within just one sentence, named Michael McDonald would write appr. 30 years later: "HANDKE HAS NEVER abandoned his bedrock faith that language is merely a set of debilitating fictions used to mask reality." [How can language, either written or spoken, be a fiction? Does it contain some kind of black matter?]Instead of continuing to be nauseated by the materiality of words, Handke becomes what he calls a "Wortklauber" - he begins to love them, in somewhat Rilkeish fashion if you like, they become endearing, like his darling sparrows; one step up in the world from being a "mot juster" as he had always been. Handke, who had agreed with his psychotherapist that he lacked access to his feelings, becomes possessed by the extraordinary love he had absorbed as a child, from intra-uterine [yes, someone who knows how to read an author like Handke in the dozen ways that analysis then teaches you to "read" also finds those memories in his work, in the great, the ever so rich "Walk About the Villages"] and during the first two years of his life from his bounty-fully beauteous mother; at least for a while, he opens up to the world, as is evidenced especially by the first chapter of the title text of "A Slow Homecoming" so that one might come under the impression that even if all of Alaska were consumed by Dick Cheney's energy consortium it continued to live in Handke's response to what it had once been. Handke's dissociations lessen, yet his powers to be in the necessary dissociative state of mind to produce these amazing texts is not diminished. If that amazing pretender McDonald knew anything about Robbe Grillet or perhaps he is really thinking of Robbe Fricasse, [yes, just one thing, Mr. McDonald - give me a single item, just one - not the "so much" that Handke allegedly learned] he would cite the one Handke text where, if you have absorbed Robbe Grillet, you can sense RG's work as providing a kind of supporting grid: Handke's amazingly lucid Der Hausierer / The Panhandler[1969]. It is a series of 12 I think separate, alternating texts; the even numbered ones consist of extremely short sentences in the present tense, sentences by a consciousness that is evidently watching, that is transfixed by a horrendous, barely glimpsable series of bloody [more blood, McDonald! oh what terror inducing horrors are just off stage]; the odd-numbered sections, in italics, provide a kind of sequential meta description of the essence of crime and detective novels. The book was written during a period during which our Kafka redivivus was demonstrating over and over again [the "Innerworld" poems, "Radio Play One", "Kaspar"] what mastery he had acquired over his fear, that he could induce it and keep mastering it, as he did, too, to a large extent during his ten year exposure to violent brutal primal scenes, read "Sorrow Beyond Dreams", Mr. McDonald. And it is not a novel you fraud, it is Handke's most famous book, it is a biography of his mother's life, even those who have little use for the rest of Handke find it a great text. "Sorrow for Gunner McDonald." And evidently, Handke as a person with literature as his medicine, as his defense against the terror of the dark night, very cooly very hotly utilized every formal means he could get his hands on. The consciousness reporting sections, a demonstration ad absurdum of pure phenomenology Mr. McDonald, also apparently contain no end of quotes from American and British crime novels cited by Handke from their German translations, which is one reason it does not yet exist in English, since a discouraged me failed do ask Handke whose "Kaspar" I was just translating if he at least remembered what books they were from and what pages. But "Der Hausierer" exists in Italian, French and Spanish. Since Mr.McDonald claims to be working on a literary biography of Curzie Malaparte I assume {???} that he knows Italian. Poor dead Malaparte he trembles in his grave at what is going to be done to him: "Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool." No, nothing is emptier than Michael McDonalds brain! Or rather,filled with crap.Handke as of appr. 1974 became a writer composer who could achieve any effect he wanted; except, being autistic, he was never going to write socialist realist novels like Heimito von Doderer, no matter his vain claim that he could have. For his autism also implies an imprisonment in what is known as "the autistic position"... from which we sense that immense longing to break out, to make contact, that impresses the reader of Handke's first novel, "Die Hornissen" [1965], which he would later re-write in the more accessible form of "The Repetition" [l984]; yet Handke - as he has said in a sentence non of the scholars that cite it have ever followed through on: "I am so anxious and everything I write is then so calm." Since the basic source of Handke's writing is anxiety inducing libido, its transformation into calming text implies the opposite of what Freud and Breuer called hysterical conversion, or a way of productively dealing with it; since writing is not only Handke's chief means of staying emotionally well, but also this industrious and ambitious savant's gift; of his ambition to be the recipient of the laurel crown... he is indeed condemned to be the most productive living author, and who does little if any revising of his first and only draft; and who has also translated some of the greatest and other fine texts, since though he may write one book and play a year, that still leaves a lot of other time that needs to be devoted to keeping pencil in hand.As the author, also, of biography ["Sorrow Beyond Dreams", "A Child's Story"] and artistic musings cum walking tours such as "The Lesson of St. Victoire"] and of travelogues [three of of the 7 of his Yugoslavia related texts] Handke makes also for an excellent, pretty regular kind of first rate reporter and historian. I saw enough of him from the mid sixties to the late 70s to certify that he's got the essence of things right in, "A Child's Story" [1980] [part III of the Homecoming Quartett].Mcdonald writes: "Similarly in his first novel, as well as those that followed in the 1970s such as "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," "A Moment of True Feeling," and "The Left- Handed Woman," Handke dispenses with linear narrative. In its place, he offers readers a static “story” built almost entirely around the inner thoughts of characters who discover that life is absurd and language inadequate to their needs."Let's see now: "Sorrow Beyond Dreams" is an account of Handke's mother's life, evidently McDonald has not read it. He is just looking at a list of published books."Static stories?" eh? Lightning fast tortoises perhaps. Action, cut, another bucket of blood for McDonald: I was always under the impression, as its translator, that Vim Wenders managed to extract a pretty good well-moving story line from "A Goalie's Anxiety of the Penalty Kick" [1970]. "A Short Letter long Farewell [1972] sure moves like crazy all over the United States! The suicidal Keuschnig of "A True Moment" [1974] seems to do a lot of pavement pounding in Paris! Sorger in Alaska ["A Slow Homecoming", 1979] moves, albeit already as the "king of slowness" as which "The Repetion's" [1986] walking syntax can induce a sense of true being in its readers following Filip Kobal on his way to Lubliana.And as to psychology, the abandoned husband in "Lefthanded Woman" [another personae for a side of Handke], does a lot of peeing against house walls in the company of his male pals! What ought Handke the allegedly non-psychological write: a dissertation on the emasculating, crushing effect of being abandoned by your wife? In "Weight of the World" Handke notes that he feels he is walking around as though his ass is stuck out high, like that of a homosexual! It appears that McDonald like so many Americans like to have their texts and their films with characters that have a set of psychological categories in which they can then be discussed away, the horror of psychological pseudo-understanding which is worse than denial; real people as it were, instead of encountering their being. The work is rife with the under-currents of psychodrama!McDonald: "In the 1980s, however, after delving into the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger, he ventured outside the minds of his characters long enough to offer readers finely drawn evocations of natural landscapes," Mr. McDonald has it.I have come across a single mention of Heidegger in Handke who finds his work monolithic and unapproachable. Handke's close friend the poet Kolleritch, however, is reputed to derive useful backup from it. I would say that first of all Handke did not and does not "delve" whatever that might mean in the context and that to respond to nature and to communicate that response so that a reader can respond, sure as hell did not require Heidegger. In Handke's case it required the knowledge when to name and when not to. Stifter and Hermann Lenz yes, Heidegger no. Stifter and Lenz because they gave Handke the confidence that you could create texts other than those that merely reproduce an ugly world, and Cezanne, but in which the world's horror appeared as the occasional distant thunderstorm or burst in like a chain wielding Inuit. Handke is oblique, McDonald. But never intentionally obscurantist."But Handke has hardly been silenced or relegated to obloquy." I have not the faintest what this might mean "to be silenced or relegated to obloquy" - does McDonald feel it is time to throw in some big word? Is he slipping this nonsense past an editor? I gladly subject McDonald to an endless withering stream of obloquy, however. But only because his nonsense appears so improbably in the once wonderful "American Scholar."McDonald: "At his best, as Updike has remarked, Handke is 'a kind of nature poet, a romantic whose exacerbated nerves cling like pained ivy to the landscape.' And Updike cites, rightly, this passage [the same one from "Moment of True Feeling" see above] But his [Handke's I presume] visionary power of description has little in the way of intellect behind it to engage the reader. By concentrating with surgical precision on the physical details of life, Handke can paint a horrifying image of the mechanical numbness of everyday habit. But is what he describes really life? Literature is many things, but it wouldn’t be worthy of our attention if it didn’t have something to do with human psychology—from which Handke clearly wishes to escape."Some of this nonsense I have already dealt with above. But here are a few comments:I am glad that precision continues to be surgical!Handke may wish to escape the McDonalds of this world, but someone who knows psychology as intimately as he does so as to be able to forego its pedestrian enumeration, is certainly not as foolish as to want to escape it. Handke is first and foremost a materialist. He may have his foolish mystical sides, but the thought of escaping psychology of all things, I cant imagine it crossing his mind. The alleviation of the painful states that his autism can still produce is quite another matter. Just because you don't write psychological motivations for your characters, but leave them implicit, as the impressionist lyrical novel [say Henry Green, or D.H. Lawrence, or the Joyce up to and including "Portrait" have always done] doesn't mean that you as an author propose to escape the great complexity of human or any kind of monkey motivation. You want "real life" in your books, McDonald: you get the Pope's nose, Michael McDonald.As mentioned before: the cited paragraph is an instance of Keuschnig's dissociated state."Little in the way of intellect" ... I see: a phenomenologist like Handke is supposed to demonstrate to a moron like Michael McDonald the operation of the sytem prctp. in conjunction with the linguistc system? Pray why ought poetry demonstrate that the poet might also have the most powerful :"innellecual" capacities, which however, only manifest themselves in his powers to give musical form to his product? Such calls for intellect coming from the McDonalds of this world!Perhaps McD.s statement is really a projection of the fact that he has an inkling of how intellectually deficient he himself is?Updike used to feel that Handke was the best living German writer; upon reading Updike's review, in The New Yorker, of Handke's "The Afternoon of a Writer" [1987] I decided to forgo Updike reviews, and only read his wonderful pieces on the visual arts. But therefore it would be interesting to discuss - I think I will write him - what he thinks of Handke now that an extraordinary painterly element [van Ruysdael] started to enter his work as of the 1984 "Across."The Mcdonald wants real people ... well, there is always the rampaging surrogate for Handke, the Loser of the 1984 novel Across [Chinese des Schmerzens]. But I think what reality- deprived McDonald wants from novels: he wants real life! Like you want coke to be real, which, in its original green glass bottle, always at least made for a great douche. He wants words to make him forget all about words. Naif realism, here we come. He wants Handke to be something that he isn't, but can only respond to what he knows already: to "real life"... my preference is for "unreal life!"As far as I am concerned, Handke is batting around .750, pretty high on the totem pole. Occasionally, his grandiosity gets the better of him [the 500 k word "Image Loss: or Across the Sierra del Gredos, [2002] or he does something just "to stay in the picture" [the 2005 play "Subday Blues" might fit this desciption.] He is best, as he knows, at a 30 to 40 thousand word clip of his concentrated efforts. For example his "Don Juan" [2004] which moves both forward and backward simultaneously, in time, and, as usual, is also anchored in one place as its protagonist moves from one city to one woman to another in the course of one week, is even better, more cleanly and clearly articulated than the two great Assayings, as I call them, the one "About the Jukebox" and the one about "The Day that Went Well" in "Three Essays" [1994]. Think of H. as composer with the inclinations of a Cezanne, to create alternative verbal worlds that stand in an unusual relationship to the world that we inhabit. Handke is also a didactitician, a kind of activist Wittgenstein. To live in the age of Goethe is many a Germanist's pipe dream, I am glad to live in a world that at least has one Handke. He nourishes me as no other writer does. A few pages of Handke, one good analytic essay, my friends the smart crows and I forget all about the McDonalds of this world.

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

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


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

# 4] Mireille/ Handke's sense of place

now posted at
http://www.handke-discussion.blogspot.com/

# 4] Mireille/ Handke's Sense of Place....
next sending [ # 5] will serve a fillip to what Professor Pilipp makes of Goalie!
I am so pleased to find himself in agreement with Mireille's fine reading on the centrality of "place" in Handke's life and work, in her piece in Coury/ Pilipp's THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE, not that I don't want to cavil at the lack of response to the individual works, the influence that Handke's amazingly articulated encounter ought to leave in this A student's enumeration. I also feel like saying, nay I do say, that if Handke wanted to write "editorials", and perhaps all art is a form of propaganda, as he of course sometimes does, he would do just that. Or not write on the fine line of ambiguous projection screen
Chiefly, I am going to address one point, how tendentious [or ideological, how "Blut and Boden"] Handke's Taoist, transfigured nature as "mythic" measure might be regarded, as we find it starting to take that course, quite consciously now, as of " The Left Handed Woman," and will focus on the results that the focus of this mythic lens lends to Alaska in the title prose text in what is called A Slow Homecoming. In passing, however, let us remember Handke saying that while he was writing Left Handed Woman he kept running to Paris porno houses! The chasteness of the rural Tao is a tense affair! Handke is also Albin of W.A.T.V., the Josef Bloch of Goalie after he's spent some years in jail, as what in W.A.T.V is Handke not, in the event anyone really wants to tangle with what is perhaps also, among the many things it is, the most unusual and richest autobiographical display ever penciled. One could also hold that nature as idyllic calming place is manifest as early as Handke's first novel, Die Hornissen, or in that poetic text Singular and Plural that I commented on in my response to Weller's piece on Handke's poems. Ms. Mireille is quite right in finding that matters are not as simple as Fourier imagined. However, I found that with Handke's power as a writer that if nature as we think of it disappeared we might at least encounter it in Handke's encounter with it.
Just a bit of house-keeping prior to what will be a story, about me and Langsame Heimkehr, oh yes and at the end a funny story and a few comments about ABSENCE and what interests me in that text.
In Lesson of St. Victoire Handke mentions that he suffers from occasional bouts of color blindness, not that he is partially color blind; and that he has not found anyone in his family with similar problem. I must have spent at least two weeks researching the phenomenon of "occasional color blindness", there is a fair literature on this psychosomatic symptom. Most instances that are detailed in the literature are induced by hysteria, male hysteria is castration anxiety [it's pretty simple, the nerves to the gonad, the eyes and the teeth run along the same strands! in Mexican villages when kids are frightened they instantly clutch their genital area] ; which in the case of Handke's autistic sensitivities, as previously described, are induced by ugly sites, anxiety, "nausea of the eyeballs;" anger, rage make him see black and white, no wonder he prefers the color white and is such a snow rabbit. The angels in Wings of Desire [Himmel ueber Berlin] see in color when they are infused with feelings. i.e...
And no wonder that walking, being in nature, mother nature with all those rounded corners, shelves and terraces is such a solace to sore eyes for the aging mother fuck from Griffen, the chaste Taoist. Rarely do we come on this in such pure fashion. I wrote about the younger Handke's need for tinted glasses; the glasses are now internalized. Valerian.
Subsequent to St. Victoire, in Chinese des Schmerzens [Across], I was surprised to notice Handke take what I call a Ruysdealesque approach to the Salzburg surrounds, he has of course started to paint, sketch too; the prose becomes painterly, the sentences more overtly anchored in images. The danger he runs is of this becoming a kind of art prose.
Oh yes, why am I a Handke nut? Because nearly every sentence is an adventure.
Now to Alaska which I will address in the form of a story. Sometime in the early 70s Handke wrote me, asking what winters were like in the U.S. I wrote back that winters in the Rockies was like that in the Alps, in new England like that of the foothills to the Alps, but that if he wanted something really different he would go to Alaska. I had gone to Alaska as a way to recover from going dead in graduate school in Germanistics, teaching was a joy; most but certainly not some high school teacher type members of the department, I had no problem with the others, some were stellar in their field, it is what they ended up doing to texts that got to me, I was not going to perpetrate anything of the kind, and seeing the walking dead in those departments I congratulate myself on my sensibilities especially since I have seen what has become of many members who are now my age.
Anyhow, Alaska for something entirely different, well not altogether: I was a good enough woodsman.
Handke then proceeded to pay a few fairly brief visits to Alaska, I think maybe a total of three at most during the years 1976-78. When he had returned from his then last visit, prior to putting up in the Hotel Adams in late fall 1978, to write Langsame Heimkehr, we happened to be walking to Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge, in a medium snowfall, it was night, to visit the writer Michael Brodsky, I got a little worried by his telling me that he was about to write a book about Alaska, after those few visits... oh yes, and he'd forgotten as he had a few far more important matters that so very strange man, that I had pointed him in that direction some years ago.
I myself spent about nine months in Alaska, first as a fire fighter, then as a geological surveyor, and wanted to tell Handke a few of my experiences. Alaska was one of those pure experiences which had a beginning and and end, and I when the time came the following spring to return, as I had planned, I shied back, it seemed I did not want to disturb that very clear recollection I had, still have, of sometimes whole days, and if not of whole days of long treks, or rides in a raft down the river or across the Yukon; I have few such seemingly complete memory recollections, also of the people I came to know, a very varied lot, entire conversations, no blurring so it seems in Alaska, powerfully delineated shapes, outlines of the landscape, the deltas the forever sinuous shape of the Big Wide River, the infinite dark green of the flat only rarely rolling scrub spruce and pine thicket blanket, the foot thick moss, the determining permafrost beneath, which can thaw during a forest fire, and if peat burn forever. The black south side of Fairbanks with its music clubs and stills. The Indians from whom I had learned so much while we had fought the big forest fire, who weren't much good when confined to their villages.
But Handke indicated that he was overwhelmed with material, had enough, and I did not persist, but I am reminded of one of his angry women commenting on how self-involved he is, that he doesn't really want to know anyone else's story. Well, the misanthrope makes a great ultra sensitive correspondent. Writing a book on Alaska, based on so little time spent there, it worried me, it appears. Have you read the McPhee? He had. I don't think I asked him whether he had read Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam whose best parts are set in the Brooks Range, where I had worked too, and are in a way far more amazing since they were penned by a city boy. I had gone to Alaska to be rid of something, specifically of the deadening experience, to get well, with the idea that you could make money while adventuring in nature; and so it had come to pass, and Alaska was absorbed quite unselfconsciously, as a matter of course, the way you go into a river and it leaves a film on you. What was the most important part of the experience, was it this or that person, or that near accidental death experience? Quite a few of those. Including those great instructors in finding your way in a wild that was home to them who might turn raging bulls back in their settlements in the village, that angry chain wielding Indian in Handke's text, history, yes in a way, certainly. No matter that you could find no end of general and individual explanations for his rage.
Having not the faintest that Handke had chosen the personae of a geologist as a lens for his Alaska, I wonder retrospectively, if he might have been rattled by my telling him that I had worked as such a one, albeit pretty much in a "Laufer" role, far into snowshoe times.
It turned out that Handke had prepared that pathos drenched opening sentence and been carrying it around with him for years, and then, by his account, went nearly crazy because the best laid plan was not working out...got lonely in the Hotel Adams, but since he was someone of whom my experience was as someone who was always writing or wanted to do nothing as much as write I left him to his own devices. I had my hands full at the time. On his return trip from Colorado he was downcast, as compared to the return from Alaska and San Francisco where he was very up. It turned out that an Austrian ski instructor friend had died.
I did not read A Slow Homecoming at its appearance, no one sent me a copy of the book, so I picked one up at the 1980 Book Fair and read it on my way back from Bulgaria later that fall, just prior to visiting Handke in Salzburg, on my way to Zurich and way back to New York.
I was fairly overwhelmed[see http://www.kultur.at/lesen/index.htm [dem handke auf die schliche/ prosa/ the "ein besuch auf dem moenschberg" section]
I can't say that anything I ever read had such an evocative effect on me. It wasn't just that, it wasn't at all that the text produced some kind of surge of memories, the wonderful McPhee could have served that purpose,too, and far more specifically, no it did because Handke's nameless writing articulation evoked the shape of this huge landscape, its vastness, it elicited what had been until then a kind of unconscious holistic [?] experience, that I never considered articulating, and so we have these words "mythic" "eternalistic" for them... and our inability to articulate that experience joins, is akin to other inarticulated experiences, such as those we have intra-uterine, and until we enter the deceptive world of words... Handke's text affected me so much more powerfully because we shared an outerworld, and my innerworld turned, entirely unexpectedly, to have been, be in tune with his.
My first employer in Fairbanks had been the U.S. Department of the Interior, which is also in charge of firefighting on a scale of millions of acres . I flew by helicopter, from a manageable 20 thousand acre burn near Galena, on the Yukon, across a year old three million acre burn, to the Brooks Range to a burn of a couple of hundred acres that two crews of twelve could handle, one Banana with 24 men aboard; my second employer was the department of roads of the State of Alaska that surveyed what I later discovered was the route that the oil pipe line would take north of Fairbanks! Someone had really looked at those pocketbook sized brown note books with our topographical sketches and their soil analyses.
It made little difference to me that Secretary of State Seward had bought the territory of Alaska from the Czar in the 19th Century for a pittance, the only time I was reminded of that was that my native fellow fire fighters friends had Russian names! The road, the Alcan Highway, I drove up on had been constructed during WW II, among other reasons, for the lend-lease program to the USSR, black crews from the US South had stayed in Fairbanks and brought their life style there, to which I took like a fish to water in the midnight sun summers. There was only one major railway line, Fairbanks to Anchorage, one major highway. The gold fields north of Fairbanks were merging back with nature. It is easy to ignore the political marks left on that vastness. How few settlements there are in the interior, human kind has not left much of a mark until the oil exploration came.
Handke, it surprised me on first reading, appeared to be looking for signs of peace in the geologic formations; I myself would look for them in the genetic makeup of Bonono Chimpanzees! In certain unwarlike non-competive non-greed based unrighteous cultures. So "geological formations" in his instance ... or is that just Sorger?
It appears Handke for once ran out of steam, out of something, in this undertaking; the title text of A Slow Homecoming Quartet runs out of steam, Sorger is talking to the Portier at night in the Adams, a resident hotel I knew well prior to Handke's settling there for some months in 1978, since I had lived on East 86th occasionally. For many years he said this was the worst time in his life, in No-Man's-Bay he makes rather silly fun of the experience, something that might have been excised. He has called the text "a philosophical" one. Most philosophy and certainly the stance of being "philosophical" are of a defensive nature. Let me put it this way: responding as Handke does in his Alaska text, and also in the subsequent San Francisco section, there is no need for him to look through tinted glasses, no need for glancing to the side. So for those who cannot respond, such as those who only see gold or oil... On the other hand, looking for signs of peace during a war ridden zone such as Yugoslavia and not crying holy murder at every moment can get you in trouble with the righteous!
Now a note and the story about Absence. As a text, Absence chiefly interests me for two reasons: one that it is devoid of the direct intrusion of its author's unhappy psyche; and that as a prose text it can be experienced as a film; that is, it points the way towards new possibilities of communication by means of the alteration of the reader's kinesthetic reading experience; it has a renovating effect; the means our artificer uses to achieve this effect, his technical means are or seem to be of the simplest kind. What a feat, not a single US reviewer noticed, a few made passing comment abou the the text's "dramatic nature". Alas, why bother to innovate?
Now the story: In 1991, subsequent to the mother of all Battles for Kuwait, my girlfriend and I spent a night in the northern-most reaches of Los Padres National Forest, [which mountain range lies east of Big Sur on the California Coast to orient you]. We had taken Carmel Valley Road, which leads from Carmel-by-the-Sea in about 50 plus miles to the big north-south California route 101, along the southern edge of the Salinas Valley of Steinbeck fame, as is Monterrey for having been a sardine processor, while there were still sardines, and its "Cannery Row". After playing a little pool at a restaurant of a once resort called Miller's Landing, by a crossing over a brook that comes out of the Los Padres, a once 40s Hollywood getaway that had turned working class, then hippie, and was again working class, M. and I had wound our way up the several thousand feet into this the northern most stretch of the Los Padres [which extend from Ventura along the California Coast, into Kern Country to the east, through Santa Barbara County all the Way to the Carmel Big Sur area.
Miller's landing has a brook coming down out of the hills... and it is along the course of the brook that you wend your way up into the hills, on a dirt road...
We had spent the night at a hill top, M. had sat down on a fish hook, and as usual had emitted a hysterical scream... though a world class trouper her hysteria had nearly got us killed a day or so before...
Around midday that fine sunny warm Sunday morning as we were wending our way gradually back down, south, into my beloved rolling California live oak rolling hill sides, in the direction of a right turning elbow in the # 101 that would take us back to the coast highway, I started encountering, every couple of hundred yards, the tiniest of barricades, the kind you might put up for bumper carts in a country fair, childlike, painted diagonal running red and white stripes... amused, a touch puzzled, I skirted these pretend obstacles until all a sudden... we I, the Mustang of a car, found ourselves in the middle of a not so simulation of the "mother of all tank battles"... tanks rolling across the crest of hills on both sides...
it was the National Guard, on a Sunday exercise, we had driven into one of their training camps, if there had been a sign we had missed it. I looked at the US Geological Service map of the area I had with me, the kind I used in Alaska, and again five years prior while exploring the SE quadrant of New Mexico: well, well, well we seemed to be in the middle of the maneuver grounds of Fort Hunter-Ligget!The situation seemed was so dire, it shut off M.s hysteria for once.
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#=3=B-WELLER, HANDKE'S POETRY

#=3=B-WELLER, HANDKE'S POETRY
Some Notes on Narcissism, "Nausea in the eyeballs," fugueing....autism.... verbal materiality...


The reading of Singular and Plural in # 3-A is all I have to say to Innerworld. I might have added the idea of "homeostasis", the one good idea Freud claimed he got reading the entire preceding literature on dreams to his I.O.D. If only Germanisten and other disciplines along that line were as sophisticated as to understand Freud's concept of over- or multiple determination! Verdichten/ Dichtung/ Condensation. And its dimensional configurations. There would be no need for Heidegger, Lacan et al. If only they proceeded as Freud did by first studying the nervous system of an ancient fish... how much time they would save by not needing to read Husserl!
I suggest Peter Lowenberg's piece on Pyscho-Analysis as a proto-postmodernist way of proceeding. In light of this mention, I am surprised to note the lack of mention in the bibliographies of Tilman Moser's Romane als Krankheitsgeschichten which includes two pieces on Handke,although Moser was not yet aware of the underlying complicating factor of autism. It also appears that no one has read the rather extensive postscript I wrote to my translation of WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, it is rather more than the usual one two page note to lend these editions scholarly credibility. Particularly what it means to translate such a piece in the psychoanalytic situation.
"Psychoanalytic Resources On-line will get you to just about any, including journals, institutes, historical aspects.
http://soldzresearch.com/PsychoanalyticResourcesOnline.htm
Because they would have a drift on how perceptions are processed in the brain, how something like the pure phenomenology as expressed in words in Handke's early work came about...
Ms. Weller's discussion of these poems and the found poems in Deutsche Gedichte and Nonsense & Happiness is absolutely worth reading; she and I might quibble, I am being kind, but then which two people reading the same text don't quibble even if in emphatic agreement in what is basically your better college bullshit session such as her piece?
Professor Weller describes three collections of Handke's poetry but does not address more demanding works such as the Dramatic Poem, Walk About the Villages [W.A.T.V.] the richest manifestation of Handke's poetic capacities; she barely touches, that's all, on Handke's changing poetics. Handke has gone through something like six phases, last time I counted, and the transitions are sometimes the most interesting; and I think he is in one of those transitions presently... treading water a bit...
Professor Weller fails to address entirely Handke's prosody and rhetoric as it changes into the frequent simple declarative line by line that we have left over from the earlier serial procedures of Innerworld and the plays of that first period. He will take recourse to these linear procedures over and over, even in the novels, also at the end of his latest play, Spuren der Verirrten. They made their first appearance in W.A.T.V.
Her essay is no reason not to acquire the book, as Wefelmeyer's deficient discussion of Handke's drama is. Scott Abbott is always worth reading, though, as indicated, there's far more to Handke and Yugoslavia than he addresses. More on that, a summary position of mine, in a later sending.
Having taken a peak ahead at essays I still may comment on, there is a sufficiency of them, I know already, to make The Works of Peter Handke a useful addition to the mounting Handke literature. For example, I find myself in near total agreements with Mirielle Tabah's piece "Land and Landscape in Handke's Texts" and so will probably only add a few comments from my perspective and particular interests and how these texts she discusses affected me.
But let me note: Weller, like Wefelmeyer, and some of the other scholars, seem not to understand:
[1] Handke's playfulness, however more serious and melancholy it becomes as he proceeds; and
[2] that when he formalizes he creates [knowingly] projection screens: e.g. Professor Pillip's reading of GOALIE only tells me something about how Professor Pillip reads [or doesn't], as it might him.
[3] that just about any of Handke's projections are meant to affect, involve the reader in his [huge] self; and thus attention needs to be paid to the numerous techniques he employs to that purpose;
[4] Also, Handke's once saying that of course he has to dole himself out in bits in pieces, he's got to make a living from his symptom of being condemned to write, since he decided not to become, or good early fortune allowed him the foresightful law student, to forgo service in the corps of those wonderful Austrian Cultural Attaches!
I want to comment, specifically, on just two pages in Weller's piece and the poems she discusses there in the hope that it will be an all around eye opener: [p. 246/247 ]
"someone in despair takes his own life
after hearing the word
GOLDEN HAMSTER
And someone
who frequently longs to creep away
gives a guilty start
when he hears
the word
VIP AIRPORT
the word
APPLAUD MID-SCENE
the word HUNTING ROOM..."
[I don't even recall coming up with that dreadful line 'who frequently longs to creep away'!!! perhaps this is one of those texts I didn't translate? I'd have to check the book. I did find a way of translating about half a dozen further poems from the book but they then only appeared in magazines.]

Ms. Weller mentions "arbitrariness" as triggering the reactions ... "memories of associations being hidden from view..." "Removed from its functional context, the word signal determines at the same time the limits of this context [??? m.r.] namely that which is charged with anxiety and aversion. Remaining unconstrained by any network of functionality, the first person of the poem comes to experience every verbal utterance as provocation...This is tantamount to saying that every word demands [my emphasis] to be powerfully reacted to, as it assaults, demarcates and forces the subject towards what looked to have been successfully negotiated and hence forgotten.[????] Language in the pathological world of Handke's poem tends to lose its function as mediator between subject and object or subject and situation, collapsing it as it were into an endless succession of empty metaphorical associations."
You notice the word "pathological". Nonsense. Nor are there demands of any kind. The entire paragraph is riddled in nonsense. And couched in hideous unpoetic language and formulations. The subject would seem to be a human being, a fruit fly in a lab is accorded more deference than this standard usage from German philosophy!
First of all, let us recall the intentionality of the title of the book of poems: "The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld:" the attempt to communicate states of mind. This particular Handke poem, like certain sections of Kaspar, puts us [back] into the world of language as pure materiality. It has no associations yet. However, and there Ms. Weller is right on, these words fall into, evoke states of fear and nausea-filled states of mind. The words are not metaphors. They have no images in back of them. Or associations... associations always lead somewhere, that is their nature. The words are circumscribed if at all solely by considerations of absurdity and whether or not they pass the beauty threshold. If they did they would not elicit nausea. I witnessed Handke nearly throw up, thrice, at the sight/ company of three different physically exceedingly unattractive human beings, each of whom also happened to be also morally gruesome in different ways and degrees... Handke's special hyper-sensitivity is a defense... as are all nauseas....
And "initially" [at least for the autistic] indeed "every word" is just like that...Think about that, and how Handke has developed into someone with as deep a sense of the logos as anyone around...
Words in this poem are not yet [integrated] in a syntactic order, Chomsky's generative grammar sequencing has not yet started to put them into meaningful connection with each other.
Handke's once nausea, also at language, at the very materiality of it, on the part of a materialist like Handke with his challenged nervous system, points us in the right direction; and that is not at more language, or set of abstractions. A poem such as the one quoted puts us back into the state of the autistic child who becomes doubly terrified at the inception of the violent primal scenes and the bombing at age 2 in Berlin. Modulations are lacking in every respect except that of masturbating.
It was the oddest thing to hear Handke announce in 1966 that he was the new Kafka, a cheerful Beatle full of effrontery all around... and then you read the texts which demonstrate over and over again the conquest, the victory over fear and terror. Kafka I expect was the best and is the best metaphor for being in a state of continuous, libidinously fueled fright. But no one ever saw Kafka announce himself, proudly, as the first Kafka. Handke suffered as it were from a near perfect form of conversion hysteria in reverse, which is one chief reason why he has remained so productive all these years: you are in state of libidinously generated anxiety, reach for a pen, and everything is so calm, and you long for calmness all around! That will make him a rock of a reactionary by the time he is 89 years old!
Meanwhile, Handke has become, as he puts it so nicely, a "Wortklauber." Cherishing the lovely little words as he does his sparrows. I am glad that he can work himself up into feeling as one with a tree. Certain African and South American and New Guinea natives still do so as a matter of course. From their perspective there is nothing particularly mystical about such a union, only within the split mind of rationalism is there, where the so-called "savage" has been split off.
Of course in Handke's case the matter is more complicated since he wants word and the syntax to match his experience of a world that is also a world of words [as in the SINGULAR AND PLURAL POEM], to be synchronous with his perceptions, and when they are not gets angry, psychotically so, as in the SINGULAR PLURAL poem, where he sees black, or sees some ants on a hot plate and then throttles as Bloch does the the Prater prostitute in Goalie and on and on and on these forever surges from Handke's psychotic core [formed subsequent to his first two years], that nearly killed his daughter in a fit of irritation, or his Salzburg girlfriend... no wonder that he so longs for peace giving forms!
My clues came when I followed up Handke's confession to Gamper about his still occurring bouts of autism. I witnessed them, mystified at the time. At this point we enter the world of genetics and neurology but not yet the philosophy of language though that philosophy would be enriched if you took that tack, it presents a way out from the prison house of language, or from Chomsky's programable generative syntax box, which I think Mr. Handke visited, too, in the 60s. Kaspar, among all the other things that play is, can be regarded as its illustration.
1] Autism in Handke's instance might be regarded as the too intense, quantitative and also qualitative input from the various senses to a modulating system that lacks the resources to process the input. So when Ms. Weller objects to Handke's object world being too large she is being judgmental, is using her perspective of what is "normal." I do not doubt her perspective, but it is a perspective that will not lead to understanding. The aspect of autism that is so pronounced in Handke makes me think of him as possessing the nose of your best hound dog, the sonar of a bat, eyes with double the mega-pixels of any camera around, taste buds of the best taster in Stalin's court [does anyone recall that restaurateur in NO-MAN'S-BAY, that split off part of Handke that a Musil would have loved too, who keeps going bankrupt as he cooks up the world's most delicious food but prohibits all these distasteful guests from entering his restaurant? How fussy autists can be with their food, what great cooks some of them become, like Handke who sings the praises of Serbian ham in his delightful play La Cuisine], and skin - no, not of a newborn, a newborn's skin is quite insensitive it turns out, otherwise it could not endure the excruciations of the birth canal massage as it is born... unless Handke's skin lacked that protection upon birth, which we do not know: the midwife signed the certificate that his birth was normal. Thus Handke's "born to terror" must be taken somewhat metaphorically: however, I think we can date it to 1944 when he, until then his mother's love child [take a look at photos of the two of them together, what a mutual admiration dyad we have here! Beautiful smiling baby, delighted beautiful admiring Mom] started to be exposed to violent primal scenes in the then bomber raid ridden Berlin. And you might even come on the very considerable literature on that subject describing the effects of it, in as much as Handke himself,one of the best tuned phenomenologists, has not described its plethora of sequelae in "The Essay on Tiredness"; you would spend a few days or so looking at what might be the physiological cause of all his nauseas - "nausea of the eyeballs" !! for God's sake, who has given this matter thought? [and make interesting acquaintance with the vagic nerve but not necessarily construct a philosophy of any kind from such knowledge as Sartre did], why he suffers from occasional color blindness, you would take a look at the sources of Handke's irritability, his remarkable hyper-sensitivity, and discover that his autism must have something to do with this... you would look at the functioning of the perceptual system, how percepts are processed by various functions of the brain, ask whether possibly certain modulating functions are absent... the Handke who has a nose of your best pointer, the eyes of a bat, twice as many megapixels the hearing of ... with so much information coming in that his greatest longing might be for no information at all... and with the only relief afforded by reading and writing... and who casts his eyes down or squints to the side not because he is unassertive or squashed but for the same reason that he always is wearing dark glasses during those days: the sheer physicality of what he sees looking straight ahead is too intense!
... I would, I did, and though a lot of psychoanalytic concept have come in very useful, I would not turn to Lacanian concepts or any philosophical concept that Handke himself, bereft of explanations he does not seek, consults. Handke's saying that he first experienced nausea at other bodies in boarding school... give me a break... at any event, one explanation why even the oldest friends and collaborators are immediately taken out of house and into the Chaville forest to look for mushrooms... Possibly claustrophobia, too; or any person, aside a woman or child, will be experienced as foreign, and even a lover for not very long before Handke goes into emotional withdrawal.
It is the persistence of this traumatic event for a decade that really counts, how it was dealt and not dealt with as it became embedded in Handke's psyche; this is not a one time railway accident, from which you might recover in time. So skin sensitive as??? the most thin skinned? As someone who had his skin torn off? Calloused as a consequence in some respects? The words in that poem are "eye sores", "ear sores", initially every word was a wounding... That is what is so unusual and needs to be grasped as we follow his career from a withdrawal in the Handke [Keusche/ hovel] household into reading to becoming a radically important writer... the need to master fright, the ability, the marshaling of literature to do it, and the eventual resurgence of the love he had absorbed during his first two years plus 9 months somewhat troubled inter-uterine existence upon conception in the spring of 1942. Handke's relationship to language as physical objects is sui generis.
l
The first sense to develop, inter-uterine, is that of hearing...[Handke mentions an infant inter-uterine hearing its mother heart in W.A.T.V.] at around four months... skin sensitivity develops only once you have been born... you do not need your taste buds then, nor your sense of smell... the sense of sight is developed for extra-uterine existence. Brain quadruples in size extra-uterine, no matter that inter-uterine it is exposed to the mother's states of mind.
Handke suffers from what is called anaclitic depression, one of the most profound, lasting features of his writing that communicates itself to his readers, on the part of someone who calls himself [thus for good reason] "a melancholy player" [whereas with all that fright early on he was really a pretty cheerful fellow who couldn't wait to see whether his face might not be on the cover of Der Spiegel!]...because Ms. Sivec-Handke's love of her life, Herr Schönherr, father of her child, would not marry her. We do not cannot tell what other untoward experiences or states of mind were projected into bebe Peter, which he had to hold, in safe surrogate keeping as it were, to make sure that his mother staid alive long enough to give birth to him. See the most conscientuous Dr. Bernard Bail's elaboration of this approach in his holistic psychoanalysis site.
We have few leads as to what precipitated Handke's autism unless it is purely genetically determined. If the latter, judging by what Handke reports about his mother's condition prior to her suicide and about his grandfather, the Slovenian Sivic, it is in that direction one would look. Her existential conditions had much improved at that point in her life, the beating husband was off to a T.B. clinic, her NBA star first born was showering her with gifts! Nonetheless excruciating pains set in, she couldn't sleep; there was no convincing diagnosis. She took an overdose of sleeping pills, and prepared herself so as not to leave a mess. I never liked the pathos of "Wunschloses Unglueck" as a title for a book I read and reread many times: she had her wishes, her streaks of independence, her greatest wish for her son, with whom she seems to have been in nice mother son cahoots, was fulfilled beyond anyone's wildest dreams. So the re-writing of Sorrow Beyond Dreams in The Repetition is more accurate in describing the fates of the women of the region in having many of them die of cervical cancer.
Grandfather Sivec is described as irascible and as indulging in the same kind of verbal Zeus-like fits as can come upon Handke, who, ingeniously, permits himself their explosion by calling them "sacred." Since Handke installed the grandfather as his father figure in The Repetition we may assume that sheer mimicry of the behavior of his grandfather may have sufficed, and acted as a permit to throw fits.
Maria's two other children, Herr Handke's actual children, the boy became a petty criminal, and I believe died of cancer, the daughter died young, on an island in the Indian ocean, the Maldives I believe. Handke makes an attempt, it is a story line that is abandoned half way through, in his Del Gredos novel to transfigure the half-brother's criminality into something grand... the kind of grand criminal he might have become had he not had the luck to get out to the seminary..
But take a look sometime at the photo of Maria's three children at:
http://begleitschreiben.twoday.net/stories/2504464/

How young Peter is already throwing out his chest, and how German he looks as a six, and how protective of his siblings!
I simply provide the link above to the pertinent analytic material, in all the matters I bring up: to Narcissism,to Fugueing, etc. So if the scholars really want to get up to snuff, here's your chance. A summary of my analytic monograph, not as scattershot what I noted here, can be found at:
http://www.handkepsycho.scriptmania.com [I don't feel at all that I am done with thinking about language and autism.]

One consequence of too much input is a wrenching... as we see it in autists all around us. It leads to irritability as we find it in Handke in no end of matters... irritability is irritability, it is quite democratic in that respect, yet there is a quantitative increase which can break through a threshold... at which point we might withdraw from the proceedings and sit down by the record player and put on a Beatles record. However, Handke has the capacity for a salvaging constraint, a parameter: I would posit that his exposure during the first two years extra-uterine to the beautiful face of his mother is what augmented that innate capacity, that is the measure... lacking that measure? So it is the ugly that upsets Handke's nervous system, one cause for dis-syncronicity. Since there is so much ugliness around... no wonder that Handke tries to do nothing but write, that is to formalize: that is why the non-formalized involuntary naked ego jottings of WEIGHT OF THE WORLD constitute such an important materialistic trove and comparison, contrast.
In connection with Handke's poetry and work Ms. Weller cites Handke's famous "I was born into terror" and like the various hopeless commentators fails to heed what it might mean to write "I am so anxious when I start to write but what I write then is so calm."
Durzak, who hates all of Handke, or the obtuse esthete Bohrer [Handke may be exquisitely and strongly sensitive esthetically, but he is no esthete like Bohrer, or Botho Straus, esthetes are bound by reaction formation to their once love of the anal sphere as was observed some centuries ago by Freud and his early crew] are not worth bringing up.
Least of all, nearly half a century after the unraveling of most of the say half dozen strings [dimensions] that constitute narcissism would you continue to use the concept moralistically as Durzak and Bohrer and Ms. Weller do. It serves no understanding purpose to go about it that way. Handke himself in the sentence that Weller quotes shows how he has dealt with the narcissistic shield that stands between him and the world, he takes in the world and makes it part of his huge self!, where you can at least, maybe, turn toward yourself. However, he seems to have forgotten this at the short recit on narcissism that is shoe-horned in to One Dark Night [which contains at least two other recits: Handke, most tiresomely, on "the modern woman"; and a cute wish fulfillment as to what ought to have happened to some hated blue UN trucks being dragged back from the South East on the Autobahn neat Taxham/ Salzburg .. this is dream book which syntactically takes you into a dream state, and why not have some recits in it; all kinds of voices can speak up in dreams]. Narcissism as a turning of love toward yourself when there are no respondents. Not one bit better than Freud, who however pointed in the direction that Kohut could follow, in saying that "the ego is first of all a body ego." Jung was far ahead of Freud, too, in that respect. What is surprising in Handke's case is not his sensitivity to criticism [his violent portrayal pay back for Reich-Ranicki's frequently stupid critiques of his work, portraying him as that forever shitting bulldog behind that fence at the air strip in St. Victoire] but the endless need to be seen in public, to display himself on the part of someone who already as a youngster dreamt of being on the cover of Der Spiegel, why the need for endless mirroring? That compulsion, need, continues to puzzle me, though it fits in with his autism and his need to assert himself over all others. But it does appear to be insatiable. Occasionally he makes an attempt to forego the limelight, as he did when he received his honorary doctorate at age 60 and promised never to show "his idiocy" [his words] in public again. Well, I think that monkish phase lasted about two years, by the time of the Milosevic funeral he was already back in full public display, and what an orgy of display and interviews that funeral appearance generated!
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com/ [the handke/ milosevic controversy an American exposition.an exposition]
Indeed, it would be hard to explain the plenitude, the riches of W.A.T.V. without Handke's kind of intaking, or the extraordinary response to the natural worlds that the geologist Sorger transmits to us from his few weeks in Alaska.
So let us abandon the judgmental use of the word "Narcissism." Those who use it usually only manifest their envy.

However, to read the three long and one shorter poem sequence contained in the English Nonsense and Happiness, at this late date without reading the parallel works - A Moment of True Feeling and the diary novel naked ego exhibition , it has always struck me Weight of the World, and make connections between the three strikes me as a deficient way of approaching these texts.
This was a highly critical period in Handke's life. We can specify what brought on the crisis and how it affected this particular person at that time. Handke the great exhibitionist, who withholds so little about himself, especially during that period, supplies no end of material. The factors, in sequence [aside the previously sketched predispositions] are: the suicide of the mother, incompletely mourned until the writing of The Repetition ["I will get back to all that later" [appr. is the last sentence of Sorrow Beyond Dreams]; the being abandoned by a neglected wife "The worst thing that ever happened to me." [Reading biographically, you can see this coming, the wife's emotional longing is translated into a physical pursuit in Short Letter Long Farewell]; the being left as house husband for a very young daughter; feeling trapped, as Handke does so easily, constrained, the injured pride, and fugueing in and out of states of feeling alternately connected and disconnected... that is what these three long poems do...state of mind poems but of a far more intimate and dramatic nature than the Innerworld texts. Those are three "fugue states" that are resolved musically in those poems... which is why he survived them at all even though he ended up in a Paris Hospital [see W.O.W.] with a tachychardia attack. He was so delighted at my use of the word "humbug" [bah humbug indeed!] for nonsense! Fuguening in and out of meaninglessness and pure materiality... a kind of discontuous but persisting deja vue state is what fugue states can be thought of: the most important feature of deja vue being that they connect with the experience of having survived trauma. So not to be too worried during those roller coaster rides.
About two of these matters, which appear too embarrassing to mention, Handke lies: "Libgart Schwartz decided to resume acting career" is wrong since she never left it, the only thing she left was an insulting lay-a-broad of a husband! Handke has no heart valve problems since he was regarded as fit for Austrian military service but, indeed, he has a delicate nervous system, and aside the "moment of true feeling" when love set in, we can be grateful to Valium for lessening our man's anxieties, so that eventually he can become the "anti-Kafka"! that also always resided in him. His heart can widen into mythic openness as we can note in Left Handed Woman, the last of the Paris books. It is a widening of the heart born of psychosomatic necessity. And of course we became a great walker...
My problem with the "Gedicht an die Dauer" is that it is chiefly assertion, it does not involve me in Handke's states as the Innerworld and Nonsense do. I quite believe that he is ecstatic at these large variety of natural phenomena, so was I when I lived in the St. Monica Mt. Preserve with a Juniper tree dripping its sap onto the roof of my mountain loft, and the pepper tree and the humming birds all around, etc. and reading The Repetition which made me too a king of slowness for a while. Even more so in a quit rural village/ pueblo in Mexico. Also to be noted is, with all those wonderful natural phenomena, how unpeopled the scenes are. The occasional beautiful woman to whom H. can relate. Handke may have become the blessing high priest at the end of the prose text A Slow Homecoming, but a high priest who takes even the oldest friends at once out of house to pick mushrooms.
As far as I could see, the writing did not manifested signs of the old nausea - that ceased with the flowering of love and the inception of valerian compound - until the 2005 play Untertagblues. It's "wild man's" extreme irritability in the overnight neon of the subway made me think that maybe our man was off his meds, or that the piece had been pulled out of a 60s drawer just to stay "in the picture", since there had not been a play since the stupid reception of "Canoe" in 1999. The newest play "Spuren der Verirrten" derives from "Hour" and is entirely within its linguistic mode. Dis-chronologous! "Subdayblues" ends with the "turning against the self" that Handke proudly indicates as being the preferred object of his aggressive depression.
Handke himself, in W.A.T.V. has written for more clearly about what "the thing in itself" is than Ms. Weller does resorting to Lacan etc. Yes, the prison house of language but then we keep mucking around in it anyhow... Handke actually knows how to step outside, at times. And knows that the only just way to respond to a good poem... is with another poem.
Oh how many scholarly mice the collection of Handke notebooks will feed once he has become an Austrian postage stamp!
Weller mentions Handke's "wound", he has a character in "The Art of Asking" saying "I write out of my wound." I would rather say: no, he writes out of his healthiest polymorphous bi-sexual state while in his cradle in a hollowed out tree in the Chaville forest!