MORAVIAN NIGHTS: A DISCUSSION OF PETER HANDKE'S "THE MORAVIAN NIGHT," TRANSLATED BY KRISHNA WINSTON, PUBLISHED BY FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX (photo by T. Deichmann)
Sunday, October 23, 2016
ENGLISH LANGUAGE REVIEWS
ENGLISH LANGUAGE REVIEWS OF MORAWIAN RE: J. Cohen’s review of Peter Handke’s Moravian Night. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/books/review/peter-handke-moravian-night.html?_r=0 How is it possible for J. Cohen to write - is he a clairvoyant into the past? - about Handke‘s relation to his mother Maria Sivic and Yugoslava “After her suicide in 1971, Yugoslavia — historic homeland of the South Slavs — became a maternal surrogate. But despite Handke’s peripatetic visits, he never seemed to know it, or never seemed to know it as anything other than a figment or delusion, “ when it is quite clear, both from Sorrow Beyond Dreams & The Repetition ,that young Handke’s interest in Slovenia was elicited by the journal of his dead uncle, his mother’s brother [who was the one who died uring WW II, both Hankdke’s father and stepfather survived as is also quite clear from Sorrow Beyond Dreams] and Handke went on a graduation wandering trip to seek out the uncle’s origins as a horticulturalist in Llublianka. The apparent Yugoslav expert reviewer might of course learn to read which might have spared him his prolix stuff about the Balkans and allowed more focus on the book where, toward its end, Handke has a writer much like himself and Ramsey Clark [!], whom Handke met while covering the Milosevic trial in Scheveniningen, and a Japanese girl, sit in a doline in the Carso in Slovenia as the last three holdouts for justice for Serbia! If Mr. Cohen had antenae for Handke’s sense of humor about himself he might also get off his high horse & perhaps criticise some of the aesthetics . If your readers are interested, this Handke translator & fellow Handke translator Scott Abbott are conducting an even-handed discussion on Moravian Night http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/08/main-moravian-night-discussion-page.html
Sincerely, Michael Roloff ============= FIRST OF ALL: NOTE THE LINK TO SCOTT ABBOTT;S LONG REVIEW http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/a-slow-inquiring-narration/ ====================== The Moravian Night is the name of a boat moored on the Morava River, where a gathering takes place in which a writer tells friends the story of a journey he once took through Europe. The book’s journey appears to begin in Kosovo. The somewhat unreliable narrator tells his friends of “following the example of the rivers,” meandering through Spain, Portugal, and Handke’s native Austria, before circling back to the Balkans, which no longer exist the way the storyteller once knew them. He encounters a varied cast of characters. Few places are named, nor does the reader ever know precisely where the narrator is, on land or in the mind, recollecting, philosophizing, dreaming. Further muddling the narrative are the friends the narrator has gathered, who sometimes take up or interrupt the story with their own version of things during the long dark night. At the center is a woman, on the boat and in the story, a mysterious figure lurking, serving, talking, perhaps even orchestrating. In this story where memory and reality battle, Handke (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) once again showcases his valuable insight and imagination. (Dec.)
Reviewed on: 10/10/2016
Release date: 12/06/2016
Ebook - 978-0-374-71561-8
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-374-21255-1 TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT Then and Now The Other Mariners Fiction MAY 22 2009
German Fiction
HANS KUNDNANI
Peter Handke
DIE MORAWISCHE NACHT Erzählung
At the height of the Bosnian war in 1996, the Austrian writer Peter Handke caused a huge controversy when he published a polemical travelogue based on a trip around four rivers in south-eastern Europe (the Danube, the Sava, the Velika Morava and the Drina), in which he identified with Serb nationalism, glossed over Serb atrocities such as the Srebrenica massacre and criticized the Western media for distorting the conflict in the Balkans. Handke continued to defend the Serbs throughout the Kosovo war in 1999, and even spoke at the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade in 2006.
Handke’s 560-page “story”, Die morawische Nacht, returns to the same topos and in particular the Velika Morava, the tributary of the Danube that runs through Serbia. In it, an unnamed “former author” summons seven friends to the eponymous “Morawische Nacht”, a floating hotel moored on the banks of the river in what appears to be a Serbian enclave but is also apparently a refuge from noise, modernity, globalization and the European Union – present-day Europe’s equivalent of Numancia, the ultimately doomed last redoubt of Spanish Celts against the Roman Empire. This romantic critique of modernity is familiar from Handke’s earlier work and centres on the idea that in an increasingly mediated world we have lost the ability to see truly what is around us.
In one single, long night on the boat, the “ex-author”, who the outside world thinks has gone mad, tells his guests the story of the dreamlike odyssey through Europe he has just completed. Beginning with a bus ride through a hostile neighbouring area (Kosovo, perhaps), he retraces the steps of his (and Handke’s) life, visiting the Adriatic island where he (and Handke) wrote his first book, and Carinthia, where he (and Handke) grew up, encountering characters from Handke’s previous novels along the way. It is a fairy tale, told in long, drawn-out sentences that meander like the Velika Morava itself. But as the ex-author’s voice merges with that of the narrator, it also becomes a story about storytelling – which, Handke seems ultimately to suggest, is the only real refuge from the disenchanted modern world.
Hans Kundnani ===================== KIRKUS REVIEW https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/peter-handke/the-moravian-night/ The renowned Austrian novelist looks back on a body of work and a terrible century in this elegiac tale, first published in German in 2008. “Every country has its Samarkand and its Numancia.” So opens Handke’s (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, 2007, etc.) novel, evoking the Thousand and One Nights, Cervantes, Machado, Borges. These fabled places of refuge on the far ends of the world are joined by a houseboat on the Morava River, a tributary of the Danube where the Slavic and German worlds meet and armies have long clashed. There, a storyteller gathers a group of “friends, associates, distant neighbors, collaborators of the former writer,” for whom, in the face of deep danger, he offers a multitiered, time-shifting tale that crosses borders and decades, one in which figures from other Handke novels make appearances, to say nothing of angels and demons. Some of Handke’s text is a kind of meditation on history; having come under much criticism a quarter-century ago for his defense of Serbia during the most recent round of Balkans wars, he places that region on the edges of Numantia and Samarkand, joining it to the fabulous: “Where had they begun, his and our Balkans? Long before the geographic and morphological border.” Some of it is a subtly defiant self-defense, begging the question of who turned out to be right: “A sad story?” the tale closes. “That remained to be seen.” And some is simply lovely, as when, in one of his guises, the narrator, passing across La Mancha—shades of Cervantes again—suddenly confronts his literary and actual past: “One after the other, his forebears came toward him in the early light, reached him, went by him.” All play a role in his life and story, he adds, one whose threads are still playing out even as Handke’s modern epic ends. ===================== Review by Booklist Review The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. This gem from Marcel Proust could not be more relevant to acclaimed Austrian writer Handke's meandering, semiautobiographical, fictional travelogue, which is more an account of self-discovery and a continent's gradual evolution than a strict accounting of sights seen. Sure, the writer-narrator describes tables groaning with food and plenty of quaint villages studding the landscape, but the shell of the story consists of recounting his travels across Europe, noticing the tiniest of fissures in the notion of a united Europe. As his protagonist travels from the gloomy Balkans to Spain and beyond, Handke (Don Juan: His Own Version, 2010) describes not just a continent in flux, where once rancid-tasting Montenegrin olive oil is now good enough to compete with the best that Tuscany pours, but also crafts a journey of growth, in which the narrator must make peace with the ghosts of his own past. A searching exploration of how travel and storytelling can help us find our truest selves.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2016 Booklist ================== http://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/austria/handke/nacht/
Peter Handke: Die morawische Nacht (The Moravian Night)
Note that the title refers to the river Morava and not to Moravia in the Czech Republic. Handke uses a Germanised form of the Czech word, rather than the usual German word, March. The Moravan Night is a houseboat. It used to be a floating hotel but has been converted for use as a personal houseboat of the author or, rather, as the narrator quickly points out, the ex-author (he has not written for ten years) who is the focus of this novel and who may or may not be, at least in part, based on Handke himself. At the beginning of the book, a group of people – friends, associates, like much in this book it is not entirely clear – come to the boat, which is moored on the Morava river (though we do not know exactly where or, indeed, in what country). They are sat at individual tables. As well as the ex-author, there is a woman there. Who is she? We do not know. We learn from him some of his life, in particular how he had to flee from a woman who was out to kill him (we will learn about her later) But we also learn of strange journeys he made.
The first journey is a strange one through an enclave (he uses the term in German) which may or may not be Kosovo. All we know is that they goes through Porodin. They are a group of a people on a bus (an old bus, with Cyrillic writing on the side). The ex-author (we never learn his name, he is known only as the ex-author) generally keeps himself to himself and so do the others but there are occasional interactions, such as we when they all start asking him awkward questions or when the driver criticises the people of small ethnic groups struggling for their independence, and not just the ones in former Yugoslavia. The road takes them through ruined towns though some are still inhabited and occasionally they are greeted by the inhabitants or followed by the police. They even see tanks. But they also see buildings destroyed, waste all over the place and dead animals. Some villages are completely uninhabited. Both the descriptions of the landscape and the reactions and thoughts of the ex-author and some of the passengers are haunting and masterly told, as only Handke can.
But we also follow his other, earlier travels. He spends time on an island in the Adriatic, which he calls Cordura (named after the film They Came to Cordura), though that is not its real name. Here he lives a life of isolation, mixing only with the fishermen. He goes to Spain, starting with Numancia, where he attends a conference on noise and meets the poet Juan Lagunas, who tells him that we no longer have an association with a place any more and that this is something irretrievably lost. He travels around, particularly in Galicia, seeing places, meeting people and going to football matches. It could be boring with a lesser writer but Handke keeps our interest going at all times. He then goes to Germany, specifically to a small town in the Harz mountains where his father had lived. He had barely known his father and wanted to discover his roots but his visit did not help. The (naturally unnamed) town did not seem German to him but could have been any where. This may partially have been because it was near the East German border but also because he felt more Balkan than German. He looks for his father’s grave in the cemetery but it is not there. When he inquires at a nearby flower shop he learns that graves for which the upkeep had not been paid were dug up, to allow space for the recently died. He remembers only his father’s death, suddenly keeling over and telling his wife, Lina, that he was dying. The narrator points out that this is the only German name he mentions during his story.
This points to one of the key themes of this work. Later in the novel, the ex-author narrator will comment on this issue of belonging, of place as well as talking about the land and languages and cultures. This is now all confused, citing the example of an Asian and Turkish immigrant talking to one another in a strong Austrian dialect. We are part of this whole – our language, our land, our culture – but we are individuals as well and this has also taken a terrible blow in the post-Yugoslavia conflict. There is a telling image of the narrator ex-author going to a conference and visiting a cemetery called the Cemetery of the Nameless, a cemetery where unknown corpses and the corpses of suicides were buried. There is even a gravestone which reads simply Nameless. Never to be Forgotten. (It reminds us, of course, of the father’s grave which has now gone.) It is ironic, of course, but also, for Handke, deeply sad that these people have been forgotten. But, in the end the Porodin Enclave is no longer an enclave and Porodin is now Porodin and no longer Породин.
This book, unfortunately, is not available in English (nor, as far as I can see, in any other language). Handke is one of the most important authors writing tody, even if you find his views on Serbia somewhat disturbing. Yet, of the eighteen books published by him since 2000, only two are available in English. Yes, some of his works are long (this one is 560 pages but still much shorter than Der Bildverlust (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos) and yes, he is very prolific but more, much more of his work should be available in English, including this one.
Publishing history
First published in German 2008 by Suhrkamp First English translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016
Last updated 7th July, 2016
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THE MORAVIAN NIGHT A Story By Peter Handke Translated by Krishna Winston 312 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
Peter Handke commands one of the great German-language prose styles of the postwar period, a riverine rhetoric deep and swift and contrary of current. Since the first of his 100 or so books of fiction, poetry, essays and plays appeared in 1966, his talent has been inarguable, and yet it’s almost exclusively been a talent for the aesthetic. No one has ever read Handke for his ideas, but for his hostility to ideas; his ambiguous pronouns (have “we” become “they” again?), ambivalent punctuation (his infamous “(?).”) and that petulant, didactic way he has with provocation. Previous generations of the Germanosphere had sought a Nationaldichter — a Goethean laureate of nation-state vindication — but the war generation had inverted that yearning into a call for writers of chastisement, of self- and governmental punishment. It’s not a shock that the best of this cohort would hail from Catholic Austria: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek and Handke, who was born in 1942 in Carinthia, a heavily Slavic province of Austria, in a town just over the Drava River from Slovenia.
The Drava, Sava, Drina and especially the Morava — all Danubian tributaries — define the banks and the binds of “The Moravian Night,” which was published in German in 2008 and might be the most important novel of Handke’s career. Its title is also its setting. The Moravian Night is a houseboat — a Haus-und-Fluchtboot, “a house- and escape boat” — belonging to a “former writer” who’s familiar, or familiarly inscrutable, from Handke’s previous work: He’s the Handke-who-isn’t, the author’s epithetical double. Also known as “the abdicated writer,” “the boatmaster,” “the host” — he lives on the run, or on the rudder, in perpetual flight from reporters, women and “Pan-European” tax assessors. Just before Eastertide, under a full moon, he drops anchor outside the village of Porodin, “the last enclave in the Balkans, and in Europe as a whole,” and welcomes onboard a gaggle of locals to serve as both audience for, and auxiliary narrators of, a Last Supper dedicated to recounting his life: “There were not more than six or seven of us, corresponding, so to speak, to the hours stretching ahead, the episodes, the chapters of the night, until morning.”
Note the distancing technique, which is also a disclaimer: Handke’s writing about a “former writer” giving an account of “himself,” and becoming drowned out by the voices of apostolic friends who, because they weren’t around to witness the original scenes, or sins, can only repeat, and contradict, with rumor and gossip. The “former writer” reminisces about revisiting the island in the Adriatic where he wrote his first book, and about encounters with his brother, and with a writer colleague who’s become a hack journalist; he recalls a journey to the Harz, the erstwhile border between East and West Germany, and to an academic congress on noise pollution. Interleaved with these scenes are long stretches regarding the long treks taken by the “former writer” through the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia, in which the novel’s submerged plot comes up for air; namely, the ways in which the contemporary world, or the contemporary Balkans, have betrayed Handke, or just failed to live up to his imagination:
“Ah, you and your damned neo-Balkan inadequacy, obtuseness, mediocrity. Things had not always been this way, had they? At one time no voices more animated, no eyes more wide open, no gestures more inclusive than could be found among you. What had happened to your eloquent gaze, your eloquent shaking and rocking of heads, your eloquent sighs?”
Handke’s father died as a soldier in the Wehrmacht; his mother was a Slovene, a wary foreigner in Austria. After her suicide in 1971, Yugoslavia — historic homeland of the South Slavs — became a maternal surrogate. But despite Handke’s peripatetic visits, he never seemed to know it, or never seemed to know it as anything other than a figment or delusion. Coming from Austria, or Berlin, or from his regular residence in a suburb of Paris, Handke would apostrophize the Socialist Federal Republic as “the Balkans” — a multiethnic paradise of farmers whose hearts were filled with wine and song; untainted by the trappings of capitalism. Handke took this false consciousness public just as reality collapsed; in 1991, publishing a screed against Slovenian independence, and over the next decade of constant war, churning out a spate of ostensibly nonfiction texts that veered from pedantic critiques of the media coverage (which, he claimed, refused to hold Croats accountable for the persecution of Serbs during World War II) to raising doubts that read like denials (of the then-unfolding Serbian massacres of Bosnian Muslims). Indeed, Serbia — whose Belgrade had been the cultural capital of Yugoslavia — became Handke’s cathexis. He accepted accolades from President Slobodan Milosevic, attended the mad butcher’s trial for war crimes at The Hague and, in 2006, delivered a eulogy at his funeral.
The more the European press assailed and censured Handke, the more defiant he became, as if in a perverse attempt to remind Austria and a reunified Germany of the type of radical, independent, infuriating writer they had once relied upon to de-Nazify their culture and re-establish civic life. In “The Moravian Night,” Handke simultaneously escalates and surrenders that campaign. He still refuses to apologize, but now on strictly artistic grounds: To admit error or express regret would be too bourgeois. Handke’s “former writer” didn’t abandon his profession to pursue a political truth, but a political emotion; an entire odyssey of enchantment and disabuse. His Yugoslavia was never so much a country as it was a symbol of himself, which is to say a symbol of literature, or of the European Novel — the last proud polyglot redoubt of a noble dream, which reacted so volatilely to the threats of technology and Islamization that the pious gods of NATO intervened, divided it parochially and bombed it into rubble.
The “former writer” finds the Balkans that emerges from the fogs, toward the conclusion of “The Moravian Night,” unrecognizable: a fractious patchwork of new alphabets and towers, repopulated by strangers equipped with smartphones, whose “comportment clashed with his conception, or his will? his ideal? his idea? — his sense of a narrative based on all he had just witnessed.”
Handke has written a poignant book almost despite himself, or to spite the day, out of the grim confusion of his ruins.
by Peter Handke, translated from the German by Krishna Winston
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 312 pp., $27.00
Isolde Ohlbaum/laif/Redux
Peter Handke in the garden of Bartenstein Castle, Schrozberg, Germany, 1999
The Moravian Night might seem like the inevitable English title for Peter Handke’s 2008 novel Die morawische Nacht, but it is actually rather misleading. Moravia is the eastern region of the Czech Republic, whose largest city is Brno; Mähren in German, it is called Moravia in English (and Latin) after the Slavic name of its major river, the Morava. But Handke’s title does not use the word mährische, and in fact it is not Moravia that he is writing about in this book. Instead, he is referring to a different Morava River, far to the south, in the heartland of Serbia. It is on this river that the story begins and ends; here is where the unnamed protagonist of the book, known only as “the former writer,” has taken up quarters on a houseboat.
To most American readers, the difference between two Central European rivers with the same name might seem unimportant. But in this case, it is crucial to recognize that Handke is writing about Serbia and not Moravia. For Handke, one of the German-speaking world’s leading writers since the 1960s, is now perhaps even more widely known as an apologist for the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević. Starting in 1995, when he traveled to Serbia in the last days of the Yugoslav civil war, Handke has written and spoken voluminously in defense of the Serbs, who are generally—and in his view, unjustly—regarded as the instigators of a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Moravian Night ranges widely over the continent of Europe, as the former writer travels from the Balkans to Spain and back, but at its core is a defense of his highly idiosyncratic vision of what Serbia, and the Balkans in general, mean or ought to mean.
It is still mysterious just why Handke decided to cast himself as the Western world’s most vociferous defender of Serbia’s actions during the Yugoslav war. At the time Milošević died, in 2006, the deposed Serb leader was in prison in The Hague, where he was being tried for genocide and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. This did not deter Handke from attending Milošević’s burial, back home in Serbia, and even delivering a speech, in which he mused: “I don’t know the truth. But I look. I listen. I feel. I remember. This is why I am here today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia, close to Slobodan Milošević.
The willed ignorance of this endorsement—“I don’t know the truth”—is the keynote of Handke’s writings on the subject, starting with his controversial 1996 book A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia. (The original German title of this brief text names four rivers, including the Morava.) Here Handke records a brief visit to Serbia in the waning days of the Yugoslav war, just before the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords. The war had made the world familiar with previously obscure places like Vukovar, a Croatian city besieged by the Serbs for three months, at the cost of two thousand lives, and Srebrenica, a Bosnian city where Serbs massacred eight thousand Muslims, the worst war crime in Europe since 1945. These events were very recent at the time of his visit—the Srebrenica massacre took place in July 1995, just three months before Handke’s arrival—but he displays no interest in investigating them. Instead, he issues unsubstantiated challenges to the truthfulness of all the reporting on these events: “Why such a thousandfold slaughtering? What was the motivation? For what purpose?” he demands, as though he has seen through a conspiracy that has taken in the rest of the world.
Really, however, what the Serbs did or didn’t do is not what matters to Handke. What he is doing in A Journey to the Rivers is, rather, evolving a myth, which is immune to factual rebuttal because it operates on a “deeper” level than the daily news. And it is the news—newspapers, journalists, and pundits in America and Europe—that Handke sets out to attack, much more than Croats or Bosnians, for whom he seems to have at least some compassion. Clearly, the Yugoslav war attracted him because it allowed him to set his own intuitive and literary perception of Serbia against the images purveyed by the media, which he sees as shallow and inauthentic.
This opposition between the novelist and the journalist has a long history in German and Austrian literature, and it has often been involved with anti-Semitism. As the scholar Paul Reitter has shown, the litterateur, the feuilletonist, was often seen as the rootless Jewish opponent of the rooted German artist. This makes it notable that most of the writers Handke attacks by name in A Journey to the Rivers are Jewish—in particular, Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French “new philosophers” who were among the most vocal condemners of Serbian war crimes. To Handke, these belong to a new species of “contemporary philosophers who are everywhere and nowhere”—one might even say, rootless cosmopolitans. They stand in pointed contrast to the Serbs themselves, whom Handke praises in historically loaded language as a Volk: “an entire, great people, Volk, that knows itself to be scorned apparently throughout Europe, and experiences that as insanely unjust.”
Is Handke, an Austrian born in 1942, using the Serbs here as a surrogate for the Austrians and the Germans themselves—both “great peoples” who during his formative years were “scorned throughout Europe” for their war crimes? Is he trying to recuperate certain ways of thinking about nationhood—as something organic, rooted, mystical—that were banished from respectable discourse in postwar Europe? Certainly Handke is doing with the Yugoslav war what Thomas Mann did in World War I, turning a historical event into a parable about the superiority of Kultur to Zivilisation, which parallels the superiority of the artist to the mere litterateur.
This complex of ideas forms the background to The Moravian Night, and the book, in all its portentousness and grandiosity, is best understood as a restatement of Handke’s myth of the Balkans. This involves a nostalgic resistance to modern life, progress, and homogenization—in short, to everything associated with the European Union and the borderlessness it sponsors. In The Moravian Night, even the former Yugoslavia itself is not immune to the siren song of this Europe. Late in the novel, the “former writer” finds himself in one of Handke’s own favorite places—Slovenia, his mother’s native country, which he wrote about extensively in the novel Repetition.
In this book Handke pointedly avoids using the name Slovenia, however. In keeping with the book’s defamiliarizing language, he refers to it only as “the karst,” the region of the country that gave its name to a type of rocky landscape full of caves and sinkholes. Back when Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia, it stood politically as well as geographically outside the European mainstream. But now, the former writer finds it pathetically eager to join the banal prosperity of Central Europe: “In the entire karst and the surrounding area everything Balkan or even distantly reminiscent of the Balkans was frowned upon, from foods to clothing to music.”
If it is possible to be un-Balkan even in the Balkans, so too it is possible to be Balkan outside them. One might say that The Moravian Night is the story of a Balkan soul in search of Balkanness wherever he can find it. The episodic tale begins in a region of Serbia that Handke refers to as “the enclave,” a word that implies both isolation from and resistance to the outside world. But the real enclave in the book is the soul of the man known as “the former writer.” As we get to know him, we learn that he has diligently shunned every human attachment, especially to women, in the service of an exalted idea of what it means to be a writer. Handke, of course, is not a former writer but still a productive one; he has published four books in German since the appearance of The Moravian Night. In other respects, however, the character is meant to resemble his creator: he is an Austrian, a famous writer, and an inveterate wanderer.
Indeed, many of Handke’s books take the form of estranging travelogues, in which a solitary figure roams through an alienated landscape. This pattern can be traced all the way back to his early, reputation-making book The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970), which is a kind of Austrian reimagining of Camus’s L’Étranger. Like Meursault, Joseph Bloch, the antihero of Handke’s story, is an ordinary sensual man who commits a murder in what seems like a fit of absentmindedness. Bloch leaves the scene of the crime and finds himself in a town near the southern border, where he wanders aimlessly from place to place, gradually losing his grip on reality and on language itself. In one passage, Handke replaces words with pictograms, to suggest how Bloch has ceased to be able to perceive the world in linguistic terms.
More than four decades later, in The Moravian Night, Handke is still suspicious of narrative, of words that tidy up and paper over the cracks in day-to-day reality. The novel begins as a group of unnamed friends gather on the houseboat of the former writer, in order to hear him recount his recent journey across Europe. This framing device connects the book with the most ancient kind of storytelling—a tale told face to face—and the idea of a journey and homecoming is inevitably archetypal, evoking the Odyssey.
Yet Handke wants nothing to do with the traditional instruments of storytelling, such as continuous plot and developed character. What interests him is the evocation of very brief moments, epiphanic instants when the trappings of the world fall away and a more immediate, intuitive truth shines forth. “Which time, which tense, which type of time was the operative concept for the former writer’s round-trip?” he asks early on, and replies that it can only be told in “seconds”:
Not minutes, not hours, and also not, definitely not, tenths and hundredths of seconds: only my, your, his, our, your, their moments, the quivering, crackling, alarming, reassuring seconds. The seconds that mean both what comes after something, what follows it, as well as the primary thing, the thing that precedes it, that combines what precedes and what follows. Praised and feared be the second.
As this suggests, Handke does not set out to give us a realistic account of a journey across Europe in the twenty-first century. Among the former writer’s audience there is one listener who regularly interrupts with banally factual questions, asking how much things cost, or what the weather was like, or how he got from place to place; but we are meant to understand that this is a low kind of curiosity. Such details are beside the point, in just the same way that it is not Handke’s purpose to visit any big cities or tourist destinations. What draws him are scenes of rural neglect and poverty, places forgotten by the onward march of capitalist progress. Not for nothing does he embark on his journey in an old, beat-up bus still painted with the defunct colors of the Yugoslav flag, a caravan of obsolescence.
Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
Kosovar Serbs arriving by train in the town of Obilić, Kosovo, 2001
The first stage of the former writer’s journey takes him to a village that has been the victim of ethnic cleansing. In this case, however, it is the Serbs—never named, but identifiable from various clues, such as their use of the Cyrillic alphabet—who were evicted from the village, rather than being the evicters. There is a powerful scene in which the Serbian passengers on the bus, stopping in the village that used to be theirs, mutely regard their former neighbors, who are presumably Kosovar Muslims. This is a highly tendentious identification of victim and victimizer, but it is partly redeemed by the way Handke deliberately refuses to openly identify either group. We are left with a timeless emblem of displacement—former neighbors turned unforgiving enemies, both attached to the same plot of ground. “Nation and hatred go together,” the bus driver observes.
This is an unimpeachably liberal sentiment; one of the goals of the European Union has been precisely to drain the national ideal of its pathos, in order to lessen the potential for hatred. But it is not really the spirit in which Handke writes about the question of nationality in The Moravian Night. His ideal is not the dissolution of national boundaries, but a harmony of nations each contributing its different timbre to a common chorus. This vision, which owes much to the early Romantic nationalism of Johann Gottfried Herder, is dramatized in a surreal way when the former writer finds himself at a tavern that is hosting a world convention of Jew’s harp players. The Jew’s harp is a primitive instrument that exists under different names in many cultures, and in this convention Handke seems to be creating his own model for a multicultural art:
Although the players had come from all corners of the globe as individuals, not as representatives of those corners, now, toward the end, each of them struck up a melody from his or her land of origin, plucking, striking, pounding out, not just any tune but one that stood for that country, such as a national anthem….
This conception of the nation depends, however, on each group retaining its integrity by remaining, in James Joyce’s famous formula, “the same people living in the same place.” That integrity is threatened by immigration, and when the former writer returns to his native town in Austria, he is disturbed to find a new population of Muslim immigrants there:
For an entire hour nothing homelike revealed itself to him, not in the dwellings and especially not in the inhabitants…. This village seemed to be inhabited by people of all human races except the one native to the region, so to speak. And the majority were…people who were, as would have been said at one time, “from the Orient.”
Crucially, Handke writes, “they were alien to him not because of their dress and appearance but because they were strangers to themselves in the region.” As immigrants, they are deracinated, unable to be their true selves. But this kind of deracination can also afflict people who stay home, if they choose to take the bribe of modern development and turn themselves into global citizens, or model Europeans.
This is what the former writer finds at the end of his journey, when he finally makes his way back to the real, geographical Balkans. The place he formerly cherished as an “enclave” is now full of people who look like every other European—wearing tracksuits, driving new cars. “At one time he had thought all these ‘new folk’ came from another planet, were extraterrestrials,” he reflects ruefully. “But no: they came from here and were firmly anchored in the here and now. The planet belonged exclusively to them.”
A world so homogenized and bourgeois has no place for the former writer, who conceives of his calling in the old, high, sacred terms. As he roams from place to place, he reflects on themes from his own life, including his inability to sustain a romantic relationship with a woman. This loneliness had something noble about it, since it was the result of his single-minded obsession with literature. Only now, late in life, when he has cast off the burden of writing, can the former writer begin to contemplate a true marriage of souls. Indeed, in the course of his journey he finds a woman—referred to only as “the woman”—who seems his perfect mate. Yet even she is sent away when the former writer’s wanderlust overtakes him, and on one occasion he either beats her up or fantasizes about doing so—the line between reality and imagination being always porous in this novel. All of this adds up to an idea of the great artist that is, if not actually misogynist, then certainly redolent of a stale masculinity.
Of course, Handke knows perfectly well every criticism that can be made of his politics and his art. He anticipates them in one of the oddest episodes in The Moravian Night, when the former writer encounters a man whom he decides to call Melchior, after one of the biblical magi who visit the infant Jesus. The magi came “from the East,” and this Melchior too is an Eastern figure of indeterminate ethnicity: Handke writes that he has “thick lips” and that when he prays he bows “to the east,…to Mecca as well as to Jerusalem.” This figure, who could be Arab or Jewish or African but is certainly not German, starts out seeming friendly, but then he rounds on the former writer and starts denouncing him. For Melchior, it turns out, is a journalist, an arch-journalist, and he is violently hostile to the former writer’s sense of his own calling as sacred:
We’ve had enough of you writers and your dignity. Any writer today must make a point of being undignified. Yes, those of us writing today have jettisoned dignity once and for all. The Holy Ghost no longer has any part in what we do.
In this way, Handke seals himself in his own self-righteousness: anyone who criticizes his art or his politics is a petty, spiritless cosmopolitan. Luckily he will always have the Balkans to go back to—if not the real Balkans, then the ones he has built for himself out of obstinacy and pride.
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NOTE THE LINK TO SCOTT ABBOTT;S LONG REVIEW
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/a-slow-inquiring-narration/
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