COMMENT ON CHAPTER # 5, FATHERLESSNESS
Chapter V is the shortest & also the most perfect chapter in MORAWIAN NIGHT. I commented on it already during my initial take in 2008, which I have not re-read. I don't want to prejudice myself with what I said previously. However, I still feel or even more so - after reading this marvelous fairy tale set in the Harz. Handke imaginary Harzreise, competing with Heine - that our man is the bastard of bastards. No only is he an illegitimate child he is an illigitimate child whose mother did not imbibe fairness with her milk that he imbibed to excess. The father that we find here is an empty grave, a grave where the body has been disintered, it has been robbed! Discarded. If you know even half as much as I do about the Handke-Sivec family situation you ought to be appalled by what the beloved bastard performs here with the slight of hand of the killer with the silken noose. For if you wanted to be fair, matters become complicate4: Maria Sivec, Hadke’s dancing girl mother fell for a Germa soldier, a bank employee, already married, back in 1942, spring time, Handke’s birthday is December 6, a Sagitarius, like moi meme. H was carried to term, no birth ccmplication according to the midwife. Herr Schoenemann or Schoeneherr, that pretty man, however, was married, and did not divorce his wife and abandon his other childen - if alive these other children would be Handke’s other half-sibling, never mentioned to date, the two children that Maria Sivec had with the man she married to give the bastar child a name, Brunp Handke, the monster from SORROW BEYOND DREAMS, courte her after Herr Schoeneman was done with her, and she succumbed, it was Bruno that she traveled to Berlin in 1944 to find. In our marvelous fairy tale Maria’s escape from East Germany [now/ then the DDR] occurred two yeas later, and Handk, then 4 years old has written about the frightening experience, back to home village Griffen and the Slovenian Sive clan, is conflated with meeting the father in the Harz region. In the great drama STORM STILL the family saga is more intact than it is in this chapter fairy tale in MORAAWIAN NIGHT that in a one marvelous paragraph or less is elevated into the the as if of the narrtor’s make-believe - the efficiency of Handke’s stitching here! - However Herr S. [for short from now on] was concerned about the offspring, the quickly divined Wunderkind, and stayed in touch with the mother, and as even the dreadought did, contributed to his education, that is if we can believe Malter Herwig’s researches in his Handke biography which is based on good shoeleather acquired documentation
time for me to chime in again, Michael, with a note of what is approaching disgust. When you and Malte Herwig and Löffler and others scan the literature for biographical details and excoriate the author for what he reveals about himself -- supposedly reveals about himself -- and in the process pretend you are reading the novel as a work of literature, I see only so-called readers looking into a mirror.
I'd like to see you pay close attention to the marvelously evoked scene. Heine, for instance, is cited only as the writer whose work the former author is NOT reading. But the Heine reference and the book he is reading place this station of the pilgimage, like each of the stations, in a literary context. How does one write about experience? What is the relation between perception and language?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Harzreise
as to HARZ REISE & FAIRY TALES
1- CHAPTER V is an obvious anti-idyll, both gross and subtly rendered. it also shows how much handke still detest germany by confining it to a helmsdorf-like enclave. i know most definitely of handke's german hatred as of 1971, in no uncertain terms.,
your assertion that the chapter proves that Handke detests German stands there with no support other your assertion that you knew Handke in 1971 and the fact that the chapter takes place in a single town.
Handke's hatred of Germans early on is well known, I merely happened also personally to witness its expression & one an ind evidence of it also in, say, the portrayal of the business folk in THEY ARE DYING OUT not just in interviews. Austrians were merly obese I recall & I can't disagree with the features that upset him. Handke, in MORAWAIN NIGHT, it turns out is also quite ambivalent about the Balkans, and quite disgusted with the way of the Balkanese! If you don't notice that this enclave is a dystopia and rendered as a fairly ridiculous place, then you have not read it. There may be these theoretical musings going on at moments where Handke sows doubt into the machinery, for aesthetic reasons, but then he becomes a realist, as in the bus trip to the ancient gave site, or a Swiftian satirist as he does here. If Handke wanted to write an assaying about modes of representation he could do so, and doesnt need the huge machinery of a saga. Handke put in characters from his own novels - Keuschnig, Filip Kobal - into MORAWIAN, neither I nor Sigried Loefflern nor Malter Herwig did. Handke is a very inventive writer , the whole notion of a boat tied on a river as an ex-writer's abode, hell he could have set it anywhere, and had as an exwriters someone who bore nor resemblance to him, instead he has someone who seems to a near but not quite double and has as its showplace nothing but Peter Handke's importantat venues.
2-the narrator himself questions the reality of what the ex-author tells him [but the narrator question it only once, we are deepy, half way into the book, and dont need to be reminded every few pages of the realm int which all this exist.],
you are missing the point of why all the attention to modes of narration, supposing that it is just a smokescreen to keep us from attributing this to Handke. How might one tell this story? That's what the novel is exploring, station by station.
as does the author fail to deny that the whole thing is just made up:which has the following consequences.
a- the entire sequence is made non-=naturalist, an absolute sie qua non necessity for handke as of his die hornissen, and fairy tale is perhapos not as good a name for it as anti-idyll.
b- it raises the sequence into the aesthetic realm of the as if - and when the "as if" is REALIZED, rendered satisfaction sets in, as it does here, and the reader's conviction plays the game with the author, becomes in sync.
c- by questioning whether the ex-author is handke or not, our man has his cake and can eat it too; be playful and coy; playful and serious as he is here; have fun; play peekaboo with the reader; is this auto-biographical or is it not; and thus avoid serious problems as he does here as to to what extent he peter handke really lacked a father, or maybe just had several hated ones, and what qualities of theirs are his.
what on reflection puzzles me is why he seems to hate his actual father to the extent that he does here. handke suffered what is called anaclytiic depression while his mother was carrying him to term - she had been abandoned by the love of her life; and Bruno who wooed her and won her was scarcely a good substitute, although he was not yet i don't think the monster he turned out to be, for she would be unlikely to have gone hunting for him in berlin, where he, a wounded ex-soldier, was working as a tram driver, or ticket collector. if handke absorbed his mother's depression, he might also her anger at his father, and not been angry at him later for abandoning both him and his mother. these are regions peter does not want to enter. and in fact they are speculative. i will ask sigrid loeffler is maybe she wants to join our discussion and defend her position that handke here is exceptionally self-critical, certainly one aspect of the book.
as to perception and language, our sight collector is unusually playful and manages to exploit his notebooks.
you slip inevitably into your psychologizing and repeatedly discount my reading of the novel as about modes of narration as related to perception. Let me try to say it again: over the course of the night the storyteller recounts his various experiences. As he does so he wonders how one might tell those stories -- as a film might tell them? as a Western film might tell them? as Flaubert and Faulkner told them? as a journalist or creative-writing teacher might tell them? as they might be told through the structure of Catholic mass? What he perceives is determined in part by how he perceives (Kant taught us this lesson about the structures we impose on things in order to understand them).
relation between perception and language? is that a theme here? fairy tale it is in the sense that the narrator himself calls it an invention, a make-g\believe--it's a theme here as throughout. everything he sees -- the old people with their walkers, the young people returning to school, the amazing memories of his mother's stories about her border crossing, everything, as throughout the novel, is contextualized by his questions about how this would be depicted in film, in the book he is reading that is not Heine, and so on.
You call it a marvelous fairy tale but give no reasons for that -- and there are many. Instead you turn to self-righteous psychologizing. Come on, man. Let's talk about the novel!
time for me to chime in again, Michael, with a note of what is approaching disgust. When you and Malte Herwig and Löffler and others scan the literature for biographical details and excoriate the author for what he reveals about himself -- supposedly reveals about himself -- and in the process pretend you are reading the novel as a work of literature, I see only so-called readers looking into a mirror.
I'd like to see you pay close attention to the marvelously evoked scene. Heine, for instance, is cited only as the writer whose work the former author is NOT reading. But the Heine reference and the book he is reading place this station of the pilgimage, like each of the stations, in a literary context. How does one write about experience? What is the relation between perception and language?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Harzreise
as to HARZ REISE & FAIRY TALES
1- CHAPTER V is an obvious anti-idyll, both gross and subtly rendered. it also shows how much handke still detest germany by confining it to a helmsdorf-like enclave. i know most definitely of handke's german hatred as of 1971, in no uncertain terms.,
your assertion that the chapter proves that Handke detests German stands there with no support other your assertion that you knew Handke in 1971 and the fact that the chapter takes place in a single town.
Handke's hatred of Germans early on is well known, I merely happened also personally to witness its expression & one an ind evidence of it also in, say, the portrayal of the business folk in THEY ARE DYING OUT not just in interviews. Austrians were merly obese I recall & I can't disagree with the features that upset him. Handke, in MORAWAIN NIGHT, it turns out is also quite ambivalent about the Balkans, and quite disgusted with the way of the Balkanese! If you don't notice that this enclave is a dystopia and rendered as a fairly ridiculous place, then you have not read it. There may be these theoretical musings going on at moments where Handke sows doubt into the machinery, for aesthetic reasons, but then he becomes a realist, as in the bus trip to the ancient gave site, or a Swiftian satirist as he does here. If Handke wanted to write an assaying about modes of representation he could do so, and doesnt need the huge machinery of a saga. Handke put in characters from his own novels - Keuschnig, Filip Kobal - into MORAWIAN, neither I nor Sigried Loefflern nor Malter Herwig did. Handke is a very inventive writer , the whole notion of a boat tied on a river as an ex-writer's abode, hell he could have set it anywhere, and had as an exwriters someone who bore nor resemblance to him, instead he has someone who seems to a near but not quite double and has as its showplace nothing but Peter Handke's importantat venues.
2-the narrator himself questions the reality of what the ex-author tells him [but the narrator question it only once, we are deepy, half way into the book, and dont need to be reminded every few pages of the realm int which all this exist.],
you are missing the point of why all the attention to modes of narration, supposing that it is just a smokescreen to keep us from attributing this to Handke. How might one tell this story? That's what the novel is exploring, station by station.
as does the author fail to deny that the whole thing is just made up:which has the following consequences.
a- the entire sequence is made non-=naturalist, an absolute sie qua non necessity for handke as of his die hornissen, and fairy tale is perhapos not as good a name for it as anti-idyll.
b- it raises the sequence into the aesthetic realm of the as if - and when the "as if" is REALIZED, rendered satisfaction sets in, as it does here, and the reader's conviction plays the game with the author, becomes in sync.
c- by questioning whether the ex-author is handke or not, our man has his cake and can eat it too; be playful and coy; playful and serious as he is here; have fun; play peekaboo with the reader; is this auto-biographical or is it not; and thus avoid serious problems as he does here as to to what extent he peter handke really lacked a father, or maybe just had several hated ones, and what qualities of theirs are his.
what on reflection puzzles me is why he seems to hate his actual father to the extent that he does here. handke suffered what is called anaclytiic depression while his mother was carrying him to term - she had been abandoned by the love of her life; and Bruno who wooed her and won her was scarcely a good substitute, although he was not yet i don't think the monster he turned out to be, for she would be unlikely to have gone hunting for him in berlin, where he, a wounded ex-soldier, was working as a tram driver, or ticket collector. if handke absorbed his mother's depression, he might also her anger at his father, and not been angry at him later for abandoning both him and his mother. these are regions peter does not want to enter. and in fact they are speculative. i will ask sigrid loeffler is maybe she wants to join our discussion and defend her position that handke here is exceptionally self-critical, certainly one aspect of the book.
as to perception and language, our sight collector is unusually playful and manages to exploit his notebooks.
relation between perception and language? is that a theme here? fairy tale it is in the sense that the narrator himself calls it an invention, a make-g\believe--it's a theme here as throughout. everything he sees -- the old people with their walkers, the young people returning to school, the amazing memories of his mother's stories about her border crossing, everything, as throughout the novel, is contextualized by his questions about how this would be depicted in film, in the book he is reading that is not Heine, and so on.
You call it a marvelous fairy tale but give no reasons for that -- and there are many. Instead you turn to self-righteous psychologizing. Come on, man. Let's talk about the novel!
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/12/full-length-review-of-herwigs-handke.html
Meister der Dämmerung: Peter Handke. Eine Biographie: Amazon.de ...
https://www.amazon.de/...Handke.../dp/342104449X
- As Scott notes, too, [if I noted this, I'm sorry I did. Reading for biographical titillation is not reading -That is Handke's own doing by using his own biography and manipulating it and being coy, as in introducing charracters from his own novels, Keushnig et.]no, it's your doing, Herwig's doing, the doing of anyone not reading it as a novel but as autobiographical. Herwig discovered that there never transpired the famous end of SORROW BEYOND DREAMS gradudation trip with the real father where Herr S. allegedly worried that he and his bastard child might be regarded as a gay couple. A nasty piece of work by Handke who as you may recall ended the book with the wish to be able to lie again (making the naive believe that he hadn’t) but endangering the books veracity if that particular lie was ever unearthed. The truth of fiction is of a different kind, and seems to tell us of Handke’s own homophobic fears - perfectly valid appropriate fears if you dwell on his childhood trauma, and much in evidence during our early acquaintance. My point in short, despite my immense admiration for the cool cat writing of this chapter: perhaps he will yet write the essay that his complicated oedipal development deserves. After all, if you read THE REPETITION, the book in which Handke “gets back to all this” [as promised at the end of SORROW] he installs his grandfather Sivec as the father figure there, which it turns out not really to do the trick as hoped, yes it helps form the supe ego, but there is more to it: namely that empty grave, and I know whereof I speak. Also, I don't see any of the regret or wish for for forgiveness in this chapter that Corneli Causeau attributes to it. as a matter of fact, one could read this description of a surrogate germany helmsldorf inbetween border region as a form of disgust with germany as a whole.
- an addition to the father theme , biographically, is that handke initially accepted Bruno Handke as his real father, but around 10 years of age questioned how this man could possibly be, at which point his mother told him the truth. however, by that time i would say young Handke had identified with certain unpleasant of his features that would characterize his treatment of women later in life. for one would never expect someone who has written SORROW BEYOND DREAMS to become violent towards women as Handke has, to have such a brutal streak.
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Let me reply to your ctd. querey" How might one tell this story? That's what the novel is exploring, station by station."
1] First of all, you never entertain any of my argument i notice, on any level, and then where is the evidence that Handke intended anything of the kind that the book exists chiefly as a way to exolore how this kind of roundabout can be told? -
I have given you evidence of various kinds. It is the kind of evidence that requires a careful reading. Your reading the book as autobiographical keeps turning you away from my evidence. On the other hand, as I noted before, you're paying no attention to my arguments.
Handke's pride seems to be not to tell stories the way he thinks or see a lot of other folks doing it. No objections, nothiing but delight on my part on that score. what's so fucking difficulty about narrating a years travel - ah but it is if you travel to significant places of your life and if it is a kind of last roundabout, no? emotions, attachments might come into play. as they do at instances, but I remain entirely unconvinced by what so far strikes me as sheer undocuamented assertion that this is some kind of exploration, of an epistomelogical kind, how narration can be achieved.
I gave you four or five or six examples that included film. The narration of love, as I said, moves quickly to all the other love stories.
you mention film - hey, handke wrote ABSENCE in such a way that you can experience narrative as film; he does the same in instances in SIERRA DEL GREDOS where the woman sees herself on film. Yes, the ex-author claims that he turns/ turned everything he expoerienced into a past event, that is into something that can then be narrated in that fashion. I recall Bloch did something along those lines already in Goalie. This is a compulsion, Handke is a compulsive writer who loves finding new ways of narrating, he does it instance, stage by stage, and he has some serious fun.
I have given you evidence of various kinds. It is the kind of evidence that requires a careful reading. Your reading the book as autobiographical keeps turning you away from my evidence. On the other hand, as I noted before, you're paying no attention to my arguments.
Handke's pride seems to be not to tell stories the way he thinks or see a lot of other folks doing it. No objections, nothiing but delight on my part on that score. what's so fucking difficulty about narrating a years travel - ah but it is if you travel to significant places of your life and if it is a kind of last roundabout, no? emotions, attachments might come into play. as they do at instances, but I remain entirely unconvinced by what so far strikes me as sheer undocuamented assertion that this is some kind of exploration, of an epistomelogical kind, how narration can be achieved.
I gave you four or five or six examples that included film. The narration of love, as I said, moves quickly to all the other love stories.
you mention film - hey, handke wrote ABSENCE in such a way that you can experience narrative as film; he does the same in instances in SIERRA DEL GREDOS where the woman sees herself on film. Yes, the ex-author claims that he turns/ turned everything he expoerienced into a past event, that is into something that can then be narrated in that fashion. I recall Bloch did something along those lines already in Goalie. This is a compulsion, Handke is a compulsive writer who loves finding new ways of narrating, he does it instance, stage by stage, and he has some serious fun.
2] The initial intention that I can see is to have fun & play with the idea of telling the roundabout of a year of his travels - after all, he had already published GESTERN UNTERWEGS, a condensation from notebooks he kept during three years of travels around the world
3] If Handke wanted to illustrate ways of rendering experience, or of fantasized kind, such as the boat tied up by the Morawa, guests arriving, the sort of thing he knows about from becoming the occasional host, he could have, ought to have written a theme and variation - certainly something that this master of formal inventiveness could have brought off. That would have been a valuable lesson taught. Or maybe an old fashioned "diffent points of view" - where I think our man would have real difficulty achieving.
To a certain extent something along that line of variation is achieved since each stage of the roundabout is narrated via the narrator - who reports the ex-authors narration - in a different fashion, but that certainly is not one of the book's main intentions, but an incidental one, if only to keep himself, as a writer, amused - you, Scott, approach this book as though it were some kind of deadly dissertation. it is nothing of the kind. it has its grim confessional moments but it manifest chiefly Handke's love of being a writer who will die with pen in hand, and if he has his druthers, like his grandfather with the other under the skirt of the kitchen maid.
I guess it's fair enough to call me a dissertationist after I called you a psychologizing (non)reader.
But I love the subtle work Handke does, I find it beautiful, thrilling even. A matter of taste, perhaps, or testimony to the different lenses through which we read.
But let me ask you this: when you call Handke a bastard of bastards for writing the way he did about his father are you reading for intention as you claim here (but that certainly is not one of the book's main intentions, but an incidental one, if only to keep himself, as a writer, amused - )or are you reading through your own experience with the man? In other words, you can't attack my reading by saying I'm not getting at what the book intended while attacking the author for what he has done.
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The ex-author friend of Keuschnig & Filip Kobal is the same surrogate for Handke as the protagonists of THE REPETITION & NO-MANSBAY. Handke the author of all three books forces autobiographical readings of marvelous literary work, turn himself into a museum worthy literature, to be admired. MORAWING rather more extensively than other major works is not just a PORTMANEAU as I have called it, but a COLLAGE of the kind that Handke advised he wouled write a far back as THE LESSON OF ST. VICTOIRE. There is wonderful stitching, which I think is waht interests Scott, sometimes there are actual transitions from one venue to the other as in the instance of leaving the Harz & traveling to Vienna (Ch. # 5 to # 6) with fascinating stuff abpout time and the like stuffed. As a whole it is devoid to necessitas, a major clasical quality; it is quite arbitrary. . I wonder what readers who are entirely unfamiliar with Handke will make of the ex-writer's tale as told by the reporter narrator?
I could also call Handke the writer "a bitch": for the way he deal with the father theme here, i am writing street lingo and accentuation, obviously to be able to do so one had to be famiiliar with stuff he says about fatherlessness and the actual state of affairs. I love the book overall, I am just not going to be yet another hagiographer.
I love the book but refuse to be an anti-hagio biographer
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Chaptr VI [167-196] is really two entirely different chapters whose last third connects with wandering first part via an invented inn that the wandering ex-author [who describes his perambulations about the Danube east of Vienna in the manner of a eudora welty or virginia woolfe] happens upon where a world festival featuring Handke te wanderer‘s favorite instrument, the jews harp is in progress; and thus let me focus firsy on Chapter VI-A and remind us all that the writer peter handke has been a virtuoso of his craft as far back as the 1964 story BEGRUESSUNG DES AUFSICHTSRATES/ WELCOMING THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, a kind of Franz Liszt of the writing trade. Nonetheless I was a bit taken aback when Handke wrote me at about the time that he had completed the anything but virtuostic-seeming A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING/ STUNDE DER WAHREN [1975] EMPFINDUNG that he was now capable of doing anything he wanted in writing. Although I might have thought of that early story as swans trumpet call of matters to come, it was not until I translated Handke’s WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES/ UEBER DIE DOERFER that the veracity of his claim began to dawn on me, a W.A.T.V that consists of meshing monologues that each can also stand on their own, with the consoling thought that wasn’t it nice that Handke wasn't about to be a Goebbels or Goebbel’s chief writer but able to restrain himself and create focussed literary events that had unusual effects on his reading as well as play audience. Here, part I of Ch. VI scarcely bothers to connect back to the boat and the author telling a story that a narrator conveys to us, it entirley abandons that pretense but for “the dog of Porodin” [who appears in each chapter one way of the other] here appearing the size of a raven twice the usual size and blowing through the grass while the ex-author moseys around the flood plain of the Danube, the reaches downstream from Vienna and the Vienne outskirts. From the moment that the ex-author departs the airp[ort until this wonderfully written wanderer’s account of the outskirts of town [the sort of thing Handke already did in ONE DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE, moseying around a city in northern Spain] hits upon the invented inn with the jew’s harp festival the entire section can stand on its own as a “wandering arond the flood plains east of Vienna” and I suspect would come as a huge surprise to 90 % of that city’s inhabitants that anthing of the kind described here was in their vicinity; and reminds me - say when we hit the passage where Hande describes the death of bumble bees - [p. 182-3, see the jpeg that I will put up @: http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/09/xemplary-morawian-text-excerpts.html during late winter early spring - that there are prior sequences of the world’s most exquisite writing where Handke reminds me of one of my favorite Americans, Eudora Welty. The best passage of sheer minutae delicacy, however, is to be found in CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS where Handke describes the delicate root work of the uprooted big tree that has been felled by the hurricane that swept Northern France in the late 1990s. Since I was aware that Handke’s foret de Chaville would be severly affected by that storm I awaited the notice he would take of its after-effect and indeed the waiting was not in vain; notice of it was accomodated in CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS in the form of a magnificent long passage that made the heart of the bioligist in me leap with joy; and so i had a friend send him a shoebox filled with the great variety of our North West .U.S.A cones [making sure of the inclusion of Red Cedars whose bark can also make clothing], to reforest the foret de Chaville with trees that sink their roots deep and don’t fall when a Northwester hits, but which shoebox I suspect never made it past the French customs and bio police. In a certain the certain writing sense Handke always also writes about writing & each of these differrent parts of this extensive collage that is MORAWIAN NIGHT is exemplary of a different way of narrating. Part II, the jew’s harp festival, is an instanc of Handke in a rainbow colation mood, as he can also be in at moments in his plays, but also features what I at that point find rather tiresome when the narrator takes us back to the boat and the ex-author is made to do some theatrics. ===========================
Looking carefully at Chapter # 9, our protagonist returning to Peter Handke’s home village Griffen reinforces my idea that one strand weaving through these machinations is the fairy tale her manifesting itsel as transforming the “new village” not just into something horribly new [that no longer “acuireS beauty over the coure of time” as it once did in VILLAGES] but has elements of the fabulous Samarkand, minaret, prayer calls by the mujahedim! - if only - which is the Handke’s Arabic theme, sounded first in NO-MAN’S-BAY is not full throated, though I doubt that this reader of Arabid and of Sufi texts share Houlebecs fears in that respect, but there it is, ye old Griffen once fled when every piece of hay nauseated the nause prone is returned to and it greets him with extreme dislike, and since is prose the details are far more grim and plentiful than the greeting accorded to the prodigal son in VILLAGES. Wheras of course Griffen has its own Handke museum, of Handke wing in its museum! So I think I am justified in thinking of the Harz chapter as a dystopian fairy tale, and continue to object to Handke’s avoidance of teasing out his complicated super-ego developments with two German fathers and a surrogate grandfather figure and that mother he identified with to the degree that he said that since he did not really know anything about the figure in Sorrow Beyond Dreams was himself, in as much as these brief condensed cries allow insight. However, Chapter Nine i a delight to read, and you will note that no recourse is taken, thus no interrution of the continuous flow of the narrative, to all this issuing from an ex-author via a narrator on a houseboat in the Morava, except i suppose there are echos since here too the ex-author feels pursued by THAT WOMAN!
I will make a few pages available via jpeg. ==============
Dec 7, 2016
SCOOT & I HAVE BEEN DISCUSSING what kind of book MORAVIAN NIGHT is, and via different routes have arrived at the conclusin that one needs to draw connections between the various sections since this is not a straight forward book of any kind, i call it collage, Scott approaches it from the angle of Goethe's WANDERING YEARS OF WILHELM MEISTER, withh which approach I am equally satisfied.
I am now making a series of LINKAGES that this approach calls for:
"All right, lets start by making ONE SERIES OF CONNECTIONS and do it at a promising Chapter, the one that is devoted to the visit to the father[s]s’ empty grave in the dystopian fairy-tale town of the just as well nameless Helmsdorf in Thuringia, the only time our ex-author whose creator Peter Handke had two German fathers, a Herr Schoenherr, bank employee, from Northern Western Germany who begot the writer in Spring 1942 when stationed with a German Army company in Carinthia and took the Austro-Sllovenian Maria Sivec dancing & the man that Peter Handke regarded as his father until, around the onset of puberty, he found him unlikely to be his progenitor and his mother enlightened him to the actual state of affairs, that is the name-giving Bruno Handke, apparently from Berlin, a fellow soldier who wooed the dancing girl and who married him when she needed to have a husband to legitimize her pregnancy, no matter that illegitimacy is not such a big deal in a rural environment that prizes fertility. The little bastard i born December 6, 1942, and according to the midwife’s report without complications. In due course Bruno Handke will father two children pf his own with Maria Sivec. Herr Schoenmann, already married, however, shows concern for his bastard child over the years & he and the mother stay in touch & he contributes to the brilliant kids schooling, as does the stepfatyer who however, if we are to believe SORROW BEYOND DREAMS turns out to be a wife beating raping monster, which I imagine is one reason that Peter Handke found him inconceivable as his real father, no matter that his ten year exposure to the primal scene & attendant brutality, would leave, so is my supposition, leave wounds and exemplaries in the first born. The chapter dealing with the visit to the father’s empty, emptied of its body, grave LINKS with the ancestor worship of the Serbian through contested lands to their grave site, and LINKS in a COLLAGE to the mother’s grave at the ex-autor’s return to Peter Handke’s home village Griffen-Voelkermark in Carinthia, thus I make ANCESTOR WORSHIP yet one further theme. Handke however entirely avoids dealing with the complications of the two fathers, step and real, and his relationship to them, perhaps his dislike of the real father once he becomes aware of his existence and meets him is colored by his hatred of Bruno, perhaps the hatred is augmented by his knowledge of the extent his mother was depressed when Schoenherr did not marry her and left, so that she devoted the love of her life to the child who she was carrying who later in life will acknowledge that he got rather too much of mother love, as photos will confirm to those who know how to read them, and stand accused and acknowledge the truth of the accussations that he is “a mamas boy.” = Who did he have to identify with? The maother’s father plays a role in the search for a father. The empty grave may also signify the hole left in Handke’s heart. What fatherlessness however left him without was chiefly a man who stood behind him as a woman might. A big loss, and so we go searching for ancestors in literature too. Enough for a start for linkages, no???All right, lets start by making ONE SERIES OF CONNECTIONS and do it at a promising Chapter, the one that is devoted to the visit to the father[s]s’ empty grave in the dystopian fairy-tale town of the just as well nameless Helmsdorf in Thuringia, the only time our ex-author whose creator Peter Handke had two German fathers, a Herr Schoenherr, bank employee, from Northern Western Germany who begot the writer in Spring 1942 when stationed with a German Army company in Carinthia and took the Austro-Sllovenian Maria Sivec dancing & the man that Peter Handke regarded as his father until, around the onset of puberty, he found him unlikely to be his progenitor and his mother enlightened him to the actual state of affairs, that is the name-giving Bruno Handke, apparently from Berlin, a fellow soldier who wooed the dancing girl and who married him when she needed to have a husband to legitimize her pregnancy, no matter that illegitimacy is not such a big deal in a rural environment that prizes fertility. The little bastard i born December 6, 1942, and according to the midwife’s report without complications. In due course Bruno Handke will father two children pf his own with Maria Sivec. Herr Schoenmann, already married, however, shows concern for his bastard child over the years & he and the mother stay in touch & he contributes to the brilliant kids schooling, as does the stepfatyer who however, if we are to believe SORROW BEYOND DREAMS turns out to be a wife beating raping monster, which I imagine is one reason that Peter Handke found him inconceivable as his real father, no matter that his ten year exposure to the primal scene & attendant brutality, would leave, so is my supposition, leave wounds and exemplaries in the first born. The chapter dealing with the visit to the father’s empty, emptied of its body, grave LINKS with the ancestor worship of the Serbian through contested lands to their grave site, and LINKS in a COLLAGE to the mother’s grave at the ex-autor’s return to Peter Handke’s home village Griffen-Voelkermark in Carinthia, thus I make ANCESTOR WORSHIP yet one further theme. Handke however entirely avoids dealing with the complications of the two fathers, step and real, and his relationship to them, perhaps his dislike of the real father once he becomes aware of his existence and meets him is colored by his hatred of Bruno, perhaps the hatred is augmented by his knowledge of the extent his mother was depressed when Schoenherr did not marry her and left, so that she devoted the love of her life to the child who she was carrying who later in life will acknowledge that he got rather too much of mother love, as photos will confirm to those who know how to read them, and stand accused and acknowledge the truth of the accussations that he is “a mamas boy.” = Who did he have to identify with? The maother’s father plays a role in the search for a father. The empty grave may also signify the hole left in Handke’s heart. What fatherlessness, however, left him without was chiefly a man who stood behind him as a woman might. A big loss, and so we go searching for ancestors in literature too.
Maria Sivec it turned out committed suicide at the prospect of the return in 1972 of brute Bruno from a t.b. sanatorium - Handke in a dream in MORAVIAN NIGHT is forgiven for feeling guilty for not having prevented her suicide. Suicide for many years plays a role in Handke's diaries. As Scott mentions I think on the main discussion page, it came rather as a shock to find out via Herwig's Handke biography that there never occurred the famous post graduation trip with the actual father during which Handke was bothered by the father's anxiety that he and his teenage son would be regarded as a homosexual couple. As far as I am concerned Handke is projecting his own entirely justified - via childhood experience of his parents sexuality - homophobia.
Enough for a start for linkages, no???
But I love the subtle work Handke does, I find it beautiful, thrilling even. A matter of taste, perhaps, or testimony to the different lenses through which we read.
But let me ask you this: when you call Handke a bastard of bastards for writing the way he did about his father are you reading for intention as you claim here (but that certainly is not one of the book's main intentions, but an incidental one, if only to keep himself, as a writer, amused - )or are you reading through your own experience with the man? In other words, you can't attack my reading by saying I'm not getting at what the book intended while attacking the author for what he has done.
==============
The ex-author friend of Keuschnig & Filip Kobal is the same surrogate for Handke as the protagonists of THE REPETITION & NO-MANSBAY. Handke the author of all three books forces autobiographical readings of marvelous literary work, turn himself into a museum worthy literature, to be admired. MORAWING rather more extensively than other major works is not just a PORTMANEAU as I have called it, but a COLLAGE of the kind that Handke advised he wouled write a far back as THE LESSON OF ST. VICTOIRE. There is wonderful stitching, which I think is waht interests Scott, sometimes there are actual transitions from one venue to the other as in the instance of leaving the Harz & traveling to Vienna (Ch. # 5 to # 6) with fascinating stuff abpout time and the like stuffed. As a whole it is devoid to necessitas, a major clasical quality; it is quite arbitrary. . I wonder what readers who are entirely unfamiliar with Handke will make of the ex-writer's tale as told by the reporter narrator?
I could also call Handke the writer "a bitch": for the way he deal with the father theme here, i am writing street lingo and accentuation, obviously to be able to do so one had to be famiiliar with stuff he says about fatherlessness and the actual state of affairs. I love the book overall, I am just not going to be yet another hagiographer.
I love the book but refuse to be an anti-hagio biographer
==========
To get back to your interest in perceptions & Handke’s interest in films in prose, let me focus on pages 176-177 where our ex-author is reporting in the most amazing detail on his experience walking out of the Vienna airport on the side of the shoulder.
1] There is that obsession with how drivers hold their hands on the wheel, which amazingly fails to be aware that many drivers, those with gear shifts on the right side and midway the two front seats, use their left hand to steer. The ex-author here claims, in one sentence, claims to have driven a car. Handke himself never had a driver’s licens for reasons of his color blindnesss - well not exactly blindness but unreliability shifting between being unable to distinguish green from red and being able to, which is why folks always need to drive him as I did several times arond 1976 n my MGB (vide St. Victoire for this where he wonders whether other family members have the same affliction which I once spent a week reading up on at the great UCLA medical library without being able to come to a conclusion what the cause for this might be in Handke’s case, possibly his underlying hysteria, perhaps something to do with his autistic episodes, a combination of the two, his seguing states one of which is described here as the ex-author report turning his unpleasant experience of walking along the shoulder road, with cars on all sides, into a film experience that soothes, cushions - Bloch anyone?? - which for this reader has the effect of kinethetically augmenting my experience of the reported all around experience - it is a dissociation - and which eventually led me to the conclusion that Handke’s work - intentionally too perhaps - needs to be described in experiential rather than the usual literary terms; you in this instance I imagine will focus on perception and that is fine with me. I will put 176-177 up as a JPEG image in due course.
Also, preceding pages are astonishingly mature and reconciliating toward Austria - on the part of an Author who deserves postage stamp commemoration, is a national treasure, has addressed parliamment, audiences ith the heads of state and in those regards has nothing to complain of - which seems to have changed for the better in the then 20 years - no such comments about Krautland that he has just left!
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Chaptr VI [167-196] is really two entirely different chapters whose last third connects with wandering first part via an invented inn that the wandering ex-author [who describes his perambulations about the Danube east of Vienna in the manner of a eudora welty or virginia woolfe] happens upon where a world festival featuring Handke te wanderer‘s favorite instrument, the jews harp is in progress; and thus let me focus firsy on Chapter VI-A and remind us all that the writer peter handke has been a virtuoso of his craft as far back as the 1964 story BEGRUESSUNG DES AUFSICHTSRATES/ WELCOMING THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, a kind of Franz Liszt of the writing trade. Nonetheless I was a bit taken aback when Handke wrote me at about the time that he had completed the anything but virtuostic-seeming A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING/ STUNDE DER WAHREN [1975] EMPFINDUNG that he was now capable of doing anything he wanted in writing. Although I might have thought of that early story as swans trumpet call of matters to come, it was not until I translated Handke’s WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES/ UEBER DIE DOERFER that the veracity of his claim began to dawn on me, a W.A.T.V that consists of meshing monologues that each can also stand on their own, with the consoling thought that wasn’t it nice that Handke wasn't about to be a Goebbels or Goebbel’s chief writer but able to restrain himself and create focussed literary events that had unusual effects on his reading as well as play audience. Here, part I of Ch. VI scarcely bothers to connect back to the boat and the author telling a story that a narrator conveys to us, it entirley abandons that pretense but for “the dog of Porodin” [who appears in each chapter one way of the other] here appearing the size of a raven twice the usual size and blowing through the grass while the ex-author moseys around the flood plain of the Danube, the reaches downstream from Vienna and the Vienne outskirts. From the moment that the ex-author departs the airp[ort until this wonderfully written wanderer’s account of the outskirts of town [the sort of thing Handke already did in ONE DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE, moseying around a city in northern Spain] hits upon the invented inn with the jew’s harp festival the entire section can stand on its own as a “wandering arond the flood plains east of Vienna” and I suspect would come as a huge surprise to 90 % of that city’s inhabitants that anthing of the kind described here was in their vicinity; and reminds me - say when we hit the passage where Hande describes the death of bumble bees - [p. 182-3, see the jpeg that I will put up @: http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/09/xemplary-morawian-text-excerpts.html during late winter early spring - that there are prior sequences of the world’s most exquisite writing where Handke reminds me of one of my favorite Americans, Eudora Welty. The best passage of sheer minutae delicacy, however, is to be found in CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS where Handke describes the delicate root work of the uprooted big tree that has been felled by the hurricane that swept Northern France in the late 1990s. Since I was aware that Handke’s foret de Chaville would be severly affected by that storm I awaited the notice he would take of its after-effect and indeed the waiting was not in vain; notice of it was accomodated in CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS in the form of a magnificent long passage that made the heart of the bioligist in me leap with joy; and so i had a friend send him a shoebox filled with the great variety of our North West .U.S.A cones [making sure of the inclusion of Red Cedars whose bark can also make clothing], to reforest the foret de Chaville with trees that sink their roots deep and don’t fall when a Northwester hits, but which shoebox I suspect never made it past the French customs and bio police. In a certain the certain writing sense Handke always also writes about writing & each of these differrent parts of this extensive collage that is MORAWIAN NIGHT is exemplary of a different way of narrating. Part II, the jew’s harp festival, is an instanc of Handke in a rainbow colation mood, as he can also be in at moments in his plays, but also features what I at that point find rather tiresome when the narrator takes us back to the boat and the ex-author is made to do some theatrics. ===========================
Looking carefully at Chapter # 9, our protagonist returning to Peter Handke’s home village Griffen reinforces my idea that one strand weaving through these machinations is the fairy tale her manifesting itsel as transforming the “new village” not just into something horribly new [that no longer “acuireS beauty over the coure of time” as it once did in VILLAGES] but has elements of the fabulous Samarkand, minaret, prayer calls by the mujahedim! - if only - which is the Handke’s Arabic theme, sounded first in NO-MAN’S-BAY is not full throated, though I doubt that this reader of Arabid and of Sufi texts share Houlebecs fears in that respect, but there it is, ye old Griffen once fled when every piece of hay nauseated the nause prone is returned to and it greets him with extreme dislike, and since is prose the details are far more grim and plentiful than the greeting accorded to the prodigal son in VILLAGES. Wheras of course Griffen has its own Handke museum, of Handke wing in its museum! So I think I am justified in thinking of the Harz chapter as a dystopian fairy tale, and continue to object to Handke’s avoidance of teasing out his complicated super-ego developments with two German fathers and a surrogate grandfather figure and that mother he identified with to the degree that he said that since he did not really know anything about the figure in Sorrow Beyond Dreams was himself, in as much as these brief condensed cries allow insight. However, Chapter Nine i a delight to read, and you will note that no recourse is taken, thus no interrution of the continuous flow of the narrative, to all this issuing from an ex-author via a narrator on a houseboat in the Morava, except i suppose there are echos since here too the ex-author feels pursued by THAT WOMAN!
I will make a few pages available via jpeg. ==============
Dec 7, 2016
SCOOT & I HAVE BEEN DISCUSSING what kind of book MORAVIAN NIGHT is, and via different routes have arrived at the conclusin that one needs to draw connections between the various sections since this is not a straight forward book of any kind, i call it collage, Scott approaches it from the angle of Goethe's WANDERING YEARS OF WILHELM MEISTER, withh which approach I am equally satisfied.
I am now making a series of LINKAGES that this approach calls for:
"All right, lets start by making ONE SERIES OF CONNECTIONS and do it at a promising Chapter, the one that is devoted to the visit to the father[s]s’ empty grave in the dystopian fairy-tale town of the just as well nameless Helmsdorf in Thuringia, the only time our ex-author whose creator Peter Handke had two German fathers, a Herr Schoenherr, bank employee, from Northern Western Germany who begot the writer in Spring 1942 when stationed with a German Army company in Carinthia and took the Austro-Sllovenian Maria Sivec dancing & the man that Peter Handke regarded as his father until, around the onset of puberty, he found him unlikely to be his progenitor and his mother enlightened him to the actual state of affairs, that is the name-giving Bruno Handke, apparently from Berlin, a fellow soldier who wooed the dancing girl and who married him when she needed to have a husband to legitimize her pregnancy, no matter that illegitimacy is not such a big deal in a rural environment that prizes fertility. The little bastard i born December 6, 1942, and according to the midwife’s report without complications. In due course Bruno Handke will father two children pf his own with Maria Sivec. Herr Schoenmann, already married, however, shows concern for his bastard child over the years & he and the mother stay in touch & he contributes to the brilliant kids schooling, as does the stepfatyer who however, if we are to believe SORROW BEYOND DREAMS turns out to be a wife beating raping monster, which I imagine is one reason that Peter Handke found him inconceivable as his real father, no matter that his ten year exposure to the primal scene & attendant brutality, would leave, so is my supposition, leave wounds and exemplaries in the first born. The chapter dealing with the visit to the father’s empty, emptied of its body, grave LINKS with the ancestor worship of the Serbian through contested lands to their grave site, and LINKS in a COLLAGE to the mother’s grave at the ex-autor’s return to Peter Handke’s home village Griffen-Voelkermark in Carinthia, thus I make ANCESTOR WORSHIP yet one further theme. Handke however entirely avoids dealing with the complications of the two fathers, step and real, and his relationship to them, perhaps his dislike of the real father once he becomes aware of his existence and meets him is colored by his hatred of Bruno, perhaps the hatred is augmented by his knowledge of the extent his mother was depressed when Schoenherr did not marry her and left, so that she devoted the love of her life to the child who she was carrying who later in life will acknowledge that he got rather too much of mother love, as photos will confirm to those who know how to read them, and stand accused and acknowledge the truth of the accussations that he is “a mamas boy.” = Who did he have to identify with? The maother’s father plays a role in the search for a father. The empty grave may also signify the hole left in Handke’s heart. What fatherlessness however left him without was chiefly a man who stood behind him as a woman might. A big loss, and so we go searching for ancestors in literature too. Enough for a start for linkages, no???All right, lets start by making ONE SERIES OF CONNECTIONS and do it at a promising Chapter, the one that is devoted to the visit to the father[s]s’ empty grave in the dystopian fairy-tale town of the just as well nameless Helmsdorf in Thuringia, the only time our ex-author whose creator Peter Handke had two German fathers, a Herr Schoenherr, bank employee, from Northern Western Germany who begot the writer in Spring 1942 when stationed with a German Army company in Carinthia and took the Austro-Sllovenian Maria Sivec dancing & the man that Peter Handke regarded as his father until, around the onset of puberty, he found him unlikely to be his progenitor and his mother enlightened him to the actual state of affairs, that is the name-giving Bruno Handke, apparently from Berlin, a fellow soldier who wooed the dancing girl and who married him when she needed to have a husband to legitimize her pregnancy, no matter that illegitimacy is not such a big deal in a rural environment that prizes fertility. The little bastard i born December 6, 1942, and according to the midwife’s report without complications. In due course Bruno Handke will father two children pf his own with Maria Sivec. Herr Schoenmann, already married, however, shows concern for his bastard child over the years & he and the mother stay in touch & he contributes to the brilliant kids schooling, as does the stepfatyer who however, if we are to believe SORROW BEYOND DREAMS turns out to be a wife beating raping monster, which I imagine is one reason that Peter Handke found him inconceivable as his real father, no matter that his ten year exposure to the primal scene & attendant brutality, would leave, so is my supposition, leave wounds and exemplaries in the first born. The chapter dealing with the visit to the father’s empty, emptied of its body, grave LINKS with the ancestor worship of the Serbian through contested lands to their grave site, and LINKS in a COLLAGE to the mother’s grave at the ex-autor’s return to Peter Handke’s home village Griffen-Voelkermark in Carinthia, thus I make ANCESTOR WORSHIP yet one further theme. Handke however entirely avoids dealing with the complications of the two fathers, step and real, and his relationship to them, perhaps his dislike of the real father once he becomes aware of his existence and meets him is colored by his hatred of Bruno, perhaps the hatred is augmented by his knowledge of the extent his mother was depressed when Schoenherr did not marry her and left, so that she devoted the love of her life to the child who she was carrying who later in life will acknowledge that he got rather too much of mother love, as photos will confirm to those who know how to read them, and stand accused and acknowledge the truth of the accussations that he is “a mamas boy.” = Who did he have to identify with? The maother’s father plays a role in the search for a father. The empty grave may also signify the hole left in Handke’s heart. What fatherlessness, however, left him without was chiefly a man who stood behind him as a woman might. A big loss, and so we go searching for ancestors in literature too.
Maria Sivec it turned out committed suicide at the prospect of the return in 1972 of brute Bruno from a t.b. sanatorium - Handke in a dream in MORAVIAN NIGHT is forgiven for feeling guilty for not having prevented her suicide. Suicide for many years plays a role in Handke's diaries. As Scott mentions I think on the main discussion page, it came rather as a shock to find out via Herwig's Handke biography that there never occurred the famous post graduation trip with the actual father during which Handke was bothered by the father's anxiety that he and his teenage son would be regarded as a homosexual couple. As far as I am concerned Handke is projecting his own entirely justified - via childhood experience of his parents sexuality - homophobia.
Enough for a start for linkages, no???
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