Occasionally, the trusted Google Spider fails to bring me a juicy bit
of Handke News. One instance of this rare event is a rare review of MORAVIAN
NIGHT
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2017/04/summary-notice-4-months-after.html
that I might have addressed a year ago with the others
This one in FUSE
http://artsfuse.org/155874/book-review-peter-handke-a-writer-at-war-with-himself/
by Kai Maristed
http://www.kaimaristed.net
and appeared in February 2017 but came to my attention only now.
Let me make address this not altogether uninteresting and fairlypositive
piece on the basis of the dimensions of factuality.
1]
As to
the title “A Writer at war with himself” I see nothing of the kind in Handke’s
so utterly productive unceasing bisexual intra-psychic fusing – its most recent
example being the 2017 FRUIT THIEF, an utterly youthful adventurous expedition
into the language and into the Picardie
Aside
the child hood trauma that I have addressed in my pieces on Wounded Lovechild
there were the shocks of the
mother’’s suicide and the first wife near simultaneous leaving the cold salamander
– Moravian Night - layabroad in the early 70s, a crisis he wrote himself out of
over the period of several years; since
womanizing was getting him into hot water there is the vain attempt to become a
chaste LEFT-HANDED WOMAN at least in the writing of it while making matters more
difficult for the sexually vigorous by seeing no end of pornographic films in
Paris; there is a writing crisis at the novel part of A SLOW HOMCOMING coming a
cropper in New York in 1978 that is resolved with the great 1981 play WALK
ABOUT THE VILLAGES whose influence on Handke’s own work can be seen to persist even
now at the end of FRUIT THIEF; we had to flee Salzburg in 1989, woman trouble
once again it seems, back to Paris and yet further productive seven year
stretches; and the paranoia about women so noticeabla already in SHORT LETTER
LONG FAREWELL, also in ONE YEAR IN THE NO-MAN’S BAY, is especially so in
MORAWIAN NIGHT, right off the bat, that woman laying for him in the reeds, the
crone, the ex and perhaps first girlfriend from KRK! If fear is justfied based
on one’s own actions is paranoia the right word???
We survive the
controversy that ensues upon being the voice in the wilderness of human rights
hyenas in keeping our grandfather’s faith in a united Yugoslavia, and if you
survive that you will survive Stalingrad I suppose and Stalin’s p..o.w. camp. Maristed
fails to prove the title of her piece. - Handke stubbornly persists and changes
according to quakes inside himself, keeps molting is one way of putting it.
2] Maristed quotes her own truims – Maristed the discoverer - that
Handke permeates his own work, pray what real writer does not? In Handke’s case
it is that he finds surrogates for his ultra, an autist’s, sensitivities for
his phenomenology and to liberate his imagination – these surrogates – Sorger, Keuschnig,
Loser, the Taxham Pharmacist, the Bankieress of SIERRA DEL GREDOS, Fruit Thief
Alexia - are not in any way identical with Handke the person and each functions
differently as a „part object” – an accurate and blunt but useful way of
getting a handle on their functioning in these contexts. Does Ms. Maristad
think that in MORAVIAN NIGHT Handke sat with an Asian girl Journalist and LBJ’s
former Attorney General in one of those limetstone indentation on the Slovenian
Carso, the last threesome to defiantly proclaim Justice for Serbia? – the invention of part objects allows Handke
playfulness and artistry and dramatic talent to flourish. Those are the
only matters worth discussing because nothing else is actually discussable except
speculatively. Scott Abbott felt tjat MORAVIAN NIGHT was about narrating, I disagreed
in our discussion but conceded that the book certainly manifested a phenomenolgy’s
worth of kinds of narration.
3]
KASPAR
was written in 1968 not in 1977, I discusseed my translation with Handke in
Berlin in 1969. It is a noisy piece, Max Frisch accurately pointed to it as
being a product of the fatherless generation – which did not mean that the
fatherless had the war kill those fathers, but that the potential father
figures proved not to exert themselves in a positive manner – leaving, in
Handke;s instance, an empty grave that had been robbed, doubly empty – Maristed
merely notes a visit to a father but fails to note the image which is all that
counts, to register the impact.
[4]
of the
extraordinary power of this image – a matter worthy of a psychophysicist’s
monograph if you take a closer look at his relationship to his monstrous
stepfather Bruno and the man who fathered our bastard!
Handke
once expressed his unhappiness with KASPAR
to me, dumbfounding someone who had put in no end of work not just on the
translation but getting the piece mounted in New York, revising my work for Peter Brook, working with
Herbert Berghof and E.G.Marshall at tthe h B Studio and Carl Weber on it, so
that I failed to ask why in 1980 he regretted it, but suspect that the reason
may be its attack on language „jeder satz ist fuer die katz”. My own preference
in the early work is for the utterly entrancing RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE
5]The
Big Bad Wolf of Podgorica
·
was never convicted of anything, he died
of a bad heart while on trial in Scheveningen, a trial that Handke witnessed
and where he met LBJ’s former Attorney General who appears in MORAVIAN NIGHT with
an Asian Girl – a love object? - Serbia/ United Yugosloavia defender and and
the narrator in one of those limestone indentations in the Carso in Slovenia, a
conclave that might tell the attentive reader that Handke can at least in this instance, be sufficiently
witty about his own single-minded defense first of a UNITED YUGOSLAVIA, secondly, of a Serbia unjustly made exclusively responsible in the manipulated
court of public opinion and by a pack of intellectual human rights hyenas,
whereas - Milosevic, had he succeeded in
keeping the tribes united against the internal and outside forces that wanted
to impose a neo-liberal order upon them - and have their vacation spots on the
Illyriaan coast - would be known as the „Lincoln of Yugoslavia.” Del Ponte, the
Milosvic prosecutor, regretted that the Big Bad Wolf the bête noire du Jour was NOT
convicted before he expired. It seemed every tribe could be nationalistic but
the Serbs! And everyone including all those Wilsonian hyenas chimed in as one
voice and hated it that Handke who didn’t deny anthing but wouldnt chime in their chorus. And I, stepson of an OSS officer, know about the
souring of the milk of human kindness, I saw its perversion in one instance
already at age 13 in 1949 in Berlin.
For
entry into to the huge amount of material that the Handke -Yugoslave controversy
generated see the handke.yugo.blog
http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/lead-page-periodically-updated_10.html
6] Just
a Maristad merely notes a visit to the father, she notes an alleged former
girlfriend – as likely as that is in the case of someone sexually so driven as
a young man as Handke that I just read the other day he asked a Suhrkamp
editor’s companion whether he could sleep with Elizabeth Borchers – if Herr
Handke had only always asked and not just taken he might have no regrets now
that in advanced age he has started to praise the sanctity of marriage! as you
too well might with a much younger wife who already has run away once before!
However, the only thing interesting about the visit to Krk/
Cordula is the description of its fish and animal offal stink, the drama of the
old crone – the image Handke creates evoked El Greco for me. As to what
actually transpired - we will never know
whether the girl entrapped him; whether the entire event was a fantasy or dream;
it is irrelevant – Maristad again -a s throughout her piece - fails to attend
to the writing – and supposedly is a novelist.
7] Nor is Maristad a
judge of translations. Winston’s
MORAWAING NIGHT was not edited, as fellow Handke translator Scott Abbott
noted with especial severity; her editor Jesse Colemen took a hike to start his
own editorial service.
MORAWIAN NIGHT is a book that grew via several versions, it
started off as SAMARRA, the galleys were scrapped and then it greew, and it
could grow some more, we could loose the MORAVA and let it become a DUGOUT
CANOE and have it swim up stream or down the Danumbe into the Black Sea and
Handke could fit in a few more adventures.
As a whole it does not jibe for me in any other way.
===============================
Book Review: Peter Handke — A
Writer At War With Himself
The imperative to engage with landscape
and thus leave or at least minimize the self, has become of great importance to
Peter Handke.
The Moravian Night by Peter Handke.
Translated from the German by Krishna Wilson. Farrar Straus Giroux, 320
pages, $27.
By Kai Maristed
In an 2008 interview filmed while walking
in a French forest, the year The Moravian Night came out in
German, Peter Handke tells an old friend a saying: “ ‘Wars are everywhere, but
the greatest war is that of a man against himself.’ ” An Islamic aphorism, says
Handke — thin-faced, his white wool cap like a war bandage, hands thrust into
pockets of a dark jacket, eyes roving into the woods. The adage might be an
epigraph for this dense and elliptical novel, roughly Handke’s thirtieth book
and, like all his oeuvre since the early plays, a ‘literary event.’
Handke has always attracted ferocious
supporters as well as detractors, beginning with the plays Offending
the Audience (1966) and Kaspar (1977).
Controversy—and condemnation—reached fever-pitch with his, to many shocking,
defense of Serbian nationalism and convicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic in
the period following the Kosovo war. The Moravian Night, although
drenched with nostalgic love of his homeland, leaves that disaster behind. In
fact, inters it. There are new forces and phenomena, Handke seems to be saying,
that one needs to keep an eye on, that call for fresh witness.
One midnight in April, near Easter, certain
inhabitants of the Balkan village Porodin are summoned, either by a single ring
on the cellphone, or pebbles on the window. Quickly responding, a nameless
collective narrator (sic) strikes out to meet their/his unnamed friend—called
‘the boatman’ or ‘boatmaster’, or ‘the former writer’—who lives reclusively,
ever alert for danger, on a small vessel called The Moravian Night. Moored in
the eponymous river, the boat is identified by flackering neon lights as a
hotel—yet there are no rooms to let, and it’s nearly impossible to get there by
any route.
“It was impossible to make headway in the
increasing tracklessness, with more and more drainage ditches and thorny
thickets…we merely seemed numerous as we made our way across the river valley
by night. There were no 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.” And thus, until morning, which is to say until the novel’s
conclusion, the boatmaster will tell of his experiences and adventures on the
idiosyncratic ‘tour’ of parts of Western Europe he began on…how long ago,
exactly? “Some of us felt that his absence had lasted far too long. Others,
however had the sense that hardly a month had elapsed… To me, for instance, it
seemed as though both his departure and his return had occurred only yesterday.
I, on the other hand, felt the former writer had left me alone all winter,
while to me, yet another friend, it seemed a whole year.”
I chose the quotations above both to set
the scene and to give the flavor of Handke’s use in this book of a circuitous
voice, his manipulation of uncertain perception. Nothing is definitive, every
observation suggests a variant, or even the opposite. So many sentences end in
question marks! To further illustrate the slipperiness of the boatman’s world,
here is another random quote from a random page: “A mistake… his search for the
wide horizons…. a sickness… How could he have forgotten that the Great Horizon
never let itself be seen from the outside, from way out there, even at the most
distant distance? And above all never when he intentionally looked for it? That
it emerged at most in a particular proximity and then took shape internally,
and often could remain there long after the moments of proximity, as Goethe had
reputedly continued to see certain afterimages on the inside of his closed
eyelids months later.” But suddenly, dear reader, your critic perceives that
the selection appears in retrospect not at all random: for wouldn’t this
self-reproach have been among the boatman’s motives—supposing he needed any—for
setting out “steadily westward”? (Handke’s questioning stance is infectious.)
And so the boatman, on his lightly swaying
vessel, recounts aloud his tour (of inside the horizon?) in fits and starts,
with interruptions (the loud spring frogs, the noise of truck traffic between
Europe and Turkey, the mysterious, beautiful woman who serves these male guests
a sustaining meal, not least his own silences and absences) and with occasional
help from his guests—each of whom, Rashomon-like, was briefly along on the tour
with him.
Having renounced writing—surely a kind of
antechamber to Nothingness for Handke’s alter ego—the former writer desires to
revisit certain marker-places of his past. He traverses at risk the trashed
landscapes and shattered, still hostile borders of the Balkans, visits the
island where he wrote his first novel (Handke’s was The Hornets,
written on the isle of Krk) and betrayed his first girl. After hiking across
hallucinatory, often perilous stretches of the continent, always avoiding the
cities, sinking deep into a solitude that is opposite of loneliness—except
when, starved for a human face, human touch, it isn’t!—he seeks out his
childhood home, a brother who at first doesn’t recognize him, and the grave of
his mother. Handke’s own mother committed suicide in 1977. The deeply moving
novel Wunschloses Ungluck, English title A Sorrow Beyond
Dreams, was his attempt to enter into her despair.
The imperative to engage with landscape,
and thus leave or at least minimize the self, has become of great importance to
Handke. Landscape as brute matter—iron rotting in the river, hazardous
underground tunnels, above all as the protean karst of the boatman’s
homeland—and landscape as ephemera. Last year, Handke’s journals from the past
eight years were published in German. Short sketches, aphorisms, exhortations,
by turns lyrical, self-critical, humorous. One hopes for a translation soon.
Not a few of the 2007-2008 entries seem to reflect the book he was then
writing. “It’s not easy to travel. To begin and end as No-one. Yes, it’s not
easy to travel—but one has time.” And “Always again. In the dust of the field
path, that’s where you belong, that’s where your gaze belongs.” And, “The daily
Lucifer rising in me, and his daily little fall into hell. But without a
usurping bearer of light, no day?”
In addition to key places, the boatman’s
tour agenda includes a trio of oddball conferences: a congress of experts on
noise sickness, an international gathering of Jew’s-harp virtuosos, a
dwindling, death-stalked group “who clung to the idea, or the pipe dream, of a
large unified country in the Balkans, in a different kind of Europe.” While the
last and the first speak to major tropes in the novel—the former writer has
become so sensitized that even the scratching of his pen on paper became
torture to his ears—I must admit the Jew’s harp section left me lost.
What kind of story is The Moravian
Night? Possibly a love story? The boatmaster would have us think so. “The
prophecy [by a fellow hiker] about [my writing] a love story would eventually
turn out to be true.” This is hard to agree with. True, there is a love-object:
the woman we glimpse on the boat, a nameless, Beatrice-figure whom he
encountered mid-journey. They meet lyrically, portentously, and share rare but
wonderful nights. They soon part, to meet again only near the end. At that
point, afflicted by repeated bouts of paranoia, the former writer confuses her
with (or recognizes her as?) the virago stalker who used to loath his writing,
and him, and swore to kill him. “During his creative period, he had suspected
an enemy in every woman.” Escape from her was even at one point suggested as
the ‘real’ reason for his tour. Alas, neither woman (or one and the same) ever
fogs the page with the slightest breath. Set against the real drama of the
former writer’s history of tortured, failed relationships and fear of
foundering, they are allegorical figures that take up little space. The
Moravian Night is no more a love story than is the Divine
Comedy.
A contemporary ghost story? There’s certainly
a hefty supernatural element. In addition to the shape-changing Woman, other
characters encountered on the tour turn out to be not at all who or what they
first seemed, from the dog (calf? crow?) that crops up beside him throughout,
to the truly frightening figure who begins as an “amiable fellow walker… a
sonorous voice with a confidence-inspiring timbre” and whose company the quite
lonely former writer on occasion welcomes. This Melchior, a sort of cross
between Berlusconi and (insert your least favorite popular writer here) morphs
into a devil of derision and destruction, ridiculing the former writer’s
existence—“the dream of the writer as originator is dead…The book about your
European tour: I’m going to write it.” At one point he reveals the secret of
his own mega-success: “I lost my soul in midstream, don’t ask me how. …no more
problems.” After more of this snappy nihilism, “He shrank instantly into a
hedgehog…, whose spines shot off in all directions as poisonous arrows, and his
face became a grotesque caricature among the grotesque graffiti faces on the
wall of an old barn out in the fields.”
Peter
Handke’s new novel, like all his oeuvre since the early plays, is a ‘literary
event.’ Photo: T. Deichmann.
Oddly—or not—the former writer’s tale
reminded me at certain points of A Pilgrim’s Progress. That echo
(and this book is all about echoes) was reinforced by the many Catholic
references. Visits to chapels and, most strikingly, a series of changes rung on
Christ’s last words according Matthew. “Make God leave me in peace… God, my
God, when will you abandon me?”
Like Bunyan’s 1648 allegory, The
Moravian Night is first and foremost a journey novel, albeit one told
with a modern, time-rippling twist. But, to be more than a mere travelogue,
doesn’t a journey novel turn into a quest, with success after trial and doubt
providing catharsis and resolution? A Moravian Night is
silent on the subject of the boatman’s Grail (to question incessantly, that is
what seems be what matters) and, while there are moving, even redemptive
encounters toward journey’s end, they don’t lead to a traditional discovery,
nor a resolution. In fact, the mystery is: what is this driven wanderer in
search of?
The subtitle of A Pilgrim’s
Progress: ‘from This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the
Similitude of a Dream’ suggests another parallel. For Handke, at novel’s end
(without revealing here how that ending unfolds) commits—or perhaps does
not?—the narrative ‘crime’ that drives modern editors to defenestration.
However, the alert reader was gently forewarned: “All his life the writer had
worked on a book at night. And it was during the night that he had always finished
it. Except that in the morning the book was no longer there.” Speaking of
editorial issues, the translation by Krishna Wilson is heroic, blurred for me
only by a few idiomatic grammar choices (e.g. “if indeed it was him”) that
don’t sound like Handke’s diction.
There are two sorts of writers who become
famous in their own time. Those whose remain somewhat hidden behind behind
their art: say, Balzac, Goethe, Shakespeare. And those who—not always
willingly—give rise to a cult/structure/myth of their life, a ‘work’ existing
alongside the work. Rimbaud. Hemingway. Nabokov. In France, Michel Houellebecq
is rapidly becoming such a figure. In the German-speaking world, Peter Handke
has long stood out, the life inextricable from the oeuvre. (Back in the year 2000,
in a review for the New York Times, I wrote: “Handke makes no
bones, never has, about the permeability of the membrane between his life and
his fiction.”) For this reason, I suspect that the full richness of The
Moravian Night can only be mined by readers already reasonably
familiar with his life and work. But that is simply a reason to read other
Handke books along with this one, and submerse one’s mind in observations,
sensations, illuminations, and insights that take their own road and time.
Kai Maristed studied
political philosophy in Germany, and now lives in Paris and Massachusetts. She
has reviewed for the Los Angeles Times, the New York
Times, and other papers. Her books include the short story
collection Belong to Me, and Broken Ground, set in
Berlin. Recent pieces are The Toubaab, in Consequence, and Tyger,
Tyger in the Southwest Review. Read Kai’s Paris-centric take on
politics and the arts here.
