MORAVIAN NIGHT
is
can be regarded as
a big bower, a quilt
a big fat goose whttps://thisisnoordinaryworld.wordpress.com/tag/bowerbirds
ith cooked stuffing and lots of half-cooked or raw material.
MORAVIAN NIGHT by Peter Handke
Translated by Krishna Winston
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
12/06/2016
ISBN: 9780374212551
ISBN10:0374212554
http://us.macmillan.
com/themoraviannight/peterhandke/9780374212551
What is the Weaver Bird’s chief interest when he builds his bower to secure his off-spring? - He/she uses the best fabric available & whatever to fill in the gaps.
https://thisisnoordinaryworld.wordpress.com/tag/bowerbirds
Bowerbirds use interior design and optical illusions to attract females
I
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/12/weaver-birds-fiinal-bower-roloffs.html
MORAVIAN NIGHT:
peter handke/ PJOTR SIVEC’S/
MAGICALLY REALISTIC conceit OF
his/ hmm/ AN author’s
long ONE-YEAR all over ROUNDABOUT
with extra goodies stuffed in
because even after all the books we
had written
we still have so much left over
&
it turns out
a lot more to come!
A commentary
by Michael Roloff
incorporating various
side-tacks from the
MORAVIAN NIGHT DISCUSSION
as listed
@:
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/04/moravian-discussion-index.html
i.e.:
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/12/weaver-birds-fiinal-bower-roloffs.html
I
Since completing MORAVIAN NIGHT
- the book has
“January-November 2007“,
for a date line
but does not account for time spent
on MORAVIA’S origins as
SAMARA Tbe Night of an Author
https://handkeonline.onb.ac.at/search/node/samara
a grafting that may account for some of the - for Handke - unusual and perhaps unforseeable at conception = cumbersomeness? incongruities? top-heaviness? or is it that the book accumulates too much ballast?
as the good ship
MORAVIAN NIGHT
pLOUGHs on-
a kind of Odysee -
Since that time in 2007
Handke has produced the following works:
see: http://www.suhrkamp.de/autoren/peter_handke_1738.html
Specifically:
[1]
The novel KALI [The Saltworks would be a good title once it is done in English]
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/kali-saltworks-which-has-not-been.html
a straightforward somewhat poeticized account of an existing
saltworks with a mountain of Kali that the locals call Kalimanchero! and KALI’s straightforwardness must have come as a relief to a brain heavily taxed by the complications attendant MORAVIAN NIGHT.
KALI ought to exist in English as it does in other major languages aside its orignal German. But for the somewhat mystical seeming erotic relationship between a couple KALI and its description of the workings of such a mine might be regarded as a socialist realist.
[2]
The brilliant short novel
DER GROSSE FALL/ The Major Case ???
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html
forthcoming from
Seagull Books/ U. of Chicago Press
[3]
The Muehlheim Prize winning play
STORM STILL
that was immediately translated & published by Seagull/ U. of Chicago
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-stormy.html
[4]
Two further of his “assayings:” as I prefer to call his probing essays:
The first might be called
“A Fool for Mushrooms” & devotes itself to that obsession of Handke’s
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2013/08/essay-assaying-fool-for-mushrooms.html
&
The essay that focuses on Handke’s need for solitude as of an early age, because proximity of his fellow students nauseated him,
that took the for of hiding out in the shit-house!
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2012/10/versuch-uber-den-stillen-ort-reviews.html
[5]
Die Unschuldigen, ich und die Unbekannte am Rand der Landstraße
Ein Schauspiel in vier Jahreszeiten
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2016/03/directorss-take-on-handkes-unschuldige.html
[6] The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2015/06/american-aranjuez-discussion.html
[7] Ein Jahr aus der Nacht gesprochen
Where Handke catches the firsst sentence in mind as he wakes 365 days morning in a row.
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/02/vor-der-baumschattenwand-nachts.html
[8] Handke’s take on Beckett’s KRAPPS LAST TAPE:
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/04/until-day-sunders-your-two-comments-by.html
MORAVIAN NIGHT
it appears
has not left any untoward effect on our author’s industriousness in completing his projects.
And I find each and everyone of them first rate & worth reading
and in the sole instance of the 2016 play
INNOCENTS
do I haVE
reservations as WELL AS praise;
that is,
matterS in the respect are far simpler
- individually & severally -
than IN THE CASE OF
MORAVIAN NIGHT
which IS PROBLEMATIC in a way that I can find no traces of in the subsequent work.
=II=
None off Handke’s three epics prior to MORAVIAN NIGHT,
- neither in their linearity
nor in top-heaviness, or drag -
as they proceed on their adventure become as top-heavy or drag in the way that MORAVIAN NIGHT does,
Shortly after its wonderful artful opening MORAVIAN NIGHT
starts to accumulate localities, different ways of poetic metaphoric portraying, utterly realistic & poetically realistic ways of writing,
the need to switch from the scene being narrated back to the scene of narration, the boat, entails a no end of breaks
and allows for too few continuous narrative strands,
and moreover, especially in
Chapter VIII
the author
indulges in
GOOSE STUFFING
of the worst kind!
He is a very materialistic author who knows of the materiality of words!
III
As the reader enters the wonderfully calibrated invitation to hear out an ex-author report to his friends about his past year’s roundabout Europe the general reader I expect feels, as I did, that they are entering a congruent work, organic is the metaphor for creations of that kind as they fit together and how individual parts relate convincingly to each other in one way of the other, a sense that, however, begins to disappear at the latest by the time the ex-author starts to recount his moseying around Galicia, in northwest Spain, and I have been trying to fathom what the chief reasons for that disappearance of a sense of congruency may lie?: Is it that MORAVIAN NIGHT started out as a book entitle Samara: The Night of a Writer and then was enlarged, had a whole bunch of other sections propped on? and thus lost its center in the “I” on the boat, the Moravian Night tied up at the shore. That center to which the narrator seeks to splice these far off event? Is it in the nature of a year’s roundabout that they cannot be organic in that fashion, that they amount to an arbitrary collection that only makes sense to the person who experienced it - the writer’s task thus being to show the internal connections, odd as they may, inevitably will be, especially if they take us all over the place. Must there not be an expressed sense somewhere - as there is in Handke’s shorter works as well as his epics - what the overall conception is? Does the conception suffice here - of centrifugal events related to a narrator on the boat - does the splicing tie all this different kind of stuff all kinds of things, relate all kinds of things to the narrator? Or am I better off, as I have felt I am, in regarding MORAVIAN NIGHT as a hybrid, collage, grab bag, stuffed goose, agglomeration, which is best consumed slowly?
MORAVIAN NIGHT is Handke’s final major epic - and it nearly wasn’t because it started off as a book called SAMARA, the Night of a Writer {qoute and link}, and as an epic it kinds of limps at the end, and is a weird hybrid of a Handke Sampler. a grab bag of this and that of somthing like a year’s roundabout and other stuff stuffed into the beast - an something like half a dozen of the finest things that Handke has written.
=IV=
Since completing MORAVIAN NIGHT in 2007
http://www.suhrkamp.de/autoren/peter_handke_1738.html?d_view=veroeffentlichungen&tl_order=e&tl_sort=2&tl_view=cover_list&list_from_tl=21
he has written two novels and two further of his essays: the book about a SALTWORK, a straight forward oeuvre far more interested in the operation of this famous salt mine in the pro forma couple who for once do not strike me as auto-biographical. The terrific DER GROSSE FALL which may be the substitute for the “Night of the Writer’ that was absorbed into MORAVIAN NIGHT - a wild guess; two assayings, about the FOOL FOR MUSHROOMS & THE SHITHOUSE... how he felt so nauseated by his fellows at his boarding school... Though MORAVIAN. mentions Handke’s schooling in Klagenfurtz & Graz, boarding school, priest seminary Tanzenberg is scarcely even hinted at: it is clearly reserved for separate treatment. Once again MORAVIAN’S mention of idiocy leads me to believe that that once contemplated assaying may never be forthcoming. Dommage. The othrer work Handke produced since MORAAVIAN I list in part II of the preamble above.
Among the dozen or so autobiographically inflected ficciones of Handke’s we have four epics the 1984 Repetition, the 1993 The Year in the No-man’s Bay, the 2003 Crossing the Siearr del Gredos & now the 2007 Moravian Night.
=V=
MORAVIAN NIGHT’S overall setup could not be simpler, deceptively so, as so much else in this tantalizing epic, this collage, this weaver bird’s bower, this great intentionally (?) uncompleted uncompleatable quilt made up of marvelous left-overs that Handke had been unable or wanted to accomodate elsewhere or publish as stand-alone’s
Different though it may be from his prior epics, Like most of Handke’s prose works - novels and essays - MORAVIAN NIGHT yet is at least location-bound, in this instance not terra firma - not a town or forest or on the road - but to a houseboat - the MORAWIAN NIGHT - that is tied up at the edge of the Morawa, a sizable stream in deepest darkest Serbia - the Balkans announcing a major theme that can be regarded as one major strip that unites at least a number of important sections of this big mess of material - which Morawa evacuates into the Danube. In this houseboat there resides our protagonist, supposedly an ex-author, who invites friends to attend an evening where he will recount his past year’s roundabout in Europe, friends who emit surprise at seeing their host living with a woman; a roundabout that the ex-author recounts but that is told to us by the device of a reporting narrator; a roundabout - anyhow something like a years travels to a variety of places that themselves are unrelated to each other but play a significant role, that yet unite in the protagonist’s life, the protagonist as Weaver Bird:
[1] to a Serbian graveyard in an enclave in what seems to be the Kosovo [the Balkan theme is further adumbrated by an ancestor worship theme that runs throughout the book, strongly reiterated at several locations];
[2] the island of Corduba/ Krk on the Dalmatian coast where the protagonist ex-author as well as Peter Handke wrote The Hornets, his first novel in 1964, and it appears got his first girl friend with child, who now hounds haunts him as a monstrous crone [a reiteration if you like of the Balkan theme and the woman theme that incepts at the very start when the invited friends express the aforementioned surprise: the theme of paranoia of the Erinye who lurks in the river reeds and in the ex-authors past runs parallel and throughout, a theme that is expounded subsequently on at some real length.
to[3] Spain where Handke wrote two of his big essays, the one ON TIREDNESS & ON THE JUKE BOX, as well as where - on the La Mancha - most of his great road epic CROSSING THE SIERRA MADRE is located, and which served, also metaphorically as a surrogate of sorts for some Yugoslav feaures, but this time around to northwest Spain,
specifically Galicia, where he meets the woman who now resides on the MORAVIAN NIGHT, one of the half dozen great sequences in this otherwise so discontinuous work; a Spain that is also the locale, Numancia, of a wonderful section entitled The Noise Symposium that actually can stand alone and does in the U.S. as an excerpt in Harper’s Magazine;
to [4] his German father’s town in the Hartz in Thuringia Germany, yet another cross-roads - like Samarkand & Numancia - and very distopian, too, where the father - Handke’s actually kindly father and horror of a stepfather, the monster from Sorrow Beyond Dreams, where German, a nationality that Handke has invariably foresworn, no matter that he handles its language so magnificently - while yet his mother’s father, this grandfather, a Slovenian of Austrian nationality, played a significant father surrogat role - a Germany that here exists [!] as a hole, as a grave, whence the buried body has been removed, torn - I cannot think of a more powerful metaphor for trying to extract hated father figure [s] from your self while also indicating, the fatherlessness, as Handke has proclaimed himself, psychologically - over-dramatically and not entirely correctly as far as this psychoanalytically oriented commentator is concerned who yet detects an occasionally exquisitely developed super-ego in the author Peter Handke, who yet appears to have missed, longed life-long for the kind of monument that a real father can be and thus, not all that surprisingly, sought support from the great classics;
and thence [5] to Austria, to a variety of places, not by bus or on foot but for a change by train - a great section there on watching a teenage girl reading; a magnificent wandering about the Danube flood plains outside Vienna, a where we also find room for an invented inn where we can locate a Jew’s Harp Festival; to the Austrian 19the century dramatist Ferdinand Raimund’s hometown, who is one component of the author’s conscience and supports his fear of being entangled, as an author with women; and to the both general and specific region and towns and village where Peter Handke grew up and went to school in Carinthia, Austria which are named only by their first letter G., for Graz, K. for Klagenfurt, and where we find the ex-author with his half-brother, who regard themselves as the last member of their clan, and there is featured a dream only Peter Handke could have had of asking is mother for forgiveness for not preventing her suicide.
As indicated, the account of these experiences and events comes to the reader via the device of a selective narrator-reporter of the evenings proceedings - who stitches the quilt, ever so finely, especially in the first half - ;later, fortunately, the narrative becomes frequently continuos for great long stretches - a narrator who happens to talk... just like an extremely well written book! The ex-author, nameless, it turns out, somewhat but not too surprisingly, is the friend of several major protagonists in other major Handke epics, of Filip Kobal of THE REPETITION & of Gregor Keuschnig of MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S-BAY [just as surprisingly, Handke has not added the bankieress of his one other epic, of CROSSING THE SIERRA GREDOS or the Don Juan of DON JUAN AS TOLD BY HIMSELF, the latter of which two could have added quite a bit to the ex-author perorations about the danger for an auther for livin with a member of the opposite sex, or same sex partnership is included I imagine].
As compared to Handke’s other three major epics MORAVIAN NIGHT it turns out is - as may have been noticed! - anything but a straight-forward narrative, and though it contains, for my money, half a dozen of the finest stretches of his writing it contains - as well as the two remarkable stand-alone sections of the Noise Symposium and the Jew’s Harp Festival - it is yet chuck-a-block with unorganic matter, left overs of all kinds, and lacks any of the organic unity of an ordinary novel or saga and so I have concluded is actually an attempt by Peter Handke to stuff all kinds of wonderful left-overs that have not found room else-where into a bower birds nest.
There exists in the book one major protestation of my claim to disunity, it comes to us via one of the Kings of the Orient, who scatters a lot of frankincense which seems to have succeed in befuddling the hagiographers but which I regard as yet a further admirable maneuver on the part of the great artificer Peter Handke to sell a large hunk of disparate material, as a yet one further Handke trick to divert the reading of the book a just a big box full of left-overs and make the reader hunt for a non-existence unity; Melchior
who ought to have been named Caspar for the clown he is!
MORAVIAN NIGHT, rather than any kind of torturously forced unity, is better and more accuratley regarded as a hybrid between a Handkean epic and one of his other great endeavors, the condensations of his voluminous notebooks - e.g. the one for his three year wandering around the entire earth which is entitled most appropriately Gestern Unterwegs - Yesterday, On the Road - and such a hybrid cannot really be judged, as I have judged Handke’s other books, as he has asked - in the Jamesian way - on their own terms, since I cannot decipher what the term might be in this instance, overall, despite the prevalence of certain themes, at least one of which, the Balkan is woven to completion, whereas most of the others dangle all ove the place and there are lots of beginnings of things that never exceed beyond germination; whereas individual sections, many of of which could be published independently, are judgeable indeed. - The clue to what Handke is up to came to me when I ran across his comment that Goethe had tossed all kinds of stuff into his last major prose effort, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering, no end of
seeming left-overs, and therfore, if judge I must the book as a whole, I can do so only as an unfinished, purposely so, collage, in as much as one person’s account of a year or so travels to significant places can be tied into any kind of neat whole.
Handke, a hard-working genius by my estiamte, has been thinking of himself as on the order of Goethe, if not from the very start of his career, certainly so since the early 90s when he completed My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, in one year, and grandiose as that estiamte may seem, I myself concur that but for his lacks as a lyric poet he is not that far off with respect to prose and a number of his dramas.
The extraordinarily artful gradualist manner in which the arrival of the various guests at the boat is described will lead the general reader, unaware of Handke as trickster, to assume, anticipate that - like the invited guests - of which the readers are made to regard themselves - they will be treated to, as in Handke’s shorter books and epic elaborations, to a fairly straight-forward story, that might induce changes in their states of mind, might take them to grammatically unimagined territory, make them experience text as film - and indeed MORAVIAN NIGHT is a textbook of how to do narrative of all kinds and contains examples of Handke’s augmented prose techniques - and will - for sure - make them far more perceptive than they are ordinarily, will be a projection screen and provide a unique experience. For that is what Handke does, he creates, invents fairly unique experiences, these are all unique creations, he has been doing so for fifty years, be it as a dramatist or prose writer, as of his start as a writer in the mid-60s, and I have found it is best to approach his work in mind with Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation: let the experience sink in, then analyze it and how it was produced, what kind of text was it that did that? Literary categories do not get you, or at least me, very far in this case, are mis-leading. E.G. You wouldn’t expect that experiencing plays such as The Ride Across Lake Contance or The Hour We Knew Anything of Each Other would induce catharses in the audience, that your clock would feel cleaned out.
One discovery along these lines with MORAVIAN NIGHT will be that unlike Handke’s other novels, or “Erzaehlung” - narrative - as he calls these accounts of wanderings (circuitously as it were in showing the six sides of an artist in NO-MAN’S-BAY, reprieving a schoolboys search for his uncle in Slovenia, in THE REPETION) or in this instance yet another saga that features a fair amount of wandering - but all over the place - a roundabout one year trip to five different countries - is anything but straight forward but merely sequentially connected yet frequently thematically, but not invariably, the connection chiefly runs through the happenstance that the narrator was at these locations, for a variety of reasons, and had a variety of interests and experiences at each, pretty typical of most people traveling all over the place during twelve months period: some experiences are whole, other will remain unresolved, and then there is that host of clutter, one definition of life is that it is messy. That is, the reader’s final impression will be of having participated in a marvelous mess that yet might intrigue him to read a few other of an author’s work who writes, on occasion as magnificently as he does here. Handke augments the mess by suggesting via that King of the Orient that just because a story isn’t straight forward doesn’t mean that it does not hold water, and at least one Handke hagiographer of dear acquaintance has swallowed the bait yet has failed to demonstrate how the mess holds together, how it is a bower, no matter all that stitching of all kinds of stuff, and thus feels that the bower is all about stitching, to which the bower bird tells him that he must be nuts to suggest that he and his wife would go to all that trouble as if they were entering a stitching competition, which at any event, in this instance, make them come out worst in show!
=II=
Mention of coincidence of place of significance to him, Peter Handke, and the protagonist of MORAVIAN NIGHT may be of no import to readers who know nothing of Handke and his life, and need only regard the protagonist as a fictional figure endowed with experience and sufficiently substantial fictional life - experiences & themes that do no hang together here and create confusion. German readers and reviewers, however, who know at least certain major features and the rough outline of Handke and his well-publicized life will tread a different slippery slope as they note where the account coincides precisely as well as where it does not, where it has been altered, short-shrifted for whatever of a variety of reasons, but represent what I regard as a too cute and coquettish way of the author having his cake - his cleaned up image - and admiring it too;
which brings us to the underlying purpose of Handke’s endeavor as a whole, which I suggest, for a grand and obviously supremely gifted and hard-working exhibitionist is to create, to have created meanwhile, what I call the Yoknapatawpha of his Self - in analogy to the imaginary county where William Faulkner situates the characters of his many books whereas Peter Handke's self and its wishes are anything but imaginary- and ought not manifest all too many but just some warts or complications. It is a discovery I made more than twenty years ago when I noticed and realized - upon seeing how THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN links up with MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN’S BAY. Thus MORAVIAN NIGHT is yet one further major part - or rather collection, slew of small parts - of this life long literary exhibition-manifestation and of turning of oneself into a living classic, a life-lone “preparation for immortality" indeed, as are these many left overs, that fill out a few spots in the puzzle - the theme of idiocy for example, Handke the very high-end autist’s sense of affinity with them, that he at one point considered making the subject of one of his essays and which is a frequent momentary theme in numerous books of his throughout the years and that have been stuffed, still incompleted, into into this quilt, as well those moments when the account of Peter Handke and the protagonist differ, because the protagonist’s image is preferred.
There may be a fair amount of what can be called self-criticism in MORAVIAN NIGHT - the ex-author calling himself a “mama’s boy” or emotionally cold “as a salamander” - but self-critique cannot be said to have become self-understanding and change in character, therefore, being most unlikely; and even with self-understanding - how deep?
The image that achieves the most extensive massaging here is that of the protagonist as failing as a lover of the unenumerated women he became involved with, and doing so despite knowing that they posed a threat to his work.
The protagonist recounts an incident where he nearlly killed a lover that is parallel to a notorious incident in Peter Handke’s life, and whose admission here is what I regard as a tactical admission to turn the admission into an attack on the woman, whose pursuit he allegedly could not endure without committing criminal violence - if it were Peter Handke talking here he would have to cite numerous other acts of violence, ill temper, he might have to seek the reason for that streak of violence, which the close reader will notice over the years manifests itself in a most powerful yearning for absolution from that internal threat.
Thus Chapter IV’s account leads to numerous further allusions - as of the opening of MORAVIAN NIGHT - of an Erinye hiding in the Morawa reeds pursuing the ex-author and forcing the boat to occasionally change its tie-up. The theme of paranoia from a pursuing woman in Handke’s work goes back to the wife pursuing the German writer in Short Letter Long Farewell, rears up in No-Man’s-Bay - and if you happened to know Handke and his then wife Libgart Schwartz it became quickly apparent that the wife would leave the insulting multiply philandering husband and it turned out “cold as salamander” when writing writer as she then did in short order with the consequence that such leaving became “the worst thing that ever happened” to Peter Handke, that he suffered increasing panic attacks that landed him in a hospital, not that the lesson so administered held, for the second mother of yet another daughter, Sophie Semin, also split, and for the same reason, without sending Handke back into the hospital; and he achieved what he failed to with Libgart Schwartz, the wife was won back and Handke and she got smart and live in separate residences, and all has been well, and now that the author claims to be an ex it is not too surprising that he can imagine living with a woman once again, and in harmony, aboard THE MORAVIAN NIGHT.
In the claims that the ex-author makes here he fails to recall that yet another Handke protagonist, whose company he must have kept at one point, the Don Juan of Don Juan as told by himself, was not just a philanderer par excellence but the object of an endless stream of beauties that sought to share his bed or carpet; and so the ex-author-protagonist ought not to blame himself, or not too much, for living in an unusually promiscuous time that ensued upon introduction of the birth control pill. At any event, Handke’s womanizing got him into a lot of hot water since women are also invariably, property of, be it father’s husband, boyfriends, and these troubles can last generations, as fables tell!
In other respect the ex-author’s peroration - why it is so problematic for an artist, or a scientist, who is always “cooking” and was Handke ever cooking as a young man - a diary entry every five minutes when you were with him - is not really problematic, since it is so generally couched. In the interview on the occasion of MORAVIAN NIGHT’S publication he claims never to have been an obsessive writer, yet admits to not even remembering everything that he wrote in MORAVIAN NIGHT, and evidently not his published diary entries either when he was a young man where he has daughter Amina noting “Daddy you are writing again.”
=III=
MORAVIAN NIGHT’s first words - “every country has its Samarkand and its Numancia” - wafts hints of the once fabulous Silk Samarkand, the introduction of the crossroad theme - and the possibly welcome air of the fabled, of a fairy tale into the proceedings and, toward the end of the book - after half a dozen changes of location in five countries and non-linearity but linear individual stories, readers will find themselves in a New Samarkand -in that huge crossroad Central Europe - that adjoins what the knowledgeable German reader will identify as the author Peter Handke’s G. K. for Graz and Klagenfurtz and G.
for home village Griffen-Voelkermarkt in Carinthia - few bones are made in the identifications matter here - a once Roman province, that is not only chock-a-block with new construction and minarets and is not yet grown beautiful in the eyes of its beholders - MORAVIAN NIGHT was completed in 2007 - a refugee-filled region with the homeless camping in the woods who, as in the United States, invariably favor blue tarps for shelter. The section set in the Hartz mountains in Germany is yet another crossroad and has a fairly-tale quality, but of a distopian kind.
By that point,too, at about Chapter 10 of the books twelve - the final two a kind of slow fade - readers may have realized that their arrival at New Samarkand has been anything but straight forward or complete, the experience - no matter that the book at that point pretends to have been nothing more than a mirage - will feel a bit raw, they may wish that the author complete the uncompleatable collage, this reader would welcome the MORAVIAN NIGHT being unloosed at the Morawa, traveling into the Danube and adventure through Bulgaria and Rumania until it reaches the Black sea.
HERE THE LINK TO THE ADDENDUM
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/addendum.html
=V=
MORAVIAN NIGHT’S overall setup - especially initially - could not be simpler, deceptively so, as so much else in this tantalizing epic, this collage, this weaver bird’s bower, this great intentionally (?) uncompleted uncompleatable quilt made up of marvelous left-overs that Handke had been unable or wanted to accomodate elsewhere or publish as stand-alones.
Different though it may be from his prior epics, like most of Handke’s prose works - novels and essays - MORAVIAN NIGHT yet is at least location-bound, in this instance not terra firma - not a town or forest or on the road - but to a houseboat - the MORAWIAN NIGHT - that is tied up at the edge of the Morawa, a sizable stream in deepest darkest Serbia - the Balkans announcing a major theme that can be regarded as one major strip the wrap-around that unites at least a number of important sections of this big mess/mass of material - which Morawa evacuates into the Danube. In this houseboat there resides our protagonist, supposedly an ex-author, who invites a handful of friends to attend an evening where he will recount his past year’s por so roundabout Europe, friends who emit surprise at seeing their host living with a woman; a roundabout that the ex-author recounts but that is told to us by the selecting- device of a reporting narrator; a roundabout - anyhow something like a years travels to a variety of places that themselves are unrelated to each other but for several Balkan ex-Yugoslavia seeming stretches, Porodin, an enclave, but play a significant role, that yet unite in the protagonist’s life, the protagonist as Weaver Bird:
{also see my riff on “Chaptering” which becomes specifically critical of certain matters, especially Chapter VIII)
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/a-comment-on-chaptering-in-moravian.html
[1] to a Serbian graveyard in an enclave in what seems to be the Kosovo [the Balkan theme is further adumbrated by an ancestor worship theme that runs throughout the book, strongly reiterated at several locations];
[2] the island of Corduba/ Krk on the Dalmatian coast where the protagonist ex-author as well as Peter Handke wrote The Hornets, his first novel in 1964, and it appears got his first girl friend with child, who now hounds haunts him as a monstrous crone [a reiteration if you like of the Balkan theme and the woman-Erynje theme that incepts at the very start when the invited friends express the aforementioned surprise: the theme of paranoia of the Erinye who lurks in the river reeds and in the ex-authors past runs parallel and throughout, a theme that is expounded subsequently on at some real length & also crops up in a section devoted to time spent at elective affinity author Ferdinand Raimund’s turf.
to[3] Spain where Handke wrote two of his big essays, the ones ON TIREDNESS & ON THE JUKE BOX, as well as where he locates - on the La Mancha - most of his great road-epic CROSSING THE SIERRA MADRE, and which served, also metaphorically, as a surrogate of sorts for some Yugoslav & Yugowar features, but this time it is off not just to familiar Soria but to northwest Spain, specifically Galicia, where he meets the woman who now resides on the MORAVIAN NIGHT - and where the link from what is happening on board - the man-woman stuff - and the recounted story function dramatically for once - and one of the half dozen great sequences in this otherwise so discontinuous work I find in the tunnel section there; a Spain that is also the locale, Numancia, of a wonderful section entitled The Noise Symposium that actually can stand alone and does in the U.S. as an excerpt in Harper’s Magazine;
to [4] his German father’s town in the Hartz in Thuringia Germany, yet another cross-roads - like Samarkand & Numancia - and a very distopian fairy tale, too, where the father - Handke’s actually kindly father and horror of a stepfather, the monster from Sorrow Beyond Dreams, were German, a nationality that Handke has invariably foresworn, no matter that he handles its language so magnificently - while yet his mother’s father, this grandfather, a Slovenian of Austrian nationality, played a significant father surrogate role - a Germany that here exists [!] as a hole, as a grave, whence the buried body has been removed, torn - I cannot think of a more powerful metaphor for trying to extract hated father figure [s] from your self while also indicating, the fatherlessness, as Handke has proclaimed himself, psychologically - over-dramatically and not entirely correctly as far as this psychoanalytically oriented commentator is concerned who yet detects an occasionally exquisitely developed super-ego in the author Peter Handke, who yet appears to have missed, longed life-long for the kind of monument, a man as supportive as mother’s can be, that a real father can be and thus, not all that surprisingly, Handke sought support for his literary endeavors from the great classics; and as their translator - Shakespeare, Euripides, Sophokles;
and thence [5] to Austria, to a variety of places, not by bus or on foot but - for a change by train - a great section there on watching a teenage girl reading;
see my section on what grabs me the mostest:
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/roloffs-favoritg.html
a magnificent wandering about the Danube flood plains outside Vienna, a where we also find room for an invented inn where we can locate a Jew’s Harp Festival; to the Austrian 19the century dramatist Ferdinand Raimund’s turf, who is one component of the author’s conscience and supports his fear of entanglement as an author with women; and to the both general and specific region and towns and village - but for boarding school Tanzenberg - where Peter Handke grew up and went to school in Carinthia, Austria - now transformed into a New Samarkand, but unconvincingly poetically for this reader who finds the method employed to be simple-minded futurism -
which are named only by their first letter G., for Graz, K. for Klagenfurtz, and where we find the ex-author with his - accurately described half-brother, who inaccurately - but symbolically - has transformed the ancestral house into a restaurant, and regard themselves as the last member of their clan, no mention of Handke’s two daughters Amina and Laocadie, another divergerence from the otherwise complicating autobiographical; and there is featured a dream only Peter Handke could have had of asking his mother for forgiveness for not preventing her suicide - which strikes me as having only been possible if the Sivec clan had had the smarts to arrange for a divorce from Bruno Handke, who however, as a young soldier must not been that poor a choice as a surrogate for the man whom Maria could not marry - or who would not leave his wife for her sake.
As indicated, the account of these experiences and events comes to the reader via the device of a selective narrator-reporter of the evenings proceedings - who stitches the quilt, ever so finely, especially in the first half ;later, fortunately, the narrative becomes frequently continuous for great long stretches - a narrator who happens to talk... just like an extremely well written book!
In the “Old Road” section in Chapter VII the ex-author, nameless, it turns out, somewhat but not too surprisingly, is the friend of several major protagonists of other major Handke epics, of Filip Kobal of THE REPETITION & of Gregor Keuschnig of MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S-BAY [just as surprisingly, Handke has not added the bankieress of his one other epic, of CROSSING THE SIERRA GREDOS or the Don Juan of DON JUAN AS TOLD BY HIMSELF, the latter of which two could have added quite a bit to the ex-author’s peroration about the danger for an author for living with a member of the opposite sex, or same sex partnership is included I imagine].
As compared to Handke’s other three major epics MORAVIAN NIGHT it turns out is - as may have been noticed! - anything but a straight-forward narrative, and though it contains, for my money, half a dozen of the finest stretches of his writing it contains - as well as the two remarkable stand-alone sections of the Noise Symposium and the Jew’s Harp Festival - it is yet chuck-a-block with unorganic matter, left overs of all kinds, and lacks any of the organic unity of an ordinary novel or saga and so I have concluded is actually an attempt by Peter Handke to stuff all kinds of wonderful left-overs that have not found room else-where into a bower birds nest.
There exists in the book one major protestation of my claim to disunity, it comes to us via one of the Kings of the Orient, who scatters a lot of frankincense which seems to have succeeded in befuddling the hagiographers but which I regard as yet a further admirable maneuver on the part of the great artificer Peter Handke to sell a large hunk of disparate material, as a yet one further Handke trick to divert the reading of the book as just a big box full of left-overs and make the reader hunt for a non-existence unity; Melchior who ought to have been named Caspar for the clown he is!
MORAVIAN NIGHT, rather than any kind of torturously forced unity, is better and more accurately regarded as a hybrid between a Handkean epic and one of his other great endeavors, the condensations of his voluminous notebooks - e.g. the one for his three year wandering around the entire earth which is entitled most appropriately Gestern Unterwegs - Yesterday, On the Road - and such a hybrid cannot really be judged, as I have judged Handke’s other books, as he has asked - in the Jamesian way - on their own terms, since I cannot decipher what the term might be in this instance, overall, despite the prevalence of certain themes, at least one of which, the Balkan is woven to completion, whereas most of the others dangle all over the place and there are lots of beginnings of things that never exceed beyond germination; whereas individual sections, many of of which could be published independently, are judgeable indeed. - The clue to what Handke is up to came to me when I ran across his comment that Goethe had tossed all kinds of stuff into his last major prose effort, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering, no end of seeming left-overs, and therfore, if judge I must the book as a whole, I can do so only as an unfinished, purposely so, collage, in as much as one person’s account of a year or so travels to significant places can be tied into any kind of neat whole.
Handke, a hard-working genius by my estimate, has been thinking of himself as on the order of Goethe, if not from the very start of his career, certainly so since the early 90s when he completed My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, in one year, and grandiose as that estiamte may seem, I myself concur that but for his lacks as a lyric poet he is not that far off with respect to prose and a number of his dramas.
The extraordinarily artful gradualist manner in which the arrival of the various guests at the boat is described will lead the general reader, unaware of Handke as trickster, to assume, anticipate that - like the invited guests - of which the readers are made to regard themselves - they will be treated to, as in Handke’s shorter books and epic elaborations, to a fairly straight-forward story, that might induce changes in their states of mind, might take them to grammatically unimagined territory, make them experience text as film - and indeed MORAVIAN NIGHT is a textbook of how to do narrative of all kinds and contains examples of Handke’s augmented prose techniques - and will - for sure - make them far more perceptive than they are ordinarily, will be a projection screen and provide a unique experience. For that is what Handke does, he creates, invents fairly unique experiences, these are all unique creations, he has been doing so for fifty years, be it as a dramatist or prose writer, as of his start as a writer in the mid-60s, and I have found it is best to approach his work in mind with Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation: let the experience sink in, then analyze it and how it was produced, what kind of text was it that did that? Literary categories do not get you, or at least me, very far in this case, are mis-leading. E.G. You wouldn’t expect that experiencing plays such as The Ride Across Lake Contance or The Hour We Knew Anything of Each Other would induce catharses in the audience, that your clock would feel cleaned out.
One discovery along these lines with MORAVIAN NIGHT will be that unlike Handke’s other novels, or “Erzaehlung” - narrative - as he calls these accounts of wanderings (circuitously as it were in showing the six sides of an artist in NO-MAN’S-BAY, reprieving a schoolboy’s search for his uncle in Slovenia, in THE REPETION) or in this instance yet another saga that features a fair amount of wandering - but all over the place - a roundabout one year trip to five different countries - is anything but straight forward but merely sequentially connected yet frequently thematically, but not invariably, the connection chiefly runs through the happenstance that the narrator was at these locations, for a variety of reasons, and had a variety of interests and experiences at each, pretty typical of most people traveling all over the place during a twelve month period: some experiences are whole, other will remain unresolved, and then there is that host of clutter, one definition of life is that it is messy. That is, the reader’s final impression will be of having participated in a marvelous mess that yet might intrigue him to read a few other of an author’s work who writes, on occasion as magnificently as he does here. Handke augments the mess by suggesting via that King of the Orient that just because a story isn’t straight forward doesn’t mean that it does not hold water, and at least one Handke hagiographer of dear acquaintance has swallowed the bait yet has failed to demonstrate how the mess holds together, how it is a bower, no matter all that stitching of all kinds of stuff, and thus feels that the bower is all about stitching, to which the bower bird tells him that he must be nuts to suggest that he and his wife would go to all that trouble as if they were entering a stitching competition, which at any event, in this instance, make them come out worst in show!
=II=
Mention of coincidence of place of significance to him, Peter Handke, and the protagonist of MORAVIAN NIGHT may be of no import to readers who know nothing of Handke and his life, and need only regard the protagonist as a fictional figure endowed with experience and sufficiently substantial fictional life - experiences & themes that do no hang together here and create confusion. German readers and reviewers, however, who know certain major features and the rough outline of Handke and his well-publicized life, will tread a different slippery slope as they note where the account coincides precisely as well as where it does not, where it has been altered, short-shrifted for whatever of a variety of reasons, but represent what I regard as a too cute and coquettish way of the author having his cake - his cleaned up image - and admiring it too;
which brings us to the underlying purpose of Handke’s endeavor as a whole, which I suggest, for a grand and obviously supremely gifted and hard-working exhibitionist is to create, to have created meanwhile, what I call the Yoknapatawpha of his Self - in analogy to the imaginary county where William Faulkner situates the characters of his many books whereas Peter Handke's self and its wishes are anything but imaginary - and ought not manifest all too many but just some warts or complications, the HANDKE MUSEUM FOR OUR LIVING CLASSIC! It is a discovery I made more than twenty years ago when I noticed and realized - upon seeing how THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN links up with MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN’S BAY. Thus, MORAVIAN NIGHT is yet one further major part - or rather collection, slew of small parts - of this life long literary exhibition-manifestation and of turning of oneself into a living classic, a life-long “preparation for immortality" indeed, as are these many left overs, that fill out a few spots in the puzzle - the theme of idiocy for example, Handke the very high-end autist’s sense of affinity with them, that he at one point considered making the subject of one of his essays and which is a frequent momentary theme in numerous books of his throughout the years and that have been stuffed, still incompleted, into into this quilt, as are frequent indications of self-consciousness; as well as those moments when the account of Peter Handke and the protagonist differ, because the protagonist’s image is preferred.
There may be a fair amount of what can be called self-criticism - via the woman’s observation - in MORAVIAN NIGHT - the ex-author calling himself a “mama’s boy” or emotionally cold “as a salamander” - but self-critique cannot be said to have become self-understanding and change in character, therefore, being most unlikely; and even with self-understanding - how deep?
The image that achieves the most extensive massaging here is that of the protagonist as failing as a lover of the unenumerated women he became involved with, and doing so despite knowing that they posed a threat to his work. The protagonist recounts incidents where he nearlly killed a lover that is parallel to a notorious incident in Peter Handke’s life, and whose admission here is what I regard as a tactical admission to turn the admission into an attack on the woman, whose pursuit he allegedly could not endure without committing criminal violence - if it were Peter Handke talking here he would have to cite numerous other acts of violence, ill temper, he might have to seek the reason for that streak of violence, which the close reader will notice over the years manifests itself in a most powerful yearning for absolution from that internal threat.
Thus Chapter IV’s account leads to numerous further allusions - as of the opening of MORAVIAN NIGHT - of an Erinye hiding in the Morawa reeds pursuing the ex-author and forcing the boat to occasionally change its mooring. The theme of paranoia from a pursuing woman in Handke’s work goes back to the wife pursuing the German writer in Short Letter Long Farewell, rears up in No-Man’s-Bay - and if you happened to know Handke and his then wife Libgart Schwartz it became quickly apparent that the wife would leave the insulting multiply philandering husband and it turned out “cold as salamander” when writing writer as she then did in short order with the consequence that such leaving became “the worst thing that ever happened” to Peter Handke, that he suffered increasing panic attacks that landed him in a hospital, not that the lesson so administered it home, for the second mother of yet another daughter, Sophie Semin, also split, and for the same reason, without sending Handke back into the hospital; and he achieved what he failed to with Libgart Schwartz, the wife was won back and Handke and she got smart and live in separate residences, and all has been well - “Praise the Lord!” - and now that the author claims to be an ex it is not too surprising that he can imagine living with a woman once again, and in harmony, aboard THE MORAVIAN NIGHT.
In the claims that the ex-author makes here he fails to recall that yet another Handke protagonist, whose company he must have kept at one point, the Don Juan of Don Juan as told by himself, was not just a philanderer par excellence but the object of an endless stream of beauties that sought to share his bed or rug; and so the ex-author-protagonist ought not to blame himself, or not too much, for living in an unusually promiscuous time that ensued upon introduction of the birth control pill. At any event, Handke’s womanizing got him into a lot of hot water since women are also invariably, property of, be it father’s husband, boyfriends, and these troubles can last generations, as fables tell!
In other respect the ex-author’s peroration - why it is so problematic for an artist, or a scientist, who is always “cooking” and was Handke ever cooking as a young man - a diary entry every five minutes when you were with him - is not really problematic, since it is so generally couched. In the interview on the occasion of MORAVIAN NIGHT’S publication he claims never to have been an obsessive writer,
yet admits to not even remembering everything that he wrote in MORAVIAN NIGHT, and evidently not his
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-handke-interview-on-occasion-of-its.html
published diary entries either when he was a young man where he has daughter Amina noting “Daddy you are writing again.”
=III=
MORAVIAN NIGHT’s first words - “every country has its Samarkand and its Numancia” - wafts hints of the once fabulous Silk Samarkand, the introduction of the crossroad theme - and the possibly welcome air of the fabled, of a fairy tale into the proceedings and, toward the end of the book - after half a dozen changes of location in five countries and non-linearity but linear individual stories, readers will find themselves in a New Samarkand - in that huge crossroad Central Europe - that adjoins what the knowledgeable German reader will identify as the author Peter Handke’s G. K. for Graz and Klagenfurtz and G. for home village Griffen-Voelkermarkt in Carinthia - few bones are made in the identifications matter here - a once Roman province, that is not only chock-a-block with new construction and minarets and is not yet grown beautiful in the eyes of its beholders - MORAVIAN NIGHT was completed in 2007 - a refugee-filled region with the homeless camping in the woods who, as in the United States, invariably favor blue tarps for shelter. The section set in the Hartz mountains in Germany is yet another crossroad and has a fairly-tale quality, but of a distopian kind. By that point,too, at about Chapter 10 of the books twelve - the final two a kind of slow fade - readers may have realized that their arrival at New Samarkand has been anything but straight forward or complete, the experience - no matter that the book at that point pretends to have been nothing more than a mirage - will feel a bit raw, they may wish that the author complete the uncompleatable collage, this reader would welcome the MORAVIAN NIGHT being unloosed at the Morawa, traveling into the Danube and adventure through Bulgaria and Rumania until it reaches the Black sea.
HERE THE LINK TO THE ADDENDUM
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/addendum.html
English language reviews
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/10/english-language-reviews.html
- German
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2012/11/german-reviews-of-moravian-night.html
& other foreign
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2012/11/french-review-of-la-nuit-morave.html
+
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/08/italian-spanish-reviews-of-moravian.html
are starting to appear, and not only the short and favorable pre-review notices. The NY Times did not disappoint with the same kind of idiot moralizing we have seen before:
“ 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 Handke’;s fater and stepfather surivived 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, 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 the antenae for Handke’s sense of humor about himself he might also get off his high horse. 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
Fellow Handke translator Scott Abbott
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-slow-inquiring-narration.html
with half dozen major themes staring him in the face concentrated, speciously - as is his and his profession’s wont - on “narrative” as being MORAVIAm NIGHT’S subject! And it turns out the good man hates being challenged,I was told to “fuck off” in short order and called “a Melchior” - I wonder whether uncricial adulation of Handke hagiographers like Abbott & Gregor Keuschnig-Lothar Struck’s actually do Handke any good?
It would be wonderful if some the serious critics now weighed in.
Translated by Krishna Winston
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
12/06/2016
ISBN: 9780374212551
ISBN10:0374212554
http://us.macmillan.
com/themoraviannight/peterhandke/9780374212551
What is the Weaver Bird’s chief interest when he builds his bower to secure his off-spring? - He/she uses the best fabric available & whatever to fill in the gaps.
https://thisisnoordinaryworld.wordpress.com/tag/bowerbirds
Bowerbirds use interior design and optical illusions to attract females
I
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/12/weaver-birds-fiinal-bower-roloffs.html
MORAVIAN NIGHT:
peter handke/ PJOTR SIVEC’S/
MAGICALLY REALISTIC conceit OF
his/ hmm/ AN author’s
long ONE-YEAR all over ROUNDABOUT
with extra goodies stuffed in
because even after all the books we
had written
we still have so much left over
&
it turns out
a lot more to come!
A commentary
by Michael Roloff
incorporating various
side-tacks from the
MORAVIAN NIGHT DISCUSSION
as listed
@:
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/04/moravian-discussion-index.html
i.e.:
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/12/weaver-birds-fiinal-bower-roloffs.html
I
Since completing MORAVIAN NIGHT
- the book has
“January-November 2007“,
for a date line
but does not account for time spent
on MORAVIA’S origins as
SAMARA Tbe Night of an Author
https://handkeonline.onb.ac.at/search/node/samara
a grafting that may account for some of the - for Handke - unusual and perhaps unforseeable at conception = cumbersomeness? incongruities? top-heaviness? or is it that the book accumulates too much ballast?
as the good ship
MORAVIAN NIGHT
pLOUGHs on-
a kind of Odysee -
Since that time in 2007
Handke has produced the following works:
see: http://www.suhrkamp.de/autoren/peter_handke_1738.html
Specifically:
[1]
The novel KALI [The Saltworks would be a good title once it is done in English]
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/kali-saltworks-which-has-not-been.html
a straightforward somewhat poeticized account of an existing
saltworks with a mountain of Kali that the locals call Kalimanchero! and KALI’s straightforwardness must have come as a relief to a brain heavily taxed by the complications attendant MORAVIAN NIGHT.
KALI ought to exist in English as it does in other major languages aside its orignal German. But for the somewhat mystical seeming erotic relationship between a couple KALI and its description of the workings of such a mine might be regarded as a socialist realist.
[2]
The brilliant short novel
DER GROSSE FALL/ The Major Case ???
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html
forthcoming from
Seagull Books/ U. of Chicago Press
[3]
The Muehlheim Prize winning play
STORM STILL
that was immediately translated & published by Seagull/ U. of Chicago
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-stormy.html
[4]
Two further of his “assayings:” as I prefer to call his probing essays:
The first might be called
“A Fool for Mushrooms” & devotes itself to that obsession of Handke’s
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2013/08/essay-assaying-fool-for-mushrooms.html
&
The essay that focuses on Handke’s need for solitude as of an early age, because proximity of his fellow students nauseated him,
that took the for of hiding out in the shit-house!
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2012/10/versuch-uber-den-stillen-ort-reviews.html
[5]
Die Unschuldigen, ich und die Unbekannte am Rand der Landstraße
Ein Schauspiel in vier Jahreszeiten
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2016/03/directorss-take-on-handkes-unschuldige.html
[6] The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2015/06/american-aranjuez-discussion.html
[7] Ein Jahr aus der Nacht gesprochen
Where Handke catches the firsst sentence in mind as he wakes 365 days morning in a row.
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/02/vor-der-baumschattenwand-nachts.html
[8] Handke’s take on Beckett’s KRAPPS LAST TAPE:
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/04/until-day-sunders-your-two-comments-by.html
MORAVIAN NIGHT
it appears
has not left any untoward effect on our author’s industriousness in completing his projects.
And I find each and everyone of them first rate & worth reading
and in the sole instance of the 2016 play
INNOCENTS
do I haVE
reservations as WELL AS praise;
that is,
matterS in the respect are far simpler
- individually & severally -
than IN THE CASE OF
MORAVIAN NIGHT
which IS PROBLEMATIC in a way that I can find no traces of in the subsequent work.
=II=
None off Handke’s three epics prior to MORAVIAN NIGHT,
- neither in their linearity
nor in top-heaviness, or drag -
as they proceed on their adventure become as top-heavy or drag in the way that MORAVIAN NIGHT does,
Shortly after its wonderful artful opening MORAVIAN NIGHT
starts to accumulate localities, different ways of poetic metaphoric portraying, utterly realistic & poetically realistic ways of writing,
the need to switch from the scene being narrated back to the scene of narration, the boat, entails a no end of breaks
and allows for too few continuous narrative strands,
and moreover, especially in
Chapter VIII
the author
indulges in
GOOSE STUFFING
of the worst kind!
He is a very materialistic author who knows of the materiality of words!
III
As the reader enters the wonderfully calibrated invitation to hear out an ex-author report to his friends about his past year’s roundabout Europe the general reader I expect feels, as I did, that they are entering a congruent work, organic is the metaphor for creations of that kind as they fit together and how individual parts relate convincingly to each other in one way of the other, a sense that, however, begins to disappear at the latest by the time the ex-author starts to recount his moseying around Galicia, in northwest Spain, and I have been trying to fathom what the chief reasons for that disappearance of a sense of congruency may lie?: Is it that MORAVIAN NIGHT started out as a book entitle Samara: The Night of a Writer and then was enlarged, had a whole bunch of other sections propped on? and thus lost its center in the “I” on the boat, the Moravian Night tied up at the shore. That center to which the narrator seeks to splice these far off event? Is it in the nature of a year’s roundabout that they cannot be organic in that fashion, that they amount to an arbitrary collection that only makes sense to the person who experienced it - the writer’s task thus being to show the internal connections, odd as they may, inevitably will be, especially if they take us all over the place. Must there not be an expressed sense somewhere - as there is in Handke’s shorter works as well as his epics - what the overall conception is? Does the conception suffice here - of centrifugal events related to a narrator on the boat - does the splicing tie all this different kind of stuff all kinds of things, relate all kinds of things to the narrator? Or am I better off, as I have felt I am, in regarding MORAVIAN NIGHT as a hybrid, collage, grab bag, stuffed goose, agglomeration, which is best consumed slowly?
MORAVIAN NIGHT is Handke’s final major epic - and it nearly wasn’t because it started off as a book called SAMARA, the Night of a Writer {qoute and link}, and as an epic it kinds of limps at the end, and is a weird hybrid of a Handke Sampler. a grab bag of this and that of somthing like a year’s roundabout and other stuff stuffed into the beast - an something like half a dozen of the finest things that Handke has written.
=IV=
Since completing MORAVIAN NIGHT in 2007
http://www.suhrkamp.de/autoren/peter_handke_1738.html?d_view=veroeffentlichungen&tl_order=e&tl_sort=2&tl_view=cover_list&list_from_tl=21
he has written two novels and two further of his essays: the book about a SALTWORK, a straight forward oeuvre far more interested in the operation of this famous salt mine in the pro forma couple who for once do not strike me as auto-biographical. The terrific DER GROSSE FALL which may be the substitute for the “Night of the Writer’ that was absorbed into MORAVIAN NIGHT - a wild guess; two assayings, about the FOOL FOR MUSHROOMS & THE SHITHOUSE... how he felt so nauseated by his fellows at his boarding school... Though MORAVIAN. mentions Handke’s schooling in Klagenfurtz & Graz, boarding school, priest seminary Tanzenberg is scarcely even hinted at: it is clearly reserved for separate treatment. Once again MORAVIAN’S mention of idiocy leads me to believe that that once contemplated assaying may never be forthcoming. Dommage. The othrer work Handke produced since MORAAVIAN I list in part II of the preamble above.
Among the dozen or so autobiographically inflected ficciones of Handke’s we have four epics the 1984 Repetition, the 1993 The Year in the No-man’s Bay, the 2003 Crossing the Siearr del Gredos & now the 2007 Moravian Night.
=V=
MORAVIAN NIGHT’S overall setup could not be simpler, deceptively so, as so much else in this tantalizing epic, this collage, this weaver bird’s bower, this great intentionally (?) uncompleted uncompleatable quilt made up of marvelous left-overs that Handke had been unable or wanted to accomodate elsewhere or publish as stand-alone’s
Different though it may be from his prior epics, Like most of Handke’s prose works - novels and essays - MORAVIAN NIGHT yet is at least location-bound, in this instance not terra firma - not a town or forest or on the road - but to a houseboat - the MORAWIAN NIGHT - that is tied up at the edge of the Morawa, a sizable stream in deepest darkest Serbia - the Balkans announcing a major theme that can be regarded as one major strip that unites at least a number of important sections of this big mess of material - which Morawa evacuates into the Danube. In this houseboat there resides our protagonist, supposedly an ex-author, who invites friends to attend an evening where he will recount his past year’s roundabout in Europe, friends who emit surprise at seeing their host living with a woman; a roundabout that the ex-author recounts but that is told to us by the device of a reporting narrator; a roundabout - anyhow something like a years travels to a variety of places that themselves are unrelated to each other but play a significant role, that yet unite in the protagonist’s life, the protagonist as Weaver Bird:
[1] to a Serbian graveyard in an enclave in what seems to be the Kosovo [the Balkan theme is further adumbrated by an ancestor worship theme that runs throughout the book, strongly reiterated at several locations];
[2] the island of Corduba/ Krk on the Dalmatian coast where the protagonist ex-author as well as Peter Handke wrote The Hornets, his first novel in 1964, and it appears got his first girl friend with child, who now hounds haunts him as a monstrous crone [a reiteration if you like of the Balkan theme and the woman theme that incepts at the very start when the invited friends express the aforementioned surprise: the theme of paranoia of the Erinye who lurks in the river reeds and in the ex-authors past runs parallel and throughout, a theme that is expounded subsequently on at some real length.
to[3] Spain where Handke wrote two of his big essays, the one ON TIREDNESS & ON THE JUKE BOX, as well as where - on the La Mancha - most of his great road epic CROSSING THE SIERRA MADRE is located, and which served, also metaphorically as a surrogate of sorts for some Yugoslav feaures, but this time around to northwest Spain,
specifically Galicia, where he meets the woman who now resides on the MORAVIAN NIGHT, one of the half dozen great sequences in this otherwise so discontinuous work; a Spain that is also the locale, Numancia, of a wonderful section entitled The Noise Symposium that actually can stand alone and does in the U.S. as an excerpt in Harper’s Magazine;
to [4] his German father’s town in the Hartz in Thuringia Germany, yet another cross-roads - like Samarkand & Numancia - and very distopian, too, where the father - Handke’s actually kindly father and horror of a stepfather, the monster from Sorrow Beyond Dreams, where German, a nationality that Handke has invariably foresworn, no matter that he handles its language so magnificently - while yet his mother’s father, this grandfather, a Slovenian of Austrian nationality, played a significant father surrogat role - a Germany that here exists [!] as a hole, as a grave, whence the buried body has been removed, torn - I cannot think of a more powerful metaphor for trying to extract hated father figure [s] from your self while also indicating, the fatherlessness, as Handke has proclaimed himself, psychologically - over-dramatically and not entirely correctly as far as this psychoanalytically oriented commentator is concerned who yet detects an occasionally exquisitely developed super-ego in the author Peter Handke, who yet appears to have missed, longed life-long for the kind of monument that a real father can be and thus, not all that surprisingly, sought support from the great classics;
and thence [5] to Austria, to a variety of places, not by bus or on foot but for a change by train - a great section there on watching a teenage girl reading; a magnificent wandering about the Danube flood plains outside Vienna, a where we also find room for an invented inn where we can locate a Jew’s Harp Festival; to the Austrian 19the century dramatist Ferdinand Raimund’s hometown, who is one component of the author’s conscience and supports his fear of being entangled, as an author with women; and to the both general and specific region and towns and village where Peter Handke grew up and went to school in Carinthia, Austria which are named only by their first letter G., for Graz, K. for Klagenfurt, and where we find the ex-author with his half-brother, who regard themselves as the last member of their clan, and there is featured a dream only Peter Handke could have had of asking is mother for forgiveness for not preventing her suicide.
As indicated, the account of these experiences and events comes to the reader via the device of a selective narrator-reporter of the evenings proceedings - who stitches the quilt, ever so finely, especially in the first half - ;later, fortunately, the narrative becomes frequently continuos for great long stretches - a narrator who happens to talk... just like an extremely well written book! The ex-author, nameless, it turns out, somewhat but not too surprisingly, is the friend of several major protagonists in other major Handke epics, of Filip Kobal of THE REPETITION & of Gregor Keuschnig of MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S-BAY [just as surprisingly, Handke has not added the bankieress of his one other epic, of CROSSING THE SIERRA GREDOS or the Don Juan of DON JUAN AS TOLD BY HIMSELF, the latter of which two could have added quite a bit to the ex-author perorations about the danger for an auther for livin with a member of the opposite sex, or same sex partnership is included I imagine].
As compared to Handke’s other three major epics MORAVIAN NIGHT it turns out is - as may have been noticed! - anything but a straight-forward narrative, and though it contains, for my money, half a dozen of the finest stretches of his writing it contains - as well as the two remarkable stand-alone sections of the Noise Symposium and the Jew’s Harp Festival - it is yet chuck-a-block with unorganic matter, left overs of all kinds, and lacks any of the organic unity of an ordinary novel or saga and so I have concluded is actually an attempt by Peter Handke to stuff all kinds of wonderful left-overs that have not found room else-where into a bower birds nest.
There exists in the book one major protestation of my claim to disunity, it comes to us via one of the Kings of the Orient, who scatters a lot of frankincense which seems to have succeed in befuddling the hagiographers but which I regard as yet a further admirable maneuver on the part of the great artificer Peter Handke to sell a large hunk of disparate material, as a yet one further Handke trick to divert the reading of the book a just a big box full of left-overs and make the reader hunt for a non-existence unity; Melchior
who ought to have been named Caspar for the clown he is!
MORAVIAN NIGHT, rather than any kind of torturously forced unity, is better and more accuratley regarded as a hybrid between a Handkean epic and one of his other great endeavors, the condensations of his voluminous notebooks - e.g. the one for his three year wandering around the entire earth which is entitled most appropriately Gestern Unterwegs - Yesterday, On the Road - and such a hybrid cannot really be judged, as I have judged Handke’s other books, as he has asked - in the Jamesian way - on their own terms, since I cannot decipher what the term might be in this instance, overall, despite the prevalence of certain themes, at least one of which, the Balkan is woven to completion, whereas most of the others dangle all ove the place and there are lots of beginnings of things that never exceed beyond germination; whereas individual sections, many of of which could be published independently, are judgeable indeed. - The clue to what Handke is up to came to me when I ran across his comment that Goethe had tossed all kinds of stuff into his last major prose effort, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering, no end of
seeming left-overs, and therfore, if judge I must the book as a whole, I can do so only as an unfinished, purposely so, collage, in as much as one person’s account of a year or so travels to significant places can be tied into any kind of neat whole.
Handke, a hard-working genius by my estiamte, has been thinking of himself as on the order of Goethe, if not from the very start of his career, certainly so since the early 90s when he completed My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, in one year, and grandiose as that estiamte may seem, I myself concur that but for his lacks as a lyric poet he is not that far off with respect to prose and a number of his dramas.
The extraordinarily artful gradualist manner in which the arrival of the various guests at the boat is described will lead the general reader, unaware of Handke as trickster, to assume, anticipate that - like the invited guests - of which the readers are made to regard themselves - they will be treated to, as in Handke’s shorter books and epic elaborations, to a fairly straight-forward story, that might induce changes in their states of mind, might take them to grammatically unimagined territory, make them experience text as film - and indeed MORAVIAN NIGHT is a textbook of how to do narrative of all kinds and contains examples of Handke’s augmented prose techniques - and will - for sure - make them far more perceptive than they are ordinarily, will be a projection screen and provide a unique experience. For that is what Handke does, he creates, invents fairly unique experiences, these are all unique creations, he has been doing so for fifty years, be it as a dramatist or prose writer, as of his start as a writer in the mid-60s, and I have found it is best to approach his work in mind with Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation: let the experience sink in, then analyze it and how it was produced, what kind of text was it that did that? Literary categories do not get you, or at least me, very far in this case, are mis-leading. E.G. You wouldn’t expect that experiencing plays such as The Ride Across Lake Contance or The Hour We Knew Anything of Each Other would induce catharses in the audience, that your clock would feel cleaned out.
One discovery along these lines with MORAVIAN NIGHT will be that unlike Handke’s other novels, or “Erzaehlung” - narrative - as he calls these accounts of wanderings (circuitously as it were in showing the six sides of an artist in NO-MAN’S-BAY, reprieving a schoolboys search for his uncle in Slovenia, in THE REPETION) or in this instance yet another saga that features a fair amount of wandering - but all over the place - a roundabout one year trip to five different countries - is anything but straight forward but merely sequentially connected yet frequently thematically, but not invariably, the connection chiefly runs through the happenstance that the narrator was at these locations, for a variety of reasons, and had a variety of interests and experiences at each, pretty typical of most people traveling all over the place during twelve months period: some experiences are whole, other will remain unresolved, and then there is that host of clutter, one definition of life is that it is messy. That is, the reader’s final impression will be of having participated in a marvelous mess that yet might intrigue him to read a few other of an author’s work who writes, on occasion as magnificently as he does here. Handke augments the mess by suggesting via that King of the Orient that just because a story isn’t straight forward doesn’t mean that it does not hold water, and at least one Handke hagiographer of dear acquaintance has swallowed the bait yet has failed to demonstrate how the mess holds together, how it is a bower, no matter all that stitching of all kinds of stuff, and thus feels that the bower is all about stitching, to which the bower bird tells him that he must be nuts to suggest that he and his wife would go to all that trouble as if they were entering a stitching competition, which at any event, in this instance, make them come out worst in show!
=II=
Mention of coincidence of place of significance to him, Peter Handke, and the protagonist of MORAVIAN NIGHT may be of no import to readers who know nothing of Handke and his life, and need only regard the protagonist as a fictional figure endowed with experience and sufficiently substantial fictional life - experiences & themes that do no hang together here and create confusion. German readers and reviewers, however, who know at least certain major features and the rough outline of Handke and his well-publicized life will tread a different slippery slope as they note where the account coincides precisely as well as where it does not, where it has been altered, short-shrifted for whatever of a variety of reasons, but represent what I regard as a too cute and coquettish way of the author having his cake - his cleaned up image - and admiring it too;
which brings us to the underlying purpose of Handke’s endeavor as a whole, which I suggest, for a grand and obviously supremely gifted and hard-working exhibitionist is to create, to have created meanwhile, what I call the Yoknapatawpha of his Self - in analogy to the imaginary county where William Faulkner situates the characters of his many books whereas Peter Handke's self and its wishes are anything but imaginary- and ought not manifest all too many but just some warts or complications. It is a discovery I made more than twenty years ago when I noticed and realized - upon seeing how THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN links up with MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN’S BAY. Thus MORAVIAN NIGHT is yet one further major part - or rather collection, slew of small parts - of this life long literary exhibition-manifestation and of turning of oneself into a living classic, a life-lone “preparation for immortality" indeed, as are these many left overs, that fill out a few spots in the puzzle - the theme of idiocy for example, Handke the very high-end autist’s sense of affinity with them, that he at one point considered making the subject of one of his essays and which is a frequent momentary theme in numerous books of his throughout the years and that have been stuffed, still incompleted, into into this quilt, as well those moments when the account of Peter Handke and the protagonist differ, because the protagonist’s image is preferred.
There may be a fair amount of what can be called self-criticism in MORAVIAN NIGHT - the ex-author calling himself a “mama’s boy” or emotionally cold “as a salamander” - but self-critique cannot be said to have become self-understanding and change in character, therefore, being most unlikely; and even with self-understanding - how deep?
The image that achieves the most extensive massaging here is that of the protagonist as failing as a lover of the unenumerated women he became involved with, and doing so despite knowing that they posed a threat to his work.
The protagonist recounts an incident where he nearlly killed a lover that is parallel to a notorious incident in Peter Handke’s life, and whose admission here is what I regard as a tactical admission to turn the admission into an attack on the woman, whose pursuit he allegedly could not endure without committing criminal violence - if it were Peter Handke talking here he would have to cite numerous other acts of violence, ill temper, he might have to seek the reason for that streak of violence, which the close reader will notice over the years manifests itself in a most powerful yearning for absolution from that internal threat.
Thus Chapter IV’s account leads to numerous further allusions - as of the opening of MORAVIAN NIGHT - of an Erinye hiding in the Morawa reeds pursuing the ex-author and forcing the boat to occasionally change its tie-up. The theme of paranoia from a pursuing woman in Handke’s work goes back to the wife pursuing the German writer in Short Letter Long Farewell, rears up in No-Man’s-Bay - and if you happened to know Handke and his then wife Libgart Schwartz it became quickly apparent that the wife would leave the insulting multiply philandering husband and it turned out “cold as salamander” when writing writer as she then did in short order with the consequence that such leaving became “the worst thing that ever happened” to Peter Handke, that he suffered increasing panic attacks that landed him in a hospital, not that the lesson so administered held, for the second mother of yet another daughter, Sophie Semin, also split, and for the same reason, without sending Handke back into the hospital; and he achieved what he failed to with Libgart Schwartz, the wife was won back and Handke and she got smart and live in separate residences, and all has been well, and now that the author claims to be an ex it is not too surprising that he can imagine living with a woman once again, and in harmony, aboard THE MORAVIAN NIGHT.
In the claims that the ex-author makes here he fails to recall that yet another Handke protagonist, whose company he must have kept at one point, the Don Juan of Don Juan as told by himself, was not just a philanderer par excellence but the object of an endless stream of beauties that sought to share his bed or carpet; and so the ex-author-protagonist ought not to blame himself, or not too much, for living in an unusually promiscuous time that ensued upon introduction of the birth control pill. At any event, Handke’s womanizing got him into a lot of hot water since women are also invariably, property of, be it father’s husband, boyfriends, and these troubles can last generations, as fables tell!
In other respect the ex-author’s peroration - why it is so problematic for an artist, or a scientist, who is always “cooking” and was Handke ever cooking as a young man - a diary entry every five minutes when you were with him - is not really problematic, since it is so generally couched. In the interview on the occasion of MORAVIAN NIGHT’S publication he claims never to have been an obsessive writer, yet admits to not even remembering everything that he wrote in MORAVIAN NIGHT, and evidently not his published diary entries either when he was a young man where he has daughter Amina noting “Daddy you are writing again.”
=III=
MORAVIAN NIGHT’s first words - “every country has its Samarkand and its Numancia” - wafts hints of the once fabulous Silk Samarkand, the introduction of the crossroad theme - and the possibly welcome air of the fabled, of a fairy tale into the proceedings and, toward the end of the book - after half a dozen changes of location in five countries and non-linearity but linear individual stories, readers will find themselves in a New Samarkand -in that huge crossroad Central Europe - that adjoins what the knowledgeable German reader will identify as the author Peter Handke’s G. K. for Graz and Klagenfurtz and G.
for home village Griffen-Voelkermarkt in Carinthia - few bones are made in the identifications matter here - a once Roman province, that is not only chock-a-block with new construction and minarets and is not yet grown beautiful in the eyes of its beholders - MORAVIAN NIGHT was completed in 2007 - a refugee-filled region with the homeless camping in the woods who, as in the United States, invariably favor blue tarps for shelter. The section set in the Hartz mountains in Germany is yet another crossroad and has a fairly-tale quality, but of a distopian kind.
By that point,too, at about Chapter 10 of the books twelve - the final two a kind of slow fade - readers may have realized that their arrival at New Samarkand has been anything but straight forward or complete, the experience - no matter that the book at that point pretends to have been nothing more than a mirage - will feel a bit raw, they may wish that the author complete the uncompleatable collage, this reader would welcome the MORAVIAN NIGHT being unloosed at the Morawa, traveling into the Danube and adventure through Bulgaria and Rumania until it reaches the Black sea.
HERE THE LINK TO THE ADDENDUM
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/addendum.html
=V=
MORAVIAN NIGHT’S overall setup - especially initially - could not be simpler, deceptively so, as so much else in this tantalizing epic, this collage, this weaver bird’s bower, this great intentionally (?) uncompleted uncompleatable quilt made up of marvelous left-overs that Handke had been unable or wanted to accomodate elsewhere or publish as stand-alones.
Different though it may be from his prior epics, like most of Handke’s prose works - novels and essays - MORAVIAN NIGHT yet is at least location-bound, in this instance not terra firma - not a town or forest or on the road - but to a houseboat - the MORAWIAN NIGHT - that is tied up at the edge of the Morawa, a sizable stream in deepest darkest Serbia - the Balkans announcing a major theme that can be regarded as one major strip the wrap-around that unites at least a number of important sections of this big mess/mass of material - which Morawa evacuates into the Danube. In this houseboat there resides our protagonist, supposedly an ex-author, who invites a handful of friends to attend an evening where he will recount his past year’s por so roundabout Europe, friends who emit surprise at seeing their host living with a woman; a roundabout that the ex-author recounts but that is told to us by the selecting- device of a reporting narrator; a roundabout - anyhow something like a years travels to a variety of places that themselves are unrelated to each other but for several Balkan ex-Yugoslavia seeming stretches, Porodin, an enclave, but play a significant role, that yet unite in the protagonist’s life, the protagonist as Weaver Bird:
{also see my riff on “Chaptering” which becomes specifically critical of certain matters, especially Chapter VIII)
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/a-comment-on-chaptering-in-moravian.html
[1] to a Serbian graveyard in an enclave in what seems to be the Kosovo [the Balkan theme is further adumbrated by an ancestor worship theme that runs throughout the book, strongly reiterated at several locations];
[2] the island of Corduba/ Krk on the Dalmatian coast where the protagonist ex-author as well as Peter Handke wrote The Hornets, his first novel in 1964, and it appears got his first girl friend with child, who now hounds haunts him as a monstrous crone [a reiteration if you like of the Balkan theme and the woman-Erynje theme that incepts at the very start when the invited friends express the aforementioned surprise: the theme of paranoia of the Erinye who lurks in the river reeds and in the ex-authors past runs parallel and throughout, a theme that is expounded subsequently on at some real length & also crops up in a section devoted to time spent at elective affinity author Ferdinand Raimund’s turf.
to[3] Spain where Handke wrote two of his big essays, the ones ON TIREDNESS & ON THE JUKE BOX, as well as where he locates - on the La Mancha - most of his great road-epic CROSSING THE SIERRA MADRE, and which served, also metaphorically, as a surrogate of sorts for some Yugoslav & Yugowar features, but this time it is off not just to familiar Soria but to northwest Spain, specifically Galicia, where he meets the woman who now resides on the MORAVIAN NIGHT - and where the link from what is happening on board - the man-woman stuff - and the recounted story function dramatically for once - and one of the half dozen great sequences in this otherwise so discontinuous work I find in the tunnel section there; a Spain that is also the locale, Numancia, of a wonderful section entitled The Noise Symposium that actually can stand alone and does in the U.S. as an excerpt in Harper’s Magazine;
to [4] his German father’s town in the Hartz in Thuringia Germany, yet another cross-roads - like Samarkand & Numancia - and a very distopian fairy tale, too, where the father - Handke’s actually kindly father and horror of a stepfather, the monster from Sorrow Beyond Dreams, were German, a nationality that Handke has invariably foresworn, no matter that he handles its language so magnificently - while yet his mother’s father, this grandfather, a Slovenian of Austrian nationality, played a significant father surrogate role - a Germany that here exists [!] as a hole, as a grave, whence the buried body has been removed, torn - I cannot think of a more powerful metaphor for trying to extract hated father figure [s] from your self while also indicating, the fatherlessness, as Handke has proclaimed himself, psychologically - over-dramatically and not entirely correctly as far as this psychoanalytically oriented commentator is concerned who yet detects an occasionally exquisitely developed super-ego in the author Peter Handke, who yet appears to have missed, longed life-long for the kind of monument, a man as supportive as mother’s can be, that a real father can be and thus, not all that surprisingly, Handke sought support for his literary endeavors from the great classics; and as their translator - Shakespeare, Euripides, Sophokles;
and thence [5] to Austria, to a variety of places, not by bus or on foot but - for a change by train - a great section there on watching a teenage girl reading;
see my section on what grabs me the mostest:
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/roloffs-favoritg.html
a magnificent wandering about the Danube flood plains outside Vienna, a where we also find room for an invented inn where we can locate a Jew’s Harp Festival; to the Austrian 19the century dramatist Ferdinand Raimund’s turf, who is one component of the author’s conscience and supports his fear of entanglement as an author with women; and to the both general and specific region and towns and village - but for boarding school Tanzenberg - where Peter Handke grew up and went to school in Carinthia, Austria - now transformed into a New Samarkand, but unconvincingly poetically for this reader who finds the method employed to be simple-minded futurism -
which are named only by their first letter G., for Graz, K. for Klagenfurtz, and where we find the ex-author with his - accurately described half-brother, who inaccurately - but symbolically - has transformed the ancestral house into a restaurant, and regard themselves as the last member of their clan, no mention of Handke’s two daughters Amina and Laocadie, another divergerence from the otherwise complicating autobiographical; and there is featured a dream only Peter Handke could have had of asking his mother for forgiveness for not preventing her suicide - which strikes me as having only been possible if the Sivec clan had had the smarts to arrange for a divorce from Bruno Handke, who however, as a young soldier must not been that poor a choice as a surrogate for the man whom Maria could not marry - or who would not leave his wife for her sake.
As indicated, the account of these experiences and events comes to the reader via the device of a selective narrator-reporter of the evenings proceedings - who stitches the quilt, ever so finely, especially in the first half ;later, fortunately, the narrative becomes frequently continuous for great long stretches - a narrator who happens to talk... just like an extremely well written book!
In the “Old Road” section in Chapter VII the ex-author, nameless, it turns out, somewhat but not too surprisingly, is the friend of several major protagonists of other major Handke epics, of Filip Kobal of THE REPETITION & of Gregor Keuschnig of MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S-BAY [just as surprisingly, Handke has not added the bankieress of his one other epic, of CROSSING THE SIERRA GREDOS or the Don Juan of DON JUAN AS TOLD BY HIMSELF, the latter of which two could have added quite a bit to the ex-author’s peroration about the danger for an author for living with a member of the opposite sex, or same sex partnership is included I imagine].
As compared to Handke’s other three major epics MORAVIAN NIGHT it turns out is - as may have been noticed! - anything but a straight-forward narrative, and though it contains, for my money, half a dozen of the finest stretches of his writing it contains - as well as the two remarkable stand-alone sections of the Noise Symposium and the Jew’s Harp Festival - it is yet chuck-a-block with unorganic matter, left overs of all kinds, and lacks any of the organic unity of an ordinary novel or saga and so I have concluded is actually an attempt by Peter Handke to stuff all kinds of wonderful left-overs that have not found room else-where into a bower birds nest.
There exists in the book one major protestation of my claim to disunity, it comes to us via one of the Kings of the Orient, who scatters a lot of frankincense which seems to have succeeded in befuddling the hagiographers but which I regard as yet a further admirable maneuver on the part of the great artificer Peter Handke to sell a large hunk of disparate material, as a yet one further Handke trick to divert the reading of the book as just a big box full of left-overs and make the reader hunt for a non-existence unity; Melchior who ought to have been named Caspar for the clown he is!
MORAVIAN NIGHT, rather than any kind of torturously forced unity, is better and more accurately regarded as a hybrid between a Handkean epic and one of his other great endeavors, the condensations of his voluminous notebooks - e.g. the one for his three year wandering around the entire earth which is entitled most appropriately Gestern Unterwegs - Yesterday, On the Road - and such a hybrid cannot really be judged, as I have judged Handke’s other books, as he has asked - in the Jamesian way - on their own terms, since I cannot decipher what the term might be in this instance, overall, despite the prevalence of certain themes, at least one of which, the Balkan is woven to completion, whereas most of the others dangle all over the place and there are lots of beginnings of things that never exceed beyond germination; whereas individual sections, many of of which could be published independently, are judgeable indeed. - The clue to what Handke is up to came to me when I ran across his comment that Goethe had tossed all kinds of stuff into his last major prose effort, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering, no end of seeming left-overs, and therfore, if judge I must the book as a whole, I can do so only as an unfinished, purposely so, collage, in as much as one person’s account of a year or so travels to significant places can be tied into any kind of neat whole.
Handke, a hard-working genius by my estimate, has been thinking of himself as on the order of Goethe, if not from the very start of his career, certainly so since the early 90s when he completed My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, in one year, and grandiose as that estiamte may seem, I myself concur that but for his lacks as a lyric poet he is not that far off with respect to prose and a number of his dramas.
The extraordinarily artful gradualist manner in which the arrival of the various guests at the boat is described will lead the general reader, unaware of Handke as trickster, to assume, anticipate that - like the invited guests - of which the readers are made to regard themselves - they will be treated to, as in Handke’s shorter books and epic elaborations, to a fairly straight-forward story, that might induce changes in their states of mind, might take them to grammatically unimagined territory, make them experience text as film - and indeed MORAVIAN NIGHT is a textbook of how to do narrative of all kinds and contains examples of Handke’s augmented prose techniques - and will - for sure - make them far more perceptive than they are ordinarily, will be a projection screen and provide a unique experience. For that is what Handke does, he creates, invents fairly unique experiences, these are all unique creations, he has been doing so for fifty years, be it as a dramatist or prose writer, as of his start as a writer in the mid-60s, and I have found it is best to approach his work in mind with Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation: let the experience sink in, then analyze it and how it was produced, what kind of text was it that did that? Literary categories do not get you, or at least me, very far in this case, are mis-leading. E.G. You wouldn’t expect that experiencing plays such as The Ride Across Lake Contance or The Hour We Knew Anything of Each Other would induce catharses in the audience, that your clock would feel cleaned out.
One discovery along these lines with MORAVIAN NIGHT will be that unlike Handke’s other novels, or “Erzaehlung” - narrative - as he calls these accounts of wanderings (circuitously as it were in showing the six sides of an artist in NO-MAN’S-BAY, reprieving a schoolboy’s search for his uncle in Slovenia, in THE REPETION) or in this instance yet another saga that features a fair amount of wandering - but all over the place - a roundabout one year trip to five different countries - is anything but straight forward but merely sequentially connected yet frequently thematically, but not invariably, the connection chiefly runs through the happenstance that the narrator was at these locations, for a variety of reasons, and had a variety of interests and experiences at each, pretty typical of most people traveling all over the place during a twelve month period: some experiences are whole, other will remain unresolved, and then there is that host of clutter, one definition of life is that it is messy. That is, the reader’s final impression will be of having participated in a marvelous mess that yet might intrigue him to read a few other of an author’s work who writes, on occasion as magnificently as he does here. Handke augments the mess by suggesting via that King of the Orient that just because a story isn’t straight forward doesn’t mean that it does not hold water, and at least one Handke hagiographer of dear acquaintance has swallowed the bait yet has failed to demonstrate how the mess holds together, how it is a bower, no matter all that stitching of all kinds of stuff, and thus feels that the bower is all about stitching, to which the bower bird tells him that he must be nuts to suggest that he and his wife would go to all that trouble as if they were entering a stitching competition, which at any event, in this instance, make them come out worst in show!
=II=
Mention of coincidence of place of significance to him, Peter Handke, and the protagonist of MORAVIAN NIGHT may be of no import to readers who know nothing of Handke and his life, and need only regard the protagonist as a fictional figure endowed with experience and sufficiently substantial fictional life - experiences & themes that do no hang together here and create confusion. German readers and reviewers, however, who know certain major features and the rough outline of Handke and his well-publicized life, will tread a different slippery slope as they note where the account coincides precisely as well as where it does not, where it has been altered, short-shrifted for whatever of a variety of reasons, but represent what I regard as a too cute and coquettish way of the author having his cake - his cleaned up image - and admiring it too;
which brings us to the underlying purpose of Handke’s endeavor as a whole, which I suggest, for a grand and obviously supremely gifted and hard-working exhibitionist is to create, to have created meanwhile, what I call the Yoknapatawpha of his Self - in analogy to the imaginary county where William Faulkner situates the characters of his many books whereas Peter Handke's self and its wishes are anything but imaginary - and ought not manifest all too many but just some warts or complications, the HANDKE MUSEUM FOR OUR LIVING CLASSIC! It is a discovery I made more than twenty years ago when I noticed and realized - upon seeing how THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN links up with MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN’S BAY. Thus, MORAVIAN NIGHT is yet one further major part - or rather collection, slew of small parts - of this life long literary exhibition-manifestation and of turning of oneself into a living classic, a life-long “preparation for immortality" indeed, as are these many left overs, that fill out a few spots in the puzzle - the theme of idiocy for example, Handke the very high-end autist’s sense of affinity with them, that he at one point considered making the subject of one of his essays and which is a frequent momentary theme in numerous books of his throughout the years and that have been stuffed, still incompleted, into into this quilt, as are frequent indications of self-consciousness; as well as those moments when the account of Peter Handke and the protagonist differ, because the protagonist’s image is preferred.
There may be a fair amount of what can be called self-criticism - via the woman’s observation - in MORAVIAN NIGHT - the ex-author calling himself a “mama’s boy” or emotionally cold “as a salamander” - but self-critique cannot be said to have become self-understanding and change in character, therefore, being most unlikely; and even with self-understanding - how deep?
The image that achieves the most extensive massaging here is that of the protagonist as failing as a lover of the unenumerated women he became involved with, and doing so despite knowing that they posed a threat to his work. The protagonist recounts incidents where he nearlly killed a lover that is parallel to a notorious incident in Peter Handke’s life, and whose admission here is what I regard as a tactical admission to turn the admission into an attack on the woman, whose pursuit he allegedly could not endure without committing criminal violence - if it were Peter Handke talking here he would have to cite numerous other acts of violence, ill temper, he might have to seek the reason for that streak of violence, which the close reader will notice over the years manifests itself in a most powerful yearning for absolution from that internal threat.
Thus Chapter IV’s account leads to numerous further allusions - as of the opening of MORAVIAN NIGHT - of an Erinye hiding in the Morawa reeds pursuing the ex-author and forcing the boat to occasionally change its mooring. The theme of paranoia from a pursuing woman in Handke’s work goes back to the wife pursuing the German writer in Short Letter Long Farewell, rears up in No-Man’s-Bay - and if you happened to know Handke and his then wife Libgart Schwartz it became quickly apparent that the wife would leave the insulting multiply philandering husband and it turned out “cold as salamander” when writing writer as she then did in short order with the consequence that such leaving became “the worst thing that ever happened” to Peter Handke, that he suffered increasing panic attacks that landed him in a hospital, not that the lesson so administered it home, for the second mother of yet another daughter, Sophie Semin, also split, and for the same reason, without sending Handke back into the hospital; and he achieved what he failed to with Libgart Schwartz, the wife was won back and Handke and she got smart and live in separate residences, and all has been well - “Praise the Lord!” - and now that the author claims to be an ex it is not too surprising that he can imagine living with a woman once again, and in harmony, aboard THE MORAVIAN NIGHT.
In the claims that the ex-author makes here he fails to recall that yet another Handke protagonist, whose company he must have kept at one point, the Don Juan of Don Juan as told by himself, was not just a philanderer par excellence but the object of an endless stream of beauties that sought to share his bed or rug; and so the ex-author-protagonist ought not to blame himself, or not too much, for living in an unusually promiscuous time that ensued upon introduction of the birth control pill. At any event, Handke’s womanizing got him into a lot of hot water since women are also invariably, property of, be it father’s husband, boyfriends, and these troubles can last generations, as fables tell!
In other respect the ex-author’s peroration - why it is so problematic for an artist, or a scientist, who is always “cooking” and was Handke ever cooking as a young man - a diary entry every five minutes when you were with him - is not really problematic, since it is so generally couched. In the interview on the occasion of MORAVIAN NIGHT’S publication he claims never to have been an obsessive writer,
yet admits to not even remembering everything that he wrote in MORAVIAN NIGHT, and evidently not his
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-handke-interview-on-occasion-of-its.html
published diary entries either when he was a young man where he has daughter Amina noting “Daddy you are writing again.”
=III=
MORAVIAN NIGHT’s first words - “every country has its Samarkand and its Numancia” - wafts hints of the once fabulous Silk Samarkand, the introduction of the crossroad theme - and the possibly welcome air of the fabled, of a fairy tale into the proceedings and, toward the end of the book - after half a dozen changes of location in five countries and non-linearity but linear individual stories, readers will find themselves in a New Samarkand - in that huge crossroad Central Europe - that adjoins what the knowledgeable German reader will identify as the author Peter Handke’s G. K. for Graz and Klagenfurtz and G. for home village Griffen-Voelkermarkt in Carinthia - few bones are made in the identifications matter here - a once Roman province, that is not only chock-a-block with new construction and minarets and is not yet grown beautiful in the eyes of its beholders - MORAVIAN NIGHT was completed in 2007 - a refugee-filled region with the homeless camping in the woods who, as in the United States, invariably favor blue tarps for shelter. The section set in the Hartz mountains in Germany is yet another crossroad and has a fairly-tale quality, but of a distopian kind. By that point,too, at about Chapter 10 of the books twelve - the final two a kind of slow fade - readers may have realized that their arrival at New Samarkand has been anything but straight forward or complete, the experience - no matter that the book at that point pretends to have been nothing more than a mirage - will feel a bit raw, they may wish that the author complete the uncompleatable collage, this reader would welcome the MORAVIAN NIGHT being unloosed at the Morawa, traveling into the Danube and adventure through Bulgaria and Rumania until it reaches the Black sea.
HERE THE LINK TO THE ADDENDUM
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/addendum.html
English language reviews
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/10/english-language-reviews.html
- German
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2012/11/german-reviews-of-moravian-night.html
& other foreign
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2012/11/french-review-of-la-nuit-morave.html
+
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/08/italian-spanish-reviews-of-moravian.html
are starting to appear, and not only the short and favorable pre-review notices. The NY Times did not disappoint with the same kind of idiot moralizing we have seen before:
“ 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 Handke’;s fater and stepfather surivived 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, 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 the antenae for Handke’s sense of humor about himself he might also get off his high horse. 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
Fellow Handke translator Scott Abbott
http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-slow-inquiring-narration.html
with half dozen major themes staring him in the face concentrated, speciously - as is his and his profession’s wont - on “narrative” as being MORAVIAm NIGHT’S subject! And it turns out the good man hates being challenged,I was told to “fuck off” in short order and called “a Melchior” - I wonder whether uncricial adulation of Handke hagiographers like Abbott & Gregor Keuschnig-Lothar Struck’s actually do Handke any good?
It would be wonderful if some the serious critics now weighed in.
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