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THE HISTORY OF AN INVESTIGATION: PART I OF 4
THE CASE OF PETER HANDKE
“Das laesst sich alles vom autobiographischen aufrollen” … Handke to Herbert Gamper, Ich Lebe doch nur von den Zwischenrauemen. [1]
The author, in the form of an account
of a series of puzzlements, discoveries and clarifications,
presents the case of the author Peter Handke & the effects of chronic
childhood exposure to violent primal scenes as they are played out on the background of an autistic sensibility, a problematic configuration much ameliorated by Handke’s having been his mother’s love child. The fractured as well as intact family relationships, under circumstances of considerable financial distress during war time, lend special poignancy to these early years which nonetheless coincided with the future author’s assertive withdrawal into a world of reading, and the good fortune of an excellent education. Subsequently, however, at the height of his early success, the problematics which with his early traumata had endowed Handke would reassert themselves during a period of multiple catastrophes. The crisis, in its entirety, elicited a possibly inevitable reaction formation which led, first, to a gradual return to his home country, Austria, as well as to a considerable transformation in Handke’s way of writing. With respect to the latter, a going back to the classics and the acquisition of his mother’s mother-tongue proves especially interesting, as does a consolidation of a super-ego modeled on the early acquaintance with his mother’s father. This period, marked as it was, how ever, by relapses into earlier modes of grandiosity, has been succeeded by a rapprochement with Handke’s earlier modernist writing, now reinforced with ancient usages, and an apparently good enough second marriage. This unique and fascinating case of a severely challenged hard-working and ambitious genius raises interesting questions regarding the effect of the interrelationship of a variety of trauma, of artistic overcoming, and super-ego and identity formation through the acquisition of a language.
Regarded from a host of psycho-analytic perspectives, the Austro-Slovenian author Peter Handke is as extraordinary a case” as he is an author. As a matter of my experience, the exploration of the individual aspects of this case”, as well as the complexity that ensues on some contemplation of their interrelatedness, have availed this particular investigator an entirely unanticipated education.
As is well known in literary lore, at a conference of the Gruppe 47 in Princeton in 1966, Handke, while asserting his way of doing things, made a famous whole-scale attack on the kind of writing that he found lacking. Three matters were noticeable about this event for my approach: the powerful, yet typically so interestingly initial tentative [FN-2] self-assertion, at age 24, within a group very much his elders, a Beatelish mode of dress that differentiated him sharply from the majority of the others participants, and especially the confounding wholesale nature of his condemnation. The separation individuation, the self-assertion, and confidence, the sense of justice that appeared to propel him, and the sweeping nature of his attacks have remained characteristic throughout a career which has transited through five different phases which are marked by achievements of increasing complexity and stronger differentiations. Subsequent to Princeton, one would learn that one of Handke’s early dreams had been to grace the cover of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, an indication of his great need both for self-display as well as for mirroring approval. He does not take well to criticism and regards himself as his own best and harshest critic.
Within some days of seeing Handke so display himself I met him at an evening party, a Carnation in his checkered shirt carnation, and wearing tinted sunglasses. On being asked by a New Yorker, which I was then, why he wore glasses in such unusually well-modulate surroundings, that is, about ten years before I read the line nausea of
the eyeballs” in one of his poems, he said that he had eye problem; that was 15 years before reading, in The Lesson of St. Victoire [1980- FN-3] that he suffered from bouts of occasional color blindness and that, best he knew, this condition was not to be found in any of his German, Austrian or Slovenian family members. At the party I also became aware that, no matter how sophisticated and intriguing a writer Handke might be, he could also be what in ordinary language is called a happily grinning childishly sadistic village idiot.”
Some years later, in 1969, on meeting Handke again, in Berlin this time, and not as his host but as his delighted and much impressed American translator, editor and occasional director of his early plays, at that time up to and including Kaspar, the author [1] made it a point to show off the fruit of his marriage with the Austrian actress Libgart Schwartz, a baby called Amina, and on reading his 1981 A Child’s Story [FN-4] subsequently congratulated myself on being someone who liked to have babies shown to him as compared to more revolutionary visitors who incurred the author’s wrath by having more important things on their agenda than baby watching; that [2] Handke seemed to be an aficionado of the music of Bob Dylan, who then was so well evoked for being so namelessly memorialized in the San Francisco section of the 1979 text A Slow Homecoming, and whose Lay Lady Lay my ears were surprised to encounter in Berlin on entering the Prince’s apartment, barren except for stacks of newspapers; that [3] Handke, like myself, much preferred the great outdoors to confinement in a room with another person; and that, [4] although it was possible to engage in an unusually pleasurable and productive correspondence with Handke, en face he proved, at least for me, a difficult conversationalist.
At the official American premiere of some of his plays in the early 70s in New York and during a reading tour during which Handke was accompanied by his first wife and the Graz impresario Alfred Kolleritch
it became evident that my original impression of a singular lack of social couth had been correct; but also that Handke could be unpleasantly ungrateful and arrogant; that he was insultingly neglectful of his wife, seeming to be married to his buddy from Graz, that he preferred the Hotel Algonquin, of many writer’s but particularly Fitzgerald fame, to the more modest one that the Austrian cultural services had assigned him, at how easily, to the point of vocalizing his nausea, he was upset by physically unattractive features, how prescient he could be in his evaluation of people, once again of his sense of justice, but especially by the stupendous vigor with which a 21 readings in 28 days performance trip throughout the United States had endowed him, as compared to leaving the Austrian Dramaturg [Kolleritch] of Short Letter Long Farewell [which in inverted and playful fashion memorializes this event] hyper-ventilating and the wife collapsing on a bed; a tour which, as I would hear 20 years later, left wounded memories at many U.S. German departments whom he happily and merrily insulted, and that our author’s first impulse on being back in New York was to go check the international news stands, my subsequent presumption being to see whether his face was on the cover of one or the other magazine. But the most strikingly memorable event of that unusual visit occurred one afternoon with Handke, the honored guest, in mid-sentence turning away from a conversation with me and with the well-disposed critics Richard Gilman and Stanley Kaufman, and going to squat down by my record player, just like a woman! it occurred to me, that is, in the kind of half-squat in which we can see him on the photo where he is sorting photos, and putting on a soothing Beatles record.
Subsequent visits with Handke at his Paris residences and in Salzburg or his 70s visits to New York were mere elaborations of these initial impressions: difficult of conversation, hyper-sensitive and amazingly prescient correspondent, yet puzzlingly averse to the
presence of anyone in a room with him for more than five minutes, though these brief encounters ended, invariably, with the odd wish that one ought to call him again, details of a kind which, like so many others, are acknowledged in his 1975 free associated diary-novel naked ego exhibition The Weight of the World as well as in the other books of his first Paris period, A Moment of True Feeling, Nonsense & Happiness & The Lefthanded Woman, pointing to no lack of self-awareness of these matters, and confirmed by the experiences of other visitors, so that one then did not feel unpleasantly singled out by being asked to leave after having trekked all the way to the faubourg to visit the cherished author; who, providing no oasis of any kind in Paris, so surprisingly, in his 2000 book Unter Traenen Fragend on his visits to the war-besieged Serbia expresses astonishment at Serbian hospitality. However, several incidents stand out in particular. On arriving one day at rue Montmorency if it should not transpire that I found Handke in the company of an Austrian Backfisch, so that we sat around awkwardly for a while until the usual Please call back”, and on so doing, if our man confessed that the Backfisch, too, had shown up again, and that he had been, a little diabolical as I can be” and disrobed in front of her, whereupon she had flushed. Shocked and puzzled I was when to my question why he had left the left playwrights collective Verlag der Autoren, whom I had represented at one time in the United States, he replied: They are all fascists”, and in the kind of righteous tone that may make you dubious whether that was all there was to this claim which I certainly could not corroborate.
Giving a 25th floor apartment in a downtown development with a splendid view of New York Harbor, and Jersey City to Handke during a 1975 visit with Amina if out man was not disparu within a day. When found, at the Algonquin, he exclaimed suicide building”. Not that
someone who would install himself up in the Hotel Adams to write A Slow Homecoming or who, as the Lefthanded Woman preferred to view of Paris from the Clamart escarpment and who would live in the Moenschberg castle in Salzburg for some seven years has a phobia of heights. My apartment building, one of the finer examples of that kind, was probably too modern; too much like the hated Le Defense. During a trip to the Rockaway Beach I noticed for the first time Handke’s habit of flashing his pencil and jotting into his notebook at any and all moments, this one happening to coincide with the sun setting like a molten battle ship in the south-west. These incidents of what struck me as fairly aberrational behavior transpired while Handke was assembling the spontaneous notations that became Weight of the World, although the two-week trip to New York and Southern California was then excerpted from this naked ego exhibition.” Taking Peter and Amina to the airport for their trip back to Paris he asked me if I would mind showing him a typical Long Island suburb and I found a quite unspectacular development not far East of JFK: and you must imagine how odd it struck me for him to pronounce this pastel compromise, not a Levittown development, more along the line of small /// beautiful; that is around the time that he was also working on The Lefthanded Woman, which, read autobiographically, the more so in light of the recapitulation of this theme of moving to the outskirts of town in My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, makes utterly good internal as well external sense, also in light of my visits to Handke’s second Parisian abode in the Clamart/Meudon region, whence the Lefthanded Woman looks out over Paris, and which is memorialized in Handke’s film of that book, the way station to the no man’s bay. However, I could not help but notice the prematurely silent six-year-old Amina, explanation for which can then be found in Weight of the World & in A Child’s Story. Amina took a napkin that had written on it I am a bad girl” and dipped it into a glass of water whereupon the
writing dissolved.” The daughter had learned at an early ago to appease her overly severe, invariably scribbling, occasionally spanking dad. Taking the dwarf star of a songwriter Jerry Leiber, who was supposed to compose some songs for the production of They Are Dying Out, with me on to visit Handke in Paris, produced the singular line I don’t do singspiel” from our man, but subsequently elicited the analytically honed observation, from Leiber, that Handke had an extreme case of swollenheadedness, a characteristic I was seemed to be taking so much for granted that I did not even noticed it any more. On the return from Colorado, where Handke had gone, after his return from his last trip to Alaska, but prior to writing A Slow Homecoming, which I was under the impression would be just an Alaska book, he was so different from the proud and confident person who had flown off, initially to San Francisco I believe, that after reading the Colorado section of A Slow Homecoming I concluded that a real Austrian ski-instructor friend whom he had meant to visit at a resort had died, Handke was so down”. That is not to say, that the person who had not only read A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, A Moment of True Feeling and Weight of the World but who had translated the parallel poems Nonsense & Happiness might not have been more understanding of the writer’s then difficulties despite the there professed wish that he feared nothing as much as the expression of sympathy. Afforded the opportunity to test my man’s playfulness on my one visit to Handke’s abode on the Moenschberg in Salzburg, he proved not playful and a sore loser, at cards. WATV QUOTES/ A SORE LOSER. BARNABUS REX/ UNPLAYFUL/ LOSER’S ROCK In other words: these incidents correspond to features of Handke’s work during that period, are outer manifestations of variously temporary or fairly permanent characteristics of Handke’s inner/outerworld that would be transformed and recorded verbally; and are matters that he was quite unhappy with...
II
Well along the second stage of my own analysis and reviewing Handke’s 1984 novel Der Chinese des Schmerzens, published in English as Across, a title that misleadingly emphasizes the Nazi killing moment of the book, yes, that, and on beginning to read with a variety of psychoanalytically oriented dimensions, I was struck by the protagonist Loser’s saying No” when so very apparently he ought to have said yes”.
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The History or Story Behind My Site
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A son/s long good-bye
About the writings of Peter Handke
(until Die Wiederholung, 1986)
Karl-Erik Tallmo
Only a few, if any, of those who attended the literary seminar at Princeton in 1966, probably believed in a literary future for this 23 year old Austrian newbie with a Beatles hair-cut, who had crossed the Atlantic to attack celebrities like Guenter Grass, Peter Weiss and Siegfried Lenz. Peter Handke/s talk about the =descriptive impotency= of literature seemed at the time to be merely a juvenile/s urge for attention.
Handke/s first novel, =Die Hornissen=, had been published that same year, and after the visit to Princeton, his play =Publikumsbeschimpfung= (=Offending the audience=, transl. Michael Roloff, London, 1971) was staged. Considering that this play belonged to the experimental scene, its success was tremendous. Handke had turned the communicative act of the stage ninety degrees, and all of a sudden, the actors were addressing the audience, they even commanded it and abused it. =These boards do not represent a world=, the actors say at the beginning of the piece. Everything at the theater is just what it seems to be, the stage floor, the curtain; nothing needs interpretation. The absense of a door does not mean that this is supposed to depict some sort of =lacking door problem=.
The early novels and plays all exploit this insight that language is actually the only reality literature truly may represent. Sometimes Handke combined texts in a concretist fashion, letting styles clash. For instance, he interlaced a law text with parenthetically inserted reactions from the audience - like when Lenin/s or Stalin/s speeches were published in the Soviet union: =thunderous applause=, =amused laughter= etc.
In =Die Hornissen=, a person keeps fragments of a novel stored in his memory. In such a way fiction is doubled and even self-revoking, since the reader constantly wonders what is the novel and what is the novel/s novel. In =Der Hausierer= from 1967, the plot of a detective story is first outlined and later followed, the result, again, being a narrative, voluntarily abstaining from suggestive power, instead generously exhibiting its own mechanisms.
In November of 1971, Peter Handke suffered a personal loss. Maria Handke, his 51 year old mother, committed suicide. In a short letter she explained that it was =inconceivable to go on living=. Only a few months later, Handkes grief after this blow resulted in a small book, =Wunschloses Unglueck= (=A sorrow beyond dreams: a life story=, transl. Ralph Manheim, New York, 1975). Handke shows us a both intimate and distant view of the emotional poverty that obviously prevailed in his family. Particularly his mother sustained an almost total lack of identity. The word =individual= was used as an invective only, to be =special= was to be odd.
Several critics were delighted to read a more tender, less abstract Handke, one who dared to include bluntly autobiographical material. In his book =Romane als Krankengeschichten= psychoanalyst Tilman Moser claims that Handke is fullfilling his symbiotic duty to his mother, a duty she at an early stage had delegated to him: he was to give her the identity she had lacked all of her life, posthumously through his writings. That is certainly a heavy burden for anyone to bear. In this book, it seems to me, Handke is showing us a well-embedded rage over this heritage of poverty, inhibition and unsolved problems that his mother left for him, but at the same time, there is an ambivalence, since this is the very conflict that makes him a writer. Thus, this duality is perpetually masked, now as defense of the literary aspect, now as defense of the memory of the dead.
There is an aggressive momentum already in the German title: =Wunschloses Unglueck= alludes not only to complete misfortune, but also to a misfortune leaving nothing to wish for. Wolfram Mauser is on to this track when he, also from a psychoanalytical standpoint, scrutinizes Handke/s work in =Der Deutschunterricht= 5/1982. He even maintains that the book in its entirety is a psychological defense - the narrator creates a person out of his collected frustrations and finally lets it stand in for his mother.
Handke used another technique for =Stunde der wahren Empfindung= 1975 (=A moment of true feeling=, transl. Ralph Manheim, New York, 1977). He walked the streets, taking notes on loose scraps, which became valuable puzzle pieces when he later sat down to render the scattered inner life of Gregor Keuschnig. Keuschnig belongs to the corps diplomatique of Austria in Paris, but after a dream, where he commits a murder, he looses his foothold and lets impulse take command and lead him all over the city. He experiences =the true feeling= alternately with an inexplicable emptiness and anger. Handke/s true feeling is, however, not at all kindered with the Joycean epiphany, which is an enhanced feeling for life. With Keuschnig it is but a fickle experience of being alive at all; out of a condition characterized by exclusion and unreality, suddenly a temporary contact with life is established, with both the inner and outer world, and particularly with the self, that connects those two poles.
Tilmann Moser thinks that Handke/s portrait of Keuschnig is a very precise clinical description of the borderline patient/s fluctuation between illusions of grandeur and an all-encompassing experience of void and worthlessness. To shape this special kind of sensibility, Handke nurtures a sort of urban superstition, similar to the magical thinking, typical of the borderline disorder; chance is charged with meaning, =secret understandings= occur all of a sudden aboard on buses etc.
=Langsame Heimkehr= 1979 (=Slow homecoming=, transl. Ralph Manheim, New York, 1985) marked the beginning of a new period in Handke/s writing. Now he lets nature represent mental states, with a consistency and almost religious solemnity that brings to mind Georg Buechner and his depiction of the vogesian mountain country in =Lenz=. The main character Sorger is a geologist but preoccupied with =the search for forms, their distinction and description, apart from the landscape /.../ where this often painful, in between enjoyable, activity was his profession=.
This is a good description of Handke/s own literary project, as he explains it in the interview book =Aber Ich lebe nur von dem Zwischenräumen=, published in 1987. Obviously, Handke now writes in a more and more intuitive way, he says the first sentence of the book took him three days to complete. This was, however, a necessary starting point for his account of the departure from Alaska, which was supposed to fill ten pages but grew to last for ninety. Sorger had to visit several places before he could return home. The plane had just descendend through the clouds covering Europe, when Handke suddenly realized that the book was finished.
Sometimes language is even more essential than time, in getting from one moment to another, and this goes for both Handke as author and for his characters. To =narrate= is an existential need. In several interviews Handke points out that he regards himself not as a storyteller but as reteller; the world consists of signs to write down. Many people say that you must read Handke with the eyes of a writer, but at the same time he claims that he writes like a reader.
Handke had the same sensitivity for his own text while he worked on =Die Wiederholung= 1986 (=Repetition=, transl. Ralph Manheim, New York, 1988). He thought of it as completed many times, but then decided to go on. The narrator, Filip Kobal, of Slovenian origin like Handke, grew up in a small village in Kärnten in the south of Austria. Here he remembers a journey he made in the early 60/s, when he was 20 years old and crossed the border to Yugoslavia in search for his brother, who had disappeared many years earlier.
Handke is fascinated by the _expression =being conspicuous by one/s absence=. In the Kobal family the brother gains a remarkable presence through his constantly awaited return. The disappeared brother is a void that Filip may fill with projections and expectations ad libitum. Every time he needs calm and strength, he evokes the inner image of his brother, and this happens frequently, since the misery of the Kobalian household is almost parodic; the father always angry and grumbling, the mother sick and the sister distracted.
One recognizes biographical data from earlier books, although certain facts have been altered (the brother, for instance, seems to be a portrait of Handke/s maternal uncle). Linguistically, Filip is split in his identification between his father/s German and his brother/s Slovenian. This probably also represents the ambivalence Handke feels himself, when it comes to the German language, which, in the words of George Steiner, =created, organized and exculpated Belsen=. Already the lack of a passive voice in Slovienian is something the young Kobal regards as hopeful for the future.
Kobal is also travelling the strange karst land of northern Yugoslavia, a world of subterranean torrents, caves and dripstones. The story almost loses its steerage-way at times here, and the reader/s patience is severely tried. This novel is not one of Handke/s best, although there are some very fascinating passages, e.g. the brother/s annotations about how to graft different brands of apple trees, or the account of the Slovenian dictionary, which almost turns into a philosophical tract, yet with an unusual poetry budding out of the very raw material of language.
Those mystical, implicit understandings appear in this book too. First there is a servant, whose unbroken attention and incessant care become subject to Filip/s adoration: =Once he stood in the night, in the unfurnished, empty room, stock still, gazing ahead, then he stepped forward, up to a remote niche, where he executed a small tender twist on the decanter, so that the entire house was filled with hospitality.=
At an outdoor party an unsuspecting girl arouses Filip/s admiration, and while the table cloth gets colored more and more deeply red by falling mulberries, he =marries= her in his fantasy, without one word being uttered.
=Slow homecoming= is the first novel where Handke addresses his main characters, he even sometimes turns to the narrative itself: =Oh story, /.../ grant us grace.= Sometimes Handke/s style is archaic, his intonation adopts to that of the fairy tale. This tendency is even more apparent in his next novel, =Die Abwesenheit=, 1987 (=Absence=, transl. Ralph Manheim, New York, 1990). Handke looks upon himself as a reteller. Maybe this could explain his urge towards pastiche.
Finally: The more glimpses you get from Handke/s own biography, the more you understand of the apparently empty and formalistic experiments in his early plays and poems. Maybe they depict the childs lack of a functioning language within an aggressive adult world that is permeated by ambiguous messages and humiliation. If you read for instance =Publikumsbeschimpfung= as a family drama, where the grown-ups command the children in the same way as the actors try to control even how the audience is breathing, then almost every line becomes unbearably ambiguous and upsetting.
Too bold as it may sound, I still would like to introduce an even more specific reading. Should it not be substantiated in Handke/s own biography, it is nevertheless an interesting angle that casts a different light on the bulk of Handke/s Ïuvre. Publikumsbeschimpfung= and several other works, or parts of works, need not be interpreted as just any family drama, but as precisely that scolding which children most likely are subject to after having witnessed the Freudian primal scene; their parents having sexual intercourse.
Try to read Handke/s books again with this in mind! Almost every closed room might be a bedroom, almost every enigma or unsolved problem could be connected with the mystery of one/s own conception, which happened during such a primal scene. The goalie, Bruno, Keuchnig, Sorger and all the others - surely they were all witnesses!
In retrospect Handke/s literary production through the years stand out as remarkably consistent, not to say persistent, and he spent the greater part of the 70/s and 80/s trying to define an independent role for his writing, outside of his dead mother/s jurisdiction.
Her short suicide note certainly resulted in a long literary good-bye for him.
(This is a slightly rewritten version of an article originally published in Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet of Sept. 23rd 1988.)
Copyright Karl-Erik Tallmo, 1988, 1995.
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