Sunday, June 28, 2009
The "FUGUEING" Section from Part II of the Psycho-Analytic Monograph on Peter Handke
Subject: III-c FUGUEING section of the Handke psycho-bio monograph Part II
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:01:14 -0700
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Part II is done but for the notes, here is the section on "fugueing" and the three poems from Nonsense and Happiness I noodled over for some weeks. Also as an attachment. Comments appreciated. xx m.r.
=II-C
Fugueing
And then, not that long after Handke’s mother commits suicide, his wife Libgart Schwartz disparu [“the worst thing that ever happened” he told a mutual acquaintance, a woman. I would say: not by a long shot of the decade long childhood trauma, but perhaps since]. The language regulation for this event becomes that Libgart has decided to resume her acting career, which the slightly older Libgart cannot be said to have ever dropped. She had just recently acted in the film that Wim Wender’s made of Handke’s Goalie. Libgart Schwartz and Peter Handke are legally divorced many years later, just prior to Handke consummating his second marriage with a wedding trip [some wedding trip!] with the first of his Yugoslav war adventures which will result in the book A Winter’s Journey to the Rivers: Or Justice for Serbia during which his second legal wife, Sophie Semin asks that famous question, indicating Handke’s awareness of his proclivity for denial, “and so you doubt that, too” [referring to the shelling of Dubrovnik – see anon] and see:
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com
the Milosevic controversy summarized]
Handke’s second wife Sophie Semin also leaves Handke, around the time of the premiere of The Play about the Film about the War [1999] in Vienna where this model turned actress had a part, for a fellow actor, but without eliciting the same kind of fugueing disastrous consequences for my pasha’s pride as the first of at least one other disappearance, that of Marie Colbin, did. Handke said in an interview that he was not at all happy about Semin’s leaving. However, my Serbian grape vine has it that he already had a Serbian for a main squeeze at that time and that Ms. Semin and daughter Laocadie had already moved out of the unhappy-making Forêt de Chaville abode. - “Quelle horreur!”]
Thus, in the early 70s, Handke not only looses both mother and wife in short order but becomes house mother father to a most constraining but ultimately salvaging infant child [more on that anon, too]; his life disintegrates at a moment when he is at the peak of early success - he must have had two or three bestsellers at that time: Short Letter Long Farewell, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Innerworld of the Outerworld, and his plays are all the rage! And he had accomplished all this – a life’s work for many a genius – in little more than five years! And our jaunty haughty enraged fellow is laid low. And it takes him about another five years to hit a new and quite different stride. At least money is not a problem nor is time for himself, although in fact all that time by himself may be t h e problem of problems in the sense that he can dwell and noodle and doodle at length in his state of misery, which he might not at a job, on these blows which then elicit a prolonged and severe nearly five year crisis, personally, and in his work, which now becomes more immediately personal, or at any event: very differently and more directly auto-biographically tinged than were his prior self-state revealing works
Handke writes himself out of this crisis, sort of - let us never forget that the Handke writing machine needs to write most of the time to stay calm and well and so heals himself - which lasts from Fall 1971 – from Sorrow Beyond Dreams to The Left-Handed Woman - about 1976 “with a little help” [a therapeutician in Paris, a panic attack and brief hospital stay, some pills, Valium] – “working through” an analyst would call these series of attempts, a writer’s, a very particular writer’s way of working through – especially the three long poems in Nonsense and Happiness and the suicidal novel A Moment of True Feeling and the collection of spontaneous diary entries that is Weight of the World [W.O.W.] as a way to regain control, and get to the fulfillment of long-laid plans, and some, but limited, self-understanding: I think if you read or re-read W.O.W. it might occur to you that the writer of this cumulation of mostly depressive entries [which however surprisingly ends for me and some other readers in lifting us out of the depressive state that this nearly preternaturally depressive’s text has put you in] might conclude that he needed to change his life, as Handke then gradually did. [“Working through”, the labora verimus of the procedure, involves, using Freud’s metaphor, the gradual examination of the numerous bone fragments – and their dimensionality is nearly legion - that a fracture leaves in its wake. My proposition is that through writing Handke more or less accomplished what is called “working through,” halfway, imperfectly, as we can see how much the same person, though a far better writer Handke is, by the time of Across [Chinese des Schmerzens] in 1984, at which point a painterly element has become part of his style. He regained his self-control, as a writer he can not be said to have lost it, though I have no idea how many drafts it took so that he felt the three poems of N+H and A.M.T.F. were what he wanted. The plan for A Slow Homecoming seems to have been hatched during the period of recovery, though the idea of Alaska I think is much earlier even…
One question to which I do not have the answer, only a suspicion, is whether Libgart Schwartz left with or for another man, which would have been more injurious to my pasha’s pride. My guess is yes, and is so for two reasons: it was evident in New York in 1971 that any half-way attractive man’s slightest beckoning would have sufficed for the neglected and insulted “woman” to split from the obnoxious and neglectful hero of Short Letter Long Farewell, who though he evidently sensed her emotional longing [expressed in the novel as a physical pursuit] was unable to or chose not to respond; my second guess being that the way “The Left-Handed Woman” in the novella withdraws from her husband into tending her self and translating would have been a far less painful and shocking and more acceptable and comprehensible way of going about the leave-taking than what actually occurred, an admirable way of going about achieving independence from my man’s writerly perspective and self-interest, and thus a bit of wish fulfillment entered the imaginative conception of L.H.W., one of Handke’s chief strengths, the “as if,” those artistically useful states – products of the imagination are as capable of being analyzed as dreams, and like dream analysis come to an ultimately inconclusive end at the navel whence they have issued - may play into that so wonderfully and concretely imagined reversal which otherwise is bereft of profoundly autobiographical elements – but shows the extent of Handke’s ability as a writer to imagine what it is like to be a single woman, and that Handke used his Meudon view of gently rolling Paris hills and the general setting – also in the film - to become less constrained, more open-hearted, - tightness around the chest is another of Handke’s psycho-somatic symptoms - especially to become the kind of mytho-poeic writer that we see him becoming already in Short Letter Long Farewell: thus, the works of the 1971-76 period represent a break from the prior endeavors that resume with Left-Handed Woman and A Slow Homecoming. Handke’s childhood past, its consequences caught up with him then; not just his anaclytically absorbed depression, and the decade long anxiety inducing exposure to violent primal scenes,
his hypersensitivity makes him especially injurable to this sudden double nay triple whammy. The simple fact that he is the cause, at least of his wife’s leaving, even if that thought occurred to him, would provide little relief. It isn’t that he’s been victimized by a woman who really hates men; he is just one of those men who might lead some women to hate men, big diff!
The three sequential poems, Life without Poetry, Blue Poem + Nonsense and Happiness, the [title of the American edition
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0916354202/ref=sr_1_olp_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243829842&sr=1-3
composed over a three year period, I am going to regard here from the perspective of the psychological phenomenon called fugueing.
This condition, fugueing, a term also appropriate to these so musical musings, usually results from severe mental stress and may persist for several months [years in Handke’s case] and if one reads the three poems in succession – which were written in approximately sixty day periods each in the years 1972, 1973 and 1974 – three times the same tack in three years - one can tell what specific diurnal rhythm the fugueing had each day for Handke, these “nonsense attacks” over and over again, relieved by sudden disappearance, and reappearances, quite enough to drive anyone over the edge who is at their mercy, who is BEING LIVED BY THEM… and which appear to become progressively more severe. Moreover, what makes fugueing especially unpleasant is the inability to have any control over these states of mind, control being something that had become Handke’s forte, as you can see in Innerworld, and the early fear-overcoming works. [See the very long footnote at:
http://www.handke-trivia.blogspot.com
on “Turk” [Singular and Plural] one of the poems from Innerworld where I try to show what the author does for himself [and an empathic reader] in overcoming an incursion of anxiety, exemplary for many works of that period, from Der Hausierer, to Radio Play One, My Foot My Tutor, etc, etc.] These are very concrete manifestations of how Handke the artist becomes surrogate.
Not only does Handke fugue in and out of depressive states that verge on the suicidal into idyllic moments in these three long poems, but his hyper-sensitivity, now especially wounded, becomes hyper-irritated, irritations apparently entirely mood dependent, surfacing from what we would call the system unconscious. Yes, reading these three poems in sequence as I did again just now you would call them first of all moody, but also musical, filled as they are with murderous and suicidal moments, disgust, extreme nausea, hyper irritations, feelings of utter worthlessness and nonsensicality. Nearly all the same matters that he cites in his Essay on Tiredness as enraging and then tiring him as an adolescent also appear in this instance. The first of these poems, Life without Poetry, initially manifests to me the same mood or lack thereof, the same deadened state of mind in which Sorrow Beyond Dreams was composed in late 1971, it issues out of that experience. Life was also written at about the time he did the acceptance speech for the Büchner Preis – the wish for a phenomenologically registering writing, along the line that he practices instead of the then prevalent political attacks via actionist concepts. The use of the word “concept” is a bit puzzling, since no end of words can be said to be mental concepts of what they signify. Handke means, first, the occupation by slogans, of a political kind, during this fervently leftist actionist period; then cliché formulas, the slippery stones of ordinary human communication:
“In the newspapers everything stood black on white and every phenomenon looked right from the start
like a concept
Only the cultural journals
still demanded conceptual exertions
were merely the dance of veils
before other dancing veils
The novels ought to be “violent” and poems “actions”
Mercenaries had strayed into the language and occupied every word
blackmailed each other
by using
concepts as passwords
and I became more and more speechless.”
Handke’s state of mind certainly is in no way usefully described in political concepts; medical and psychoanalytic concept are another matter: but they too, should wait. And so anyone who has followed me so far and who is interested on my take ought to read these three long poems in their entirety at least once, because here I provide only long chunks, divided by (…):and color coded, but only initially, roughly, to indicate the ups and downs of mood: green for up; purple for down; grey for intrusions of feelings of deadness, alexithemia in psychoanalytic terminology, white for nonsense or absurdity [which might be regarded as the manifestations of – unsuccessful - unconscious attempts at defense, attacks on the self. Incursions of aggression are marked in red. That is not to say, that the poems are devoid of instances of mixed feeling states! I am merely – merely! – providing some indices. I italicize indications of [often exteme] sensitivity to sensation. Let us never forget that these three poems are attempts to provide verbal equivalents of a writer’s subjective state of mind.
The first two poems, Life and Blue Poem, it will be noted, are composed in the same comparatively plain declarative poetic style, the third, Nonsense and Happiness, starts off and ends in a nearly rhetorical “high mode” reminiscent of the high style French poem of which it contains a quote –
“O desespoir! O villessee! O rage!...”
- Your eyes grow wide,
whatever you look at
LAUGHS
after such long nonsense, suddenly there was so much of the world’s abundance.
a citation that made the author snap out of his state when he came on it! An instance of cycling as it were. The abundance of poetry on a page in a typewriter! He recalls poetic world feeling making him want to write as an adolescent, now he needs to write to have a feeling for the world.
(As a boy when a feeling of the world overcame me
I only felt the desire tot WRITE something
now a poetic desire for the world usually
only occurs when I write something)
Literature, in general, I would hold, is a defensive operation, for Handke clearly a salvation, and “high mode” provides an upper register or valve in that endeavor!
Handke presented the three poems as an ongoing development of his Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld project, which is the primary vantage – equivalent to states of mind and being - into much of his work, especially the novelistic. I think Handke is absolutely correct in that presentation, but what a different innerworld than in the poems in the book of that title it is! The English educated world of course recalls T.S. Elliot’s notion of the “objective correlative”, of which the adjective may have become entirely questionable and irrelevant, but not the part that there exist related correspondences…
During these years 1971-73 Handke also completed the play They Are Dying Out [discussed on page 49] which I translated in 1974 and where he then made one change for the final version, altering a passage that manifested feelings to the more standard tough derisive cold tone that rules that play as well as the two prior novels, Goalie and Short Letter; and excusing himself to me, unnecessarily [the things writers then excuse themselves for!], that he had not been well and had lost his concentration. The therapeutician that Handke mentions seeing in Weight of the World points out to him that he seems to lack access to his feelings and Handke notes that he agreed, but if we read these three poems we note the incursions of feelings and their frequent soon disappearance, sympathy, if only for himself, and then none. He, something in him, was equivocating, but couldn’t really help the feeling coming on, overwhelming him, so it appears, to near tearfulness at moments. Life, written entirely in a well-to-do section of Kronberg, also shows how places enter Handke’s work, the degree to which someone so sensitive is also to his surroundings.
The writer knows that something is seriously off:
I’m really in a bad way
I know one shouldn’t stop like that
but there’s no alternative”
with precisely those words
- Speedy Gonzales of concepts –
- I wanted to stop
even before I started to write
But he is trapped in his fugueing!
“Blue Poem,” the second of the triptych is the most aggressive and down of the lot. There we see Handke visiting Paris [as he did to find an apartment] and then going off to visit a friend somewhere in Germany [perhaps Nicolas Born] “Life without Poetry” appears to be located entirely in the well to do bungalow suburb Kronenberg, and is the gentlest, comparatively. By “Blue Poem” Handke is in Paris, Paris street scenes, Metro scenes [the period those great physical fights with Jeanne Moreau – not exactly the woman you would chose if you needed a bit of succoring! Unless he had started having an affair even prior to his being left, which is quite conceivable in the instance of our then lay-a-broad. There is a lot of sadism and strength in Handke, and he takes pride in introducing sadistic payoffs into his texts, I can’t say I encounter even a whiff of masochism, the occasional pangs of conscience and self-berating are another matter.
From Life without Poetry
[October/November 1972, Kronberg]
“This fall time passed nearly without me
and my life stood as still as then
when I had felt so low
I wanted to learn to type
and waited evenings in the windowless ante-room
for the course to begin
The neon-tubes roared
and at the end of the hour
the plastic covers were pulled back over the type-writers.
I came and went and
would have not been able to say anything about myself.
I took myself so seriously that I noticed it,
I was not in despair merely discontent.
I had no feeling for myself and no feeling for anything else. (…)
A diary I wanted to keep
consisted of a singe sentence
“I’d like to throw myself into an umbrella”
and even that I hid in shorthand
The sun has been shining for four weeks
and I have been sitting on the terrace
and to everything that crossed my mind
and to everything I saw
I only said “yes yes” (…)
”The longer I think the more Siberian the wind that blows through my head”
I read in James Hadley Chase (…)
I had the need to love someone
but when I imagined it in detail
I became discouraged
In The Man Without Qualities I reached the sentence “Ulrich examined the man”
(“man”, too, Musil meant disparagingly)
when nausea stopped me from reading on
That perhaps was a sign that things were looking up for me
Occasionally I thought of my child
and went to him
only to show him that I was still there
Because I had such a guilty conscience
I spoke very distinctly to him (…)
At that time in summer
when the grass was still dense and long colorful toys lay strewn about in it
and someone said
“That lies there like a child’s dream”
(Before I wrote that
I had to laugh very intimately
But it fit the facts –
and without conceptual exertion)
My sister came from Austria
and at once began to clean
and to put the house in order
Grumpily I watched
how she filled my tea cup to the brim
Then I remembered that all poor people
do that when they have guests
and felt so sad that I became strange to myself (…)
I wasn’t completely inactive
started a kindergarten with others
applied for membership in a club
but those were merely ornaments of my dozing
like a child smearing his shit over the floor
…
I talked as if I constantly wanted to prove that I was harmless to my listeners
My neck became stiff
and when I had had enough (…)
and all the mindless gibberish
so distracted me
I couldn’t read a book afterward (…)
In this monstrously glowing autumnal world
writing too seemed nonsensical to me
Everything pressed itself so much upon me
that I lost all imagination (…)
In the papers I read that a wealthy aristocratic banker’s wife had said “The rich became even richer under this government. You won’t believe me
BUT MY HUSBAND WAS FURIOUS ABOUT THAT.”
That perked me up absurdly
Once a woman sat before me
so beautifully
and I thought
“I have to get very close to her
so that her beauty can unfold itself.”
but she shriveled
when I approached her (…)
…
flies died everywhere obtrusively
I picked them up and threw them in the wastebasked
When I turned on the faucet
I always caught the chlorine donation (…)
… and when I went to the mailbox
I was so blinded by the asphalt
I had to put my hand over my eyes
so as to be able to greet the dark figures approaching me
Finally, then, at dusk
at the gabled house diagonally opposite
the EDEKA sign glowed
consolingly yellow
and I went shopping
The shop was so bright and quiet
the manager was counting the receipts
the freezers hummed endearingly
and the fact that the chives I bought
were held together by a rubber band
practically moved me to tears (…)
Then at night
I slept with the garden shears beside me
and the child fidgeted with trembling hands
screaming in his bed
When I closed my eyes I could open them only one by one
Yes, I had once known how I ought to live
But now everything was forgotten
I would not even perceive a fart
as something physical
I’m really in a bad way’
I know one shouldn’t stop like that
but there’s no alternative”
with precisely those words
- Speedy Gonzales of concepts –
- I wanted to stop
even before I started to write
Then with the insolence
of self-expression
what was thought-out beforehand became even ghostlier
word by word
and really with one jolt
I again knew what I wanted
and again felt eager for the world
(As a boy when a feeling of the world overcame me
I only felt the desire tot WRITE something
now a poetic desire for the world usually
only occurs when I write something)
“I am feeling again” I thought
But I made a slip of mind
and thought “I am reeling again.”
In the last few days
nature became musical
It s beauty
became human
and its magnificence so intimate
I sloshed with pleasure through the dead leaves
walked behind the perfumed poodle
The bushes moved
as when soldiers are on maneuvers
are camouflaged behind them
The deep brown fir trees stood animally physical
before the window
and at one place in the ominous landscape
the birch tree leaves glinted as bright
as a cry of pain
“Oh” I thought
Farther away smoke drifted past behind houses
and the TV antennas in front became monuments
With every day you saw more branches among the foliage
the few leaves of grass grown back since the last mowing
glowed so intimately
that I became afraid of the end of the world
even the façade of the houses
smiled in my human reflection
“It hurts so much!” I heard a woman say of the jet trails in the sky (…)
I really wrote ALONG
said long-suppressed things
and then thought literally
“So, now life can go on”
Frightened by the change of traffic lights
the ‘guest’ worker women
started to scoot across the Zebra stripes
The shop girls their behind stuck out
in thin blouses
ran arms clasped across the street
Behind the frosted glass of a telephone booth
a mother slapped her child’s face
How proud I was of writing!
-fini-
Blue Poem
[June 1973/ Kronenberg/ Paris]
The mood is the same nearly a year later, however it is also graver, more serious, the author leaves Kronenberg, goes to Paris, we are having a few bouts of sex it appears, not much relief, but after initially feeling a bit better, Paris, too, gets to him, or rather: he will take his kit bag of troubles wherever he goes, I think he went to see his German poet friend Nicolas Born at this point.
Deep at night
it became bright again
Crushed from the outside
I began to curdle
in full consciousness
Unfeeling my cock twitched
larger
from breath to breath
“Don’t wake up now!” I thought
and held my breath
But it was too late
Nonsense had struck again
Never before had I felt so in the minority
Outside the window
nothing but omnipotence
At first a few bird sang
then so many
the singing
became a racket
the air an echo chamber
without pause or end
Such a down
suddenly no memory
no thought of the future.
I lay stretched out long in my fear
did not dare
open my eyes
relived the winter night
when I did not turn once
from one side
to the other
gnarled by the cold then
now stretched out
illiterate from the horror outside me (…)
(…)Fear billowed up from the cellar stairs’
and the COMMON-SENSE-PERSON inside me
listened:
the tune was repeated
was repeated –
“No bird whistles that monotonously
the phantom wants to ridicule me
it’s grinning
with pitch black lips”
“I” thought (…)
(…)”But which bird?” the common-sense-person thought
Then the child woke up in the next room
and shouted
that he couldn’t sleep
“Finally”!” I said
went to him
and calmed him down
full of egotism
A garage door slammed
the first early riser had to go to work
The evening of the next day I left
The unleveled rolling plazas
in the large graceful city
this repetition of the open country
with the horizons of hills
amid the houses
the land
prolonged into the city
onto these plazas
where you were over-whelmed as nowhere else
by horizon longing…
When I climbed out of the subway
even the dog shitting on the sidewalk
struck me as magicked
I shuddered with disbelief
suddenly I was THE OBJECTIVELY LIVING THING
My cock lay strangely forgotten
between my legs
Joy rose from the deepest depths
and replaced me
“I can be happy” I thought
“Why don’t you envy me!”
For days I was beside myself
and yet as I wanted to be.
I ate little
talked just to myself –
needless so happy
unapproachable so full of curiosity
selfless
and self-confident(…)
I as inspired machine
everything happened by chance:
that a bus stopped
and that I got on
that I rode the ticket’s worth
that I walked through the streets(…)
no longer HESITATED
reacted IMMEDIATELY
experienced nothing SPECIAL
- no “Once I saw” –
merely experienced
The cats sniffed around in the mausoleums
of the large cemeteries
Very small couples sat in the cafes
and ate Salade Niçoise together…
I was in my element
clucking
But in my dreams
I hadn’t yet lost all interest
Straggling slime track
of the snail person.
I was not ashamed
was only angry.
I made myself wishless
by drinking too much
The twitching eyelids became irksome
The passersby were walk-ons
who behaved like stars
“Levi-Jeans-People! I thought
“Ad-space bodies!”
-“Which says everything about you” I thought
without the earlier sympathy.
I became superficial with crossness(…)
(…)
In any case:
a DIFFERENT NONSENSE
without deathly fear
My heart throbbed for no one
and the city was foreign to me again
from all its familiar landmarks
(…)
In a friend’s apartment
I sat absentmindedly
my ears buzzing
and heard my own soulless voice
Being happy all I could remember
was happiness
being unhappy merely unhappiness
Indifferently I recounted
how okay everything had been with me.
Then we talked about fucking
The sexual expressions
provided us with the unabashedness
for everything else
Anyone joining us we greeted
with obscenities
and let loose
they lost their strangeness(…)
Everything without being horny
In the upper deck of the bus
the total strangers grinned
as they listened to us
and felt at home with us
What exhibitionism
as soon as one of us
suddenly mentioned something!
But there was always someone’
who found a hint of sex
in the allegedly other…
Yet no one talked about him or herself
we only fantasized
never the embarrassment of true stories
How the surrounding flourished then
and the pleasure of the sour wine in
the heartiness of the sour wine
in the cylindrical glasses
Don’t stop!
The indescribable particular’
of the grim new age
and the order of their lost connection
in the dirty stories
Hello meaning is back!
(…)
Then it got serious
and the seriousness hit so quickly
that it didn’t want to be me
who was meant
Then I became curious
then ruthless
I would take a woman to the next best toilet
No more flirting
no more obscenities
no more double entendres
instead of “fucking” I now said:
“sleep with you”
- if I said anything at all.
I pared my fingernails
so as not to hurt you too much
In my horniness’
I could suddenly call nothing
by its name
Before I had found a metaphor for sex
in the most unsuspecting things
now
during the experience
we experienced the sexual acts
as metaphors for something else(…)
the leaves by the window
the child singing himself awake
a framework house at dawn
the light blue on the wayside shrine
from the time
when you still believed in eternity
“Yes, swallow that!”
“Beauty is a kind of information” I thought’
warm from you
and from the recollection
“You force me
to be
as I want to be” I thought
To exist
began
to mean something to me –
Don’t stop!
I faltered just now’
when I noticed’
how suddenly the poem ended
-fini-
Nonsense + Happiness
[January/February 1974 Paris]
On a cold indescribable day
when it does not want to become dark and not bright
the eyes neither want to open nor shut
and familiar sights don’t remind you
of your old familiarity with the world,
nor as new sights magick a feeling for the world
- the Two & One poetic world feeling –
when there exists no When and But,
no Earlier ad no Then,
dawn sweaty
and evening still unimaginable
and on the motionless trees only quite rarely a single twig snaps
as if it had become slightly lighter,
on an the indescribable day like that,
on the street,
between two steps,
the sense is suddenly lost:
the black man walking toward you
in his leather coat –
you want to slug his face,
and throttle the woman
reading off her list before you in the shop.
And more and more often
the thought frightens you
how you nearly did it
- a jolt was still lacking, the mysterious
JOLT
with which love set in at one time
or the wild resolve to lead life your way,
the certainty of a formless kind of immortality…
(Then you read in the papers of some who succumbed to this jolt and you wonder why there are still so few.)
Wherever you look now – everything greenish-discolored at such moments
as on a too briefly discolored photo,
the objects half complete,
and no hope of completing them,
every sight a rotted fragment
without the idea of a plan,
which became lost,
still raw-girdered and already a ruin,
which you avoid,
fearing you will collapse with it(…)
(…)
excrescence of an excrescence
- if only the eyes would close,
- of you could only squint at such moments,
soothe the nausea in the eyeballs,
- and it would be just MOMENTS (after which you could sigh) –
but not this TIMELESS, EMPTIED-OUT, SPEECHLESS, FUTURE-REPRESSING, INANIMATE, SENSELESS HUMBUG
IRREMOVABLE FROM THE ZENITH, SCRATCHING YOUR
SOUL FROM YOUR BODY.
- Someone has stopped on the street
and cannot go on:
not only he has stopped,
everything else has too,
and so it seems that he walks on,
and that the rest walks on too.
But he is only pretending to walk; and the way he regards the horizon at the end of the street is also feigned;
and the French fries which he smells somewhere while he pretends
to walk
- it might be altogether somewhere else –
he only notices
as a last kindness toward himself;
actually he does not smell anything any more,
and the French fries are homeless remnants
from that already unimaginable time
when every object still hugged its meaning:
recollection of a picture in a church where the Just stand beneath the Blessed Virgin’s coat.
Yes, everything has turned into abrasive outer world in this state
and in the open-skull an unappetizing something, once called brain
puffs itself up in the draft.
Instead of consciousness
nettle-like vegetation
skin sensations and allergy:’
an incalculable time of rashes,
of goose bumps,
of eczemas,
of soreness.
An unpleasant itch
when the lips accidentally touched each other
- you have become ticklish to yourself. (…)
(…)
The sky above the crane could be a picture,
which rekindles the necessary patience,
but the well-worn sky heals nothing either,
nor the word that soothes so often,
which you say to yourself:
the clouds grow repulsively
lie in unholy havoc,
wind-wrecked,
and the earth too, leveled to the horizon.
Everything wind-wrecked.
Everything mixed up.
And everything expressionless.
AND EVERYTHING COMPLETELY EXPRESSIONLESS. (…)
(…)
and feel in the wrong toward others
and regard your states just one of those states:
as if you behaved “like a schoolboy
not to be taken seriously.
So you don’t take yourself seriously in company’
but the nonsense is too real,
and therefore unbearable.(…)
but even the prettiest sight now diminishes life.
A bombing attack of nonsense on the world:
right behind the house wall the earth breaks off
into whirlpools of
the indefinable
(some call it ocean trench, others space, others hell)
and on the last atoll a children’s carousel turns
tinkling, god forlorn.
Stop! Gaze at this picture:
Did not the lids lower over the eyes at this sight?
- It is no picture: and if so, it went under from your impatience
with the last bit of earth.
The gloom where the earth was
distinguishes itself from the gloom
of the indefinable all around’
only by its fresher black,
and now even the whirlpools are streaming in…(…)
(…)
in the shattering environment,
which had been on the verge of soothing itself,
your dyed in the wool HUMBUG breaks forth aain,
world-wide and skin-tight…(…)
(…)
AND NO MORE OPPORTUNITY
STALE AIR
WHICH YOU VAINLY TRY TO BREATHE
EVERYTHING AS IT IS
EACH ONE FORCED BACK INTO HIS NICHE. (…)
(…)
or another time
a typewriter shop,
you stare down at the machine’
with paper to try it out,
and there
among the people in the shop,
read:
“O desespoir! O villessee! O rage!...”
- Your eyes grow wide,
whatever you look at
LAUGHS
after such long nonsense, suddenly there was so much of the world’s abundance. (…)
(…)
a feeling also returns
to your own ugly, deaf face,
and the indescribable day
becomes describable,
it wanes
and when you look at the woman again
you notice she isn’t smiling at all,
but only has an expression:
even the expression on her face
seemed like a smile to you.
(…)
gradually you begin to picture these different women
even as something mythical
- old hiccup of poets drunk on being –:
when a woman with water in her leg climbs in,
more awkwardly than the others,
and kindly destroys the facile PICTURE…
And what do you bring home in the evening?-
Such sights for example,
the sight collector answers proudly.
And how do you order them?-
Because the fear of the nonsense is over
they no longer need an order.
And your own impression? –
Because the nonsense is over the sight has simultaneously become the impression.
And the actual words?-
When I see something, I only say: O God!
or: No!
or: Ah!
or simply call out: The evening sky!
or whimper softly..
And yet –
Beware of the musicality of the world!
Beware of the happy ending!
For even when the indescribable day came
you had been warned of previous indescribable days,
as in a fairy tale,
before you walked through the forest,
of the good fairy
or of the talking animal,
- and must,
as in the fairy tale,
have forgotten the warning after all.
At least,
instead of the all too anecdotal happiness,
you cling to the moment
when the nonsense let up and the new familiarity was felt as pain.
The dreams are in the offing.
They are there:
A large red cherry falls slowly past you down the elevator shaft.
(…)
the time when you can dream
is a sensible time.
Already you nod to yourself in the street and shake your head; munch like a child an apple before falling asleep;
walk straight through puddles
and again say “merry go round”
instead of “carousel”…
On a cold bright morning
still imbued by a long
bliss-kindling dream
where you were
what you can be
-the dream itself was the fulfillment –
and at the sight of the wide sky
behind the edge of the city
you look forward to growing old for the first time,
and in front of the child
who looks at you
after he has knocked over the glass,
you think
if the child wouldn’t have to look at you like that any more –
that might be the real way.
fini
In the sense that the three poems manifest by and large similar states of mind, they can also be regarded as a single text; they are not a theme and artful variation, although the reader will have noted an increase in the writer’s upsetness from one poem to the next, thing get worse not better for him, an increase in the incursions of irritation and nonsense attacks, of “meaninglessness”, and the subsiding. At least he could write!
Such similarities, such repetitions as we encounter them in this sequence of three poems are unique for Handke is what I am trying to say. The various preceding Innerworld texts are all quite different from each other, each plays a different game. They all employ Handke’s patented serial procedure [to which he takes a different kind of recourse throughout his work] and if not written in one fell swoop to still a moment of anxiety or still it in the recollection, are written in short order, they each have a theatrical and dramatic quality, too. Some are mini-plays and so bear a relationship to the early Sprechstücke. They have a kind of objective quality to them as well.
The three long poems in “Nonsense and Happiness” not only lack the prior playfulness, each of them was composed over the course of a month or so at least. They are extremely artful even graceful but have longer rhythms than anything Handke has written before, that is formally they are very different creatires indeed that Handke devises to communicate, exhibit his states of mind.
These features distinguish these three poems from Handke’s previous formalist endeavors where he does not repeat himself, but explores the formal possibilities, say, as he does in the early Sprechstücke that are then summarized in one of his greatest pieces of sheer writing, The Hour We Knew Nothing of each Other [a work begun in the 70s but not completed until the early 90s, see:
http:///www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com
and
http:///www.handkedramalecture.scriptmania.com]
Informal, highly personal as these three poems appear yet they are not formless, and Gerhart v. Graevenitz’s approach to the “Assayings” [FN] too made me take a closer look at the apparently loose yet not arbitrary form of these three poetic texts. The word sinuous comes to mind. One breaks off suddenly, the other two have hints of a futile kind of optimism: in that disjointing sense fugueing resembles déjàs of all unpleasant kinds: the return of memories of repressed unpleasant occurrences – there are quite a few moments of fright from Handke’s childhood and then adolescence past, introduced as similes – déjà vues that literally take over your being, but usually just for a long moment, even in dreams – that, importantly, as the great Jakob Arlow observed, you knew you had survived a particular déjà, and thus they or it gave you just a brief fright: i.e. they are compromise formations – between what we call the ego and uncontrollable intrusions from the unconscious inhabitants of the self, and are of a defensive nature, which makes what is being defended against no less dangerous: if they are not defended against, if the defenses break down or perhaps it ought to be formulated as “taking over” of your self so that you might go wander off for weeks and have no recollection of how you happened to, when you come to; you could freeze into a pillar of salt.
Handke evidently survived, but unlike a déjà [of whatever kind], a comparatively brief experience, fugueing can obviously drive you over the edge… And in Paris it apparently did, he writes of panic attacks to his poet friend Nicola Born
http://www.schreibheft.de/docs/pdfs/Schreibheft-65-Born.pdf
http://www.amazon.de/Briefe-1959-1979-Nicolas-Born/dp/3835301063
http://www.nicolasborn.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=0
In Weight of the World we read of a hospitalization for a heart problem. The doctors say it isn’t serious, and Handke is glad of that and starts to take Valium [as he told me in Salzburg], the anxiety is put under control, its sources however are not eliminated. The language regulation for this event becomes “congenital heart valve problems” - apparently not detected upon his physical to qualify for the Austrian defense forces, the one achievement of which his hideous stepfather Bruno Handke was proud! [see Lesson of St. Victoire which also contains Handke’s mention that he sought among his relatives others who suffered from his occasional color blindness] I would think tachycardia induced by the general upset, the fugueing eventuated in a panic attack. Panic makes sense in the case of someone who once thought he was the new Kafka and suffered from fear and trembling - in one poem the fear that he felt at night during his childhood crops up. But let us recall that Handke in his early writing [when he claimed to be “the new Kafka”] became over-confident, nay a virtuoso victor in the control of anxiety, victorious over fear! Grandiose! A trapeze artist above the abyss! All gone now! Or only very very gradually it appears, in part by writing these three long extraordinarily beautiful [so feels their then somewhat or, let’s say, more puzzled translator] poems that describe the coming and going, the waves of self-states; three extraordinary fugueing attempts as I now think of them, a preternaturally depressive and troubled poets attempt to deal with the same theme - the novel A Moment of True Feeling, narrated in the distancing third person, thus more distanced, more controlled, induces stylistically the kind of suicidal state that the author was in at the time, his own self having been an alternative object to all the other matters that enraged and irritated the so easily irritable hyper sensitive poet.
Handke’s prose texts are all of a very different kind, solve different formal and linguistic problems, employ different personae lenses and narrators. The Three Assaying [1987-1991] as I think of those three prose experiments On Tiredness, On the Jukebox and The Day that Went Well employ markedly different highly self-conscious narrative approaches; and, as a matter of fact, the last of the three – the one on The Day that Went Well – takes up, circles the theme of being and nothingness and beauty, broached in such an unusually intimate manner in these three poems, once more… not quite twenty years later.
A Moment of True Feeling of course has not only that Gregor Samsa moment at the opening, consciously Kafkaesque [and thus literarily distanced] moment of horror at its opening moment – which as compared to the poems makes it also a work of the imagination - but also has that salvaging “moment” for which I suppose we must thank Amina Handke for pulling our author away from the abyss, when “love sets in”, for the child,[a shard of a mirror, a lock of hair] when love in him resurfaced… the moment Handke started to become the “anti-Kafka.” The child also keeps pulling the author back out of his fugue states in the three poems; thus we can speak of a gradual surfacing of feelings in the man who agreed with his therapeutician that he seemed to lack access to his feelings; dissociated I would say, since - after all - they would surface. On being left by his wife Handke appears to have been struck dumb – perhaps he woke up one morning and there was note on the kitchen table, or maybe there was a scene [s], there must have been quite a few prior, judging the his knowledge of such in Dying – but at a certain point, eventually he starts to - what on the evidence of the three long poems in Nonsense and Happiness – be called, and I think usefully, begin to fugue. But by the time he uses the shock as the opening of A Moment of true Feeling it has been shorn of its origins and universalized and made literary, a defense. Not that there would be anything wrong with an opening such as: “One morning I woke up and my wife had left me. I had had no idea but weirdly enough instantly felt like the bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. That was even worse than being left by the love of my life. I had become an ogre. Also, I instantly felt suicidal; then I was suddenly pleased to be alone, until I heard the bloody child bawling to be taken to the bathroom… After several years of these kind of up and down mood swings, someone suggested that maybe I had something to do with her leaving. How could it possibly was my first, unspoken, response… but then I fell to thinking…maybe something I did, the way I behaved was at fault…”
Moments of depersonalization alternate with repersonalizations; moments of feeling nothing, nothing attacks alternate with the return of feeling.
We find the recurrence of the following matters in these three fugues: [1] nausea – so that he writes “nausea of the eyeballs,” nausea at himself to the point of wanting to “turn himself inside out” [!!!!] i.e. every sight becomes irritable to the point of eyes hurting, skin itching: The severity of the state that Handke was in becomes evident once one appreciates this the most extreme of the many nauseas Handke mentions – more severe than any of those enumerated in Tiredness signifies. The hyper-sensitivity managed with medically soothing eye-glasses that he wore when I first saw him. “Nausea of the eyeballs” is a pretty extreme, perhaps the most extreme kind of irritation especially for a “sight collector” voyeut such as Handke [you will recall Handke claiming that the first time he felt nausea at other bodies was in boarding school, and if he’d give you a calling card “I’m sorry I’m autistic and I just can’t stand being alone in the same room alone with men,” you wouldn’t – I would not have been mystified all those years], and this nausea, too, is one of the classical derivatives of the kind of traumatization he suffered as a child; and which is related to, when the irritation reaches a crucial point, to [2] the wish to run amok! – as Loser then does in Across; i.e. upsurge of violent impulses approximating psychosis; magnified by the self-imposed state of isolation; [3] resentment, that is envy, of anyone who walks past seemingly royally self-satisfied, tall Africans parading their beauty on Paris streets; [4] occasionally being pulled out of this absorption in states of self-hatred and feeling that he is “nothing” [see the end of Afternoon of a Writer for a dramatized similar state of nothing where it becomes clearer that the nothingness is really the obverse of really thinking that you are king of the hill, hot shit] by the child waking, or crying [as at that “moment” in A.M.T.F.] [5] surges of feeling that seem invariably accompanied by the observation of soothing sights of nature, where nature becomes musical, as these poems do, at least so thinks their translator who a the time he was translating them [1974-5] sort of knew “there is a troubled soul” but can’t be said to have given much thought to the why’s and wherefores of Handke’s state of mind; yet the feelings made sense, as did/ does their representation. I am pretty immune to nauseas – after all, it is a fundamental impulse to rid yourself of potentially deadly, toxic substances - unless in the company of someone who pukes at which I have to take great control of my sympathetic mirroring nervous system, which failed me only once, at age seven.
The musical passages I responded to with especial attunedness, especially the “high mode” of the title poem Nonsense and Happiness, and they entered my being in the process of translation and they have popped up a chords sort of on occasion during my own writing: as a clue, a safety blanket, as parameters.
[6] Generalizing, perhaps usefully for once: each poem is a kind of ever repeated ride on the roller coaster of “nonsense attacks” and the rediscovery of “meaning”… What is that attack that nothings? what precisely does it turn into “nothing?” We are not in some kind of Heideggerian world here, after all. Human beings, nay everything organic can be said to be a “meaning making machine” – thus the “nonsense” attacks would be suicidal impulses, what Keuschnig the hero of A.M.T.F. suffers, attacks on the self, and which Handke the author knows intimately, but represents, knowingly, stylistically to convey that state to us to the degree that we participate, which, however, means that the author, though he may suffer their recurrence, has achieved dissociative, his forte, control over them.
What made Handke particularly happy in the translation was my occasional use of the word “humbug” for the word “nonsense” which indeed reduces that tiresomeness to something playful and slight! Handke’s extreme sensitivity also to language to which we owe, and to which he owed his nausea at Spiegel language…
As fate would have it, Handke was friends with the Austrian cultural attaché in Paris at that time [who both are taking care of young daughters] and I recall going with them on a Sunday to the Bois de Boulogne I think it was, and I wonder idly what that fellow made of the book. But that is not what Handke is interested in, in A.M.T.F., an account of his life with his daughter, or with his friends: he is interested in representing and evoking a state of mind: we are still in the world of the inner outer innerworld. And he finds the stylistic means to put the reader into that state of mind.
In the poems Handke, the writer, faced the task of communicating his state of mind to a reader and in the process, regained some self control, the writing becomes a controlled discharge, a kind of acting out [but one on quite a deep psychic level, that was itself calming – at least he was writing, he was working, he was concentrating], and he is very good at that at this point, although this is a greater challenge than any he faced before: his Goalie will put the reader via a sleight of grammatical ingenuity into the state of mind of a paranoid schizophrenic… and that was an act of objectification for whose sake he had studied the linguistics of paranoia and schizophrenia! So it takes a good deal of work to communicate authentically and penetrate another mind and heart just with words. Here in the three poems not too many games are being played, the old rage is there, but playfulness doesn’t work it out of the system.
If Handke had been on the couch and in a state of transference with a good enough analyst, the analyst would have had a pretty good idea what he was going through, and the anxiety would have been discharged in the talking and in the security of the analyst’s holding [who would not have talked “dog language” that is in the language in which cases are generally written up or that of the world of therapy] and perhaps Handke would have been open to understanding and perhaps “understanding” would have sunk in. The analyst whom Handke saw in Paris [see Weight] and who pointed out to him that he was emotionally disconnected, an observation with which Handke agreed, also, confessed to Handke to carrying the cross at Easter – so the analyst may also have been a religious, or purposefully confessional to his patient, or Handke is once again projecting - thus one further aspect of the meaning of the title “weight of the world”: only Handke or his unedited note books or the thera-peutician whoever he or she was can tell us.
The fine German psychoanalyst Tilman Moser [“Years of Apprenticeship on the Couch”, which I happen to have published in English these many years ago] addressed several novels in his untranslated Romane als Krankheits Geschichten [“Novels as Case Histories” would do in English], among them also Handke’s A Moment of True Feeling, but could not come to any definite conclusion about what was ailing our man. Yes, narcissistic injury, but that really begs the question. Not that I claim to have total insight: but once you are aware of Handke’s extended childhood trauma, his possible identification with the violently aggressive stepfather, in his hatred for whom Handke felt no ambivalence whatsoever, his being a love child for the first two years of his life, his having that super confident big head, once you realize his ultra sensitivities, the sheer rawness of his nerves, and that he is always needs to write to stay well, sometimes intensively, that you know that he has won many victories over his fright… you are at the very least a lot closer to unraveling this knotty question in this moment of uncompleted mourning for his mother [his identity, who has committed suicide, the would-be suicidal’s suicidal mother] and her surrogate, his wife abandoning him: a double repetition in some way of the childhood trauma which had its beginning with his mother’s return to her husband in Berlin, and no doubt, indeed not the slightest doubt for once on my part, for elicited similar rages, especially if Libgart Schwartz eloped with another man! Internalized figures of protection are gone, have vanished is a short hand way the modern gods of science might put it.
And even if you realize that it is your fault that they left, and I find no evidence of such reflection on Handke’s part in his writing [which does not mean that I may have missed them] that you had been impossible to live with, realizations which unfortunately somehow do little to assuage the injury, there are of course those self-berating! Self-flagellations! where what is needed, I would suggest, is self-understanding], and I suspect it took some time for that realization to set in, if in fact it ever did, certainly neither the works of this period nor A Child’s Story do, and as a writer he may even have felt “good riddance” I am left to write… but there was still the child, who he notes in Weight says “Daddy you are writing again.” And who early on learned to charm her harsh father: she takes a napkin with the message “Amina has been bad again” and dips it into a glass of water where the message dissolves! The honest Weight also notes our old sadist at work: Amina comes up and says she has to go potty. Her father notes that he says nothing and waits “what is going to happen now!” I was not surprised when Vim Wenders told me here in Seattle that Handke invariably hurts the people closest to him: Wenders it appears has put up with that if not forgiven. Later in life, there are these great lags in realization in Handke, he will deeply regret his parenting methods, and THE CHILD becomes a major invocation, e.g. in Walk About the Villages… In A Child’s Story it becomes clear that women friends have berated him for his ways as a father, and he dismisses what they say as being the “dog language” of the therapeutic society. [No real quarrel on the latter score though I can think of several dozen exceptions to the rule of inhuman scientism ruling the language roost of an allegedly humane science], but when I saw Amina in New York, in 1975 or in Paris, she seemed to be an unusually quiet child. The hyper-cathexis on language, the narcissism of the word… well, he might have listened past that for once. For his second daughter, Laocadie Semin-Handke, he writes the delightful Lucie im Wald mit den Dingsbums, Lucy in the woods with the Thingamajigs] a sort of extra chapter of No-Man’s-Bay, [and it shows that the second time around he’s doing a better job at child rearing, who however does not live with him! as he keeps picking what he regards as peace-object, mushroom, to make the world’s best mushroom stew!]
It is noticeable in these text of what I call the critical first Paris Period [1973-78, though it had its inception in Kronenberg in Fall 1971] there is no mention of the wife, the mother of the child, except Weight at one point notes dismissively [if it is her and not one of the numerous women he would then sleep with, compensatorily, the great compensator that he is not just exhibitionistically, [a characteristic of both sexes when abandoned, to make up and avenge the loss of love so I noticed during my ten years in the so romantic and fairly communal – until the money pigs ruined it - heterosexual Tribeca] “L.s little lyricisms”. A person who is so irritable needs to live by himself… as he does now, and even takes the closest friends at once for a walk through the forest, only interviewers are allowed, and if it’s a T.V. crew so much the better, and Chef Handke # 2 [there is a famous establishment in Ohio with something called Handke Cuisine! which just now in June 2009 went broke!] will treat them to a meal as only that part object chef in No-Man’s-Bay can when the guests are actually welcome, and no doubt such meals on the house pay for themselves in the long run!
Friday, March 27, 2009
RESUME OF THE HANDKE CASE = OPENING OF PART II BETA
PETER HANDKE: WOUNDED LOVE CHILD
=Part II=
The psycho-bio monograph
on Peter Handke
=II-A= 2
Résumé of Part I
=II-B=2
New York 1971
=II-C=47
Fuguing
=II-D=68
Encounters, visits
correspondence, comentary
=II-E=77
Yugoslav Manifest
Terminus = 87
NOTES 1-00=
Résumé of Part I
In Part One I sought to detail Handke’s psychological liabilities:
[a] his decade-long exposure – starting in 1944, at age two, in Berlin - to violent drunken primal scenes; with a plethora of sequaelae especially for someone diagnosed as autistically hypersensitive which he himself enumerates in his Essay on Tiredness; following on two years as the exclusive love child of a very beautiful young mother of the Slovenian minority in the Austrian province Carinthia; which, too, has its consequences;
[b] the likelihood that his life-long somewhat depressive state of mind is of anaclytic origins, absorbed while a depressed mother [dumped by the love of her life and then marrying his compadre German soldier as surrogate] carried her child to term;
[c] that Handke’s feeling that something dreadful had happened to him early in his life – that is, that he was traumatized - most likely is the result of the exposure, possibly coinciding with the experience of bombing attacks in Berlin, his birth having been entirely normal according to the midwife’s report;
[d] I emphasized Handke’s extreme hatred of his violent German stepfather, his early preference for his mother’s father, the Slovenian “Ote” Sivec, and Handke’s longing for his mother’s dead Slovenian brothers whose war time letters were a Sivec family heirloom, one of many impulses to become a writer and express a preference for Yugoslavia, as his land of peace; the advantage that accrued from that avunculate also in his passing through a Oedipal phase victorious and with kinder sides; his early turn in a Slovenian and Yugoslav direction; and aversion to matters German;
[e] his early retreat into reading; that is also into fantasy, imagination; an affinity for versions of denial;
[f] his luck, that of an unusually gifted child, in finding a priest to support his wish to attend a boarding school that offered a better education than the village of Griffen;
[g] his entering the boarding school for priests, Tanzenberg, where, however, he felt instantly lonely, and claimed that this was the first time he felt his life-long nausea at other bodies, one of many reasons for his general asociability; and which he left after four years over a principled disagreement; his then attending the regular public high school in Klagenfurt; his working in a packing material factory to earn his keep upon entering the University of Graz to study law, his plan being to acquire the customary sinecure of
Tanzenberg
talented culturers as a cultural attaché [what a joke it would have been on that service to have the socially so inept Handke prove the exception to all those diplomatically well trained attachés!] in the event his early dream to be a writer did not permit him to live as one without drudgery; his affiliation to the Graz and Austrian avant garde; his becoming professionally adept in writing for Austrian radio and - though playwriting had not been part of the original plan - quick success, writing very much to his generations concerns, as a playwright, success being more gradual, that having been his chief ambition, as a prose writer; his lack of inhibition at speaking publically and to exhibit himself; his publically insulting, his arrogance; the odd contradiction of someone saying that he was “the new Kafka” and doing so with a happy smile.
[h] I ventured the guess that one of the few benefits that accrued from the constant violent primal scene exposure, for a writer, was the acquisition of an early training in the dissociation so necessary for his discipline, for his work also as a self-healing artist; that and insomnia - Napoleon slept four hours a day, it is said, in fifteen minute increments, and I imagine drove his generals bananas; Handke has only driven several wives and live-in girlfriends and one child to despair; and upset the public, usually to good and useful effect; but has published about 65 + books by his 65th year, some of them as great as the victory at Austerlitz! One derivative related to the ability to dissociate would be Handke’s capacity for denial, especially powerful in someone as self-involved in his own identity [in Sorrow Beyond Dreams the metaphor for that is “pulling the covers over my head.”]
[i] the downside consequences of the exposure being the plethora of matters, including a large variety of nauseas, that made Handke angry – and tired - as an adolescent, enumerated in great detail in his Essay on Tiredness; as well as the root of Handke’s misogyny – so surprising in the writer of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - too, can be traced to the decade long primal scene exposure, to the rage the love-child must have felt instantaneously upon what must also have been experienced as an abandonment, at age two, in Berlin, and still in evidence during his student days. Nonetheless we ought not to discount that Handke remained her favorite and the intimate complicity that existed between mother and child;
[j] that the example of physical violence, [and the great likelihood of his having been a victim of physical violence as a child himself] and the exposure to violent drunken primal scenes is also one [major] reason for the physical, not just the verbal, violence Handke has committed on occasion, but knowledge of which propensity drives Handke’s extraordinary and pathos drenched yearning for peace and for peaceful forms, for example, in seeking them in geological formation in Alaska [!!], or its expression in Nova’s epilogue in his most enitirely self-revealing work, Walk About the Villages, and is one major reason for his turn to lyrical nature description, a mania nearly, which a pastorally oriented reception to this kind of writing can easily mistake for being born of placidity;
[k] that Handke’s covering his eyes with a blanket during these primal scenes – also then symbolically – laid the groundwork for a future tendency in that direction, of scotomization, especially when it affects his identity, as say in - after initially not wanting the Serbian crimes to be true - finally having a surrogate, at the sight of Srebrenica, keep crying out “I don’t want to be a Serb” [not that anyone had asked Handke to be anything but what he was: a half Slovenian Yugo – Southern - Slav for whom, however, the idea of a confederated Yugoslavia, whose ground had become his “amour fou,” and for those madnesses: see Midsummer Night’s Dream… but I am ahead of myself… Also the wish, and then the learned ability, to transfigure, transfigure somewhat, make magical again – a wish in which the society in which he writes is complicit - and in the world such as it is, at least create works of sustained verbal beauty; to make one see the world anew [a didactic quality as well, pointing both to the nature of his super-ego and an identification with a priestly pastoral function]; as well as his unwillingness to represent violence directly on stage, but merely to suggest it, so that we may peek, as he did; in fascination and horror; Handke is not a writer of “make believes”, he creates experiences.
[m] that what Handke in his interview with Herbert Gamper calls his “autism” [autistic episodes], an unlikely self-diagnosis but pointing to curiosity, are for our purposes best understood as hyper sensitivity of each and all of his senses, “the eyes of an eagle,” “the nose of a beagle,” “the finicky taste of a feline;” “the skin of a porpoise,” “the ears of a bat,” and that even his occasional bouts of color blindness – for which he sought out, but failed to find – as of 1980 [Lesson of St. Victoire] - similar afflictions in his Sivec and Schönherr [his real father’s name] family, may be related to this fundamental [?] hyper sensitivity which at one time forced him to wear glasses to ameliorate what irritated his eyes even in well modulated circumstances; that over-stimulation of his senses, that excess, as well as a finely honed sense of beauty, another fate of the sons of beautiful mothers, accounts for the nauseas of just about everything that Handke once complained of and suffered – “nausea of the eyeballs” “wanting to turn my body inside out” being his two most extreme expression of those feelings - another derivative of the traumatic childhood exposure – but also for his preference for aesthetically satisfying experience; and of course the chief reason that he not only seeks out but creates works opposite that experience, in other words that both formally and in every other respect, including women, for his addiction to beauty; aside whatever inborn [?] gifts that will forever be a mystery, at least to me; e.g. there is no telling in this instance what genetic alterations occurred intra-utero; that the fastnesses of the etiology of autism going hand in hand with a brilliant mind are beyond our ken, that is if the diagnosis Handke received is at all useful except to indicate his extreme hyper sensitivity; although his habit of insulting might point to Monsieur Tourette being a kind of kissing cousin of his,a frequent companion of Señor Autism as he Kaspars his way through life discombulatedly!
[n] that even though he called himself the “new Kafka” and the work of his first five years [1965-70: [Die Hornissen, Der Hausierer; Radio Play One, quite a few of the poems in Innerworld, Kaspar, even Goalie] gives evidence of fear and trembling, what really distinguishes this work is it’s ultimate victory over fear – a victory it appears that had to be won, and demonstrated, over and over, to the point that he became a virtuoso at it;
[o] that he calms himself by writing; and since he is such a libidinal creature, the productivity is near endless [libido has an aggressive component too], a proof it seems the obverse of the original conversion theory of hysteria: here fear becomes productive: Handke becomes calm, his self is calm where every one else’s trembles; he becomes strong, that presumably he masturbated successfully during the primal scene [Kohut’s proposition], and thus will come out the victor [except in certain extreme circumstances, see anon].
[p] One reason that one/ that is “I” can even venture these speculations is because Handke has revealed himself so nearly entirely in his writing: there are not only the novels of his self, the publication of diaries and correspondence during his life time, in the fictions he uses versions of his self, personae, thinly veiled but focused masks, for his particular states of mind, mediums as it were, vehicles, artistic challenges solved. His self-presentation, if he can help it, is shown in the best possible light [i.e. nothing critical of him or his work appears is allowed to appear in any of the many publications about him that his publishers have done]; he poses multifariously like a movie star, as only an exhibitionist can, is hyper-sensitive about his image, both in writing about him and in being photographed; an exhibitionism which, to my thinking, is also of a compensatory competitive nature for the narcissistic psychological injury that the love child suffered from early childhood to early adolescence; the “wound that he writes out of” as he has his surrogate, a raggedy Parsifal of The Art of Asking, exclaim; aside whatever class consciousness and ascendance from the class of Keuschnig’s – he once regretted not belonging to any class - plays a part, and being better at the writing game than anyone else, and the pride that goes with staying at the world’s best hotels; but for which effort he would lack the strength had he not been a “love child” during his first two years; “wounded love child Peter Handke, “melancholy player” he called himself once, instead of Ted Dorpat’s “Wounded Monster” [an important psychoanalytic contribution to Hitler studies: it demonstrates the effect on Hitler’s blood lust and need to be in a continuous state of war from the post-traumatic stress at having been in the front line near continuously for five years and keeping bad company as Handke cannot be said to have since he keeps scarcely any company at all, except his own] whereas Handke’s two half-siblings, fathered by Handke’s stepfather Bruno Handke, born to the same unhappy mother, as of birth exposed to the violent drunken father, led rather sad unsuccessful lives, the half brother a petty criminal, now moribund; the sister dying early of cancer, despite what their older brother’s generosity afforded them;
[q] one major reason for the power, the experience that Handke’s texts and plays provide, perhaps even for the extraordinary dexterity in devising techniques and forms – modernist in that sense and very much of his time while salvaging the past – Goethe Stifter Eichendorf Grillparzer to remain in the German language realm, and so much more - be they of his plays or fictions - derives, I would venture, from the extreme need to communicate from the autistic position, to make contact, to effect and affect, not just from pure ambition and a well schooled talent and drive to exhibit his self: thus the quality of “letters in a bottle” of his texts, the attempt to communicate and in an original, a unique way – after all, that is what comes through most powerfully, that is what encounter with his work produces: states of mind; including the effect of putting the reader into a depressed state of mind but at the end of writing himself and the real reader out of it: thus if the physicians prescribed a Handke book instead of Zoloft or whatever medications prescribed by the billions per year to keep folks happy under madcap capitalism… how much better the world would be off. Thus his books as well as his plays need to be described first of all as the reader’s experience of them! And critiqued by the measure of how well he succeeds in this endeavor. And that is also a technically ascertainable question – for example, a work such as The Hour We Did Not Know Each Other [the summa of all his early theater work] takes its readers by the scalp of their syntax and never lets go until the very end; experiencing a performance of the play becomes paradisiacal in the sense that we see the world – and each other – refreshed, anew; with new eyes [the essence of the function of theater]; a series of especially autobiographical works – Nonsense + Happiness [1972-74]; A Moment of True Feeling [1974], Across [1984], The Afternoon of a Writer [1986] and One Dark Night I left My Silent House [1996] – are diminished by mystifications, chiefly their refusal to own up to unhappy-making women matters. Other works, that entirely focus on his self – such as Der Hausierer, The Repetition, My Year in the No-Man’-Bay, especially the trip novel/ film The Absence [which I recently found out Handke thinks of his modern retelling of Parsifal] and is devoid of irruptions of violence [except for the loudest tank in literature], the Del Gredos epic – are devoid of the problems that the novelist’s license to lie introduce. Facing the task of needing, initially, to describe the experiences that these works produce, criticism enters a different arena from the usual.
These then are some, most I think, of the psychological coordinates and parameters with which one can address Handke and his work: The sheer productivity – aside the early vision of seeing himself as a kind of 19th century author with a large and varied oeuvre - is over-determined, too. Colleagues insist I need to mention Handke’s psychic bisexuality. I myself have never felt easy with this concept [literal-minded me keeps seeing something copulating in the brain!], but since Handke seems able to adapt women personae as a writer too, and identified so closely with his mother, there may be something to that suggestion. The Gruppe 47 folks in 1966 in Princeton said, “Oh, ein Mädchen,” Alan Ginsberg came up to Handke and me at the Pannah Grady party and asked me to translate his wish to fuck Handke [Yes back in 1966! in so many words. Pannah and her beatnik friends who smashed her Persian vases!] and drew a deadly blue eyed Prussian stare from this co-host, while Handke, his English must have been poor at the time, thinking the request was being made of me, evinced that memorable unselfconscious grin of the born again village sadist which the elephant memory affixed in its trunk; a matter that was not cleared up until 1980 where his grin, revealed as having been at my expense, and not, as I had assumed – that world of assumptions that has assumed rule over the world – at his own, then comes out looking, at least to me, that much uglier. Handke being insecure in the matter, over compensates there too, just look how “male” he then tries to appear in photographs subsequent to the early ones. However, best to my knowledge he has not gone Elephant or lion hunting…
[C] 2009
michael roloff
=Part II=
The psycho-bio monograph
on Peter Handke
=II-A= 2
Résumé of Part I
=II-B=2
New York 1971
=II-C=47
Fuguing
=II-D=68
Encounters, visits
correspondence, comentary
=II-E=77
Yugoslav Manifest
Terminus = 87
NOTES 1-00=
Résumé of Part I
In Part One I sought to detail Handke’s psychological liabilities:
[a] his decade-long exposure – starting in 1944, at age two, in Berlin - to violent drunken primal scenes; with a plethora of sequaelae especially for someone diagnosed as autistically hypersensitive which he himself enumerates in his Essay on Tiredness; following on two years as the exclusive love child of a very beautiful young mother of the Slovenian minority in the Austrian province Carinthia; which, too, has its consequences;
[b] the likelihood that his life-long somewhat depressive state of mind is of anaclytic origins, absorbed while a depressed mother [dumped by the love of her life and then marrying his compadre German soldier as surrogate] carried her child to term;
[c] that Handke’s feeling that something dreadful had happened to him early in his life – that is, that he was traumatized - most likely is the result of the exposure, possibly coinciding with the experience of bombing attacks in Berlin, his birth having been entirely normal according to the midwife’s report;
[d] I emphasized Handke’s extreme hatred of his violent German stepfather, his early preference for his mother’s father, the Slovenian “Ote” Sivec, and Handke’s longing for his mother’s dead Slovenian brothers whose war time letters were a Sivec family heirloom, one of many impulses to become a writer and express a preference for Yugoslavia, as his land of peace; the advantage that accrued from that avunculate also in his passing through a Oedipal phase victorious and with kinder sides; his early turn in a Slovenian and Yugoslav direction; and aversion to matters German;
[e] his early retreat into reading; that is also into fantasy, imagination; an affinity for versions of denial;
[f] his luck, that of an unusually gifted child, in finding a priest to support his wish to attend a boarding school that offered a better education than the village of Griffen;
[g] his entering the boarding school for priests, Tanzenberg, where, however, he felt instantly lonely, and claimed that this was the first time he felt his life-long nausea at other bodies, one of many reasons for his general asociability; and which he left after four years over a principled disagreement; his then attending the regular public high school in Klagenfurt; his working in a packing material factory to earn his keep upon entering the University of Graz to study law, his plan being to acquire the customary sinecure of
Tanzenberg
talented culturers as a cultural attaché [what a joke it would have been on that service to have the socially so inept Handke prove the exception to all those diplomatically well trained attachés!] in the event his early dream to be a writer did not permit him to live as one without drudgery; his affiliation to the Graz and Austrian avant garde; his becoming professionally adept in writing for Austrian radio and - though playwriting had not been part of the original plan - quick success, writing very much to his generations concerns, as a playwright, success being more gradual, that having been his chief ambition, as a prose writer; his lack of inhibition at speaking publically and to exhibit himself; his publically insulting, his arrogance; the odd contradiction of someone saying that he was “the new Kafka” and doing so with a happy smile.
[h] I ventured the guess that one of the few benefits that accrued from the constant violent primal scene exposure, for a writer, was the acquisition of an early training in the dissociation so necessary for his discipline, for his work also as a self-healing artist; that and insomnia - Napoleon slept four hours a day, it is said, in fifteen minute increments, and I imagine drove his generals bananas; Handke has only driven several wives and live-in girlfriends and one child to despair; and upset the public, usually to good and useful effect; but has published about 65 + books by his 65th year, some of them as great as the victory at Austerlitz! One derivative related to the ability to dissociate would be Handke’s capacity for denial, especially powerful in someone as self-involved in his own identity [in Sorrow Beyond Dreams the metaphor for that is “pulling the covers over my head.”]
[i] the downside consequences of the exposure being the plethora of matters, including a large variety of nauseas, that made Handke angry – and tired - as an adolescent, enumerated in great detail in his Essay on Tiredness; as well as the root of Handke’s misogyny – so surprising in the writer of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - too, can be traced to the decade long primal scene exposure, to the rage the love-child must have felt instantaneously upon what must also have been experienced as an abandonment, at age two, in Berlin, and still in evidence during his student days. Nonetheless we ought not to discount that Handke remained her favorite and the intimate complicity that existed between mother and child;
[j] that the example of physical violence, [and the great likelihood of his having been a victim of physical violence as a child himself] and the exposure to violent drunken primal scenes is also one [major] reason for the physical, not just the verbal, violence Handke has committed on occasion, but knowledge of which propensity drives Handke’s extraordinary and pathos drenched yearning for peace and for peaceful forms, for example, in seeking them in geological formation in Alaska [!!], or its expression in Nova’s epilogue in his most enitirely self-revealing work, Walk About the Villages, and is one major reason for his turn to lyrical nature description, a mania nearly, which a pastorally oriented reception to this kind of writing can easily mistake for being born of placidity;
[k] that Handke’s covering his eyes with a blanket during these primal scenes – also then symbolically – laid the groundwork for a future tendency in that direction, of scotomization, especially when it affects his identity, as say in - after initially not wanting the Serbian crimes to be true - finally having a surrogate, at the sight of Srebrenica, keep crying out “I don’t want to be a Serb” [not that anyone had asked Handke to be anything but what he was: a half Slovenian Yugo – Southern - Slav for whom, however, the idea of a confederated Yugoslavia, whose ground had become his “amour fou,” and for those madnesses: see Midsummer Night’s Dream… but I am ahead of myself… Also the wish, and then the learned ability, to transfigure, transfigure somewhat, make magical again – a wish in which the society in which he writes is complicit - and in the world such as it is, at least create works of sustained verbal beauty; to make one see the world anew [a didactic quality as well, pointing both to the nature of his super-ego and an identification with a priestly pastoral function]; as well as his unwillingness to represent violence directly on stage, but merely to suggest it, so that we may peek, as he did; in fascination and horror; Handke is not a writer of “make believes”, he creates experiences.
[m] that what Handke in his interview with Herbert Gamper calls his “autism” [autistic episodes], an unlikely self-diagnosis but pointing to curiosity, are for our purposes best understood as hyper sensitivity of each and all of his senses, “the eyes of an eagle,” “the nose of a beagle,” “the finicky taste of a feline;” “the skin of a porpoise,” “the ears of a bat,” and that even his occasional bouts of color blindness – for which he sought out, but failed to find – as of 1980 [Lesson of St. Victoire] - similar afflictions in his Sivec and Schönherr [his real father’s name] family, may be related to this fundamental [?] hyper sensitivity which at one time forced him to wear glasses to ameliorate what irritated his eyes even in well modulated circumstances; that over-stimulation of his senses, that excess, as well as a finely honed sense of beauty, another fate of the sons of beautiful mothers, accounts for the nauseas of just about everything that Handke once complained of and suffered – “nausea of the eyeballs” “wanting to turn my body inside out” being his two most extreme expression of those feelings - another derivative of the traumatic childhood exposure – but also for his preference for aesthetically satisfying experience; and of course the chief reason that he not only seeks out but creates works opposite that experience, in other words that both formally and in every other respect, including women, for his addiction to beauty; aside whatever inborn [?] gifts that will forever be a mystery, at least to me; e.g. there is no telling in this instance what genetic alterations occurred intra-utero; that the fastnesses of the etiology of autism going hand in hand with a brilliant mind are beyond our ken, that is if the diagnosis Handke received is at all useful except to indicate his extreme hyper sensitivity; although his habit of insulting might point to Monsieur Tourette being a kind of kissing cousin of his,a frequent companion of Señor Autism as he Kaspars his way through life discombulatedly!
[n] that even though he called himself the “new Kafka” and the work of his first five years [1965-70: [Die Hornissen, Der Hausierer; Radio Play One, quite a few of the poems in Innerworld, Kaspar, even Goalie] gives evidence of fear and trembling, what really distinguishes this work is it’s ultimate victory over fear – a victory it appears that had to be won, and demonstrated, over and over, to the point that he became a virtuoso at it;
[o] that he calms himself by writing; and since he is such a libidinal creature, the productivity is near endless [libido has an aggressive component too], a proof it seems the obverse of the original conversion theory of hysteria: here fear becomes productive: Handke becomes calm, his self is calm where every one else’s trembles; he becomes strong, that presumably he masturbated successfully during the primal scene [Kohut’s proposition], and thus will come out the victor [except in certain extreme circumstances, see anon].
[p] One reason that one/ that is “I” can even venture these speculations is because Handke has revealed himself so nearly entirely in his writing: there are not only the novels of his self, the publication of diaries and correspondence during his life time, in the fictions he uses versions of his self, personae, thinly veiled but focused masks, for his particular states of mind, mediums as it were, vehicles, artistic challenges solved. His self-presentation, if he can help it, is shown in the best possible light [i.e. nothing critical of him or his work appears is allowed to appear in any of the many publications about him that his publishers have done]; he poses multifariously like a movie star, as only an exhibitionist can, is hyper-sensitive about his image, both in writing about him and in being photographed; an exhibitionism which, to my thinking, is also of a compensatory competitive nature for the narcissistic psychological injury that the love child suffered from early childhood to early adolescence; the “wound that he writes out of” as he has his surrogate, a raggedy Parsifal of The Art of Asking, exclaim; aside whatever class consciousness and ascendance from the class of Keuschnig’s – he once regretted not belonging to any class - plays a part, and being better at the writing game than anyone else, and the pride that goes with staying at the world’s best hotels; but for which effort he would lack the strength had he not been a “love child” during his first two years; “wounded love child Peter Handke, “melancholy player” he called himself once, instead of Ted Dorpat’s “Wounded Monster” [an important psychoanalytic contribution to Hitler studies: it demonstrates the effect on Hitler’s blood lust and need to be in a continuous state of war from the post-traumatic stress at having been in the front line near continuously for five years and keeping bad company as Handke cannot be said to have since he keeps scarcely any company at all, except his own] whereas Handke’s two half-siblings, fathered by Handke’s stepfather Bruno Handke, born to the same unhappy mother, as of birth exposed to the violent drunken father, led rather sad unsuccessful lives, the half brother a petty criminal, now moribund; the sister dying early of cancer, despite what their older brother’s generosity afforded them;
[q] one major reason for the power, the experience that Handke’s texts and plays provide, perhaps even for the extraordinary dexterity in devising techniques and forms – modernist in that sense and very much of his time while salvaging the past – Goethe Stifter Eichendorf Grillparzer to remain in the German language realm, and so much more - be they of his plays or fictions - derives, I would venture, from the extreme need to communicate from the autistic position, to make contact, to effect and affect, not just from pure ambition and a well schooled talent and drive to exhibit his self: thus the quality of “letters in a bottle” of his texts, the attempt to communicate and in an original, a unique way – after all, that is what comes through most powerfully, that is what encounter with his work produces: states of mind; including the effect of putting the reader into a depressed state of mind but at the end of writing himself and the real reader out of it: thus if the physicians prescribed a Handke book instead of Zoloft or whatever medications prescribed by the billions per year to keep folks happy under madcap capitalism… how much better the world would be off. Thus his books as well as his plays need to be described first of all as the reader’s experience of them! And critiqued by the measure of how well he succeeds in this endeavor. And that is also a technically ascertainable question – for example, a work such as The Hour We Did Not Know Each Other [the summa of all his early theater work] takes its readers by the scalp of their syntax and never lets go until the very end; experiencing a performance of the play becomes paradisiacal in the sense that we see the world – and each other – refreshed, anew; with new eyes [the essence of the function of theater]; a series of especially autobiographical works – Nonsense + Happiness [1972-74]; A Moment of True Feeling [1974], Across [1984], The Afternoon of a Writer [1986] and One Dark Night I left My Silent House [1996] – are diminished by mystifications, chiefly their refusal to own up to unhappy-making women matters. Other works, that entirely focus on his self – such as Der Hausierer, The Repetition, My Year in the No-Man’-Bay, especially the trip novel/ film The Absence [which I recently found out Handke thinks of his modern retelling of Parsifal] and is devoid of irruptions of violence [except for the loudest tank in literature], the Del Gredos epic – are devoid of the problems that the novelist’s license to lie introduce. Facing the task of needing, initially, to describe the experiences that these works produce, criticism enters a different arena from the usual.
These then are some, most I think, of the psychological coordinates and parameters with which one can address Handke and his work: The sheer productivity – aside the early vision of seeing himself as a kind of 19th century author with a large and varied oeuvre - is over-determined, too. Colleagues insist I need to mention Handke’s psychic bisexuality. I myself have never felt easy with this concept [literal-minded me keeps seeing something copulating in the brain!], but since Handke seems able to adapt women personae as a writer too, and identified so closely with his mother, there may be something to that suggestion. The Gruppe 47 folks in 1966 in Princeton said, “Oh, ein Mädchen,” Alan Ginsberg came up to Handke and me at the Pannah Grady party and asked me to translate his wish to fuck Handke [Yes back in 1966! in so many words. Pannah and her beatnik friends who smashed her Persian vases!] and drew a deadly blue eyed Prussian stare from this co-host, while Handke, his English must have been poor at the time, thinking the request was being made of me, evinced that memorable unselfconscious grin of the born again village sadist which the elephant memory affixed in its trunk; a matter that was not cleared up until 1980 where his grin, revealed as having been at my expense, and not, as I had assumed – that world of assumptions that has assumed rule over the world – at his own, then comes out looking, at least to me, that much uglier. Handke being insecure in the matter, over compensates there too, just look how “male” he then tries to appear in photographs subsequent to the early ones. However, best to my knowledge he has not gone Elephant or lion hunting…
[C] 2009
michael roloff
Friday, February 20, 2009
PART [1] OF A CONDENSED PSYCHOANALYTIC MONOGRAPH ON PETER HANDKE
A CONDENSED PSYCHO-BIOGRAPHIC MONOGRAPH on PETER HANDKE
by Michael Roloff
“Das lässt sich alles vom autobiographischen aufrollen” …[„That can all be regarded from an autobiographical perspective.“] Handke to Herbert Gamper, Ich Lebe doch nur von den Zwischenrauemen. [But I derive my sustenance only from the inbetween, the thresholds.”]
“Stay in the picture.”
“As if everyone, all over the world, had his daily visually artistic task; the task of being an image for others.” Peter Handke
Preamble
Peter Handke is what Harold Bloom would call a “strong author,” a contender for the laurel wreath, who brooks little competition among contemporaries [“how hot blooded writers are amongst each other.”] and seeks to demolish the greats of the immediate past while wishing to assume the pantheon even during his life-time, an ambition in which, with his several dozen novels, a dozen or so great plays, diary publications and what not, 65 books altogether in 40 years of writing he has by and large succeeded.
However, Handke is not just a hugely ambitious and productive author, it appears that he is condemned to write, he is not healthy when he does not, already in the early 70s he started filling notebooks upon notebooks, flashing his pen in the presence of acquaintances and friends, always cooking [proud of how “geil” – German word where the English “hot” fails to include the implication of “lewd” - his formulations are], and as he states above in the hugely revelatory book length interview with Herbert Gamper, he uses his self – various versions seen through personae lenses - as his chief material to affect his audience. Handke is also a powerfully driven, compensatory exhibitionist - perhaps authors need to be exhibitionists as much as visual artists in however sublimated a fashion – both in socially and culturally accepted forms [plays, novels, films, autobiographical accounts, published diaries of the most intimate kind]. And if one wants to put the matter in a nutshell: Handke exhibits his self by means of conveying and producing states of mind – via his projective innerworld outerworld innerworld procedure - and thus affects his audiences more powerfully but also in a very different manner than authors generally do. He may also be the most photographed author ever, also posing, see http://www.handke-photo.scriptmania.com/
As to the socially unaccepted manner of Handke’s exhibitionism to produce a reaction: not to worry, dear voyeur, we shall get to that too. Handke says that he “writes out of his wound.” The chief reason it is possible to approach Handke and his work also from a psychoanalytic perspective is because he has exhibited so much of himself and left such a rich trail of data.
I
Peter Handke was born on December 6, 1942 in Griffen/ Altenmarkt, in the province of Carinthia, Austria. According to the midwife’s extant report [1] he was carried to term and born head first without birth complications, which does not prove that Handke’s subjective birth experience – no matter that our skins are desensitized at birth and is nicely massaged as we pass through the birth canal - pace birth trauma notions – may not have been experienced as a trauma: I cannot prove a negative. Handke might be able to evince memories of that experience if he underwent an analysis and experienced a complete regression; but to the best of my knowledge the only time he consulted a therapeutician – apparently of the Catholic persuasion - was during his crisis years in Paris in the early 70s; not on the couch but en face [see the first and most revelatory of his diary publications the 1975 Weight of the World/ Das Gewicht der Welt: [2]; and the memory of a “first heart beat” as we find it cited in his great work of the imagination the play Walk About the Villages [1981/2] cannot be taken as evidence of a personal memory of an intra-uterine experience at the fetal age of four or five months. His midwife’s report [3] thus neither confirms nor disavows Handke’s future speculation that something dreadful had happened already at birth; many other dreadful matters were to happen to Peter Handke in the future, subsequent to the first two presumably wonderful years as his mother’s love-child.
Handke’s mother, whose sometimes exceedingly unhappy life he memorialized in Sorrow Beyond Dreams/ Wunschloses Unglück [1971] [4] shortly after she committed suicide, aged 52, derives from a carpenter farmer clan by the name of Sivec, of the Slovenian minority in Carinthia, who fell for a member of the German army stationed in Griffen, Handke’s actual father, a Herr Schönherr, a German Army company treasurer and bank employee from the Harz Mountain Region in Germany, who was married, and who [“carried to term”] must have fathered our genius out of wedlock in spring of 1942. Since the love of her life, the aforementioned Herr Schönherr, did not leave his wife to marry Maria, we can presume that she was in a depressed state of mind during her pregnancy; and that the incipient depression that Handke has frequently mentioned – and which, from my perspective makes him more realistic than he might be otherwise - may indeed be an instance of what is called anaclytic depression, a state of mind absorbed intra-uterine, as so much else, as we are still finding out; quite aside the love child relationship that continued to fuse Handke to her subsequently to the point of considerable identification: to the extent that he said once, exaggerating as he can when he speaks, about his mother, the protagonist of Sorrow Beyond Dreams: “What did I really know about her life? Moi mere, c’est moi.” Approving eye contact, smiles, joy. A love child imbibing love, confidence, approval. A resource to have recourse to, however a resource which, as we will see, that can be severely shaken. [///]
Unable to marry Herr Schönherr, Maria Sivec, however, then married a fellow suitor for her affections, a surrogate from the same German Army company stationed near Griffen, a Herr Hugo Handke, the future monster in his stepson’s life and psyche, who provided both her and her offspring with a last name that has now become famous, whereas we might more accurately think of Handke, if such names are needed, as Peter or Pyotr Sivec-Schönherr-Handke which would also serve as a hint at a complicated cultural identity of someone who was to write, in 1968, the play of the fatherless generation, Kaspar {“I want to be someone like somebody else once was.”}; or maybe as “the one and only ever Count auf und von und zu Griffen” as which he appears in certain photos.
At any event, by age two: a loving mother, perhaps overly loving, a doting stepfather … a rural environment… the immediate prospects are favorable, even during war time, even though the future “Keuschnig” – “Hoveler” Hardy would have called him - is living in just a Keusche…
One alternative that Handke has not imagined in all the various personae he has worn, tried out [5] as an author is what his life would have been like if he had had his grandfather as father from the beginning, no Hugo Handke to bring horror into his life… no Berlin from 1944 to 1948, no bombing attacks: He might have become a fairly well adjusted leader of the Slovenian minority, their pro se lawyer, a great one, a member of parliament; and not an obsessive writer. The mother's father, old man Sivec, the "Ote" as grandfathers were called in that region, would assume the father figure in H.P.'s intra-psychic world only in the mid-80s and be finally installed as such after impressive psychic labor [“labora verimus” – the quote at the beginning of “The Repetition” - in this instance too; not just in finally learning Slovenian well enough so as to be able to translated from it!]
as we can read in Die Wiederholung [1986] The Repetition] Handke’s 1980s rewriting of Sorrow Beyond Dreams [one of the chief sources for information about his early childhood]. This grandfather, notorious for fits of Zeus-like fury, during the 20s and 30s depressions repeatedly kept working his way out of near bankruptcy and during the 1921 plebiscite voted for the "Slavic option", that is for the first Yugoslav federation; and kept reaching under skirts until he died well into his 90s!
However it is war time in 1944 and Maria Sivec, who seems to have taken marriage seriously, joins her husband, Bruno Handke, who was wounded and is unfit to return to the front and works on the tramways in Berlin, apparently already with another woman. At that point, in Berlin, in 1944, if we are to believe the account Handke gives in S.B.D./ W.U., there ensued Handke’s decade long exposure to violent drunken primal scenes and it is to this exposure to this decade long trauma that we might sensibly trace the plethora of symptoms that Handke evinces subsequently in his behavior, as they trickle out in his autobiographically colored writing and as he enumerates them in his Essay on Tiredness [Versuch Über die Müdigkeit, 1988][6], the various rages and angers that made him tired as a young man, the numerous intense nauseas that did not start to abate until the mid-seventies, the emotional difficulties he has in living with women, right: one would not assume that someone who wrote the so empathetic Sorrow Beyond Dreams might end up a misogynist: you wouldn’t until you gave some thought to the rage the love child must have felt as it kept seeing its love object violated and not entirely unwillingly. The ill effects of witnessing such violent primal scenes has been well documented [7], yet I keep thinking of medieval customs and where they persist with entire extended clans and their beasts procreating in one space: not violently, not drunkenly would seem to be the needed caesura in my thinking; Handke’s need to show male visitors out of his house - unless it be the visiting media through whom he can exhibit himself;
he used to take friends for walks through the forest; now he does not even do that any more; and his recourse to a compulsive need, the being condemned to write, to write himself not only out of poverty into wealth but also into health, in both of which endeavors, the once “I am the new Kafka”
has succeeded to a considerable extent, capitalist wealth being easier to acquire and maintain than psychic equilibrium in the world and literary environs such as they are. Among the derivatives from this exposure that are conceivably useful to a writer, as opposed to being problematic for a regular life, I can find only three: [1] the ability to dissociate, conceivably trained already during that decade, which lent Handke a head start in that requirement for a writer of his kind – think Joyce’s pointing to Rembrandt’s painting of the woman “paring her fingernails”; [2] to put a blanket over his head as he did as a child might point in the direction of the incipient wish towards transfiguration; to not represent the bloody drama head on; to disavowal; to states of dissocation; and [3] insomnia – you can always write or become one of the best-read persons on this earth: I once witnessed Handke devour a long poem – it was the German translation of a long poem by the considerable Bulgarian poet Lubomir Levchev – if it was a milkshake through one draught on the straw; and then to be judged to be good. At that rate….
In 1948, shortly prior to the Russian sealing off transit to the West [Junes 24] and the inception of the famous “air bridge” to Berlin, Maria, Bruno and Peter Handke [and the younger half-brother?] cross the border from East Germany to the West, an event that appears to have left distinct memories of anxiety in Handke. Although Handke initially acknowledged Bruno Handke as his father, he evidently suffered from the relationship to this progressively more violent alcoholic; while his closeness to his mother’s father, grandfather Sivec, provided some relief and future orientation. If we are to believe Handke it appears he withdrew into reading at an early age. On this photo, we see the future defender of the logos, nicely proud and throwing his chest out, protecting
his two year old half-sister and four year old half-brother, dressed like an utterly Austro-German kid of the time, 1948-1950 I would guess. However, these two other children of Maria Sivec-Handke appear not to have been as welcomed as her first, and lived anything but illustrious lives. Peter Handke, it might be noted, for many years, mentioned that all his life he was haunted by the thought of suicide.
Prior to moving to Berlin in 1944, Handke’s grandfather Sivec, a farmer carpenter, who will play such a significant future role in our genius psyche, can be presumed to have doted on his first grandchild. The mother’s two brothers, whose deaths during the war and whose wartime letters [which became a family heirloom] will also play a highly significant if not central role in the future writer’s psyche and in his writing – as absences, longed for - were presumably already off to war, in Yugoslavia during which they both perished.
Stepfather Handke, so it appears, was despised by the clan in Carinthia; hating him became child's play for the jealous love child, poor chap, not a bad-looking fellow at all who must have regretted his wager to win Maria’s affection. Handke’s later hatred of the stepfather is unique for its lack of ambivalence; the hatred of the stepfather also manifests itself in fairly unambivalent decade-long hatred of all things German. Later in life H.P. will admit that a bit of self-hatred probably plays into those sentiments! The real father, Herr Schönherr, when he appears in Handke’s life to go on the customary father son trip on High School graduation – cited in S.B.D. - is looked down upon with Handke’s then customary arrogance – whose defensive nature I assume requires littler elaboration; a treatment that decades later elicits regrets [8] Thus Handke’s oedipal constellation - the mother’s first-born and love-child, the mother’s father the father figure, dead uncles; no relationship to the actual or the stepfather’s family - Handke becomes a kind of specimen case for the fatherless generation, a generation that more than usually fashioned itself after their grandparents. I have come on no mention of the other grandparents in Handke’s so autobiographical work, except that he took the trouble to find out that there was no incidence of temporary color-blindness, one of his afflictions, or color-blindness of any other kind, among any related family member [The Lesson of St. Victoire] 1980. I spent much time tracking down the phenomenon, but came to no conclusive finding; it might be a matter as simple as the expression “seeing black” and a derivative of Handke’s rages. However, the first time I talked to Handke he was wearing sun glasses an in an environment that could not have been more generously and soothingly lighted and he said it was a matter of his eyes, so it may be a combination of factors, genetic inheritance, hysteria, anger combining to produce the liability which must be one reason he never learned to drive: the affliction would prevent him from getting a driver’s license.
Shortly after his birth, Peter Handke was baptized a Catholic. [For this, as so much else, see not only Sorrow Beyond Dreams + Adolf Haslinger’s Jugend eines Schriftstellers]. During his “homecoming period” – from the years 1966 to 1979 in Germany and France – in 1979 Handke also resumed his relationship to the Catholic Church, especially to its sacred texts, that is until he left the Catholic for the Greek Orthodox persuasion subsequent to his unhappiness with the Pope’s insufficient opposition to the bombing of Serbia during the 1994 Kosovo campaign during which Handke acquired no end of publicity and notoriety in expressing his preference for a continued Yugoslav Federation. Certain parts of the culmination of Handke’s Homecoming Cycle [A Slow Homecoming, A Child’s Story, The Lesson of St. Victoire] the play and dramatic poem Walk About the Villages is infused with Catholic imagery and feeling and in a manner that will touch all religious. His side as a possible country priest is expressed in the 1993 No-Man’s-Bay in that the only actual person in that book who is also a side of the Handke’s, and not just another elf of his self with all those elve in it, is his country priest friend from his early days in Carinthia.
The inception of exposure to those violent drunken primal scenes in Berlin that he mentions in SBD coincided with the bombing attacks, that were to provide the title of his first novel Die Hornissen. Certainly, bombers and being bombed played a role in baby Handke’s life, as they did for longer stretches in my own, where they elicited a traumatic dream that turned into a screen memory of events that transpired at the time that British bombers started to attack Bremen in 1940.
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=PART II=
As of September 13, 1948 until June 1952 Peter Handke attended the classes of the village school in Griffen. Subsequently he attended the first two classes of the "Öffentlichen Hauptschule für Knaben und Mädchen" (14. September 1952 - 10. Juni 1954). On 7. Juli 1954 he absolved the admission test - upon his own wish, supported by the village priest - to attend the Catholic-Humanist „Gymnasium” Marianum [Tanzenberg], a school designed to produce priests, an alternative life Handke might have led and that is expressed in one of the six sides of the imaginatively autobiographical novel My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay [1993]. Handke’s invariable comment about his boarding school is that the bodies of the alien fellows there nauseated him, and he traces his nausea at fellow bodies to this experience!, and it is a noticeable defect of Die Wiederholung/ The Repetition that no matter how finely – Stifter refined by Vermeer is one shorthand way of putting it - an alternative yearning childhood is re-imagined there, the author’s verbal imagination flags when young Filip Kobal, Handke’s Slovenian alter ego, enters the seminary. This nausea is the first of numerous, including nausea at language, of his sequaelae nauseas that Handke mentions, culminating in what Handke in “Nonsense and Happiness” calls “nausea of the eyeballs.” [More on “nausea” anon]. Also, no matter the unhappy making home environment that he had just managed to escape, Handke is filled with home sickness. There is also an all-important dream that Handke had at the Seminary and which he recounted in great and extant detail to his mother, of becoming her brother, his uncle Gregor, whose war time letters were a family heirloom for the Sivecs. Within the internalized oedipal world, the assumption of the avunculate, as anthropologists called it, is an unusual solution within the outward family constellation as I have described it, and it points not only to Handke’s sublimated oedipal wishes but to his friendly protective attitude towards his mother. That the dream was noted down and communicated points not only to the relationship of intimacy with the mother, but of the author’s own awareness of its importance.
In 1959, on the occasion of conflict with this seminary school, Handke changed over to the regular federal “Gymnasium” in Klagenfurt. During this period Handke composed a 16 page autobiographical report “My Life – Part II.” He was also writing for the school paper, “Die Fackel” [The Torch, same name as Karl Kraus’s famous journal] rather typically expressionistic things he has said. In 1961 Handke passed his matura with the highest marks. His interest in Slavic culture was evident even at that point, as he decided not to travel with his school class to Greece, but traveled to Slovenia by himself [see The Repetition’s – the promised re-writing of Sorrow Beyond Dreams but in some ways also of his first novel, Die Hornissen - imagined reliving of that event, where his alter ego Philip Kobal, named after a 19th century Slovenian independence fighter, is on his way to visit an uncle who is studying horticulture in Ljubljana.
In fall 1961 Handke began his study of law at the University of Graz, the idea being, since he planned on being a writer even then, that a law degree would enable him to acquire the sinecure of an Austrian cultural attaché, which if not a sinecure has provided him with one of his chief alter egos in his writing, the suicidal Austrian Cultural attaché Gregor Keuschnig of A Moment of True Feeling [1974] who however, at that point, starts turning into the anti-Kafka, when love burst through [putting it bluntly: mother’s love bursting through one could say] at the sight of a series of emblematic images; and as the now ex-attaché of the aforementioned 1992 major opus No-Man’s-Bay who makes mention of that unforgettable moment. In Graz Handke initiated contact with the literary circle "Grazer Gruppe" and its leader Alfred Kolleritsch, who will remain a life-long friend [their correspondence just came out with Jung + Jung under the title of Schönheit ist des Bürger’s erste Pflicht]; published things in the journal “manuskripte" and attached himself to the group of writers associated with "Forum Stadtpark," writes for Austrian Radio, apparently helped edit Ossie Wiener’s Die Verbesserung Mittel-Europas, and by his early 20s, if you look at these contributions, goes about his business in a surprisingly professional manner. In the summer of 1964 Handke took time off and went to the now Croatian Island of Krk and completed his first novel, Die Hornissen, at his third try it appears; and after its completion said I will write another and then I will write another. Die Hornissen is suffused with longing for the missing uncles, whose war time letters were regarded a family heirloom, which may figure in the over-determination of Handke’s choice of profession: his books, many of them, have a quality of letters in a bottle, also I imagine because of his autism, a matter to which I will come shortly, to which Handke confessed in his interview with Gamper [at which point of reading a whole series of clicks, little epiphanies – Eurekas, ahas - went through me!] the isolation of that position but also Handke’s hyper-sensitivities. Die Hornissen is also drenched in fear as is Handke’s second novel Der Hausierer [8] as are most texts of that period: but ending always in the victory over anxiety! The anxiety the fear is played away! At least in the writing: “I sit down and am in a state, and what I write is then so calm.” Handke notes apparently to his own surprise!
If by nothing else, these early works are marked by an unusual ability to handle language in a serial form, to the point of virtuosity; and the creation of texts that stand in the unusual relationship to the world; that is, by means of an extra-ordinarily rich repertoire of grammatical maneuvers the world that the words refers to is placed into a conditional existence, exists as an “as if”, the “as if” also being one of the forms of defence; and that, therefore, the world of words, of syntax, becomes a world with laws unto itself! In No-Man’s-Bay Handke mentions that it was the ultra fie distinctions in Roman penal texts that brought some clarity into his angry noggin. He might also have mentioned Wittgenstein’s whose Philosophical Investigations he certainly knew inside out and used to such wonderful discombobulating effect in The Ride Across Lake Constance.
Upon initial rejection by Luchterhand Verlag, Die Hornissen was accepted for publication in 1965 by Suhrkamp which published it in 1966. [Aside Suhrkamp, who have remained his chief publisher ever since, Handke also sought and found an Austrian outlet for specifically Austrian matters, such as the book about his mother’s suicide, first Residenz, and when its editor-in-jefe Jochen Jung left with Jung and Jung; and initially he joined his Suhrkamp dramaturg in the founding of Verlag der Autoren and some of his texts were there for a time.] Subsequent to the acceptance of Die Hornissen Handke gave up his studies and has lived as a writer ever since. That same year he married the slightly older actress Libgart Schwarz and in April 1966 he wrote his first play "Publikums-Beschimpfung" [Offending the Audience/ Public Insult]. In 1966 his publisher Siegfried Unseld, as a kind of afterthought, also recommended to the Gruppe 47 that Peter Handke attends its Princeton meeting, and that is where I first set eyes [I seem to have missed Handke’s reading], that is on Handke’s back while sitting next to the famous West German journalist Erich Kuby whom I knew from Hamburg – “Handke, Handke heiß+t der” as he began to scribble in a small
note pad as Handke unloosed a rather hesitant, I thought, general [and thus, because non-specific, prohibited] attack on the innocuousness of the other texts that were read there, truth of which indictment was proved by his attack becoming the news rather than any memorable text. This play had its premiere, a success de scandale, at the “Theater am Turm” under the direction of Klaus Peymann, now head of the Berliner Ensemble, who was to do most Handke premieres over these now many years. I myself schlepped from venue to venue with my translation of the early Sprechstücke using a disheveled hippie troupe that had just returned from St. Miguel de Allende until I found a professional home for short performances at Herbert Berghof’s HB studio, E.G. Marshall doing Kaspar. The first professional public performances did not occur until the early 70s in New York. Subsequent to the Princeton event, a hostess by the name of Pannah Grady, the German writer Jakov Lind [Soul of Wood] and I, gave a party at Pannah’s swell apartment in the Dakota in Manhattan for the Gruppe 47 and American writers to meet, which was memorialized by the German writer Jürgen Becker in one of his books of the time, and where I talked to Handke twice, the first time inquiring about his sun glasses [“Was I dealing with a German who was affecting a U.S. gangster style, and a Beatle haircut, too?” was a thought in back of my mind.], the second time noting that no matter what kind of writer he might be, I, who had some German village roots too, was dealing with a grinning village sadist, and such a smell sticks, and what Abraham observes about the strength that sadism can provide holds true in this case as well. See anon.
Handke’s daughter Amina was born in 1969 in Berlin and shown to me, who adores babies, instantly seeks to ogle and make eye contact and no doubt wishing to revert, that year at a prince’s rather unprincely-seeming news-paper-stacked apartment Handke had sublet on the Uhland Strasse. Handke then wanted quickly to go out of the house, to which I had no objection, especially not considering the kind of rather dark forbidding newspaper strewn apartment it was. I had persuaded the publisher I worked for to take on Handke, the contract was for two books, a collection of plays and the novel Der Hausierer, we sat at an outdoor restaurant on the Kudamm, a street I knew quite well, I had photographs of my elegantly dressed mother sitting at an outdoor restaurant there in the 30s, an aunt had a bookshop at one intersection where I had read up on contemporary German literature in 1965; I had lived in one room of the apartment of a grad student at the intersection of Fasanen and Kantstrasse in 1957, who also had an excellent, tennis ball catching – through its faux-sheep’s-wool covered eyes Hungarian sheepdog, during my junior year abroad; and being born in Berlin, its dry cool air always perked me up. I was someone who, as I enjoyed and suffered a complete regression on the couch, came bursting out of the womb imbued with too much optimism; we discussed my translation of his Kaspar and Der Hausierer… Handke wanted to make sure that the sentence “I want to be like someone else” was as abstract as possible, and mentioned that Der Hausierer contained a lot of quotes from American black mask type detective fiction, and in German, and I lacked presence of mind to ask whether he could at least point them out to me and what U.S. titles they derived from, and maybe their places in their German editions, and if I had Der Hausierer might exist in English, but Goalie was then substituted for it as Handke’s first prose work in English.
Handke also participated in the founding of the "Verlag der Autoren" [a socialist authors’ combine that concentrated on the publication and dissemination of theatrical texts which I later represented for some years in New York] which he left sometime in the late 70s, and when I asked why, called the group “fascist,” his manner of saying “fascist” made me suspect that this was an excuse that his own righteousness would not maintain if pressed, and so I didn’t, but suspect that Suhrkamp/ Unseld pressures and or enticements or obligations were the chief factors. Needless to say, this departure did not go over big with Karl Heinz Braun, his first dramaturg at Suhrkamp who was the moving force behind the founding of VDA.
In 1971 Handke, his wife, the actress Libgart Schwartz, and his friend Kolleritsch came to the U.S. for a 21 reading 28 day cultural jaunt…I myself was easing over from being Handke’s editor at Farrar, Straus to representing Suhrkamp through the Lantz-Donadio Literary Agency and it appears that this threesome of Austrian cultural good regarded my apartment as their home away from home. Handke quickly changed hotels from the one the Austrians had picked to the Algonquin, his taste for first class hotels was born with early success, there was the premiere of My Foot my Tutor and Self-Accusation at the BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music], well received by the critics, but not by Handke who thought it just as well that it transpired in Brooklyn, no doubt the German premieres under Peymann were far superior: I faced a far different problem with German plays in a city and country that was not exactly hospitable to things German. Shortly thereafter, however, The Ride Across Lake Constance had its premiere at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center, and Kaspar, once again at BAM with a professional director and an Obie winning actor in the lead. I gave a small party for Handke at my apartment and during the gathering there occurred the first event to which my memory took recourse when I read Handke’s 1988 confession to Herbert Gamper that he still had moments of being over-come with autism, whatever he himself really meant by that. Engaged in conversation with two of his earliest fans in the United States, the critics Richard Gilman and Stanley Kaufmann and a listening me, Handke suddenly stepped away and squatted down by the record player in a corner and on the lowest shelf and put on a record, and I do not recall whether it was a Beatles record or not. No one said anything but I imagine
that Gilman and Kaufmann were as puzzled as I. Nothing untoward had been said that I could recall, but I think the conversation could be regarded as the kind of literary bullshitting that one might engage in to find a common vocabulary among strangers, and who knows how much of it Handke had even understood: but I expect he was seized by what he would call nausea, that he had his fill of it, and lacked the knowledge to disengage elegantly or steer the conversation into different paths. As soon a the guests had departed, my man perked up to be the insulting self with which he would grace his host at the 21 venues in 28 days culturally representative trip that the threesome were about to undertake, behavior that produced scars that still spoke when I visited the same venues about twenty years later. On their return from their marathon jaunt, Kolleritsch was having a tachycardia attack and had to lie down exhausted on my marriage bed, Libgart, also exhausted, graced the cot in my study, but a seemingly inexhaustible Handke went off to the two nearby shops that carried international magazines and papers, I suspect to check whether the star’s picture was in any of them, or perhaps he had heard of one or the other item and wanted to check it out at once. At some point we also met with a fellow translator and I witnessed for the first time Handke’s disgust with physical ugliness: the fellow was not only physically ugly but turned out to have a character that fit his ugly face. Handke and crew went to see a Broadway play that starred Lauren Bacall and Handke expressed regret at seeing her having fallen so low. There was a reading at the cultural institute on whose grand staircase Libgart Schwartz demonstrated the entrance to Lake Constance. Handke subsequently wrote the wonderful novel Short Letter, Long Farewell which features an Austrian dramaturg [Kolleritsch] and a wife who pursues her husband, which I imagine was the case emotionally, since it was evident within moments that she was being ignored, taken for granted, neglected. Whether that theme of pursuit that lends a story to this rather French/ American novel, anyhow for me it has a Godardlike quality in its cutting, is based on a sense that he was being emotionally pursued and trapped is something only the author can say with greater certainty. However, the news that Libgart Schwartz had left Handke in the early seventies came as no surprise to me. She was ready for the splitting then while her husband, as in the novel, was engaged in literary theoretical discussions with Kolleritsch into which I was never sufficiently clued in: I still love talking literary theory. Short Letter was written quickly upon Handke’s return to Germany, I think he had already moved to Kronenberg near Frankfurt. It was a big success in Germany. On 9. October 1971 Handke was arrested for „insulting the honor of the police” as he tried to enter an over-crowded hall for a reading of one of his own texts at the „Steirische Herbst” in Graz. His mother, aged 51, committed suicide that fall; he wrote Sorrow Beyond Dreams while drinking a fair amount of white wine so he has said. Libgart Schwartz left at about the same time; the “language regulation” for this separation became that Libgart Schwartz had decided to resume her career as an actress, which was true to the extent that she had never really abandoned it in the first place [she had acted in Vim Wenders’ 1971 made released in 1972 film of Handke’s Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick; and this represents one of two major lies that the otherwise so honest exhibitionist has maintained all these years, presumably for reasons of his sometimes delicate self-image, otherwise I find that he is right when he says that he isn’t such a “softie” as which he used to look at one time. Nor is this tomcat any more.
He was left to care for his baby daughter;
Except for summer vacations Handke then tried his hand at raising his daughter on his own, see his book Kindergeschichte 1981 [A Child’s Story] for this, a very honest book as best as I can tell, who saw Handke in Berlin, Paris and New York during that period, except that there is no mention of the child’s mother!] and the girl seemed unusually quiet for her age when I saw her in New York in 1977 or so. Weight of the World contains an entry that notes that Amina had come up to her father and said she had to pee; whereupon Handke appears simply to have sat back and “waited what would happen now.” Toilet training a la Handke! Young as she was, she too is recorded as noting: “Daddy, you are writing again already.”
At the height of early success the roof fell in… and “the poetry in his life” disappeared for some years and he entered a crisis ridden period of some duration that is well recorded in the works of that period which I initially looked at most closely from every vantage point for the purpose of exploring Handke’s psychic dimension when I had tired of my own in the late 80s. As a matter of fact, it was a disavowal in his 1984 novel Der Chinese des Schmerzens/ Across where the author obviously should have assented that set off my education in Handke’s psychology which has evolved into the psychology of writing and reading meanwhile. In the Loser of Across I seemed to be re-encountering the same unhappy consciousness that I thought had vanished with the end of the first Paris Period [1973-1976] and his writing of the “Homecoming Quartet.”
The works of the period subsequent to the shock of his wife’s departure [coming on the heels of his mother’s suicide and having his style cramped by being house father to a young baby girl] are
by Michael Roloff
“Das lässt sich alles vom autobiographischen aufrollen” …[„That can all be regarded from an autobiographical perspective.“] Handke to Herbert Gamper, Ich Lebe doch nur von den Zwischenrauemen. [But I derive my sustenance only from the inbetween, the thresholds.”]
“Stay in the picture.”
“As if everyone, all over the world, had his daily visually artistic task; the task of being an image for others.” Peter Handke
Preamble
Peter Handke is what Harold Bloom would call a “strong author,” a contender for the laurel wreath, who brooks little competition among contemporaries [“how hot blooded writers are amongst each other.”] and seeks to demolish the greats of the immediate past while wishing to assume the pantheon even during his life-time, an ambition in which, with his several dozen novels, a dozen or so great plays, diary publications and what not, 65 books altogether in 40 years of writing he has by and large succeeded.
However, Handke is not just a hugely ambitious and productive author, it appears that he is condemned to write, he is not healthy when he does not, already in the early 70s he started filling notebooks upon notebooks, flashing his pen in the presence of acquaintances and friends, always cooking [proud of how “geil” – German word where the English “hot” fails to include the implication of “lewd” - his formulations are], and as he states above in the hugely revelatory book length interview with Herbert Gamper, he uses his self – various versions seen through personae lenses - as his chief material to affect his audience. Handke is also a powerfully driven, compensatory exhibitionist - perhaps authors need to be exhibitionists as much as visual artists in however sublimated a fashion – both in socially and culturally accepted forms [plays, novels, films, autobiographical accounts, published diaries of the most intimate kind]. And if one wants to put the matter in a nutshell: Handke exhibits his self by means of conveying and producing states of mind – via his projective innerworld outerworld innerworld procedure - and thus affects his audiences more powerfully but also in a very different manner than authors generally do. He may also be the most photographed author ever, also posing, see http://www.handke-photo.scriptmania.com/
As to the socially unaccepted manner of Handke’s exhibitionism to produce a reaction: not to worry, dear voyeur, we shall get to that too. Handke says that he “writes out of his wound.” The chief reason it is possible to approach Handke and his work also from a psychoanalytic perspective is because he has exhibited so much of himself and left such a rich trail of data.
I
Peter Handke was born on December 6, 1942 in Griffen/ Altenmarkt, in the province of Carinthia, Austria. According to the midwife’s extant report [1] he was carried to term and born head first without birth complications, which does not prove that Handke’s subjective birth experience – no matter that our skins are desensitized at birth and is nicely massaged as we pass through the birth canal - pace birth trauma notions – may not have been experienced as a trauma: I cannot prove a negative. Handke might be able to evince memories of that experience if he underwent an analysis and experienced a complete regression; but to the best of my knowledge the only time he consulted a therapeutician – apparently of the Catholic persuasion - was during his crisis years in Paris in the early 70s; not on the couch but en face [see the first and most revelatory of his diary publications the 1975 Weight of the World/ Das Gewicht der Welt: [2]; and the memory of a “first heart beat” as we find it cited in his great work of the imagination the play Walk About the Villages [1981/2] cannot be taken as evidence of a personal memory of an intra-uterine experience at the fetal age of four or five months. His midwife’s report [3] thus neither confirms nor disavows Handke’s future speculation that something dreadful had happened already at birth; many other dreadful matters were to happen to Peter Handke in the future, subsequent to the first two presumably wonderful years as his mother’s love-child.
Handke’s mother, whose sometimes exceedingly unhappy life he memorialized in Sorrow Beyond Dreams/ Wunschloses Unglück [1971] [4] shortly after she committed suicide, aged 52, derives from a carpenter farmer clan by the name of Sivec, of the Slovenian minority in Carinthia, who fell for a member of the German army stationed in Griffen, Handke’s actual father, a Herr Schönherr, a German Army company treasurer and bank employee from the Harz Mountain Region in Germany, who was married, and who [“carried to term”] must have fathered our genius out of wedlock in spring of 1942. Since the love of her life, the aforementioned Herr Schönherr, did not leave his wife to marry Maria, we can presume that she was in a depressed state of mind during her pregnancy; and that the incipient depression that Handke has frequently mentioned – and which, from my perspective makes him more realistic than he might be otherwise - may indeed be an instance of what is called anaclytic depression, a state of mind absorbed intra-uterine, as so much else, as we are still finding out; quite aside the love child relationship that continued to fuse Handke to her subsequently to the point of considerable identification: to the extent that he said once, exaggerating as he can when he speaks, about his mother, the protagonist of Sorrow Beyond Dreams: “What did I really know about her life? Moi mere, c’est moi.” Approving eye contact, smiles, joy. A love child imbibing love, confidence, approval. A resource to have recourse to, however a resource which, as we will see, that can be severely shaken. [///]
Unable to marry Herr Schönherr, Maria Sivec, however, then married a fellow suitor for her affections, a surrogate from the same German Army company stationed near Griffen, a Herr Hugo Handke, the future monster in his stepson’s life and psyche, who provided both her and her offspring with a last name that has now become famous, whereas we might more accurately think of Handke, if such names are needed, as Peter or Pyotr Sivec-Schönherr-Handke which would also serve as a hint at a complicated cultural identity of someone who was to write, in 1968, the play of the fatherless generation, Kaspar {“I want to be someone like somebody else once was.”}; or maybe as “the one and only ever Count auf und von und zu Griffen” as which he appears in certain photos.
At any event, by age two: a loving mother, perhaps overly loving, a doting stepfather … a rural environment… the immediate prospects are favorable, even during war time, even though the future “Keuschnig” – “Hoveler” Hardy would have called him - is living in just a Keusche…
One alternative that Handke has not imagined in all the various personae he has worn, tried out [5] as an author is what his life would have been like if he had had his grandfather as father from the beginning, no Hugo Handke to bring horror into his life… no Berlin from 1944 to 1948, no bombing attacks: He might have become a fairly well adjusted leader of the Slovenian minority, their pro se lawyer, a great one, a member of parliament; and not an obsessive writer. The mother's father, old man Sivec, the "Ote" as grandfathers were called in that region, would assume the father figure in H.P.'s intra-psychic world only in the mid-80s and be finally installed as such after impressive psychic labor [“labora verimus” – the quote at the beginning of “The Repetition” - in this instance too; not just in finally learning Slovenian well enough so as to be able to translated from it!]
as we can read in Die Wiederholung [1986] The Repetition] Handke’s 1980s rewriting of Sorrow Beyond Dreams [one of the chief sources for information about his early childhood]. This grandfather, notorious for fits of Zeus-like fury, during the 20s and 30s depressions repeatedly kept working his way out of near bankruptcy and during the 1921 plebiscite voted for the "Slavic option", that is for the first Yugoslav federation; and kept reaching under skirts until he died well into his 90s!
However it is war time in 1944 and Maria Sivec, who seems to have taken marriage seriously, joins her husband, Bruno Handke, who was wounded and is unfit to return to the front and works on the tramways in Berlin, apparently already with another woman. At that point, in Berlin, in 1944, if we are to believe the account Handke gives in S.B.D./ W.U., there ensued Handke’s decade long exposure to violent drunken primal scenes and it is to this exposure to this decade long trauma that we might sensibly trace the plethora of symptoms that Handke evinces subsequently in his behavior, as they trickle out in his autobiographically colored writing and as he enumerates them in his Essay on Tiredness [Versuch Über die Müdigkeit, 1988][6], the various rages and angers that made him tired as a young man, the numerous intense nauseas that did not start to abate until the mid-seventies, the emotional difficulties he has in living with women, right: one would not assume that someone who wrote the so empathetic Sorrow Beyond Dreams might end up a misogynist: you wouldn’t until you gave some thought to the rage the love child must have felt as it kept seeing its love object violated and not entirely unwillingly. The ill effects of witnessing such violent primal scenes has been well documented [7], yet I keep thinking of medieval customs and where they persist with entire extended clans and their beasts procreating in one space: not violently, not drunkenly would seem to be the needed caesura in my thinking; Handke’s need to show male visitors out of his house - unless it be the visiting media through whom he can exhibit himself;
he used to take friends for walks through the forest; now he does not even do that any more; and his recourse to a compulsive need, the being condemned to write, to write himself not only out of poverty into wealth but also into health, in both of which endeavors, the once “I am the new Kafka”
has succeeded to a considerable extent, capitalist wealth being easier to acquire and maintain than psychic equilibrium in the world and literary environs such as they are. Among the derivatives from this exposure that are conceivably useful to a writer, as opposed to being problematic for a regular life, I can find only three: [1] the ability to dissociate, conceivably trained already during that decade, which lent Handke a head start in that requirement for a writer of his kind – think Joyce’s pointing to Rembrandt’s painting of the woman “paring her fingernails”; [2] to put a blanket over his head as he did as a child might point in the direction of the incipient wish towards transfiguration; to not represent the bloody drama head on; to disavowal; to states of dissocation; and [3] insomnia – you can always write or become one of the best-read persons on this earth: I once witnessed Handke devour a long poem – it was the German translation of a long poem by the considerable Bulgarian poet Lubomir Levchev – if it was a milkshake through one draught on the straw; and then to be judged to be good. At that rate….
In 1948, shortly prior to the Russian sealing off transit to the West [Junes 24] and the inception of the famous “air bridge” to Berlin, Maria, Bruno and Peter Handke [and the younger half-brother?] cross the border from East Germany to the West, an event that appears to have left distinct memories of anxiety in Handke. Although Handke initially acknowledged Bruno Handke as his father, he evidently suffered from the relationship to this progressively more violent alcoholic; while his closeness to his mother’s father, grandfather Sivec, provided some relief and future orientation. If we are to believe Handke it appears he withdrew into reading at an early age. On this photo, we see the future defender of the logos, nicely proud and throwing his chest out, protecting
his two year old half-sister and four year old half-brother, dressed like an utterly Austro-German kid of the time, 1948-1950 I would guess. However, these two other children of Maria Sivec-Handke appear not to have been as welcomed as her first, and lived anything but illustrious lives. Peter Handke, it might be noted, for many years, mentioned that all his life he was haunted by the thought of suicide.
Prior to moving to Berlin in 1944, Handke’s grandfather Sivec, a farmer carpenter, who will play such a significant future role in our genius psyche, can be presumed to have doted on his first grandchild. The mother’s two brothers, whose deaths during the war and whose wartime letters [which became a family heirloom] will also play a highly significant if not central role in the future writer’s psyche and in his writing – as absences, longed for - were presumably already off to war, in Yugoslavia during which they both perished.
Stepfather Handke, so it appears, was despised by the clan in Carinthia; hating him became child's play for the jealous love child, poor chap, not a bad-looking fellow at all who must have regretted his wager to win Maria’s affection. Handke’s later hatred of the stepfather is unique for its lack of ambivalence; the hatred of the stepfather also manifests itself in fairly unambivalent decade-long hatred of all things German. Later in life H.P. will admit that a bit of self-hatred probably plays into those sentiments! The real father, Herr Schönherr, when he appears in Handke’s life to go on the customary father son trip on High School graduation – cited in S.B.D. - is looked down upon with Handke’s then customary arrogance – whose defensive nature I assume requires littler elaboration; a treatment that decades later elicits regrets [8] Thus Handke’s oedipal constellation - the mother’s first-born and love-child, the mother’s father the father figure, dead uncles; no relationship to the actual or the stepfather’s family - Handke becomes a kind of specimen case for the fatherless generation, a generation that more than usually fashioned itself after their grandparents. I have come on no mention of the other grandparents in Handke’s so autobiographical work, except that he took the trouble to find out that there was no incidence of temporary color-blindness, one of his afflictions, or color-blindness of any other kind, among any related family member [The Lesson of St. Victoire] 1980. I spent much time tracking down the phenomenon, but came to no conclusive finding; it might be a matter as simple as the expression “seeing black” and a derivative of Handke’s rages. However, the first time I talked to Handke he was wearing sun glasses an in an environment that could not have been more generously and soothingly lighted and he said it was a matter of his eyes, so it may be a combination of factors, genetic inheritance, hysteria, anger combining to produce the liability which must be one reason he never learned to drive: the affliction would prevent him from getting a driver’s license.
Shortly after his birth, Peter Handke was baptized a Catholic. [For this, as so much else, see not only Sorrow Beyond Dreams + Adolf Haslinger’s Jugend eines Schriftstellers]. During his “homecoming period” – from the years 1966 to 1979 in Germany and France – in 1979 Handke also resumed his relationship to the Catholic Church, especially to its sacred texts, that is until he left the Catholic for the Greek Orthodox persuasion subsequent to his unhappiness with the Pope’s insufficient opposition to the bombing of Serbia during the 1994 Kosovo campaign during which Handke acquired no end of publicity and notoriety in expressing his preference for a continued Yugoslav Federation. Certain parts of the culmination of Handke’s Homecoming Cycle [A Slow Homecoming, A Child’s Story, The Lesson of St. Victoire] the play and dramatic poem Walk About the Villages is infused with Catholic imagery and feeling and in a manner that will touch all religious. His side as a possible country priest is expressed in the 1993 No-Man’s-Bay in that the only actual person in that book who is also a side of the Handke’s, and not just another elf of his self with all those elve in it, is his country priest friend from his early days in Carinthia.
The inception of exposure to those violent drunken primal scenes in Berlin that he mentions in SBD coincided with the bombing attacks, that were to provide the title of his first novel Die Hornissen. Certainly, bombers and being bombed played a role in baby Handke’s life, as they did for longer stretches in my own, where they elicited a traumatic dream that turned into a screen memory of events that transpired at the time that British bombers started to attack Bremen in 1940.
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=PART II=
As of September 13, 1948 until June 1952 Peter Handke attended the classes of the village school in Griffen. Subsequently he attended the first two classes of the "Öffentlichen Hauptschule für Knaben und Mädchen" (14. September 1952 - 10. Juni 1954). On 7. Juli 1954 he absolved the admission test - upon his own wish, supported by the village priest - to attend the Catholic-Humanist „Gymnasium” Marianum [Tanzenberg], a school designed to produce priests, an alternative life Handke might have led and that is expressed in one of the six sides of the imaginatively autobiographical novel My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay [1993]. Handke’s invariable comment about his boarding school is that the bodies of the alien fellows there nauseated him, and he traces his nausea at fellow bodies to this experience!, and it is a noticeable defect of Die Wiederholung/ The Repetition that no matter how finely – Stifter refined by Vermeer is one shorthand way of putting it - an alternative yearning childhood is re-imagined there, the author’s verbal imagination flags when young Filip Kobal, Handke’s Slovenian alter ego, enters the seminary. This nausea is the first of numerous, including nausea at language, of his sequaelae nauseas that Handke mentions, culminating in what Handke in “Nonsense and Happiness” calls “nausea of the eyeballs.” [More on “nausea” anon]. Also, no matter the unhappy making home environment that he had just managed to escape, Handke is filled with home sickness. There is also an all-important dream that Handke had at the Seminary and which he recounted in great and extant detail to his mother, of becoming her brother, his uncle Gregor, whose war time letters were a family heirloom for the Sivecs. Within the internalized oedipal world, the assumption of the avunculate, as anthropologists called it, is an unusual solution within the outward family constellation as I have described it, and it points not only to Handke’s sublimated oedipal wishes but to his friendly protective attitude towards his mother. That the dream was noted down and communicated points not only to the relationship of intimacy with the mother, but of the author’s own awareness of its importance.
In 1959, on the occasion of conflict with this seminary school, Handke changed over to the regular federal “Gymnasium” in Klagenfurt. During this period Handke composed a 16 page autobiographical report “My Life – Part II.” He was also writing for the school paper, “Die Fackel” [The Torch, same name as Karl Kraus’s famous journal] rather typically expressionistic things he has said. In 1961 Handke passed his matura with the highest marks. His interest in Slavic culture was evident even at that point, as he decided not to travel with his school class to Greece, but traveled to Slovenia by himself [see The Repetition’s – the promised re-writing of Sorrow Beyond Dreams but in some ways also of his first novel, Die Hornissen - imagined reliving of that event, where his alter ego Philip Kobal, named after a 19th century Slovenian independence fighter, is on his way to visit an uncle who is studying horticulture in Ljubljana.
In fall 1961 Handke began his study of law at the University of Graz, the idea being, since he planned on being a writer even then, that a law degree would enable him to acquire the sinecure of an Austrian cultural attaché, which if not a sinecure has provided him with one of his chief alter egos in his writing, the suicidal Austrian Cultural attaché Gregor Keuschnig of A Moment of True Feeling [1974] who however, at that point, starts turning into the anti-Kafka, when love burst through [putting it bluntly: mother’s love bursting through one could say] at the sight of a series of emblematic images; and as the now ex-attaché of the aforementioned 1992 major opus No-Man’s-Bay who makes mention of that unforgettable moment. In Graz Handke initiated contact with the literary circle "Grazer Gruppe" and its leader Alfred Kolleritsch, who will remain a life-long friend [their correspondence just came out with Jung + Jung under the title of Schönheit ist des Bürger’s erste Pflicht]; published things in the journal “manuskripte" and attached himself to the group of writers associated with "Forum Stadtpark," writes for Austrian Radio, apparently helped edit Ossie Wiener’s Die Verbesserung Mittel-Europas, and by his early 20s, if you look at these contributions, goes about his business in a surprisingly professional manner. In the summer of 1964 Handke took time off and went to the now Croatian Island of Krk and completed his first novel, Die Hornissen, at his third try it appears; and after its completion said I will write another and then I will write another. Die Hornissen is suffused with longing for the missing uncles, whose war time letters were regarded a family heirloom, which may figure in the over-determination of Handke’s choice of profession: his books, many of them, have a quality of letters in a bottle, also I imagine because of his autism, a matter to which I will come shortly, to which Handke confessed in his interview with Gamper [at which point of reading a whole series of clicks, little epiphanies – Eurekas, ahas - went through me!] the isolation of that position but also Handke’s hyper-sensitivities. Die Hornissen is also drenched in fear as is Handke’s second novel Der Hausierer [8] as are most texts of that period: but ending always in the victory over anxiety! The anxiety the fear is played away! At least in the writing: “I sit down and am in a state, and what I write is then so calm.” Handke notes apparently to his own surprise!
If by nothing else, these early works are marked by an unusual ability to handle language in a serial form, to the point of virtuosity; and the creation of texts that stand in the unusual relationship to the world; that is, by means of an extra-ordinarily rich repertoire of grammatical maneuvers the world that the words refers to is placed into a conditional existence, exists as an “as if”, the “as if” also being one of the forms of defence; and that, therefore, the world of words, of syntax, becomes a world with laws unto itself! In No-Man’s-Bay Handke mentions that it was the ultra fie distinctions in Roman penal texts that brought some clarity into his angry noggin. He might also have mentioned Wittgenstein’s whose Philosophical Investigations he certainly knew inside out and used to such wonderful discombobulating effect in The Ride Across Lake Constance.
Upon initial rejection by Luchterhand Verlag, Die Hornissen was accepted for publication in 1965 by Suhrkamp which published it in 1966. [Aside Suhrkamp, who have remained his chief publisher ever since, Handke also sought and found an Austrian outlet for specifically Austrian matters, such as the book about his mother’s suicide, first Residenz, and when its editor-in-jefe Jochen Jung left with Jung and Jung; and initially he joined his Suhrkamp dramaturg in the founding of Verlag der Autoren and some of his texts were there for a time.] Subsequent to the acceptance of Die Hornissen Handke gave up his studies and has lived as a writer ever since. That same year he married the slightly older actress Libgart Schwarz and in April 1966 he wrote his first play "Publikums-Beschimpfung" [Offending the Audience/ Public Insult]. In 1966 his publisher Siegfried Unseld, as a kind of afterthought, also recommended to the Gruppe 47 that Peter Handke attends its Princeton meeting, and that is where I first set eyes [I seem to have missed Handke’s reading], that is on Handke’s back while sitting next to the famous West German journalist Erich Kuby whom I knew from Hamburg – “Handke, Handke heiß+t der” as he began to scribble in a small
note pad as Handke unloosed a rather hesitant, I thought, general [and thus, because non-specific, prohibited] attack on the innocuousness of the other texts that were read there, truth of which indictment was proved by his attack becoming the news rather than any memorable text. This play had its premiere, a success de scandale, at the “Theater am Turm” under the direction of Klaus Peymann, now head of the Berliner Ensemble, who was to do most Handke premieres over these now many years. I myself schlepped from venue to venue with my translation of the early Sprechstücke using a disheveled hippie troupe that had just returned from St. Miguel de Allende until I found a professional home for short performances at Herbert Berghof’s HB studio, E.G. Marshall doing Kaspar. The first professional public performances did not occur until the early 70s in New York. Subsequent to the Princeton event, a hostess by the name of Pannah Grady, the German writer Jakov Lind [Soul of Wood] and I, gave a party at Pannah’s swell apartment in the Dakota in Manhattan for the Gruppe 47 and American writers to meet, which was memorialized by the German writer Jürgen Becker in one of his books of the time, and where I talked to Handke twice, the first time inquiring about his sun glasses [“Was I dealing with a German who was affecting a U.S. gangster style, and a Beatle haircut, too?” was a thought in back of my mind.], the second time noting that no matter what kind of writer he might be, I, who had some German village roots too, was dealing with a grinning village sadist, and such a smell sticks, and what Abraham observes about the strength that sadism can provide holds true in this case as well. See anon.
Handke’s daughter Amina was born in 1969 in Berlin and shown to me, who adores babies, instantly seeks to ogle and make eye contact and no doubt wishing to revert, that year at a prince’s rather unprincely-seeming news-paper-stacked apartment Handke had sublet on the Uhland Strasse. Handke then wanted quickly to go out of the house, to which I had no objection, especially not considering the kind of rather dark forbidding newspaper strewn apartment it was. I had persuaded the publisher I worked for to take on Handke, the contract was for two books, a collection of plays and the novel Der Hausierer, we sat at an outdoor restaurant on the Kudamm, a street I knew quite well, I had photographs of my elegantly dressed mother sitting at an outdoor restaurant there in the 30s, an aunt had a bookshop at one intersection where I had read up on contemporary German literature in 1965; I had lived in one room of the apartment of a grad student at the intersection of Fasanen and Kantstrasse in 1957, who also had an excellent, tennis ball catching – through its faux-sheep’s-wool covered eyes Hungarian sheepdog, during my junior year abroad; and being born in Berlin, its dry cool air always perked me up. I was someone who, as I enjoyed and suffered a complete regression on the couch, came bursting out of the womb imbued with too much optimism; we discussed my translation of his Kaspar and Der Hausierer… Handke wanted to make sure that the sentence “I want to be like someone else” was as abstract as possible, and mentioned that Der Hausierer contained a lot of quotes from American black mask type detective fiction, and in German, and I lacked presence of mind to ask whether he could at least point them out to me and what U.S. titles they derived from, and maybe their places in their German editions, and if I had Der Hausierer might exist in English, but Goalie was then substituted for it as Handke’s first prose work in English.
Handke also participated in the founding of the "Verlag der Autoren" [a socialist authors’ combine that concentrated on the publication and dissemination of theatrical texts which I later represented for some years in New York] which he left sometime in the late 70s, and when I asked why, called the group “fascist,” his manner of saying “fascist” made me suspect that this was an excuse that his own righteousness would not maintain if pressed, and so I didn’t, but suspect that Suhrkamp/ Unseld pressures and or enticements or obligations were the chief factors. Needless to say, this departure did not go over big with Karl Heinz Braun, his first dramaturg at Suhrkamp who was the moving force behind the founding of VDA.
In 1971 Handke, his wife, the actress Libgart Schwartz, and his friend Kolleritsch came to the U.S. for a 21 reading 28 day cultural jaunt…I myself was easing over from being Handke’s editor at Farrar, Straus to representing Suhrkamp through the Lantz-Donadio Literary Agency and it appears that this threesome of Austrian cultural good regarded my apartment as their home away from home. Handke quickly changed hotels from the one the Austrians had picked to the Algonquin, his taste for first class hotels was born with early success, there was the premiere of My Foot my Tutor and Self-Accusation at the BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music], well received by the critics, but not by Handke who thought it just as well that it transpired in Brooklyn, no doubt the German premieres under Peymann were far superior: I faced a far different problem with German plays in a city and country that was not exactly hospitable to things German. Shortly thereafter, however, The Ride Across Lake Constance had its premiere at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center, and Kaspar, once again at BAM with a professional director and an Obie winning actor in the lead. I gave a small party for Handke at my apartment and during the gathering there occurred the first event to which my memory took recourse when I read Handke’s 1988 confession to Herbert Gamper that he still had moments of being over-come with autism, whatever he himself really meant by that. Engaged in conversation with two of his earliest fans in the United States, the critics Richard Gilman and Stanley Kaufmann and a listening me, Handke suddenly stepped away and squatted down by the record player in a corner and on the lowest shelf and put on a record, and I do not recall whether it was a Beatles record or not. No one said anything but I imagine
that Gilman and Kaufmann were as puzzled as I. Nothing untoward had been said that I could recall, but I think the conversation could be regarded as the kind of literary bullshitting that one might engage in to find a common vocabulary among strangers, and who knows how much of it Handke had even understood: but I expect he was seized by what he would call nausea, that he had his fill of it, and lacked the knowledge to disengage elegantly or steer the conversation into different paths. As soon a the guests had departed, my man perked up to be the insulting self with which he would grace his host at the 21 venues in 28 days culturally representative trip that the threesome were about to undertake, behavior that produced scars that still spoke when I visited the same venues about twenty years later. On their return from their marathon jaunt, Kolleritsch was having a tachycardia attack and had to lie down exhausted on my marriage bed, Libgart, also exhausted, graced the cot in my study, but a seemingly inexhaustible Handke went off to the two nearby shops that carried international magazines and papers, I suspect to check whether the star’s picture was in any of them, or perhaps he had heard of one or the other item and wanted to check it out at once. At some point we also met with a fellow translator and I witnessed for the first time Handke’s disgust with physical ugliness: the fellow was not only physically ugly but turned out to have a character that fit his ugly face. Handke and crew went to see a Broadway play that starred Lauren Bacall and Handke expressed regret at seeing her having fallen so low. There was a reading at the cultural institute on whose grand staircase Libgart Schwartz demonstrated the entrance to Lake Constance. Handke subsequently wrote the wonderful novel Short Letter, Long Farewell which features an Austrian dramaturg [Kolleritsch] and a wife who pursues her husband, which I imagine was the case emotionally, since it was evident within moments that she was being ignored, taken for granted, neglected. Whether that theme of pursuit that lends a story to this rather French/ American novel, anyhow for me it has a Godardlike quality in its cutting, is based on a sense that he was being emotionally pursued and trapped is something only the author can say with greater certainty. However, the news that Libgart Schwartz had left Handke in the early seventies came as no surprise to me. She was ready for the splitting then while her husband, as in the novel, was engaged in literary theoretical discussions with Kolleritsch into which I was never sufficiently clued in: I still love talking literary theory. Short Letter was written quickly upon Handke’s return to Germany, I think he had already moved to Kronenberg near Frankfurt. It was a big success in Germany. On 9. October 1971 Handke was arrested for „insulting the honor of the police” as he tried to enter an over-crowded hall for a reading of one of his own texts at the „Steirische Herbst” in Graz. His mother, aged 51, committed suicide that fall; he wrote Sorrow Beyond Dreams while drinking a fair amount of white wine so he has said. Libgart Schwartz left at about the same time; the “language regulation” for this separation became that Libgart Schwartz had decided to resume her career as an actress, which was true to the extent that she had never really abandoned it in the first place [she had acted in Vim Wenders’ 1971 made released in 1972 film of Handke’s Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick; and this represents one of two major lies that the otherwise so honest exhibitionist has maintained all these years, presumably for reasons of his sometimes delicate self-image, otherwise I find that he is right when he says that he isn’t such a “softie” as which he used to look at one time. Nor is this tomcat any more.
He was left to care for his baby daughter;
Except for summer vacations Handke then tried his hand at raising his daughter on his own, see his book Kindergeschichte 1981 [A Child’s Story] for this, a very honest book as best as I can tell, who saw Handke in Berlin, Paris and New York during that period, except that there is no mention of the child’s mother!] and the girl seemed unusually quiet for her age when I saw her in New York in 1977 or so. Weight of the World contains an entry that notes that Amina had come up to her father and said she had to pee; whereupon Handke appears simply to have sat back and “waited what would happen now.” Toilet training a la Handke! Young as she was, she too is recorded as noting: “Daddy, you are writing again already.”
At the height of early success the roof fell in… and “the poetry in his life” disappeared for some years and he entered a crisis ridden period of some duration that is well recorded in the works of that period which I initially looked at most closely from every vantage point for the purpose of exploring Handke’s psychic dimension when I had tired of my own in the late 80s. As a matter of fact, it was a disavowal in his 1984 novel Der Chinese des Schmerzens/ Across where the author obviously should have assented that set off my education in Handke’s psychology which has evolved into the psychology of writing and reading meanwhile. In the Loser of Across I seemed to be re-encountering the same unhappy consciousness that I thought had vanished with the end of the first Paris Period [1973-1976] and his writing of the “Homecoming Quartet.”
The works of the period subsequent to the shock of his wife’s departure [coming on the heels of his mother’s suicide and having his style cramped by being house father to a young baby girl] are
=end of part I=
Saturday, November 10, 2007
dan savage/ curtis/ autogynephilia
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=433857
dear dan savage,
your piece on Eastern Washington, specifically your speculations about ex-state legislator curtis caught my attention. your correspondent's guess at autogynephilia I find a useless category that asks for a dynamic explanation.
allow me to approach Curtis behavior, his enactments, acting out of his desires in the following manner:
1] it is dangerous, risky. He is accomplished; he has done this many times. the risk taking implies masochism, where there is masochism there is sadism [as in his both fucking and being fucked]. the unprotected sex he pays to impose on his prostitute also is dangerous to both parties, and is sadomasochistic. Running these dangers also implies a wish to be caught – to be helped, thus one of the possible meanings of stethoscope. However, the masochism may just be a defense, and overlay, like the sexuality of all of this, which however makes the case notorious and misleads us and thus becomes another instance of the miasma of confusion.
2] let me entertain the possibility that Curtis is not gay: i.e. that his erotic and love object choice is not a projection of something inside himself; the other possibility is, of course, not that he is a hypocrite [a useless moral judgment as far as understanding goes] but that he is split, that one side does not know, does not allow the other to know what it wishes what it is doing.
in the event of Curtis being neither gay nor bi-sexual, the cross-dressing points in a specific manner to Curtis relationship to his mother – or rather it points to a trauma in his past, possibly like a railway trauma, or of a trauma of longer duration, which then was not repaired: the entire enactment strikes me as an attempt, unsuccessful [of course],
at reparation – possibly of early abandonment, perceived or real. thus the stethoscope may be more than part of some early childhood ritual of sexual curiosity games among children – however, it also points towards childhood aside expressing the wish for a real doctor, that is: real the entire scene as a dream and interpret it as such.
whom is the rope tying down, tries to keep from leaving - aside the fantasy of mastery?
the excitement of the risk taking as well of the sex might point to a wish to return to the state of excitement induced by the trauma- not for its own sake; but that once you are in that state perhaps there will be no trauma this time? to keep the identity intact?
the identification with the figure that abandoned him might affect his identity to the point where he don's women's underwear -- if you become your mother then she has not abandoned you: it is a fetish [the sexual aspect, kink turn-on is a kind of lubricant] to allow what is fundamentally more important: the re-attachment. i can't but help suspect the oldest of anxiety, of castration, that is of disintegration, of death, absence being covered by that woman's underwear.
at any event, all of this is speculative since Curtis so far has not said more [anyway not that I know or that you report] nor did Cody, the male prostitute, reveal to you the game that they actually played prior to intercourse. if you had paid Cody, he might of course have lied, or maybe not, if you had managed to make some human contact with him, and pointed out that – aside sex and money – a human being was involved who deserved more than media exploitation. you pity him because Curtis pursuit is so lonely, well the GOP convention conviviality or anything along those lines certainly will not heal him. sincerely,
--
MICHAEL ROLOFF
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
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- SUMMA POLITICO
- seattle, Washington, United States
- MICHAEL ROLOFF http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name exMember Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html "MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce} "Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben] contact via my website http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html