Peter Handke: “Inner dialogues at the edges. 2016-2021″ – Culture

Peter Handke’s journals have been irritating from the start. They are indeed notes of the time, but they contrast the chronological sequence with something completely different. However, what this completely different thing consists of is a question that constantly worries him. Programmatically, there is nothing private or political in these notes, but there are always typical fanfares of recognition. In the records for the years 2016 to 2021, one reliably comes across poetic finds such as “horizon chirp” or “dewdrop spectrum”. Many observations apply to such “period blossoming”. All Handke journals, from the 1970s to the present day, are structured by them. It’s about capturing the moment, and with that Handke works unflinchingly on his form of literature, which wants nothing to do with general attributions.

His search movements in language, he calls himself to do this again and again, are guided by sensuality, perception and attention. It is strange how much he provokes precisely this – because he vehemently rejects everything that seems to him pre-cut, hypothetical or, which he would never formulate in such a way, discursive. Since he published his daily notes, he has fallen out of time. Handke has always, especially in the 1960s, strictly separated his literary language from political ones and tried to give it its very own space. That is why his sympathies have always been with the outsiders, the marginalized and oddballs who distance themselves from everyday norms and everyday speech, the Kaspar Hauser characters he invoked in many ways. So Robert Walser is once again a fixed point of reference in the new journals, and with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, whom he upholds as one of the few generation colleagues, he does not declare the “poet” to be “responsible”. The youngest writer he mentions in this context is Wilhelm Genazino. The radicalism that is evident in this conception of literature is by no means always secretive.

Against the “ideology trap accuracy” and for an “accuracy of the vague”

Handke turns polemically against the common wear and tear of the language. For him, “journalism” is clearly the opposite of literature. One of the notes, which is always very short and only a few lines long, reads: “Without the ‘Homeric source’ (Antonio Machado) it doesn’t work. Down with journalistic prose!” And what this “Homeric source” is all about, which is often invoked and not necessarily to be understood only pathetically, revolves around Handke just as much as the rustling of the treetops or the blossoming strings of the sweet chestnuts. For him, the epic, the storytelling, is the opposite of “knowledge”, yes: he calls his life from the knowledge “a kind of death”.

Handke has an extremely allergic reaction to the journalistic principle of “accuracy,” and he proclaims that he wants to be particularly wary of the “ideological trap of accuracy.” Instead, he pleads for an “accuracy of the vague”. And he brusquely goes against all the instructions for contemporary writing, which apply equally to novels and reports, and offensively counters what characterizes literature: “A clarification through enigma, becoming enigmatic, ‘obscure'”. For Handke, “becoming obscure” is a seal of quality. And with that, the link has been drawn back to all those great writers who were always considered marginal figures and oddballs.

Handke always wants to find new words and not repeat the old ones. A characteristic leitmotif is the constant search for the right verbs, even now he is finding new ones again: “Verb to a swallow high in the sky: it ‘sickles'”. Or: “Verb to the tit wings crossing the first morning sun: they ‘glimmer'”. It’s not that this writer wants to turn away from his immediate presence, quite the opposite. But he also operates with fairly heavy counterweights. This is evidenced by the old Greek dictionary and the readings that accompanied him over the years, from Wolfram von Eschenbach or the Apocalypse of St. John to Adalbert Stifter. About the latter it is even said: “no author who is so exciting”! Handke is well aware how the “unattainable” that he connotes as such affects many today, but he emphasizes it as convincingly as he does theatrically.

Along with the theatrical and playful aspects, sore spots in his authorship and himself, which he is well aware of, also come to light. Something of this can be felt in some of his most sensitively heightened ecstasy of observation: “dangling with the spruce branch in the morning breeze”: isn’t there also a certain tension in this supposed lightness, a forcing oneself? In the pathos of the supposedly small and casual, there is sometimes an overstimulation, a hypersensitivity that can possibly even turn into something aggressive. The abrupt change from tenderness to anger can be sensed in some of these sentences, and “anger” as well as “anger” are discussed more often – than they belong. “The wicked never get angry, that’s how you recognize them,” he once stated, and in his constant search for the right names there is also a “verb to anger: ‘sees clearly and colorfully'”.

Handke’s sensitivity is always on the go, there are often visions of irascibility and violence

The “anger” is always considered in his self-perception. In the face of the marginalized, the stray, the inhabitant of in-between spaces and times, the despised “unreachable” inevitably represent the majority, and this leads to insights that are also abysmal self-knowledge: “Kind people don’t make revolutions. At most they rebel, or, rather still, run amok.” Handke’s sensitivity is always on the go. Also in his longer prose texts and the multi-layered plays there are often visions of irascibility and violence, and his poetological notes reflect this: “Pride is in place when the opportunity arises – as a place order” it says once. This, too, can of course be assured of a “Homeric source”. Immediately afterwards, French international goalkeeper Hugo Lloris is quoted as saying: “I always liked hurting my opponent.” Peter Handke can also see literature as a sport. He is anything but a delicate poet. Sometimes he sees red.

In the time of these records, among other things, the work on the long epic “The fruit thief or a simple journey into the interior” – and the award of the Nobel Prize to him in 2019. This literary business event also finds no concrete entry in Handke’s poetological notes – unless you grasp it Entry explicitly dated “October 13, 2019”, i.e. three days after the official announcement, so on. The “motto of the day” is a quote from a hit by Eric Burdon, one of the heroes of Handke’s early pop phase in the sixties and early seventies: “When I think of all the good times I have wasted having good times”. . That looks pretty confident.

But there still has to be a journalistic follow-up. One of the notes can certainly be read as a reaction to the scandals after the Nobel Prize, when Handke was accused of taking sides with Serbia. It is unmistakably about the Balkan War. As is well known, the media public is not his territory. But here it says: “‘Genocide’? – No, something different, something different terrible: fratricide. – Cain and Abel? – Cain and Cain”.