Saturday, July 9, 2011

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 11

Michael Morrow writes that this is boring.

I wrote earlier about the nature of Peter's writing that cuts into the sales numbers for Farrar Straus. It is boring, for most readers, to follow a narrator's account of a character's consciousness/phenomenological experience. What plot line does consciousness follow, after all, especially a consciousness that isn't structured by normal and generic forms, a consciousness that is trying to break its way out of the prisonhouse of language even while it knows all too well that there's no way out?

What is the physical plot of this novel so far? The actor wakes up in the woman's house. He listens to a storm and bathes in the rain and has breakfast and reads a book and walks into the woods and then into a clearing and gets angry when other people enter the clearing and then feels good when they greet him and then sits down next to a stinking man who yells shut up every time he hears a noise and then fights the urge to do the same and then looks over the city with some satisfaction.

Add to that plot line the thoughts of someone reading the book for the first time, sometimes random thoughts, sometimes more questioning than answering, a set of reading notes.

What's not boring about that? You're stating the obvious, Michael, stating the ludicrous. What if this king has no clothes, after all? What if these readers are so besotted by Peter Handke that they can't tell a boring, self-indulgent book when it's right up in their faces?

It's also possible that you're pointing out that this is a very special kind of literature, perhaps a very odd kind of literature, certainly a very difficult kind of literature; and your willingness to follow along, even when I ramble and Michael Roloff stumbles across breaks in the text, makes you a welcome fellow traveler.

This morning I've come across a sentence I don't understand grammatically: So ließen die Zuggleise und -weichen, beim Passieren der Züge im Wald fast ein Lärm, sich jetzt überhören -- war denn von einem Moment zum anderen der Zuverkehr eingestellt worden?, wie auch die Lautsprecherstimme vom nahen Bahnhof, vom Endbahnhof, in den Wald geschallt als Gebrüll -- darauf das Gegengebrülls des Waldmanns --, beim Ausschreiten im Freien ein Hintergrundgeräusch abgab im Rauschen der Stille!

The problem begins with sich jetzt überhören, or does it begin with fast ein Lärm? What a tangled and, I trust, wonderful sentence!

Can anyone help? It's on pages 120-131.

This is a long chapter, #5, and I'm going to read to the end tomorrow before writing anything else about it.




10 comments:

michael morrow said...

the question continues to pop up for me...what is the purpose of this book specifically and art in general??? Is art's primary responsibility to capture/expose some sort of societal "essence" ...some semblance of consistency or societal identity citizens can hang onto...does reading stories about people..artists...who have quirky personalities and affairs with "other" women, and walk through thorny forests, only to rip their life-less sunday best into tatters,...much like their pithy, tattered, life-less personality..

SUMMA POLITICO said...

i was so tired by 10 am last nite that i didn't read any handke at all, but i will try to help you out with that sentence that would not trouble einstein at all:

"So ließen die Zuggleise und -weichen, beim Passieren der Züge im Wald fast ein Lärm, sich jetzt überhören -- war denn von einem Moment zum anderen der Zuverkehr eingestellt worden?, wie auch die Lautsprecherstimme vom nahen Bahnhof, vom Endbahnhof, in den Wald geschallt als Gebrüll -- darauf das Gegengebrülls des Waldmanns --, beim Ausschreiten im Freien ein Hintergrundgeräusch abgab im Rauschen der Stille!"

It was now [he is in the open ] possible [not to hear] for your ears to fail to hear the traintracks and switches, which/ whose noises as they passed
through the forest were nearly cacaphonous - had all train traffic been stopped from
one moment to the next? - as well as the loudspeaker voice from the nearby railway station, the terminal as it had resounded into the forest - answered thereupon by the forest man's countering screams -- as you/ while you walked/ paced out into the open it [the sounds] provided a background noise to the stillness."

There is a lot of noise being heard, so much that you even notice when you don't hear any noise. No wonder that Handke wrote up the congress of noise
in Morawian Night. So there is a forest man, madman of the forest?, who shouts like mad against the mechanical noises as they penetrate the forest stillness... lots of stuff going on, he might even notice that the birds no longer notice! I make some matters
quite literal. let's see what krishna comes up with one of these years.
the point is that as you read, each of these events registers one by one and
becomes a series of events inside your noggin. grammar actually stands in the way.

* said...

this belongs together: So ließen die Zuggleise und -weichen sich jetzt überhören.

this is a source of noise:
beim Passieren der Züge im Wald fast ein Lärm

and this is a second source of noise:
wie auch die Lautsprecherstimme vom nahen Bahnhof, vom Endbahnhof, in den Wald geschallt als Gebrüll -- darauf das Gegengebrülls des Waldmanns

this is a question, an odd one for it sort of assumes quiet when he speaks at the same time about noisy trains in the wood, as if this noise suddenly had stopped but it's not clear from the information he gives, as if from one moment you only hear the trains and then only the railroadswitches and the station people shouting and that results into some backgroudn noise:
war denn von einem Moment zum anderen der Zuverkehr eingestellt worden?


this last one refers to while you are listening to that, during waling along outside and it's all backgroundnoise.
beim Ausschreiten im Freien ein Hintergrundgeräusch abgab im Rauschen der Stille!

it is an odd one, indeed.

SUMMA POLITICO said...

Let me briefly comment on your plot summary above, Scott. As you yourself realize only too well, such a summary not only does not do justice to the book, as scarcely a single german review that i have collected here does:
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html
But such an approach fails to provide entry to what occurs during a reader's experience of its text. Thus, a different approach is needed, which might begin with the experience of the the sentences. I will do something along those lines after reading the text several times. Meanwhile I will be lagging behind your efforts here. xx michael r.

SUMMA POLITICO said...

Let me briefly comment on your plot summary above, Scott. As you yourself realize only too well, such a summary not only does not do justice to the book, as scarcely a single german review that i have collected here does:
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html
But such an approach fails to provide entry to what occurs during a reader's experience of its text. Thus, a different approach is needed, which might begin with the experience of the the sentences. I will do something along those lines after reading the text several times. Meanwhile I will be lagging behind your efforts here. xx michael r.

SUMMA POLITICO said...

i did get a chance to penetrate the forest in chapter 2 last nite.

chapter one ends with the actor turning around once more to eliminate all traces of his having been at "the woman's" place - actor? madman? - can we believe anything he says? - where allegedly he is having an illicit affair for years? also the kind of forest madman's dress he tries on briefly! the forest madman theme, adumbrated by having had a son who might have been the very one whose apprentice workbook, a rag of it, he finds in the kind of bush where I too might seek shelter, reminds of that theme in VOYAGE BY DUGOUT. The observations of how a forest looks, what trees allow for undergrowth, which is then an utterly normal and sane observation, if normal is sane. so much for now. xx michael r.

SUMMA POLITICO said...

michael morrow is asking some heavy duty question! why life? why god? why haven't we found higg's boson yet!

as the purpose of the book, we can take a few stabs at that:
1] writing 1000 fine words a morning keeps handke sane, earns a keep that he no longer needs to earn.
2] provides pleasure to his readers.
3] one book a year keeps his name "in the picture"
4] acts as borox to the journaleese that infests minds
5] makes his readers aware, observe more closely - whatever use that is but to make us that more easily nauseated by all the ugly matters in the world; that is, it has an aesthetically didactic purpose;
6] by exploding the notion of identity with the "actor", or at least this "actor", as its protagonist the book does something to at least question types";
7] being as playful as it is...
8] being as "in" as it is into Handke being coy...
back to work on me own stuff.
xx michael r.

SUMMA POLITICO said...

well: switches, trains passing over them - produces a screech, which he assumes we the readers know? i do anyhow, the careful reader of Uwe Johnson's SPECULATIONS ABOUT JAKOB who spent at least a year of his early childhood on no end of trains in no end of sidings and bombed railway stations...

it is not clear to me, unless he acknowledges the ability to TUNE OUT why in this instance he can do so. Being in the woods I imagine. But perhaps there is a sound damper somewhere? the woods themselves... sometimes yes, sometimes no?...
And why he doesnt hear them anymore - is it because he is so effective in being able to tune out? Is Handke mad [in the ordinary sense] or not, is this Bloch all over? Does someone with Handke's kind of to the tenth power senses also require the ability to shut them off, and what else shuts off? we are not necessarily in the realm of depth psychology, but perhaps in that of neuron functioning. x m.r.

michael morrow said...

What is the physical plot of this novel so far? The actor wakes up in the woman's house. He listens to a storm and bathes in the rain and has breakfast and reads a book and walks into the woods and then into a clearing and gets angry when other people enter the clearing and then feels good when they greet him and then sits down next to a stinking man who yells shut up every time he hears a noise and then fights the urge to do the same and then looks over the city with some satisfaction.

Seems to me that Handke's premise is to demonstrate that actor/individual/audience are always one-in-the-same "person". I find that only documentary history separates life out, making self-serving points, eliminating even author...not to mention actor/individual/audience...almost an emasculation of actual experience.... industrialized de-nuttiness....

Where as literature works to pry open life "on the ground" (a phrase I resent)...authors' weave life on the page, looking under skirts anonymously, or not, revealing, smelling fragrance, licking "sticky cunty fingers" with gusto...scheming on audience as if no one would ever reveal such inside info about themselves,...when we all know the "truth"... some like it some dont....all the while sitting back watching, reveling as minions scurry feverishly to stuff overflowing bank accounts in hopes of the next installment of life held in secret.

SUMMA POLITICO said...

I notice that I didn't make a reply to Michael Morrow back then. I would say that to confine what transpires the book to its PHYSICAL action is wrong in this instance.
Let us get back to that perfect first chapter: everything that transpires on the page is the action, acts on me the reader; and there we also have aside the numerous details and sense impressions the "dialogue interieur" rendered with an efficiency and lightness I have never encountered before. D/I or monologue goes back to the French 19th century novel, to naturalistic rendering of thought processes, reached its culmination in Joyce's ULYSSES - now, I have always felt that Handke's WEIGHT OF THE WORLD, the diary he kept during his first and unhappy years in Paris [1971-74] could also be regarded as a kind of notation for a kind of ULLYSES, lots of shorhand notes that only needed expanding, but were better off for not having been; if we / I regard DER GROSSE FALL as it then proceeds from the first chapter onwards as a piece of prose that then records intrusions of the unconscious [the rule Handke made for himself for WEIGHT was a psychoanalytic one: he wanted to catch the conscience, or rather the unconscious impulses as they surfaced in his mind!!] here these impulses: walking backward, what seem like neurotic tick ... are not noted as impulses but are acted out... anyhow there is something akin to that going on, as of the beginning, the various projections, fantasies, rainman/husband, etc.