Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 6

 Woke up this morning as the light was gathering its first thoughts after the night.

I picked up "Der Grosse Fall" and read my way into the morning, hungry for the steady progress of the careful and revelatory sentences.

Would they be revelatory?

The green book felt good in my hands and eyes. The cream-colored pages are generous with their good-sized print and capacious margins.

I was hungry, I discovered when unexpected rain began to fall and a rainbow glowed through a south window, for color.

After the experience yesterday with the ugly cover of "The Great Fall," I pulled a few books off my shelf and unclothed them. Here they are, colorful in a way I had never experienced. I felt what can only be described as lust, Leselust, as I held "Der Bildverlust" in my hands, naked and red and inviting as the book had never been before in its awkward white cover.

When I quit reading yesterday I had slipped into the slow time the book describes and facilitates in its first chapter.

Chapter 2 is similarly patient.

The actor leaves the grasslands around the woman's house and walks into the woods. He thinks about property, about ownership, and about how property limits one's gaze, one's experience. His suit, bought for him by the woman for the evening's reception, begins to catch on thorns and to gather rips. He likes that and thinks about how he likes to leave a script he is learning outside so it gathers dew or even snow and becomes more approachable, more a thing of his own.

These are the motions of the book, the plot line: the thoughts that come from events like the ripping of the suit, like the signs of deserted camps in the woods. He finds, for instance, a page of a notebook written by an apprentice forester and thinks about his course of study and then about what happened to him as he left the camp and then about the contrast between childhood experiences of love and the adult existence the boy has fallen into in which he will never again experience that. He has maudlin thoughts about all children falling that way and then never standing again. "My actor," the narrator writes, wishes he could help.

The actor finds a feather, a falcon's striped feather. The feather, unbelievably, "sailed, as if it had just fallen, down before his eyes, rocked and wagged back and forth, to and fro in the air around him and just before it reached the ground plunged perpendicularly with its shaft down."

It's the play, once again, between falling and standing that I'm sensing this book is about.

The walking actor thinks about a path he'd like to create in contrast to the paths marked with informative signs explaining the flora and geology of an area. His path would be a path of error. Things would be laid out on the path, full of exaggerated meaning, things that seemed like other things. He thinks that the moment of realization that the wild pig's scat is not a truffle, that the silver snake skin is not a necklace, will have value in "observation, in being able to observe, in the transition from senseless looking to sensitive observation . . . of forms and colors of the gestalt of the object of error."

What has meaning? What has symbolic meaning? What can we know as we think something is like something else? Given Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," given the Goalie's fall out of language when things separate from their words, how can we talk about symbolic meaning?

"Die Natur spielt Beispiel" is the narrator's answer in this "Erzaehlung" or "story" or "narrative." Nature plays the play that is example. It's the play of meaning between Spielen and Beispiel that German makes so nicely possible. Okay, this is still play, the symbol doesn't point to GOD, but by god these examples, these similies, these flashes of meaning that arise out of error, mean something.

And then the actor approaches a tree trunk about the height of a man. This is an error. A revelatory error? The trunk turns and he glimpses a man's face. A standing man's face. "The lonely standing man." A man like a tree.

The man has stood up two birch trees, has planted them to celebrate the festival of Pentecost and the life of his deceased wife. The man is standing, the trees are standing, the man is standing guard, the trees are standing for the woman lying in her grave, the sun is standing high in the mid-summer's sky. And while all this standing and standing for is going on, the man's clothing and his skin are disintegrating: "The man's suit was . . . tattered . . . on his neck a large boil thrust up . . . all the buttons on his coat were missing except for the one hanging by a thread. . . ."

The chapter ends as the actor thinks this is, perhaps, The Last Man (the man entropy is working toward?) and then hastens ("Kusch, Freund" -- down! Friend) on his way.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 5

I just realized that one of the reasons I had let this book languish on my shelf so long before finally beginning to read it was that its cover is ugly. See the image on the first post about the novel.

This morning I took the cover off to reveal an elegant book, bright-dark green. The scan, complete with morning sunlight that has leaked in a couple of places, shows a much finer book.

The actor's morning, so far a contest between chaos and form, continues as he glues together the cup that had fallen from his hand. And outside the wind stands up a chair that had fallen: ". . . a fallen chair was lifted up again by the wind and stood then, and stood. Was that then a thing of possibility? Yes."

Entropy will win this ongoing battle, as it always does. It is, after all, the law, the second law of thermodynamics to be specific. And the novel is called the Great Fall, not the Great Standing.

The rain continues and the actor reads a book, a book about a kind of running amok, an act related to the role he will play in the film. He reads and disappears into the narration. The motto of the story: "Impatience destroys existence." The narrator of Handke's book summarizes a couple of the chapters that sound close to the the book I am reading: "The following chapter began as the man stepped out of the house onto the street." And, as I expect, the second chapter of Handke's book begins as the actor leaves the house. 44 pages to wake up and have breakfast and leave the house.

Slow going. Slow going that feels welcome this slow hot Sunday morning. Patience solidifies existence.

................ postscript
thoughts from Michael Roloff and my subsequent thoughts:

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 5:29 AM, michael roloff  wrote:

 No one so far among the reviewers or here seems to be fazed that
our actor seems to have a bit of a brain aneurysm after the thunderstorm and taking his morning shower while swishing around the grass in the rain! he's off balance and only gradually finds it again. also there are some oddities: he mentions that the swallows "before" seemed to fly higher, too  - what "before" I feel like saying: wasn't he asleep and then fell asleep again. There are matters happening "unterschwellig"/ surreptitiously under the surface as you read the text - of which you become aware if you read carefully, but "bevor" ??
also, the text is not as carefully proofread as usual: the verb shultern
is suddenly upper case. 

Michael,

you're pointing to a key moment. I've gone back and reread it. What exactly causes him to be so clumsy? He is listening to the radio and think the rain has quit, but then realized it hasn't quit. Is that a momentary break, the brain aneurysm you're thinking about? "Als er seiner inne wurde" follows immediately and then he can't grab what he wants to grab. And why does he gradually come out of this?

The sentence that ends with Shultern made, there at the end, no sense to me. Your suggestion that shultern is a verb makes it come clear. Simple typo.

As for the "before" in the swallow passage: this is, as you write, a break in the description of what the actor is experiencing at the moment. I take it to be a break in the pure (and beautiful) phenomenology, a break caused by the knowledge encapsulated in the accepted "fact" that swallows dive down in the face of storms. Like hell they do, the actor thinks. Having stripped off that bit of "knowledge," he can simply be a body in the rain and grass.

And once I think it this way, following your thought, I can make sense of what was a jarring sentence at the end of the paragraph in the rain: Er wuerde im Haus keine Dusche zu nehmen brauchen. He's back in language, back in the scheme that requires cleanliness for the day, back to the "Dusche nehmen" -- what an ugly phrase. Especially when backed up against the previous one: Der Regen war warm, und nach einigen Schritten kalt, dann wieder warm, undsofort."

Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 4

As a student contemplating graduate school in German literature, I was put off by what felt like an endless set of dry articles about literature, articles written, it felt, by unfeeling and unimaginative pseudo-scholars. Then I happen to read Oskar Seidlin's magical take on a single sentence in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice." It was thoughtful, a little sly, and brilliant in a way I hadn't seen before.

I went to graduate school.

Last night, I was tempted to write a whole article on the first paragraph of this book. To do that, however, I'll need to finish the rest of the book. It's the hermeneutic circle: I'll need the whole to understand the parts and the parts to understand the whole.

In the last post, I wrote about the loss of images, the absence of revelation that has made the actor quit acting and the writer quit writing. That makes this novel, like earlier ones, a novel about images and revelations, not a novel of such images.

Does that mean that Handke's work is bereft of exactly what has drawn readers to fiction for hundreds of years? Has he written himself into a dead end?

I read on.

The actor has come to this city to make a film. He hopes, "with his acting, with his being, standing, looking around himself, to assist in making the story open eyes."

With his standing?

This could get interesting for someone who has written about "standing" in Handke's work before.

Don't laugh.

A quick look at the end of the novels reveals that this may indeed be an ongoing motif: "Er stood, and stood, and stood. Third hunger, the great one. Time for the second gentle course. Instead of that the Great Fall."

What is he up to? Where will this go?

The actor walks out of the house, naked, into the rain. He washes himself in the rain. He returns to the house and finds that he has lost his ability, his vaunted ability to relate physically with the world around him. He can't even pick up the loaf/body (Laib) of bread. The coffee cup falls from his hand and shatters.

Isn't this the fallen teaspoon that means a fall of another kind?

Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 3

I claimed in part 2 that reformulation of a previous statement showed a productive attention to language. It could, of course, simply indicate that the writer had been sloppy the first time. But I don't think so.

The man whose Great Fall will come this day is an actor. His sleeping is acting and not acting. Like some actors in films his movements are second nature to him, without having been learned, which makes them, perhaps, natural. He is less a player of roles, the narrator claims, than anyone; and thus is is the perfect hero for this story.

If the writer who corrects his sentences is a better writer than one whose sentences seem perfect, then why not an actor as more straightforward than a non-actor?

Peter's sentences are, or at least can be, difficult. His thoughts take their time to appear through the physignomies of vocabulary and grammar.

The actor has quit acting because, the narrator writes, there are no more stories to tell, no more revelations possible, not even the revelation of a teaspoon that falls out of a hand to become a simile for a greater fall.

Loss of images (Bildverlust) is an ongoing theme in Peter's work.

Is that why he writes how he does? What he does? With the sentences he carves? Is that why the author in "The Moravian Night" gives up writing as this actor gives up acting.

Have they given up only the writing and acting that are no longer possible in exchange for writing and acting in ways that are no longer recognizable.

Thus the plots that take place in the sentences. Thus the sentences that are themselves flaneurs. Thus the novel in which the hero is still in bed with his eyes shut 13 pages into the novel.

Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 2

I ended the previous post with the claim that this novel will be about narration. That was on the basis of the first few sentences, each of which alerted a reader to the the textuality of this story, to the fact that this is language about language.

This morning I remembered Peter's preface to the American edition of his "A Journey to the Rivers": "I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature: a slow, inquiring narration; every paragraph dealing with and narrating a problem, of representation, of form, of grammar -- of aesthetic veracity."

So I read the second paragraph.

Quickly the narrator revisits something he wrote in the first paragraph: "Frightened out of sleep: that wasn't exactly the case for the man lying there either." Rather, it was a mundane event, that storm with lightning and thunder, an everyday happening that woke him suddenly and naturally into a complete presence of mind, into a readiness.

The restatement reveals the narrator as a meticulous searcher for aesthetic veracity.

Why is that important?

So that we, at least to some extent, speak language rather than surrendering to language that speaks us.

The consciousness that is related to that kind of inquiring narration comes to the man who continues his enjoyment of the storm by reaching out to find that he is not in his own bed, not even in his own country. It's like Gregor Samsa waking up to find he has become a bug -- the disconcerting consciousness will change how the events and things of the day are experienced. And on this day, the day of his Great Fall, he feels at home in the strange place (although, the narrator assures us, the bed is not strange).

And, he hasn't yet opened his eyes. A pleasing rain follows the lightning and thunder he has enjoyed and then a third good sensation courses through him: he has awakened in the bed of a woman who is good to him. Who loves him? the narrator asks. Even though she may have indicated something like that during the night, the narrator writes, the man "would not have agreed to have that written so literally here. She was good to me: that was it, that was what he could say."

Who writes this carefully, so attentive to each sentence, to each assertion?

Peter Handke.

And that's why I read him.

Peter Handke's Latest Novel

This book has been lying on my shelf for a couple of months now. Because I like Peter's work so much and because his prose requires extended concentration on my part and because I now have a week or two without pressing concerns and because my friend Michael Roloff has begun reading the book and because this morning while riding my bike up the mountain I kept thinking about how the title might translate into English and because I always write better after reading a couple of pages of anything Peter has written, I decided to begin reading the novel this morning and to post my notes as I go.

Beginning at the end: "Great Falls, Montana, Juli-September 2011."

The book was written in the future, then, in a place with a name that echoes the title.

How to translate the title?

The German word "Fall" has a lot of meanings, including "case" (both as in grammatical case and as in "if that's the case"), "fall" (as in all the meanings that have to do with falling, including Adam's fall and falling water and so on), etc.

I think, given the "Great Falls, Montana" ending, and given that the idea of "case" isn't connected to the word "fall" in English, that I'd stick with "The Great Fall" for an English title.

Now to the first sentences, which might be translated as follows: "That day, the one that ended with the Great Fall, began with a morning storm. The man, the one who is to be the subject of this narration, was awakened by a powerful thunderclap. The house, along with the bed, will have trembled and for a long moment will have continued to shake. Moment: that had no connection to the man lying there. Frightened out of his sleep, he kept his eyes closed and waited -- how would the event continue."

The repetitive rhythm of the first three sentences, each with a phrase between commas after the stated subject, begs to finds its way into a translation. In German, the third sentence's verb begins with "wird erzittert" which could mean that the house is shaken. The final part of the verb (haben) doesn't come until the end of the sentence, so not till that point does a reader realize that the tense is future perfect instead of present. That tension, which I can't reproduce in English, draws attention to the fact of narration.

In any case, the future ending and the first three sentences swaying between past, present, and future firmly establish this story as a problem in narration.

More as the reading progresses.

Palmer's Penstemons, Woodland Hills, Utah, July 1, 2011