Summary of Reviews of Handke's "The Great Fall" by M. Roloff

This revista of reviews of Peter's "Der Grosse Fall," compiled by Michael Roloff, is also posted at 

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html

along with links to much, much more material related to the work and life of Peter Handke.

Recent portrait of Michael, done in Seattle by J. Patterson

..................................................................

I did not read the reviews prior to my reading, a very slow,
chapter by chapter, and commenting on it at; not that reading them would have changed anything in my reception http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/; nor did Scott; and our discussing certain aspects, especially its religious and aesthetic components, at leisure. Now I have read all the reviews to which I have access, a dozen or more, and will reread the book in one slow fell swoop. While Scott and I prepare ourselves for an online discussion of IMMER NOCH STURM, as of its Salzburg premiere on the 12 of this August, at:

  http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

Right now I can say about these reviews  that in general: in the instance of Andreas Breitenbach at the NZZ, Georg Schmidt in DIE ZEIT and especially the reviewer in The Stuttgarter, who really engaged with the book, that they opened up aspects of which I had not paid attention. Several reviews were gravely disappointing, Klaus Kastberger's and Lothar Struck's because both gentlemen know Handke's work. Schmidt strikes me as best attuned to Handke. However, what is really needed about Handke as phenomenon is an essay, say on the order of Walter Benjamin's about Karl Kraus, or one of the great Adorno essays in NOTEN ZUR LITERATUR {notes on literature, columbia u. press, shierry nicholson weber, translator}. I have all that interiorized somehow plus of course the great things in English and American, so perhaps I will try to fail there one of these days. What I miss most immediately in all the reviews is the failure to note that "Amok running" was already a theme in NONSENSE AND HAPPINESS and recourse to Handke's frequent violence and seeking of peace, to draw the parallel between the 1987 THE AFTERNOON OF THE WRITER and DER GROSSE FALL; or noting that Paris played an important role during Handke's first Paris period [1972-79 - is this still the "Keuschnig": of those days?,or noting how much of a FREUDENSTOFF, to use Peter Strasser's once succinctness about a lot of Handke's subsequent work, DER GROSSE FALL what a joy in life it conveys despite the irritants that upset our absolute genius hyper-super-duper nervous system. No doubt some great graduate student is already at work breaking this piece of art down into its components.

1] The review in Neues Deutschland, as so often the case there with Handke, is definitely worth reading, and entices the reader to read,the book: http://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/199737.das-augenaufgehen-einer-geschichte.html

I see nothing objectionable in it. The reviewer has a sense of the poetic. I expect that if he had more space he might have had more to say and address the book's form, and some of its details. If we get  anything like it in the U.S. of Sheeples we will be lucky!

2] Andreas Breitenstein in the NZZ [Neue Zuricher Zeitung] who,writes comparatively, to the ND with a heavy pen is however, right on:
 "Wer Handke kennt weiss, dass ein Viel an Handlung nicht zu erwarten ist", seeming not to realize that each sentence, in Handke's case, is the action. Andreas apparently had  a bit of a hard time, so did a few other plaintiffs, something I cannot say for myself. However, Breitenbachs description is reliale, and he also gets that GROSSER FALL becomes like HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER. Again: anything as first rate is not to be excpected here in the U.S.S.R.

3]The well-known Austrian reviewer Daniela Strigl in the FAZ also, confesses to some difficulty in her ability to follow - somethign that I feel is due to here not reading each sentence as slowly for it to yield the so much that is there. She instead makes the mistake of recounting the actor's walk without in fact recounting it as the series of epiphanies, which is all that counts. That is, she simplifies these steps into bad cliches which give the reader of the review not the faintest. However, she is not insensitive in some of her generalizations:

"In all ihrer Weltwut und Zärtlichkeit ist die Erzählung ebenso gegenwärtig wie märchenhaft surreal, eine apokalyptische Zauberposse mit selbstironischer und satirischer Spitze."

 Strigl ends with a kind of last paragraph cop-out that would do honor to the NY Times Book Review:

 "So schön und verblüffend die Umspringbilder und short cuts en detail wirken (auch Handkes Sätze sind häufig kurz angebunden), so hat das atemlos additive Verfahren des Aventuiren-Berichts doch seine Tücken. Der unaufhörliche Kulissenzauber strapaziert die Geduld des Lesers, der im Distanzlauf leicht auf der Strecke bleibt. Aber wie lautet das Motto des Amokläufer-Buches, das der Schauspieler liest: „Die Ungeduld vernichtet die Existenz.“ At any event, the FAZ has kept Hubert Spiegel in its dog house.

4] derives from the Stuttgarter Zeitung,  there is nothing
wrong with it except it too, cannot put it's finger, get a real grasp of the book yet comes through at the end:

" Zwischen Epischem und Dramatischem gibt es bei Peter Handke keinen Unterschied'
 
 Die Mischung aus Krimielementen und solchen aus dem antiken Gesang, aus Entwicklungsroman und Gesellschaftsporträt wird gegen Ende immer explosiver. 

  Der letzte Satz des Buches - "Stattdessen der Große Fall" - ist elliptisch. Ihm fehlt das Zeitwort, also die gesamte Bewegung der Sprache. Der Auslöser für diesen Absturz ist offenkundig die Beziehung zu jener namenlosen Frau; die Begegnung kann nicht mehr stattfinden. Doch das ist nur ein Aspekt dieses Gangs von oben hinab in die Unterwelt der Stadt, dieser Erkundung des Inneren.

Es ist die alte Paradoxie der Literatur, dass die Erfahrung solch eines Absturzes der Sprache das Schreiben erst möglich macht. Der erste Satz des Buches, der den "Großen Fall" bereits voraussetzt, bereitet im selben Atemzug den letzten Satz vor, in dem der "Große Fall" den Leser förmlich überrumpelt. Die Sprache setzt sich frei- sie wäre sonst ein bloßes Kommunikationsmittel. Handke verdichtet in diesem Buch viele Motive seiner früheren Bücher bis hin zum Manierismus: Er wiederholt und variiert seinen spezifischen Formelvorrat. Er hält dem landläufigen Sprechen einen verstörend hohen Ton entgegen, der an etwas ganz anderes erinnert.
5] I have lost the source for this - no matter, it is a neither fish nor fowl reviewer, who adds nothing. it's only use is that it might alert someone interested in Handke to the existence of the book.

6] Is by the knowledgeable Handke expert Klaus Kastberger who is writing in the Austrian paper DIE PRESSE and emphasizes Handke's Christ complex, without noting that Handke takes a carnal Liberation Theology tack here once the two workers have broken bread. I would like to point out here that Handke since his earliest days has functioned as a "surrogate" in the culture, in Freud's sense of the word. The early plays - the SPRECH STUECKE, all of which I translated, manifest that quality: the conscience of the race, even more than that: DER HAUSIERER as a work that overcomes fear, anxiety is also composed in an objective manner. If anyone is interested in my demonstration how Handke in the poem SINGULAR AND PLURAL [Die Einzahl und die Mehrzahl] can be seen in the act of composition of allaying his own anxiety: the opposite of the hoary conversion hysteria, in the event anyone has interest in reason to be puzzled by the various sources of Handke's immense industriousness during the past near fifty years. 

 http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
also at: http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

Kastberger is not especially sensitive to what the formal aspects of the book, the dimensions in which it plays. He approaches it autobiographically, but doesn't carry through. Mention that Handke appears to call the stuff with which you glue tiles by the first name of his biographer Malte Herwig, sticky stuff I recall not that I think of how hard it was to get off me. Herwig's bio is fine on Handke's childhood, but the author has no interest in the work, and no relationship to it; he was a good gum shoe and not only in the archive, and also did some useful interviewing. Handke, as far as I am concerned, as a person, strikes me as even more unpleasant. The  has a very long review of mine of MEISTER DER DAEMMERUNG and also has Marie Colbin's review which Herwig and his publisher DTV  successfully eliminated from the Nachrichten.at by threatening suit for 60 K. Amazing! The volume FREIHEIT DER SCHRIFT that Kasteberger editor for Zsolnay is marvelous collection of Handkeana, however, his own pieces there,too, show him to be some kind of cultural apparachik, and he does not far well be comparison with many of the brilliant contributions by Fabjan Haffner, Elizabeth Schwagerle, Hans Hoeller, et. al.

7] derives from Evelyne Polt-Heinzla and is fine and unobjectionable."Dass Handkes Bücher immer auch Kommentare zur mentalen und gesellschaftlichen Befindlichkeit sind, ist von der Kritik genauso häufig übersehen worden wie des Autors Talent zu Groteske und (Selbst-)Ironie.

Der Tag ist eine einzige Bewegung auf sie zu; unmittelbar vor der Begegnung bleibt der Erzählfaden wie in einer ins Unendliche gedehnten Zeitlupeneinstellung hängen – ein stummer Verzweiflungsschrei über das Scheitern der Liebe "...

Was der Stadtstreicher auf seinem Weg sieht und wie Handke diese Fundstücke arrangiert, ergibt eine dichte Folge von Momentaufnahmen über die großen und kleinen sozialen Katastrophen unserer Gegenwart. Die Blickrichtung ist auf den Boden konzentriert; wie beim Geologen Sorger in "Langsame Heimkehr" wird der "gesenkte Kopf" berufsbedingt erklärt, denn ursprünglich war der Schauspieler Fliesenleger. Wenn er im Stadtwald die Spuren "der aushäusig Gewordenen und endgültig Abgehausten" sieht, dann wird wie im Negativ die jüngste Ausweisungspolitik Frankreichs sichtbar.

8] Lothar Struck, writing under his own name not that of Keuschnig, the deferential pseudonym he has adopted for his Begleitschreiben blog http://www.begleitschreiben.net/ ,
first does a kind of resume of other works along the same line as his review of MORAVIAN NIGHT:

" Zunächst einmal sind Handkes Figuren Forschungsreisende in eigener Sache; einsame Sucher nach einem Platz in der trost-losen Welt, nach einem Aufgehoben-Sein." ...Und das neue Buch, »Der Große Fall«? "Es war eine Endzeit. Aber man hatte sich an diese gewöhnt. Sie würde nie enden." ...When Struck describes the fight of neighbor against neighbor he entirely misses that this scene occurs entirely in the actor's film fantasy mind who projects an intuition into visual form in an entirely farcical manner, I imagine so farcical so as not to be misunderstood by the likes of Struck. Lothar thinks of this as one of Handke's succession of fairy tales, and forgets that NOMANSBAY was called "A Fairy Tale of Time" - which added nothing as far as I was concerned. However, the book about going mushrooming for his daughter Laocadie LUCIE IM DEN WALD MIT DEN DINGSBUMS is definitely a successful very artificial fairy tale. Would make a great children's y.a. in this country. ABSENCE I experienced as reading a film - the kineaesthetic quality of Handke's prose, certain sections here are severely fractured, perhaps the above use of the word "maniriert" is appropriate? So far I have no read any mention of its Shakespearean dimenstion, The Tempestand Midsummer Night's Dream qualities that the GROSSE FALL has.

# 9] joerg magenau [?[ in the TAGESANZEIGER is the only really negative voice who evidently has been sick of Handke for some time. He'd like to have had some kind of Schnulzer to review it seems.

10] Versuch über den Müßiggang again I find entirely unobjectionable.

11]"dass man womöglich selbst beginnt, die eigenen Wege in der Großstadt in nahezu handkescher Sprache aich selbst zu erzählen, kann ich aus eigener Erfahrung als eine Nebenwirkung dieser Erzählung festhalten. Eine Nebenwirkung, die ich nicht als schädlich ansehewrites Herr Labig in his blog, and I could not agree more: http://herrlarbig.de/2011/06/27/herrn-larbigs-bibliothek-8-peter-handke-der-grose-fall

12] Schriftstellerin Wiesmüller "Anklingen des Religiösen" in Handkes "Der große Fall"  Scott has dealt with. I have nothing to add to our discussion of the Christian aspect of the book. Scott has already addressed this self-serving approach in an earlier posting.

13] The Review in the Sueddeutsche is a once over lightly that is completely acceptable and smooth, and neither adds nor detracts anyting to or form my reading of the book.14]Von Hage, Volker DER SPIEGEL 
Handke hat den Vergleich selbst herausgefordert. Vor einem Vierteljahr wetterte er in einem Interview gegen das "rezepthafte Schreiben" amerikanischer Erzähler. Jonathan Franzen folge einem Strickmuster, und auch Philip Roth sei "letzten Endes nur ein Conférencier". In der Literatur, so Handke, müsse "sprachlich die Suchbewegung drin sein", es müsse "Ausbrüche geben, ein beherrschtes Sichgehenlassen".


15] Der Falter Klaus Nuechtern writes::
Wenn einem ständig erzählt wird, wie zu gehen und zu sehen, wie zu sammeln und zu hungern sei (ja, auch der Hunger kann bei Handke „falsch“ oder „richtig“ sein), dann droht der Kollaps durch ethische Dauerüberhitzung. In dieser – und wirklich nur in dieser! – Hinsicht fühlt man sich bei der Lektüre ein bisschen wie in einem Film von Woody Allen: „Gestern hatte ich einen Orgasmus, aber mein Arzt meinte, es sei nicht der richtige.“

Ausgerenkt an Leib und Seele":

 

Je näher der schweifende Rhapsode des selig Nutzlosen und durch seine Profanität Geheiligten der Stadt kommt, desto mehr sieht er sich mit den apokalyptischen Ausläufern einer "Endzeit" konfrontiert, die allein von Feindseligkeit, Gewalt und Entfremdung beherrscht wird, einer Realität, die abwechselnd das Gewaltpotential und das Helfersyndrom in ihm wachruft. Von ihrem Fluch, so muss er einsehen, kann er die sündige Stadt nicht erlösen. Doch der geschärfte Blick, in den dieser zivilisationsmüde, ausgewilderte Asphaltindianer die entzauberte Welt nimmt - er hat durchaus etwas von einem Amoklauf, allerdings nicht der blindwütigen Gewalt, sondern der hellsichtigen Poesie

Wenn einem ständig erzählt wird, wie zu gehen und zu sehen, wie zu sammeln und zu hungern sei (ja, auch der Hunger kann bei Handke „falsch“ oder „richtig“ sein), dann droht der Kollaps durch ethische Dauerüberhitzung. In dieser – und wirklich nur in dieser! – Hinsicht fühlt man sich bei der Lektüre ein bisschen wie in einem Film von Woody Allen: „Gestern hatte ich einen Orgasmus, aber mein Arzt meinte, es sei nicht der richtige.“

Beautiful - Schön - Dialectic

Thinking, still, about the word "schön" and about my sense that Peter wouldn't use the word the way I tend to use it.

It would shock me, for instance, if the actor in "Der Grosse Fall" looked at the church or the pissoir (they serve similar functions for him) and said "schön."

His admiration is rather for forms adequate to thought or forms that destroy thought and lead to running amok.

Michael writes that the word "schön" appears in this book. He's right. But the three times it appears also make my point, I think:

p. 64: "Den Marktwert her, bitte schön!" Out with the market value, please!

p. 74: "Was sie von sich sehen ließen, war nämlich nicht schön." What they revealed of themselves was, namely, not pretty.

p. 77: ". . . und wie sie sich dann bewegten, das war einfach nicht schön." And how they moved then, that was simply not pretty.

This implied beauty is almost like negative theology. You don't say what God is because that would limit God. You say only what God isn't.

Peter's not interested in Platonic beauty or in God. He is, however, interested in sneaking up obliquely on beauty and truth dialectically ("I am a dialectical writer," he claims), which means that before he reaches what he's approaching he swerves away with questions or with the claim that what is to be found is only absence (see the previous discussion) or with a "joke" (the Witz that in German is both funny and sharply rational).

My friend Alex Caldiero has a performance piece called "This Is Not It" that gets at this way of wrestling with truth and beauty and justice. Alex begins by saying "this is not it," repeats the statement, repeats it again and again, shifting rhythms and dynamics until the statement is so full of noise and swing that it becomes inarticulate, sounds that are so intimately tied to the body that all abstract meaning disappears until the sounds jerk back, suddenly, into the words "this is not it."

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Walking

Michael's latest comments about the book include some fine memories of walking.

After a morning walking on the beach (sometimes backwards, but, minding Michael's advice, never backwards into a tidal pool), I've got my own memory of walking with Peter (published with Zarko's Vampire as Razumni recnik, or A Reasonable Dictionary, in Belgrade:

May 28, 1998, Bajina Bašta

We’ve had a hearty breakfast in Dušanka’s garden and are packing for a two-day hike on the Tara Mountain.

Peter carries the sturdy canvas pack used by one of the characters in his film Absence. He wears an old pair of high-topped leather shoes I imagine to be the same shoes featured in his story “The Shoeshiner of Split”:

In the following weeks, however, he wore the shoes in the snow of Macedonia, in the leafy dust of the mountains of Peloponnesos, in the yellow and gray sand of the Libyan and Arabic desert. And even months later, one day in Japan, it was enough to rub the leather with a cloth and the original shine from the promenade in Split reappeared, undamaged.

Žarko has a good nylon daypack and a pair of generic white athletic shoes. Zlatko, Thomas, and I carry our things in high-fashion vinyl shopping bags -- black-and-white, lemon-yellow, and pink bags supplied at the last minute by Olga. Zlatko and Thomas wear city shoes, black-leather low-topped shoes that are the antitheses of my heavy leather hiking boots.

What to note about the 35-kilometer hike? The wildflowers. The changing views of the Drina from ever-higher vantage points along the switchbacking road. The blind-worms copulating blindly on the roadside. The sunlit meadow where we lie in the grass to rest our weary feet and legs. The rare Serbian spruce Peter points out. The ski-resort inn where we re-hydrate. The serpentine logging roads. Peter’s ongoing search for mushrooms, which he stuffs into a compartment of Žarko’s pack. The desultory conversations. Our growing weariness. Žarko’s incipient and then pronounced limp. The moment late in the day when Peter picks up the pace and Thomas and I fight to match his strides while the other two fall back. The huge Tara Mountain conference and sports center swarming with sweat-suited volunteer firefighters gathered for a training session. The little roadside restaurant where the owner has been waiting for us.

While we eat a hearty dinner that includes the mushrooms Peter has picked, the restaurant owner tells us about the years he spent playing an accordion in Germany. After his back gave out, he says, he tried racing cars and finally came back to the Tara Mountain.

Sometime before midnight the racing restauranteur proves his prowess by speeding us up a winding road, leaving his slow headlights hanging in the trees at every tight corner, accelerating and braking, screeching and honking, torquing and turning to pull up abruptly at an A-frame cabin where we spend the night.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 17

The novel's final chapter, Chapter 9, begins with the actor walking through the city in the night, waiting for the appointed time when he will pick up the woman from her night work. He walks constantly, as if he is not allowed to stand still. There is risk here ("Es stand etwas auf dem Spiel. Viel. Alles."), and after the statement of risk that, in German, means literally "There was something standing on the game," or, perhaps a bet had been laid, he lightens the mood by referring to himself as that guy in the film "Mission Impossible."

Over the years, critics, both positive and negative alike, have missed this playful, dialectical aspect of Peter's work. They keep seeing him as earnestly sensitive and metaphysically inclined. This is, as I read him, an anti-metaphysical writer who nevertheless works his ass off to create what meaning there is to be created; and then winks.

Before becoming Peter's traveling companion and translator, Zarko once interviewed him and mentioned what a sensitive writer he was. "Sensitive is a word for condoms," Peter replied.

On this last walk through the city (it's explicitly not "flanieren") the actor comes across a man who is dying on the ground by a subway entrance. The man looks at him and the look means "I recognize or know you (erkennen). You are known!"

Okay, here a break to think about realism.

This is not likely, that the actor is gazed at by a dying man. It's the last chapter and we need a climax or a set of them. So the narrator drags in a dying man. As a reader I think: the narrator just dragged in a dying man. How likely is that?

But then I think, as I have before: this isn't a realistic novel. It's a novel about what makes our lives more or less real, more or less authentic, more or less governed by the idiocies and wisdoms of our cultures. It's not a Dutch realist painting. The point here is simply that the actor needs the eyes of another person looking into his eyes, he needs face-to-face relationships to give him meaning. This is psychologically realistic, not a realist plot.

Finally, we're not alone in wondering. The narrator knows readers may be asking how the actor knew the man was dying: "He knew it, he still knew such things."

Back to the playful dialectic. The actor hears children laughing and thinks he has lost the ability to be drawn into such laughter: "Permeated by seriousness, he longed to laugh."

More children, these two swinging in a lit-up park.

Apples begin to appear, first in a display window, next in a phrase a passing man says to the woman he's holding close: "My apple,"and finally after thinking he will ram his head into a wall, the actor instead becomes a juggler with two apples."

If the Great Fall is coming, there have to be apples.

In the book the actor was reading in the morning, the man who ran amok, the man so troubled by things like the lemon seed, came to an understanding with things as the evening came. The man who runs amok in the film is almost speechless. The actor who keeps threatening to run amok thinks about the two fictional cases as he has his own experiences. And I as a reader ........ yes, I've written this already.

Two distraught people, a young man who drops everything as he leaves his house and stands on the sidewalk without picking up the things, just stands there, and a young woman who is crying because, the actor surmises, she has been jilted, she has lost her job, and she has no savings. The actor picks up the young man's things and gives him a hug. He can't think of how to help the woman and that impotence turns to anger at her.

Headed for the Bar of Destiny (not the Bar of Hope) where the woman will be waiting for him. She is waiting there, and he can tell from the back of her head that she, unlike he, has a mission. He can tell she has thirst and he thinks that she, like the others sitting there, is one of the latter-day saints, a different sort from the normal ones (that must be my ones, the ones I belong to and the ones I left, otherwise known as Mormons). What makes these people saintly is hunger and thirst and thirst and hunger -- for food and drink. Then comes the second hunger, for sex with the woman (remember the desire-filled mass the actor celebrates while the priest celebrates the more normal mass). Finally comes the third hunger, the great hunger, but only after he hears the heavy slow steps of a mother climbing a wooden staircase up to the abandoned room of the lost son and then the murmur of the inconsolable: "Grant that . . ."

"He stood, and stood, and stood. Third hunger, the great one. Time for the second Gentle Course/Path (Lauf). Instead, the Great Fall."

When the three hungers were introduced just before the actor entered the church, the third hunger, for Geist/Spirit/Mind, the actor thought of Goethe, not the Goethe of "Faust," which didn't much concern the actor, but the Goethe of the saying about the "'Oberen Leitenden', welches den Geist meinte," the 'guiding spirits' (or high leading ones?) that meant Geist. 

The phrase is from Goethe's "Westoestlicher Divan: Der höchste Charakter orientalischer Dichtkunst ist, was wir Deutsche Geist nennen, das Vorwaltende des oberen Leitenden. . . .

And it's the actor's third hunger. How to satisfy it? By a second walk, a gentle walk through the day, the next day. For that he needs time.

He has no time.

And that's it.

A few final thoughts.

First the standing image I've been following throughout. Having read the entire novel, I see at least three different kinds of standing, although they are closely connected by the fact that they are the same image. First is the standing that opposes falling, the standing that works against entropy. Second is the standing that is a kind of threatening power, the standing of the policemen or of the actor himself in the subway. The actor's standing, standing, and standing at the end may entail both of those, but it is also the third kind of standing, the one that is stasis. There's life in the gentle moving on. It's a mobile standing, dialectical erection.

Second, the actor leaves the woman's house and travels toward her over the course of the entire day. He finally reaches her (although he remains at a distance). A second gentle walk would repeat that course, from woman to woman. The last image of the novel is the mother lamenting her lost son. Although the actor has set Faust aside, how can we not hear echoes of Faust here? 

 Das Unbeschreibliche,

Hier ist's getan;

Das Ewig-Weibliche

Zieht uns hinan.

The eternal womanly draws us, draws the actor as she draws Faust. And let's make no mistake here, the heaven into which Faust is raised is a heaven carefully composed/constructed out of Renaissance paintings and is thus a re-entry into the very constructed world Faust has longed to transcend (see  Neil Flax, "The Presence of the Sign in Goethe's 'Faust,'" PMLA 98 (1983): 183-203).

I wanted to end this series with an appropriate image, a visual equivalent of sorts to the thoughts Peter's novel has evoked.

Last night I took a hundred photos of Utah Valley during a sunset. These three may share something with the powerful novel that undermines its own power, with the simple story that is so complex, with the coming darkness of the Great Fall still illuminated by the already absent sun.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 16

Utah Valley Sunset While I Read Chapter 8

Chapter 7 drew to a close with thoughts about a possibly troubled son and how the actor would step in as father to help or even to save him. Naturally, his thoughts turn to a film, Clint Eastwood's recent "Grand Torino." The actor thinks he would never sacrifice his life for the neighborhood or for the world; but for a family member, certainly.

Awakened from his sleep on the grass, pressed by Zeitnot or dangerously evaporating time, he falls (stuerzt) into the inner city.

The threshold to the inner city is marked by a newly constructed public toilet. And should there be any lingering thoughts that this is a story written by a religiously addled and aging Peter Handke, what follows should dispel those notions while making you laugh early on a Thursday morning.

The front of the toilet spreads out in a way that reminds the actor of the nave of the church he has just been in. Perhaps it is even broader once you enter and close the door he thinks. And inside, from the dome, a gentle light radiates over the azure-blue tiles. "The ceremonious organ music that sounded all around was the constant flow of water." In short, he washes himself and undergoes a transformation in the toilet very much like the one in the church that so inspired the Austrian Public Radio Sunday host (see the post titled Angus Deli).

Besides being funny as hell, this scene reminds a reader that Peter finds meaning, the meaning that arises from form, wherever he can. Van Morrison (whose "It's a wonderful [sic] night for a moondance" floats out of a car window earlier in this novel) has always been as good a source for meaning as Bach or Beethoven, perhaps better. And the films cited here aren't Tarkovsky or even Wim Wenders. The only difference between popular culture and high culture is that the latter is apt to carry with it the taint of crowd worship, the whiff of decay.

As the actor walks on, there's a riff on wall paintings vs graffiti, the former harmonious the latter threatening to run amok. Order vs anarchy. No real preference stated. The actor sees the graffiti "as letters out of a half-sleep, as a mirror text, impossible to decipher."

In the subway, after a funny imagined future in which all cell-phone users are required to encase their heads in helmets that completely deaden the sound of their talking (a metaphor, perhaps, for what the constant public talking and listening has already accomplished?), the actor feels the threat of violence. Someone will soon attack someone else with a knife or something else, he thinks. And then he sees the person, "recognized him, the one who stood there still and erect, by his fixed eyes and even more clearly by his tense cheeks." (This could be, the standing image suggests, one of the policeman who threatened him earlier, standing firm on their spread legs.) It turns out to be his own mirror image in the window of the subway car. "It's strange," he thinks, "that so few people run amok." The novel has been taut with that possibility throughout. The actor will play someone who runs amok in the film. He is reading a book about someone who runs amok. He himself is constantly on the cusp of violence in his thoughts.

In a broad plaza that features a giant screen, the actor watches the country's president declare war (or if not war an "intervention," a "reaction") in the name of God: "History demands its due and must run its divinely determined course. May God help us! Our God is great. Great God, we praise you. . ." The actor wishes he had killed him in the woods earlier that morning.

The rest of the people the actor has seen during the day reprise their contacts with him, as does his father, as the sole representative of an earlier life. The book has had many references to a mostly domineering father; but here he comes back as an aged dancer entering a ballroom where he dances the tango with other old people until they tire and turn to waltzing. The scene ends as the actor addresses his father: "He Vater, alter Stenz!" Old dandy.

In the plaza huge advertisements of naked women compete with the hidden faces and bodies of women in veils. The actor finds himself rejecting both as counterfeits, wishing instead for real faces: "The face of the other as medicine."

He writes a letter to his son (the reverse of Kafka's letter to his father) which ends "And thus I wait for your judgment as your father." He puts the letter in an envelope, but realizes he doesn't have the address for the Yukon River the son is descending in Alaska. Should he send the message electronically? No. "The letter was a letter and thus had a distance in space and more importantly in time to put behind it."

Made me want to write Peter a letter.

The actor watches, as darkness gathers, hundreds of people put personal letters in the mailbox marked International. Letters are being written again! he thinks. It's not the last days after all!

But where is a face? he asks. Ein Antlitz. The medicine he needs.

Two women are talking in a bar in front of him and one of them is so lively, so alive, speaking with her whole soul so intensely that he is filled with thankfulness. "What a gift."

The bar is the Bar of Destiny. The woman is the woman he has come to meet, the woman in whose bed he woke up. Her face is so alive that he feels unworthy of her. She is talking of love and he has betrayed love. He thinks that all the ravens of Alaska should descend on him. Her face, "this face there, was power, true power, legitimate power -- misuse of this power unthinkable."

The chapter ends with the actor sitting in a dark place lit up now and then by sheet lightning. The last image is of a mailbox that appears in the lightning that will surely ensure that his letter will reach his son.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 15

primrose

 Chapter 8 this morning.

What a pleasure to have slow summer mornings before me and a slow book to help me enter into the day.

This primrose, growing just off the deck, has a new blossom this morning. How is it possible that a plant in this semi-arid place can risk such delicate and showy flowers that last for only a single day?

More understandable are the red paintbrushes just east of the primrose that love proximity to sage and rabbitbrush. Their red tops aren't even flowers, but bracts, and their flowers much less conspicuous.

paintbrush in sage and rabbitbrush

Now to the book.

Several times in Chapter 7 there are references to films, as there have been throughout the novel. The actor often compares what he is experiencing to something in a film.

Chapter 8 begins with just such a reference: "He walked like an Indian in a film by John Ford who, in his own language, in Navajo, described a way of walking . . . 'Haske yichi nixwod,' which in translation means something like 'the one who walks with determination'" (or precision, or certainty).

A little earlier in the book (p. 170), the actor is about to kill someone with a hatchet when a scene from the screenplay for his film comes to mind and he goes on his way instead.

Films (and books and religious rituals) offer us patterns for living our lives. John Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln" offers the protagonist of Peter's "Short Letter, Long Farewell" a kind of coherent (if obviously / because obviously fictional) story at a time he has lost coherence.

And here the actor draws on the memory of a film to provide impetus and form for the next station in his journey. At least that's the fiction of this novel. In all likelihood, however, as he was writing this part of "The Great Fall," Peter fell back on something he had read in "Die Presse":

Oder man sieht sich einfach in Razor Saltboys Zimmer um. . . . Er arbeitet im Gesundheitszentrum in Window Rock, der Hauptstadt der Navajo Nation, und verdient nebenher Geld als Musiker – daher der eher ungewöhnliche Name. Seinen richtigen Namen, den Navajo-Namen, kann nämlich kaum mehr jemand aussprechen: „Haske Yichi Nixwod.“ Der mit Bestimmtheit geht. (Norbert Rief, Die Presse, February 15, 2008)

There are indeed Navajo actors in John Ford's films, most often when Monument Valley is featured; and Navajos love to watch the films at Gallup's drive-in theater where they honk their pick-up horns in response to the often comic and even salacious things said in Navajo where Ford required something in an Indian language.

So Peter picks up the article in "Die Presse" and conflates it with John Ford and he has what he wants here, which is direction for the actor from film (as he had direction for the actor from the mass in the previous chapter).

At least that's how I see it.

The chapter has a couple of strong reminders that the narrator is working here, moves that remind me of Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, assuring that we won't get caught up in identifying with the actor as opposed to paying attention to the sentences and to the novel as text. The one is the assertion, repeated before, that "my actor . . . ." The other comes when the narrator adds a statement that the actor had, along with the priest's robes, stitched up his own coat while in the church after the mass: "I forgot to mention that" (204). 

There's a scene in this chapter in which two policemen confront the actor. I laughed as the actor confronted them with reference to their language: "'Your way of signaling is not aesthetic!" In response one policeman taps on his holster.

It reminds me of the morning Peter left the Salzburg jail and told the waiting press he hadn't called the policemen Nazi pigs, he had said they were "like" Nazi pigs.

Like the Salzburg police, these officers aren't keen on linguistic distinctions. Only after a forcible search to determine that the actor is neither a terrorist nor a suicide candidate do the policemen let him proceed.

He sleeps for a while on grass, wakes up to find himself, suddenly, experiencing "Zeitnot" (time emergency, the distress of time, time urgency, even time peril): "He had had enough time just now, and suddenly he had no more."

Zeitnot leads to Durcheinander, to a mixing up of things, to confusion. He can think only in numbers (earlier he killed, in thought, the berry picker who was reciting numbers), can hum only Schiller's "An die Freude." This Schiller reference made laugh. Such a cliche? 

The actor comes out of the condition, as he has before, by being his own audience, the way a drunk sees another much worse drunk and then sobers up.

The chapter ends with a dialectic: aren't both idling and having no time necessities.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 14

I'm going to title this post

"Angus Deli."

Chapter 6 of the novel has the actor walking into the city. Again he observes people and birds.

AND THEN TROUBLE! (page 161)

Ahead of him is a group of young people he judges to be a gang. They have sticks with them and they're up to no good, he's sure. As they pass he notices their sticks are really bats and that they have gloves and balls. He has misjudged them with his first impulse, as so often. A second look is always critical, he thinks.

But that wasn't the trouble I meant. Here's the problem: Die Stöcke, welche die Jugenlichen durch die Stille pfeifen ließen, waren Basketballschläger, nachrichtenweise bekannt als Totschlagsinstrumente, aber sie hatten, das zeigte sich erst auf den zweiten Blick, auch die zugehörigen Fanghandschuhe und Bälle dabei.

Basketball bats! Where the hell was the copyeditor on this one?

Now to the Angus Deli.

In his collection of reviews of "Der Grosse Fall," Michael Roloff includes one printed just 4 days ago. Here a couple of paragraphs:

Graz, 08.07.2011 (KAP) In Peter Handkes Erzählung "Der große Fall" blieb ein Aspekt von der Literaturkritik unbeachtet: Es ist das "Anklingen des Religiösen", das in dem heuer erschienenen jüngsten Werk des großen österreichischen Schriftstellers "immer wieder wahrhaftig zum Vorschein kommt". Aufmerksam macht darauf die in Wien und Salzburg lebende Autorin Christine Wiesmüller, die die Sendereihe "Erfüllte Zeit" am Sonntag in Ö1 gestaltet. "Interessant an diesem Werk ist nicht nur die große sprachliche Gestaltungskraft, sondern auch die feine religiöse Spur, die den Roman sehr ernsthaft durchzieht", erklärte sie gegenüber "Kathpress".

In dem von der Kritik vielgelobten Prosatext "Der große Fall" begleitet Peter Handke in einem sprachgewaltigen "stream-of-consciousness"-Stil einen namenlos bleibenden Schauspieler auf seinen Weg durch den Tag. In der Früh verlässt er nach einem Gewitter ein Haus im Wald und tritt eine Tageswanderung an, "eine Lebensreise" in vielen einzelnen Etappen, wie es Wiesmüller nennt. Während dieses langen Tages mache sich auch der Hunger bemerkbar - mit den Worten Handkes "ein Hunger nach Speisen, und ein Hunger nach mehr, viel mehr". Der Autor vermittelt dies durch eine Szene in einer Kirche, wo Brot in den Leib und Wein in das Blut verwandelt wird. Der Schauspieler, der es "bisher nicht einmal in den Filmen über sich gebracht" habe, auf die Knie zu fallen, habe plötzlich "ein Bedürfnis, eine Sehnsucht - oder war das Teil seines Hungers? -, nicht allein auf die Knie zu fallen, sondern der Länge nach hinzustürzen und mit dem Gesicht nach unten liegenzubleiben". Handke schreibt von einer "Heiterkeit, welche von der Eucharistiefeier ausgegangen war und anhielt - verwandelte alles in das, was es war".

The Austrian writer Christine Wiesmueller, who hosts a Sunday show called "Fulfilled Time" on Austrian Radio 1, claims that reviewers of this new novel have missed the fine religious sensibility that pervades the novel. She says that at one point in the novel the actor feels a great hunger for food and for more, much more. In response, she says, the actor enters a church and experiences the transubstantiation enacted during a mass. She says he then feels the desire not to kneel but to fall prostrate to the floor. And finally the novel speaks of a "lightness that had emanated from the celebration of the Eucharist, one that lasted, one that transformed everything into what it really was."

Although this prayerful reading isn't entirely wrong in its description of the main section of this chapter, it leaves out a couple of crucial things:

1. The actor's hunger is for three things: 1) for food, 2) for the woman down there in the city with whom he want to immediately join, "now, and now, not the animal but the god with two backs," and 3) for Geist or spirit (which Geist? Goethe's "Oberen Leitenden", welches den Geist meinte -- note the distance from the HOLY SPIRIT of the Church, the distance that increases through the placing of the spirit in Goethe's literary form and then heightened with the phrase "which meant the spirit).

2. The cross on the church might also have been a TV antenna (p. 176).

3. While the priest reads the mass silently, to himself despite the one visitor (the actor), the actor has his own holy text: "Yes, the impotence or powerlessness of God! But his omnipresence is his power, his only power. That is, it would be if. . . . But: Where should I turn? And how? And, yes!: The body of the woman is the descent of the omnipotence of the spirit in the night. With the woman together the other language begins. . . . Praise the bodies. The woman, the other letter. I don't come over the woman, the woman comes over me and my flesh becomes spirit. . . . There is nothing higher than desire, than our combined hunger and thirst. Praise our two hearts. Amen. Thus it is. Thus may it be."

4. The actor has never knelt in a church, not even when acting in a film. At most he moves his body slightly so that the priest thinks he might have knelt. But beyond the religious ritual genuflection that he won't perform, he does feel the desire to prostrate himself on the floor and to lie there with face down. But  he's also pleased to realize that that kind of falling between the benches is impossible.

So, there are religious signs and gestures in the text. But their contexts surely can't be broadcast on Austrian Public Radio 1 on a show for Catholic listeners.

This brings me to the "Angus Deli." We see what we want to see. We know what corresponds to what we know. The actor sees gang weapons that are really "basketball" bats. Ms. Wiesmueller sees Catholic religion in Peter's text just as I saw Catholic religion in a fast-food sign the other day. The sign said "ANGUS DELI SANDWICHES." In my mind the "l" in deli fell away and the "n" and "g" in angus transposed and I thought that Burger King was offering holy sandwiches: Lamb of God sandwiches.

That really happened to me; but it doesn't make it right.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 13

lazuli bunting [click on photo for larger image]

Was it food poisoning or gastro-intestinal virus? Guess I'll never know; but this morning I'm feeling much better, thank you. Making coffee, I heard a familiar song and looked out at a lazuli bunting (he's atop the maple in the foreground).

Then there was a motion in the clearing just to the right of the bunting, a little to the right of where the line of light reflected from the window distorts the photo. It was a tiny faun, spotted like a tiny faun (to steal from Peter Handke's early play "Prophecy" Did you translate that Michael?). The faun was frisky! stotting up to its mother, then away from her, then past her again. She wanted to cross the road as she and other resident mule deer do about this time every morning, and she wanted the little fellow right at her heels when she did that; but he (or she) was having none of that -- too much fun to be had, right now, right here!

Michael Morrow, I'm enjoying your thoughts, thoughts from an ex-submariner from the cornfields of Illinois who became a modern dancer at 60. ". . . most importantly . . . into morrow."

And Michael Roloff, your comment about Peter's dislike of Heidegger (sentences like concrete) reminds me of Peter's own sentence (a tangle of neurons?). Your comment about phenomenology being part of his problem is nicely ambiguous. It's part of the problem he is investigating -- that's been my point -- and it's a problem because it's not very weighty when weighed against the phenomena of human interactions.

Okay, back to the book, Chapter 5 again.

The actor comes across a previous neighbor, "a good neighbor, almost a friend, a friend" sitting with a somewhat younger woman on a bench at a bus stop. "Andreas," the actor says, the first name he has used on this day. There is no response; and, the woman says, there will be no response: "It's over with him. The End!" At first there was a respectful (because somewhat distant) relationship. Gradually the neighbor became more intrusive, standing at the garden gate around midnight, calling to the actor until he let him in, then sitting there waiting, it seemed to the actor, for signs from the oracle that would decide existential questions for him. Then the neighbor, a businessman, went to Mongolia and was never heard of again.
Until now.

Although the woman has proclaimed the end for him, the neighbor begins to speak: "What he uttered weren't entire sentences, nothing but separate words, or words that wanted to be sentences. Wanted? . . . snowball fight . . . chalkboard . . . fall from a window . . . water runner . . . early apples . . . temple jumping . . . gasmasks . . . handgrenades . . . Hitler . . . knee raises . . . money changing . . . blueberries . . . ear boxing . . . money or life . . . mountain and valley . . . so green . . . so dear . . . turn around . . . go home . . ."

This feels like a page from Peter's early play "Kaspar" (which I know Michael translated, a wild and wooly and even brilliant translation), which ends, if I remember correctly, with the words "goats and monkeys"! But this time it isn't the speaker (Kaspar) who is the main character, but the audience (the actor). And he knows that in this face-to-face encounter he must respond correctly, accurately, well, adequately: "Wo if he now failed to stand firm in the gaze of the other." "Standhalten" is the verb here, but the idea of withstanding that undergirds most of them, including "stand firm," misses the idea in this sentence that the actor must respond adequately to the gaze, to the words, otherwise he will be a "versager" -- a loser who has said the wrong thing.

But then a bus comes and the moment is past. He continues on his way. When he looks back the woman is standing and the man sitting. He reflects on his impulse, in this case and many others, to help those who have suddenly "lost their footing" ("den Stand verloren").

And now we're back to the theme I've been following. This novel is about the great fall. The opposite of falling is standing. The "standhalten" to which the actor has just felt himself called is in the presence, in the face-to-face with a man who has fallen, and the standing firm is the response that will save him ("retten").

The actor, interrupted by the bus, didn't in fact do that; and the chapter ends with his thoughts about helping, about saving, about his "Alaska woman" who said derisively that he thought he was an angel, about his inability to help anyone except the people who saw his plays and films and small things like a bee and a hedgehog.

There is a lot of Peter Handke woven into this narrator's account of the actor's thoughts, including notes from people who have responded positively to his work. Again I feel that odd tension between what might be pure autobiography (pure?) and pure fiction, that tangle of author/narrator/hero/people and things experienced by the actor.

I like that tension.

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.