LETTER TO BOB SILVERS @ NYRB: RE: J.S. MARCUS [1]

“Marcus [occasionally] on the Verge”

Marcus quotes in: GRAY

since he feels that that is Handke’s coloring

I am YELLOW JACKET!

Handke quotes in Green

One or two Scott Abott quotes

  Others, Colbin, Caldwell etc.     

Volume 47, Number 14 · September 21, 2000

Apocalypse Now

By J.S. Marcus

Die Fahrt im Einbaum oder Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg [The Journey in the Dugout Canoe, or The Piece about the Film about the War]

by Peter Handke

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 126 pp., DM 32.00 (paper)

Scott Abbott’s translation is called:

VOYAGE BY DUGOUT: THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR

Unter Tränen fragend [Questioning Through Tears]

by Peter Handke

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 158 pp., DM 36.00

OTHER BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THIS ESSAY

My Year in the No-Man's-Bay

by Peter Handke, Translated from the German by Krishna Winston

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 468 pp., $30.00

A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia

by Peter Handke, Translated from the German by Scott Abbott/ Viking, 83 pp., $17.95

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

by Peter Handke, Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 70 pp., (out of print)

In print with New York Review Books!

Repetition

by Peter Handke, Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 225 pp., $ 18.95

Plays: 1

by Peter Handke, Translated from the German by Michael Roloff, with an introduction by Tom Kuhn

Methuen, 308 pp., $17.95 (paper)

Abschied des Träumers vom Neunten Land [The Dreamer's Farewell to the Ninth Country]

by Peter Handke

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 50 pp., DM 19.80

Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise [Summer Afterword to a Winter Journey]

by Peter Handke

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 92 pp., DM 24.80

Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch [released in America as "Wings of Desire"]

by Wim Wenders, by Peter Handke

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 170 pp., DM 29.00

Noch einmal vom Neunten Land [One More Time from the Ninth Country]

by Peter Handke, by Joze Horvat

Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 110 pp., DM 29.80

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

by Peter Handke, Translated from the German by Krishna Winston

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 185 pp., $ 23.00

1] J.S. Marcus’s hook begins like this and it at once familiarizes the reader with several of his favorite adjectives: “grey” and “abstract”  and “detached”

“One of the last German films to win an international following was Wim Wenders's 1987 fantasy Wings of Desire, about an angel, played by Bruno Ganz, who longs to be mortal; he sees everything but feels nothing. The film is remarkable for its muted black-and-white images of West Berlin, which shows up on screen as a blank, almost abstract, cityscape (the Potsdamer Platz, then in the shadow of the wall, appears, memorably, as a vacant lot), and for its stern, incantatory dialogue.

Wings of Desire was co-written, we are told, by Wenders and the Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke; but the story and the effect of the images, like the dialogue, bear the mark of Handke,generally regarded at the time as the premier prose stylist in theGerman language, and one of post-war Europe's most recognizableliterary figures.

At the end of the film, Ganz's angel finally gets his wish andbecomes merely human — unlike Lucifer, he is redeemed by his fall, and the film is submerged in a haze of color. Handke has lately taken his own fall: he has put himself at the center of a resounding controversy by forsaking his gray world of detachment and longing…”[ my emphases throughout- M.R.]

I once analyzed the film and the screenplay and in the process made several interesting discoveries: [1] that Handke can be the ultimate scavenger of his own work, since he wrote only several long poems that are new, most famously of course his “The Song of Childhood” which is all over the web in no end of translations, and through whose eyes the film is filmed and magicks Berlin and the world, which is what made the film such a success:

Song of Childhood 
By Peter Handke

When the child was a child 
It walked with its arms swinging, 
wanted the brook to be a river, 
the river to be a torrent, 
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child, 
it didn’t know that it was a child, 
everything was soulful, 
and all souls were one.

When the child was a child, 
it had no opinion about anything, 
had no habits, 
it often sat cross-legged, 
took off running, 
had a cowlick in its hair, 
and made no faces when photographed.

When the child was a child, 
It was the time for these questions: 
Why am I me, and why not you? 
Why am I here, and why not there? 
When did time begin, and where does space end? 
Is life under the sun not just a dream? 
Is what I see and hear and smell 
not just an illusion of a world before the world? 
Given the facts of evil and people. 
does evil really exist? 
How can it be that I, who I am, 
didn’t exist before I came to be, 
and that, someday, I, who I am, 
will no longer be who I am?

When the child was a child, 
It choked on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding, 
and on steamed cauliflower, 
and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child, 
it awoke once in a strange bed, 
and now does so again and again. 
Many people, then, seemed beautiful, 
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

It had visualized a clear image of Paradise, 
and now can at most guess, 
could not conceive of nothingness, 
and shudders today at the thought.

When the child was a child, 
It played with enthusiasm, 
and, now, has just as much excitement as then, 
but only when it concerns its work.

When the child was a child, 
It was enough for it to eat an apple, … bread, 
And so it is even now.

When the child was a child, 
Berries filled its hand as only berries do, 
and do even now, 
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw, 
and do even now, 
it had, on every mountaintop, 
the longing for a higher mountain yet, 
and in every city, 
the longing for an even greater city, 
and that is still so, 
It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees 
with an elation it still has today, 
has a shyness in front of strangers, 
and has that even now. 
It awaited the first snow, 
And waits that way even now.

When the child was a child, 
It threw a stick like a lance against a tree, 
And it quivers there still today.

[2] That the naturalistic dialogue is either Wenders or was created by the actors during the filming, since Handke refuses to write naturalistically, but since Handke was not present during the filming itself and the idea for a film about angels had been Wenders it is exceedingly speculative to decide what idea derives from whom, or what happened in the editing room, and it was better to concentrate on the work as a whole. It is a long quite demanding essay and it appeared in the St. Monica review which was then edited by Jim Krusoe, but a good section of it can be found at:

http://www.handkefilm.scriptmania.com

J.S. Marcus begins in typical fashion, for him and many another writer in the age of celebrities, by mentioning that the film is famous for being famous, and that Handke is now also famous for being infamous. The transition from the fallen angel to the “fallen Handke” is the kind of specious transition that you find rarely among good enough reviewers, say in the New York Times or the New Yorker or L.A. Times which have many good ones on film and art. These hooks are meant to have a noose at the end, and the noose in this instance is called “romanticism”, on which Handke, at the end of J.S. Marcus’s [J.S. from now on] piece is accused of having strangled himself, and a very specific Serbian one at that. That is, between the hook and the noose is a narrative that those habituated to narration can follow, and if really followed he had and responded to what Handke’s prose had turned into by the year 2000 would have discovered that the kind of magicking that the film performs is also performed and ever more successfully thereafter by Handke’s “gray”prose!

Although Handke early on wrote  alovely essay called “Literature is romantic,” he is not Lord Byron yet by a long shot, and if you read the highpoint of his “Home Coming Cycle” [1] the dramatic poem playWalk About the Villages [2] and everything that whelms out of the treasure chest he built himself there, you notice that our man is as fiendishly critical as ever if not more so, also of many features in Serbia, no matter that he has stuck to his Balkan guns as I will update my I hope patient readers at the end of a kind of decimation of J.S. 

Marcus pathetic impressionistic way of describing, his repeated use of the term gray world of detachment is the oddest when applied to a writer whose every sentence becomes more and more anchored in images lying behind the syntax and where the syntax itself, later in the form of dream syntax, subliminally engages the reader on a far deeper than ordinary level of communication, who with the 2007 novel film opera KALI has re-acquired the great narrative style, sentence by sentence. see the KALI page at:

http://www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com

You can go anywhere, as of Handke’s third extended prose text, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and notice that Handke is anything but “gray” whatever gray might actually mean:

 “While the child was speaking, sentence after sentence, a strip of light traveled beneath the plane which was flying at a perceptively lower altitude now, moved across the plateau, and caused a band of asphalt to shimmer, a reservoir to glitter, an irrigation canal to flash. A topsy-turvy new world on the first day of the journey [but hadn’t several days passed already?]: the sky above the glass roof nearly as black as night, with a hint of the first stars, and down below the sunlit earth. In similar fashion, on the way to the airport, an ancient crone, without her dentures, had come towards her, driving a factory-new race car, as if trying to set a new record, the car’s number emblazoned from stem to stern. And similarly, the outskirt’s troupe of drunks had been hauling cases of beverage from the super market to their lairs in the wood – without exception bottles of mineral water. And was that possible? a flock of wild geese, flying past the plane window in a long, jagged V formation from right to left: “Arabic writing,” the boy commented. And could there be such a thing: in the same fashion a swarm of leaves swept past the window, holm oak leaves typical of the plateau? And where and since when did this exist?: and next a pale-pink of snowflake like blossoms, as if the almonds were abloom and had almost finished blooming, now in February early March.” [page: 77-79 of Del Gredos. You can see how Handke makes matters fabulous when he cooking as he is nearly entirely for the first ten chapter, and it is something to behold how he inhabits a woman’s consciousness, when she is not being the ice queen; and here something that, basically, falls into the realm of the strictly realistic convention, also fabulous, I find, in its way: "None of the other trees had such spreading crowns as the giant oaks, or oak giants. At the same time, the branches in the crowns were inter-woven, forming a dense mass. And nothing made a more powerful impression of devastation than all the oak crowns lying smashed on the forest floor. Yet even these almost countless heaps of broken limbs offered something to observe. On its way down, one of these giant trees had fallen on its equally large, equally broad, giant neighbor, which in turn had fallen on the oak in front of it and now they lay there as a single trunk, forming a sort of transcontinental line, all pointing toward a common vanishing point at the very end of the continent.” What is noticeable, too, is Handke’s sparse use of adjectiva – well, J.S. who must be the kind of fellow who really digs vivid writing, Tom Wolfe, Salmon Rushdie? Since J.S. also makes a mis-description of Handke’s first novel, Die Hornissen [I will not anticipate what I have to say about his idiocy on that score] except to mention that Handke’s second novel, Der Hausierer’s, [The Panhandler/ Peddler] main text - it exists in various Romance language translation - consists of nothing but impressions left on the consciousness of a terrified being in a room. It’s half dozen or so sections have descriptions of the procedures of the crime novel. Handke, as we also know from his 1971 Short Letter, Long Farewell,just republished by NYRB Books, with a first rate appreciation byGreil Marcus, played with the conventions of the U.S. black mask novel. These works, including the play My Foot My Tutor and Radio Play One, also quite a few poems from his Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld all play with and conquer anxiety. Handke, who is indeed somewhat sinister, and for good reason, became a virtuoso at that; until his first wife split and the lay-abroad had a tachycardia attack, as lay-abroads like that usually do under such circumstances, became panicked, fugued! And wrote great literature about it! The three long poems in Nonsense & Happiness [Urizen Books, 1976], A Moment of True Feeling, Farrar, Straus 1975] and the diary novel, process notes of automatic spontaneous notations Weight of the World [F.S.& G. 1977]. As a kind of supreme phenomenologist Handke is immediately accessible to readers of impressionism. Being somewhat autistic, Handke uses himself as his own material via a series of focused personae throughout his burgeoning work: as pure consciousness in Der Hausierer; and as Josef Bloch, the “German Writer,” Keuschnig, the “Left-Handed Woman”, Sorger, Loser, “the writer” [of An Afternoon], Keuschnig again, the “Pharmacist of Taxham”, an ex-bankieress, an woman opera singer, most recently as “ex-writer,” in each instance variously transforming what he has acknowledged can be unrolled [“vom autobiographischen aufrollen,” see his book-length weekend’s conversation with Herbert Gamper, ICH LEBE DOCH NUR VON DEN ZWISCHENRAUEMEN - for once Handke is not lying and playing games with one of his interviewers] into a thoroughly re-imagined prose text that communicates his state of mind and takes over the states of minds of real readers, Freudenstoff, Peter Strasser has called it and reading books of Handke’s such as No-Man’s-Bay or Crossing the Sierra del Gredos has put me into such a joyous state… and my guess is that Handke’s sheer love of writing communicates itself, subliminally. Formally successful, each book is also a lesson in writing. You may not wish to follow the instruct, but you will be glad to see what the teacher can show.  

As to “detached”: Handke is the writer who said to himself: “Write everything with passion,” which of course does not imply that you have roaring Italian arias, but that the passion goes into the construction of a text, passionately dispassionate as we may recall Stephen Deadalus proceeding in Portrait of the Artist. Not that Handke did not have some real problems accessing his own feelings, until they surfaced at about the time that he wrote the 1974 novel A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING, after his first wife had left the lay-abroad, no doubt finding him to be as cold a fish as his second wife did, a cold fish who was always writing, as of puberty, nearly at every moment of the day, terrorizing his entire family, as we can find out as of the 1981 WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, his greatest and richest work by far, it has every facet manifested, exhibited, and as is described at greater length in the sometimes extremely autobiographical  2008 MORAWISCHE NACHT. Think of him as a musician possessed by one brilliant idea after the other, and it becomes easier to take - after all you are not married to the guy nor his child.

2]“He became famous, indeed infamous, as a very young man forexquisite, absurdist… [my emphases m.r.]” Handke’s plays are never absurdist, that only applies to the one playwright with both whose formalism and playfulness he has affinity: Ionesco. As to”exquisite”: Handke comes out of Latin “clarity”, precision, Wittgenstein, differentiation as you find them in legal texts, he has a very light touch - that  shows his affinity for Austrian playwrights Horvath and Raimund, exquisite would mean Proustian, Valery. Handke is not a jeweler, to put it that way, not even the short pieces in Once More for Thucydides [1980 New Directions] ought to be called “exquisite” if that term has meaning and use. Handke was not famous for any of those matters, though famous he was indeed. Infamous he has made himself only since his intervention in matters Yugoslavian.

a] His first play, the 1965 PROPHECY, does the same thing as Susan Sontag’s essay “Illness as Metaphor” – it excoriates similes and stupid metaphoric thinking and it does so in Handke’s serial fashion, playfully and unrelentingly.

b] Offending the Audience, which I now call Public Insult [the word “Abuse” having become too fraught] addresses an audience and tells it all about going to the theater and what it will experience as it experiences – as it exists on the world stage - with the effect of making the audience as self-conscious about theater and their own BEING IN THE WORLD - as Mr. Handke is about language, and ends with the delivery of the offensive come-on curses in the form of musically arranged sets of cuss chords: just like old Franz Josef Haydn had his drum roll Surprise Symphony. Handke is a didacticist, a language educator, an activist Wittgenstein, and can be a real pain when he turns self-righteous judge and jury [see anon], his now priestlyness bothers me less because it is infused with his immense capacity for love.

c] Self-Accusation, the obverse of Public Insult, and the most frequently performed of his early pieces, turns the table on himself, and drives the series of failures of the person to obey the claims the super ego has on it to a point where we have the first instance [that I know of] of Handke’s later characteristic pathos - the unreachability of the ideal, which most famously attains a climax in Nova’s great final Hoelderlinesque aria at the end of Handke’s 1981 Walk about the Villages which was published in this country in 1995 and which, if J.S. had read and half-way understood it, would have clued him in on Handke’s changed playing procedures, not that he evidently has the faintest about what was involved initially, nor did idiot Neil Gordon for that matter despite claims to the contrary, and the recourse Handke began to take to Euripidean and Goethean techniques while driving forward his modernist project, and so might just have obviated no end of stupid statements of J.S.’s about Einbaum/ Voyage or alleged coldness; boy is Villageshot! What a heart test it is too! And what a way to find out why so many of the cold hearted have heart attacks. On the other hand, by the time that J.S. comes to misportray VOYAGE it is clear that he has not the faintest about drama.

e] The wordless 1967 My Foot My Tutor is the purest and poeticdemonstration ever of the master slave sado-masochistic relationship, in a wonderful rural setting. Nothing absurd about that, is there? Anyhow, not as long as we remain in the world of ordinary language. Noticeable, too, how Handke sustains his formal procedures.

All these plays – from the 1965 PROPHECY to the 1973 THEY ARE DYING OUT – also exist within their time and its conversation about these matters, not in a vacuum, although Handke’s approach, his conceptions are sufficiently fundamental, keenly conceived,  to outlive their immediate circumstances, 1968 and all that!

f] The 1968 Kaspar is not a “retelling of the Kaspar Hauser story,”it merely abstracts one sentence from it, “I want to be like someone else was once.” Max Frisch, appropriately, called it THE play of the fatherless generation. It is Chomsky and Wittgenstein rolled into one and a half hours of language education; and once I got a bead on my man’s psychic dimensions, I can see him as that Kaspar who was never successfully Kasperfied, whose autism keeps breaking out, as he moves so discombobulatedly on stage. In some ways Kaspar is pure determinism, its final sentence “goats and monkeys,” [Othello] repeated several times over is neither nihilist nor absurd.

g] The 1969 Quodlibet [As You like It.] is THE statement of his artistic work as a dramatist: the play works on the principle of auditory hallucination – “Catch the conscience of the King” – that is, of an audience that is now king! Handke creates projection screens, also in his novels, projections which absorb the reader’s self; playfully of course. You can then either think, or not. InQuodlibet a bunch of World Stage Characters parade around - C.I.A. KGB, great whores of the world, Geopolitical monsters, one J.S. Marcus - muttering monosyllabics which this Finnegan’s Wakeaficionado translated into Joycean puns along those ambiguous lines. Handke does not care for Joyce, or perhaps just not for Ulysses, so he has said several times, though he used the rhythms of the end ofThe Dead for a section in No-Man’s-Bay, just as he has some bees from Beckett’s Molloy buzzing around in the Chaville woods, can’t really tell whose bees are more metaphysical! But I give very good odds that my infinitely competitive lord knew what he was doing.

h] The 1970 Ride Across Lake Constance starts with a maid in black face vacuuming the stage, and that is what Handke then proceeds to do with stage practices, with boulevard theater, the first character waking from a dream and the characters engaging in that maddening specious Wittgensteinian Socratic questioning - not just of language but of everyday activities, and you listen to that for an hour and half of ever more sinister goings, are subjected to it, and it is the weirdest experience I have ever had, I as its translator who hadn’t the faintest how that would play and what effect a performance would have on me, and I had absolutely nothing to compare it to until I entered psychoanalysis: the famous “good hour” where the cobwebs are cleaned away, the world looks fresh, the angers and conflicts, the passions are assuaged, that kind ofcatharsis, better than good love making and how you can feel afterwards even. Absurd? No, neither the procedure nor the effect. I wish friend Richard Gilman had experienced the play before writing about it and merely pointing to Wittgenstein procedures in it, a very different thing to read and be subjected to! Handke creates “happenings” in the best sense of that word.

Jannings: Not that I know

George: If you don't know it, then you haven't heard of it either. But the expres"George: And have you ever heard of a "fiery Eskimo"

sion "a flying ship" - that you have heard?

Jannings: At most in a fairy tale.

George: But scurrying snakes exist?

Jannings: Of course not.

George: But fiery Eskimos - they exist?

Jannings: I can't imagine it.

George: But flying ships exist?

Jannings: At most in a dream.

George: Not in reality?

Jannings: Not in reality.

pause

George: But born losers?

Jannings: Consequently they exist.

George: And born trouble makers?

Jannings: They exist.

George: And therefore there are born criminals.

Jannings: It's only logical.

George: As I wanted to say at the time...

Jannings: [interrupts him] "At the time"? Has it been that long already?

i] If your man missed the humor in the previous plays, he cannot have missed it in They Are Dying Out, especially in Act One, with its antics of business folk talking the Marxist and Revolutionary lingo of the Sixties, language games of a more specific kind now, some of which calcified into the P.C. of the following decades. This is within the comic tradition of the best that Austrian theater, Raimund, has to offer; Thornton Wilder, you may recall, had fine traffic with that tradition, too.

Though the volume with my 12 translations is listed with the article, J.S. literally has not the faintest. Why did you pay a purblind to write nonsense?

Bob Silvers, Wasn’t there an editor in the house, I believe Elizabeth Hardwick was still alive, Barbara Epstein?

3]”threatening rants, and were scandals when they opened in Germany in the 1960s. Kaspar, the best known of these dramas…” There is not one single “rant” threatening or otherwise in any of these or any other play Handke has written. Some wonderful monologues in Dying Out, which contains one attack aria that Handke re-uses in the section of the “Internationals” of Einbaum/VOYAGE. Handke is best considered as a composer, and there exist a handful of dissertations that demonstrate the musical form of these plays. Handke becomes more and more graceful a matter no one in this utterly klunky country appears to have noticed. As matter of fact, there exists a Handke industry, which even by the time J.S. shat his shit in your pages, numbered close to a hundred books, and some thousand of articles, few if any of as low a quality as J.S.’s.  

4]“A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is Handke's masterpiece, a short, concentrated, mysteriously exhaustive portrait of his mother, from whom history and circumstance have removed most traces of an identity; as a character, she is weirdly, poignantly, blank…”

Maybe J.S. ought to have his eye checked or the spectrum in his vocabulary that responds to descriptions. Otherwise, he is not all that dreadful for once. However, Maria Sivec comes through to me as anything but a blank, as very clearly delineated, but am unfamiliar with such unhappy Austrian or German lives, although not with the waste of love and effort that women in all classes suffered, except for  those that became professionals, or if they were Junker wives knew how to run an estate and ride a horse if their husband was off to war and got himself killed, as so many did. J.S. needs to take the adjective cure. Aside the impression I have of Maria Sivec as a young and adventurous woman who fell in love too easily as which young woman and man does not, and her trying to make a life for herself, also in Berlin, the mistake she makes in her choice of a surrogate father for the utterly beloved illegitimate Peter baby, the truly dreadful image that sticks is of the preparations she made, so as not to leave a mess: by putting on diapers. Handke recently was interviewed by his friend, the fine writer Weinzierl, who now edits the Welt Feuilleton. There Handke states that he feels his mother decided to kill herself chiefly at the thought of the return of her dreadful husband, the detested Bruno Handke. Peter was actually seeing a lot of her, I thought that he had been berating himself for having neglected her, as it looks if you read the book, and he describes how distant he had become, and it occurs to me to wonder: had no one heard of divorce, or at least separation in Griffen in 1971?

5] Born into a seemingly feudal world of peasants and landowners (Handke depicts his mother's father as a kind of freed serf)…” Has J.S. had read Sorrow and Repetition carefully he would have discovered that Old Man Sivec was anything but a Serf, a proud small farmer carpenter, who kept working his way back out from one financial crisis of that time in Austria after the other, but became the father figure for the fatherless Handke with whom Handke then identified himself, and who voted for the first Yugoslav federation back in 1921, which would lead your sleuth on the right trek to appreciate why a federated Yugoslavia, a successor to the K.u.K. federation, was important also to his grandson; why the Serbs, initially under Milosevic, the defenders of the Federation, then upon its dissolution became Handke’s particular love, the kind of conflation that occurred there… perhaps they really got more of a shaft than  the other tribes.