Tag: Peter Handke

The Writer’s Vision – Peter Handke’s Afternoon of a Writer

Peter Handke’s Afternoon of a Writer (Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers) is my fourth work by the controversial Austrian Nobel laureate and the second which I have succeeded in squeezing a blog post out of, after his Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. I certainly don’t return to Handke because I enjoy reading him. Rather, I keep giving in to the aura of importance created by his prizes and his praises, in particular the curious assertion by native speakers, one I am unable to verify although I am reading in the original German, that Handke was one of a few writers who rescued the German language from the degradation that Nazism forced upon it. What I can say, and what was obvious at once with The Goalie’s Anxiety, is that Handke created what felt like a new way of writing about subjective experience, about consciousness, that was neither free indirect discourse nor the full interiority of the first person, stream-of-consciousness.

In The Goalie’s Anxiety Handke used this approach to question and probe the state of mind of a chance murderer as he increasingly lost touch with the world. In Afternoon of a Writer, by contrast, Handke represents the state of mind of a writer, who can stand in for perhaps any artist, as they go about their day. The morning’s work of creating is over, and now is time for the living. But living, for an artist, (all of this post must be silently caveated by saying this applies to some, not all creatives), is not the same as it is for the rest of us. For an artist, their subjectivity is changed, their living is charged and crackling with the absorption of material and impressions. Handke, particularly through his language, shows the full intensity of this subjectivity in his short novel as his writer goes for a walk.

It is on this language that I want to focus today, because language is the centre of this work, and observing its effects is the main source of excitement as we read. But there is also a space for judgement too. As we observe the writer and his consciousness it is impossible to avoid judging him, just as he judges his own self and relationship with the world. But to get to that judgement one must first make it through the language and what it does.

Plot

A writer finishes his writing for the day and goes for a walk. (Welcome to the world of Peter Handke.)

Clarity and Details

Perhaps it is best to begin with a paragraph, from when the writer enters his garden:

Despite the winter it still flowered, here and there, in his surroundings. It was precisely from their littleness and isolation that the campions, the daisies, the buttercups and the dead-nettles brought life to the carefully dug landscape. The buttercups, shining like enamel, for a moment even deceived him into believing he saw some sunshine. In the crown of an apple tree, eaten up by birds, there still hung a few fruits, their flesh likely frozen to glass. The last few leaves, heavy with hoar frost, fell, one after the other, almost vertically, with a crackle. The catkins were colourless, as if lamed by the cold. On the picket fence and next to the house door there was even a bluebell, frost blue.

Trotz des Winters blühte es noch hier und da in dem Umkreis. Gerade in ihrer Kleinheit und Vereinzelung belebten die Lichtnelken, die Gänseblümchen, die Hahnenfüße und die Taubnessellippen das starr gerippte Gelände. Die emailleglänzenden Hahnenfußkelche täuschten für Augenblicke sogar einen Sonneschein vor. In der Krone des einen Apfelbaums, von Vögeln angefressen, hingen noch einige Früchte, das Fleisch wohl glasig gefroren. Die letzten Blätter, beschwert vom Reif, stürzten eins dem andern zu Boden, fast senkrecht, mit einem Krachen. Die Haselkätzchen waren farblos, wie gekrümmt von der Kälte. Am Palisadenzaun und neben der Haustür stand je eine Glockenblume, frostblau.

Once, when I was at school, an English teacher I much admired made us do a test. We had to identify, from pictures, about twenty different common plants in our surroundings – I mean things like oaks, elms, birches. I think the high score was about seven. Today I would be no better, but I have always found it funny that I can name more plants or birds or fish in German or Russian than I could ever identify with my own eyes. The knowledge of the natural world that is needed to give specificity to our impressions is increasingly absent among us, but not with Handke’s writer, who pins down each of the flowers’ names. There’s also a richness to them that the English cannot quite convey, though my own attempt could be improved. Daisies are literally “little geese flowers”, buttercups are “hen feet”, nettles echo the word “Taube”, for a dove, while catkins at least manage to carry over the association to English. In short, the flowers are not static, but by Handke’s choice, perhaps, are each associated with living animals, giving them still further liveliness. We can almost see the writer (and his author) noticing this and smiling to himself.

The leaves falling – how clear this is, how precise, how mechanically, the writer notices them! First – that there are not many leaves left, then, the hoarfrost, then the order of falling, then the way they fall, and finally the sound. In short, he captures the whole thing, a series of impressions forming a whole. Then we end with a single word in German, “frostblau”. It sounds like a breath on a wintry afternoon with its open vowel ending. Its purpose again is to show the artistic vision focusing in. A bluebell’s colour is obvious, known, in its name. But the writer must be clearer than that, must note to himself exactly what the right word is – and that is precisely why that word is there, the follow up that caps the impression. It confirms that he knows how to look.

We can notice another characteristic element of Handke’s style – the relative absence of images that are not the things present. In a story, a writer has to decide whether to see what is there, or what is not. And here Handke has the writer seeing what is before him, yet with just a hint of looking beyond. The glassy apples are an example – it’s like the beginning of an image, the first thought before its elaboration. The German is also softer than my rendering. “Frozen glassily” is softer than “frozen to glass” or even “like glass” because it keeps the wordcount low and lets us pass by, barely registering it. Instead, we notice the image, the apple itself. It’s about prioritisation, framing.

This is a section of Afternoon of a Writer from before the man begins his walk. It hangs on the page, surrounded by white space. It is a noticing, a thing of beauty to me, a word person. It is not merely the background to some other impression or emotion, or that concealed boast of botanical erudition that I remember feeling while reading someone like A.S. Byatt – here, this noticing is all there is. What is normally the background has become the foreground, even if one day, perhaps in the writer’s work, it will need to move back into the background once again. We are simply made to see.

Imagine

The novel is so rich with details, with noticings, that it is almost a shame to move on. Besides noticing, besides detail after detail, about light, about eyes, about landscape, we also see another aspect of the artistic vision, when the man imagines, rather than merely seeing. The autobahn suddenly causes him to feel, for a moment, “a vibration in his arms, as if he were sitting with the driver in the cabin” of a truck. He then sees a stationary train, and seems, instantaneously, to create characters from afar. He imagines how “a child’s hand searched for the hand of an adult.” He sees the waiter, the dishwasher, each with their actions and their distinct being. And all of this from just a “Fernbild[]” – a distant image. 

We learn very little about the writer’s work in Afternoon of a Writer, but one of the few things we learn is that it is set in the summer. At another moment, looking at some birds, his mind shifts from the detail into the imagination, and then into the work. We observe this process again, directly, in the text:

“Motionlessly sat the tiny birds up in the branches, just like the crows in the crown of the next tree along, and the even the gulls, otherwise so unruly, sat motionless upon the railings of the bridge. It was as if snow were falling upon them all, even though there were no flakes in sight. And just here, at this living image with the rain of wings, hardly noticeable, the gaps of the beaks as they opened, with the eyes like little dots, there arose before the observer that summer landscape where the story played out which he was writing at that moment.”

The first sentence gives us the real, with the second we begin to see the artistic mind look beyond the real, and with the third we arrive at the destination – the image of the story, entirely different from what he is seeing. In this way we see the process of creation yet again.

To be a successfully writer, Handke might argue here, we play many different roles. Hence the use of that word “Beobachter” (observer) instead of the “Schriftsteller” (writer) of the novel’s title.  At another point he is the “Beschatter”, or shadower. One thing that I have just noticed as I write this is these two examples contain the passive “be” prefix in German. Compared to the activity of writer, they suggest a much more receptive role. This is appropriate. If the novel begins with the man having finished his writing, for the rest of it he is primarily receiving, experiencing. At one point he grows anxious while reading the newspaper because he feels it is stopping him from thinking. Instead, he wants perhaps to be that transparent eyeball which Emerson described in his essay “Nature”. He takes things in and reflects while we watch.

Hence the use of questions in the novel. They are not the fake questions of a stream of consciousness, but the questions we can imagine the artist asking themselves as they reflect: “Wasn’t it curious that it was only during the hours of writing that his living space could lose its boundaries in this way?” It’s a note to self we are privileged to see, but nothing more. It may have a future use, but we will not be present to see it.

Judgement

The one role that the writer does not give himself directly in the text is “mad”, but it is not so far away from his experience for him to be entirely safe from it. For just as the writer experiences the world with the aim of gathering material, of making it “beschreiblich” (describable), we can also see him facing other consequences of that particular tuning. Early on, and in a beautiful (in the original) phrase about his hopes for his writing, he thinks “the shadows of a bird twitching over the wall should, instead of distracting him, accompany the text and make it transparent.” The word “accompany” is the one to focus on. For we soon notice that the writer has no family except a cat, and no real social life to speak of. He believes, indeed, that he cannot truly connect with others anymore. Stopping in a pub, the people he meets are reduced to their artistic use – “turns of phrase, exclamations, gestures and cadences.”

In short, we could say he has made himself stunted, stranded. He can create, we must assume, and he can absorb from the world far more than most of us can. Yet for all that richness, what poverty! To gain every shade of green he has eliminated all red from his world. He refuses to go onto his own balcony except to do the washing because the impression of the view is too overwhelming. When he goes for a walk he feels no “joy” until he has placed his movements within a plan. Handke is not a writer for judgements, but it is probably telling that the novel ends with the word “Schauder” – awe. “He wondered at himself, near to a long-forgotten awe.” Such a word redeems him, even if it does not do so to us. Just as with earlier use of the word “entrücken” (translate), in the biblical sense of going from earth or hell to heaven, we have a sense that we ought not judge him. His life is different, higher, even if it seems strange to us. He, himself, appears happy – he is at work.

Certainly, I can sit here in judgement, but I am jealous really. I mentioned a few posts ago that I wanted to start carrying around a notebook precisely for such noticings – I need to learn to experience the world around me in the way the writer does here. While I may not wish for myself the isolation this writer has, (at least on a full time basis), there’s no denying that this novel portrays a way of life that is far closer to what is necessary for the kind of art I might want to make than the way of life I currently lead. And what is hardest to avoid is the sheer clarity of Handke’s work as it describes that way of life. We spend the novel standing next to the writer as he perceives. We observe his observations. We see exactly what he sees, how he processes his material and reflects upon it, even the questions he asks. In short, and probably far better than any guidebook, Afternoon of a Writer is a guide to precisely that – being a writer, being in the world and finding in it what you need to create.

I would like to be more critical, but I can’t. I don’t enjoy reading Handke. Yet each time I return I learn something I seriously think no other writer would be able to teach me. Some of it can only be done in German, of course. His use of separable verbs (especially the word “fort” for a continuing indicated only at the end of the sentence) to freeze an image for an extended moment of observation, or his long adjectival phrases which maintain the connection between a thing and its surroundings thanks to forgoing commas in a way that is difficult in English, for example. But the rest – the details, the details, all of the wonderful details – we can take away, whoever we are, whatever language we write in. I don’t want to read more, but I know I must. He surely is one of the greats.

Peter Handke – The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which I read in the original German, is not a book that brought me much pleasure. It is probably the best-known work by the Austrian author Peter Handke, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Thankfully, it is quite short. I covered my copy with annotations, but with me, that is not always the sign of a good book. In fact, I was quite convinced the novel was a complete waste of time and energy until somewhere around the halfway mark when I began to perceive some actual sense in it and dutifully upgraded it to merely a book I will be glad both to have read and never to have to read again.

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is a novel about Bloch, a former goalkeeper who loses his job, murders a random woman, and then loses his mind, though possibly not in that order. The murder happens early on and after it, Bloch leaves town and spends time loafing about near the Austrian border. He gets into fights and flirts with various women, and he goes on walks and goes mad while looking at things. This is all that happens. From such nothingness, it is for us as readers to work out why the book has gathered the reputation of a literary masterwork. As much as I want to complain, I will try to turn my complaints into strengths for the book.

The way I found to appreciate this book was to consider it as part of the rather rich tradition of German literary works dealing with madness, such as Büchner’s “Lenz”, Hoffmann’s “Sandman”, and Heym’s “The Madman”. As a theme, madness is a rich one because it naturally turns itself around to raise questions about who is actually mad – Bloch, us, or society. At the same time, the particular form of Bloch’s madness, which so often seems to relate to perception and speech, connects The Goalie’s Anxiety… to the language crisis affecting German letters at the beginning of the 20th century, where Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler were only some of the big names that tried to consider our ability to represent anything at all with words.

Translations are my own.

Language of Experience

In a way, reading in another language gives you a sort of madness akin to the one afflicting Bloch. Much more so even than when we closely read on our own, we notice thingswhen we have to trudge through a foreign tongue. Words and phrases that repeat strike us, and odd formulations strike us too. From the beginning, The Goalie’s Anxiety… strikes us with its numbness. The very first word in German is “dem” – the dative, telling us that something is happening to Bloch, rather than the other way around. That something is his firing.

The passive voice we tend to associate with passivity and numbness, and that is the dominant note of the book. The language is simple, and the sentences are short. Handke’s narrator typically refers to characters with their roles, not their names. Even Bloch’s ex-wife and child are deprived of the emotional significance that a name would give them. Most of the dialogue is reported, rather than given directly so that it too is numb. When Bloch calls a woman, he has to talk for some time “until she knew who he was.”

This numbness is Bloch’s world. Sometimes he stretches out to play an active role, as when he commits murder, but mostly things happen to him, like random fights and his anxiety in the city. He reads a lot of newspapers but there’s no real sense that he takes anything in. It seems compulsive more than anything. But newspapers themselves, like the cinema that plays an important role, are sites where we are passive receivers rather than active agents. A newspaper tells you, in essence, that something was happening in the world, but you weren’t involved. Just as a film shows action you also can only see as a spectator.

This general numbness is what makes the book hard to read. There are paragraphs, but nothing like white space for pauses or chapters. This has, again, a levelling effect. Everything that happens, from murder to looking at a field, is equally important – or, we might better conclude, equally unimportant. It also leads to a certain perception of determinism because there are no breaks to the logic. One thing just follows on from the other, except for the “plötzlich” (“suddenly”) that begins the paragraph with the murder. In other words, the way the story comes to us makes us numb and feel our own powerlessness.

Bloch’s Madness

We never really see into Bloch’s mind, only as far as his perceptions of things. Unlike Arthur Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else”, where mental collapse is seen from within, here madness is seen almost from without – “Everything he saw disturbed him”. We learn, at other times, how things disturbed him. But the language is thoroughly unemotive. “Bloch was” either “excited”, or “not at peace”, or “disturbed” – this is a typical and repeated sentence. He does not have an inner world, at least not one that is revealed. Neither firing nor murder actually results in any feeling that we can see.

Instead, our understanding of Bloch comes from the surface, both from his actions and perceptions. The least interesting thing is that he struggles with any kind of commitment or acknowledgement of others’ existence – he is numb to the idea of it. He has no real friends; his marriage has collapsed; he organises meetings with women and then leaves the bar with another person before the original person arrives; he casually murders another woman after a night together.

More interesting, though is his perception of things. Martin Swales’ comment on Büchner’s “Lenz”, that it is the tale of “a mind already unhinged, in the sense that there is no coherent and sustaining relationship to the world”, is perfectly apt here. In that novella, there is no violence, but there is the same problem – a man walking about trying to make sense of things and failing utterly. (“Lenz”, about a poet who went mad, is more enjoyable to read for Büchner’s beautiful language, which shows that poetic mind at work.)

Bloch’s problems circle around sensory problems and odd fixations, but these specific problems change. At one point, he notices persistence – of urine on a market wall, of shells he was chewing the day before. At another, he becomes obsessed with asking the price of objects. At still another, he wants to find something that has been lost and refuses to believe that someone else has found it when he is told, as if he wants to be some kind of hero.

What links these oddities and all the others? Perhaps the key one to me is the idea of control. In the numbness of Bloch’s world, fixations – like murder – are a way of trying to impart a framework and meaning and personal presence onto things. They are a reaction to individual powerlessness. We read the word “wehr” (“defence”) more than a few times here in the context of Bloch’s attempts to survive life. He is actually trying to find some way of holding on to his grip on things, even if that way looks even more mad than what came before it to us.

Words, words, words.

Which brings us to the language problem. Ultimately, stories like The Goalie’s Anxiety… are made of words. So, madness must come to us in words. Bloch’s final collapse comes to us as a “Wortspielkrankeit”, a “problem of language games” or “punning”. He stops finding any meaning in language. He hears a woman scream and thinks it has no meaning, so he ignores it. He tries to tell a story but finds he needs to explain the meaning of every single word before he can use it, so he is unable to tell the story at all. Things swerve rapidly into an overabundance of meaning, however, when Bloch becomes paranoid and convinced that everything is a code only he can read if only he can see behind the language. Still, words are failing him – giving him too much, or altogether too little.

In Austria, at the beginning of the 20th century, something similar was happening. Language had been exhausted by realism, and poets like Rilke, Trakl, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal sought to recover the meaning of words like “spirit” from simple definitions that killed their significance. There was both a huge sense of hidden meaning, with Freud gaining popularity and showing hidden mental worlds even we could not access, and a striving to find meaning in the desperately desolate world left by god-killing thinkers like Max Weber and Nietzsche. Sometimes the struggle was too much. Hofmannsthal gave up on poetry with the fictional “Letter of Lord Chandos”, which shares much with Bloch’s own problem.

In that work, the fictional Lord struggles with the fact that he has “totally lost the ability to put anything coherent together in word or thought.” He has only a personal language, uncommunicable. “Words… break apart in my mouth like rotting mushrooms”. This is what Bloch has too. He stops being able to communicate, so he just becomes more and more isolated from others while his internal language grows stranger and stranger. He is left adrift in a world he cannot find words for, but nobody cares.  

Whose madness? Film and Society

The “Letter of Lord Chandos” is a letter, written by one man. The Goalie’s Anxiety… puts the same kind of madness into a social setting. How does that change our understanding of that madness? For one, we see that it goes beyond just Bloch. Near the end of the book he talks to a village schoolmaster who reveals that nearly all the children there are unable to create full sentences. If that is the case, then the problem is not just Bloch’s. We know this already, though. Bloch is subject to random violence himself, and on the streets, he greets people who don’t return that greeting. The world itself is numb and cruel. If it is so, then the same solutions – conspiracist thinking, odd fixations, and finally murder – may appear to others too. It’s not just noblemen who get word-sick.

Then there is the cinema, a modern intrusion Hofmannsthal did not have to worry about. Like the newspapers that Bloch is constantly reading, cinema runs through the book – the woman he kills works at one, and Bloch regularly compares things in real life with things he has seen in films. The significance of cinema, it seems to me, is twofold. I have already mentioned how it numbs the world by making it seem like life is elsewhere. For example, Bloch reads about the police hunting him in the paper, but he does not react to it – because it does not feel real, it feels like it is happening somewhere else. But then, films also represent reality without being a reality. They create a space for us to lose our sense that the world we see is the real world, and in that space Bloch wanders, unable to see sense.

Conclusion

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is thus a novel of madness and the breakdown of language, rather than just a boring story about a man who commits a murder and then mooches around. It sits in a tradition of such works in German literature and contributes to it by having a perspective – external and sensory rather than stream-of-consciousness as in Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else” – and a focus – language collapse as social rather than purely individual, as in Büchner’s “Lenz” – which sets it apart from other works. It is a strange little novel.

But reading it brought me no joy, and analysing it, now that I don’t pay professors to read that analysis and say nice things about it, was not very joyous either. If our world is as numb and miserable as Bloch’s, why read about it? As for Bloch himself, the perspective choice means that even if he were charming (Humbert Humbert was dead wrong when he said “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), we would hardly know it. Else is likeable – I feel sad when she goes nuts. Bloch was an empty, violent man from the beginning. His only character development consists of actually losing his mind.

So, interesting, but a tale that’s hard to recommend. “Lenz” is much shorter and more beautiful, “Else” much more emotionally impactful, and “Lord Chandos” more likely to come to mind when you try to live and say things in this world of ours. Handke kicks the ball, but it hits the post.