Earlier this year I read a strange but wonderful novella by the Austrian Nobel Laureate Peter Handke, Afternoon of a Writer. This work describes a few hours in the life of a writer, focusing on how the world comes to him as someone trying to perceive it creatively. We can see not just the beauty the writer finds within things, but also those moments when his perception begins to take an impression and work out how to integrate it into something more, adding meanings beyond what is directly apparent. It’s the most brilliant representation of how creativity might work (for some) that I have yet read.
Reading Handke is never exactly fun for me, but always rewarding. Turning to his journal of 1975-77, Das Gewicht der Welt (The Weight of the World), what I was interested in was the relationship between this text as a journal of impressions and the more directed, intentional work of Afternoon of a Writer. While Handke began Das Gewicht der Welt planning to integrate it into some kind of prose or dramatic work, he soon decided to broaden the scope of his notes to make it simply the “spontaneous noting-down of purpose-free perceptions”.
What we end up with, then, is simply impressions, recorded over two years in the life of a man. Things noticed and felt, raw materials following pre-processing rather than the refined product of The Afternoon of a Writer. The book declares in its dedication that it is for those “whom it concerns”. This is fair – it’s probably not for many. The majority of Handke’s observations are simply not particularly exciting. Inevitably so – one of its most memorable lines is “Never search for comparisons – one experiences them”. We readers, seeing them written rather than felt, suffer for the distance.
Handke wrote the things he wrote with a sense that they had some kind of value – he often notes his excitement to be finished with a conversation so he can write down some details, or his instinctual reaching for his notebook in the street. But unlike with an aphorism, this value may be only for him at this raw stage, and noticing the light is not the same thing as a practical insight on human behaviour which an aphorism often strives for.
As readers, we can attempt to be detectives, trying to see why he thought this particular thought was worth remembering. But this is far less rewarding than what we can get from Afternoon of a Writer, where we get not just an image but also its transformation into something luminous with meaning. Reading the journal is like trying to work on a cold case with no guarantee of success; reading the novella is more like reconstructing an event from a murderer’s confession and a bunch of scattered clues.
All those things we can get from Das Gewicht der Welt we can get as well, if not better, from Handke’s other prose. His perceptiveness regarding things like smells and sounds, his willingness to look at an action and relentlessly break it down into its components. If we can get those things elsewhere, the core value of the book might simply be the knowledge that Handke’s perceptiveness is the result of real work and real observations. A skill, trained and practiced. Not inspiration alone by any stretch.
Still, we must try to enjoy what we have too. A man on the street – “A man who sits sunken, tries repeatedly to set himself upright, to show his good posture, but each time sinks back into the same pose – finally, he is satisfied with it”. Another man reading a water bottle, “constantly slowly rotating it.” All of these are telling details but they tell us nothing except that Handke has noticed them – removed from a fictional setting, what do they do for us? There is no meaning behind the meaning, no thematic framework.
The value is simply the observing, not the things observed. But that makes the work hard to read even if enhancing our own watchfulness is our goal. We read a phrase like “sulphur-yellow late-afternoon light in the bedroom, and the feeling that one has already lain there a while a corpse,” and can do nothing with it except appreciate its aptness and try to see what the light looks like in our own rooms. Handke’s is not our perception to use, nor does what he see cohere as part of a whole in the context of this work or any other. For all those texts he wrote concurrently, such as The Left-Handed Woman, he kept separate notebooks. An overwhelming sense of a deliberate meaningless does not make for pleasurable reading.
I have written before of my intention to start keeping a writing journal of my own, and one of the successes of Das Gewicht der Welt is that it did give me a push to get started. A push and, to a certain extent, a model. The way Handke writes down things and says “a story could begin with this”, or how he gives hints about how he has come to his perceptions – “I decided not to buy a newspaper for the metro – that way I could experience more” – all of this was not wasted on me. Without such a desire to become an observer, however, it’s hard to see the book as anything but a slog.
I felt at times I could look behind observations and see the author, sat on a park bench too far away to hear a conversation but fixated upon the gestures of the conversant ones. Handke, as one of the most perceptive of writers, is absolutely a good person to learn observation from. The ruthless breaking-down of emotions (tiredness as an assault of the deja-vu was a favourite here), the breaking-down of actions, the observation of smell and sound and taste. In that sense, I have gained plenty from the work, even as I cannot easily commend it to others’ attention.
“The river water supremely textured, as if it were already frozen in place.”
“A Japanese family crossing the street. Husband, wife, and two daughters. All three women are exactly the same height, reaching only the man’s shoulders.”
“The sound of a hosepipe in the meadows like someone repeatedly ripping a piece of fabric”
We have shifted from Handke to me now, a few of my notes from a recent sojourn in the Alps. I do not want to suggest I have reached Handke’s level in my finished fiction, but as far as observations go, I don’t think these three random extracts from my little notebook are too far from his own in quality. That is probably another reason why I find it hard to recommend Das Gewicht der Welt. Noticing, ultimately, is probably not the hard part of writing. Flaubert told Maupassant to stare at a tree long enough to understand what separates it from all other trees, but how far does this actually matter?
Not so much, I think. (And indeed, when I read Maupassant recently I was not particularly impressed). Absolutely everything on the street is novel, never-quite-before-seen. Every person is unique. But fiction is not really about uniqueness itself, so much as competent coherence when dealing with something particular. Can we find a way of saying something new, whether that’s a new thematic network, or a new configuration of events designed to develop some reader’s emotional response? Can we say something new in a new way, or a more real way?
Paying absolute attention to what happens on the street is only really a path to a kind of meaningless realism, caked suffocatingly in details. I picked up Das Gewicht der Welt because I thought the “weight” of the title would be emotional, but I now think it really is just the weight of all Handke’s impressions upon him. The real difficulty with fiction, however, comes instead from caring enough about a thing or way of telling to use all those details effectively while discarding the rest. For Handke, that care is about perception itself. For another writer it might be something different, like God or love or money.
Reading another writer’s notebook like Das Gewicht der Welt is occasionally fascinating, and helpful as a guide to begin your own, but I’ve come to see it’s not really as much help as perhaps I had hoped. As with mining, where the primary value addition is never getting rocks out of the earth’s crust, but rather the process of milling, refining, and polishing, that turns raw materials into usable products, so too here the impressions are not nothing, but not where the real magic is either. For that magic, and for a far deeper sense of what a writer like Handke does, The Afternoon of a Writer is a much better thing to read.