Comments on: “anxiety or people?”: more notes on handke’s the weight of the world

By: michael roloff

michael roloff — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 23:25:01 +0000

i left the links to a bunch of handke sites a while back and want to urge this fine site to think of using a photo of handke where he looks a bit less sour, here is a photo album i have created, and you are free to take your pick, right now he is of an age where the great exhibitionist is starting to look like his mother:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#

Now let me make a long comment about WEIGHT OF THE WORLD, which I regard as “process notes” taken spontaneously during a very critical, or more than unusually critical period, during which I also saw quite a bit of Handke. [saw him first in 1966, started translating him in 68, last saw him in 1980]

the writer of these notes, or of the contemporaneous poems in NONSENSE AND HAPPINESS is not someone it is pleasant to be with. he let’s his daughter pee into her pants when she tells him she has to go potty. handke was panic stricken after his wife left him and often violent. here he ends up hospitalized for tachychardia. he makes these phenomenological observations but hasn’t a clue. a genuis bereft, later he will find out that he is autistic: one reasons he cusses so much and can’t really be with people in the same room, less so now than then even. in the garden, going mushrooming yes, otherwise the world closes in. when he writes so angelically he is evidently another person, yet one more reason to write an write and fortunately not just type.

http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/

the new HUB to all Handke-blogs and handke.scriptmania sites.

By: scott

scott — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:50:08 +0000

The short pieces in “Once Again for Thucydides” are some of my favorites, situated somewhere between the longer works and the gems you’re reading in “The Weight of the World.” When I translated “A Journey to the Rivers” for Viking, I kept coming on passages that must have come from Peter’s notebooks, like this one: “Not a few reports have made fun, more-or-less mildly, of the indeed ridiculous things with which the Serbian people, if they don’t belong to the local mafia, try to make a profit, from badly bent nails to painfully thin plastic sacks and, let’s say, empty match boxes. But there was also, it now turned out, much to buy that was beautiful, pleasing, and — why not? — charming. It is difficult for someone who doesn’t smoke to tell whether, for example, the heaps of thin-cut tobacco, airy and grassy, changing from market table to market table, taste as good in hand-rolled cigarettes as they look. I do know the taste of the Yugoslavian breads, uniform or monotonous only at first glance, of the massive forest-dark honey pots, of the soup chickens as big as turkeys, of the strangely yellow nests or crowns of noodles, of the often predator-mouthed, often storybook-fat river fish. But what I remember most vividly of such market life, noticeably affected by a time of shortage, and this applied not only to delicacies but equally to all the perhaps really almost useless stuff (who knows?), was a liveliness, something happy, light, vivacious, as it were, about the process (that elsewhere has too often become pompous and grave, also mistrustful, half scornful) of buying and selling — a general, graceful finger-dance back and forth over the market grounds, a dance of alternating hands. From the messiness, mold, and forced nature of mere business deals there arose there, in miniature, but in myriad variety, something like an original and, yes, traditional pleasure in commerce which we accomplices then enjoyed as well.”

And finally, I like the sparseness of your blog.

By: rm

rm — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:52:29 +0000

Happen to be reading Short Letter, Long Farewell and at the same time Beckett’s on Proust again. Handke seems to be renaming, or even inverting, the categories of memory and maybe the value of epiphany, and maybe in this early book looking forward to the kind of memory he develops in The Weight of the World:
“I think I’m developing something that looks like an active memory,” I said. “Up until now I had only a passive memory. But in this active remembering I don’t try to repeat complete experiences; all I want is to prevent the first little hopes I felt in connection with those experiences from relapsing into fantasies. As a child, for instance, I used to bury things, hoping that when I dug them up they’d have turned into treasure. I don’t regard this as a childish game any more, I’m no longer ashamed of it as I used to be; today I remember such things on purpose in order to assure myself that if I was unable to change the things around me or see them in a different light, my nature was not to blame, but only momentary dullness or bad humor. I see this even more clearly when I remember how often I pretended to be a magician. What I wanted was not so much to make something out of nothing or change one thing into another as to enchant myself. I twisted a ring or pulled a blanket away and I was still there, but what was more important for memory was the brief moment when I really thought I wasn’t there any more. Today I interpret that feeling not as a desire to vanish from the face of the earth, but as joyful anticipation of a future when I would cease to be the person I was the moment.”

It’s a revaluing of the Proustian values, as if Marcel had tried to stop before the fantasy of completion took over, and as if the willed memory (active) was more important than the involuntary of suffering, all inflected by the narrator being as he says elsewhere a poor kid from the country, where the same thing happened day after day. And the arc of the book leads him to be able to see more and more outside himself, in those bits and pieces of Weight–the sturm and drang narrative fades away and leads to a new kind of storytelling, that stopping in the “brief moment when I really wasn’t there anymore” but something was.

Anyway, happy to see you thinking and writing about Handke.

By: adswithoutproducts

adswithoutproducts — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:17:37 +0000

Reminds me a lot of Joyce’s epiphanies, and the role that they play in the development of especially his early work. Portrait is just the epiphanies strung together (and ironically undercut – that’s, magnificently, the role that narrative serves in Portrait).

In general, though, I’m very, very interested in minimal forms of fiction. The aphoristic narrative, that sort of thing… And interested in it both in a scholarly and extra-scholarly way….

Thanks for your comment…..

By: rm

rm — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:54:38 +0000

If you read a The Left-Handed Woman, for instance, you’ll find bits and pieces of this in there, and elsewhere Handke’s comment that for awhile he made the fiction by rearranging these kind of journal entries and giving them a narrative frame–the lack of distance between the two becomes more apparent, and also the centering or dec-centering of the writer, who becomes a narrator or the character of these journals. In the later books, he seems to have opted to keep muddying the waters, maybe as if you gave yourself full freedom to swing from fiction to non-fiction in these entries.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:56:03 +0000

If it's better than (the also reissued by NYRB) Slow Homecoming, then that's high praise indeed.

By: jeroenn

jeroenn — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:27:51 +0000

Thanks. I live in Berlin, so feel sort of obliged to go for the German

By: MICHAEL ROLOFF

MICHAEL ROLOFF — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:39:55 +0000

here a collection of handke sites for you:

LINK OF LYNXES TO MOST HANDKE MATERIAL
AND BLOGS ON THE WEB:

http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

http://www.handke-nobel.scriptmania.com/

HANDKE LINKS + BLOGS SCRIPTMANIA PROJECT MAIN SITE:

http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/index.html
-
and sub-sites
e.g.

http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/index.html

http://www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com/index.html

http://www.handkedrama3.scriptmania.com/index.html

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/

http://www.handkeromance.scriptmania.com/index.html

http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/index.html

http://www.handkescholar.scriptmania.com/index.htlm

http://www.handkebild.scriptmania.com/index.htlm

http://handke-photo.scriptmania.com/index.htlm

http://www.handke-nobel.scriptmania.com/index.html

http://www.handkeprose.scriptmania.com/

http://www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com/index.html

http://www.handkefilm.scriptmania.com/index.html

http://handke-watch.blogspot.com/
[moravian nights discussion, etc]

the newest:
http://handke-photo.scriptmania.com/
bpth have the psychoanalytic monograph
http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/index.html
[the drama lecture]
http://www.van.at/see/mike/index.htm
[dem handke auf die schliche/besuch auf dem Moenchsberg, a book of mine about Handke]

http://begleitschreiben.twoday.net/topics/Peter+Handke/

http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/
the American Scholar caused controversy about Handke, reviews, detailed of Coury/ Pilipp’s THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE, the psycho-biological monograph/ a note on Velica Hoca/ open letter to Robert Silvers + NYRB re: JS Marcus..

With three photo albums, to wit:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE2ONLINE#

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/POSTED?authkey=YeKkFSE3-Js#

http://www.handke-trivia.blogspot.com
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com
[some handke material, too, the Milosevic controversy summarized]

MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS:
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
“MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS! +
THE FIREPLUG OF FILIALITY REINSURE YOUR BUNGHOLE!” {J. Joyce}
“Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde” [von Alvensleben]

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:13:09 +0000

There are seven first US editions on Abebooks, a wide variance in prices with 1 in fine condition at a reasonable price.

By: adswithoutproducts

adswithoutproducts — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:28:44 +0000

If I were a semi-famous novelist, I’d be hitting up the NYRB to reissue it in their series. They’ve done other Handke, but this, it seems to me, is better than what they’ve put out. You know the prices have jumped on Amazon since I wrote this post. There are only twelve or so copies available, and therefore…