summer 2005

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE HANDKE LECTURES A + B + C -1-a DRAMA LECTURE POSTED ON THE DRAMA PAGE OF

http://handkelectures.freeservers.com/

Through the Barren Landscape Of Nothingness
By Hubert Spiegel


FRANKFURT. The Austrian writer Peter Handke has become a travel agent=s nightmare. In his novels, every journey is a pilgrimage, every pilgrimage is an adventure trip and every adventure trip becomes an educational holiday. All Handke=s voyages of discovery and awakening lead to the end of our world and into the heart of another, better world -- a world of Handke=s own -- in which people do not so much travel as wander around with purposeful aimlessness, following wind-blown birch leaves and their inner voices.


In this world, one cannot get lost -- every wrong turning is a short cut. The more lost one gets, the closer one comes to one=s destination. And like all amusement parks, Handke=s world is built to a simple plan, but one that is deceptively simple, which creates the impression of bewildering, gigantic size. It takes considerable effort to set up something this size, and so the construction, titled Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos (The Loss of Images, or Through the Sierra de Gredos), takes up 759 pages, almost 500 of which are devoted to marking time.

The book=s nearly 800 pages invite the reader to wander slowly through them rather than rush. Within this world, a unique calendar applies: Hours, days and seconds are generally =intrusive, unnecessarily disillusioning units= -- intrusive because the world, sick with its own disillusionment, hungers for magic. What Handke paints here is recognizably our own present, the developments of which he condenses and extends into the future: Globalization has resulted in the demise of nation-states, a kind of world government is in power and regional loyalty has taken the place of nationalism.

Unnoticed by most of its members, this secular society is threatened by a disaster: the =loss of images.= For Handke, this means the absence of =sparks of images and images of sparks,= entering people=s awareness all on their own, as inspirations rather than memories: =Admittedly, every image belonged to each person=s individual world. But as an image, every image was universal. It transcended him, her, it. The people belonged together by virtue of the open and opening image. And the images, unlike any religion or earthly doctrine of salvation, were free of compulsion.=

These images, which refuse to be steered or captured, are the basis for the =belief in images= and the community of those blessed with the capacity to see the images. And like every other faith, this one, too, has a prophetess. She is a financial expert, living alone: the =banker lady,= an internationally acclaimed =world champion of finance,= the mother of a daughter who has disappeared, the mistress of an absent lover, an adventurer and globetrotter and, finally, the person who commissions the book that an =author,= the narrator, writes to her specifications. She is Handke=s beautiful chosen, a white magician with a mission, at once strong and weak just like the forces of good.

Handke=s style is a combination of deliberately pathetic expressions and cliches, of conversational tone and bureaucratic jargon, of phrases that succeed with effortless confidence and sentences that search, grope and almost stammer. In the course of the novel, the frequent formulas of repetition and confirmation are joined by signs of ambiguity and indefiniteness. Again and again, the prose flow is interrupted by confirmations, explanations and questions. All results in an exceedingly nervous, thoughtful narrative style, precise and vague, self-assured and searching, artistic, respect-mongering and indescribably nerve-racking.

Readers not receptive to linguistic gems and goodies are doomed to suffer. Handke spares them nothing -- this most hot-tempered of peaceable men has set his sights high in his latest book. For a long time, it has been Handke=s pet project to extend the fulfilled, happy moment. But now he postulates more: =The greater Now= should rule and =be the determining factor.= Behind these cryptic terms, the present lies concealed, =but with the addition of other times; it is the present as it always has been.= To the heroine, this transcendent =all-Now= appears as a park and garden, and finally as an enclosure: =the enclosure of the larger time.= In this park, people and animals could live together in natural innocence, and everyone would be so good to everyone else -- the present as a golden age. Handke=s retrospective utopia is about loss, however, and the purpose of the journey that this novel describes is not to avert loss, but to make it felt.

The journey reaches its temporary destination in Hondareda, the basin of a largely dry lake in the Spanish Sierra de Gredos mountains west of Madrid. Here the =converters= live: the last remaining people to resist the loss of images. A refuge in the mountains, doomed to destruction because the profane present refuses to be shut out. The sojourn in Hondareda is the last in a series of stations of an adventure that begins in a German harbor town, where the =banker lady= and pilgrim lives and commissions the =author= to write down her story.

This narrative frame as well as the story=s setting -- the barren steppe of the Spanish sierra -- and many other details are reminiscent of another Handke novel, =On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House= (In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus, 1997). There, too, Handke uses the duality of two narrators because it allows him to simulate the coexistence of the spoken and the written word.

In the earlier novel, the pharmacist von Taxham thought that the roots of all literature lay in the toneless monologue of the narrator. In the new book, the =author= believes that orality is =the foundation= and the =cross-check.= Four years ago, Handke was concerned with orality as the source of narrative. The new novel takes one more step backward into preliterate, almost prelinguistic territory. The loss of images of which the title speaks is a warning of what Handke sees as the greatest conceivable threat: =The loss of images is the most painful loss of all,= and: =It amounts to the loss of the world.=

For Handke, the cause for this loss lies in =the exploitation of the roots and layers of images= of which the image-obsessed 20th century was guilty. The =natural treasures,= as the author and the adventuress agree at the end, have been used up, and people are now thrashing around as addenda to the =manufactured, mass-produced, artificial images, which replace and simulate the realities that were lost along with the real images.= On this banal note, at the level of day-to-day media criticism, Handke=s new novel ends.

The book, however, is not quite finished yet. The nocturnal union= of two lovers is yet to come, the embrace of the author and the prophetess and the promise of salvation. The images have been lost, but the search for them still remains: =There was a search in which the object already seemed to have been found, far more real and effective, as though it really had been found. And this search was the search for the benefit of someone else, and of others.= So one searcher redeems another? This is naught but the chain reaction of kitsch.

Peter Handke, Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos (The Loss of Images, or Through the Sierra de Gredos). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002. 759 pp., Hardcover. euro 29.90 (.40).Jan. 21, 2002

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