PETER
WEISS
225
what stronger and more vital impression. But these are childhood
experiences that spook around in there. Tales I was told and ex–
periences I had as a child of artisans coming to the house and doing
something or other which I didn't comprehend clearly. I don't believe
I wanted to say something different from what is written there, and
I believe for me this
is
the realistic story of a man who leads an
existence at the edge of society, among people who are also cut off from
the usual life. A number of things in
Kutscher
are perhaps some–
what exaggerated, are viewed somewhat feverishly, for instance the
doctor 'who's all bandaged up, but in general this did not have a
symbolic meaning for me.
ROLOFF:
I wonder whether one couldn't easily interpret the very end
of the piece symbolically, where the love scene between the coach–
man and the kitchen-maid is seen from the second-story window as
two
shadows intermingling on the ground outside the kitchen win–
dow, at double remove, so
to
speak?
WEISS:
Well, I hadn't meant to impute any other meaning to this event
than what I said just now. The business with the shadow can be looked
upon as a visual game. I can imagine that one might be able to
see something of the sort through a window. There's no need to
as–
cribe any meaning to it, the piece was just a linguistic exercise.
ROLOFF:
In other words: nothing but a linguistic exercise . . .
WEISS:
No: Of course, one can't say that either.
ROLOFF:
But it's not that you could have exercised yourself on a
dif–
ferent subject matter with equal felicity?
WEISS:
No. I certainly had a theme, a milieu and a subject matter that
I wanted to express there, even
if
it wasn't meant symbolically.
ROLOFF:
Just Nolte also says that you took the "epic law literally" in
Der Schatten des Korpers des Kutschers
and thus captured each
moment within a sequence of events. Nolte goes on to say that by
dissecting this sequence into seconds but by not granting each second
more words than it can
bear,
you managed to get your sentences
moving, and to prove this he cites the following sentence from
Kutj,cher:
"Then the hired man appeared, running from the direction
of the shed, from the darkness into the light shining through the
window, leaped up the steps to the kitchen door, across the thresh–
hold, pulled the kitchen door shut behind him, ran through the
kitchen, the passageway, up the stairs, along the hallway and into
the room, shutting the door behind him." It occurred to me that you
might have had something quite different in mind, namely that the
