BOOKS
661
this -let us ca1l it a novella - is anything but self-forgetful: the writer's mind
is relentlessly focussed on that illegible and fugitive entity, itself. His morn–
ing's work done, the writer goes downstairs, leaves his empty house, takes a
walk through the town - seeking the solace of movement, change, company?
Nothing quite so simple; Handke deftly thwarts any symmetrical expecta–
tions. For example, leaving the house:
On his way to the garden gate, the writer suddenly turned around.
He rushed into the house and up to his study and substituted one word
for another.
Nor is his progress easy once he does get outside. In this world, simple ways
of getting from one place to another are not the point:
The writer stopped at the crossroads longer than usual. Per–
haps because his profession did not impose a hard-and-fast schedule,
he seemed to need an idea to carry him through the most trifling daily
movements; the idea that came to him was to combine the periphery
with the center by crossing the inner city on his way to the outskirts.
If the writer is, in spite of himself, a center of consciousness - both his
own and perhaps other people's as well- he is also marginal. This paradox,
as uncomfortable as writer's cramp, is what Handke elegantly explores in a
book which is no less luminous for being hard to classify.
As
the writer makes
his way through town, and through the mazes of his mind, images of edges
take on the force of a leitmotif, as do scenes of experience's i1legibility:
anonymous letters, unreadable postcard, muttering madman, amnesiac
woman. Handke's precise, elegantly translated prose cries out for quotation
on page after page, but I'll restrict myself to one more passage - a
cri de
coeur
that twists the kaleidoscope of genre from novella
to
the opening of the
first Duino elegy:
... now he was able to question himself systematically - as he could not
in his dreams - about his problem, the problem of writing, describing,
storytelling. What was his business, the business of a writer? Was
there any such business in this century? Was there anyone, for ex–
ample, whose deeds and sufferings cried out to be recorded, cata–
logued, and publicized in history books but also to be handed down in
the form of an epic or perhaps only ofa little song? To what god was it
still possible to intone a hymn of praise? (And who could still summon
up the strength to lament the absence of a god?)
