316
PARTISAN REVIEW
by Peter Handke, presented in one volume as
Essays about Story Telling:
On Tiredness, The Jukebox,
and
The Succesiful Day.
In the original German editions, each piece appeared separately as a
slim, handsome book, each entitled
Versuch
-
a difficult term to capture
in English without losing some of its resonances. Literally meaning
"attempt," the term suggests an experiment that implies a certain
humility in tackling the given subject matter, an uncertainty about the
outcome, a grappling also with the task and how to approach it, all of
it pointing
to
what the author is after, which is first and foremost
tracking the right questions. Two of the highly personal pieces were
written as Handke's dialogues with himself. Here, he continues a kind of
archeological dig for a lost art which he had taken up in his play
The
Art of Asking,
just prior to the
VersHche.
And finally, the publication of
his long awaited one-thousand-page novel
Mein Jaltr in der Niemandsbllcht
(My Year in No Man's Bay)
last fall corroborates the above quotation:
The three
Versuche
constitute a journey towards the questions that
would eventually lead to the novel.
It is not easy at first
to
find one's way into these texts. Like all of
Handke's work, they are investigations into the possibilities and
limitations of language, and in particular the German language with
both its rich literary heritage and its legacy of political abuse. Handke's
sentences unfold with deliberate slowness, as he unearths words, cleans off
the dirt, polishes them, shapes them, and strings them in a syntax that
reflects the movement of his world as he finds or remembers it. "Look
and keep looking with the eyes of the right word," the writer tells
himself in
The Succesiful Day.
Accordingly, the doggedly minute
observations and descriptions of the places chosen to pursue constitute
the real challenge for the writer, for they provide the "real" pictures, a
secure foothold in the "real world" against the dangers of abstraction
inherent in the chosen motifs for his "essays."
Each of the three pieces is written in countries where his native
German language is not spoken.
Tiredness
and
Jukebox
were written in
different parts of Spain,
The Succesiflll Day
in Paris, where he now lives.
Handke is also an obsessive translator, delving into Greek and Latin as
readily as into French, English, and Sloven ian, his mother's native
language. Through such extended soujourns into other languages,
foreign idioms and etymological cues highlight the world presenting
itself to the writer in his own language. Cut off from its habitual
context, it suddenly yields its own surprising treasures. With the
painstaking gentleness of an artist restoring ancient, damaged pictures,
Handke strips German grammar, idiomatic compositions and compound
