The Weight of the World, Peter Handke’s first journal, was published in 1977. The then 35-year-old author saw the journal as a suitable form of reacting as directly as possible with language to what was perceived and experienced. No life without writing! Since then, Handke’s Notat books have been published at irregular intervals. With his latest publication, which was published by the small, fine Salzburg publishing house Jung und Jung, he is continuing this tradition.
Anyone who expects intimate diary confessions from Peter Handke’s journals will be disappointed. His notes do contain personal elements, but not as reproduction, retelling or confession, but as poetic transformation and condensation. For example, like this: “‘Shame on you!’ said the beginning snowfall to the enraged man. And he was ashamed.” There is no lack of critical self-examination, sometimes with irony: “Ever since I’ve known myself, I’ve been afraid of animals.” Conversely, he formulates “ideals” worth striving for, such as “cheerfully missing out”.
Handke sees one of the main impulses for “writing down” in “capturing, passing on, handing down what is being grasped”. As a leitmotif, he thematises the “breaking of the day in the day”, brief, apparently inconspicuous brightening of everyday life, for example the surprising “awakening of the old desire to learn”, which makes him reach for the dictionary of ancient Greek. Again and again he makes us witnesses to his search for the right word, the right image. There are no synonyms for him, each language sign contains an individual nuance of meaning. “Destiny” is not the same as “fatalism”.
In the years 2016-2021, Peter Handke wrote his novel “Die Obstdiebin” and the stage text “Zdenek Adamec”. His notes from this period contain poetological notes on these works. For Handke, writing as a way of life is inextricably linked to reading.
The reader Peter Handke records striking quotes from works by Stendhal, Goethe, Tolstoy, from the Gospels, not always in agreement, but also with critical distancing. While he was reading Rilke, he wanted to interrupt his colleague: “Stop it! – now!”
One searches Handke’s Journal for comments on current affairs with almost no results. He explicitly refuses “topicality” and sometimes experiences “apolitical” or “unpoliticizable” people as the more entertaining contemporaries. He even devotes only a few sentences to the corona pandemic. You might chalk that up to him as an escape from reality, but maybe it’s for the best. In the past, when Handke leaned too far and loudly out of the political window, things rarely ended well.
Peter Handke: “Inner dialogues on the edges. Notes 2016-2021”, young and young, 372 pages, 26 euros
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Source: Nachrichten
