acting and perceiving
by Douglas Messerli
Peter Handke In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus, translated from the German by Krishna Winston as On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)
The small village of Taxham—on the outskirts of
Salzburg, Austria—was constructed early-on in the manner of many villages
throughout the world today, with barriers blocking most of its entrances and
exits due to the highways, nearby airport, natural boundaries, and old military
bases. In short, it is a city unknown almost to all except those who live and
work in it.
Peter Handke's
most recent novel, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, centers on
one of Taxham's citizens, the local pharmacist, whose life, like that of the
other villagers, has been carefully constructed to keep others out and himself
locked in. Although he shares his house with his wife, she and he have little
communication and live in spaces (real and imaginary) that each other does not
inhabit. His major activities other than the daily pattern of opening and
closing the town's pharmacy, is a morning swim, his reading of medieval
romances, and his love of nature, the latter of which is particularly focused
on the gathering, tasting, and analyzing of various varieties of mushrooms.
For the
first third of this work, he indeed appears as an unlikely candidate for the
fantastic fable that he, the narrator of the work, and Handke himself are about
to tell. But one evening, while in the woods, his is apparently attacked and
hit severely on the head. The injuries, which at first seem minor, are soon
recognized as serious when, at the local airport restaurant, he is unable to
speak. There, as if in a dream, he picks up two strangers—a former Olympic
sports champion and a poet, both now down on their luck, and travels with them
into a strange world, which, although later named as Spain, represents an
archetypal city "of the night wind," as surreal as the worlds created
by Kafka, Walser, Celine and other continental fabulists.
They've
chosen the city, almost by accident, because the poet recalls that his ex-wife
and a child he has never met lives there. But upon arriving in the strange
Santa Fe, they perceive the city is celebrating a festival, and the poet can
recognize very little. Although they find the house, his wife no longer lives
there. Nonetheless, the pharmacist, now described by the other two simply as
"the driver," there encounters, once again, the former woman friend
of the ski champion in whose house they had spent the previous night and who
had strangely enough entered the pharmacist's room and pummeled him in his bed;
and he also recognizes, among the gypsy musicians, his own son, who had
abruptly left his family years before upon being slapped by his father in the
face upon the boy's release from the authorities for a petty theft. And soon
after, the poet recognizes his own daughter as the queen of the festivities at
the very moment she is arrested and taken off.
In short,
the three together vaguely represent aspects of one being, and events in each
of their lives recall and newly affect one another. In the days following the
first evening of the festival, the town and townspeople gradually take on
stranger and stranger qualities as a plague of near-madness begins to affect
the citizens, one by one of them falling into tirades and attacking, for no
apparent reason, others, often killing them. Upon saving his poet friend from
just a fate, the pharmacist realizes he must leave, and enters the seemingly
endless vastness of the surrounding steppes.
Accordingly,
Handke sends his character across a near-desert in a kind of pilgrimage into
the self, the past, and all that in the bunkered-up village of Taxham the
pharmacist has attempted to escape. The surreal voyage across this seemingly
desolate and empty space—which we gradually come to see is actually filled with
animals, vegetation and other itinerant voyagers—is a true literary
tour-de-force, as Handke's anti-hero both suffers and finds, at times, near
ecstasy in the inexplicable search for something different in his life. The
vague magnet of this voyage is the skier’s friend, the woman described earlier
in the book as "a winner," presumably a term applying to her
appearance and personality, but growing in the pharmacist’s voyage to mean so
much more: a winner in life, something as the young skier was, a champion,
perhaps a prize.
Handke's hero
does ultimately find something of value, his own voice, a reconciliation of
sorts with the son (who is seen with the poet's daughter), and the discovery of
love with the "winner." But the final section of the book is not a
record of fulfillment and rewards, but a statement of the role and purpose of
art. For life has returned to its usual pattern, slightly altered perhaps, but
filled with the tedium of the daily repetition and workaday acts. The
pharmacist, now designated as "the storyteller," has experienced
something amazing, but he knows that he must record it, not only
"tell" the story, but as he says as the narrator, to see it in print,
in "black and white." "I want to have my story in writing. From
speaking it, orally, nothing comes back to me. In written form, that would be
different. And in the end I want to get something out of my story too. Long
live the difference between speech and writing. It's what life's all about. I
want to see my story written. I see it written. And the story itself wants
that."
Handke
brilliantly points up the differences here between the act of living and the
recognition of it, the reception of those acts. They are not the same.
As in this profound, short work, things simply happen in life, one is pulled,
driven to it in a world where the acts themselves often make little sense,
often seem to be without meaning; while art records them, reveals them, allows
one to observe them, giving them substance.
Los Angeles,
2000
Reprinted from Green
Integer Blog (April 2009).
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