Handke untriumphs

Ah, so Peter Handke has not received the Heine Prize after all. Pierre Joris reports with links and includes his latest insistance that the unforgivable opinions he has been reported as expressing have been put into his mouth.

Perhaps appropriately, I've just finished reading In Time of Need, a stimulating conversation between Reiner Kunze and Mireille Gansel about the German poet Peter Huchel. He had endured two German regimes that sought to control writers. As I'd not heard of Huchel before, nor most of the names referred to in the conversation, it was almost like reading fiction; a sci-fi novel about poets (there's an idea for any blocked genre writers out there).

I say "appropriately" because the general technique of the modern world, of course, is not to place the jackboot across the writer's wrist, but simply to ignore what they write. So, it's almost like the old days!

(I say 'almost' because few people seem interested in what Handke has actually written).

Handke triumphs

So Peter Handke has received the Heine-Preis despite the distortions of the herd. Gilles d'Aymery provides an excellent report of the farce. He also translates the words of the great author himself in a conveniently delayed correction to the factual errors spread by the French press:

I have not laid a red rose on the hearse of Slobodan Milosevic. I did not touch the hearse. I did not wave the Serbian flag. And I have never approved "the Srebrenica massacre and other crimes done in the name of ethnic cleansing." I've never considered the Serbs as "the real victims of the war."

We even get a glimpse of what that infamous speech at the funeral consisted.

The world, the so-called world, knows everything on Yugoslavia, Serbia. The world, the so-called world, knows everything on Slobodan Milosevic. The so-called world knows the truth. For that, the so-called world today is absent, and not only today, and not only here. I know that I do not know. I do not know the truth. But I look. I feel. I remember. For that, I am present today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia, close to Slobodan Milosevic.

The speech might be present in full and in German on Michael Roloff's unique Handke site but I can't find it.

I hope this tiresome controversy at least has the virtue of prompting more English-speaking interest in Handke's work, particularly those transcendent novels of not knowing, of looking, of feeling and of remembering Across (which I actually saw in a bookshop recently!!), Repetition and The Afternoon of a Writer. Maybe someone might even translate and publish Der Bildverlust and Don Juan. In the meantime we can make do with other necessary volumes such as Jade's My Autobiography (as if she could write anybody else's).

Acquired naiveté

Robert Newman is a novelist too. But in this brilliant stand-up performance about 'the history of oil' he begins by wondering why professional journalists fail to highlight the continuity of 90 years of western intervention in the Middle East. He calls it 'acquired naiveté'. The kind of thing, I imagine, one needs to sign the Euston Manifesto. That makes me laugh too.

One might keep this in mind when literary journalists repeat the old chestnut that non-fiction is supplanting the novel.

Portals of discovery

During the Open Source discussion (as mentioned below), the presenter Christopher Lydon wished for a Great American Novel like Dostoevsky's Demons, which James Wood referred to as The Possessed (so I presume that's the same book with in a different translation. It's also translated as The Devils). Anyway, this was the work that Thomas Bernhard read as a young man in a sanatorium, dying (or so it seemed) from tuberculosis:

Never in my whole life have I read a more engrossing and elemental work, and at the time I had never read such a long one. It had the effect of a powerful drug, and for a time I was totally absorbed by it. For some time after my return home I refused to read another book, fearing that I might be plunged headlong into the deepest disappointment. For weeks I refused to read anything at all. The monstrous quality of The Demons had made me strong; it had shown me a path that I could follow and told me that I was on the right one, the one that led out. I had felt the impact of a work that was both wild and great, and I emerged from the experience like a hero. Seldom has literature produced such an overwhelming effect on me.

This is from Gathering Evidence, itself an engrossing and elemental work. Almost everything he says about Demons applies also to my experience of reading Gathering Evidence. Curious then that Bernhard did not go on to write an Austrian version of that novel. He merely reinvented the novel in his own likeness.

Taking a sentence for a walk

The Open Source roundtable about The Great American Novel is a good listen. However, I was disappointed and depressed by Ruth Franklin's and Mark Greif's recommendations of young novelists to look out for. James Wood had said he didn't take part in the poll selecting the greatest US novels of the last 25 years because people choose what they think is appropriate rather than any personal reason. The suspiciously-pleonastic phrase 'public novel' was used to define it. Franklin and Greif chose novelists who write exactly those kind of novels. Scope, relevance and ambition were presented as guarantors of worth. Public worth, I suppose. But what about worth it for me?

I longed for a recommendation of a quiet, uncertain narrative that merely took a sentence for a walk; a novel equivalent of Eloge de l'Amour. I wonder what that would be like?

Actually, maybe I should start writing about novels that have yet to be written. Browsing the library shelves, their ghostly form is often glimpsed as I remove another to peruse, drawn by the title ... and then dolefully replace.

The way ahead

A line just heard in the 1944 feel good war movie The Way Ahead currently on Channel 4. Raw civvies are on their way to training camp. Conversation turns to politics.

"There's only one good man who ever got into Parliament."
"Who's that?"
"Bleedin' Guy Fawkes."

The newest gloss

In a mad moment I deleted the post about the Jessie Macbeth interview. It wasn't prompted by the uncertain veracity of the video but getting the title of the Euston Manifesto wrong. I first read about it on 3 Quarks Daily which, as you can see, calls it the Euston Road Manifesto [link now broken due to host site's failure]. When I accessed the site, I had scrolled down beyond the title and was immediately faced with its convoluted apologia for state terror. (Whereas this, as you'll see, is a convoluted apologia for recognising and opposing it).

Anyway, the video contains a memorable performance by Macbeth, which makes me doubt doubt itself. As I wrote, it's like a Beckett monologue; those musical stammerings in particular. In what way, I ask myself, are Beckett's monologues false?

It all reminded me, too, of the Wilkomirski Affair. His book Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, as Moby Lives explains, received a lot of attention and won awards because of its stark, poetic descriptions of Nazi atrocities from a child's perspective; Wilkomirski's own.

Except they weren't. He was a German called Bruno Grosjean. He wasn't even Jewish. All of it was imagined. Blake Eskin wrote an excellent book about the affair. Many people, mainly those who had welcomed Wilkomirski/Grosjean as a long-lost member of their decimated family, refused to believe that it was invented. The Holocaust itself wasn't imagined after all.

But one thing Eskin's book didn't address was why Fragments was written in the first place. Grosjean evidently believed he was really Wilkomirski and that he experienced those terrible events. Watching him on a BBC documentary, it was clear he was, at that time, a deeply troubled individual. If he hadn't have believed, he might not have been able to write the book in the first place. When I discussed the Eskin book with a friend, he said it was an extraordinary account of autism.

So perhaps writing the book was necessary for the writer to make the connection to the outside that, in life, he otherwise couldn't. He absorbed other people's experiences to an extraordinary degree; to the point where he became the other person. He wrote; he became.

What might that mean for the meaning of writing and of experience? Perhaps Jessie Macbeth is less a fraud than a victim of extreme imaginative empathy.

Remembered if outlived

When I read reports that Will Oldham a.k.a Bonnie Prince Billy has a new LP soon called Then the Letting Go I thought: he's so good with titles! It's always a good sign. But it turns out the title also makes up the final words of Emily Dickinson's poem that begins After great pain. Whatever, it's in keeping with a theme I noticed so many years ago when I wrote something to welcome I See a Darkness into the world: he writes songs of the human animal. The LP covers, at least until Joya, tended to feature an animal on the way to becoming human. But then there was last year's slightly disappointing Superwolf collaboration too. This is something to be investigated further. The relation between the formal feeling of being human and the great pain of being animal might be said to be the dynamic behind so much art (that is, art has to outlive the animal yet also seeks to return). Eric Santner certainly seems to think so. His new book On Creaturely Life looks at Rilke, Walter Benjamin and, perhaps most intriguingly, WG Sebald. Santner argues:

Sebald’s entire oeuvre can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors.

This last point is one I tried to make in my own essay on Sebald (now offline) - one that I felt was missing from the reviews of his Airwar book, mainly because many of the reviewers used it for special pleading on behalf of bombing our neighbours in Iraq.