Older work: Peter Handke – On the road to unlearning

We live in the relentless age of explanation. Analysts, experts and critics lurk everywhere. Where previously the spiritually imbued was valued, the place is now occupied by intruders without empathy: the scoffer who just piles up rubbish; the ironist who never read Jean Paul. Romanticism spoke warmly of openness, but modernity trumpeted coldly about decryption or revelation.

Reading Peter Handke seems like a relief. He warmly and irascibly despises certain people of civilization – the activist boasters, the zealots of insight, the slaves of conceptualization. And those mechanistic answer subscribers who only mean one thing by understanding the world: living on the wiser side of a contradiction, where all certainties are immovable.

Handke’s poetry dances in contradiction without having to be goal-oriented. What happens between nature and the narrator applies to existence in general: you are always and universally an enhanced person only when you feel the gaze of things resting on you and allow this feeling to happen. It’s about translating yourself into the world. Until you understand yourself, but nothing is self-evident anymore. Handke’s provocative appeal arises from a quiet nevertheless: from the knowledge that we are lost and still wandering, we break the circle of isolated existence and move towards one another: “Secret of the equality of all on earth, oh sublime anarchy!”

“Never shake my head at anyone anymore, except at myself.” That’s what it says in “The Ballad of the Last Guest.” Gregor Werfer is the main character. He goes through his life as a “one-man expedition” and is open to many things, but is never unfaithful to being alone. A geologist, working on a distant continent, well provided for but radically groping, a stranger in the thicket of busy people.

Now he’s going to his childhood village for a few days. Re-encounter: the father and his beautiful wordlessness; the sister without a husband, but with a baby – a baptism is coming up. Unfortunately, the former village is now just an “agglomeration”, has become sprawled and fragmented. What was beautiful in the backwoods became the dreary hint of suburban ugliness. The churches, at least at the foot of the high-rise buildings, are no longer so “autonomous, pointing the finger to heaven, if they didn’t even threaten heaven.”

The short-term returnee arrived on a bus. Handke’s work is unthinkable without views from intercity and suburban buses. Just like the name Gregor goes with it or the “abundance of apples” in the garden (stealing fruit means letting something natural go with you, that is the fruitiest, juiciest, healthiest materialism). This book is reminiscent of the basic words of Handke’s literature: time and threshold and walking and transformation. Nouns, but not predominant. Because there are words that cannot rule, just as the common statement is wrong, a peace – rule.

Gregor had received a bitter message on the “pocket phone”: his brother Hans, a member of the Foreign Legion, is dead. Shot in the head, far from home. Gregor doesn’t dare tell the family this truth. He suffers from the fact that telling the truth often brings hardship. The way out? »Come here, age of silence.« Varieties of silence, like scenes from childhood – no one can describe them like Handke, universes of shame or guilt or shyness. Inside and outside, a single flooding, whirring space.

The narrator then sets off to explore the surrounding area for a short while. Has anything been saved from the “village era”? Handke Classic: A path begins, a journey, a look around by the narrator, away from every conceivable center. The best thing about being on the move: “The seeing doesn’t stop.” Gregor watches a young woman playing soccer on the sports field – all alone, only with herself. (“A good game happens without words. One of the main rules, not just for a soccer game?”) He spends the night in a tram Forest, in an old bomb crater, calls Odysseus, the “late returner”. In the inn he develops his special philosophy, “he brings happiness, the last guest”.

The minority “of those who are rather aloof, of marginal figures, of lopsided people, of people who stay in corners and corners and squatters” – these are they, all the “last guests” who are to be celebrated and praised. Being last when everything is pushing for first place. Praise for those who have drifted away, those who are strange, those who are out of place. »Praise of shabbiness. Good beautiful shabbiness.”

So, getting lost in discovery. No plot. More of a plot twist. The reader’s pleasure must be that of a fellow traveler in the midst of the uneventful. Handke once called it “spatial fidelity.” That’s not escapism. Read, feel, sink in. “Sinking in”, for Handke, a way of life. The world is surrounded by educational paths, all dead ends – in one of his earlier books, Handke spoke of the alternative to this: an “error educational path”; Based on this, he now wants an “unlearning path”. We are “tipping figures,” says the returnee. When something is on the brink, possibilities open up, there is a healing tipping “into the right, the good situation”.

While Novalis once suffered from wanting the unconditional but always only encountering the profane things, with Handke the profane is the unconditional. A kindness manifesto. Dedicated to the fullness of what exists, everything that remains unavailable to our stubborn civilization, whose progress only further impoverishes it.

Wonderful boredom!, which is also inscribed in this book. Without the effort of a vocabulary that would be in someone else’s service. The creation of words as the creation of the world; beautifully shielded from the “heaven of language”. Finding words, no, being surprised by them; interrupt the surprise word in the next sentence; get lost behind a comma in subordinate clauses like in a forest; to give in to the side strands of a thought; remain branched out joyfully or despairingly; get a dash to help you, see a semicolon in between and wonder where the question marks come from; then finally make a point – only to have a colon declare everything open again.

Gregor’s hike wants to establish presence: to be a kind of property for himself, i.e. to gain in essence – without becoming entangled in what is called politics or duty, profession, party, commitment. It is not the world that surrounds us that makes us creative, but rather the world that does not exist. Therefore, when we read, we become immensely stronger and more open than we usually are. Lightness would be the greatest radicalism imaginable. If only it could be maintained, this self-image enhanced through poetry! It cannot be maintained. Because desire cannot be contained. But that’s how desire stays awake.

Worldwide in the undergrowth of everyday life. “Don’t ignore the beginning of the rain.” And also this: “Sparrows in the roadside bush: an invisible parliament.” This is how one could try to summarize this poet’s confession: to agree to be seized. Of all creatures. Even from humans. Who can look up and be convinced that he is being blessed by a flock of birds high above his head.

Peter Handke: The ballad of the last guest. Suhrkamp, ​​185 p., hardcover, €24.