Peter Handke - Repetition

Thus I discovered a people as tender as they were crude, a people with many different ways of scoffing at those who were quick to think and slow to act; an industrious people (“When it comes to work, we Slovenes are miles ahead,” my brother wrote in a letter) whose adult language is shot through with children’s expressions; taciturn and almost mute in despair, voluble and almost eloquent in joy and yearning; without aristocracy, without military marches, without land (their land was leased), without kings, their only king being the legendary hero who wandered about in disguise, showing himself only briefly. But, on second thought, what words made me aware of was not specifically the Slovene people or a people at the turn of the century, but rather an indeterminate, timeless, extrahistorical people — or better still, a people living in an eternal present, regulated only by the seasons, in an immanent world obedient to the laws of weather, of sowing, reaping, and animal diseases, a world apart from, before, or alongside of history. (I am aware that my brother’s tick marks contributed to this static image.) How could I help wanting to count myself among this unknown people that has none but borrowed words for war, authority, and triumphal processions, but devises names for the humblest things — indoors for the space under the windowsill, out of doors for the shiny trace of a braked wagon wheel on a stone nag — and is at its most creative when it comes to naming hiding places, places for refuge and survival, such as only children can think up — nests in the underbrush, the cave behind the cave, the fertile field deep in the woods — yet never feels obliged to call itself “the chosen people” and distance itself from “the nations” (for, as their every word shows, this people inhabits and cultivates its land)?

Just as my brother’s copybook, without excursions through another language, translated itself directly into his work, his orchard, so now his dictionary led me beyond the orchard into the whole landscape of childhood. Childhood? Was it my particular childhood? Was it my personal places and things that I discovered through names? Unquestionably, the scene of action was my father’s house. With the help of the word for the space behind the stove, for the beam under the cider barrel in the cellar, for the stone-rimmed watering trough in the stable, for the last furrow in plowing, I visualized the corresponding object in or around our own house. It took only a word to evoke the broad end of “our” scythe, or “our” cling peaches, or the blue mist on “our” plums; and to lift even our subsoil — the layer of gravel under the humus, the pit where we stored our fodder beets — into a realm of light and air. And there were many words that communicated images of things which I had never seen but which must nevertheless have related to our life at home. Our horse, for instance, had never had an eelback, but once I had the word for it, I saw a horse with just such dark stripes in the village paddock. Nor had I ever heard the voice of the queen bee, which now, thanks to the onomatopoeic verb, resounded from within my father’s abandoned apiary and penetrated my innermost being, followed by the sound, “as of boiling plum butter,” of a whole swarm of “our” bees. Yes, “one who produces whirring sounds on a birchwood flute” was I myself, the reader of the one word for all that, and likewise it was I who, immersed in “the blade of grass on which strawberries are strung,” emerge forthwith from our community forest beyond the Seven Mountains, holding that same blade of grass in my hand.

At that point I thought of my teacher, the writer of fairy tales, who precisely because he was absent had been a kind of prop to me in the course of my journey. There was never any plot in his fairy tales; they were mere descriptions of objects, and each story dealt with only one thing, a thing which, as accessory or scene of action, must have been familiar to readers of folk tales. The subject of one tale was a hut in the forest, but without a witch, without lost children, without fire (except at the most for a puff of chimney smoke, soon carried away by the cold wind); and beyond the Seven Mountains there was nothing but a brook, so clear that its bed could be mistaken at first sight for a road — fish could be seen swimming over its dark elongated paving stones until at last the water, rushing over a round protruding rock, gave forth an endless sound. The only one of his fairy tales in which anything “happened” was a description of a bramblebush (of course without a struggling Jew tearing himself to pieces in it); this bush is in the middle of an impenetrable wilderness but is surrounded by a large circle of sand where, in the final sentence, a first-person narrator suddenly turns up and throws a handful of sand, “and then another, and still another, and so forth and so on,” into the brambles. According to the author, these “one-thing tales” were supposed to be “sun tales” and manage without the usual “moonlight of spooky additives”; “sun and subject,” he thought, were fairy tale enough; they were the “situation.” A single glance at a treetop, he held, sufficed to produce a fairy-tale atmosphere.

Seen as a collection of one- word fairy tales, the dictionary did the same thing for me: it gave me images of the world, even when, as in the case of the strawberries strung on their blade of grass, I had not actually experienced them. Around every word I came across in my ruminations, a world took shape, as much around “an empty chestnut husk” as around “the wet tobacco left at the bottom of a pipe” or even “a sunshower” or “the white weasel,” which also means “a saucy beautiful girl.” And just as certain passages in my brother’s letters, comparable to the fragments from the Greek seekers after truth, had a kind of halo around them, so now isolated words traced circles that made me think of a prehistoric figure who lived in the hazy centuries before those early stammerers, namely, of the legendary Orpheus. Only a few of his idiosyncratic terms had survived; neither his poems nor his songs had been thought worth collecting, only his peculiar names for things: “woven chains” for the furrows in fields, “bent shuttles” for plows, “threads” for seed grains, “Aphrodite” for the sowing season, “the tears of Zeus” for rain.

On me, too, word circles had the effect of fairy tales, for though the terrible, the repellent, and the evil were amply represented in them, they were only a component which took its place in the whole and, in the dictionary at least, could never win out. My teacher found fault with the stories I had been writing at the time, saying that I had a weakness for the macabre, that I was positively addicted to the gloomy and gruesome; the law of writing, by contrast, was to create, letter after letter, syllable after syllable, the brightest of brightnesses; even a last breath, he said, must be transformed into the breath of life. And now, immersed in the dictionary’s “rain of blood,” “rat turds,” “spittle of disgust,” “the fecal sausages of the earthworm,” “shoes moldering in a corner,” a beast named “understone” (a viper), a place called “land of moles” (the grave), I felt free from my addiction to the gruesome or even to the tragic and found in the contemplation of names a pattern in the world, a plan, which transformed country people and a village house into world people and a big-city house. Every word circle a world circle! The crux of the matter was that every circle emanated from a single foreign word. When people felt unable to communicate an experience, weren’t they always wailing: “Oh, if there were only a word for it!” And in moments of recognition, weren’t they much less likely to say “Yes, that’s it!” than “Yes, that’s the word!”