Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And another paradox connected with my reading of the laws, the most curious of all? That these laws, focused on everyday misdeeds and atrocities, of which they treated exclusively and on which they rang the changes exhaustively, gave me, the decipherer, more than a millennium after their compilation, fresh certainty under my feet, something like rootedness, simply on the basis of their language, generally applicable and binding, which first named stabbing, killing, ripping out limbs, raping, exhuming corpses, pillaging in all conceivable degrees — that in itself created order and tranquillity! — then organized them, and in such a way that even the most deviant and malicious act was, to put it briefly, “provided for.”

Because the legal dicta provided for every possible turn of events, I was no longer threatened by chaos, and the unreal — than which there was nothing more catastrophic in my eyes — evaporated. A legal work that catalogues crimes and punishments comprehensively does not merely order them, but, as I still feel when reading this text, also welds the world together and validates it. What then emerges at times is indeed something like an empire; not a vanished Roman one, but rather one that again brings to mind the phrase “New World”; I experience in this case the very opposite of a trance.

I also became rooted in another sense through the language of these laws: even while I was a student in various capital cities, whether in Vienna or in Paris, the occurrences circumscribed by the Latin paragraphs were always transferred in my mind to the rural area from which I came. Although, as far as I knew, violations of the law had hardly ever occurred there, at least no criminal offenses — there was just one person in the village who was constantly in litigation with his neighbors, as probably happens everywhere — I thought I recalled, as I worked my way through even the smallest subparagraph, a corresponding situation in and around Rinkolach. Such a memory would shoot through me, brightly outlined, an oscillating, vibrating image, electric in quality. What flashed by me as I pored over my texts were fragments of narrative images such as I had never seen in any actual narrative from my native region. The village tales told by my grandfather, who everyone agreed was a “born storyteller,” never aroused any memories, nor did the novels of Filip Kobal, he, too, as people said, made of “epic bedrock.” Memory, marvelous in quality, did come to me, however, by way of the generalizations and ramifications of those long since inoperative prescriptions.

As recently as this morning, when I was trying, with my now fairly faded Latin, to decipher the paragraph in the digests about stealing flour from a mill — and it mattered for the penalty whether the flour belonged to the miller himself or to a customer — I found myself transported, with the force of a hallucination, to the Jaunfeld mill, deep down in the already dark rift valley, furthermore on a gloomy rainy day, sacks of grain under the tarpaulin outside on the ladder wagon on which I had been sitting only moments before, facing backward, while now I was standing inside the deserted mill, surrounded by the shrieking and roaring of the millrace, high above me the guttering light of a naked bulb.

And when I read on, another situation is evoked for me, from the same region: “When a person enters a stranger’s garden for the purpose of stealing …” “When a person steals grain from a stranger’s field and hauls it away with a cart or on a horse …” and “But if he hauls it away on his back …”

One section even reminds me of a specific person, my grandfather, who, after the death of his wife, when he was already quite an old man, fell in love with a neighbor’s hired woman. In the law it is mentioned that anyone who consorted with the king’s maid and openly entered into relations with her was sentenced thenceforth to serve the king likewise. And thus, when I read the Roman law I see my grandfather on a certain Sunday afternoon, when he had been left alone on purpose with his forbidden love, which was known to the entire village, being caught by his family when they returned unexpectedly — his own daughter, my mother, and also his second daughter are there. The almost seventy-year-old man stands there with his pants down, the hired woman, not much younger, in her slip. None of the witnesses laughs; that a man, and an old man at that, should enter into relations with another woman so soon after the death of his wife, and with this kind of woman, is serious, and the two daughters look most serious of all. The two elderly dissolutes have flushed cheeks, two times two small, bright red, perfectly round spots there, not from shame, but because they were just kissing, their mouths almost closed and their lips pursed like birds or children, and just as eagerly, at a frenetic pace, head against head, yet their bodies at a distance from each other. The hair of this purple-cheeked couple sticks out from their heads, the woman’s gray, the man’s still black. She looks at the bystanders while he gazes into her eyes as before. They do not pluck at their clothing, either one of them, and thousands of Sundays later, in his charity cubicle, with room only for his bed, this man, meanwhile almost ninety, pulls the blooming young woman from Catalonia, visiting with his grandson, onto his knee and breaks into dry sobs.

Where I come from, I was never considered a native, a villager. But I can say that deciphering the aforementioned legal code helped make a villager out of me in the cities, at a distance, and only there. I read: “When someone steals the bell from a stranger’s pigsty …” and I recall the bell, although there was probably no such thing, in a pigsty back home, and see or visualize our village as located in an imperial province, isolated yet within easy reach of the capital.

And yet the law, even that of classical antiquity, does not provide sufficient reading for me. Give me a sentence that begins with “In the days when” instead of “Whenever,” and I am electrified altogether differently.

I fear, though, that I have read all the “In the days when” books I am referring to. The last one was the Bible, and there I kept putting off the end, finally rationing myself to two sentences a day of the Apocalypse. After that I stopped my kind of reading for the time being. I do continue to read, but it is really more a reflex action, like watching television, no longer a way of life; it does not penetrate to a deeper layer, and just as I soon switch off the television, I soon hit a snag in my reading.

The “In the days when” books still rank highest, as far as I am concerned, although those written nowadays usually soon catapult me back into the outside world, the here and now, instead of keeping me in their “It was” and “It happened.” And I feel just as comfortable there as earlier when reading stories, even if nothing happens but a cloud’s passing overhead. I do not know why. The only strange thing is that I am back outside most quickly, have no desire to enter into a present-day book at all, when the story pretends to be one from olden times, like a classic tale. I also cannot manage to read the “In the days when” books that merely make a game of those earlier ones in which everything is possible. I need a kind of narration that is initially problematic, lifelike, urgent —“What is the question?” means to me “What comes next?”—and then, when it can finally answer all questions and take up where the earlier or eternal stories left off, comes across as something very rare, as a happening, suitable to the kind of narration I have in mind.

At the mere idea of such a thing achieved in this day and age, I, who have not taken leave of my reading, feel immeasurably relieved, a feeling that is conferred on me only in bits and pieces by the kind of hairsplitting over definitions that occurs in the texts of the various scholarly disciplines, no matter how animating and pleasurable that may be. An idea or merely a wish? A new book full of narration, that’s what I wish for. And then I again see before me and in me something grand that calls for a form entirely different from that of conventional narrative. But what sort of form?