Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

You have seen this, no doubt: I cut a figure like that slalom skier in an international competition who goes shooting out of the starting posts with total concentration and in that very moment wipes out at the first pole and is out of the race — yet remains on the screen.

But this analogy does not work (and it seems to me there are simply no even moderately accurate analogies for the vicissitudes of writing): for I did not want to admit defeat. First came a dazed feeling, then alarm, then a new start, although, according to the prevailing rules of the game, this seemed impermissible.

I crept out of the light and tried to continue in the dark, just as in childhood, when I had failed in front of others, I would imagine that off somewhere by myself I could cancel out my failure by starting over (and this analogy, too, is wrong).

At any rate, I started again and again in the days that followed, absolutely without hope and equally stubborn, and with the tenaciousness of a descendant of small farmers.

And yet I never got beyond my preconceived first sentence, which I could not or would not give up. This sentence, at first a simple main clause — subject, verb, object — now grew from day to day, called for additions, concessions, boxed itself in, bulged out, sought to break out into the open with a consecutive clause, came to a head, sharpened its focus, strove for lightness, also for fading, for inarticulateness, demanded, above and beyond narration, to address itself to someone (no one in particular), in a little twist to one side, then already in a subordinate clause, until the entire sentence looked like something between the onset of the long story I had planned and the convoluted salutation of a Pauline epistle, although certainly not addressed to a community, or even to an individual, and I, unlike the apostle, had not the slightest awareness of having been sent forth by anyone.

And when, on the evening of the third or fifth day, the sentence stood there without any continuation in sight, it was clear to me that the world-embracing epic for which I had prepared so thoroughly in spring and summer, as I had never prepared for an examination, was a failure, a bust. All the strength I needed for it had abandoned me. The notebooks I had filled in the previous months, piles and piles in front of me on the table, were utterly useless, as were the detailed maps, some of which I had drawn myself, held down by chunks of the yellow-and-gray stone from the area around my suburb.

Ilay down on the floor and slept, or lost consciousness, until the following evening.

Then I casually followed the windings of the one and only sentence that went on for several pages. When I took my eyes off it, absently, a few very short, almost unconnected sentences presented themselves quietly, like “He went shopping. The tree was very beautiful. The summer came,” which I immediately added.

And then I realized I was going to have to write something entirely different from what I had planned: something for which I was not in the least prepared and also felt quite unsuited: the story of, or the research report on, something that did exist inside me but was untouchable: my religion, or, as the resulting work then turned out to be called by others, “a prayer in narrative.” And although I considered such a thing hardly possible in this day and age, not amenable to being expressed in that rational language without which, in my eyes, no writing and no reading could take place, my few sentences inspired a kind of trust, entirely unparalleled, as never before, in words, in myself, in the world.

As I then went out walking in the evening landscape of the enclave, there swept through me, as novel to me as the word that went with it, ecstasy. The low walls of cut granite that bordered the roads there glittered, and bathed my face. I was looking forward to my one-man expedition.

And with that began what was called at the beginning of these pages a metamorphosis.

It was the loveliest time I had experienced up to then, month after month, then on through the years, and my most difficult. It was the struggle I had always wished for, the war of which the reader had spoken, yet not against an external enemy, out there in society, but rather against myself.

I sensed the existence of rules almost impossible to satisfy, of which I furthermore had no knowledge, except perhaps that the process had to be very different from my usual writing, which, for instance, required that I repeatedly make blunders in order to get on with the story and maneuver it toward my original conception. Here, without an initial conception, without any conception at all, my trusty technique of doing it wrong would not help at all. On the contrary, a single wrong word that I let stand would block all progress on my project.

To put it another way, I could neither have recourse to my experiences, dreams, and facts nor invent action, plot, or conflicts. The book, or whatever it would turn out to be, had to be created out of nothing.

I was in suspense. The struggle seemed unwinnable; at best it could be drawn out as long as possible. And yet I was often also hopeful, could feel myself, as my own enthusiastic opponent, closer to myself than ever before.

Thus I sat from morning until usually late at night in my warm, quiet, bright writing room above the Pyrenean punch-bowl landscape around the enclave of Llivia, in the light of autumn and then already winter.

I ate less and less, often only zwieback with the tea I brewed for myself now and then. There were hardly any people in the “city,” which consisted chiefly of vacation houses, whose owners at that time of year, since there was no snow for skiing yet, were in Gerona or Barcelona. And the few local people, in the morning in the bar or sometimes driving the cows home toward evening from the pastures on the highland slopes, were so laconically cordial that they made me look forward even more to getting on with my work.

This was not to involve anything more than narrating happenings, peaceful ones, which themselves were everything, and taken all together perhaps constituted the event itself: the streaming of a river through the seasons; people moving along; the falling of rain, on grass, stone, wood, skin, hair; the wind in a pine tree, in a poplar, against a sheer stone face, between the toes, in the armpits; that hour before dusk when the last swallows swoop across the sky, while the bats begin to zigzag about; the traces of different birds in the mud of a puddle on a dirt road leading through fields; the simple coming of evening, with the great ball of the sun still visible in the west, that of the moon exactly opposite in the east.

It was that fullness of the world, as I had known it during my years off from school, so to speak, in those suburbs of Paris, except that, contrary to my plan, it had no dramatic plot or particular incidents, purely variations, nuances, more and more of them. And nevertheless all that was supposed to appear as interconnected and vibrate, with the intensity of a treasure-hunt story.

Nor were heroes lacking, a group of friends, men as well as women, who, embarked on a common journey, primarily had to serve as eyes, ears, and language for those other stories of the world. In between, the most that would occur would be things like playing cards, dancing, sewing on buttons, or someone sleepwalking, singing an original song, perhaps suggestive of Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart. They all had names from classical antiquity, jumbled up by me so as to seem contemporary.

I transposed the quintessential events from the populated hills of the Seine to the region of the Orinoco in Latin America, which I knew only from directories of subject headings. Snowing in Clamart now turned up near the springs in the mountainous region of Guyana, although there, so close to the equator, it had probably never snowed. Borrowing from the rivulet that emerged from the woods at the foot of the menhir — and immediately ran dry again — I described the origin of the mighty river. The people on the clay path near my inn in the clearing became Indios following a trail through the rain forest.