Across the Border: Peter Handke's Repetition

world in a different manner, almost seem to me to be conceived in order to put a stop to this critical and scholarly game. The author Across the Border: clearly paid a dear price for this insolence – whether unintentional or strategic – through Peter Handke’s Repetition which the author secured for his writings a claim to a certain discretion after publication. W. G. Sebald What unsettled critics more than anything else was Handke’s new and, one could say, ‘The journeys of men should lead to programmatic design for the visualization of where they have come from.’ a more beautiful world by virtue of language (Shlomo of Karlin) alone. Neither critics nor scholars managed to come up with much to say about the many In recent years, there are few clearer exam- wonderfully-built textual arcs of ‘Child Story’ ples of the misunderstanding between culture or ‘The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire’, and culture industry than that of Peter except to designate them as examples of the Handke. Around the time of his return to abstruse extravagance of Handke in his latest Austria it was considered as a given that this phase. Since then readers have retreated, author, who from the very beginning has scholars have for the most part liquidated stood at the centre of public scrutiny, repre- their interests (if I’m not mistaken), and as sented the highest class of contemporary for the critics, who were naturally the most German-language literature. The specific exposed, some have felt compelled to pub- narrative genre he developed succeeded by licly rescind their confidence in Handke.3 dint of its completely original linguistic and In recent years it has come to a point where imaginative precision, through which – in Handke’s new works may still be reviewed, works such as The Goalie’s Anxiety or but these reviews are as a rule formed by A Sorrow Beyond Dreams – the author reports animosity, either open or concealed. Even the and meditates upon the silent catastrophes few positive commentaries exhibit a strange that continuously befall the human interior. perplexity and a palpable discomfort. In It is particularly worth noting, retrospec- every case, the metaphysic developed in tively, the ways in which these texts manage Handke’s newer books, which aims to trans- to satisfy the demands of the book market, late the seen and perceived into language, without giving up any claim to ‘literary’ status. remains undiscussed. There is obviously The secret of this success, I venture, is that no longer a contemporary discourse in which Handke’s narratives – though doubtlessly metaphysics may claim a place. And yet art, formed from high artistic understanding and wherever and whenever it may take place, true feeling – are hardly at odds with an idea bears the closest ties to the realm of meta- of literature which critics are ready or able physics. In order to explore this proximity, to understand. Handke’s texts were accessi- the writer requires a courage which should ble; even after a quick perusal, all kinds of not be underestimated; for critics and schol- progressive observations could be applied to ars who see metaphysics as a kind of junk them. Handke likewise laid no overlarge closet, it is naturally easy to be satisfied with obstacles in the way of literary criticism. In the general admonishment that, in the higher the shortest time, numerous essays, analyses realms, the air is thin and the danger of falling and monographs were written up and great. What I want to do now is not to discuss Handke’s work was subsumed into the canon.1 the particularities of this distanciation from Already with the appearance of the three Peter Handke – nor do I want to be tempted books of Slow Homecoming, however, the by the considerable task of sketching the engagement with Handke became more hesi- psychology and sociology of the parasitic tant.2 Far more hermetic, far more difficult to species that takes literature as its host; in- describe, these works, which observe the stead, I simply want to experimentally 1 process a few things regarding the book homeland, ‘took notice of me now and then Repetition, which upon first reading in 1986 but never stared’, and the longer he observes made a great and, as I have since learned, his surroundings, the more certain he be- lasting impression on me. comes ‘that this was a great country’. In the Repetition is the report of a summer train-station tavern he dreams of being ac- journey to Slovenia, undertaken in 1960 or cepted into the population of this great coun- 1961 by a young man named Filip Kobal, on try, amidst a people that he envisages as the trail of his missing older brother Gregor. being ‘on an unceasing, peaceful, adventur- The reporter and narrator is Filip Kobal ous, serene journey through the night, a jour- himself, who looks back on the time from a ney in which the sleeping, the sick, the dying, distance of a quarter century. As much as we even the dead were included’. The normally learn from him about the young Filip Kobal, mostly light-flooded empire, in this passage the currently middle-aged narrator is unwill- drowned in darkness, which Filip Kobal sees ing to give us much information regarding himself entering, is qualitatively as far re- his present identity. It’s almost as if he, who moved as is thinkable from the false home- we can recognize only by his words, is the land from which, according to the synopsis missing brother himself, whose trail the of his previous years, he escapes ‘after almost young Filip Kobal is following. The beneficial twenty years in a non-place, in a frosty, un- effect that this search for clues, described by friendly, cannibalistic village’. As the narrator Handke, has on the reader, is rooted in the remarks, Filip Kobal’s feeling of freedom is following constellation: that the young Kobal completely concrete, for in contrast to his is lead by the older, for whom he is searching, ‘so-called native land’, the country on whose and that protagonist and narrator, separated threshold he stands lays claim to him not ‘in from each other only by passed time, relate to the name of compulsory education or com- each other like the two brothers who are the pulsory military service’, but rather, as the subjects of Handke’s story. narrator in turn states, it lets itself be laid Directly upon passing his final exams, claim to, ‘as the land of my forefathers, which Filip Kobal leaves his home – his old father, thus, however strange, was at least my own his ailing mother, and his confused sister – country’. ‘At last’, the narrator recalls from and travels across the border to the country his memories, ‘I was stateless; at last, instead on the other side of the Karawanks, whence of being always present, I could be lightheart- came the Kobals, and where Gregor fled edly absent’. Outland, the country of ances- when he was drafted into the German army in tors and of absence: these passages strangely the mid-thirties, in order to study the cultiva- invoke the coincidence between the ‘king- tion of fruit trees at the agricultural school dom of freedom’ and that of the dead, which in Maribor. The crossing of the border opens may initially prove perplexing. Yet there is up a new kingdom for Filip. Although the something to this, since both the kingdom of industrial city of Jesenice, the first stop of his freedom and that of shades are sites of expec- journey, ‘grey on grey, squeezed into a nar- tation, where no living being has yet been. row valley, shut in between two shade-cast- The narrator recalls how his mother, when- ing mountains’, in no way corresponds to the ever speaking of her Slovenian homeland, picture Filip had imagined to himself of this would recite the names of the major towns of neighbouring empire as a collection of ‘cities Lipica, Temnica, Vipava, Doberdob, Tomaj, resplendent with colour, spreading out over Tabor, Kopriva, as though they were settle- a wide plain, […] the one merging with the ments in ‘a land of peace where we, the Kobal next all the way to the sea’ – nevertheless, as family, would at last recapture our true the narrator specifically remarks, the city selves’. The land of peace envisaged by son ‘fully confirmed my anticipation’. Jesenice is and mother is not only a metaphysical, but actually the entryway to a new world. Filip also a political concept. Without doubt, the notices how the droves of people going about metaphysics of an ‘other world’ where one their business, unlike in the small cities of his goes to meet one’s ancestors point towards a 2 position of resignation, in which liberation of the empire, is a paradigm for this paranoid can always only be a liberation from life; yet concept of homeland, whose gruesome con- at the same time the utterances of the mother, sequences reach far into the post-war years remembered by the son, are defined by their during which Filip Kobal grew up. At the end resolute resistance to coercive assimilation, of his wanderings, as he returns home and their clearly pronounced resentment through the Karst, he is at first happy to see against Austria. Thus, talk of a possible alter- Austria again – inspired, perhaps, by the native situation leads not only to a quiet de- hope that he would be able to bring home his mise: it also has a real social significance. various foreign experiences. ‘On the way The country of peace, evoked by the pretty- from the border station to the town of sounding Slovenian names, is the absolute Bleiburg […] I vowed to be friendly while opposite to the false homeland of Austria, as demanding nothing and expecting nothing, as well as to the malignancy of a society organ- befitted someone who was a stranger even in ized by confederations and associations.

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