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. The the land of his birth. The crowns of the trees text makes this unmistakably clear. What is broadened my shoulders.’ Yet barely arrived beneficial for Filip Kobal about the crowd in the city with the ominous name [Blei: lead], in which he finds himself, walking the streets he is met once more with the ‘guilty, hangdog of Yugoslavian cities, is primarily ‘what it ugliness and formlessness’ of his Austrian lacked, the things that were missing: the compatriots – ‘fashionably dressed, they had chamois beards, the hartshorn buttons, the gleaming badges on their lapels’ – constitut- loden suits, the lederhosen; in short, no one ing a suspicious people, whose sidelong in it wore a costume’. Thus, for Filip Kobal – glances prompt the twenty-year-old to reflect in a foreign land, amid the passing shades on how ‘not a few members of this crowd of Jesenice – it is less the resigned absorption were descended from people who had tor- into an anonymous other that communicates tured and murdered, or at least laughed ap- the feeling that he is finally among his own provingly, and whose descendants would kind, as it is the absence of all costume, of all carry on the tradition faithfully and without a insignia, of anything overdetermined. The qualm’. This remembered realization, as well dialectical mediation of metaphysics and as the narrator’s complete silence regarding politics enables a change of positions: namely, his subsequent experiences in his unaccom- that as the bent shades of Jesenice come to modating homeland, clarify why he must life, the costume-wearers take on the appear- repeat his voyage out of Austria, twenty-five ance of evil, unredeemed, dead souls. The years after he first left. ‘costumed’ is in no way identical to an orien- The departure for the imaginary true tation which aims to conserve the homeland; homeland, lying across the mountains, is an rather, it is the unmistakable indication of attempt not only at self-liberation, but also at an opportunism, by which the propagation of the breaking-through of exile, in the widest the concept of ‘homeland’ becomes allied meaning of this concept. Despite being long- with the destruction of homeland. Addition- time residents of Rinkenberg, where they are ally, the ‘costumed’ also signifies the negation accepted as natives by their fellow villagers, of every foreign country. If the concept of the Kobal family – comparable in many ways homeland comes about in the nineteenth to the Barnabas family of Kafka’s Castle – century in response to the evermore inelucta- have retained, due to their own obstinacy, a ble experience of the foreign, the ideologisa- feeling of their own foreignness. Unlike their tion of homeland in the twentieth century, fellow Rinkenbergers, they possess and pro- similarly inspired by a fear of loss, develops tect the memory of a way of life more digni- into the attempted expansion of the home- fied than their present one, oppressed by a land, as far as possible and employing force corrupted Austrian populace. Thus the father when necessary, at the cost of other home- and mother constantly and involuntarily lands. The word Austria, as the name for the think back to past times, as though they were Alpine republic left over after the dissolution both cut off from their Slovenian provenance, 3 and condemned against their will to an exist- angels’, is sent out above the unhappiness ence in Austria, as ‘prisoners or exiles’. The of his family in order to report back from the family legend which recounts the story of the other side as to whether the other world, Kobals’ exile, said to be rooted in historical which appears in the dreams of the exile, events, tells of a Gregor Kobal who had led exists also in reality. the Tolmin peasant revolt, and whose de- It cannot be ignored that the Kobals’ scendants had been driven out of the Isonzo secret royal family exhibits some traits which valley following his execution. Since this are known from Handke’s own family history, far-off past, the Kobals have been a clan of as it is reported in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. farmhands and foresters, migrating across The fictional transpositions carried out in large distances, ending up in Carinthia. The Repetition can in turn be read as the author’s text makes it no secret that the mythological own redemptory wishes. What is decisive in conjecture, by which the oppressed family Handke’s rewriting of his own family history claims the ancestry of a rebellious forefather in this work cannot simply be equated with sentenced to an ignominious death, is geared the concept of idealization – the Kobals are in towards a new rebellion against ‘their exile, many respects a gloomy and self-destructive their servitude, and the suppression of their association – rather, the rewriting is more language’. It is primarily the father who, concerned with the elimination of a single ‘with all his strength, especially the strength specific element in order to achieve the far- of his obstinacy, […] was intent on redemp- thest possible distancing from the German tion for himself and his family’, although he descent of Handke’s paternal side; this ap- had ‘no idea, and never uttered any proposal pears to me to be one of the heaviest burdens to us concerning the form the redemption of on the psychological and moral development his family here on earth might take’. Accord- of the author Peter Handke. The Kobals have ing to the mythological model, the task of nothing in common with the Germans, nor redemption falls also on the shoulders of his even anything fundamental in common with sons. In his thirties, Gregor, the missing the Austrians. It is their privilege and brother – who bears the name of the rebel- sovereign right to be the others, who take no lious ancestor, and who was represented part in the violence that stems from paternal in the stories of his mother as ‘a king cheated fear and spreads out across all of Europe. out of his throne’ – was the first to set out to The ideal of human cohabitation, which can discover anew the land in the south; now it be extrapolated from the passages where the is up to the younger brother, considered by family unity of the Kobals is presented in a the mother as ‘rightful heir to the throne’, to somewhat sunnier light, is that of a society in resume long-lost affairs, and to go where which fathers play at most a diminished role. there are cities which are nothing like ‘our The mother’s dream, as reports the narrator, Klagenfurt’ – cities like Görz, where, accord- would have been ‘to run a big hotel, with the ing to the father’s memories, ‘there are palm staff as her subjects’. The extensive house- trees in the parks and there’s a king buried hold of this dream, like the narrative’s inher- in the monastery crypt’. The path out of exile ent utopia, is of a clearly matriarchal nature. is the path towards Jerusalem, and he who In the narrator’s memory it also appears as is meant to follow it, the young Filip Kobal, though the mother had spoken ‘with the voice must be innocent. Unlike his schoolmates, of a judge’, and the maxim that Filip Kobal almost all of whom have at one point sur- makes his own, after having apprenticed as a vived a bad accident – losing a finger, an ear, kind of day labourer for the old woman who or an entire arm – he is still unmarked: ‘dur- gives him shelter in the Karst, commands: ing my years at the seminary my youth had ‘Get away from your father’. Whereas under a passed but I had never for one moment patriarchal order each feels as alone as the known the experience of youth’. Now this narrator can’t help but feeling, under a matri- holy fool, who recognizes ‘the mentally de- archal regime, in which relations are woven ranged and feebleminded’ as his ‘guardian more loosely and more extensively, each 4 individual would almost be a brother to the the unredeemed world, belong to the narra- next. This can be seen in Filip Kobal’s en- tive tradition of exile literature. Even in the counters with masculine figures in the ancient worst of times, there must be a righteous landscape of the Karst. Figures like the young person walking somewhere in one’s country. soldier in Vipava, appearing to Kobal as his The task is to recognize him. Different than doppelgänger, or the waiter from the Bohinj, the dogmatic Christian histories of the who Filip guesses to have been the child of a Saviour – systematically suppressing hopes smallholder, like he himself was. This waiter, for redemption, which in turn gradually grow whose portrait is drawn with great devotion, virulent – the messianism of Jewish prov- is a veritable imago of the ideal of brother- enance, always ready to see the hoped-for hood. Brimming with constant attentiveness, redeemer in each stranger or foreigner, con- and only ‘seemingly lost in some faraway tains not only theological, but also political dream’, he surveys, in truth, ‘his whole realm’. potential. Even when the father has no idea Handke’s shaping of the story of the of ‘the form the redemption of his family here waiter from three or four sides belongs to the on earth might take’, this much is neverthe- most beautiful passages of the past decade of less clear: that it must be a redemption taking German-language literature. Deeply im- place in the here and now, as well as a re- pressed by this individual who embodies true demption of an entire community. It is no civility – even giving a light to a drunkard coincidence that the mythical ancestor of the with utmost gravity – Filip Kobal thinks only family was an agitator. The rebellious dispo- of him the following day. He knows, accord- sition, setting itself against all authority, ing to the narrator, that ‘it was a kind of love’ determines the messianic fantasy from the that draws him not into contact with the ground up – which doesn’t, however, imply waiter, but into proximity to him. The story that the figure of the redeemer is established takes a strange, thoroughly remarkable turn from this model. The redemptive figure of with the silent meeting of the two young messianism is characterized more by the men – wherein not a single word is ex- ability to transform multifariously. Due to his changed – on the last day Filip Kobal spends one-eyedness, Gregor, the older brother, in the ‘Black Earth Hotel’. On the way up to having preceded Filip in his journey to the his room, around midnight, Filip Kobal other country, is the king among the blind of passes by the open door to the kitchen, and the exiled. As the narrator informs us, sees there ‘the waiter sitting by a tub full of Gregor ‘never actually became an insurrec- dishes, using a tablecloth to dry them. Later,’ tionary’, even though he often stood on the continues the text, ‘when I looked out of my threshold of becoming so; yet in this he em- window, he was standing in his shirtsleeves bodies a certain type, which the narrator on the bridge across the torrent, holding a believes to have otherwise seen in only a few pile of dishes under his right arm. With his children: namely, the pious. Necessitated left hand, he took one after another and with by the war, the disappearance of the son in a smooth graceful movement sent them sail- whom the hopes of the Kobal family were kept ing into the water like so many Frisbees.’ alive – for whom the favourite word ‘holy’ This scene is simply recounted, without com- referred ‘not to the church, heaven, or any mentary, and left in its own right. Due to this other place outside the world’, but rather unquestioning representation, the figure of with everyday life and getting up early in the the waiter, finishing his daily work in the morning – the loss of this bearer of hope strangest way, impresses itself deeply on the spells an almost unbearable trauma for the reader’s mind. And the plates sailing out into exiled. Even ‘twenty years after my brother’s the darkness, like the no less beautiful sen- disappearance’, the narrator remembers, ‘our tences describing arcs across a dark back- house was still a house of mourning’, in which ground, become dispatches of brotherhood. the missing brother left his family ‘no peace; Consoling dreams, in which a lengthy every day he died again for them’. From this procession of messianic figures emerge from unappeased and unappeasable mourning, 5 the otherwise independent parents develop even when they almost had it in their hands communally the wishful dream of their son’s – nor were they especially interested in return home. As the text recounts, the par- power’.4 Repetition makes similar claims ents worship their missing son ardently, each about the Slovenian people: that as a power- in his or her own way: ‘At news of his coming less people, ‘without aristocracy, without she would immediately have prepared “his military marches, without land’, they remain apartment”, scrubbed the threshold, and uncorrupted, ‘their only king’ – again almost hung a wreath over the front door, while my like the Jews – ‘being the legendary hero who father would have borrowed the neighbour’s wandered about in disguise, showing himself white horse, harnessed it to the spit-and-pol- only briefly’. It is clear that Filip Kobal, like ished barouche, and, with tears of joy run- his brother before him, is expected to fill this ning down his nose, driven to meet him.’ role of the secret king. His messianic disguise The strong self-assurance of the exile is is that of the guest, entering the household represented in the character of the Kobal anonymous, unsuspected. The role was as- family. In the future, the mother is certain signed to him early on by his mother and that ‘after our return home, our resurrection sister, who would set a cup of tea before him from a thousand years of servitude’, the upon his return home from school, with the village of Kobarid in the Isonzo Valley, from obliging attitude that becomes second nature which, according to lore, the Kobals origi- to women, as though he were ‘an unexpected nated, will be renamed Kobalid. Nothing noble guest’. And in his wanderings, the more is required for the messianic adjustment smallholder’s son, actually someone with ‘no to the world than the tiny displacement of origins at all’, becomes conscious of his enor- a syllable. The fact that the village is called mous task. Similar to an early version of the Karfreit in German is a further symbol for beginning of Kafka’s Castle, where the the redemptory mission of the son [-freit: prince’s chambers are prepared for the wan- -freed], which would see the family’s op- derer K. when he appears in the village, Filip pressed existence transform into a proud Kobal is offered a large room in the ‘Black indomitability. According to their family Earth Hotel’, ‘with four beds, enough for a mythology, the Kobals are the designated whole family’. And evenings, when he sits in representatives of the Slovenian people, who the hotel restaurant, ‘no one, not even the like the Jews, the exemplary exilic race, ‘had militia on its constant rounds, asked me my been kingless and stateless down through the name; everyone called me “the guest”’. Filip, centuries, a people of journeymen and hired whose home has become travel and transpor- hands’. As Filip walks among these people tation, already during his school years – and through Yugoslavian streets, he feels an anti- who, wandering southwards with his blue authoritarian power emanating from this seabag and walking stick, moves towards the anonymous populace, who ‘had never set up fulfilment of his predestined role – is here, as a government of their own’. ‘We children of the silent guest, the one from whom redemp- darkness’, the narrator states, counting him- tion is expected. It takes a long time – a quar- self as one of this group, ‘were radiant with ter-century – before the task he carried out at beauty, self-reliant, bold, rebellious, inde- that time becomes, on repetition, clear to pendent, each man of us the next man’s hero’. him. At first he is simply looking for his The exclusivity that the narrator ascribes to brother. Significantly, when he glimpses a the Slovenian people is a reflection of the vision of his brother in a sort of ancestral changing consciousness of Filip Kobal, who, invocation, he is unable to bear it. The hallu- like Amalia from Kafka’s The Castle, learns to cinatory apparition, with eyes set so deep bear the imposed destiny of the exile as a that their ‘white blindness remained hidden’, mark of honour. One of the least understood completely overwhelms Filip, forcing him attributes of the Jewish diasporic people is to immediately leave the sight of the appari- the fact that, as Hannah Arendt makes clear, tion, and to find rescue taking up his own way ‘Jews neither knew what power really was – in the stream of the passing crowd. In the 6 messianic tradition, it is not a matter of the circumstances almost infallibly curtail that separated falling into each other’s arms; more which, in a nicely worked out story, is laid important is that the effort be sustained, that out as possibility. The narrator’s fear that he the younger succeeds the elder, the student could similarly be snuffed out, as his brother becomes the teacher, and that the redemp- was before him, haunts his written-down tory ‘pious wish’ – the wish, expressed in one memories as a feeling of powerlessness. All of Gregor’s letters from the front, to enter the same, the temporal structure of his report the Ninth Country in the Easter vigil carriage shows us that he has managed to survive for – be given earthly fulfilment, ‘in writing’. a good number of years. A quarter-century The text of Repetition constitutes this has passed since the young Filip Kobal found fulfilment. The book is the Easter vigil car- his inner storyteller. Looking back, it be- riage, in which the separated members of comes clear to the forty-five-year-old that, at the Kobal family may sit together once more. the time, he would not have been able to tell The composition of the text is thus no pro- the story of homeland to anyone. It is a fane matter. From the outset, the storyteller lengthy process of gestation by which indif- is aware of the difficulty of the task set before ferent scraps of one’s own life transform into him. He remembers, significantly, how his thought-provoking images; and even when mother, ‘whenever I had been out of the the ancient fragments seem to be gathered house for any length of time, in town or alone into a sensible pattern, the storyteller is in the woods or out in the fields, assailed me plagued by doubts, never to be fully assuaged, with her “Tell me!”’; and how at that time, as to whether what he holds in his hands are before she fell ill, he never succeeded in tell- only a matter of ‘the last remnants, leftovers, ing her. We can assume, from the fact that his shards of something irretrievably lost, which mother’s illness helps him to overcome his no artifice could put together again’. The fact narrative block, that one of the principal that, despite this difficulty, and despite such tasks of storytelling is to soothe. One of the scruples, Repetition presents us over and requirements for the administration of such over with passages – like the one cited above, an artistic practice, so closely related to that recounting the waiter at night – which almost of medicine, is the readiness to stay awake communicate a sense of levitation, seems through the night. Already for the schoolboy to me a mark of the exceptional quality of this Kobal, ‘the one lighted window in the teach- story, whose secret ideal, so it seems to me, ers’ house’ – and not ‘the trembling little is one of lightness. Not that the narrator is flame beside the altar’ – was the true, eternal carefree or lighthearted; but instead of talk- light, which would not let hopes for redemp- ing about his burdens, he turns to his senses tion be extinguished. In Handke’s work, in order to produce something that could learning and teaching are ways of conserving help him and his reader – who may also be in the world. This is exemplified inRepetition need of comfort – to resist the temptation of by his brother’s notebooks, written in melancholy. The professional role model Slovenian and dealing primarily with the chosen by Filip Kobal for his own narrative cultivation of fruit, which Filip brings with work is that of the roadmender, who is re- him on his travels, and which become a text- sponsible for the upkeep of the roads in the book for his approach to life. On the example area, and who, like the author in his hut, of his brother’s writings, he realizes that lives in a one-room house which resembles those ‘who, unlike the great mass of those the porter’s lodge of a manor – despite there who speak and write, had the gift of bringing being no such manor in the vicinity. This words and through them things to life’, and roadmender, who, like the writer, carries out who are prepared to devote themselves un- his laborious work day after day, on occasion ceasingly to this strange art, are able to pro- transforms suddenly into a sign painter, duce a healing effect on others. The traceless standing high upon a ladder outside the en- disappearance of his brother in the Second trance to the inn at the centre of the village. World War also symbolizes how cruelly ‘As I watched him’, recounts the narrator, 7 ‘adding a shadowy line to a finished letter same angle, where, as the narrator reports, with a strikingly slow brushstroke, aerating, the stubbly grass hardly trembles, bean or as it were, a thick letter with a few hair-thin potato plants hardly sway, and on whose lines, and then conjuring up the next letter ground therefore, ‘without fear of one an- from the blank surface, as though it had been other, the beasts of the Karst could assemble, there all along and he was only retracing it, a stocky little roe deer along with a hare and I saw in this nascent script the emblem of a a herd of wild pigs’. To this image of peace- hidden, nameless, all the more magnificent able unity, animated by reference to the ark, and above all unbounded kingdom.’ I don’t is inscribed the hope that, despite prevalent know if the forced relation between hard unfavourable conditions, something of our drudgery and airy magic, particularly signifi- natural homeland may yet be saved. cant for the literary art, has ever been more beautifully documented than in the pages of Repetition describing the roadmender and 1 By 1982, the list of secondary literature contained sign painter. It is also important that the around two-hundred entries. work of this man, chosen by the narrator as 2 The stream of secondary literature has certainly his preceptor, is done outside: that it does not dried up in the eighties, yet it relates what Handke not place the landscape in a frame, as is oth- has written in the past decade mostly to his earlier writings. To this is added the fact that most of what is erwise the case with art, but instead brings published on Handke’s newer work is of a distinctly the landscape into alignment with itself. polemic character. For a long time now, there can be no The extraordinary openness of the text of question of an objective study of one of the most impor- Repetition arises from its presentation of the tant authors of contemporary literature. [Cf. J. Lohmann, ‘Handke-Beschimpfung oder Der Stillstand der Kritik’, external as something much more important Tintenfaß H. 2, 1981.] Characteristic­ of the increasing than the internal. Accordingly, the model for distanciation of literary scholars is Manfred Durzak’s the true place of the narrator, as Filip Kobal Peter Handke und die deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur, pub- realizes in hindsight, is the shed in his father’s lished in 1982. Clearly unconvinced by the ideas devel- field: ‘I’ve gone directly to the fields from oped by Handke in the three books of Slow Homecoming, Durzak criticizes the roguishness, the lack of a connec- school, and I’m sitting there at the table with tion to social reality, and in particular the ‘stylistic poin- my homework.’ This shed, as he now knows, tillism, which endlessly compiles details with no ap- was and is ‘the centre of the world, where the parent necessity, and misses the vision of a poetic image storyteller sits in a cave no larger than a way- which brings all together’. My translation; originally side shrine and tells his story’. The field shed cited from N. Honsza (ed.), Zu Peter Handke – Zwischen Experiment und Tradition (Stuttgart, 1982), p. 108. the narrator has in mind here, like the sukkah of a different tradition, is a place of rest on 3 Cf. B. Heinrichs, ‘Der Evangelimann. Glücksmärchen, Wanderpredigt, Lesefolter: Die the journey through the desert, and its peri- Wiederholung’, Die Zeit, 3. X. 1986. odic reconstruction, in a civilization which sets ever sharper limits upon what is appro- 4 My translation; originally cited from H. Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totalitärer Herrschaft, Vol. 1: priate for human nature, is a ritual of remem- Antisemitismus (Frankfurt, Berlin, Wien, 1975), p. 54. brance for an outdoor life. In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illu- ——— minates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed Translated from the German by Nathaniel Davis. here with astounding caution and precision; Originally published as ‘Jenseits der Grenze’ in in doing so, he succeeds in making the text Unheimliche Heimat (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), 162–78. into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day This translation was commissioned and published by by day. The book of the journey through the The Last Books in 2013. Karst, over which the infamous bora wind www.thelastbooks.org blows, resembles thus the dolinas: sinkholes which lie beneath the wind, islands of still- ness, surrounded by trees, all bent at the 8