I would gladly explain the feeling of happiness which, like now, I have within me from time to time. It is really something effervescent that fills me completely with a light, pleasant quiver and that persuades me of the existence of abilities of whose non-existence I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now.
Noted: Franz Kafka
From the Diaries (translation by Joseph Kresh):
The Viewer
In re-reading Peter Handke's Across this week (see my review after my first reading and an excerpt), I took notice of one peculiar aspect of the narrative. It's a first-person narrative. The narrator's name is Andreas Loser, though at times, speaking to another character, he arbitrarily says his name is something else entirely. He uses "I" most of the time, but on occasion he refers to himself in the third person, not as "he", but as having taken on new roles at certain points in the narrative. He is, variously, "the adult" (in reference to his attitude about cards compared to when he was a child), "the teacher" (his profession), "the questioner" (having asked others for their thoughts on thresholds). After describing a dream, he becomes "the bundle on the bed" who "opened its eyes and sat up". After receiving a letter imploring him to come back to teaching, he becomes "the reader of the letter" who "sat down and wept". Earlier, he chases after a man and violence occurs: "The runner became a pursuer and pursuit meant 'action.'" And the book is divided into three sections, with the following titles: The Viewer Is Diverted, The Viewer Takes Action, and The Viewer Seeks a Witness.
It could be argued that these are merely intended to achieve some sort of ironic distance from the events of the narrative. But, in a sense, though we use "I" all the time--an I that is not without problems--do we not view ourselves in the third person? Do we not take on roles and assess our conduct in terms of those roles? (I am "the husband", "the parent", "the blogger", "the commuter", in this case "the reader".) Do we not see ourselves moving in the world as if in a narrative, at least part of the time? Perhaps this is in part to distance ourselves from the world to a necessary extent, to protect the I that projects itself onto the world. Andreas is, throughout, "the viewer"--the narrator, of course, and as such he who views the world around him, observing and describing nature, or people, or the city, or events (though he oddly seems able to view that which seems unviewable, his gaze seems to go where it logically, physically, could not), but also he who views himself in these other roles, he who views himself taking action, or not taking action, speaking, doing, being: he who views himself writing, and he who translates what the I experiences into writing.
It could be argued that these are merely intended to achieve some sort of ironic distance from the events of the narrative. But, in a sense, though we use "I" all the time--an I that is not without problems--do we not view ourselves in the third person? Do we not take on roles and assess our conduct in terms of those roles? (I am "the husband", "the parent", "the blogger", "the commuter", in this case "the reader".) Do we not see ourselves moving in the world as if in a narrative, at least part of the time? Perhaps this is in part to distance ourselves from the world to a necessary extent, to protect the I that projects itself onto the world. Andreas is, throughout, "the viewer"--the narrator, of course, and as such he who views the world around him, observing and describing nature, or people, or the city, or events (though he oddly seems able to view that which seems unviewable, his gaze seems to go where it logically, physically, could not), but also he who views himself in these other roles, he who views himself taking action, or not taking action, speaking, doing, being: he who views himself writing, and he who translates what the I experiences into writing.
Marx is Icky
As I've mentioned previously in discussing my recent forays into Marx and Marxian economics, I've found the work so helpful and to be of such great explanatory power that it seems to me that capitalists, simply in order to understand their own system better, would do well to be up on their Marx. But of course classical or neo-liberal economists are not capitalists, but apologists for capitalism, technicians who differ on only particulars, for all their claims to be scientific and empirical. For them as for so many of us, it seems clear, capitalism is simply the natural order of things. Though, as Harvey makes abundantly evident in his The Limits to Capital, there have been numerous bourgeois critiques of Marx and Marxian theory over the years, I get the sense that real liberal engagement with the work has long since dried up, as if merely touching Capital, let alone taking the ideas seriously enough to work through them, is tantamount to signing the forms for a re-education camp or personally approving of the evils of Stalin or Pol Pot.
Now via jane dark I learn of the news that Emmanuel Saez has been awarded the Clark medal, which apparently is of some importance in the world of economics. We are told by Economic Principals that "his most striking finding has been to confirm the widespread intuition that income inequality has been increasing". This is astonishing. That this is news, that is, worthy of an award in economics. As jane says, the rising inequality over the last 30+ years has been common knowledge for quite a long time. But of course, that it's common knowledge is not so damning on its own; after all, science is always somehow or finally validating what has been or ought to be (or once was) common knowledge, so nothing new there. However, as jane also points out, there have been numerous studies on this very topic over the last decade or so; it has been explored in incredible detail by researchers and economists on the left. But of course Marx is icky. What you have then is a purported science, which because of ideological blinders refuses to take notice of important work. Again, to close, jane puts it best:
Now via jane dark I learn of the news that Emmanuel Saez has been awarded the Clark medal, which apparently is of some importance in the world of economics. We are told by Economic Principals that "his most striking finding has been to confirm the widespread intuition that income inequality has been increasing". This is astonishing. That this is news, that is, worthy of an award in economics. As jane says, the rising inequality over the last 30+ years has been common knowledge for quite a long time. But of course, that it's common knowledge is not so damning on its own; after all, science is always somehow or finally validating what has been or ought to be (or once was) common knowledge, so nothing new there. However, as jane also points out, there have been numerous studies on this very topic over the last decade or so; it has been explored in incredible detail by researchers and economists on the left. But of course Marx is icky. What you have then is a purported science, which because of ideological blinders refuses to take notice of important work. Again, to close, jane puts it best:
The whole news event of this prize, then, is on par with granting the latest Fields medal for long division. What to make of this? Is the fact that the guild of professional economics doesn't know the extant scholarship relevant to their own field more shocking than the fact they are just reaching these easily reachable and socially fundamental conclusions out now? Or is the oddest element the hubris whereby knowledge can't be true — despite empirical evidence — until a guild member says it? In any case, welcome to reality, economists: you are making any attempt to take seriously your institutional field rather challenging.
Noted: Peter Handke
From Across (translation by Ralph Manheim):
Now I had time. Facts and questions crystallized. This having-time wasn't a feeling; it was a resolution: the resolution of all my contradictory feelings. It was a jolt and a widening; disengagement and devotion; defenselessness and the ability to resist; quiescence and enterprise. Its occurrence was rare. Perhaps what is commonly called a "state of grace" should be called a "state of having time." It had its counterpart in a traditional paraphrase of the threshold concept as a "transition between privation and riches." In a state of having-time, a murmur spread over the countryside, colors shone, grasses trembled, moss cushions puffed up.
How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!
Two quotations from Walden, to begin:
Why is Thoreau out of step, Walden in particular? Here is a guy who writes about nature, about divorcing himself for a period of time from the regular flow of society, about simplicity, about working with nature, not against it, about the flow of the seasons, the battles of ants and songs of birds and and rise and fall and freezing of ponds. Everything else we learn in school is geared towards speed, efficiency, in one way or another, and here is a guy from the ancient past--before the Civil War!--asking not only us but his already impossibly slow contemporaries (from our perspective) to slow down. More precisely, school is designed so that we learn how to fit in, how to be good cogs in the liberal capitalist world, how not to think for ourselves, or really when not to, how to shape ourselves for maximum value in the "real world".
Thoreau, in Walden as much as in "Civil Disobedience" (which if we read it at all in high school would have been framed in such a way so that its true import was necessarily muted), is pitched against all of this. What he offers, frankly, is a necessary rebuke. There are times, to be sure, when he sounds preachy, like a scold, but this is not what I mean. The book is a rebuke in its very essence. And reading Walden I had a feeling I've had often in recent years, the feeling that I am not free.
The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!And one from "Civil Disobedience":
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness.
[T]hey who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property.As I know was true of most Americans, and possibly still is, when I was in high school we were forced to read excerpts from Walden. I couldn't have been more bored. Is there any writer more out of step with high school students than Thoreau? A writer less likely to appeal to such readers? (Perhaps Hawthorne, whose The Scarlet Letter we were also forced to read, over the course of one interminable month. A month! The novel's not 300 pages long!) I used to make fun of Thoreau--not only was he boring, but he wasn't even what he claimed, was he? He wasn't authentic! He wasn't really out in the wilderness, right? Not that I knew what I was talking about, but I'd heard in passing something to the effect of this or that and certainly I was eager to find some reason to dismiss a writer, to feel as if I needn't bother. But, in any event, of course these concerns were not really the point. (And they were not helped by the fact that all we ever read were short excerpts, pretty much of anything, excerpts or short stories. The only full works of literature of any length I remember us reading were the aforementioned Hawthorne and the ubiquitous The Great Gatsby. Worse, these excerpts were packaged in such a way to almost invite dismissal--Thoreau of course would have been carefully placed in the section helpfully designated "The Transcendentalists"--particularly given how we were expected to relate to these writings, as works with Themes and Meanings and whatnot. I always struggled mightily with this: how was I to know what the right answer was?)
Why is Thoreau out of step, Walden in particular? Here is a guy who writes about nature, about divorcing himself for a period of time from the regular flow of society, about simplicity, about working with nature, not against it, about the flow of the seasons, the battles of ants and songs of birds and and rise and fall and freezing of ponds. Everything else we learn in school is geared towards speed, efficiency, in one way or another, and here is a guy from the ancient past--before the Civil War!--asking not only us but his already impossibly slow contemporaries (from our perspective) to slow down. More precisely, school is designed so that we learn how to fit in, how to be good cogs in the liberal capitalist world, how not to think for ourselves, or really when not to, how to shape ourselves for maximum value in the "real world".
Thoreau, in Walden as much as in "Civil Disobedience" (which if we read it at all in high school would have been framed in such a way so that its true import was necessarily muted), is pitched against all of this. What he offers, frankly, is a necessary rebuke. There are times, to be sure, when he sounds preachy, like a scold, but this is not what I mean. The book is a rebuke in its very essence. And reading Walden I had a feeling I've had often in recent years, the feeling that I am not free.
Untimely
I was protective of my reading of Slow Homecoming. I'm protective of my reading anyway, but I knew I needed to not lose the oh so fragile thread here. For the book is quiet, read in spurts the prose doesn't gel, for me, it loses something. As Benjamin Kunkel puts it in his very fine introduction to the new NYRB edition of the novel, "you are asked only to pay attention", attention that is often difficult to give. Kunkel also says that it is "not an easy book to read on a subway or in an airport, or in a café where recorded music blares, or if you are anxious to check your e-mail" etc; sure enough, my reading, of any kind, of any book, is done primarily on trains and subways, amid crowds of people. It is all I can do to shut them out. (This is the main reason why I sometimes think that I have not done this or that book justice.) With Slow Homecoming, the Sebaldian second section "The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire"--Sebaldian because our narrator follows in the footsteps, for a time, of a famous artist, in this case Cézanne--perhaps suffered the most for this, but I was fortunately able to stay with Handke. (Meanwhile, I say "Sebaldian" knowing full well that this first appeared in 1979, well before Sebald's own fiction was first published.)
I like how Kunkel concludes his introduction (which can be seen online here; link via Twitchelmore):
I like how Kunkel concludes his introduction (which can be seen online here; link via Twitchelmore):
Americans won't feel quite the same need as an Austrian of Handke's generation to wake from historical habits of mind and action into a patient, slow, form-discovering style of careful attention. But it does seem that such wakefulness grows at once harder and more valuable as electronic noise and communications crowd the margins of our thoughts—and here is a book, more untimely today than when it was first published, from which anyone might receive an image of what Handke calls "being able to live an acceptable life even at cross-purposes to the times."It is often said that the novel, contemporary fiction, should reflect the time in which it is written, should rather be like the time, that the fast-paced novel, the information-rich novel, the post-modern novel in which everything goes, everything is, is more relevant, more necessary. I submit that a novel like Slow Homecoming, out of time, quiet, slow, and yet not old fashioned, is necessary for giving us the experiences of what is--or at least what might be--lost in the rush forward.
Thoughts on Handke's Slow Homecoming
Of the Peter Handke fiction I've read to date, I loved Across, admired The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and have thus far struggled and failed with Repetition (meanwhile, The Left-Handed Woman didn't leave much of an impression on me at all). I've written in most of those posts linked to above about how I find Handke's prose elusive, as if the text resists me, or as if I resist the text. There is something quite simple about his writing, yet perhaps that very simplicity implies depth and this implication is the wall I hit when I read. I try to force the words to say more than they do, or I try to force meaning out of the simple prose. Then, of course, there is the truth that the prose is occasionally slippery: a clear, beautiful description of a landscape and people or things in it will suddenly become something else, to the narrator, an image, and this something else by itself may be clearly, precisely described, but as appended to the end of the other description a sense of vagueness creeps in. But then the narrator, or the character whose point of view is narrated, is experiencing this uncertainty, so the reader may as well too.
My experience with Slow Homecoming (see this for a short passage) was both similar to these other books and more immediate, more successful, as a reading experience. In places I stumbled, as previously, but here and there, and more and more often, I would hit a vein, where the writing seems to take on the quality of thought, as if thought is happening on the page, as I read. In this, Slow Homecoming reminds me of the better stories in Ingeborg Bachmann's The Thirtieth Year--I'm thinking in particular of "A Wildermuth", which I previously excerpted, as well as "Everything". (The latter story is similar, too, to "Child Story", the third part in Slow Homecoming, in that, in both, a man considers a child, his child, observes the child in context, against his own expectations and those of society, thinks through the problems the child presents, for him or herself as well as for the family.) It is this quality of thought, this thinking on the page, not thinking of ideas in the sense of the Novel of Ideas, but thinking nonetheless, the illusion that the words don't exist until I encounter them on the page, it primarily is this quality, I think, along with the mythical/allegorical aspect of the work, that gives Slow Homecoming the unique effect it has. This effect is the sense that one is encountering anew the work of art. That writing is happening and that this writing is writing that somehow writes what usually eludes writing. And perhaps it is this very quality that makes the reading so often elusive. In this way Slow Homecoming strikes me as a necessary novel for these times.
My experience with Slow Homecoming (see this for a short passage) was both similar to these other books and more immediate, more successful, as a reading experience. In places I stumbled, as previously, but here and there, and more and more often, I would hit a vein, where the writing seems to take on the quality of thought, as if thought is happening on the page, as I read. In this, Slow Homecoming reminds me of the better stories in Ingeborg Bachmann's The Thirtieth Year--I'm thinking in particular of "A Wildermuth", which I previously excerpted, as well as "Everything". (The latter story is similar, too, to "Child Story", the third part in Slow Homecoming, in that, in both, a man considers a child, his child, observes the child in context, against his own expectations and those of society, thinks through the problems the child presents, for him or herself as well as for the family.) It is this quality of thought, this thinking on the page, not thinking of ideas in the sense of the Novel of Ideas, but thinking nonetheless, the illusion that the words don't exist until I encounter them on the page, it primarily is this quality, I think, along with the mythical/allegorical aspect of the work, that gives Slow Homecoming the unique effect it has. This effect is the sense that one is encountering anew the work of art. That writing is happening and that this writing is writing that somehow writes what usually eludes writing. And perhaps it is this very quality that makes the reading so often elusive. In this way Slow Homecoming strikes me as a necessary novel for these times.
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