December 15th, 2010 / 2:51 pm
Craft Notes
Ken Baumann
Craft Notes
Peter Handke on American Writers
Generously translated and sent by Paul Buchholz.
ZEIT: Do you like American writers?HANDKE: Not the recent ones. I’m always thinking again: how wonderful literature would be without all these period-, family- and society-novels. [Theodor] Fontane could maybe still do that, but today it’s a form of sagging culture. I translated Walker Percy, The Last Gentlemen and The Moviegoer, that is a great author. And I love Thomas Wolfe, his novel Look Homeward, Angel. These books have something lyrical, that is absolutely a part of them. With Jonathan Franzen for instance it doesn’t appear at all. He follows a knitting pattern, a scheme. Philip Roth is in the end only a master of ceremonies. But reading is an adventure. In a book, also in a society novel, its seeking movement has to be there in the language. There is no epic literature without a lyrical element. But that has completely disappeared from American literature. There have to be outbreaks, a controlled letting-oneself-go, not this recipe-like writing. Something has to emit from the author, whether that comes from his being lost or from his pain. When, with an author, one only sees the making–to avoid the word Mache [style]–that’s not enough.
Tags: american, epic literature, paul buchholz, peter handke, writing, zeit
I don’t agree with a lot of Handke’s opinions. But I do think he is probably a better writer than almost any living American. Not sure where the idea that America has supplanted anyone as far as literature goes comes from.
Thanks for posting this. Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams) is essential. So very, very essential.
Thanks for posting this. Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams) is essential. So very, very essential.
I’m in the middle of Mikael Niemi’s Popular Music from Vittula, and it’s a strange, fresh little novel–I’m surprised more people aren’t familiar with it. I also loved Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, but that’s definitely a more traditional realist work.
I always get new things from your website
Thank You.
et tu, Peter?
When Peter Handke, of all people, can’t see American Literature beyond the mountain range of Franzen et al… are we truly lost?
(by the way… love the photo)
(EDIT: Oh, as a second comment: I’ve been thinking for quite some time that if France has been the epicenter for ‘new literature’ for the past century… America has surely supplanted them for this century . . . but of course, that’s not considering that American literature is more easily available to me than translations of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Slavic, Skandinavian, Japanese etc. literature.)
(EDIT #2: Apart from Tove Jansson (Swedish, known as a writer of children’s books, wrote at least two ‘conventional’ non-children’s books late in life) I really can’t think of any modern Scandinavian writers who interest me. (Not withstanding Tove is no longer alive, oh well.) …The Swedish invasion seems to comprise only suspense novels, so far as I’ve been able to discern. (At least among those that’ve been lucky enough to be translated.) I hope someone here can inform me otherwise…. .)
I don’t agree with a lot of Handke’s opinions. But I do think he is probably a better writer than almost any living American. Not sure where the idea that America has supplanted anyone as far as literature goes comes from.
i find this quote kind of compelling. i like the “emit[ing] from the author” bit, the criticizing of recipes. i have appreciated many lyrical writers, like Woolf, Joyce, Beckett. i think the word “personal” is more inclusive than “lyrical,” or “emotional.” Salinger moves me, but he is not, except for in very small bursts, lyrical. But he has an idiosyncratic style and he’s not a recipe-writer. Tao has a number of recognizable styles, and he’s used several of them multiple times, and he’s written many things i wouldn’t describe as lyrical, but there’s a personal and emotional element that is, I think, always there, if you see it.
Thanks for posting this. Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams) is essential. So very, very essential.
I’m in the middle of Mikael Niemi’s Popular Music from Vittula, and it’s a strange, fresh little novel–I’m surprised more people aren’t familiar with it. I also loved Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, but that’s definitely a more traditional realist work.
McSweeney’s devoted half an issue purely to Icelandic writers:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/subscribe/issue15intro.html
I think he’s talking about the American hype machine more than American literature.
Or writing school writing?
He’s on to something here.
I do think M.C. Roth achieves more than Herr Handke describes and find his dismissal somewhat surprising, mostly because Roth’s strength is as a comic writer and I’ve often found Handke amusing (in spots) for the same reasons I find Roth funny—when they both veer toward the demented, that is.
He’s then asked about loving your characters (or something like that).
Perhaps the appropriate follow-up would have been to ask him about contemporary writers of the American South, as he dusts off and cites Percy and Faulker. It’s no wonder those two writers would appeal to him. Maybe ask about Cormac McCarthy.
I don’t know. He seems to have his mind made up.
Sorry. He cites Wolfe, not Faulker.
Faulkner. (Jesus.)
Him citing Wolfe when talking about Roth and Franzen is appropriate, as they all three write the same type of novels. Only Wolfe somehow comes across as less of a poser. Well, he certainly was less of one than Franzen.
Faulting novelists for not instilling a ‘lyrical’ element in their prose is a very German complaint, really.
I think, in as much as there are problems with ‘American Literature’, these are not the ones.
The whole interview is interesting (the current book, the Serbian stuff, literature, listening to Johnny Cash on an old boombox). The occasion is the publication of Handke’s latest, a dream-book, »Ein Jahr aus der Nacht gesprochen« (A Year Told At Night). A discussion of how he put the book together and what’s in it, and includes this exchange:
Zeit: Is this material for dream interpretation?
Handke: That wasn’t my motive. I took notes because dream-language is a form of literature. Sometimes these night-time sentences hang around in my head all day long, like: “The light must fall on everyone as it fell on a Chipa Dakota.”
Zeit: What is that?
Handke: I don’t know.
[…] Peter Handke — HTMLGiant und Zeit […]
Thanks Aych, I’ll check him out. On a similar subject of campainging-for-others-books, I’m still trying my best to get people to read Oisin Curran.
Also, thanks Kevo. I’ll check out the — oh, fuck… it’s lain out in typical McSweeney’s “isn’t the uselessly endless single column exciting” fashion… well, maybe there’ll be something cool, here.
EDIT: I seem to have missed the ‘flood’ they mentioned in my very haphazard scan. But if they’ve published all these authors in the book and won’t mention their names then I’ll never find out about them… unless I find their journal in a bookstore and write their names down — perhaps I can find one, out here in the wilderness.
Glad people found this interesting. Handke has cultivated an America-mythos in many of his novels, quotes songs by American musicians, but I’d never heard him comment on contemporary literature so directly.
I guess I distantly and somewhat reflexively agree with what he’s saying, though what I find most interesting is how he uses genre-categories to bracket out this contemporary writing (in particular, family-novels). It’s not so much interesting in understanding contemporary American writing (since he likely doesn’t go digging for the most obscure interesting things) as it is in showcasing, ex negativo, his own current ideas about poetic creation.
Which, if the translation of accurate, wasn’t the question… unless we’re missing something they were discussing just previously… .
Paul Buchholz, when is the world going to get to see more of your novel?
The sense I’m getting about the lyrical is that it’s the result of some pressure in the narrative – it’s pushed there or it finds itself there – not just lyric writing for the sake of lyric writing. That at the right moments the book really takes you somewhere, which I don’t think is quite the same as merely asking for more lyricism.
Ken? I’m lost.
That’s why people don’t like Franzen’s novels – because they only see their “making”?
The “lyrical element” has “completely disappeared from American literature”? – and Franzen is exemplary of this “literature”-wide absence??
A lastingly successful lyricism characterizes Wolfe’s novels?
Contemporary American novels suffer from their not disclosing enough of their authors’ “being lost” and “pain”??
ha ha
why hasn’t this perspective been ‘moderated’ yet?
I know it’s not just me because older writers/readers I’ve talked to have also noticed that current/recent/modern writers are far more interested in lyricism than earlier writers. I remember, at one point in college, coming to the realization as to the importance that poetics plays in fiction writing. Before then, I simply wrote stories. But that was a real turning point for me, instead of just thinking about “what sort of weird thing can I make this character do/say” or “what sort of weird thing can I make happen”, I was now also thinking, “how can I describe this?” and “what sorts of interesting things can I do with these words?” I embarked on a mission to break any rule that was suggested to me, just to find out what exactly I was able to do and not able to do with language.
This was after the Armadillo God and the origami dogs, mind you. (Holy christ.)
…Oh, yeah… I forgot the Hair Juice. [rolls eyes]
I was a weird child.
But Handke’s [translated] description of Franzen’s writing is priceless: “He follows a knitting pattern”.
here are some handke links for you all:
http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/index.html/
http://www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com/index.html/
http://www.handkedrama3.scriptmania.com/index.html/
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html
http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/
http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HandkeDrama?authkey=Gv1sRgCOTfj7uY3emmMw#
http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKEYUGO?authkey=Gv1sRgCMy1neDq6rC14wE#
http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#
http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HandkeDrama?authkey=Gv1sRgCOTfj7uY3emmMw#
http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/COVERS?authkey=Gv1sRgCPnLkNmhx8_p-AE#
The Hub, the Navel to Todos Handke!
http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HandkeDrama?authkey=Gv1sRgCOTfj7uY3emmMw#
http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#
http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html
http://handke-watch.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html
http://handke-trivia.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html
http://handke–revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-revista-of.html
http://handke-scholar.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-handke-scholar-and-all.html
http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2010/05/links-page-for-pages-of-this-blog.html
http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/index.html/
http://www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com/index.html/
http://www.handkedrama3.scriptmania.com/index.html/
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html
http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/
Chicquita abracas a todos”
MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
Paul Buchholz, when is the world going to get to see more of your novel?
Check out the recent wave of nontraditional writers. I’m talking nontraditional, not traditional.
I’m not sure what I think of all this. What’s the general complaint; that American writers are too sociology based? Is this directed at a certain tier of writers? there is so much diversity (in German and in America) of authors I find it hard to believe it’s so easy to “lump them all together”.
http://www.imgerman.com
I’m not sure what I think of all this. What’s the general complaint; that American writers are too sociology based? Is this directed at a certain tier of writers? there is so much diversity (in German and in America) of authors I find it hard to believe it’s so easy to “lump them all together”.
http://www.imgerman.com
Hey Alan,
I wish I knew! Give it another four months, then maybe I’ll just send you a pdf. I started another one, too…. maybe give that one four years.
Hey Alan,
I wish I knew! Give it another four months, then maybe I’ll just send you a pdf. I started another one, too…. maybe give that one four years.
I would love to read it. alanshorn at gmail
Would also be interested to hear your experiences sending it out since I have something of my own to submit.
I would love to read it. alanshorn at gmail
Would also be interested to hear your experiences sending it out since I have something of my own to submit.
I would love to read it. alanshorn at gmail
Would also be interested to hear your experiences sending it out since I have something of my own to submit.
I’m not sure what I think of all this. What’s the general complaint; that American writers are too sociology based? Is this directed at a certain tier of writers? there is so much diversity (in German and in America) of authors I find it hard to believe it’s so easy to “lump them all together”.
http://www.imgerman.com
Hey Alan,
I wish I knew! Give it another four months, then maybe I’ll just send you a pdf. I started another one, too…. maybe give that one four years.
His answer desperately needed a proper follow-up.
Sounds like a good way to go about it, seeking the limits of the language. I think even older writers would be all for it as long as it all came together, as long as the narrative had some reason to go there.
Mmm, I wonder where you got the link to this interview from?
Yes, but a truncated version of the blog I posted two weeks ago and which you commented on.
http://this-space.blogspot.com/2010/12/then-controlled-letting-go-peter-handke.html
Thomas Wolfe is a writer people like to mention at cocktail parties (and during interviews) that is hardly read today.
Has anyone read “Look Homeward, Angel”? The novel has not aged well at all and is almost unreadable (unlike Faulkner or Joyce). There are probably 9,9059 adverbs and adjectives per page, nothing happens for large chunks of the novel, the “O lost” crap is like a fingernails on a chalkboard, and Wolfe’s provincial worldview and reliance on his own life experiences become grating and are both signs of a lazy writer. Thomas Wolfe is easily the most overrated American writer of the 20th C, and this is coming from a Southern writer and proud NC native. Not sure he should ever be cited as some exemplar of high-style.
Again, I wonder how many people have actually made themselves suffer through “Look Homeward, Angel,” or if it’s just hip to namedrop the novel and/or its author?
Quite a different translation. I’d like to read the entire transcript. Thoughts on Kafka and humo(u)r are interesting. I actually think Handke is funny at times for the reasons he gives. I guess he feels M.C. Roth doesn’t get at the truth.
I would love to read it. alanshorn at gmail
Would also be interested to hear your experiences sending it out since I have something of my own to submit.
Have you read Lars Gustafsson? I wouldn’t say he’s “non-traditional” necessarily, but still pretty amazing. He writes in Swedish, but lived and taught in the US for years and years.
Popular Music from Vittula is pretty great. This book was also pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive,_Super and I think you can find it in English, though it might be a UK publication which would make it a little harder. I’m reading Paris-Dakar by Jens Liljestrand right now and liking it ok, but it’s not translated, I don’t think. The thing is, there isn’t much in translation that I can think of. There are some exciting Swedish/Scandinavian writers but much of their work is untranslated. I feel there’s more poetry available. Wasn’t there a McSweeney’s Norwegian writer issue, too, recently?
The first sentence wasn’t meant to form a causal relationship with the second one; that is, I wasn’t necessarily saying the lyrical complaint was why I thought his take on American literature was off, though I could probably make a case around it, I suppose.
Mostly what I was thinking about with the first comment was the history of the novel in Germany, and how it differs sharply from other countries, in particular England and America. There’s no way around it, we ask different things of our novels, especially our ‘serious’ ones, and I do think that he was, in part, being literal in his complaint about lyricism in the novel–German novels, as we know them, developed after the other two major German genres, lyric poetry and philosophy, and the German novel very clearly bears marks of this belatedness. Their novels tend to either aim at a kind of extended prose poetry, or attaining the status of a ‘philosophical novel’ (a German invention, even), unless, of course, they’re trying to do both.
So I do think his standpoint on American fiction is probably skewed to match these characteristics, at least, though that wasn’t necessarily my point. The observation was mostly a bemused one.
More what I was thinking about in the second sentence, “these are not the problems,” was that I’m not actually convinced A) He exhibits an accurate view of American literature, and B) the points he’s making are therefore capable of ringing true. I do think you describe very accurately, and well, what he was saying, but my problem is that the ‘NOS’ or ‘turbo’ moment (if I had the time I’d just link to a clip of the muscle car hitting the train in The Fast and the Furious every time I need to refer back to this pressurized moment in the narrative) is simply a characteristic of good fiction. Different styles may be involved, but that is a moment identifiable in good and great novels across the board, the moment when the narrative’s pulse spikes and we suddenly comprehend some facet crucial to our sense of the novel, or even the world, in our better moments.
He lists three authors (Roth, Wolfe, Franzen), and I think those three come back to bite him in the ass. Even if his familiarity with the American novel penetrates further than those three (Pynchon and McCarthy themselves, in the obvious picks, refute every point he makes, even just in their fiction of the past decade), I don’t really like what he’s done with them. I have never read a letter of Franzen’s work, so I can’t speak to him, but Roth has a repertoire which is full of those moments, and beyond a prose style and a knack for broad satire, Wolfe is in many ways a very shallow writer who doesn’t hold up under the same kind of scrutiny as Roth, or others.
The main thing that comes to mind, however, is that I don’t think this special quality we’ve been discussing, and he doesn’t see in American prose (for whatever reasons), isn’t something which flowers or manifests in trends on a national level, or even a local level. Lyricism itself, yes, as a stylistic device, may do so, but this is an individual capacity. While sometimes a country produces a stalwart group of such capable individuals, to broadly swipe away a national output on these grounds, whether or not you do actually read deeply in that national output (as I don’t think he does), strikes me as dubious.
I didn’t especially elaborate, because I thought it was rather off-the-cuff comment, and he probably would have more considered views if they were probed any deeper, about this ‘lyical’ quality and possibly also American writers.
is something*, rather.
Yes, “In a book, even a social novel, the language must be the movement in search of [adventure [?]].” is quite different from Buchholz’s sentence.
–
Laughter not of hilarity, but rather a burst of discomfort. That’s superb.
When people say, ‘oh, I love X for the humor‘, and X = “Kafka”, I wonder if this is what at least a few of them mean.
It’s much worse than Handke knows. Only two writers matter in the US at the moment JAMES McCourt to relation to any of the other drunken McCourts and Alexander Theroux and I would mention myself, Thomas McGonigle and one other book The Dead of the House by Hannah Green… That is it, really
OK, this is a sentence that I probably just should have tried to render as exactly as possible without trying to make it fit English idiom.
“In einem Buch, auch in einem Gesellschaftsroman, muss sprachlich die Suchbewegung drin sein.”
Here it is, as a literal translation:
“In a book, even in a society novel, the seeking-movement must be in it linguistically.”
The subject is “seeking-movement” or “movement of seeking” (“Such-bewegung”). The other translator chose to make “language” into the subject, understandable because it’s such an odd formulation. I think the point is that searching/seeking movement, for Handke, cannot be in the book only by virtue of subject matter, but it has to be in the book “linguistically,” i.e. searching has to be manifest in the linguistic form of the book.
I wish I had known this before I spent all that money on all those books.
No, I haven’t. But checking his stuff out just now… well… I’ll just say that anyone whose work can be described as “existential” is probably somebody whose work is right up my alley. I just ordered a couple of his books; they look interesting. Thanks, man.
I’ll let you know if I like the stuff.
Incidentally, back to Tove: She’s not at all unconventional by any means… but she’s great with characters, and her writing [well, the translation, of course] is so beautifully clean. Like the best of Bergman’s films, her characters just glow, and everything else is so deliberately sparse, in a way that amplifies the characters. I’ve read “The Summer Book”, about a little girl living on an island with her distant father and her grandmother — beautiful book . . . and also “The True Deceiver” (original title Den ärliga bedragaren; literally something more like “The Sincere Deceiver”, I think, at least based on my really limited familiarity with the language — maybe you can give me a better translation, I don’t know); I liked The True Deceiver more, personally, it’s much more thought-provoking, but the Summer Book moved me on a more visceral level . . . at any rate, I happen to think everyone here who loves writers who really know how to write about just people, and common psychology, should read both of those books; they’re really, really good.
Yeah, making it actually work is the real trick. But that fiction class was fun, anyhow.
[…] is no epic literature without a lyrical element. But that has completely disappeared from American literature.” (Exercise: Define “epic.” Also, define […]
I move that we move all our writers to Germany.
the one Handke book i’ve read bored me to death, to be honest. it was no less american than any american. it’s not a geographical problem. it’s minds. lazy of him.
Which book?
‘In a book, even in a novel about ‘society’, the way-making-in-search must be therein linguistically (that is, ‘as a function of its language-usage’).’
Ha ha. Paul, your searching has to be manifest in the linguistic form of the book is MUCH better, as is “there in the language” clearer.
Looking at this sentence, I wonder if it isn’t otiose.
Don’t all novels, even ‘society’ novels, disclose, in their use of language and literary structure, whatever exploration, with respect to subject matter, their writers are (and aren’t) making?? George Eliot, Hardy, Wharton: how they make paragraphs and sentences, handle common and rare vocabulary, pace (and digress from the pace in) their stories – all sprachlich darin, eh?
What Handke might be talking about is a foregrounding, a thematic connecting of linguisticality (and of literary-ness) to whatever else is the ‘subject’. Style as critique, rather than as uncritically received and employed.
Or Austria.
So, read another, man. I wouldn’t like Barthelme if the only thing I’d read of his was Paradise.
EDIT: Granted, though, his writing can be a little dull. There’re moments here and there that you can’t help but love — psychological moments — and that’s what makes Handke, for me.
or the moon where they would not write
You know… what if there were a whole country composed of only writers? And then we had a neighboring nation composed of illustrators… and at some point there was a disagreement, and Writersland had to go to war with Illustratorsland…? Now… assuming that Filmmakersland — Writersland’s faithful ally — was busy negotiating a war between Actorsland and Cinemetographersland, and therefore couldn’t help… who would win?
DISCLAIMER: Not to say that I have anything personal against any illustrator anywhere… just throwing ideas out there, is all.
EDIT: Humanity help us if some Hollywood producer sees this and decides to turn it into a movie. [shivers]
By the way . . . for those here who know German… would his first name be pronounced PAY-der or PED-der in Austria/Germany? I suppose my best guess would be the latter, but I don’t know. This has always bothered me . . . the not-knowing.
I would find Handke’s comments more trustworthy if I hadn’t wasted a week in September trying to get through his 2007 novel “Crossing the Sierea De Gredos” and found it utterly static and pointless, and if his stated affection for Slobodan Milosevic were possible to excise from my mind while reading him. His early stuff was great and inspiring, but somewhere along the way he simply rotted from the inside out.
Yeah, you’re definitely right– I think Handke is describing a basic internal operation of prose writing, if you could call it that.
If I had to guess at what Handke is talking about specifically, I think it would be the kind of agony of naming you find in his own works, where narrators continually reflect on whether there might be a better way of saying what’s being said, and that this anxiety of naming and describing becomes the main action of the book.
I didn’t have as much time to think about this and respond to this as I’d have liked to, being stuck in that horrible blizzard airport mess in Europe now.
[…] was talking about how he didn’t like contemporary American fiction, but said that, “Walker Percy, now there’s a great novelist.” But it seems like, in the rest of the States outside the South, not that many people pay […]
Read “Slow Homecoming” then. If it bores you, you’re too young. Also, there is indeed a geographical problem, or at least a publishing problem, in the USA.
You do realise he’s talking about Thomas Wolfe and not Tom Wolfe, right? Very, very big difference there!