Peter Handke’s “Dialogue”: voices in a bed of straw straw

by time news

Sstrictly speaking, every writing is a dialogue. Even those who take notes in order to keep what seems important at the moment for a later point in time, even those who only keep a diary for themselves, are confronted with an earlier self when rereading their notes.

And enters into a kind of dialogue with this I, which he is no longer. With the special kind of writing that we call literature, however, third parties are needed, aka real readers who are not the author. This does not preclude these readers from witnessing a conversation that an author has not only with them but also with himself.

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Especially the late texts of Peter Handke often read like such a monologue. Better: like rereadings of the now very extensive work of the Nobel Prize winner for literature. If Handke’s latest volume, which is very small at around 70 pages, now has the “dialogue” itself in the title, care must be taken when answering the question of who is actually speaking to whom.

Warning: narrative

Superficially there are actually two people having a conversation here: old friends, “two special fools”, as one says to the other, “each in their own way. You, who are expecting a crowd that has never been dreamed of, and I, who in my daydream wink at my ancestors, not to say ancestors.”

However, in this dialogue it quickly becomes clear that the friends have a lot in common with Handke’s narrator characters as we know them: “But first I’ll tell you. Attention, narration. A little patience for telling, please. And then be patient with the storytelling!” begins someone who is expecting the crowd to fill an empty stage.

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“Big moment for me”

And thus cites the young Filip Kobal and his calls to the story as a muse, whom Handke sent in 1986 in “The Repetition” in search of his missing fruit farmer brother across the border to Slovenia, which was still Yugoslavia, as well as the narrator, as the author himself ten years later will travel to Serbia, which is no longer Yugoslav, to demand “slow down, patience, justice”.

Now, fool number two, whose daydream is about “the only ancestor I met in my life, my grandfather,” tells of how his ancestor once impaled a snake that had gotten into his scythe “between the teeth of a rake driven into the ground “: “The snake lived up there high above the grassland until after sunset.”

What, in a slightly modified form – a “hazel stick” has become a “rake” – could also be read in the “repetition”: “You, who not only spent the whole day at that time, but through the years in the Fork, on the stick driven into the ground, more enduring a landmark of the place than all the Sunfruit, now evaporated.”

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The legitimate question to the other person in the “dialogue” is: “Have I already told you that?” And the answer: “Twice, if not three times.” And that should be fine with me.” His friend is fine too, so right that he, who already knows the story, sets about telling it himself: “Don’t make a drama out of it. But you’ve had enough text for now. let me go now Let me play the snake text.”

Against the division

Handke’s readers are also well acquainted with this constellation, in which one tells the other about his life and is thus a stage, so to speak. For example, from the great novel “The Morawian Night” from 2008: An author who no longer writes gathers friends on a houseboat and lets them tell them about what has happened to him since he laid down his pen.

There is a point in this “dialogue” where such narration, which in an almost wondrous way blurs the boundaries between I and you, becomes a topic in itself: as he was walking past a barn, one of the two old friends reports that they are It soon became increasingly difficult to tell apart, “suddenly, suddenly, voices could be heard from the inside of the boards, that of a man and that of a woman.” No, no “hayloft whispering” – we are talking about a completely different association here.

In “my imagination, the two are still lying there, on a bed of chaff, and talking, now the man with the woman’s voice, now the woman with the man’s voice.” the power of storytelling to create community and to overcome divisions between you and me, now, yesterday and tomorrow. Which of course requires the right listeners, aka real readers.

Peter Handke: “Dialogue”. Suhrkamp, ​​72 pages, 18 euros

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