Peter Handke: The Austrian Nobel laureate turned 80 – Orgylos, subversive, wizard of language

“Have I told you that?” one asks. “Two, if not three times” replies the other. “What to do, that’s how it is with short stories when you get old.” Two extraordinary old gentlemen walk and talk in his latest work Peter Handke with the title “Dialogical discussion” which is staged the day after tomorrow in a theatrical adaptation at the famous Burgtheater in Vienna. One complains about the groups of young people who flood the sidewalks without paying attention to him, although his horoscope promised him in the morning: “Today you are irresistible!”. The other remembers his grandfather, the sadist who whitewashed wasps’ nests in the trees so that they would die. Reminiscence and search for coordinates in today’s changed world, associative rhymes with shreds of memories, thoughts and observations, thoughtful interjections of old age. After all, the author himself turned 80 years old.

Decades have passed since the revolutionary for its time, 1966 play Cursing the Audience. That same year, then only twenty-four years old, the young Handke dared to tell the best writers of postwar Germany gathered at Princeton that they were “incapable of describing the world.” Complaint of uneasiness, rage over trifles. And as so often one must trace the origin of the rage to Handke’s childhood, which he spent in poverty in his native Griffen, Carinthia, Austria. His mother is a washerwoman, her husband drinks and beats her. Just before graduating from high school, the son learns the truth: the drunkard is just his stepfather, himself the illegitimate child of a German soldier. In 1961 he began law studies in Graz, which he abandoned when the Suhrkamp house accepted the manuscript of his first work, published in 1965 under the title “Wasps”. His mother would commit suicide in 1971, and her son chronicled her life and death in the nonfiction book Careless Misfortune.

A modern classic

Just then, in the 60s and 70s, Handke establishes himself as one of the rebels in the German-speaking literary firmament. His most classic titles also date back to those years: “The goalkeeper’s agony at the moment of the penalty”, “The hour of true feeling”, “The left-handed woman”, “The Chinese man of pain”. The questioning of trivial cognitive schemes for the perception of reality is the most characteristic feature of Handke’s thought and prose.

All these years he has been struggling to shape a modern “epic writing”, through which reality is left to sing its own song without the mutterings and fictions and doctoring of our own stereotypes about it, without the vise of the prescribed meanings. It is a poetic and painful writing, almost torturous for the reader. He will surrender to her without a fight, if he discovers her secret.

A failed political intervention

Peter Handke also tried to oppose the stereotypes during his political period par excellence, in the 90s, when with a series of texts and travel notes he styled the Western choices in relation to the disintegrating Yugoslavia. He tried to show that the absolute culpability of only one side in a civil war and the willful blindness to the responsibilities of the other is absurdity and gross injustice. He did not make it. The public sphere could not accept a famous writer who undermined in one way or another the legitimization of the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia. Handke was declared excommunicated. “I am a private person in the Greek sense”, said the author in an interview, confirming in his own way the role of waste from the municipality and the market. Despite all this, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019 for his multifaceted and innovative writing work.

The angry young man is now an ambassador. At his home in Saville outside Paris he still writes every day, on white paper with a pencil and eraser next to him. Otherwise he goes about like all old gentlemen, he is anxious to get his oil in time for the winter, he is afraid that one night he will go to sleep and not wake up again, he talks to his daughters, he travels less because the seats on airplanes are now too uncomfortable, he does walks in the forest picking mushrooms and when the day is sunny he goes to the pond nearby. There is an Italian restaurant on the bank that makes amazing artichokes with shrimp.

Read the News today and get the latest news.
Follow Skai.gr on Google News and be the first to know all the news.