world in a different manner, almost seem to
me to be conceived in order to put a stopto this critical and scholarly game. The author
clearly paid a dear price for this insolence –whether unintentional or strategic – throughwhich the author secured for his writings aclaim to a certain discretion after publication.
What unsettled critics more than anythingelse was Handke’s new and, one could say,programmatic design for the visualization ofa more beautiful world by virtue of language
alone. Neither critics nor scholars managed
to come up with much to say about the many
wonderfully-built textual arcs of ‘Child Story’or ‘The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire’,
except to designate them as examples of theabstruse extravagance of Handke in his latest
phase. Since then readers have retreated,scholars have for the most part liquidated
their interests (if I’m not mistaken), and as
for the critics, who were naturally the most
exposed, some have felt compelled to publicly rescind their confidence in Handke.3
In recent years it has come to a point where
Handke’s new works may still be reviewed,
but these reviews are as a rule formed byanimosity, either open or concealed. Even the
few positive commentaries exhibit a strange
perplexity and a palpable discomfort. In
every case, the metaphysic developed in
Handke’s newer books, which aims to translate the seen and perceived into language,
remains undiscussed. There is obviously
no longer a contemporary discourse in which
metaphysics may claim a place. And yet art,
wherever and whenever it may take place,bears the closest ties to the realm of metaphysics. In order to explore this proximity,
the writer requires a courage which should
not be underestimated; for critics and scholars who see metaphysics as a kind of junkcloset, it is naturally easy to be satisfied withthe general admonishment that, in the higher
realms, the air is thin and the danger of falling
great. What I want to do now is not to discuss
the particularities of this distanciation fromPeter Handke – nor do I want to be temptedby the considerable task of sketching thepsychology and sociology of the parasitic
species that takes literature as its host; instead, I simply want to experimentally

Across the Border:
Peter Handke’s Repetition
W. G. Sebald
	‘The journeys of men should lead towhere they have come from.’(Shlomo of Karlin)
In recent years, there are few clearer examples of the misunderstanding between culture
and culture industry than that of Peter
Handke. Around the time of his return toAustria it was considered as a given that thisauthor, who from the very beginning has
stood at the centre of public scrutiny, represented the highest class of contemporary
German-language literature. The specificnarrative genre he developed succeeded bydint of its completely original linguistic andimaginative precision, through which – inworks such as The Goalie’s Anxiety or
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams – the author reports
and meditates upon the silent catastrophes
that continuously befall the human interior.
It is particularly worth noting, retrospectively, the ways in which these texts manage
to satisfy the demands of the book market,
without giving up any claim to ‘literary’ status.
The secret of this success, I venture, is that
Handke’s narratives – though doubtlessly
formed from high artistic understanding andtrue feeling – are hardly at odds with an ideaof literature which critics are ready or able
to understand. Handke’s texts were accessible; even after a quick perusal, all kinds ofprogressive observations could be applied tothem. Handke likewise laid no overlarge
obstacles in the way of literary criticism. In
the shortest time, numerous essays, analyses
and monographs were written up and
Handke’s work was subsumed into the canon.1
Already with the appearance of the threebooks of Slow Homecoming, however, theengagement with Handke became more hesitant.2 Far more hermetic, far more difficult to
describe, these works, which observe the1process a few things regarding the book
Repetition, which upon first reading in 1986
made a great and, as I have since learned,
lasting impression on me.
Repetition is the report of a summer
journey to Slovenia, undertaken in 1960 or
1961 by a young man named Filip Kobal, on
the trail of his missing older brother Gregor.
The reporter and narrator is Filip Kobal
himself, who looks back on the time from a
distance of a quarter century. As much as welearn from him about the young Filip Kobal,
the currently middle-aged narrator is unwilling to give us much information regarding
his present identity. It’s almost as if he, who
we can recognize only by his words, is themissing brother himself, whose trail the
young Filip Kobal is following. The beneficial
effect that this search for clues, described by
Handke, has on the reader, is rooted in thefollowing constellation: that the young Kobal
is lead by the older, for whom he is searching,
and that protagonist and narrator, separated
from each other only by passed time, relate toeach other like the two brothers who are thesubjects of Handke’s story.
Directly upon passing his final exams,
Filip Kobal leaves his home – his old father,
his ailing mother, and his confused sister –and travels across the border to the country
on the other side of the Karawanks, whencecame the Kobals, and where Gregor fledwhen he was drafted into the German army in
the mid-thirties, in order to study the cultivation of fruit trees at the agricultural schoolin Maribor. The crossing of the border opens
up a new kingdom for Filip. Although theindustrial city of Jesenice, the first stop of his
journey, ‘grey on grey, squeezed into a narrow valley, shut in between two shade-casting mountains’, in no way corresponds to the
picture Filip had imagined to himself of thisneighbouring empire as a collection of ‘cities
resplendent with colour, spreading out overa wide plain, […] the one merging with thenext all the way to the sea’ – nevertheless, as
the narrator specifically remarks, the city
‘fully confirmed my anticipation’. Jesenice isactually the entryway to a new world. Filip
notices how the droves of people going about
their business, unlike in the small cities of his

homeland, ‘took notice of me now and thenbut never stared’, and the longer he observes
his surroundings, the more certain he becomes ‘that this was a great country’. In the
train-station tavern he dreams of being accepted into the population of this great country, amidst a people that he envisages as
being ‘on an unceasing, peaceful, adventurous, serene journey through the night, a journey in which the sleeping, the sick, the dying,even the dead were included’. The normallymostly light-flooded empire, in this passage
drowned in darkness, which Filip Kobal sees
himself entering, is qualitatively as far removed as is thinkable from the false homeland from which, according to the synopsis
of his previous years, he escapes ‘after almost
twenty years in a non-place, in a frosty, unfriendly, cannibalistic village’. As the narrator
remarks, Filip Kobal’s feeling of freedom iscompletely concrete, for in contrast to his‘so-called native land’, the country on whosethreshold he stands lays claim to him not ‘inthe name of compulsory education or compulsory military service’, but rather, as thenarrator in turn states, it lets itself be laidclaim to, ‘as the land of my forefathers, whichthus, however strange, was at least my own
country’. ‘At last’, the narrator recalls fromhis memories, ‘I was stateless; at last, insteadof being always present, I could be lightheartedly absent’. Outland, the country of ancestors and of absence: these passages strangely
invoke the coincidence between the ‘kingdom of freedom’ and that of the dead, which
may initially prove perplexing. Yet there issomething to this, since both the kingdom of
freedom and that of shades are sites of expectation, where no living being has yet been.
The narrator recalls how his mother, whenever speaking of her Slovenian homeland,
would recite the names of the major towns of
Lipica, Temnica, Vipava, Doberdob, Tomaj,
Tabor, Kopriva, as though they were settlements in ‘a land of peace where we, the Kobal
family, would at last recapture our true
selves’. The land of peace envisaged by son
and mother is not only a metaphysical, butalso a political concept. Without doubt, themetaphysics of an ‘other world’ where one
goes to meet one’s ancestors point towards a2

position of resignation, in which liberation
can always only be a liberation from life; yetat the same time the utterances of the mother,remembered by the son, are defined by theirresolute resistance to coercive assimilation,and their clearly pronounced resentment
against Austria. Thus, talk of a possible alternative situation leads not only to a quiet demise: it also has a real social significance.
The country of peace, evoked by the prettysounding Slovenian names, is the absolute
opposite to the false homeland of Austria, as
well as to the malignancy of a society organized by confederations and associations. The
text makes this unmistakably clear. What isbeneficial for Filip Kobal about the crowd
in which he finds himself, walking the streetsof Yugoslavian cities, is primarily ‘what it
lacked, the things that were missing: thechamois beards, the hartshorn buttons, theloden suits, the lederhosen; in short, no one
in it wore a costume’. Thus, for Filip Kobal –in a foreign land, amid the passing shadesof Jesenice – it is less the resigned absorption
into an anonymous other that communicatesthe feeling that he is finally among his own
kind, as it is the absence of all costume, of all
insignia, of anything overdetermined. The
dialectical mediation of metaphysics andpolitics enables a change of positions: namely,that as the bent shades of Jesenice come tolife, the costume-wearers take on the appearance of evil, unredeemed, dead souls. The‘costumed’ is in no way identical to an orientation which aims to conserve the homeland;rather, it is the unmistakable indication ofan opportunism, by which the propagation of
the concept of ‘homeland’ becomes alliedwith the destruction of homeland. Additionally, the ‘costumed’ also signifies the negationof every foreign country. If the concept ofhomeland comes about in the nineteenth
century in response to the evermore ineluctable experience of the foreign, the ideologisation of homeland in the twentieth century,
similarly inspired by a fear of loss, develops
into the attempted expansion of the homeland, as far as possible and employing force
when necessary, at the cost of other homelands. The word Austria, as the name for the
Alpine republic left over after the dissolutionof the empire, is a paradigm for this paranoid
concept of homeland, whose gruesome consequences reach far into the post-war years
during which Filip Kobal grew up. At the endof his wanderings, as he returns homethrough the Karst, he is at first happy to see
Austria again – inspired, perhaps, by thehope that he would be able to bring home his
various foreign experiences. ‘On the way
from the border station to the town ofBleiburg […] I vowed to be friendly while
demanding nothing and expecting nothing, as
befitted someone who was a stranger even in
the land of his birth. The crowns of the trees
broadened my shoulders.’Yet barely arrived
in the city with the ominous name [Blei: lead],
he is met once more with the ‘guilty, hangdog
ugliness and formlessness’ of his Austriancompatriots – ‘fashionably dressed, they had
gleaming badges on their lapels’ – constituting a suspicious people, whose sidelong
glances prompt the twenty-year-old to reflect
on how ‘not a few members of this crowd
were descended from people who had tortured and murdered, or at least laughed approvingly, and whose descendants would
carry on the tradition faithfully and without aqualm’. This remembered realization, as wellas the narrator’s complete silence regarding
his subsequent experiences in his unaccommodating homeland, clarify why he must
repeat his voyage out of Austria, twenty-fiveyears after he first left.
The departure for the imaginary true
homeland, lying across the mountains, is anattempt not only at self-liberation, but also at
the breaking-through of exile, in the widest
meaning of this concept. Despite being longtime residents of Rinkenberg, where they are
accepted as natives by their fellow villagers,
the Kobal family – comparable in many ways
to the Barnabas family of Kafka’s Castle –have retained, due to their own obstinacy, afeeling of their own foreignness. Unlike theirfellow Rinkenbergers, they possess and protect the memory of a way of life more dignified than their present one, oppressed by acorrupted Austrian populace. Thus the father
and mother constantly and involuntarily
think back to past times, as though they wereboth cut off from their Slovenian provenance,3and condemned against their will to an existence in Austria, as ‘prisoners or exiles’. The
family legend which recounts the story of the
Kobals’ exile, said to be rooted in historicalevents, tells of a Gregor Kobal who had led
the Tolmin peasant revolt, and whose descendants had been driven out of the Isonzo
valley following his execution. Since thisfar-off past, the Kobals have been a clan of
farmhands and foresters, migrating acrosslarge distances, ending up in Carinthia. The
text makes it no secret that the mythologicalconjecture, by which the oppressed family
claims the ancestry of a rebellious forefather
sentenced to an ignominious death, is geared
towards a new rebellion against ‘their exile,
their servitude, and the suppression of theirlanguage’. It is primarily the father who,‘with all his strength, especially the strengthof his obstinacy, […] was intent on redemption for himself and his family’, although hehad ‘no idea, and never uttered any proposal
to us concerning the form the redemption of
his family here on earth might take’. According to the mythological model, the task ofredemption falls also on the shoulders of hissons. In his thirties, Gregor, the missing
brother – who bears the name of the rebellious ancestor, and who was represented
in the stories of his mother as ‘a king cheatedout of his throne’ – was the first to set out todiscover anew the land in the south; now it
is up to the younger brother, considered by
the mother as ‘rightful heir to the throne’, toresume long-lost affairs, and to go where
there are cities which are nothing like ‘ourKlagenfurt’ – cities like Görz, where, according to the father’s memories, ‘there are palm
trees in the parks and there’s a king buriedin the monastery crypt’. The path out of exile
is the path towards Jerusalem, and he who
is meant to follow it, the young Filip Kobal,
must be innocent. Unlike his schoolmates,
almost all of whom have at one point survived a bad accident – losing a finger, an ear,or an entire arm – he is still unmarked: ‘during my years at the seminary my youth had
passed but I had never for one moment
known the experience of youth’. Now thisholy fool, who recognizes ‘the mentally deranged and feebleminded’ as his ‘guardianangels’, is sent out above the unhappinessof his family in order to report back from theother side as to whether the other world,which appears in the dreams of the exile,
exists also in reality.
It cannot be ignored that the Kobals’
secret royal family exhibits some traits which
are known from Handke’s own family history,
as it is reported in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.
The fictional transpositions carried out in
Repetition can in turn be read as the author’s
own redemptory wishes. What is decisive in
Handke’s rewriting of his own family history
in this work cannot simply be equated withthe concept of idealization – the Kobals are inmany respects a gloomy and self-destructive
association – rather, the rewriting is moreconcerned with the elimination of a single
specific element in order to achieve the farthest possible distancing from the German
descent of Handke’s paternal side; this appears to me to be one of the heaviest burdens
on the psychological and moral developmentof the author Peter Handke. The Kobals havenothing in common with the Germans, noreven anything fundamental in common with
the Austrians. It is their privilege andsovereign right to be the others, who take nopart in the violence that stems from paternalfear and spreads out across all of Europe.
The ideal of human cohabitation, which canbe extrapolated from the passages where thefamily unity of the Kobals is presented in asomewhat sunnier light, is that of a society inwhich fathers play at most a diminished role.
The mother’s dream, as reports the narrator,
would have been ‘to run a big hotel, with thestaff as her subjects’. The extensive household of this dream, like the narrative’s inherent utopia, is of a clearly matriarchal nature.
In the narrator’s memory it also appears as
though the mother had spoken ‘with the voiceof a judge’, and the maxim that Filip Kobal
makes his own, after having apprenticed as akind of day labourer for the old woman who
gives him shelter in the Karst, commands:‘Get away from your father’. Whereas under apatriarchal order each feels as alone as thenarrator can’t help but feeling, under a matriarchal regime, in which relations are woven
more loosely and more extensively, each4

individual would almost be a brother to thenext. This can be seen in Filip Kobal’s encounters with masculine figures in the ancientlandscape of the Karst. Figures like the young
soldier in Vipava, appearing to Kobal as his
doppelgänger, or the waiter from the Bohinj,
who Filip guesses to have been the child of asmallholder, like he himself was. This waiter,whose portrait is drawn with great devotion,
is a veritable imago of the ideal of brotherhood. Brimming with constant attentiveness,and only ‘seemingly lost in some faraway
dream’, he surveys, in truth, ‘his whole realm’.
Handke’s shaping of the story of thewaiter from three or four sides belongs to themost beautiful passages of the past decade ofGerman-language literature. Deeply impressed by this individual who embodies true
civility – even giving a light to a drunkard
with utmost gravity – Filip Kobal thinks onlyof him the following day. He knows, according to the narrator, that ‘it was a kind of love’that draws him not into contact with thewaiter, but into proximity to him. The story
takes a strange, thoroughly remarkable turnwith the silent meeting of the two youngmen – wherein not a single word is exchanged – on the last day Filip Kobal spends
in the ‘Black Earth Hotel’. On the way up to
his room, around midnight, Filip Kobal
passes by the open door to the kitchen, andsees there ‘the waiter sitting by a tub full of
dishes, using a tablecloth to dry them. Later,’continues the text, ‘when I looked out of mywindow, he was standing in his shirtsleeveson the bridge across the torrent, holding apile of dishes under his right arm. With hisleft hand, he took one after another and witha smooth graceful movement sent them sailing into the water like so many Frisbees.’
This scene is simply recounted, without commentary, and left in its own right. Due to thisunquestioning representation, the figure of
the waiter, finishing his daily work in thestrangest way, impresses itself deeply on thereader’s mind. And the plates sailing out into
the darkness, like the no less beautiful sentences describing arcs across a dark background, become dispatches of brotherhood.
Consoling dreams, in which a lengthy
procession of messianic figures emerge fromthe unredeemed world, belong to the narrative tradition of exile literature. Even in theworst of times, there must be a righteous
person walking somewhere in one’s country.
The task is to recognize him. Different thanthe dogmatic Christian histories of the
Saviour – systematically suppressing hopes
for redemption, which in turn gradually growvirulent – the messianism of Jewish provenance, always ready to see the hoped-for
redeemer in each stranger or foreigner, contains not only theological, but also politicalpotential. Even when the father has no ideaof ‘the form the redemption of his family hereon earth might take’, this much is nevertheless clear: that it must be a redemption taking
place in the here and now, as well as a redemption of an entire community. It is no
coincidence that the mythical ancestor of thefamily was an agitator. The rebellious disposition, setting itself against all authority,
determines the messianic fantasy from theground up – which doesn’t, however, imply
that the figure of the redeemer is establishedfrom this model. The redemptive figure ofmessianism is characterized more by theability to transform multifariously. Due to his
one-eyedness, Gregor, the older brother,having preceded Filip in his journey to theother country, is the king among the blind of
the exiled. As the narrator informs us,
Gregor ‘never actually became an insurrectionary’, even though he often stood on thethreshold of becoming so; yet in this he embodies a certain type, which the narrator
believes to have otherwise seen in only a few
children: namely, the pious. Necessitatedby the war, the disappearance of the son inwhom the hopes of the Kobal family were kept
alive – for whom the favourite word ‘holy’referred ‘not to the church, heaven, or any
other place outside the world’, but rather
with everyday life and getting up early in themorning – the loss of this bearer of hopespells an almost unbearable trauma for the
exiled. Even ‘twenty years after my brother’s
disappearance’, the narrator remembers, ‘ourhouse was still a house of mourning’, in which
the missing brother left his family ‘no peace;every day he died again for them’. From thisunappeased and unappeasable mourning,5the otherwise independent parents develop
communally the wishful dream of their son’s
return home. As the text recounts, the parents worship their missing son ardently, eachin his or her own way: ‘At news of his coming
she would immediately have prepared “hisapartment”, scrubbed the threshold, andhung a wreath over the front door, while myfather would have borrowed the neighbour’s
white horse, harnessed it to the spit-and-polished barouche, and, with tears of joy running down his nose, driven to meet him.’
The strong self-assurance of the exile isrepresented in the character of the Kobal
family. In the future, the mother is certainthat ‘after our return home, our resurrection
from a thousand years of servitude’, thevillage of Kobarid in the Isonzo Valley, fromwhich, according to lore, the Kobals originated, will be renamed Kobalid. Nothing
more is required for the messianic adjustment
to the world than the tiny displacement ofa syllable. The fact that the village is called
Karfreit in German is a further symbol forthe redemptory mission of the son [-freit:-freed], which would see the family’s oppressed existence transform into a proud
indomitability. According to their family
mythology, the Kobals are the designatedrepresentatives of the Slovenian people, wholike the Jews, the exemplary exilic race, ‘hadbeen kingless and stateless down through thecenturies, a people of journeymen and hired
hands’. As Filip walks among these people
through Yugoslavian streets, he feels an antiauthoritarian power emanating from thisanonymous populace, who ‘had never set up
a government of their own’. ‘We children of
darkness’, the narrator states, counting himself as one of this group, ‘were radiant withbeauty, self-reliant, bold, rebellious, independent, each man of us the next man’s hero’.
The exclusivity that the narrator ascribes to
the Slovenian people is a reflection of thechanging consciousness of Filip Kobal, who,
like Amalia from Kafka’s The Castle, learns tobear the imposed destiny of the exile as amark of honour. One of the least understood
attributes of the Jewish diasporic people isthe fact that, as Hannah Arendt makes clear,‘Jews neither knew what power really was –even when they almost had it in their hands– nor were they especially interested in
power’.4 Repetition makes similar claims
about the Slovenian people: that as a powerless people, ‘without aristocracy, without
military marches, without land’, they remain
uncorrupted, ‘their only king’ – again almost
like the Jews – ‘being the legendary hero whowandered about in disguise, showing himself
only briefly’. It is clear that Filip Kobal, likehis brother before him, is expected to fill thisrole of the secret king. His messianic disguiseis that of the guest, entering the household
anonymous, unsuspected. The role was assigned to him early on by his mother andsister, who would set a cup of tea before him
upon his return home from school, with the
obliging attitude that becomes second nature
to women, as though he were ‘an unexpected
noble guest’. And in his wanderings, thesmallholder’s son, actually someone with ‘noorigins at all’, becomes conscious of his enormous task. Similar to an early version of the
beginning of Kafka’s Castle, where theprince’s chambers are prepared for the wanderer K. when he appears in the village, Filip
Kobal is offered a large room in the ‘Black
Earth Hotel’, ‘with four beds, enough for awhole family’. And evenings, when he sits in
the hotel restaurant, ‘no one, not even the
militia on its constant rounds, asked me myname; everyone called me “the guest”’. Filip,
whose home has become travel and transportation, already during his school years – andwho, wandering southwards with his blue
seabag and walking stick, moves towards thefulfilment of his predestined role – is here, as
the silent guest, the one from whom redemption is expected. It takes a long time – a quarter-century – before the task he carried out atthat time becomes, on repetition, clear tohim. At first he is simply looking for his
brother. Significantly, when he glimpses avision of his brother in a sort of ancestral
invocation, he is unable to bear it. The hallucinatory apparition, with eyes set so deepthat their ‘white blindness remained hidden’,completely overwhelms Filip, forcing him
to immediately leave the sight of the apparition, and to find rescue taking up his own way
in the stream of the passing crowd. In the6messianic tradition, it is not a matter of theseparated falling into each other’s arms; more
important is that the effort be sustained, thatthe younger succeeds the elder, the student
becomes the teacher, and that the redemptory ‘pious wish’ – the wish, expressed in oneof Gregor’s letters from the front, to enter
the Ninth Country in the Easter vigil carriage– be given earthly fulfilment, ‘in writing’.
The text of Repetition constitutes thisfulfilment. The book is the Easter vigil carriage, in which the separated members of
the Kobal family may sit together once more.
The composition of the text is thus no profane matter. From the outset, the storyteller
is aware of the difficulty of the task set before
him. He remembers, significantly, how his
mother, ‘whenever I had been out of thehouse for any length of time, in town or alone
in the woods or out in the fields, assailed mewith her “Tell me!”’; and how at that time,
before she fell ill, he never succeeded in telling her. We can assume, from the fact that his
mother’s illness helps him to overcome his
narrative block, that one of the principal
tasks of storytelling is to soothe. One of therequirements for the administration of suchan artistic practice, so closely related to thatof medicine, is the readiness to stay awake
through the night. Already for the schoolboy
Kobal, ‘the one lighted window in the teachers’ house’ – and not ‘the trembling little
flame beside the altar’ – was the true, eternal
light, which would not let hopes for redemption be extinguished. In Handke’s work,
learning and teaching are ways of conserving
the world. This is exemplified in Repetition
by his brother’s notebooks, written in
Slovenian and dealing primarily with thecultivation of fruit, which Filip brings withhim on his travels, and which become a textbook for his approach to life. On the exampleof his brother’s writings, he realizes thatthose ‘who, unlike the great mass of those
who speak and write, had the gift of bringing
words and through them things to life’, and
who are prepared to devote themselves unceasingly to this strange art, are able to produce a healing effect on others. The tracelessdisappearance of his brother in the Second
World War also symbolizes how cruelly

circumstances almost infallibly curtail thatwhich, in a nicely worked out story, is laidout as possibility. The narrator’s fear that hecould similarly be snuffed out, as his brotherwas before him, haunts his written-down
memories as a feeling of powerlessness. All
the same, the temporal structure of his reportshows us that he has managed to survive fora good number of years. A quarter-century
has passed since the young Filip Kobal foundhis inner storyteller. Looking back, it becomes clear to the forty-five-year-old that, atthe time, he would not have been able to tell
the story of homeland to anyone. It is alengthy process of gestation by which indifferent scraps of one’s own life transform intothought-provoking images; and even when
the ancient fragments seem to be gathered
into a sensible pattern, the storyteller isplagued by doubts, never to be fully assuaged,
as to whether what he holds in his hands are
only a matter of ‘the last remnants, leftovers,
shards of something irretrievably lost, which
no artifice could put together again’. The fact
that, despite this difficulty, and despite such
scruples, Repetition presents us over andover with passages – like the one cited above,
recounting the waiter at night – which almost
communicate a sense of levitation, seems
to me a mark of the exceptional quality of thisstory, whose secret ideal, so it seems to me,
is one of lightness. Not that the narrator iscarefree or lighthearted; but instead of talking about his burdens, he turns to his senses
in order to produce something that could
help him and his reader – who may also be inneed of comfort – to resist the temptation ofmelancholy. The professional role model
chosen by Filip Kobal for his own narrative
work is that of the roadmender, who is responsible for the upkeep of the roads in thearea, and who, like the author in his hut,
lives in a one-room house which resembles
the porter’s lodge of a manor – despite there
being no such manor in the vicinity. This
roadmender, who, like the writer, carries out
his laborious work day after day, on occasiontransforms suddenly into a sign painter,standing high upon a ladder outside the entrance to the inn at the centre of the village.
‘As I watched him’, recounts the narrator,
7‘adding a shadowy line to a finished letterwith a strikingly slow brushstroke, aerating,as it were, a thick letter with a few hair-thinlines, and then conjuring up the next letterfrom the blank surface, as though it had been
there all along and he was only retracing it,
I saw in this nascent script the emblem of ahidden, nameless, all the more magnificent
and above all unbounded kingdom.’ I don’tknow if the forced relation between hard
drudgery and airy magic, particularly significant for the literary art, has ever been more
beautifully documented than in the pagesof Repetition describing the roadmender andsign painter. It is also important that thework of this man, chosen by the narrator as
his preceptor, is done outside: that it does
not place the landscape in a frame, as is otherwise the case with art, but instead brings
the landscape into alignment with itself.
The extraordinary openness of the text ofRepetition arises from its presentation of theexternal as something much more important
than the internal. Accordingly, the model forthe true place of the narrator, as Filip Kobal
realizes in hindsight, is the shed in his father’s
field: ‘I’ve gone directly to the fields fromschool, and I’m sitting there at the table withmy homework.’ This shed, as he now knows,
was and is ‘the centre of the world, where thestoryteller sits in a cave no larger than a wayside shrine and tells his story’. The field shed
the narrator has in mind here, like the sukkah
of a different tradition, is a place of rest on
the journey through the desert, and its periodic reconstruction, in a civilization whichsets ever sharper limits upon what is appropriate for human nature, is a ritual of remembrance for an outdoor life. In Repetition,
Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or atent canvas to glisten between words, placed
here with astounding caution and precision;in doing so, he succeeds in making the text
into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which,even in the culture industry, grow larger day
by day. The book of the journey through the
Karst, over which the infamous bora windblows, resembles thus the dolinas: sinkholes
which lie beneath the wind, islands of stillness, surrounded by trees, all bent at thesame angle, where, as the narrator reports,
the stubbly grass hardly trembles, bean or
potato plants hardly sway, and on whose
ground therefore, ‘without fear of one another, the beasts of the Karst could assemble,
a stocky little roe deer along with a hare anda herd of wild pigs’. To this image of peaceable unity, animated by reference to the ark,
is inscribed the hope that, despite prevalent
unfavourable conditions, something of our
natural homeland may yet be saved.
1
By 1982, the list of secondary literature contained
around two-hundred entries.
2 The stream of secondary literature has certainly
not dried up in the eighties, yet it relates what Handke
has written in the past decade mostly to his earlier
writings. To this is added the fact that most of what is
published on Handke’s newer work is of a distinctly
polemic character. For a long time now, there can be noquestion of an objective study of one of the most important authors of contemporary literature. [Cf. J. Lohmann,‘Handke-Beschimpfung oder Der Stillstand der Kritik’,Tintenfaß H. 2, 1981.] Charac­teristic of the increasing
distanciation of literary scholars is Manfred Durzak’sPeter Handke und die deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur, published in 1982. Clearly unconvinced by the ideas developed by Handke in the three books of Slow Homecoming,
Durzak criticizes the roguishness, the lack of a connection to social reality, and in particular the ‘stylistic pointillism, which endlessly compiles details with no apparent necessity, and misses the vision of a poetic image
which brings all together’. My translation; originallycited from N. Honsza (ed.), Zu Peter Handke – Zwischen
Experiment und Tradition (Stuttgart, 1982), p. 108.
3 Cf. B. Heinrichs, ‘Der Evangelimann.
Glücksmärchen, Wanderpredigt, Lesefolter: Die
Wiederholung’, Die Zeit, 3. X. 1986.
4 My translation; originally cited from H. Arendt,
Elemente und Ursprünge totalitärer Herrschaft, Vol. 1:
Antisemitismus (Frankfurt, Berlin, Wien, 1975), p. 54.
———
Translated from the German by Nathaniel Davis.
Originally published as ‘Jenseits der Grenze’ inUnheimliche Heimat (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1995), 162–78.
This translation was commissioned and published by
The Last Books in 2013.
www.thelastbooks.org

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