Today, Peter Handke is being awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. Handke is probably my favorite living writer, and people sometimes ask what I like about his work, and to recommend some of his books. This latter part is always difficult for me, because no single work really represents what I appreciate about him as a writer. I like Handke the writer better than any of his individual works. In fact, Handke seems to me a strange example of a great writer whose greatness lies not in his works, but in his writing practice. Most writers become great by producing monumental works which become pillars of a canon; but most of my favorite of Handke’s books do not have this masterwork character. And this is part of what I appreciate about him. Great works of fiction generally present hermetic worlds with epic scope that hold the imagination in their grasp; Handke’s writing resists this, instead offering a flow of language that constantly compels the reader to look up from the lines on the page, away from the book, and out at the world.
For me, what is most important about Handke’s work is his manner of looking and his method of reflecting that looking in his writing, which always represents a distinct perceptive method, pausing at what more grandiose minds gloss over, showing affection for the idiosyncratic detail, exhibiting a pure talent for identifying fleeting moments of beauty, grace, and justice. This comes from looking, taking the time to look, being open to minor events and their humble yet profound gravity.
There is a transcendent thread through all of his writing that shape-shifts with his polyvalent positioning towards language. Sometime this leads him to poetic abstraction, which in German has an aural elegance that radiates mere suggestions of ideas. This subtlety sometimes grates; it gets boring, or you have no idea what he’s trying to say; but sometimes you get glimpses. Alternately, he has a precise descriptive mode that I count among the most directly evocative in world literature; a photographic clarity with sensual depth, economical without ever veering into the cloying figurative description of other attempts at imagism. Between these two poles, his writing attempts to capture something of individual experience, facing the world with five senses: how it feels to think in a body, how the natural world reflects within the psyche, how the subject discovers and creates truth and meaning in what it sees. Always the specter of language hovers above this, qualifying and enabling any and every attempt at communication.
It is endlessly frustrating and deeply saddening to me that the entire media response to this award has been focused not on his writing, but on a handful of statements made about Yugoslavia. From his earliest days, Handke has resisted direct political declaration, designating a different, less partisan, more observational role for literature; his great failure was not seeing that most people are far too simple to recognize this, and will steamroll literary nuance and replace it with polemic. The imbeciles and the cynical ideologues that try to delegitimize Handke’s win with slanderous and willfully uncomprehending attacks (who understand nothing of Handke or of literature, whose opinions are straight out of the Dictionnaire des idées reçues) may eventually, I can only hope, prove his point (one legible in his entire oeuvre, including his statements on Yugoslavia): that language, the writer’s tool, is conscripted by various social actors—journalists, politicians, generals, salesmen—not to represent or reflect any kind of individual or shared reality, but rather to violently and forcefully contort symbolic elements into a tawdry facsimile used to prop up a certain hegemonic structure, and that literature—at its very best—can save language (if not over a whole work, then at least in a short passage or a few luminous lines) from this ignoble fate.
