Peter Handke: the awkward Nobel or the epic look

It could be said that every book by Peter Handke - like the last one, The Fruit Thief , neatly translated and presented by Anna Montané in the Alliance publishing house - somehow contains an epic journey to some interior place in search of something . The place of interior can be a region, such as the French Picardy in The Fruit Thief , or Gredos or Soria or the Slovenian Carso, but also the interior of an existence or the interior of a toilet, for example, of a toilet, as said before with a good word; and the something, the something that is sought, well, that, like the modality of the trip, must also be sought and understood by the reader in his own reading and living trip .

Sometimes, as in this case of The Fruit Thief - in my opinion a true compendium and rubric of all of Handke's work -, the reader follows a narrator who follows a girl who follows a mother who already before ( Loss of the image or by the Sierra de Gredos ) had in turn followed the daughter along random physical and mental itineraries where everyone - characters, author and narrator and also reader - always seeks deep down the true treasure of living. But true journeys, like true searches and true works, never end, they only begin, and they do that at every moment; in them it is not so much about going to the end (of a journey, of a reading or a time) as of the bottom, of achieving the bottom, and the true bottom has no bottom, has surface, and therefore look, attention, images, feelings or spinning. That the background is the look, the precision and the joy of the look every time, the continuous keep with the things there, is learned by the Handke reader as his vital reading (reading or is vital or it is nothing, just like writing), in the same way that you learn to look, to try to look well, to pay attention and to capture and distinguish and then link , let yourself be linked by games of ideas and memories or stories told or under construction as the narrator does. He also learns that it requires fortitude, loneliness and struggle, courage: it is an epic. "How difficult it is to look," Handke writes in one of his bookmarks. And there is no school to teach it; each one can only learn for himself day after day from the beginning ».

Learning to look, learn to see and realize, is an epic . An epic today? Maybe more than ever. An epic anyway that if it also has to do with wandering and running through uncertain paths, it is closer to leaving and leaving than to act, to let the place act on one and also act what the character or the Narrator have gone to meet things, circumstances, people or words. Peter Handke has affirmed that the fruit thief is his "last epic", what can he mean? Beyond the narrator or the protagonist running on a template of classic hero (a man undertakes a trip - a woman returns from another to distant latitudes and returns to undertake another - and in the silence of the farewell of the house and the garden he is attentive to the possible signs of blessing of his march before beginning the adventures and encounters of the road after something), every epic is an epic of inclusion , of totality in the sense.

"Epic steps," reads in The Fruit Thief, "" steps that included. " Handke's epic writing includes everything that happens at every step , at every moment: every tiny observation and every sensation, every memory or reverie, and every thought of the necessary wandering and wandering of the narrative hero or the heroine character as if his walk it consisted of a struggle to save everything , to live it all by noticing it. The struggle of a hero - and a heroine - in the face of the chaos of the monstrous and senseless dispersion and disregard of our age, the struggle to "stand up to chaos, but with what? - Handke wondered in another place -: With the look ». The weapon is the attentive look (the look and the ear), the struggle of the look to be, to make someone look and look or look at it .

The hero, then, of Handke's epics is the one who fixes himself, the one who goes out to the fields or the suburbs of new cities to perceive, to live by perceiving and letting himself be perceived, to realize and then keep track, count, count on everything, of everything, based on everything. He is the one that everything and everyone takes into consideration in the face of the devastating disregard of our world, the one who notices everything precisely in the face of the crazy dispersion of our time because everything, so as not to disappear in his indistinction as it is disappearing - and with it One of us-, is worthy of note, totality of meaning. Does the indistinction of our era seem to be a little monster? Are baalting roadsterers banalization and discouraged disorientation, armies little hardened?

The trip to look well, to distinguish between what our society has turned into signs and we have swiped the ubiquitous media (things that are not things, moments that are nothing, empty words, no places, no times, no people ) and what an attentive look could still recover or swipe at them, has to do with the most intimate heart of the epic adventure that is the adventure of meaning. In that adventure every moment is a new beginning for the joy of the gaze, a joy that makes strong . I'm weak, Handke wrote, when I don't see or hear, "when I'm out of the senses, this is without eyes or ears." The strength does not have to do with seizing anything or fortifying itself in anything, but with letting everything be and open to it, let itself be absorbed. "See and let it be," he notes. See and leave and stop before things: this is how the image emerges, the journey of the image that then transforms into memories and dreams and asks to be counted.

Handke is a master of the gaze like few others, of the activity of "apprehending images with feeling" and "putting the words that correspond to those images" ( Essay on the jukebox ) because "without language, the gaze does nothing but err ». So that the gaze is not lost or dispersed, so that it is effective, and thus achieve that the joy of there is there and begins (two verbs that correspond to joy) language is necessary. Because it is "with the eyes of the right word" as we see ( Essay on the day achieved ).

Handke is letting the images come to him and form and then, or at the same time, conform to the writing. This requires an extraordinary quality of presence, quality of perception and association: is that paradise, joy? "Relieved, I just looked, in a paradisiacal state where I just wanted to look and in which looking was already a form of knowledge," he writes in a short letter for a long goodbye. In any case, what better school of quality of presence, of the joy of presence and being, than literature, than some literature. «Joy is a kind of force of imagination», of capacity to stop and observe and invoke things on the fly in front of the ubiquitous and continuous disappearance of the reality that the mass media for everything and the mass of means for everything and everything , ah, also politicians: « Foam. Leave us alone at least here, in reality. Get out of the little Here and Now that remains. Disappear from my day »(page 109). Who can we not be thinking about?

Every epic does notwithstanding his fatigue and every hero knows his discouragement . Look tired, look at everything, take everything into consideration. They also get tired of the heroes of any kind, the heroes of idle life, solipsist, wandering, without place in society like so many young people, without fit in the chain of efforts and tasks of yesteryear, those who go from one place to another, from one sensation to another, from a superstition and a reverie to another, lost, left, coming.

Also, reading Handke's long texts, with its thoroughness of sensation and instantness, can tire and bore. You have to make days, as in any expedition, pauses, stops in reading, you have to travel and read (and even fight) slowly. To restore life, to achieve it, to understand it, to rescue here and now and rescue images taken hostage by the media, words streamed by publicity and politicians, language loyalty. «Blessed is he who begins to speak saying, look! Have confidence in him, ”writes Handke. Confidence in the one who shows, in the one who indicates, the one who points. Because "look" is "one of the most worthy words to be loved."

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