Combating the Tyranny of Language

...applause/to develop his personality treely?applause " In the poem's second section this idea is rephrased "Every citizen has the right?applause/to develop his personality freely within the framework ot the law?exclamations Hear' Hear1 " And in the final section "Every citizen has the right to develop his personality freely within the tramework of the law and standards of common decency/ General, stormy, nearly unending applause " Language enslaves us, and the bitter irony is that we can enjoy being enslaved Handke does not abandon more ordinary poetics, though "Singular and Plural" is musical m its repetition of images and lines "Abstraction of the Ball that Fell in the River," combining old poetics with new, starts with a reminiscence "As children we often sat at the edge of the river Sunday afternoons watching the soccer game from where we sat at the midfield line ' Once again Handke presents a senes of restatements, among them these "Children walk alongside the ball each time it falls in the river at mid-field " "In order to traverse half the length of a playing field (playing field length = 90 meters) someone requires 1 minute, 30 seconds " Until finally "As children we walked on Sunday afternoons at a speed of one-half meter per second alongside the soccer ball when it was kicked from the playing field into the over " What interests Handke, as always, is the relationship between the language and the experience Handke made his reputation in Europe first as a playwright and then with his fiction and poetry Here in the United States, however, he is practically unknown He deserves a much wider audience than he has hitherto enjoyed, and I hope these two translations help him to get it...

...Combating the Tyranny of Language Short Letter, Long Farewell By Peter Handle Translated by Ralph Manheim Farrar, Straus and Giroux 167 pp $7 95 The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld By Peter Handke Translated by Michael Roloff Seabury 128 pp $8 95 (cloth), $4 50 (paper) Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short-story writer The Austrian narrator of Short Letter, Long Farewell ends an odys-sey across America by paying a visit to director John Ford m Southern California "He took us to his study and showed us a pile of movie scripts, writers were still sending them to him 'There are some good stones in there,' he said 'Simple and clear The kind ot stones we need ' " Few readers are likely to find Peter Handke's novel either simple or clear, but it seems to me precisely the kind we need We must remember where we are Joyce Carol Oates is the darling of the publishing world, and Thomas Pynchon is refused the National Book Award Most fiction editors today search for "a good read," something that will attract a mass audience Yet accoiding to Newsweek, a novel that sells only 20,000 copies will make the best-seller lists I hope there are as many as 20,000 readers for Handke's book It is important for two reasons its narrative technique and the landscape of America against which the narrative unfolds The latter shows us a country we have not seen so clearly since, perhaps, Nathanael West In this America—the imitation of a Hollywood fantasy instead of the other way around—a tense drama is given shape Central to it is the narrator himself, whose reflections suggest the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein "Philosophy," Wittgenstein wrote in The Blue Book, " is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us ' Handke's protagonist battles against language's tyranny over experience At one point he tells his mistress, "You must know people who try to reduce everything they see, even the most extraordinary things, to a concept, to do away with it by formulating it, so they won't have to experience it any more " And since the Austrian's estranged wife is following him on his journey, threatening to murder him, his struggle against language becomes a struggle to live Two things are going on in Short Letter, Long Farewell The hero, desiring pure experience, fights his own intellectual formulations, while Handke, as a writer, combats the novel-as-hterary-formulation At the least, the latter contest is won, and the victory is complete and powerful Handke's method—to question the nature of experience, including literary experience—is most economically seen in the poems in Innerworld But, again, these are no more like what many readers have come to think of as poems than Handke's novel is like an Oates melodrama Handke cares less about entertaining than changing the reader Many of the poems present a series of language-descriptions of "the same thing " "The Three Readings of the Law," for example, begins "Every citizen has the right...