Handke & Milošević
Now the text is translated, and I trust that you will read it as it is; I need not defend or take back a single word. I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature: a slow, inquiring narration; every patagrpah dealing with and narrating a problem, of representation, of form, of grammar — of aesthetic veracity; that has always been the case in what I have written, from the beginning to the final period.
But of course, talking with a few Serbian friends, sussing the local market & admiring the ways in which the local people manage to survive & keep sane under the harsh conditions of those years, does now allow the writer to draw conclusions beyond what he sees or to extrapolate as to the innocence of the Serbs in general and of their government & leader more specifically. Handke will over time come again and again to the defense of Milosevic, seeing in the latter (and in what he wrought in the Balkans) a tragic historical figure. A tough position to defend — and which I cannot help comparing with the opening lines of Pound’s “Pisan Cantos” where EP speaks of “the enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders” when he means the end of Italian fascism with the death of “Boss” Benito Mussolini. Pound manages to move those Cantos relatively fast into a realm that transcends his own fascist leanings. Handke’s flat post-modern prose does not allow for such transcendence — which may, in fact, not be a bad thing.
Now, in the current issue of the German literary review Literaturen, Handke is back with a long piece on the same subject. Or more accurately on why he still thinks the Serbs and Milosevic are getting a raw deal at the Haag court. I haven’t gotten my hands on the whole essay, but the dozen excerpts or so quoted by the numerous responses the essay imemdiately again generated, give a pretty good idea of the drift of Handke’s thought. He explains why, though Milosevic put him on the list of witnesses for his defense he drew up, he refused to witness: not because he doubts Milosevic’s innocence, but because he refuses to accept the legitimacy of the De Haag tribunal. Which seems a rather snaky way of getting out from under a hard place. But in recent years it is exactly that distrust of such institutions and dislike of those people who put their trast in them, that has fuelled Handke’s anger. Vide, the following quote from his 1999 play DUGOUT CANOE, THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR:
There is an indifference that is more helpful than your blabbering about being humane, as the right hand pets some of us like Mother Teresa, and the left hand swings the sword of the tribunal against others. Little devils of goodness. Humanity hyenas. There is no one less open to suffering than you official humanitarians. Marsbodies that appear as the protectors of human rights… The people here have become as evil as they are not. And the war has made you tourists as evil as you are.
It is difficult not to agree with the feelings behind Handke’s outrage — but to go from there to defend Milosevic is another story all together. (The essay also relates the several hours long interview Handke conducted with Milosevic in prison.) Though 95% of the response to the Literaturen essay has been very negative, there have been a few responses that try to avoid the usual anti-Handke-hysteria. Thus Thomas Steinfeld, of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, tries to explain Handke’s scepticism towards those who won the war:
The victor will not need to be accountable, because his victory consists exactly in that he can force the other side to be accountable, but does not have to be so himself. All this Peter Handke suspects, not only as the writer that he is, but also the jurist he once was. He suspects it because he loves that landscape, those people, maybe also their social and political organisations, the refugees, the crocuses, the ‘beautiful small orient.’ And because he loves it, he is all the more clearly aware what stigma it is for the losers to have to bow before the jurisdiction of the winners — and as the poet that he is, he reacts poetically and only poetically. Nowhere does his text turn into analysis, nowhere does it become political or mention interests by name, nowhere does he try to penetrate the variosu calculations.
Der Sieger wird keine Rechenschaft ablegen müssen, denn darin, dass er den anderen zur Rechenschaft zwingt und diese selbst nicht leisten muss, besteht eben sein Sieg. All das ahnt Peter Handke, nicht nur als der Dichter, der er ist, sondern auch als der Jurist, der er einmal war. Er ahnt es, weil er diese Landschaft liebt, diese Leute, vielleicht auch ihre sozialen und politischen Organisationen, die Flüchtlinge, die Krokusse, den ‘schönkleinen Orient’. Und weil er das liebt, nimmt er um so schärfer die Schmach war, die es für den Unterlegenen bedeutet, sich der Gerichtsbarkeit der Überlegenen beugen zu müssen – und reagiert, als Dichter, der er ist, poetisch und nur poetisch. An keiner Stelle arbeitet sich sein Text zur Analyse vor, nirgends wird er politisch, macht er Interessen namhaft, versucht er, in das Kalkül einzudringen.
The political and then poetical — we’re at that old conundrum again. Inescapable? Probably — but there must be other ways through this, different constellations possible? I think I will now go and reread various essays & interviews by Ammiel Alcalay on the Bosnian wars, as I suspect that one way (maybe the only way) out of the dilemna of the binary political/poetical lies in the multiple & differentiated activities (translator, poet, journalist, essayist, etc.) that someone like Alcalay brings to a given historical situation.
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
a book that has been with me for several years is diana johnstone’s fool’s crusade from monthly review press; it is tough going for me, since i am not a student of balkan war, but rather a reader of the shrill ny times and the left journal buddies; but i seemed to be looking for such a book because of the the same questions that you suggest motivate handke, namely how can i trust the amercian press version of this war when i trust so little that comes from this government; johnstone tries to explain how milosevic got pulled into the war, and why he became the focus of guilt; i found her work compelling, though again i have little knowledge available in the way of checking her facts, or unraveling the obvious contradictions that come from placing her text alongside american journal articles and books anti-milosevic; so i guess this is a book recommendation, and a comment that my reading of this text has caused me to cast a cold eye on the court proceedings.