Peter Handke presents his notebooks in Berlin

The lightning in Griffen in the early summer of 1978 must have been an astonishing spectacle. As Peter Handke noted after a walk through his Carinthian hometown, the details flashing in the sky and soon also shining in artificial light combined to form a unique constellation.

What doesn’t he encounter on his way: “the crickets; the wayside cross; the white caraway blossoms; the mountain ridge; the power line”, then “the village square with the cherry tree (the still unfinished house); the man in the window; strong light from a very distant lamppost; omnibus on the street” and finally, passing an illuminated cigarette machine, just in time before the cloudburst, the return to the inn, into the “vault with the flies darting across the tablecloth, the sound of rain, the thick drawn curtains – this walk was the great lesson – the existence of THE OTHER, the valid one was kindly and cheerfully illuminated for him, forever.”

There it is, the turn to that universal interconnectedness composed of the smallest fragments of perception, which Handke creates again and again in his texts, without going beyond the sensory world. Inside and outside merge into one another in a materialistic mysticism.

Rhythm of the landscape

What is a mere sketch here in a short passage from his notebooks, which have grown to around 35,000 pages, can also be found in the great novel from that period, “Slow Homecoming,” which revolves around the geologist Valentin Sorger and was followed by the poetic “The Teaching of Sainte-Victoire.” It is an attempt to eavesdrop on a rhythm in things and landscapes that people can fit into.

Almost half a century and a Nobel Prize later, Peter Handke sits in the Einstein Hall of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, five floors above the Gendarmenmarkt, and can hardly remember what his wife, the actress Sophie Semin, has just recited in double transposition to a woman’s voice and with a French accent.

At that time, he says, I was seized by a strange enthusiasm to record the Klagenfurt market life or the lightning in a kind of stammering narrative. It was the beginning of something. I am not a contemporary witness, but a witness of another time. That’s how it happened. It was not dramatic, it was not symbolic. The things that life plays out or death … And then he interrupts himself and says: Oh, nonsense!

Poking around in the word field

It is difficult to determine where the poet’s shyness, which at times mumbles to the point of being toneless, groping for formulations and poking around in the field of words in search of the most appropriate expression, ends and a certain slowing down of old age begins: In December, Handke celebrates his 82nd birthday. But by then he has already put aside his anger at himself, which probably also includes having agreed to appear in front of an audience in the first place.

As Heimito von Doderer said, he continues, the observer is freed from the fall of his own ego. There are no small things. I have also written short texts about fireflies in Friuli or an ash tree in Munich – he is referring to the volume “Once again for Thucydides”. That is the history that concerns me.

At the same time, he admits: It is dangerous to make a kind of preconceived melody out of it. And so, in an effort to go beyond himself and his writing, he repeatedly tried to overcome repetition through repetition, turned to gods who changed between Stifter, Kafka and Goethe, and yet remained Handke.

The Carinthian lightning, for example, has transformed into a Parisian lightning in “The Great Fall” (2011), and in his most recent notebook, which he produces from the pocket of his battered black suit, it finds an early, quite unmeteorological appearance in “The Evening,” a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff written in 1817.

The lines unfold in me for the first time, says Handke: “When man’s loud joy is silent: / The earth rustles as in dreams / wonderfully with all the trees, / what the heart is hardly aware of, / old times, gentle sorrow, / and quiet shivers / like lightning run through the chest.”

Eichendorff’s Lightning

The inconspicuous pad, which can only be opened at the top, is not one of the 221 notebooks that found a new home in the German Literature Archive Marbach (DLA) in 2018. 21 of them, including the one mentioned from 1978, have been freely available to view since June in a benchmark digital edition by the DLA and the Austrian National Library, and over 60 more are being prepared. And so the covetous eyes of Katharina Pektor, the editor-in-chief, and the project managers Ulrich von Bülow and Bernhard Fetz, who are sitting on the stage with the poet, are immediately directed at this work in progresswhich they had never seen before.

For the first time, one can now marvel at the wealth of drawings, scribbles, readings, descriptions of images and impulses from which Handke has created the selected volumes of his notes, in facsimile, transcribed, commented on and indexed.

These are only partially preliminary stages to the narrative works; they form a cosmos of consciousness of their own, which can safely be described as basic literary research: What does it mean to link life and writing with skin and hair and pencil? Handke has made an unmistakable contribution to this philosophical enterprise, without even having to use the term.

He describes how his approach has changed over the years in the foreword to “Yesterday on the Road,” notes from 1987 to 1990. The volume, he explains, represents the last phase of his “writing along with the daily and nightly events. It also marks the transition from pure writing along (predominant above all in ‘The Weight of the World,’ 1975 to 1977) to subsequent, slightly delayed note-taking.”

The basic motif has not changed. “What remains and will remain is the deciphering, the spelling,” he quotes from his notebook under the date of August 28, 2024, Goethe’s birthday. And he discovers the promise of a French horoscope: “You have a very good period ahead of you in your later life.” How can one possibly comment on that in a future edition?