A few notes from Thomas F. Barry's article on Handke.

Here is Handke himself:

When I was 36 years old, I had the illumination of slowness. Slowness has been since this time a principle for my life and my writing.... Perhaps instead of slowness one could speak more exactly of a deliberateness. Never, never become fast, never suggest, always keep a distance to things and be cautious.

Barry remembers this from The Afternoon of a Writer:

You know of course slowness is the only illumination I have ever had.

Barry: The productive otherness of the experience of literature in acts of reading and writing is, as Handke phrased it in his acceptance speech for the Buchner prize [...]

nothing other than poetic thinking that is all about hope, that allows the world to begin anew again and again whenever I, in my obstinacy, have already considered it predetermined, and it is also the basis of the self-awareness with which I write.

Barry: Handke's preface to the original German edition of The Weight of the World gives the reader some insight into what kind of radical literary experiment he was taking with his journals, an experiment that focuses the attention of both writer and reader on the nature of perception and its formulation in language. Handke calls this first journal 'a sort of novel or epic of everyday occurrences'.

Barry tells us how Handke's plan for the notebooks changed: 'Handke soon realised that he was paying attention to only those thoughts and events that suited his plans and everything else became insignificant and thus forgettable'. 

But precisely through this state of heightened attentiveness, into which I had thought myself, I became aware of the daily forgetting.

It is thus to this 'daily forgetting' (a beautiful phrase) that Handke will now attend. Is that what The Afternoon of a Writer is about? And My Year in No-Man's Bay?

Reflecting on his earlier fiction, Handke says:

These narratives and novels have no story. They are only daily occurrences brought into a new order. What is 'story' or 'fiction' is really always only the point of intersection between individual daily events. This is what produces the impression of fiction. And because of this I believe they are not traditional, but that the most unarranged daily occurrences are only brought into a new order, where they suddenly look like fiction. I never want to do anything else.

And he says this:

The more I immerse myself in an object, the more it approaches a written sign.

Handke has published 4 volumes of his journals, which he began to keep in the mid 70s. Was this amidst the general crisis to which he alludes at the beginning of My Year in No-Man's Bay?

There was one time in my life when I experienced metamorphosis. Up to that point, it had only been a word to me....

Very early on, while at the famous Group 47 meeting, he says:

Above all, it seems to me that the progress of literature consists of the gradual removal of all fictions.