A writer develops a 'metaphysic', a system of recognisable motifs, of themes, of relations. A development insinuated in creative work, that permeates what is written, and in a manner at first unnoticeable. The writer does not ask, who have I become? but accepts the changes that cross his writing like light across ice; this is the bounty of writing, it is how writing, like our handwriting, is complexified with age, with experience.
Old rhythms set themselves in motion as they are touched by new ones, and the whole is changed each time, with each book. The whole is changed: motifs, themes, relations retaken freshly: this is the life of an oeuvre, of the climate of a writing. A climate that deepens, becomes richer and greater - that has travelled a greater internal distance, that rises into itself like a stormcloud, and generating internal potencies that must discharge themselves in lightning.
Sometimes it can seem to break away from easy readibility, so that a newcomer may remain disorientated and unseduced: style encountered as mannerism, as pretension. But that style was earned - it sought itself; it came to itself through an immense distance; it enfolds such greatness, such vastness that whatever its disappointments - the bloatedness of No Man's Bay, the whimsy of One Night - these are still complexly folded works of middle age, of the middle of life.
What must it have been to have written every day? Every day - and with Handke to have known, each day, the measure of time, its gift - the steady brightness beneath which he formed his books. Across already exhibits a 'late style', I've decided this morning. Repetition still looks like a novel, but Across? A plot without tension, without resolution. This book occupies a plateau, a great threshold. At every moment, open. What must it have been to have risen each morning to keep that opening open, and to have been kept by that opening as between two hands in prayer? (The Afternoon of the Writer is one answer).
It is as though every novel he would write begins at that place where the plateau opens, a point that normally closes, rather than begins a work of art - think, for example, of the last thirty pages of Lawrence's St. Mawr, and the long denouement (is that the word?) of Herzog's Heart of Glass. It's true, plot seems to lose itself - or it is gathered, at each moment, to the threshold where anything at all could happen. At once, open - but also fated, living the measure according to a kind of justice.
No Man's Bay would be an epic; the chemist of One Night reads tales of knights and chivalry, which the narrative parodies; Loser, of Across, reads Virgil. Don Juan, still untranslated, will presumably renew the story of the old seducer: each time, an older European form is brought to our new Europe. Or is it that the older form is brought to exhaustion by this worn out Europe, this Europe at the edge of its disappearance into economism? Disappears - and what is left but what Handke allows a narrator to call 'the evil of the every day' which must be retraversed in order to recover its hidden bounty.
I think of Handke as a pagan writer, as a Greek, as a Latin: I think he has that resource, a kind of pressure, that reaches him from ancient books. A pagan, whose pages turn in the wind and are read by the sky, as though they were abandoned books, similar to the haiku the travelling poets of Japan used to leave at stages on their journeys. Abandoned, because there are no other poets to read them. Lost in the expanses of Old Europe - lost as Old Europe is lost in this worn out continent, that capital buys and sells to itself.
A pagan - and then as one who is not lost, despite everything; whose narrators have behind them the wind from old Europe, the Greeks, the Latins - but I would not say the prophets, I would not say Judaism belongs to his writing. I'm not sure what I mean by this, but I remember Levinas's anti-mystical Judaism, that allowed his to celebrate Gagarin's ascent as the beginning of the disappearance of sacred places, of the pagan.
But then, for Levinas, Greek is the language of Europe into which the septaugint must be continually translated. Greek is rationality and order; Greek is philosophy, Europe's language. But with Handke, there is another Greek, and a Latin linked to that Greek. Isn't there something of Heidegger in this novelist? But let me brush these ill-formed thoughts away, except to note that there is a way of living the end of Europe that is no longer Greek, or Latin - no longer pagan, perhaps, and yet that still does not accede to the triumph of capital.