In 2014, the same year that this English translation of Peter Handke’s 2010 novel (or a play, or a cross between both, or whatever) Immer noch Sturm, was published, the Austrian-born playwright and essayist was in Oslo to receive the Ibsen Award. Outside the National Theatre, the venue of the ceremony, were gathered throngs of protesters, many of whom were of Bosnian origin and had come to Norway as refugees in the 1990s to escape the civil war in the erstwhile Yugoslavia.
Wending his way through the protesters, who spat out angry expletives at him for his denial of the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian ‘nationalists’, Handke was evidently seething with rage — which manifested itself, within minutes, in arguably the most unrepentantly combative award-acceptance speech in literary history.
Offending the audience
There was, he thundered, no reason for him to tell his critics to “go to hell” because they were already in hell, and in fact, they were “hell itself”. All he wanted to “assert in your direction, which is not a direction” was a Slovenian curse — “ Jebo te mis ” — which, translated, suggests that the recipient of the ‘blessing’ may enjoy amatory action with a member of the rodent family!
But then, Offending the Audience — the title of Handke’s 1966 “anti-play” (as Publikumsbeschimpfung came to be characterised) — wasn’t at all an alien experience for him. In the ‘play’, which a gifted Handke wrote when he was 23 or so, four performers “abuse” the audience and analyse the nature of theatre. He wrote it, he said, to show that the “dramaturgy of the old plays” did not satisfy him any more. “My point,” he said, “is to use words to encircle the audience so they’d want to free themselves by heckling; they might feel naked and get involved.”
So, too, in Storm Still , Handke weaves a mesmeric circle of words, whose lyrical quality in the translation is a tribute to the exertions of Martin Chalmers. Right from its opening lines — “A heath, steppe, a steppe-like heath, or wherever. Now, in the Middle Ages, or whenever...” — Storm Still slips us into the psychedelic, allegorical dream-play rendition of the narrator’s (presumably Handke himself) return to the land of his birth: Carinthia province in Austria.
Ancestral voices
There, as if in a dream, he feels the weight of his history and ancestry bearing down on him. Out on the Jaunfeld plains, the narrator recalls, “my forebears are approaching from every side”. With theatrical precision — Storm Still came out as a play before it was offered as a short novel — “each one makes for the place to stand that seems prescribed for them”.
What follows then is a series of monologues, in which the living and the dead reach out across generations to narrate the story of their lives in times of peace — and in times of bitter conflict — just before and during World War II.
For all of Handke’s energetic prose, Storm Still makes for disquieting reading. There is a haunting, elegiac quality to the narrative as the ghostly ancestors channel their existential angst and unburden themselves of feelings and emotions in a way they might only in a familial setting. The questions that they pose to the narrator are troubling: “Should we,” one asks, “have gone on being the silent sufferers? Have gone on allowing the language of our soul to be taken away from us?”
Not all peoples are, of course, afforded the luxury of a return to their homelands. From Tibetan Buddhists to Kashmiri Pandits to Palestinians, estrangement and exile of a people from the place they consider their home make for the more common historical narrative. There may well be other such explorations of the mind and yet more heart-aching allegorical stories waiting to be written.
In other circumstances, though, monstrosities have similarly been committed in the name of defending a ‘homeland’ against ‘others’. Handke’s own life became intertwined with that of Slobodan Milošević, the so-called ‘Butcher of the Balkans’: the playwright even attended the Serb nationalist leader’s ‘war trial’ and, later, his funeral. It might be tempting to dismiss this as just another instance of Handke “offending the audience”. Except that — as he did at the Oslo award-acceptance speech in 2014 — Handke reckons that those who denounced him are a sub-species who only deserve to copulate with rats.
The borders that delineate ‘homelands’ may only be shadow lines of history, but they etch far deeper grooves in the recesses of people’s minds. And for every ‘winner’, there is also someone who loses out.
As one of the narrator’s forebears asks plaintively: “Unhappy the people, is it not so, that becomes a people of history — turned from a victim people into an active and victorious one, it forces another people into the role of the victim people, does it not?”
Storm Still raises troubling questions which those of us who lack the clarity that evidently suffuses Handke’s worldview can only inexpertly grapple with.
venky.vembu@thehindu.co.in
Storm Still; Peter Handke, trs Martin Chalmers, Seagull Books, ₹499
