Peter Handke, Meng Jinghui's Idol, Comes to China and Talks About Writing and Death

"No writer is entirely pure. Sometimes you have to get a little dirty."

If you pay any attention to theater, you may know the name Peter Handke, the well-known Austrian novelist and playwright. Last weekend in Shanghai he talked about theater, fiction, film, writing and death — serious one moment, funny the next.

The director Meng Jinghui has called Handke his idol more times than anyone can count; his own production I Love XXX comes out of Handke's Offending the Audience. "That headlong, reckless spirit of rebellion in Handke came on strong, and it hit me hard," Meng said at a 2013 Shanghai International Literary Week event.

In 1966, aged 24, Handke published the play Offending the Audience and was famous overnight. The play threw out everything conventional theater rests on — plot, scenes, characters, events, dialogue — leaving four nameless speakers on a bare stage, no set and no curtain, abusing the audience like madmen.

Two years later another important avant-garde play of his, Kaspar, opened at the same time in Frankfurt and Oberhausen, Germany. It follows a man named Kaspar learning to speak, and shows how language controls and disciplines a person. Plays like these came to be called "speak-ins." They dissolved the distance theater had tried to keep since Brecht — between actor and audience, between theater and reality — and were deeply subversive.

In the 1970s Handke wrote the novels The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Short Letter, Long Farewell, A Moment of True Feeling and The Left-Handed Woman. Each tries, from a different angle, to find the self inside real lived experience and so to shake off the confusion of existence; the group was later called Germany's "New Subjectivity" literature.

Handke, though, thinks of himself as a traditional writer. What he admires is Russian literature — Chekhov, Tolstoy — and the tradition of Goethe, not rebellion. "I hate rebellion, rebellion annoys me. Rebellion is something only young girls do. I even envy rebellious writers — they're so good at catching women's eyes," Handke told The Paper in Shanghai last weekend.

Perhaps it is this classical bent that has made Peter Handke one of the most important writers in contemporary German-language literature. He won the Büchner Prize in 1973, the Franz Kafka Prize in 2009 and the International Ibsen Award in 2014, and for years now he has been a favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature. "Handke is a living classic. He deserves the Nobel more than I do," said Elfriede Jelinek, who won it in 2004.

Like the earlier Nobel laureates Svetlana Alexievich and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he carries on the morality and conscience that matter most in the Russian literary tradition he loves.

Europe in the 1990s was shaken by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the upheavals in Eastern Europe and the wars in Yugoslavia, and Handke published a great deal in response, against war and calling for peace. In 1996 he ran a Serbian travelogue in Süddeutsche Zeitung. In 1999 his play on Yugoslavia, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, opened at the royal theater in Vienna. He also returned the Büchner Prize he had been given in 1973, to protest the German military's bombing of Serbia and Kosovo.

In 2006 Handke attended the funeral of Slobodan Milošević, former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Milošević had been accused of genocide against Croats in the Balkan wars of the early 1990s and was, to some people, a monster, though the International Court of Justice at the United Nations later declared that the charge did not hold. The funeral still set off wide controversy in the press. Productions of his plays were canceled in several European countries because of it, and the Düsseldorf city government refused to pay out the Heine Prize it had awarded him. Handke's reply was calm: "I am watching. I am understanding. I am feeling. I am remembering. I am questioning."

Beyond literature, a book review in The New York Times noted, Handke is also linked to the "New German Cinema" movement that began in the 1960s and produced directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff. Handke himself often wrote screenplays for Wenders — Wings of Desire, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Wrong Move and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez are all his — and The Left-Handed Woman, which he wrote and directed himself, was nominated for best film at Cannes.

This year is Handke's first visit to China, and he chose Shanghai as his first stop. The hall at the Shanghai Writers' Association was packed.

So that you get a more direct sense of Peter Handke, we have excerpted part of the conversation on stage.

Excerpts from the Conversation

S = Sun Mengjin (host, writer)

P = Peter Handke

S: You're a novelist and a playwright, and you've directed films and television programs too. You believe the highest form of language is poetic language. How do you define yourself as a writer — which of these identities matters most to you?

P: I once said that I am a poetic writer, but with a certain dramatic leaning.

S: So your plays sometimes read like novels — is that right?

P: My soul is poetry, and my whole machinery comes out of poetry. Within the German, or the whole Western, epic tradition — because in this age you often have to combine much of poetry with much of drama — at bottom, when I'm working something out or writing for the theater, I'm still a poet who leans toward poetry, toward the lyrical. And the dramatic things in me are really the many voices deep in my soul. Mechanically I'm a poet, or an epic writer; sometimes I'm a dramatist; sometimes I can write a song, but with no guitar. People can read my prose as a song, a song with no instrument. Language is my only instrument, and that, for me, is literature — that is, language. The trouble today is that much of literature has lost some of the power that belongs to language itself. Just as it happened to Flaubert and Balzac in their time.

S: The earliest play of yours I read was Offending the Audience, and many Chinese directors have staged it. What shocked us about it was its aggression toward the whole audience sitting right there, and at the same time its doubt about the existing system. You were very rebellious early on, which puts you close to certain musicians and writers; the play itself is anti-theater, and you succeeded — famous overnight, and very young. Can you tell us where you started from?

P: I'm not really anti-theater. In fact I think that first run of plays, beginning with Offending the Audience, is closer to Aristotle. Austria, we say — I was still a university student then, and after I heard a lot of music by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, in that Central European atmosphere of ours nobody called it a culture or anything tremendously shocking, but for me it meant liberation. So when I heard that Beatles song, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," I kept wanting to make one of those, to reproduce that kind of feeling or spirit — so my Offending the Audience is really "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in another form. On the whole, my first batch of plays, my early plays, were the friendlier ones. My plays now have only the form of friendliness, while the content runs against the world, or against theater — so that's the dialectic Marx or Lenin talked about, I suppose.

S: These past few days I've been reading your play The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. It's a fascinating script: all kinds of walking across the stage, people whose identities are unknown at the start and only slowly emerge. A German director friend of mine who has seen it says it's tremendously powerful. It's one of your later works. Could you talk about the later plays?

P: Take theater: it's more about the question of the harm done to people, and my most recent work runs in that direction, on that theme. Everything I have written before comes from an inner, dramatic, troubled love; without a contradictory love for people I wouldn't write — but if there's no reason rooted in love, then nobody should write. So that's what you might call a dramatic reason for it.

S: In a lot of your work we find your own shadow. Some pieces are autobiographical in form; others keep a wary distance from the world, including a fresh look at values. In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, for instance, you say that "fear is in keeping with the laws of nature."

P: Without a self there's no literature; without a self there's no such thing as our poetry — none of it exists. Take Tolstoy's War and Peace: where the truly poetic thing appears, you can of course say it's the character Tolstoy speaking, but in good writing it's always the person himself making the sound, not the author's voice. Yes, around the seventies I lived through it; the literature of that time had a New Subjectivity element in it, and perhaps I did too much of it then, which is why that impression stuck. Without a self you get so-called international literature, and all of today's international literature has no self. That kind of international literature means that where you write makes no difference — New York, Bangkok, Alaska, anywhere — you write the same thing. My model is Goethe, who called for world literature, not international literature. The literature of the world has to be one's own; only when it really starts from something of your own, of your own people, is it genuinely world literature — and that, I'd say, is what can shake more people. What floods literature today is international literature.

S: You once made a film called The Left-Handed Woman. You had asked Wenders to direct it, he didn't, and in the end you borrowed his crew and directed it yourself. But you've said you became unwilling to make films after that, because once you finish a film you can't get back into a writing state of mind. Is that right?

P: Making films or working as a writer, I've always felt myself a "defier" of the law. As a writer, you can't be a conventional thing. What you receive from God shouldn't come with some indifferent set of rules attached. When I write I'm not like Kafka; I lean more toward being a man with no law, someone who jumps over the boundary of the law. Cross that boundary completely and you become a fully conscious defier. No one can defy me; I could wipe everyone out. Writing, to me, is a "crime," and it's precisely inside that "crime" that the most beautiful world lies. On this point, once you've broken one rule you can do other things.

S: I've noticed that on different occasions you revise the same thing. Do you often break your own rules?

P: That's true.

S: Then should I believe today's you, or yesterday's?

P: Yes. Writing, or literary creation, does have its own regularities, and what we should do is slowly try to break particular boundaries. Literature's rules should stay mostly at the level of form; don't let them set into a fixed route. Break your own fixed route and you're a rule-"breaker." Every sentence has to be put in danger — that way you can oppose yourself and break your own rules, and that has happened to me too. Once or a hundred times, you have to let yourself break your own boundaries or rules. No writer is entirely pure. Sometimes you have to get dirtier.

S: I feel you have both things in you — things from deep in the soul, and a very precise way of describing things. Do those two conflict sometimes? Are you a contradictory person?

P: A line of Rilke's comes to mind, though I hadn't meant to quote it; it just came to me. He was a poet, and what he hated was ambiguity, and that ambiguity is exactly the imprecise thing. So I'm against that ambiguity. But as a writer there are in fact moments when I do have to go through something approximate, something ambiguous — sometimes. In certain cases that imprecision is more precise than precision itself. But not always.

S: I've noticed you're quite an interesting person in daily life. Can you tell us what sort of person you are day to day? Any bad habits?

P: I don't think it's a matter of a bad habit; it's that sometimes I'm not patient enough. Kafka said impatience is really the greatest sin. In that sense I'm a great sinner. Not today and not here, but maybe an hour from now I'll have had enough. Impatience, not being able to bear things, makes a person uglier, so sometimes I feel I have that tendency. I say this seriously: it's worse than a bad habit. Personally I have no bad habits; all my habits are good. My habits make me better, and my habits are what have made me the person I am now, though sometimes I'm not that good. Everyone has his own point of humor. Some say Kafka is really the funniest writer in the world, but I don't much like humor myself; I even hate it. What I like is cheerfulness, optimism. Goethe said humor is a relatively low and inferior form of literary expression. Humor should be a byproduct of seriousness. Kafka was in fact an extremely serious writer, and it's because he was so serious that what he wrote can make people laugh. Without that depth of seriousness you can't produce humor.

S: Two of your novels moved me deeply, especially A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which is autobiographical, about your mother's suicide. Can you talk to us about that novel? Did your mother's suicide affect you deeply?

P: The book is there, read it, that's enough. It's also the only piece of writing of mine with any real autobiography in it. While I was narrating my own pain, narrating my mother's situation, I also knew there were things that shouldn't be written. On death: for literature, without death there's no poetry and no literature — but for me it's sometimes also a "taboo" that forbids me to write. Spinoza said in the Ethics that "a truly rational person should not think about death, but about life"; if people aren't aware of death, then in another sense there's no real life either. So what I wanted to describe more was that stretch of life. What I write about, more than anything, is what life actually is, what existence is. There's a well-known German regional writer, Hermann Lenz, who has a wonderful line: "People should be full of gratitude for life." People should be grateful for existence, and for the dramatic quality of existence too. From that angle I hope to keep going, and on that path an awareness of death shouldn't be missing — though in the end I'd rather have no more talk about death, because there's already too much death in life. Death is sometimes a pretty bad thing.

Cover image via diepresse