Sebald Across

7/27/2019 Sebald Across

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W. G. Sebald

‘The journeys o men should lead to

where they have come rom.’

(Shlomo o Karlin)

In recent years, there are ew clearer exam-

ples o the misunderstanding between culture

and culture industry than that o Peter

Handke. Around the time o his return to

Austria it was considered as a given that thisauthor, who rom the very beginning has

stood at the centre o public scrutiny, repre-

sented the highest class o contemporary

German-language literature. The specic

narrative genre he developed succeeded by

dint o its completely original linguistic and

imaginative precision, through which – in

works such as The Goalie’s Anxiety or

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams – the author reports

and meditates upon the silent catastrophesthat continuously beall the human interior.

It is particularly worth noting, retrospec-

tively, the ways in which these texts manage

to satisy the demands o the book market,

without giving up any claim to ‘literary’ status.

The secret o this success, I venture, is that

Handke’s narratives – though doubtlessly

ormed rom high artistic understanding and

true eeling – are hardly at odds with an idea

o literature which critics are ready or able

to understand. Handke’s texts were accessi-

ble; even ater a quick perusal, all kinds o

progressive observations could be applied to

them. Handke likewise laid no overlarge

obstacles in the way o literary criticism. In

the shortest time, numerous essays, analyses

and monographs were written up and

Handke’s work was subsumed into the canon.1

Already with the appearance o the three

books o Slow Homecoming , however, the

engagement with Handke become more hesi-

tant.2 Far more hermetic, ar more dicult to

describe, these works, which observe the

world in a dierent manner, almost seem to

me to be conceived in order to put a stop

to this critical and scholarly game. The author

clearly paid a dear price or this insolence –

whether unintentional or strategic – through

which the author secured or his writings a

claim to a certain discretion ater publication.

What unsettled critics more than anythingelse was Handke’s new and, one could say,

programmatic design or the visualization o

a more beautiul world by virtue o language

alone. Neither critics nor scholars managed

to come up with much to say about the many

wonderully-built textual arcs o ‘Child Story’

or ‘The Lesson o Mont Sainte-Victoire’,

except to designate them as examples o the

abstruse extravagance o Handke in his latest

phase. Since then readers have retreated,scholars have or the most part liquidated

their interests (i I’m not mistaken), and as

or the critics, who were naturally the most

exposed, some have elt compelled to pub-

licly rescind their condence in Handke.3

In recent years it has come to a point where

Handke’s new works may still be reviewed,

but these reviews are as a rule ormed by

animosity, either open or concealed. Even the

ew positive commentaries exhibit a strangeperplexity and a palpable discomort. In

every case, the metaphysic developed in

Handke’s newer books, which aims to trans-

late the seen and perceived into language,

remains undiscussed. There is obviously

no longer a contemporary discourse in which

metaphysics may claim a place. And yet art,

wherever and whenever it may take place,

bears the closest ties to the realm o meta-

physics. In order to explore this proximity,

the writer requires a courage which should

not be underestimated; or critics and schol-

ars who see metaphysics as a kind o junk

closet, it is naturally easy to be satised with

the general admonishment that, in the higher

realms, the air is thin and the danger o all-

ing great. What I want to do now is not to

discuss the particularities o this distancing

rom Peter Handke – nor do I want to be

tempted by the considerable task o sketching

the psychology and sociology o the parasitic

species that takes literature as its host; in-

stead, I simply want to experimentally

Across the Border:Peter Handke’s Repetition



homeland, ‘took notice o me now and then

but never stared’, and the longer he observes

his surroundings, the more certain he be-

comes ‘that this was a great country’. In the

train-station tavern he dreams o being ac-

cepted into the population o this great coun-

try, amidst a people that he envisages as

being ‘on an unceasing, peaceul, adventur-ous, serene journey through the night, a jour-

ney in which the sleeping, the sick, the dying,

even the dead were included’. The normally

mostly light-fooded empire, in this passage

drowned in darkness, which Filip Kobal sees

himsel entering, is qualitatively as ar re-

moved as is thinkable rom the alse home-

land rom which, according to the synopsis

o his previous years, he escapes ‘ater almost

twenty years in a non-place, in a rosty, un-riendly, cannibalistic village’. As the narrator

remarks, Filip Kobal’s eeling o reedom is

completely concrete, or in contrast to his

‘so-called native land’, the country on whose

threshold he stands lays claim to him not ‘in

the name o compulsory education or com-

pulsory military service’, but rather, as the

narrator in turn states, it lets itsel be laid

claim to, ‘as the land o my oreathers, which

thus, however strange, was at least my owncountry’. ‘At last’, the narrator recalls rom

his memories, ‘I was stateless; at last, instead

o being always present, I could be lightheart-

edly absent’. Outland, the country o ances-

tors and o absence: these passages strangely

invoke the coincidence between the ‘king-

dom o reedom’ and that o the dead, which

may initially prove perplexing. Yet there is

something to this, since both the kingdom o

reedom and that o shades are sites o expec-

tation, where no living being has yet been.

The narrator recalls how his mother, when-

ever speaking o her Slovenian homeland,

would recite the names o the major towns o

Lipica, Temnica, Vipava, Doberdob, Tomaj,

Tabor, Kopriva, as though they were settle-

ments in ‘a land o peace where we, the Kobal

amily, would at last recapture our true

selves’. The land o peace envisaged by son

and mother is not only a metaphysical, but

also a political concept. Without doubt, the

metaphysics o an ‘other world’ where one

goes to meet one’s ancestors point towards a

process a ew things regarding the book

Repetition, which upon rst reading in 1986

made a great and, as I have since learned,

lasting impression on me.

Repetition is the report o a summer

journey to Slovenia, undertaken in 1960 or

1961 by a young man named Filip Kobal, on

the trail o his missing older brother Gregor.The reporter and narrator is Filip Kobal

himsel, who looks back on the time rom a

distance o a quarter century. As much as we

learn rom him about the young Filip Kobal,

the currently middle-aged narrator is unwill-

ing to give us much inormation regarding

his present identity. It’s almost as i he, who

we can recognize only by his words, is the

missing brother himsel, whose trail the

young Filip Kobal is ollowing. The benecialeect that this search or clues, described by

Handke, has on the reader, is rooted in the

ollowing constellation: that the young Kobal

is lead by the older, or whom he is searching,

and that protagonist and narrator, separated

rom each other only by passed time, relate to

each other like the two brothers who are the

subjects o Handke’s story.

Directly upon passing his nal exams,

Filip Kobal leaves his home – his old ather,his ailing mother, and his conused sister –

and travels across the border to the country

on the other side o the Karawanks, whence

came the Kobals, and where Gregor fed

when he was drated into the German army in

the mid-thirties, in order to study the cultiva-

tion o ruit trees at the agricultural school

in Maribor. The crossing o the border opens

up a new kingdom or Filip. Although the

industrial city o Jesenice, the rst stop o his

journey, ‘grey on grey, squeezed into a nar-

row valley, shut in between two shade-cast-

ing mountains’, in no way corresponds to the

picture Filip had imagined to himsel o this

neighbouring empire as a collection o ‘cities

resplendent with colour, spreading out over

a wide plain, […] the one merging with the

next all the way to the sea’ – nevertheless, as

the narrator specically remarks, the city

‘ully conrmed my anticipation’. Jesenice is

actually the entryway to a new world. Filip

notices how the droves o people going about

their business, unlike in the small cities o his



empire, is a paradigm or this paranoid con-

cept o homeland, whose gruesome conse-

quences reach ar into the post-war years

during which Filip Kobal grew up. At the end

o his wanderings, as he returns home

through the Karst, he is at rst happy to see

Austria again – inspired, perhaps, by the

hope that he would be able to bring home hisvarious oreign experiences. ‘On the way

rom the border station to the town o

Bleiburg […] I vowed to be riendly while

demanding nothing and expecting nothing, as

betted someone who was a stranger even in

the land o his birth. The crowns o the trees

broadened my shoulders.’ Yet barely arrived

in the city with the ominous name [ Blei : lead],

he is met once more with the ‘guilty, hangdog

ugliness and ormlessness’ o his Austriancompatriots – ‘ashionably dressed, they had

gleaming badges on their lapels’ – constitut-

ing a suspicious people, whose sidelong

glances prompt the 20-year-old to refect on

how ‘not a ew members o this crowd were

descended rom people who had tortured

and murdered, or at least laughed approv-

ingly, and whose descendants would carry on

the tradition aithully and without a qualm’.

This remembered realization, as well as thenarrator’s complete silence regarding his

subsequent experiences in his unaccommo-

dating homeland, clariy why he must repeat

his voyage out o Austria, twenty-ve years

ater he rst let.

The departure or the imaginary true

homeland, lying across the mountains, is an

attempt not only at sel-liberation, but also at

the breaking-through o exile, in the widest

meaning o this concept. Despite being long-

time residents o Rinkenberg, where they are

accepted as natives by their ellow villagers,

the Kobal amily – comparable in many ways

to the Barnabas amily o Kaka’s Castle –

have retained, due to their own obstinacy, a

eeling o their own oreignness. Unlike their

ellow Rinkenbergers, they possess and pro-

tect the memory o a way o lie more digni-

ed than their present one, oppressed by a

corrupted Austrian populace. Thus the ather

and mother constantly and involuntarily

think back to past times, as though they were

both cut o rom their Slovenian provenance,

position o resignation, in which liberation

can always only be a liberation rom lie; yet

at the same time the utterances o the mother,

remembered by the son, are dened by their

resolute resistance to coercive assimilation,

and their clearly pronounced resentment

against Austria. Thus, talk o a possible alter-

native situation leads not only to a quiet de-mise: it also has a real social signicance.

The country o peace, evoked by the pretty-

sounding Slovenian names, is the absolute

opposite to the alse homeland o Austria, as

well as to the malignancy o a society organ-

ized by conederations and associations. The

text makes this unmistakably clear. What is

benecial or Filip Kobal about the crowd

in which he nds himsel, walking the streets

o Yugoslavian cities, is primarily ‘what itlacked, the things that were missing: the

chamois beards, the hartshorn buttons, the

loden suits, the lederhosen; in short, no one

in it wore a costume’. Thus, or Filip Kobal –

in a oreign land, amid the passing shades

o Jesenice – it is less the resigned absorption

into an anonymous other that communicates

the eeling that he is nally among his own

kind, as it is the absence o all costume, o all

insignia, o anything overdetermined. Thedialectical mediation o metaphysics and

politics enables a change o positions: namely,

that as the bent shades o Jesenice come to

lie, the costume-wearers take on the appear-

ance o evil, unredeemed, dead souls. The

‘costumed’ is in no way identical to an orien-

tation which aims to conserve the homeland;

rather, it is the unmistakable indication o

an opportunism, by which the propagation o

the concept o ‘homeland’ becomes allied

with the destruction o homeland. Addition-

ally, the ‘costumed’ also signies the negation

o every oreign country. I the concept o

homeland comes about in the 19th century in

response to the evermore ineluctable experi-

ence o the oreign, the ideologisation o

homeland in the 20th century, similarly in-

spired by a ear o loss, develops into the

attempted expansion o the homeland, as ar

as possible and employing orce when neces-

sary, at the cost o other homelands. The

word Austria, as the name or the Alpine

republic let over ater the dissolution o the



the unredeemed world, belong to the narra-

tive tradition o exile literature. Even in the

worst o times, there must be a righteous

person walking somewhere in one’s country.

The task is to recognize him. Dierent than

the dogmatic Christian histories o the

Saviour – systematically suppressing hopes

or redemption, which in turn gradually growvirulent – the messianism o Jewish prov-

enance, always ready to see the hoped-or

redeemer in each stranger or oreigner, con-

tains not only theological, but also political

potential. Even when the ather has no idea

o ‘the orm the redemption o his amily here

on earth might take’, this much is neverthe-

less clear: that it must be a redemption taking

place in the here and now, as well as a re-

demption o an entire community. It is nocoincidence that the mythical ancestor o the

amily was an agitator. The rebellious dispo-

sition, setting itsel against all authority,

determines the messianic antasy rom the

ground up – which doesn’t, however, imply

that the gure o the redeemer is established

rom this model. The redemptive gure o

messianism is characterized more by the

ability to transorm multiariously. Due to his

one-eyedness, Gregor, the older brother,having preceded Filip in his journey to the

other country, is the king among the blind o

the exiled. As the narrator inorms us,

Gregor ‘never actually became an insurrec-

tionary’, even though he oten stood on the

threshold o becoming so; yet in this he em-

bodies a certain type, which the narrator

believes to have otherwise seen in only a ew

children: namely, the pious. Necessitated

by the war, the disappearance o the son in

whom the hopes o the Kobal amily were kept

alive – or whom the avourite word ‘holy’

reerred ‘not to the church, heaven, or any

other place outside the world’, but rather

with everyday lie and getting up early in the

morning – the loss o this bearer o hope

spells an almost unbearable trauma or the

exiled. Even ‘twenty years ater my brother’s

disappearance’, the narrator remembers, ‘our

house was still a house o mourning’, in which

the missing brother let his amily ‘no peace;

every day he died again or them’. From this

unappeased and unappeasable mourning,

individual would almost be a brother to the

next. This can be seen in Filip Kobal’s en-

counters with masculine gures in the ancient

landscape o the Karst. Figures like the young

soldier Vipava, appearing to Kobal as his own

doppelgänger, or the waiter rom the Bohinj,

who Filip guesses to have been the child o a

smallholder, like he himsel was. This waiter,whose portrait is drawn with great devotion,

is a veritable imago o the ideal o brother-

hood. Brimming with constant attentiveness,

and only ‘seemingly lost in some araway

dream’, he surveys, in truth, ‘his whole realm’.

Handke’s shaping o the story o the

waiter rom three or our sides belongs to the

most beautiul passages o the past decade o

German-language literature. Deeply im-

pressed by this individual who embodies truecivility – even giving a light to a drunkard

with utmost gravity – Filip Kobal thinks only

o him the ollowing day. He knows, accord-

ing to the narrator, that ‘it was a kind o love’

that draws him not into contact with the

waiter, but into proximity to him. The story

takes a strange, thoroughly remarkable turn

with the silent meeting o the two young

men – wherein not a single word is ex-

changed – on the last day Filip Kobal spendsin the ‘Black Earth Hotel’. On the way up to

his room, around midnight, Filip Kobal

passes by the open door to the kitchen, and

sees there ‘the waiter sitting by a tub ull o

dishes, using a tablecloth to dry them. Later,’

continues the text, ‘when I looked out o my

window, he was standing in his shirtsleeves

on the bridge across the torrent, holding a

pile o dishes under his right arm. With his

let hand, he took one ater another and with

a smooth graceul movement sent them sail-

ing into the water like so many Frisbees.’

This scene is simply recounted, without com-

mentary, and let in its own right. Due to this

unquestioning representation, the gure o

the waiter, nishing his daily work in the

strangest way, impresses itsel deeply on the

reader’s mind. And the plates sailing out into

the darkness, like the no less beautiul sen-

tences describing arcs across a dark back-

ground, become dispatches o brotherhood.

Consoling dreams, in which a lengthy

procession o messianic gures emerge rom



even when they almost had it in their hands

– nor were they especially interested in

power’.4 Repetition makes similar claims

about the Slovenian people: that as a power-

less people, ‘without aristocracy, without

military marches, without land’, they remain

uncorrupted, ‘their only king’ – again almost

like the Jews – ‘being the legendary hero whowandered about in disguise, showing himsel

only briefy’. It is clear that Filip Kobal, like

his brother beore him, is expected to ll this

role o the secret king. His messianic disguise

is that o the guest, entering the household

anonymous, unsuspected. The role was as-

signed to him early on by his mother and

sister, who would set a cup o tea beore him

upon his return home rom school, with the

obliging attitude that becomes second natureto women, as though he were ‘an unexpected

noble guest’. And in his wanderings, the

smallholder’s son, actually someone with ‘no

origins at all’, becomes conscious o his enor-

mous task. Similar to an early version o the

beginning o Kaka’s Castle, where the

prince’s chambers are prepared or the wan-

derer K. when he appears in the village, Filip

Kobal is oered a large room in the ‘Black

Earth Hotel’, ‘with our beds, enough or awhole amily’. And evenings, when he sits in

the hotel restaurant, ‘no one, not even the

militia on its constant rounds, asked me my

name; everyone called me “the guest”’. Filip,

whose home has become travel and transpor-

tation, already during his school years – and

who, wandering southwards with his blue

seabag and walking stick, moves towards the

ullment o his predestined role – is here, as

the silent guest, the one rom whom redemp-

tion is expected. It takes a long time – a quar-

ter century – beore the task he carried out at

that time becomes, on repetition, clear to

him. At rst he is simply looking or his

brother. Signicantly, when he glimpses a

vision o his brother in a sort o ancestral

invocation, he is unable to bear it. The hallu-

cinatory apparition, with eyes set so deep

that their ‘white blindness remained hidden’,

completely overwhelms Filip, orcing him

to immediately leave the sight o the appari-

tion, and to nd rescue taking up his own way

in the stream o the passing crowd. In the

the otherwise independent parents develop

communally the wishul dream o their son’s

return home. As the text recounts, the par-

ents worship their missing son ardently, each

in his or her own way: ‘At news o his coming

she would immediately have prepared “his

apartment”, scrubbed the threshold, and

hung a wreath over the ront door, while myather would have borrowed the neighbour’s

white horse, harnessed it to the spit-and-pol-

ished barouche, and, with tears o joy run-

ning down his nose, driven to meet him.’

The strong sel-assurance o the exile is

represented in the character o the Kobal

amily. In the uture, the mother is certain

that ‘ater our return home, our resurrection

rom a thousand years o servitude’, the

village o Kobarid in the Isonzo Valley, romwhich, according to lore, the Kobals origi-

nated, will be renamed Kobalid. Nothing

more is required or the messianic adjustment

to the world than the tiny displacement o

a syllable. The act that the village is called

Karreit in German is a urther symbol or

the redemptory mission o the son [- freit :

-reed], which would see the amily’s op-

pressed existence transorm into a proud

indomitability. According to their amilymythology, the Kobals are the designated

representatives o the Slovenian people, who

like the Jews, the exemplary exilic race, ‘had

been kingless and stateless down through the

centuries, a people o journeymen and hired

hands’. As Filip walks among these people

through Yugoslavian streets, he eels an anti-

authoritarian power emanating rom this

anonymous populace, who ‘had never set up

a government o their own’. ‘We children o

darkness’, the narrator states, counting him-

sel as one o this group, ‘were radiant with

beauty, sel-reliant, bold, rebellious, inde-

pendent, each man o us the next man’s hero’.

The exclusivity that the narrator ascribes to

the Slovenian people is a refection o the

changing consciousness o Filip Kobal, who,

like Amalia rom Kaka’s The Castle, learns to

bear the imposed destiny o the exile as a

mark o honour. One o the least understood

attributes o the Jewish diasporic people is

the act that, as Hannah Arendt makes clear,

‘Jews neither knew what power really was –



circumstances almost inallibly curtail that

which, in a nicely worked out story, is laid

out as possibility. The narrator’s ear that he

could similarly be snued out, as his brother

was beore him, haunts his written-down

memories as a eeling o powerlessness. All

the same, the temporal structure o his report

shows us that he has managed to survive ora good number o years. A quarter century

has passed since the young Filip Kobal ound

his inner storyteller. Looking back, it be-

comes clear to the orty-ve-year-old that, at

the time, he would not have been able to tell

the story o homeland to anyone. It is a

lengthy process o gestation by which indi-

erent scraps o one’s own lie transorm into

thought-provoking images; and even when

the ancient ragments seem to be gatheredinto a sensible pattern, the storyteller is

plagued by doubts, never to be ully assuaged,

as to whether what he holds in his hands are

only a matter o ‘the last remnants, letovers,

shards o something irretrievably lost, which

no artice could put together again’. The act

that, despite this diculty, and despite such

scruples, Repetition presents us over and

over with passages – like the one cited above,

recounting the waiter at night – which almostcommunicate a sense o levitation, seems

to me a mark o the exceptional quality o this

story, whose secret ideal, so it seems to me,

is one o lightness. Not that the narrator is

careree or lighthearted; but instead o talk-

ing about his burdens, he turns to his senses

in order to produce something that could

help him and his reader – who may also be in

need o comort – to resist the temptation o

melancholy. The proessional role model

chosen by Filip Kobal or his own narrative

work is that o the roadmender, who is re-

sponsible or the upkeep o the roads in the

area, and who, like the author in his hut,

lives in a one-room house which resembles

the porter’s lodge o a manor – despite there

being no such manor in the vicinity. This

roadmender, who, like the writer, carries out

his laborious work day ater day, on occasion

transorms suddenly into a sign painter,

standing high upon a ladder outside the en-

trance to the inn at the centre o the village.

‘As I watched him’, recounts the narrator,

messianic tradition, it is not a matter o the

separated alling into each other’s arms; more

important is that the eort be sustained, that

the younger succeeds the elder, the student

becomes the teacher, and that the redemp-

tory ‘pious wish’ – the wish, expressed in one

o Gregor’s letters rom the ront, to enter

the Ninth Country in the Easter vigil carriage – be given earthly ullment, ‘in writing’.

The text o Repetition constitutes this

ullment. The book is the Easter vigil car-

riage, in which the separated members o the

Kobal amily may sit together once more. The

composition o the text is thus no proane

matter. From the outset, the storyteller is

aware o the diculty o the task set beore

him. He remembers, signicantly, how his

mother, ‘whenever I had been out o thehouse or any length o time, in town or alone

in the woods or out in the elds, assailed me

with her “Tell me!”’; and how at that time,

beore she ell ill, he never succeeded in tell-

ing her. We can assume, rom the act that his

mother’s illness helps him to overcome his

narrative block, that one o the principal

tasks o storytelling is to soothe. One o the

requirements or the administration o such

an artistic practice, so closely related to thato medicine, is the readiness to stay awake

through the night. Already or the schoolboy

Kobal, ‘the one lighted window in the teach-

ers’ house’ – and not ‘the trembling little

fame beside the altar’ – was the true, eternal

light, which would not let hopes or redemp-

tion be extinguished. In Handke’s work,

learning and teaching are ways o conserving

the world. This is exemplied in Repetition

by his brother’s notebooks, written in

Slovenian and dealing primarily with the

cultivation o ruit, which Filip brings with

him on his travels, and which become a text-

book or his approach to lie. On the example

o his brother’s writings, he realizes that

those ‘who, unlike the great mass o those

who speak and write, had the git o bringing

words and through them things to lie’, and

who are prepared to devote themselves un-

ceasingly to this strange art, are able to pro-

duce a healing eect on others. The traceless

disappearance o his brother in the Second

World War also symbolizes how cruelly



same angle, where, as the narrator reports,

the stubbly grass hardly trembles, bean or

potato plants hardly sway, and on whose

ground thereore, ‘without ear o one an-

other, the beasts o the Karst could assemble,

a stocky little roe deer along with a hare and

a herd o wild pigs’. To this image o peace-

able unity, animated by reerence to the ark,is inscribed the hope that, despite prevalent

unavourable conditions, something o our

natural homeland may yet be saved.

1 By 1982, the list o secondary literature con-

tained around two-hundred entries.

2 The stream o secondary literature has certainly

not dried up in the eighties, yet it relates what Handke

has written in the past decade mostly to his earlierwritings. To this is added the act that most o what is

published on Handke’s newer work is o a distinctly

polemic character. For a long time now, there can be

no question o an objective study o one o the most

important authors o contemporary literature.

[C. J. Lohmann, ‘Handke-Beschimpung oder Der

Stillstand der Kritik’, Tintenfaß H. 2, 1981.]

Characteristic o the increasing distanciation o liter-

ary scholars is Manred Durzak’s Peter Handke und

die deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur , published in 1982.

Clearly unconvinced by the ideas developed by

Handke in the three books o Slow Homecoming ,Durzak criticizes the roguishness, the lack o a con-

nection to social reality, and in particular the ‘stylistic

pointillism, which endlessly compiles details with no

apparent necessity, and misses the vision o a poetic

image which brings all together’. My translation; orig-

inally cited rom N. Honsza (ed.), Zu Peter Handke

– Zwischen Experiment und Tradition (Stuttgart,

1982) p. 108.

3 C. B. Heinrichs, ‘Der Evangelimann.

Glücksmärchen, Wanderpredigt, Leseolter: Die

Wiederholung’, Die Zeit , 3. X. 1986.

4 My translation; originally cited rom H. Arendt,

Elemente und Ursprünge totalitärer Herrschaft , Vol. 1:

Antisemitismus (Frankurt, Berlin, Wien, 1975) p. 54.

‘adding a shadowy line to a nished letter

with a strikingly slow brushstroke, aerating,

as it were, a thick letter with a ew hair-thin

lines, and then conjuring up the next letter

rom the blank surace, as though it had been

there all along and he was only retracing it,

I saw in this nascent script the emblem o a

hidden, nameless, all the more magnicentand above all unbounded kingdom.’ I don’t

know i the orced relation between hard

drudgery and airy magic, particularly signi-

cant or the literary art, has ever been more

beautiully documented than in the pages

o Repetition describing the roadmender and

sign painter. It is also important that the

work o this man, chosen by the narrator as

his preceptor, is done outside: that it does

not place the landscape in a rame, as is oth-erwise the case with art, but instead brings

the landscape into alignment with itsel.

The extraordinary openness o the text o

Repetition arises rom its presentation o the

external as something much more important

than the internal. Accordingly, the model or

the true place o the narrator, as Filip Kobal

realizes in hindsight, is the shed in his ather’s

eld: ‘I’ve gone directly to the elds rom

school, and I’m sitting there at the table withmy homework.’ This shed, as he now knows,

was and is ‘the centre o the world, where the

storyteller sits in a cave no larger than a way-

side shrine and tells his story’. The eld shed

the narrator has in mind here, like the sukkah

o a dierent tradition, is a place o rest on

the journey through the desert, and its peri-

odic reconstruction, in a civilization which

sets ever sharper limits upon what is appro-

priate or human nature, is a ritual o remem-

brance or an outdoor lie. In Repetition,

Handke allows the peculiar light which illu-

minates the space under a leay canopy or a

tent canvas to glisten between words, placed

here with astounding caution and precision;

in doing so, he succeeds in making the text

into a sort o reuge amid the arid lands which,

even in the culture industry, grow larger day

by day. The book o the journey through the

Karst, over which the inamous bora wind

blows, resembles thus the dolinas: sinkholes

which lie beneath the wind, islands o still-

ness, surrounded by trees, all bent at the



‘Across the Border: Peter Handke’s

Repetition’ by W. G. Sebald.

Translated by Nathaniel Davis.

Composed by Phil Baber using Bradord,

a typeace by Laurenz Brunner.

Originally published in Unheimliche Heimat

under the title ‘Jenseits der Grenze’(Frankurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,

1995, pp. 162–178).

This translation was commissioned and

published by The Last Books on the occasion

o ‘Postremo’, an event by Francesco

Bernardelli held on the 25th February 2013,

and prior to the release o the third issue

o Cannon Magazine – a complete reprint o

Peter Handke’s Repetition – in May 2013.

www.thelastbooks.org

Sebald Across

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Transcript of Sebald Across