Wherever he goes, wherever he turns, the ghosts of the animals he has killed are with him, until at last, after much hardship and suffering, he is rowed by a leper across the water to the end of the world. On the opposite bank, Julian must share the ferryman’s bed, and then, as he embraces the man’s fissured and ulcerated flesh, partly hard and gnarled, partly deliquescent, spending the night breast to breast and mouth to mouth with that most repellent of all human beings, he is released from his torment and may rise into the blue expanses of the firmament.
Not once as I read could I take my eyes off this utterly perverse tale of the despicable nature of human violence, a story that probes horror further with every line. Only the act of grace when the saint is transfigured on the last page let me look up again.
Evening twilight was already darkening half of my room. Outside, however, the setting sun still hung above the sea, and in the blazing light that rippled from it the whole of that section of world visible from my window quivered, a view unspoiled by the line of any road or the smallest human settlement. The monstrous rock formations of Les Calanques, carved from granite over millions of years by wind, salt mist, and rain, and towering up three hundred meters from the depths, shone in fiery copper red as if the stone itself were in flames, glowing from within. Sometimes I thought I saw the outlines of plants and animals burning in that flickering light, or the shapes of a whole race of people stacked into a great pyre. Even the water below seemed to be aflame.
Only as the sun sank beneath the horizon was the surface of the sea extinguished; the fire in the rocks faded, turned lilac and blue, and shadows moved out from the coast. It took my eyes some time to become accustomed to the soft twilight, and then I could see the ship that had emerged from the middle of the fire and was now making for Porto harbor so slowly that you felt it was not moving at all. It was a white yacht with five masts, and it left not the slightest wake on the still water. Although almost motionless, it moved forward as inexorably as the big hand of a clock. The ship was moving, so to speak, along the line dividing what we can perceive from what no one has ever yet seen.
Far out above the sea, the last gleam of daylight faded; inland, the darkness was gathering closer and closer, until the lights on board the snow-white ship showed against the black heights of Capo Senino and the Scandola peninsula. Through my binoculars I saw the warm glow in the cabin windows, the lanterns on the superstructure of the deck, the sparkling garlands of light slung from mast to mast, but no other sign of life at all. For perhaps an hour the ship lay there at rest, shining in the dark, as if its captain were waiting for permission to put in to the harbor hidden behind Les Calanques. Then, as the stars began to show above the mountains, it turned and moved away again as slowly as it had come.
La cour de l’ancienne école
After this picture was sent to me last December, with a friendly request for me to think of something appropriate to say about it, it lay on my desk for some weeks, and the longer it lay there and the more often I looked at it the further it seemed to withdraw from me, until the task, in itself nothing worth mentioning, became an insuperable obstacle looming ahead. Then one day at the end of January, not a little to my relief, the picture suddenly disappeared from the place where it lay, and no one knew where it had gone. When some time had passed and I had almost entirely forgotten it, it unexpectedly returned, this time in a letter from Bonifacio in which Mme Séraphine Aquaviva, with whom I had been corresponding since the summer before, told me that she would be interested to know how I had come by the drawing enclosed without comment in my letter of January 27, showing the yard of the old school of Porto Vecchio, which she had attended in the thirties. At that time, Mme Aquaviva’s letter continued, Porto Vecchio was a town almost dead, constantly plagued by malaria, surrounded by salt marshes, swamps, and impenetrable green scrub. Once a month at most, a rusty freighter came from Livorno to take a load of oak planks aboard on the quayside. Otherwise, nothing happened, except that everything went on rotting and decaying as it had for centuries. There was always a strange silence in the streets, since half the population was drowsing the day away indoors, shaking with fever, or sitting on steps and in doorways looking sallow and hollow-cheeked. We schoolchildren, said Mme Aquaviva, knowing nothing else, of course had no idea of the futility of our lives in a town made practically uninhabitable by paludism, as the phenomenon was called at the time. Like other children in more fortunate areas, we learned arithmetic and writing, and were taught various anecdotes about the rise and fall of the Emperor Napoleon. From time to time we looked out of the window, across the wall of the schoolyard and over the white rim of the lagoon, into the dazzling light that trembled far out over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Otherwise, Mme Aquaviva concluded her letter, I have almost no memories of my schooldays, except that whenever our teacher, a former hussar called Toussaint Benedetti, bent over my work he would say: Ce que tu écris mal, Séraphine! Comment veux-tu qu’on puisse te lire? (How badly you write, Séraphine! How do you expect anyone to read that?)
[Essays]
Strangeness, Integration, and Crisis: On Peter Handke’s Play Kaspar
We must therefore listen attentively to every whisper of the world, trying to detect the images that have never made their way into poetry, the phantasms that have never reached a waking state. No doubt this is an impossible task in two senses; first because it would force us to reconstitute the dust of those actual sufferings and foolish words that nothing preserves in time; second, and above all, because those sufferings and words exist only in the act of separation.
When, after several panic-stricken attempts, Kaspar emerges onstage from behind the backdrop of a curtain, and at first does not move from the spot in that strange space, “he is the incarnation of astonishment.”1 At the end of what seems to us to have been a long flight he finds himself in a clearing, hemmed in without any way of escape, delivered up to a reality of which he has no concept. He knows nothing about us. It may be that in his colorful jacket, wide trousers, and hat with its band he reminds us of the wide-eyed rustics who used to make Viennese audiences laugh. As wily provincials, these rustics of course knew their way around, not perhaps in urban society “comme il faut” but onstage, where they were never at a loss for either information or an excuse. But Kaspar is still a stranger here and has no companions. The theme of the play, then, is not the fast-moving adventures of the comic character, which are happily resolved in the end, but the inner and inward-looking story of the taming of a wild human being. The result, however, is to cast a critical light on what the development of the outer plot constantly implies in its specific and historical course: the transformation of the unruly clowning into a proper Kasperl play, the attempt, in many ways a hopeless one, to turn an individual who by ordinary standards is uncivilized into a respectable citizen.[6]