Why can't Peter Handkes' avoid hiding the truth?

In his speech during Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance this weekend, winner Peter Handke again tried to avoid the issue of his support for Slobodan Milosevic and denial of war crimes in Bosnia, but his slow tactics to do so are not functioning. Before Peter Handkes, it was Dobrica Chosic. Chosic, a troubled ideologist whose works for historical revisionism were required to be read by a generation of hopeless Serbian literature students, in fact did not receive the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. A cleverly orchestrated joke led some ordinary people to believe, for about an hour or so, that he received this award and that it warranted a grim attempt to create ethnically clean state territories in the 1990s.

Handke is, of course, a stylist more realized than Chosiqi, but there are many points that unite them: in particular a monumently self-esteem and a lack of self-awareness that disguises very little of their inflated sense of cultural importance. Handke is also more fine. While Cosqi enjoyed the title “father of the nation” that stemmed from his position as a fallen angel of communist authoritarianism, Handke takes advantage of his suspicious alliances, which he repeatedly denies, instead presenting as a man tormented by the fundamentally insignificant answers of other people in terms of his ill - informed political interventions, which he intended as art and never seriously.

In the face of questions, he tries, increasingly, to leave. Before telling a reporter at his press conference last Thursday “I don't want to answer any of your questions”, he told another person who asked if he had changed his opinions: “Never had an opinion.” This exit strategy is not unique to Handken. It was undertaken by Anders Olsson, chairman of the Swedish Academy Awards Committee, who told critics in a series of letters that “when Handkes is awarded the prize, the goal is to celebrate his extraordinary literary work, not the person. The price means only this aesthetic of appreciation and nothing more. ” Handke himself applies the same form of solipsism, telling a person who asked him that he could ask: “I'm a writer, coming from Tolstoy, Homer, Servantes. Leave me alone and don't ask me questions like that. The objective conclusion is that the artist is not political and should not be influenced by association with political realities, even if the questions posed stem from his work.

The position of overcoming politics is, of course, a very political attitude. The artistic attitude that claims not to be a point of view or that retreats into the simple attitude of doing beautiful things to be consumed by debt is a strong grouping attitude with existing relationships of power and inequality. He is also, no doubt, a outcry away from the provocative arrogance that gave Handke fame and set his position as one of the most persistent merchants of the world's world-renowned teutonic brand of unhappily self-challing. This new, more appropriate approach was highly evident in Handke's Nobel Prize speech on Saturday, in which he accepted the literature award as a result “his aesthetic assessment and nothing more”. The talk, as a press conference of a famous person, is far more obvious to what he does not say than what he says. He focuses on his “as writer”, withdrawing to banalia as “never ignore what a tree or a water surface will say. ”

Rejecting his no journalistic adventures in the Balkans as “Narrative attractions or expedition”, he wanders only occasionally into the field of reality upon which his influence has been so weak. It honours Nazi soldiers “who fell into the honorary field” (they “died as heroes for their homeland”) and at another moment honours the alleged Nobel laureate, Knut Hamsun (rarely, he also mentions Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen). The sentimental memories of Nazism are separated by pacifist expressions: “The blue color of the mountains is true ) the coffee of a weapon case.”

Handke has a strategic reason to reduce his entire literary production, including estimated political interference. Literature is transformed, from this gymnastics, into the infallibility of literature. I am not a legal man. I am not a judge”, says the writer, who was quoted by Slobodan Milosevic (two times) in his defence statement before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As he was asked to explain his opinions, Handke states: “I like literature, not opinion. ”

At all points he allows himself to claim the unique position, for example, for giving a speech at the funeral of a dictator who committed genocide and later claiming that he meant nothing. Putting aside the romantic activities of rivers, flowers, and mountains, no one who follows Handke's public appearance cannot help but notice his generous use of vulgarity. He uses reproach like throwing shells on a pedestrian avenue from a position in the mountains over a besieged city. He tells concerned citizens to put their concerns up their “ass”. He tells protesters “I'd fuck”, while adding that they're already in hell. He is very happy to describe people who have written them as “minus”. The Vulgate is, of course, an honorable literary technique. He has many potential goals, perhaps the most important is attention. Out of the position of marginalized and outcasts, vulgarity can be art, showing rejection of the imposed value, or hypocritical projection of power.

Coming from a very comfortable old aesthetic under the supervision of the Swedish Academy, vulgarity is common arrogance. Doubtful claims for “truth.” In the states of the former Yugoslavia where Handke's political interventions (ex2> have been so harmful, people have great experience with literary composers taking over the authority of social science, offering suspicious claims to “the truth” and then being drawn to the fortress without windows of cultural popularity. This is the story of novelists who produce memorandums that turn into instruction books on ethnic cleansing, film directors that become paramilitary commanders whose suicide trends are discovered very late, failed poets who design genocide projects before resurface as healers. The inflated responsibility of these artists turned into politicians has cast a permanent shadow into the region on claims of art autonomy, and on war, which constituted the essence of Handkes' speech in Stockholm on Saturday, that art can inform life. The same spirit prompted Handke's publisher to describe it and his alegetics repeatedly, such as “cricritic media”. The criticism involved consists of a claim that Serbia was treated unjustly in covering the war.

This is not an unsupported claim and pro- and counter evidence can be found in the very volume research conducted on this subject by qualified scientists who collect current data. But if Handke knows anything about this organ, he'll mention it on any of his jobs. On the contrary, he claims a position that is at once evasive and self-denial: “I feel obligated only to justice. Or perhaps even question it, to question”, he once wrote.

The claim only to suspect constitutes a claim to transcendence, with a way out: Handke claims the authority of philosophy and removes responsibility for its contents. This is evident in Handkes' speech at Slobodan Milosevic's 2006 funeral, which had cited him as an authority in his criminal defense four years earlier. In a defense of Milosevic himself, who Handke described as simultaneously weak “” and the right “”, he declared: “Bota, the so-called world, knows everything about Yugoslavia, Serbia. The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Slobodan Milosevic. The so - called world knows the truth. So today's so-called world is missing, not just today, and not just here. The so-called world is not the world. I know I don't know.”

This offered the opportunity for his publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, to offer the explanation that Handke himself started “had doubts at the funeral” where he gave the speech. Political composers describe this kind of avoidance planned as offering a reliable “modation”, but this may be the only case in which the principle of faithful denial has been called to explain a speech at a funeral. The basic principle is simpler: As a fanatic of beauty, the artist cannot be considered responsible for what he says and does. Handke has previously practiced this form of escape.

Asked in 2010 about allegations that he had beaten up his former partner, Marie Colbin, he answered literally: “It's a stupid expression because it sounds like self-trial. His assessment of the close link between consciousness and idiocy may be correct if it is not misorited.” We're actually talking about banal art, which we can define as normalizing ideology and recapitalizing it in the form of beauty. Making a mockery of domestic violence by wordplay is banal art. Anti-Islamic racism disguised as philosophical suspicion is banal art. The counterfeiting of history is banal art. The degradation of victims is banal art. The raising of “leterity” on its content is banal art. Handke himself is a banal artist. / BIRN/