The Midday Of A Blogger

OK, so the post about the somewhat confusing book I mentioned yesterday is go.

The Afternoon of a Writer, Peter Handke - This is actually more a short story, only around 80 pages long. It chronicles one afternoon and evening in the life of an unnamed writer, living in an unnamed European city (it's somewhere German is the primary language, but that's about all we have to go on). The writer, having finished a page of his current work, feels he's accomplished enough in that sense for the day, and resolves to go out for a time. He travels through the town, eventually arrives at a place he calls "the gin mill" spends some time there, is talked at by some strange drunken man who brings about a crisis of confidence in the writer. Eventually the writer remembers he had a prior engagement for the day, and hurries off to meet a man working at translating some 'itineraries of a book set in the region' who wants to ask the writer some questions. Their work concludes quickly, and they begin talking. The translator reveals he was once a writer, but has felt so much freer once he became "only" a translator. The writer arrives home shortly after their parting (though he decides to covertly follow the translator for awhile after they appeared to go their separate ways), feeds his nameless cat, sits in the dark observing the city, and eventually goes to bed, considering how he is a puzzle to himself.

That's the plot, now what does it all mean? There's precious little dialogue in the book, and no actual conversations between characters are written. We are told people speak to the writer, but their dialogue is often not written out, and the writer only has dialogue to inanimate objects or to himself*. Even when another character's dialogue is written out, the writer does not really respond to it, so that it is more a sense that the character, be it the translator or the drunk, are monologuing, and the writer just happens to be there.

Furthermore, the writer often can't understand what people are saying. He finds an old woman in her night clothes, passed out on top of a bush. he and other passerbys help her awake, but she remembers nothing of herself, and speaks as though she were a child. But she speaks only to the writer, and while she's speaking only disjointed phrases and syllables, he somehow feels he knows everything there is about the woman from them. When the drunk talks to him, the writer can't hear what he's saying**, yet connects with what the man is trying to get across, up to a point. Eventually the writer makes eye contact, and that causes him to lose the thread of the drunk's words, which is perceived by the speaker, who then calls him a coward and a liar, then messes up the pages of the writer's notebook. Because he's drunk. Or a jerk. Or nuts. I'm unsure which.

There seems to be in the book an idea that what a writer puts to pen and paper is not just from their minds but from something larger than that, that the writer is trying to convey something vitally important, and that it must be done precisely, even though the writer may barely comprehend what they are trying to convey. This seems to be what drove the translator to his current profession, because it would lack such pressure. He would merely translate preexisiting works, rather than try to grasp that larger something himself.

It further appears that for the protagonist, the attempt at writing has left him somehow outside the world. He may understand things, but he does so in a different way, such as being able to grasp the essence of what the old woman wanted to tell him, even if what she uttered was insufficent to such a task. Or following the drunk, even when he couldn't hear a word the drunk said. When walking down a crowded street, he begins to perceive hostility in many eyes, and to believe it to be the anger of people who know him to be a writer, and disdain him for such a useless profession***. He regrets having allowed his picture to be taken, because it brings him recognition, and so he hears people discussing him, which contributes to a feeling of alienation he has, where he describes himself as belonging to a different, third sex. He sees ice on the river, which then reminds him of a colder winter which had even larger floes on the river, which then reminds him of a summer when a child was trapped by the overflowing riverbank, and he saved the boy. Later happy moments in this winter make him abruptly recall pleasant memories from summer, and this goes both ways apparently, as though his brain is on a tape delay, where he can only appreciate things until long after they were experienced.

While the drunk is talking, the writer begins to ponder whether there is any need for writers in the current day and age? He appears to feel writers are there to preserve people and moments of great import, so that they may be remembered, and he starts to doubt whether there is actually anyone or anything in the current world worthy of that designation, and if not, then he's wasting his and everyone else's time, isn't he?

Early in the book, we're told that at one point in the not-so-distant past, the writer for a year feared he had lost contact with the language. Since he is able to write, it would seem he's regained contact, but I can't shake the feeling that it's more difficult for him now. When he says he lost conatc with language, is that how he's able to understand people who can't use language? That he lacked the ability to take what he was sensing and put it into words? During the interlude with the old woman, he states that he's always learned best through intuition, not observation, so did that hasten his disconnect with language? Listening to someone speak (or reading their lips) would be a form of observation, while knowing they were speaking, but simultaneously understanding all of it and none of it seems closer to intuition.

It truly seems the writer has distanced himself from society to the point he looks upon it more as a story he's writing, or researching for, than something he takes part in. He follows the translator after they part ways, just to see where he goes, and apparently the writer does this with other friends and even complete strangers as well. Rather than interact with them, he plays the role of the reader, watching through third-person perspective, much as we follow him****. He connects certain memories of the summer in his mind, as if he's building the setting for the opening chapter of a story. When he briefly leaves the drunk's presence to visit the bathroom, the drunk apparently waits patiently for his return, then resumes speaking as if there was no pause at all. It's as though the writer set the book down, and as books tend to do, the action halted until his return. The others in the gin mill know him, but don't really acknolwedge him, as if they were characters aware of their creator, but not willing to tempt fate by treating him as such.

* For example, at one point he tells his shoes 'You are the right shoes for me, because in you I feel myself stamping the earth, and above all because you are the brake shoes I need. You know of course that slowness is the only illumination I have ever had.'

** Though they're sitting right next to each other. The writer describes the drunk as being seemingly voiceless.

*** He comapres these people to a woman Chekov described who hated on him for being a landscape painter, because that meant, in her eyes, he didn't contribute to the advance of society.

**** Except we're privvy to his thoughts, while he can't access theirs. Though we aren't always able to understand his mind, perhaps because he can't himself. He crosses a courtyard, and ponders what "work" is to him, and then begins running across the courtyard. The why isn't provided. He doesn't seem to be running in glee, but it doesn't seem to be fear of anything in particular that drives him.