The Dialectic of History and the Revocation of Modernity

Abstract

In his essay on the narrator, Walter Benjamin notes, “The fairy tale, which is still the first counselor of children because it was once the first of mankind, lives on secretly in the narrative. The first true storyteller is and remains that of fairy tales” (Benjamin 2007, 103–128). Peter Handke, whose reflection on narrative in Der Bildverlust (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos) parallels Benjamin’s reflections in some respects, follows this phrase of the philosopher in his story Kali. Eine Vorwintergeschichte (Potash) from 2007. However, the fairy tale forms only the innermost core of this story, which simultaneously displays elements of mysticism, the epic, the initiation novel and the road movie. It is important to realize, however, that the images and scenes presented in Kali are also part of an intertextual network of relationships that equally determines other texts by the author Handke and is closely linked to his metatextual reflections developed in the narrative. Many of the fairy-tale and mythical motifs correspond to the “mythe personnel” (Mauron 1962, 284, 286) that the author inscribes in his texts; at the same time, they belong to his cross-textual treatment of the themes of perception, experience and memory, writing and image. It is precisely in the fairy-tale narrative that the author presents here that this general writing principle of creative schematization becomes evident. It uses a limited stock of narrative set pieces to continually generate new stories and narrative situations. Observation and movement, departure and arrival, remembering and recognizing, crisis and new beginning, past and present, childhood and death, to name but a few of these points of reference, are at the center of a game of textual variation that, in the end, confirms above all the capacity of narrative itself.