Just reading with great enjoyment Sebald's Campo Santo, a collection of
miscellaneous writings, including an early draft of A Natural History of
Destruction. There's a great essay on Handke's play Kaspar, about Kaspar
Hauser, which reflects on the nature of language and the "pathological
connection between the possession of property and education":
"For do not things have names only to help us grasp them better, as if the
blank spaces in the atlas we have made for ourselves out of reality
disappear only so the colonial empire of the mind may grow?"
He also discusses what Handke calls "speech torture": "In this learning
process speech itself features as an arsenal containing a cruel set of
instruments" - and an immediate reference of course to Kafka's The Penal
Colony.
He finishes quoting Handke again: " 'Thus the sound of speech strives to
'express' subjective and objective happening, the 'inner' and the 'outer'
world; but what of this it can retain is not the life and individual fulness
of experience, but only a dead abbreviation of it.' Literature can transcend
this dilemma only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by
learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of
communication."
Sounds to me so much like a definition of poetry. But then, I would think
that...
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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