The Weight of the World

In 1975, Austrian writer Peter Handke began an experiment in writing that continues to the present: a practice of daily note-taking. A space for “spontaneous recording of aimless perceptions,” Handke's notebooks are heterogeneous in both their semantic content and material form: montages of thoughts, impressions, landscape descriptions, and reading notes are inscribed in pencil and colored ink into pocket-sized notebooks of different bindings and paper qualities with a range of inserted ephemera. In describing his process, Handke writes: “I now practiced reacting to everything that befell me imme-diately with language. […] It is not the narration of a consciousness, rather an immediate, simultaneously captured reportage of it.” The majority of Handke's notebooks from 1975 to 2018 have been acquired by the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, which currently houses 229 notebooks containing more than 33,000 pages. Handke's notebooks are neither diaries nor journals in the traditional sense nor merely “pre-text” for to-be-published works. Rather, they are part of a distinct artistic-writerly project that undergirds much of Handke's published work.

In 1977, Handke published Das Gewicht der Welt: Ein Journal (November 1975–März 1977) (The Weight of the World: A Journal [November 1975–March 1977]). The book was the first in what would become a series of so-called journal volumes containing selections of notes edited and transformed into typographic text. The journal volumes are essentially abridged versions of Handke's notebooks, indications of the manuscript wholes from which they were drawn. The cover of Das Gewicht der Welt, however, offers the reader a literal glimpse of the notebooks from which it was produced: a color facsimile of a torn-out page with both written script and a drawing of tramcar handholds (see Figure 2.1 ). The title, author's name, and publisher's name are also handwritten, rather than in typeface, and printed in orange and white, the visuality and materiality of the notebook page thus expanded through the cover design to envelop the book's printed contents. Semantically, the facsimiled notes capture a feeling of exclusion or isolation (“Gradually no one is free for me”). Seeing and reading (“ONE large eye; wanting to retreat to ‘Elective Affinities’”), which would become two central topics for Handke, are evoked, tinged here with feelings of anxiety and withdrawal.