Introduction

THIS CHAPTER ANALYZES the intersection of walking, remembering, writing, and reading in the semi-autobiographical travel narrative Mutter und der Bleistift (2013; Mother and the Pencil) by Carinthian author Josef Winkler (*1953). Recognized in the Austrian press as a “requiem for his mother,” Winkler's narrative follows the author's travels to India, the Ukraine, and the South of France shortly after his mother's death. Winkler first describes a walk, accompanied by Ilse Aichinger's collection of short prose, Kleist, Moos, Fasane (1987; Kleist, Moss, Pheasants), through the Ellora caves, the famous temple caves in Maharashtra, India. Peter Handke's journal volume Gestern unterwegs (Traveling Yesterday, a collection of notes culled from various notebooks) is Winkler's touchstone in the second part, as he visits churches in Lagrasse and Kiev. His travel descriptions of and reflection on sacred sites become intertwined with memories and descriptions of his hometown of Kamering, where the act of traveling became associated with death, paralysis, and silence during the Second World War.

The representation of otherness, and particularly its (over-)familiarization, its focus on boundaries, and the systematization of others through mimesis, has always been a central concern in the history of travel writing. Writers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries often sought to break free from Eurocentric perspectives by using strategies of complication and intentional rejections of conventional narrative authority. I will show how Winkler uses his mobile vantage point on various global locations to overwrite conventional geographical imaginings. My analysis is further informed by Stephen Clingman's discussion of the significance of grammar and form in multilingual and multiliterary experiences. With a heavy emphasis on detail, layering, and repetition, Winkler's intricate syntax structure showcases the “performative power of language” by imitating the act of traveling on the actual page.

The first section of my study places Winkler's notoriously provocative work within the larger context of postwar Austrian literature and provides a brief summary of recent scholarly analyses. Winkler, as I will show, self-consciously incorporates intertextual references into his text and meditates on the influence of other authors on him with the peripatetic combination of walking, reading, and remembering.