In the final analysis, Handke tried to “update the perception of the world and create a new way of observing things” with his own literary creations, and in this way “break through people’s inherent concept of the world, and get rid of the seemingly natural standard of judging things.” Therefore, Handke’s novels are more about creating a certain posture or feeling beyond the “common language”, thereby weakening and overflowing the persuasion and discipline of ideological discourse. In “On Tiredness”, Handke sharply criticized the Western media for always constructing the world with a certain hegemonic logic and paranoid view in unison, blinding the readers who do not understand. He advocated the “new subjectivity” literature and the “subjective authenticity” writing of self-contact with reality, and subjective observation as the truth.
Handke’s anti-traditional writing method and the enigmatic text that “makes readers confused, makes literary critics into an awkward position, and even feels irritated” have caused considerable controversy in the literary world, but they really involve Handke. The whirlpool of public opinion is his questioning and critical stance on the Western media and mainstream discourse on the Yugoslav war, which has become the “ideological monster” and “Bob Dylan among the defenders of genocide” in the eyes of the Western world.
In the 1990s, Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic’s rule was involved in three wars, which caused turmoil in the Balkan Peninsula and disastrous life. Western media consistently accused the Serbs of concocting genocide. Milosevic is the “Balkan Butcher”. Reporters from CNN or BBC were eloquently and awe-inspiringly accusing the Serbs of the massacre in the artillery and corpses all over the sky… However, anyone with a little bit of logic and common sense can see that the Western media is very much about this The reporting of war and guilt is “one-way” and “monopoly.” Outsiders cannot experience it personally, have no way of comparison, and are easily trapped by mainstream discourse. This kind of naked information tyranny will inevitably make information deteriorate and lose its function of conveying the truth. The Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels’ famous saying “A lie is the truth if repeated a thousand times” must be understood by Handke. Therefore, he urged that “the media should also listen to the voices of the Serbs, and should realize that war is not a The slap is loud, and you should not write reports in black and white.” However, this rational voice and motion was drowned out by fanatical noise and ulterior motives.
In 1995, Handke, who was of Slavic descent, set foot on the land of the former Yugoslavia with a distrust of the mainstream Western discourse, to observe, perceive, and search for the truth during his travels. “I was the first to stand up and say that we should also listen to the Serbs. But they said that the Serbs are evil, and the media at the time played a role in fueling the flames. So I wrote “Winter’s Journey”, which is also the only one. A book about that period of war.” Handek clarified the purpose of the trip in his travel journal “A Winter Trip to the Danube, Sava, Morava, and Drina or Justice for Serbia” published the following year. “The wars of the past few years have made me determined to visit Serbia. Since the outbreak of the war, Serbia has been generally called the’aggressor’… In the past four years, almost all pictures and reports about Serbia have come from the front lines of the war. Or on either side of the border, even if there is news from the other side, I gradually feel that these news are just a solidified, artificial perspective-it is an illusion created in our senses-in any case, it is not witnessed in person Yes. This prompted me to decide to explore behind the mirror; this prompted me to look at every report, every comment and every analysis that became more and more unfamiliar and worthy of study, or worthy of observation. Serbian country.”
In his travel notes, Handek recorded in detail the sufferings of the Serbian nation demonized by the Western media, calling him “an orphan, an abandoned child” and expressing his grievances to the “innocent Serbs” The sympathy of the “author” attacked the “unverified” accusations made by the Western media against Serbia and then Yugoslav leader Milosevic. Criticisms of media politics and information despotism made Handke a target of public criticism, but he still went his own way. “The source of my survival is the incomprehension of others”, and even unscrupulously claimed that “sometimes I want to be A Serbian Orthodox monk fighting for Kosovo”. After half a year of controversy and reflection, Handke believed that it was necessary to supplement what he felt during the previous trip, so he revisited the old place and wrote the “Winter Travel and Summer Supplement”. During the new trip, he found that his earlier understandings “become more and more uncertain”, because the shadow of war and death has penetrated into the hearts of local people, and people are full of doubt and distrust, so they have to choose It is believed that the high degree of “sense of presence” created by the western mainstream media with media symbols continues to be obscured and distorted.
Faced with the bloody conflict of excessive consumption by the Western media, he deliberately created the evil of Serbia. The “stigmatized” Handke criticized the western mainstream media and public opinion for ignoring the historical root of the problem, and only arrogantly launched public opinion encirclement and suppression against Serbia. The media’s way of speaking is almost entirely restrained by a tight dog chain in advance.” Prejudices and stereotypes prevented them from seeing the reality that Serbs were all victims of war. “In this war, the roles of the attackers and the attacked, the real victims, and the naked perpetrators were determined too quickly and became black and white.” In Handke’s view, these reports are one-sided. , Serbia needs to be treated fairly. At that time, he chose a very lonely position, even an enemy of the Western world, because he declared that the Western world bears an inescapable responsibility for the outbreak of the Yugoslav war: not only did not take effective intervention in the situation at the time, but instead fanned the flames. , So that the ancient hostility provoked by external forces in the “World War I and World War II” can be reproduced. The NATO bombing ended the war in Yugoslavia. At the same time, in Handke’s words, it also “destroyed Yugoslavia”. He publicly denounced NATO as a “criminal” and Western countries as a “rogue country.”
In essence, Handke is unwilling to move his works closer to politics. “The starting point of writing has never been a movement that most people in society participate in.” He thinks mostly about existence and essential meaning in his writing. However, his writing as “another reality” has had an impact on the “symbol construction monopoly power” of the western mainstream media. It is true that the formation of any kind of opinion will inevitably have its own biases, but multi-party understanding helps to understand things more objectively. Even if absolute objectivity cannot be achieved, it can still provide a refusal to construct a certain point of view as “cultural arbitrary” The possibility of arbitrariness is the root of hegemony. Western media regard Serbia as a guilty nation. Handke is not concerned with what conclusions people draw, but the way in which they reach conclusions. He tries to clarify the root causes of conflicts that frequently occur in the Balkans. This kind of compassion is strikingly similar to the British travel writer Rebecca West’s persistent exploration of historical truth. West described his trip to the Balkans in the book “Black Sheep and Grey Eagle”. In his contacts and observations of daily scenes, he traced the internal and external political entanglements and military conflicts in Balkan history due to ethnic, religious, and geographical factors, and described that the region has been continuously used as a tool by the West in the past few hundred years. The history of betrayal has revealed the mystery of the tragedy of the fate of local ethnic groups. Based on Handker’s inquisitive way of observation, Norwegian writer Carl Ove Knausgaard believes that the criticism of Handke is “ridiculous” because “he is in a world full of blood and war. What he sees here is not only the cruel and indifference of the political correctness of the Western mainstream public opinion, but more importantly, through these signs of the gradual disappearance of human nature and conscience.” He “don’t know the truth but actively seek the truth. This is exactly what the author’s Responsibilities”.
Needless to say, the Western hegemony trying to control the world has destroyed the possibility of integrating the world with literature to a certain extent. The biggest challenge faced by non-Western countries, including China, is how to resist the various new forms of colonization that are still continuing or even advancing, to independently understand themselves and the world, and to replace identity politics with realistic concerns about human justice Blind judgment. Handker’s award, no matter how much trouble it has caused, at least proves that the Swedish Academy of Letters still seriously expresses its naive attitude towards literature under the circumstances that factors other than literacy are infinitely magnified, so that readers are still deep in their hearts. Believe in the universal standard for judging the value of literature, and expect that literature can retain its transcendence relative to real life, cultural traditions, and geopolitics. Just like Handke’s “observation from any purpose… The coat of experience makes the world show its own weight and make people feel it.”
