So described, one has difficulty seeing why this was a popular play. Handke demonstrates the power of convention by removing it from the context in which it usually exists. He goes further by discussing those same conventions while violating them. The play affirms the power of theater by pointing out that the conventions are mistaken for the reality. When theater imitates, it does so through a structure of conventional movement and language. Handke forces the audience to see how often it confuses the convention with the reality it purports to imitate.

Self-Accusation

Similar themes animate the two other Sprechstücke. Self-Accusation has two speakers—one male, one female—who in no sense carry on a dialogue. Rather, speaking alternately and together, they portray an Everyman who spells out the process of growing up civilized. Every sentence in the dialogue has “I” as its subject. Again a short quote will convey more than a description.I learned. I learned the words. I learned the verbs. I learned the difference between singular and plural. . . . I learned the adjectives. I learned the difference between mine and yours. I acquired vocabulary.

In this play, the processes of verbal, moral, and physical growth are intertwined by Handke’s curiously declarative style. This style seems to imply that verbal growth is the controlling factor in shaping human life: Language civilizes at great cost and it creates our world.

Kaspar

This notion that language creates the individual’s world also motivates Handke’s first full-length play, Kaspar. This play has a historical antecedent. In Nuremberg in 1828, a boy, Kaspar Hauser, was discovered, who—as a result of abuse and sensory deprivation—could, at age sixteen, say only one sentence: “I want to become a horseman such as my father once was.” Handke, however, does not write historical drama. He says in the play’s introduction that his play “does not show how IT REALLY IS OR REALLY WAS with Kaspar Hauser. It shows how someone can be made to speak through speaking. The play could also be called speech torture.”

The play, like the Sprechstücke, presents a speaker on what is obviously still a stage, although a much more cultured stage than in the earlier plays. This speaker, Kaspar, is costumed and heavily made up as a Chaplinesque clown. This clown interacts with the voices of four Einsager, a neologism that literally means “in-sayers” but implies indoctrinator. (Michael Roloff translates it as prompter.) Later, Kaspar is joined by six other Kaspars all identically made-up and costumed.

Handke lists sixteen stages through which Kaspar must pass, beginning with the question “Can Kaspar, the owner of one sentence, begin and begin to do something with his sentence?” and ending with “What is now Kaspar, Kaspar?” Handke has stressed his concern with identity and individuality by changing Kaspar’s only sentence to “I want to be a person like someone else was once.”

Basically three main movements constitute the play. Kaspar and the audience learn that his one sentence is inadequate. The Einsager teach Kaspar new sentences until he has mastered language. It is at this point that the identical Kaspars appear. Finally Kaspar discovers that by accepting the Einsager’s language he has lost his uniqueness and identity. As Kaspar says, “I was trapped from my first sentence.”

Voices heard on the loudspeaker suggest all the voices of coercion one hears in growing up—parents’ warnings, teachers’ threats, government propaganda. By calling the speakers “in-sayers,” Handke demonstrates how quickly humans internalize such voices. The audience is never fully certain where these prompters exist. Are they outside or inside Kaspar’s head? Handke might argue that humankind cannot answer that question about its own consciousness and that this inability to answer is the point. Each human being is made up of others’ speech that has been internalized.

As the play progresses, the action onstage and the verbal images in Kaspar’s speech become increasingly more violent; indeed, there is the sense of a barely hidden threat throughout the play. By the end, Kaspar is left writhing on the ground to a shrill electronic noise, shouting over and over Othello’s phrase, “Goats and monkeys.”

Writer June Schlueter suggests that Othello, like Kaspar, is concerned with the “idiocy of language”: Othello is led astray by Iago’s lines, just as Kaspar is by the Einsager’s sentences. A significant difference between the two works, however, is the difference between Renaissance and modern concepts of language. Iago manipulates language to his own ends and violates the moral order by destroying the relation between the world of objects and events and the world of language. Kaspar’s Einsager use a language that has only a tenuous and conventional relationship to the world of ideas and events. The play seems to argue that this is the only relationship language can have to reality.

Influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein

In discussing Handke’s ideas of language, nearly every critic mentions his countryman, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), and the group of linguists and philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, who flourished in the 1920’s. Although Handke admits to having read Wittgenstein and some of the others, he has not explained the effect of this philosophy on his work, nor have critics satisfactorily suggested what this relationship might be.

Wittgenstein’s first major work, “Logischphilosophische Abhandlung,” (1921; best known by the bilingual German and English edition title of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922, 1961), reveals similarities with Handke’s understanding and use of language. The first is a stylistic similarity. Both writers use simple declarative sentences, frequently not connected by the usual linguistic connectors to what precedes or follows. In part, the style is a working out of Wittgenstein’s dictum: “What can be said can be said clearly, and what cannot be said must be passed over in silence.”

The concern with “what can be said” and “what cannot” seems common to both writers. Wittgenstein seeks to put a limit to philosophy, which he defines as “not a body of doctrine, but an activity.” One “does philosophy,” and its value lies in its doing. Similarly, Handke presents a definition of speech as an activity in which the nature, direction, and energy of the act are all more important than the content conveyed by the speech. That about which “we must remain silent” Wittgenstein calls “the mystical,” by which he means not only the subjective religious feelings ordinarily associated with that term but also such normal areas of philosophic inquiry as ethics and aesthetics. Indeed he seems to put ontology (the question of existence) in the realm of the mystical: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”

The notion that humankind infers the existence of the world from language extends throughout Handke’s work and even approaches the notion that humans create the world by speaking about it and by hearing elders speak about it. Drama has traditionally dealt with those subjective feelings and expressions about which Wittgenstein says humankind “must pass over in silence.” In fact, Handke does pass over them in silence. The expressions of subjective feelings (and they are very rare) are offered as objective statements and have no value beyond themselves.

Thus, one becomes aware of a hole, an absence, in the middle of Handke’s work. His dramas seem to be concerned with aesthetics, ethics, and identity—yet there is no language in them that discusses these issues; they are approached through silence. One could argue that Handke parodies a Wittgensteinian universe to show its inadequacies. A more consistent understanding of the plays, however, might be approached through another of Wittgenstein’s ideas, the pictorial theory of language, which argues that language can picture reality and that propositions “show what they say.” Further, he insists, “What can be shown, cannot be said.”

This last proposition is extremely important in considering Handke’s purpose. Instead of parodying Wittgenstein’s universe, he displays its tragicomic nature. Because language is always inadequate, humankind is led to wildly comic errors and actions; because human beings can never speak about that which is most important, they are left alone and twitching at the end of the action.

During his later years, Wittgenstein rethought the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and challenged his own picture theory. He admitted that language arises out of specific social occasions, and, therefore, words need not always name objects. In his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein developed the notion of language games and stressed that speech is an activity.

The Ride Across Lake Constance

Handke clearly likes to play language games, but for him, unlike Wittgenstein, they are never innocent. Handke’s games are always zero-sum; there is a winner and loser, a master and servant, a speaker and listener. In this, Handke seems to participate in a major theme of German drama, the relation of the individual will to authority. His use of this theme creates a tragic paradox: Language, which enables human beings to conceive of freedom, is the principal force that prevents them from achieving it.

Handke’s two full-length plays The Ride Across Lake Constance and They Are Dying Out explore this paradox and the power relations that it creates. Unlike Handke’s earlier plays, The Ride Across Lake Constance has a real set—a kind of nineteenth century drawing room with a long double staircase leading into it. There are some suggestions that this may be a madhouse, but Handke, as usual, never specifies. What is apparent is that it is a set. Handke insists on the theatricality of the piece. He arbitrarily assigns the names of famous German actors to his characters, but he suggests that “the characters should bear the names of the actors playing the role . . . the actors are and play themselves at one and the same time.” In an interview, Handke said that the play examines “poses” as they are used onstage and in life.

The title derives from a folktale in which the hero, lost in fog, crosses Lake Constance on very thin ice. When learning of his narrow escape, he dies of fright. “To ride on Lake Constance” is the German equivalent for the expression “skating on thin ice.” Author Nicholas Hern suggests that the “thin ice” in the play is society itself and that the play explores what society means by the concepts of sense and madness.

This sense of the social definition of madness relates this play to the themes of power and domination in all Handke’s work. The familiar images and apparatus of dominance fill the stage. One woman is sold a riding crop and later beaten, another seeks to dominate a man through temptation. Two men are shown in a clear master-servant relationship. Yet the audience feels neither threatened nor enraged by these relationships and acts because they appear as theatrical poses.

A typical first reaction to The Ride Across Lake Constance is befuddlement; New York theater critic Clive Barnes admitted that within the first two minutes of the play, he realized that he did not know what was going on. One suspects that Handke wants the audience to see that reality is a mental construction socially imposed and accepted and that madness reconstitutes the world in a socially unacceptable but no less valid way. Again language, sentences, and the place of objects deny the viewer the freedom to re-create reality except through madness.

They Are Dying Out

Handke’s next play, They Are Dying Out, suggests that humankind’s normal construction of the world is equally mad. Its protagonist, Herr Quitt, is a protean, laissez-faire capitalist of the sort who prompted Germany’s economic recovery. Throughout the play, he sees into and seems to criticize capitalist society. As Schlueter points out, however, no critic has convincingly given a definition of Handke’s politics; she adds that the play “stops considerably short of becoming a Marxist platform.” The German title of the play means, literally, the irrational are dying out, and the play seems to be about irrationality. Quitt cannot reconcile his inner sensibilities with his social actions. When he denounces capitalism, another capitalist says, “It was just a game, wasn’t it? Because in reality you are. . . .” Quitt cuts him off with, “Yes, but only in reality.” This notion that one can choose the irrational world and that it is truer than the rational world motivates one strain of German Romantic thought, especially that of the poet Novalis.

Again, it is unclear where Handke stands. His hero commits suicide at the end of the play by beating his head against a rock to the sound of recorded belching. Is this the defeat of the poet by the modern world? Is it the ultimate image of the failure of civilization? Whatever it is, Handke believes that one cannot talk rationally about it. Handke can only offer the image. Thus Quitt, who is shown as a dominant force throughout the play, destroys himself in part because of society’s dominion over him, because of the understanding that society drives human beings away from their true selves.

Because Handke is in this play more concerned with society than language, it is the first of his plays to have conventional characters and something approaching a plot. Narrative seems here to be the appropriate mode. This might suggest that Handke’s career as a dramatist began with an examination of language’s inability to communicate, passed through an examination of how language forces people to construct reality, and concludes with the acknowledgment that language is only one of the forces that determine humankind. His work centers on force, attack, control, and humans’ inability to protect themselves.

1990’s Plays

Handke’s career as a dramatist began with an examination of language’s inability to communicate and passed on to an examination of how language forces humans to construct reality. In the plays he wrote in the late 1990’s responding to the Balkan conflict, Zurüstungen zur Unsterblichkeit (preparations for immortality) and Die Fahrt im Einbaum (the journey in the dug-out canoe, or the play about the film about the war), he arrives again at a position first articulated in Kaspar: Language is a tool of manipulation and indoctrination. The Einsager, the linguistic social engineers of his most famous play, turn into the chorus of the three journalists in Die Fahrt im Einbaum.