end result of that process. The narrator acts out the perennial dilemma of the writer, who must make choices at all times and who does not—as the reader might imagine from the finished product—have firm control over the action and the characters of the story that unfolds. There is thus no continuity of plot inDie Hornissen; instead, there is continuous vacillation between descriptions and explanations, fantasies and dreams. This novel is a writer’s confession about the difficulties encountered during his work. Such difficulties can be illustrated only through a plot that the narrator is attempting more or less successfully to construct; thus, there is the trace of a conventional story in Die Hornissen. The novel is about two brothers, or perhaps three. One of them has become blind while searching for the second one. A war may have had some influence on his blindness. On a Sunday, much later, the blind brother awakens and is reminded of his absent brother by something that remains rather vague in his mind. The periodic arrival of the local commuter bus seems to be important for the blind man, who shares a house with his father and his father’s second wife. The Sunday events are reminiscent of events during the war. Shortly before the end of the novel, there is a hint at a possible connection among all these disjointed elements. The blind narrator thinks of a book, possibly with the title Die Hornissen, that he once read. He vaguely remembers some of the events in the book, while he has forgotten particulars. The events still remembered begin to change and become superimposed on events from the present.

Handke had observed that a method of description can be used only once before its repetition becomes the description of the method rather than that of the world, and his second novel, Der Hausierer, was an attempt to salvage and revivify a method made moribund by repetition. In it, Handke begins with the perception that the detective story has a plot structure that is always the same, with the same descriptive clichés of murder, death, fear and fright, pursuit and torture. By making his readers conscious of the signature character of these clichés, he attempts to show the true human emotions of fear and pain behind them. Der Hausierer, with its barren attempt at making “real reality” perceptible behind a huge inventory of detective-story clichés, has been deemed a monumental failure in novel writing.

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Some early critics thought that his failure with Der Hausierer, as well as possible difficulties in discovering constantly new descriptive methods, might have forced Handke back into a more conventionalnarrative stance in his third novel, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. The novel indeed possesses a continuously unfolding plot, clearly defined characters, and a recognizable setting and time frame. Nevertheless, Handke did not abandon his original intention of discovering metaperspectives for himself and his readers. Rather than focusing on language, his investigation this time concentrates on the reliability of psychological causality as it is conventionally depicted in literature. The leitmotif of the novel is the false interpretation of a gesture by the protagonist, Josef Bloch—an “insignificant” event that sets in motion everything that happens thereafter. By describing Bloch’s reaction, Handke again questions the validity of a “signature.”

A construction worker who was once a well-known soccer goalie, Josef Bloch thinks that he has been fired from his job. Nothing has been said to him to indicate his termination; Bloch has interpreted as a sign of his dismissal the fact that only the foreman looked up from his lunch when Bloch entered the workers’ shack, while the other workers continued eating. Out of work, Bloch roams the streets and frequents cheap restaurants and motion-picture houses. He sleeps with a film usherette, Gerda, whom he chokes to death the following morning. He flees to a small border village to hide out with a former acquaintance, Herta, an innkeeper. The police have no leads in the murder case, yet Bloch’s reactions and observations of his surroundings are those of a hunted man. He interprets every event in the village—a missing child who accidentally drowned, inquisitive policemen, customs officials on guard—as connected to him alone.

The novel’s last scene shows a soccer field where Bloch asks a bystander to observe the game from the perspective of the goalie for a change, rather than from that of the players. Bloch’s whole life by now has assumed the typical reactive attitude of a goalie defending against a penalty kick, who must try to anticipate the direction in which the opposing player will kick the ball. A comparison to Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936) seems to offer itself, as Bloch also undergoes an inner metamorphosis and loses contact with his environment. Handke has stated that it was his intention to portray a protagonist for whom the environment proceeded to turn into a “signature” as a consequence of a single event—namely, the murder: “A schizophrenic interprets every event as alluding to himself. This is the principle behind the story, yet the process is not applied to a schizophrenic, but rather to a ’normal’ protagonist.” The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick became a best seller in Germany shortly after its publication, and it established Handke’s reputation in the United States as one of the foremost modern German-language writers.

Short Letter, Long Farewell

In 1972, Handke published two well-received novels, Short Letter, Long Farewell and A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. The detective-story cliché of the pursuit, which Handke had used in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, is varied once more in Short Letter, Long Farewell. The narrator is at once the victim and the detective-observer of the pursuit. The adoption of first-person narrative in this novel as well as in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is significant. Handke’s earlier linguistic experimentation, which he had largely overcome in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, was abandoned altogether to make room for the author-narrator’s ego and its relationship to the surrounding world. Destabilizing events in Handke’s personal life contributed to this new perspective; in an interview, he stated that these events had led to an expansion of his definition of himself. His mother’s death, the birth of his daughter, and the protracted proceedings surrounding his divorce brought on the realization that the automatisms of life itself are as unreliable as the linguistic ones had been found to be. The autobiographical component would be overstated, however, if one were to assume that these events triggered the writing of the two novels in order simply to free the author from his emotional distress. Handke asserted that he had planned the writing of a bildungsroman, a label frequently applied to Short Letter, Long Farewell, for almost ten years prior to its date of publication. Also, the novel does remain a typical Handke product, because, in contrast to the traditional novel of education, it educates its author rather than the protagonist.

The author-narrator, no longer merely Handke’s abstract alter ego sifting through possible literary methods and models, has become a concrete and discernible individual in his appeal to himself to know and experience more of the world per se in order to reach his goal of cognition. Handke’s former protest against stagnant literaryconventions has thus given way to his attempt to find the communicative possibilities inherent in his own earlier models. In Short Letter, Long Farewell, Handke has gone forward another step in his quest for truth, now seeking the moral veracity of his own writing. The narrator asserts at the end that “all this has really happened,” which is, of course, not true in a factual sense, since Handke never really met the filmmaker John Ford, as depicted in the last scene of the novel. The “real happening” has taken place inside the author-narrator. Repeated statements in the work indicate that Handke had by then separated himself completely from his earlier linguistic experiments as purely evasive maneuvers, in order to come to terms with his literary environment.

The assessment of a nonliterary and very real environment, which Bloch attempts unsuccessfully in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, is taken up by the narrator-author of Short Letter, Long Farewell, who has traveled to the United States in search of a new self. The firm ground of his prior existence has begun to sway during the separation from his wife. The fears of his childhood as well as present anxieties and threats must be raised from the subconscious to the level of consciousness. Only then can the narrator, at long last, free himself from them, bid them good-bye, and achieve a new sense of life without fear. The stations of his journey through America become the symbolic backdrop for his gradual liberation. Time and space form a curious congruity in the novel, as the narrator travels from east to west. The geographic east-west progression of the United States in time from infancy to maturity becomes the larger reflection on the narrator’s development, as in St. Louis he separates from his traveling companion, Claire, and her daughter, Benedictine. (Their names are certainly symbolic as well.) The child, through her sudden outbreaks of fright, has helped him to comprehend his own childhood fears. A happily married couple in St. Louis serves as a foil in the narrator’s assessment of his ended marriage. After these events, he can embark on his journey to the new frontiers of America and his own life.

The novel is divided into two parts, titled “Short Letter” and “Long Farewell,” both of which are prefaced by a quotation from a bildungsroman. The first part is prefaced by a passage from Anton Reiser (1785-1790), by Karl Philipp Moritz, an eighteenth century writer and companion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The book, written in the form of an autobiographical account, was of great historical importance to the development of psychological fiction, as it entered the innermost depths of the soul and at the same time attempted to be an objective sociocritical and pedagogical account of the age, thereby combining the two prominent currents of Pietism and Enlightenment thought. The relevance of Anton Reiser for Handke becomes obvious in its protagonist’s disrupted relationship to his environment. He—like Handke’s unnamed narrator—draws his sole understanding of his environment from the books he reads during his journey. The loneliness, estrangement, and fear of Anton Reiser are shared by Handke’s traveler in the first part. The second part, “Long Farewell,” is prefaced by a quotation from the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (1854-1855; Green Henry, 1960), in which the protagonist does finally achieve the elusive union between himself and his environment, between the inner world and the outer world.

Short Letter, Long Farewell is the story of an unnamed Austrian first-person narrator who is being pursued by his estranged wife, Judith. He has arrived in the United States endowed with sufficient financial means to undertake what might be referred to ironically as the customary nineteenth century Bildungsreise (educational journey)—with the typical Handke twist that it is a Bildungsreise in reverse, from Europe to America. In Providence, Rhode Island, he receives a letter from Judith advising him not to look for her, as it “would not be nice” to find her. He travels back to New York, on to Washington, D.C., and then to a small town in Pennsylvania, where he is joined by Claire and Benedictine, with whom he continues to the Midwest. From St. Louis, he sets off by himself to Arizona and finally to Oregon: Pursuer and pursued meet at Oregon’s Haystack Rock. Its enormous granite form, standing alone in the midst of the ocean but at the same time in harmonious union with its natural environment, becomes the backdrop for their encounter, as the narrator faces Judith’s pointed gun. Together, Judith and the narrator travel on to California to meet John Ford. Ford’s film Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) had touched the narrator’s inner sense of reality, as the people on the screen prefigured those he would soon meet. Like them, he desires to be fully present in body and mind, an equal moving among equals, carried along by their motion yet free to be himself.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams replaces the utopian hopefulness of America with a provincial Austrian remembrance of the past, dictated by the finality of death. Handke’s mother, who, at the age of fifty-one, swallowed a whole prescription of sleeping pills, bore little resemblance to the young and spirited woman of thirty years earlier. Again, quotations preface the novel, this time by Bob Dylan (“He not busy being born is busy dying”) and mystery writer Patricia Highsmith (“Dusk was falling quickly. It was just after 7 p.m., and the month was October”). The quotation from Highsmith is meant to evoke the tone of her novels, which are not tied to spectacular events or extraordinary characters and seem to eschew judgmental statements. Handke’s often expressed aversion for characterizing, and thereby judging and degrading, the individual prevails in the Erzählung (short narrative). Nevertheless, the author seems to reach far beyond the customary emotional detachment from his earlier and also his later protagonists. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams may be considered Handke’s first work to strike an emotional chord. In it, as June Schlueter has observed, “the intellectual coldness of the earlier novels gives way to a deeply personal retelling of his mother’s life and death.”

The metalevel of the narrative, as in Short Letter, Long Farewell, remains the differentiated investigation of the author-narrator’s ability to perceive his environment as well as an analysis of these perceptions themselves. The narrator is thus again the focal point. He explicitly notes the dangerous tendency among abstractions and formulations to grow independent of the person for whose characterization they were created. Consequently, a chain reaction of phrases and sentences sets itself in motion, “as in a dream, a literary ritual in which the life of the individual functions merely as the triggering occasion. Two dangers—the mere realistic retelling of events on the one hand, and the painless disappearance of a person in poetic sentences on the other—these retard my writing.” As in his early revolutionary statement at Princeton, Handke thus cautions himself in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams against the sterile descriptive tedium of simply retailing a plot, in which he would either permit life itself to tell the story, thereby rendering it without interest to anyone outside his immediate family, or bury the story under an overpowering aesthetic superstructure that would choke it in meaningless poetic formalism.

Handke first had to overcome the stunned perplexity that he felt at reading the obituary notice in the Kärntner Volkszeitung. The notice turned his mother’s death into a statistic without any further human implication whatsoever. His narration takes its departure from this printed notice: “In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.” Even beyond her death, this woman has thus been denied her existence as an individual. The author-narrator becomes the “remembering and formulating machine” that will restore to his mother what is rightfully hers, at the same time departing, as in Short Letter, Long Farewell, on a voyage into his own childhood, which he begins to see in a different light through the description of his mother’s life. Two continuous impediments seem to have stifled his mother’s attempts at individuation: the socially conditioned, material limitations during her youth, exemplified in the description of the grandfather, and her individually motivated depressions, which she felt as a result of the growing automatisms of her particular life as a woman, for whom a palm reading at the county fair, which was to reveal the future, was nothing but a cruel joke. Handke quotes a rhyme that the girls in her village chanted about the stations in a woman’s life: “Tired/ Exhausted/ Sick/ Dying/ Dead.”

As the son begins to study at the university, he introduces her to literature: “She read every book as a description of her own life, felt revitalized, learned to speak about herselfand so I gradually found out details about her life.” Different from those in Short Letter, Long Farewell, Maria Handke’s visions gleaned from books are only those of the past, making obvious to her the fact that she has no future. Having led his mother to the Tree of Knowledge, the son has become the tempter in the Garden of Eden and therefore is, at least in part, responsible for her death.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams was Handke’s second attempt to “describe the political circumstances as part of an individual story, to connect the individual with the general events.” At the same time, the author could reach into himself within a concrete and historically verifiable context instead of his usual private method. This has made A Sorrow Beyond Dreams arguably his most lucid and most successful work.

In A Moment of True Feeling and The Left-Handed Woman, Handke made two renewed attempts at reaching a higher level of feeling beyond the usual literary clichés. In the same measure in which he strove to depict these truer feelings, however, he seems to have missed his mark because of an increasing abandonment of a concretely discernible narrative. A Moment of True Feeling has been labeled “an angry act of regression,” and The Left-Handed Woman “as closed as an oyster, a sign- and signal-labyrinth similar to the universe of a schizophrenic, in which language no longer serves the purpose of communicating, but rather to encode communication.”

The diary The Weight of the World is the harbinger of Handke’s new perception of the world during the 1980’s. German critics have been divided in their response to this work; some have seen it as an “inventory of [Handke’s] delusions of grandeur,” a “trite game of hide-and-go-seek with notes arbitrarily strung together,” while others have regarded it as an expansion of Handke’s earlier efforts to overcome the shortfalls and deficiencies of language on a higher and more sophisticated level. Peter Pütz has stated that The Weight of the World is Handke’s most radical attempt “to note, catalogue and thus preserve all appearances, experiences and acts of consciousness” in a preselective state, when their value has not yet been conditioned by human judgments. Everything should be freed from the superfluous value that humans attach to it, permitting a fresh assessment of the world’s net weight.

The Long Way Around

Handke widens the focus from singular things, perceptions, and feelings and the intended preservation of their individual weight in his next novel, The Long Way Around. There, he strives to uncover the connections between all things as well as their salutary harmony. During his slow homecoming to Europe from the snowy loneliness of Alaska via California and New York, Valentin Sorger, the protagonist of the novel, rediscovers nature as the new essence of reality. In California, Sorger had lost his sense of space under the impact of his return to civilization; in a New York coffee shop, he regains the consciousness of his “earthen form” and subsequently regards his return to Europe as the beginning of a prophetic revelation. There exists an immediate connection between natural things, which fantasy must uncover or—more skeptically—to which Sorger “must apply his own lie.” Glimpses of such nature revelations can be found in Handke’s earlier novels—for example, in the heaving cypress tree in Short Letter, Long Farewell and in the chestnut-tree leaf in A Moment of True Feeling. In The Long Way Around and The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, these revelations of nature become the essence of reality altogether.

The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire

In The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a narrative situated somewhere between a short story and an essay, the protagonist of the trilogy has returned to Europe. The narrative perspective has changed from the third to the first person to allow Handke to supply the theoretical supplement for the trilogy that comprises The Long Way Around, The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and the dramatic poem Über die Dörfer. Biblical allusions abound, as well as references to Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (1810; Theory of Colors, 1840), in which artistic endeavor overcomes the boundaries between writing and painting, poetry and philosophy, and also between present and past, fact and fantasy. Nature, as revealed in art, becomes the author’s weapon against the “calcified Federal Republic which has grown more and more evil” and against the raw brutality of a madly barking dog along the narrator’s path.

Mont Sainte-Victoire, near the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence, was painted repeatedly by Paul Cézanne during his most creative years after 1870. In these paintings, the narrator perceives the perfect synthesis between the eternal and the transitory, between nature and human endeavor. As the narrator climbs the mountain for a second time, “the realm of the words” lies suddenly open before him, “with the Great Spirit of The Form.” He senses the structure of all things in himself as the ready substance of the works that he will write. His future works will be devoted to the metamorphosis of nature into art and the salvation of those things threatened by the human world.

Child Story

Handke’s attempt in Child Story to repeat the delicate balance of the inner with the outer world, which he had achieved in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, met with mixed reactions from the critics. The narrator’s daughter begins to loosen her bonds with him at the age of ten or eleven, and he reflects on her influence on him and his writing during the decade of their lives together. In the spirit of The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the novel is Handke’s attempt at saving the endangered daughter and eternalizing her. Some critics have noted the “insurmountable ego-stylization” in the novel and have criticized Handke for turning his daughter into a marketable commodity; others interpret the book as Handke’s successful redemption from the “almost choking solipsism” that he had displayed in The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire and The Long Way Around.

Across

Across seems to indicate Handke’s return to the messianic stance of those two novels, in this case filtered through the classical restraint of a first-person narrator who is a teacher of Greek and Latin; his name, Loser, might be translated as “the listener.” Loser goes further than the protagonists of Handke’s earlier novels in his attempts to preserve that which is in danger. He removes language from nature by destroying election posters and slogans that have been attached to trees, and in the second part of the novel, he intervenes decisively by hurling a stone and thereby killing a swastika painter who has desecrated a mountain. “The mountain must remain empty,” he triumphs over the murdered man. A circle in Handke’s work seems to close with Andreas Loser, a teacher of classical languages and an etymologist whose favorite work is Vergil’s Georgics (c. 37-29 b.c.e.).

Throughout Handke’s novels, the unusually close bond between author and work seems to be both a source of strength and a liability. Handke’s early questioning of the automatisms of postwar German literature—and consequently the automatisms of life altogether—required the undetached participation of the author in his works, for Handke, like the schizophrenic whom he mentions in his discussion of The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, needed to interpret every event as alluding to him and him alone. Such a schizophrenic stance made Handke the outsider from the start, and it has led almost automatically to some narcissistic excesses in his novels, in which he has begun to regard himself as an isolated seer who can save himself and the world from the forces of these automatisms through an intense, more direct, and somewhat mystical kinship with nature, as it had already been advocated by his nineteenth century compatriot, the Austrian novelist Adalbert Stifter. Such prophetic visions have naturally antagonized some of Handke’s critics, who see him as having moved dangerously close to a Nazi Blut und Boden Romantik (blood and earth romanticism).

My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay

Handke wrote My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay in 1993. It is set ahead in 1997—a technique designed to keep vague any references to world events. The main character, Gregor Keuschnig, is soon to be fifty-six years old. Like Handke, he studied law before becoming a writer; also like Handke, he found himself a single parent after his wife left him. Keuschnig is self-absorbed and goes into great detail about his writing and the landscape in which he feels at home, a place near Paris that he calls the No-Man’s-Bay.

As indicated by the novel’s subtitle, A Fairytale from the New Times, the focus is not on factual events but on personal perceptions. Keuschnig’s goal is “to find the way back to the dreamlike, to keep that basic tone and be clear as sunlight.” People interest him most as silhouettes. The less he knows about them, the better they fit into his fantasies. For example, he imagines a singer who feels something healing in him that he did not want healed, a painter who loses his relationship to distance, and a priest who has not yet given up the priesthood, but may.

There are strong undercurrents of emotion as Keuschnig acknowledges the importance of others in establishing his own identity. In his solitude he senses the presence of ancestors who dream on in him. Ana, the wife who left him (twice), is present in his thoughts, interrupting his concentration, and appearing to him in others as her double. A midlife situation that could be seen as sad is instead made to seem unconventional by Keuschnig’s eccentricities. Handke’s subtle use of language and wry humor sustain the sunlight through a long book.

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

Handke wrote On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House in the summer and fall of 1996. The main character, the pharmacist in the small city of Taxham outside Salzburg, likes to read medieval epics, and Handke works medieval motifs into the story. Like the knights who set out to seek adventure, the pharmacist leaves his house from July to October to work out his problems on a long trip. During that time he is unable to speak and traverses a landscape that bears no resemblance to modern-day Europe. In fact, he wonders at one point if he has ever left the environs of Salzburg.

The trip changes him both outwardly and inwardly for the better. People had previously overlooked him or failed to recognize him outside his pharmacy, but on his return, he seems to have more presence. The pharmacist has come to accept two aspects of his family situation that had previously preyed on his mind. Seeing his son with the Gypsies, the pharmacist no longer “disowns” him, but realizes that the boy must go his own way. Second, he understands that he is not the only man whose wife chooses to live separately from him in other parts of the house. This complex, well-crafted novel supports many levels of interpretation.

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos

Written in 2002 but not translated into English until 2007, the monumental novel Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is a comprehensive summation of Handke’s view of the decline of Western European culture as well as his most ambitious attempt at including the reader in the creation of a novel, something he first attempted in his 1988 work Repetition.

The main thematic focus of the novel, the central importance of images for human existence, is indicated in the German title, Der Bildverlust: Oder, Durch die Sierra de Gredos. “Bildverlust” means “loss of images.” Indeed, the novel does not deal primarily with an adventurous journey of the protagonist across the Spanish mountain range but with her loss and potential reconstruction of autonomous individual images that she had shored up against the ruins of her personal life.

Thus the American reader expecting a travel-adventure plot will be disappointed. The novel is about a nameless, highly successful female banker of Slavic descent who finds herself confronted with her inner life in tatters, quite in contrast to her public image as it is portrayed in the media. To set the story right she has hired a well-known Spanish writer who lives in the La Mancha region in Spain and has determined to meet him at his home in Spain, after retracing her earlier walking tour from Valladolid to La Mancha across the Sierra the Gredos. She reaches her destination after stopping in several places, most of which cannot be found on a map of Spain but are characterized by an decreasing attachment to contemporary Western material/commercial values and increasing appreciation for the world of the imagination. At the climax of the novel, she suffers a complete breakdown and subsequent break with her former life. When she arrives at the home of the author, she finds that her biography is already finished and she dedicates her future to the images and the world of imagination that had been destroyed by the artificial, manipulative, commercial images propagated by the media.

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is a complex work of cultural criticism and narratological theory. Handke sees the current era as an “interperiod,” a transitory period, characterized by superficiality, lack of imagination, commercialization, and the insinuation of images and the accompanying false values that lead to loss of autonomous images and ideas in the individual. This loss, which began in the late Middle Ages, the time of Cervantes, will eventually lead to a total collapse of Western civilization and, perhaps, a renaissance on the basis of some remembered or imagined fragments of a richer past. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is a “wasteland” novel that holds out the hope of possible redemption and restoration if people are able to recognize where they have gone wrong.

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos thus deals exclusively with travels and adventures of the mind. It deals with an imaginary journey whose plot writes itself as the protagonist travels through her own past and into an uncertain though not entirely hopeless future. Declarative sentences diminish and are replaced by sentences that end in questions or alternative statements and outcomes from which readers are invited to choose, in the process becoming authors themselves. It is a novel that requires much patience and thought from the reader, but it is unquestionably Handke’s richest novel to date.