[In the following essay, Hays examines the theoretical and aesthetic principles governing Handke's critical perspectives and dramatic works, particularly his effort to subvert the conventions of modern drama. According to Hays, “Handke's goal is to make art out of artifice while revealing the artifice of that art.”]

In order fully to understand Peter Handke's contribution to modern European drama, one needs not only to locate his work in relation to that of other contemporary playwrights (this has been done often enough), but also to come to grips with the fact that Handke is a serious literary critic and theoretician whose dramaturgy springs more from his desire to expose the ideological substance of drama and criticism than it does from a desire to author works which follow in the tradition of the “modern.”¹ Therefore, prior to dealing with his plays, I would like to place Handke in the historical-critical context out of which his art and criticism have arisen. By exploring this context and his work, I wish to show that Handke stands at the crossroads between the modern and the as yet undefined realm of “post-modern” culture.

In his book on the modern drama, Richard Gilman comments that “ … Handke's plays are all extremely resistant to conventional methods of criticism and critical reporting. …”² Gilman is right, of course; the irony is that he has failed to connect Handke's radical subversion of the modern drama with his equally radical attack on modern criticism and its approaches to reading and spectating. In both cases, Handke wants to draw our attention to the way in which conventions—conventions of form, language and perception—have blocked our ability to recognize the artificial, that is the fictional and therefore non-“real” nature of art. According to Handke, this failure in understanding takes place whenever the critic accepts or propounds the ideal that a particular literary-dramatic model represents reality or is “true to life” or “describes nature.” Such critics, according to Handke, take no notice of the fact that these forms, all the conventions of the drama for that matter, have a history. That is to say, the drama is artifice and, as such, as something constructed, cannot be the same as nature or external (non-artistic) reality. It comes into being at a certain time and a certain place because a new historical-aesthetic mode of perceiving reality has been developed. In a short essay on the popular German critic Marcel Reich-Ranickí, Handke points to “realism” and the “realistic” narrative method as examples of what he means. “Even the realistic method is not natural but an artificial model that … at first created the impression of being affected and amateurish and only through familiarity came to seem natural. …” The same is true of more recent literary models. The interior monologue, for example, has come to be described as “realistic” and “natural.” Handke further asserts that formalism, today’s “affected art, belongs nonetheless to the natural, to the realism of tomorrow.”³ Thus we see that “nature” in this case is itself a convention, one which describes the imputation of a particular way of seeing and doing to the world itself. Critics who do not recognize this fact mistake the artistic reality of the work of art as well as its historically conditioned quality. Far from revealing more of our reality to us (how we stand in relation to our art and our history), these critics and their criticism blind us with claims about a “nature” and a “metaphysics” that are in fact internal to the formal-verbal structure of the work of art and in no way synonymous with the “external world” of everyday experience. We are, thus, prevented from recognizing the difficulty that exists in designating our relationship to either of these realities. Instead, we are provisioned with a simple, mechanical vocabulary (with no recognition of its own artificial structure), which prevents our making independent judgements about art and life. Critics and the general public alike are then trapped inside a system of clichés which lead one to search for the “universal truth” or the “life-like” qualities of a work because “art reflects life” or “nature imitates art.” Prime examples of this kind of critical rhetoric can be found in Gilman’s comment that the “tension and struggle” in Handke's plays “rise from a sense of a stricken human condition beyond any immediate causes. …” Gilman draws on the post-existentialist/absurdist critical idiom here because Handke's plays “lack … the usual elements of conflict between characters or … a moral or psychic dilemma. …”⁴ Since Handke's plays do not provide the linear narrative and character psychology of earlier “realistic” modern drama, Gilman cannot apply the methods of criticism which have been developed to perpetuate the conventions of the “real.” He therefore moves over to the lexicon of absurdist abstractions and, as Handke suggests will be the case, helps naturalize the idea that the drama (in this case Handke's) should and does present us with a picture of the human condition as “stricken.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that Gilman believes “ … Handke has … absorbed and been much influenced by Beckett. …”⁵ There is, of course, no question about the fact that Handke knows Beckett’s work. He occasionally quotes from Beckett’s plays in his own. But he has also commented on Beckett’s work—negatively and at some length—in his critical texts. Handke's statements indicate how misleading Gilman’s rhetoric actually is. Indeed, Gilman has reproduced the very practice to which Handke objects. Handke's own position is that Beckett belongs to the old theater—to the tradition of the modern drama—because his plays are locked into the conventions which associate the stage with the real world. “The fatal signifying structure (stage means world) remains unanalyzed and leads … to the ludicrous straightforward symbolism of the Beckettian pantomimes. That is nothing new, but rather a falling back on the old meaning of the stage.”⁶ What Handke wants to show us is that for all Beckett’s attempted subversion of traditional theatrical conventions and despite his ironic use of the rhetorical forms and clichés of literature and society (a use that only seems to parallel Handke's own), what he actually accomplishes is an inversion which, although it empties the forms of their value as signifiers in a narrative structure, in no way denies the referentiality of linguistic and dramatic activity as such. Beckett’s plays may not be construed as concrete pictures of everyday experience, but they are understood as symbolic representations of the nature of reality—of life as “absurd.” His plays make no effort to assert the theater’s artificiality over and against life. It is rather that Beckett’s theater shows us that life is artificial—like the theater. This is not at all Handke's opinion. He believes that the external world is not an artificial construct, but rather a reality which can be construed more or less clearly depending on the consciousness one has of one’s self and of one’s signifying systems. This is the reason the theater is so important for Handke. It provides the place and the possibility for an analysis of the social, linguistic, and gestural forms which have become the normative structures for describing and defining reality. This is also why Handke is so deeply interested in critics and criticism, since, for Handke, critics have the role of substantiating (or negating) the artistic forms and norms which institutionalize our perceptions of the world. As far as Handke is concerned, both drama and criticism have for some time promoted the same erroneous notions about the “reality” of the theater’s fictions. Dialogue and the narrative (story) form of the modern theater have been means of perpetuating the false notion that what takes place on stage represents or is part of natural life. But, as Handke has stated in his critical writing, the drama (and literature as well) presents not reality, but rather a “mechanical and automatized … false naturalness.”⁷ The nature/reality presented in the theater is always one that derives from the norms and conventions of the drama of the period (“reality” is monologue, or dialogue, or silence, etc.). These forms, and particularly the social, linguistic and theatrical mechanisms which define dialogue on stage, “are not in tune with the actual problems of the spectators.”⁸ Indeed, how can they be when everything that appears on stage is in fact part of an artificial construct, not part of an ontological order?

Until quite recently, then, the theater has enclosed the spectator in words and forms which are thoroughly artificial, but because they laid claim to reality, they prevented a self-conscious recognition either of their artifice or of external reality. Handke says this aspect of the theater dates back hundreds of years and, as another recent critic has pointed out, one can document the effort to transform the theater, as an institution, into a place and a form which claims to give a truer “picture” of reality than that provided by personal, everyday experience. In his essay on “Tableau and coup de théâtre,” Peter Szondi examines Diderot’s part in establishing the language and action of the theater as a “higher” reality. In his commentary on the drama, Diderot suggests that in the theater one sees “the human race as it is. …” Far from being troubled by the experience of the everyday world, one can, in the theater, learn to be reconciled to “life,” by seeing the truth of human existence.⁹ The beneficent vision of an ideal humanity that Diderot proposes has certainly been altered in the drama of the last one hundred years, but, and this is the main point of Handke's argument, the notion that the theater presents us with insights into the “true nature” of human experience—a nature which, though more or less at odds with individual experience, is presented as everyone’s reality. It is this theater, or rather this idea of the theater, which Handke's criticism and his plays attack and attempt to subvert. He wants to show that the rhetoric of criticism and the conventions of the theater cannot present reality because they are signifying systems which are man-made and self-referential. As has been pointed out by almost every student of Handke's work, this linguistic and dramaturgic analysis owes a great deal to Wittgenstein,¹⁰ but it should be added that the terms in his discussion of the multiple sets of signifiers in the theater belong more to Saussure and Roland Barthes than they do to the Philosophical Investigations.

The codes which govern signification in the theater are grounded in the development of the theater as an institution. They are historically and ideologically bound structures which pre-empt the self-conscious critical faculty of the individual by providing the terms through which all social and aesthetic experience is to be understood. In the traditional theater, one is supposed to sit back and be entertained by these encoded, prejudged descriptions of “life,” rather than to see them as artistic fabrications which use language and gesture as conventions according to the demands of the currently accepted theatrical manner.¹¹ Far from providing a serious statement about the external world, the theater, which refuses to announce its own artifice, in fact transforms everything that is “serious, important, clear and final,” outside the theater into “play”—the interplay of connections which allow us to recognize, not reality, but the encoded meanings proper to the world of the drama itself.¹² Thus, self-conscious awareness of and engagement in the social, political and aesthetic realms are “played” away in the pre-structured play and signifying space that we call the theater. Every moment, every word, every sentence is formalized by the conventions of drama and has meaning only in terms of the lexical possibilities contained within these formal, semiotic structures.¹³

Handke wants the public to recognize this “mendacity” of the theater in order to become more conscious of the fact that neither the order found inside nor that found outside the theater is permanent and natural. They are rather products of the social and artistic norms generated by the dominant groups in a given society at a given time. This is true for the moral codes of a society as well. For Handke, “morality, however moral it claims to be, is simply a lie in a hierarchically organized society, an alibi for the inequalities that crop up in society. And the theater, in its role as a moral institution, functions simply as a safety-valve for the social order.”¹⁴ Handke wishes to give the theater a different function. He believes the theater can make one conscious of the fact that structures of power exist to which one has been blinded, structures which one has accepted as a matter of course. This can happen if the theater suddenly appears to be something artificial and not at all natural, through “linguistic deconstruction, through grammatical analysis which … reveals the fact that structures of domination are neither divine nor state necessities.”¹⁵ Handke would like to contribute to the end of the domination of one individual or group over another. Outside the theater he would, therefore, support the development of a Marxist model “as a solution to the dominant contradictions in society (‘dominant’ in every respect)—but not its announcement in the theater.”¹⁶ His reasons for rejecting Marxist or “political” theater of any kind are rooted in his analysis of the formal and theatrical qualities of the theater discussed above. Handke's specific rejection of Brecht’s dramaturgy is also understandable in this light and makes clear why one should be careful when ascribing “Brechtian” characteristics to his work.

Handke regards Brecht as having made a positive contribution to social and aesthetic analysis through his “alienation effects” and through his presentation of the formal contradictions that exist between, for example, rhetoric and action. But, according to Handke, Brecht has applied the wrong sociological means in the wrong place—totally away from the reality he wished to change, Brecht tried to use “the hierarchic order of the theater to disturb other hierarchic orders, hierarchically. …”¹⁷ Even Brecht’s attempts to alter acting techniques were of no value, since it is “historically false” to assume that changing the actors’ comportment indirectly changes that of the spectator. Despite his revolutionary will, Brecht was so caught up in the performance canon of the theater (referential, narrative plot line, theater as entertainment) that he failed to see that the forms of his plays actually subverted his intentions. His techniques were inevitably constructed as variants on the formal structures of the modern drama in general. Furthermore, claims Handke, the lack of contradiction at the ends of Brecht’s works, his formalizing of a solution to the contradictions announced in the rest of the play, simply naturalizes another “order,” without giving the audience awareness of the ordering process behind the theater as an artistic and social institution.¹⁸ Form and“content” convey another version of “reality,” without making the spectator aware that all formal orders are reductive structures which deny alternative modes of perception and self-conscious analysis. Like the other works of the modern canon, Brecht’s plays are self-enclosed and, formally speaking, clichés. In place of the “modern,” be it as contemporary as Brecht’s socio-political narratives or Beckett’s inversions of the “meaning” found in earlier drama, Handke proposes a new critical and dramatic method, one which calls into question all that has previously been settled and shows “that there is … another manner in which to present reality,” or rather “that there was another manner, since this one is also exhausted with its first use. It is not a question of imitating this model, but with it to make known how, as reader, one can seek out other possibilities.”¹⁹ Instead of what Handke calls theater-theater (drama which does not scrutinize its own situation and conventions), he calls for a theater in which the play space serves not as a means of perpetuating social and aesthetic norms, but as a context for the development of “as yet undiscovered inner play spaces in the spectator, as a means whereby the individual’s consciousness is not expanded, but rather made more exact, as a means to sensitize, to cause reactions, to awaken to the world.”²⁰

Although Handke wants a drama which announces itself as “play,” as pure formal/linguistic abstraction, the purpose of this play is to indicate to the audience the nature of the forms which encode the performance event. By becoming conscious of himself or herself in this theatrical context, the spectator is more readily able to identify the way in which all institutional structures allocate meaning in a certain, arbitrary way. The theater, by imitating (playing on) its own conventions, can awaken the spectator/listener to the historical and non-necessary character of these forms. This in turn can lead to a more explicit consciousness that the world can be changed.²¹ Thus, Handke's critical method and his dramatic method are both aimed at revealing the fact that the public can liberate itself from the ideological orders institutionalized by language, literature, all systems of naming and describing. He wants us to see their historical origins—how and when they were formed, and how they inform our social and aesthetic practice. He does not give us this history though, since to do so would create the closure of a fixed explanation, a conclusion. This was Brecht’s error. Handke insists on the public’s ability to understand by itself the abstract playfulness of his texts. They are meant not to show us how to think, but to elicit the knowledge that new possibilities of thinking, speaking and acting are possible. This is the reason that Handke's plays, although they employ the forms and conventions of the modern drama, are not part of the modern. They are prologues to our awareness of the modern and also prologues to a drama yet to come, so it is not surprising that Handke uses this very term to describe Offending the Audience, one of his first dramatic pieces.

This and Handke's other plays expose, subvert and do away with all of the forms—verbal, gestural, spatial—that embody and give meaning to the modern drama. They leave the audience with an awareness of what has been and, therefore, with the possibility of creating new socio-aesthetic patterns to take the place of the old. Handke accomplishes this, as I shall show, by transforming the traditional dramatic narrative into an “archaeological” exploration of the bits and pieces, the artifacts that were the constitutive elements of the drama. His method is, in fact, quite close to that employed by Michel Foucault, who, during the past fifteen years, has produced a series of archaeological investigations of the knowledge, discourse and cultural institutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²² In both cases, the purpose of their work is to reveal the historical and ideological foundations (the structures of order and power) which lie in and behind the terms and practice of social and aesthetic institutions. Handke's archaeology of the drama proceeds from his awareness that the audience comes to the theater enmeshed in the presuppositions which have made the drama understandable in a specific way: through the dialogue and interaction of the characters, one gets a “picture,” albeit mediated and symbolic, of the “nature” of human experience and reality. The task of the audience is to decode and understand this mediated vision of the world by means of symbolic association, allegorical and metaphorical interpretation, and the general codes built into language, architectural space and gesture. An initial premise of such drama is that the audience cannot perceive reality on its own. Instead, the public “sees” that reality is knowable only when it learns to interpret the interpretations presented on stage. Thus, the forms of the drama produce a fiction which becomes “reality.” We learn to be entertained not so much by this artificial world as by the fact that we have learned to understand the codes which are used to interpret and present this world. Handke reverses this process. Instead of presenting to a passive audience a coded picture of “reality,” he forces the audience to become an active participant in the discovery of the formal principles which have generated the fictions on stage.

Plays were played here. Sense was played here. Nonsense with meaning was played here. The plays here had a background and an underground. … They were not what they seemed. … The conspicuous meaninglessness of some plays was precisely what represented their hidden meaning. … Not a play, reality was played. Time was played. … The theater played tribunal. The theater played arena. … The theater played tribal rites. … It was not there, it was only signified to you, it was performed.²³

The audience is no longer the object of an action which unfolds on stage; it becomes the subject, the center of the process of deconstructing the roles and functions of the traditional theater.²⁴

You are the subject matter. You are the center of interest. … You are an event. You are the event. … You are a species. You form a pattern. … You are a standard pattern and you have a pattern as a standard. You have a standard with which you came to the theater. … You don’t need a standard. You are the standard. You have been discovered.²⁵

It is this discovery—the revelation of the audience’s primary role in the coding and decoding of meaning in the theater—that lies at the heart of all of Handke's work, but especially his Sprechstücke (“Talking plays”; Michael Roloff has given the word a political turn by translating it as speak-in). These first four dramatic works—Offending the Audience, Self-Accusation, Prophecy and Calling for Help—are the initial archaeological investigations and the premises upon which the later plays are built. They and their accompanying commentary present the method and the focus of Handke's dramaturgy.

The … Sprechstücke … are spectacles without pictures, inasmuch as they give no picture of the world. They point to the world not by way of pictures but by way of words; the words of the … [Sprechstücke] don’t point at the world as something lying outside the words but to the world in the words themselves. The words that make up the … [Sprechstücke] give no picture of the world but a concept of it. … Ironically, they imitate the gestures of all the given devices natural to the theater.²⁶

By reducing his plays to pure language, Handke hopes to interrupt the learned tendency to interpret dialogue and action as references to or pictures of the real world. Freed from this habit of mind and focused on language itself, the audience is able to recognize the norms and concepts which lie behind speech. This in turn should lead to an awareness of the fact that these concepts and norms determine how we “see” the world, not how the world is. Handke, through his ironic imitation of the “devices natural to the theater,” doubles the fictions of the drama and thereby exposes their un-naturalness, their fictional and playful quality.

Handke's goal is to make art out of artifice while revealing the artifice of that art. Therefore, as soon as the audience enters the house to see Offending the Audience (1966),²⁷ it is “greeted by the usual pre-performance atmosphere. One might let them hear noises from behind the curtain, noises that make believe that scenery is being shifted about. … These noises should be amplified … and perhaps should be stylized and arranged so as to produce their own order. …”²⁸ Handke also insists that late comers should not be admitted, that a dress code be enforced, and that the ushers act in a particularly solemn manner. His purpose here is not simply to trade on the clichés of traditional theater comportment. He wishes to evoke in the spectator a spontaneous recognition of these codes and their arbitrariness. In so doing, he hopes the audience will become aware of the way in which these codes condition the theater event. Because one hears and sees certain things, one expects other things, not because they must come, but because they have been joined together by the habits of mental association. Once this expectation horizon has been evoked,²⁹ the speakers on stage (who talk to the audience, not to each other) announce that the public will “hear nothing … [it has] not heard here before,” but that what it hears will not be what it has “always heard” before in the theater (p. 7). In lieu of the expected, the speakers name the words and forms which constituted that expectation. All the conventions of action, space, decor and dialogue—all the illusions of stage reality—are named and subverted in the lines that follow. Finally only two realities remain: that of the words themselves and that of the presence of the actors and spectators. These words are not, as Christopher Innes has suggested, the “irreducible basis of reality. …”³⁰ They are their own reality and stand in contradistinction to that of the audience. This dialectical relationship is the basis for the analysis of the theater event which now becomes possible for the audience. The real words in Handke's plays are to the fictional “meanings” of the modern drama as the self-conscious presence of the audience is to its traditional role as receiver/interpreter of meaning. This knowledge is not imparted to the audience by the speakers, though. It is experienced by the public when its actions and interpretations meet the negating presence of theatrical language which insists on remaining theatrical: fiction, play and pure acoustical pattern.

There is no back door. Neither is there a nonexistent door as in modern drama. The nonexistent door does not represent a nonexistent door.

(p. 13)

By always speaking directly to you and by speaking to you of time, of now and of now and of now, we observe the unity of time, place, and action. … Therefore this piece is classical.

(p. 20)

A final, brief section gives the play its name. The speakers announce that they will now offend the audience. But, they say, “we won’t offend you, we will merely use offensive words which you yourselves use. We will contradict ourselves with our offenses. We will mean no one in particular. We will only create an acoustic pattern. You won’t have to feel offended” (p. 29). Some critics feel Handke has backed off from his intention here. After preparing the audience, he fails to affront it. Innes, for example, thinks the audience is therefore able to enjoy the “expertise” of the verbal assault, without being affected by it (pp. 239–40). What Innes has failed to understand is that Handke's intention is not to insult the public, but rather, by using language heard on the street, to show how that too, like the language of the drama, is formal and not referential. Handke obviously wants to draw the attention of the now theatrically self-conscious audience to the forms which structure perceptions in the everyday world. He attacks the “audience” so that the actual spectators can become aware of and take their distance from the clichés, the stereotypic codes and concepts which isolate and oppress individuals in society.

you drips, you diddlers, you atheists, you double-dealers, you switch-hitters, you dirty Jews. … you vigilantes, you socialists, you minute men. … You positive heroes. You abortionists. You anti-heroes … You generals. … You tax-evaders.

(pp. 30–32)

Handke wants to sensitize the spectators to the patterns and contradictions of common speech so that they can, perhaps, perceive themselves and others as the “fellow humans” whom the speakers address as they announce the end of the play.

In Self-Accusation (1966), Handke continues his assault on the “world in … words themselves.” But this time it is not the clichés, conventions and conceptual patterns that authorized “meaning” in the theater that are the focus of the piece. Instead, it is the process whereby the “self” takes on an identity that comes under investigation. The play is an actionless patterning of the words and phrases through which the “I” structures its relationship to the world and to the “others” which surround it. This play prepares the way for Kaspar, but here, instead of seeing how one is socialized by learning to speak, we hear a chorus of two voices. The play is in the “form of a Catholic confession and carries the marks of those public self-criticisms that are usual under totalitarian regimes.”³¹ The “I” of Self-Accusation is not the “I” of a story; it is the grammatical “I,” according to Handke.³² By making this distinction, he emphasizes once again the fact that it is the forms of speech and, by extension, the forms they inculcate, that are of central importance—not the accidental pathos of some fictional individual. The “I” in Handke's play acquires an identity in relation to the forms to which it is attached. “I learned the verbs. … I became the object of sentences. … I said my name.”³³ Along with these acquisitions, “I” “became capable of separating good and evil …” (p. 39). But the moral and social rules thus embodied stand in contradiction to each other, so that “sin” becomes inevitable. This is in fact “original sin,” the unnamable original sin of “becoming” for which the “I” must take responsibility although it has not created the forms into which it fits. “I offered an easy target. I was too slow. I was too fast. I m o v e d” (p. 51). “I” can only be guilty once; it has become a function of an oppressive cultural model. That model and its antithesis are implied in the confessional form of the work. The specific source, the “confession” that underlies not only Catholic confessional practice but moral self-stigmatization in general, is Augustine’s Confessions.³⁴ Handke introduces Augustinian argument and “proof” in his own text. “One day in the world, I was no longer free of sin. Bawling, I craved my mother’s breasts. … All I knew was to gratify my desires. … I was disobedient out of love of play” (p. 47).³⁵ The antithesis to this moral verbal web is obviously the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil, and Handke's humor takes on the strong flavor of Nietzschean irony: “I refused to divulge the name of the highest being. I only believed in the three persons of grammar” (p. 48).³⁶ It is obvious that Handke's analysis of language in general and of the oppressive structures imposed by the hierarchic institution of class and moral orders is also Nietzschean—as is the process of subverting these forms through irony and play.

Prophecy (1966) and Calling for Help (1967) are further additions to Handke's deconstruction of the world perceived and produced through language. Prophecy is a choral presentation of metaphors which are employed to describe and “explain” the experiences of life, but they are denied their “meaningfulness” when we recognize that the “reality” which underlies them is not some higher truth.

The flies will die like flies.
.....The vulture will circle like a vulture.
.....The bombs will strike like bombs.
.....The fool will prattle like a fool.(37)

There is no special significance, no pathos in a fly dying “like a fly.” It is the sequence “die like flies” itself, without any context, which has, in our cliché-filled verbal life, acquired a weight that it brings to its every usage. There is no more “truth value” in it than in “The skin will be skin-deep” (p. 16).

Calling for Help is an equally short piece, a formal exercise in searching through the common stock of everyday phrases for the word “help.” The play may be a demonstration of the spatial and verbal distance between the speakers on stage and the audience—a signal of the need to establish a community of support, but as Handke himself has said, this play and Prophecy as well are so lacking in inner tension or contradiction that they are little more than formal models. Handke would like to eliminate them from his works.³⁸

In his next play, Kaspar (1969), the pure forms of language Handke has used before solidify into a character—Kaspar—and thus begins the second phase of Handke's dramaturgy. In addition to the idea of language as perception, we are now given the opportunity to see language as action. Kaspar is not a person, though—Handke continues to reject that kind of referentiality; he is instead the embodiment of “what IS POSSIBLE with someone.”³⁹ He is the model for a person who, through language, through recitation, learns to fit into the behavioral practice of a society.⁴⁰ Handke has borrowed the name and his starting idea from the true story of Kaspar Hauser, but there the similarities end. Handke's Kaspar is “born” onto the stage: he struggles for some time before he “breaks through” the “slit” in the backstage curtain and emerges into an as yet undefined world of “theatrical props.”⁴¹ These props—chairs, tables, a sofa, an armoire, a bottle, a broom—participate in the theatrical event, but they are not part of a “story.” They are the objects used to evoke an awareness of the subject (Kaspar)-verb-object basis of perception and of social integration.

When Kaspar emerges onto the stage, he has at his disposal a single sentence: “I want to be a person like somebody else was once.” The sentence itself “means” nothing on an immediate level, however. This becomes clear as soon as Kaspar comes in contact with the furniture on stage and uses the “sentence” in “response” to each experience—whether that of knocking over a chair or getting his hand caught between two cushions. The sentence does not “mean” in the social and lexical sense because it is a totally private and subjective utterance, like the sounds that babies make before they learn to talk. Handke could hardly stage the whole process of growth and development from infancy to young adulthood (this would require too much narrative and offer too much opportunity for identification and association), so instead he presents us with a hypothesis: a stage figure, aged sixteen, who can utter word sounds which, for him, are free of fixed signifying properties. Kaspar is thus able to “verbalize” all his inner experience without having that experience shaped by the lexical and grammatical systems which govern ordinary speech. As the play progresses, three “prompters” begin to introduce him to the purpose of “purposeful” model sentences:

The sentence is more useful to you than a word. … You can make yourself comfortable with a sentence. … With the sentence you can pretend to be dumfounded. Assert yourself with the sentence against other sentences.

(pp. 67–68)

The sentences that they then offer as models are tautologies and normative points of view that often stand in contradiction to each other, but are conceptually complete “pictures” of “reality.”

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Good order is the foundation of all things.

(p. 83)

Through these models, Kaspar, who at first has no ability to distinguish between two and three dimensions or to “name” time-space relationships, acquires the ability to speak rationally and to act in accord with the concepts contained within these sentences. Through them he is also given the means to build sentences of his own, sentences which, unlike his first verbal production, are based no longer on an inner urge to express, but on the acquired need to order experience according to the norms he has learned. As he learns the models, his own sentence is lost, fragmented first into single words, then into letters and a jumble of sounds. Clearly, two parallel events have taken place. Kaspar has become adept at using the social/verbal structures of society, but he has also lost contact with his original experience of himself—however painful it may have been. In lieu of this immediate, subjective awareness, Kaspar learns the sentences “that an ordinary person learns to get through life safely.”⁴² But this safety necessarily brings with it alienation and fragmentation of the self. The goal-oriented rationality of everyday speech is anti-individual and also hides its historical/ideological origins: Kaspar has been “sentenced” to life in the prison house of language. When, in a moment of doubt and, perhaps, self-awareness, he asks,“what was it I said just now,” he regains his original sentence and is free to reconstruct playfully his early life and learning experience. But this new “poetic” freedom leads only to chaos and schizophrenia, since there is no place for this kind of liberated self-expression within the formal constraints of contemporary language and society. At the end of the play, Kaspar and the other Kaspars who have appeared on stage to make clear the leveling and homogenizing effect of language are knocked over and fall behind the curtain as it slowly twitches shut.

Kaspar’s closing line is “Goats and monkeys” (p. 140), Othello’s raving comment about human lasciviousness (IV, i. 256). This is obviously not the final word on the subject, however; we know that both Kaspar and Othello have been misled by their “prompters.” The play provides no specific answer to the problem of linguistic oppression, though; it cannot if the public is to be seized by that nausea which Handke hopes will be the beginning of individual consciousness.⁴³ But his own position is clear. “People who are alienated from their language and from speaking, like workers from their products, are alienated from the world.”⁴⁴

Given Handke's interest in contemporary society and his wish to overcome the limitations of traditional drama, one might wonder why his next two plays have titles that conjure up that most canonical of playwrights: Shakespeare. My Foot My Tutor (1969) takes its title from a line in The Tempest where Prospero rebukes Miranda with the comment, “What, I say, my foot, my tutor!” (I, ii 354).⁴⁵ Handke's intent is clearer in the German version, in which the lines read, “the ward wants to be guardian!” Once again Handke wishes to deal with the manner in which authority is imposed, and in The Tempest, not only Miranda and Ariel, but also Caliban, whom Prospero “took pains to make … speak” (I, ii), are under the sway of Prospero’s words. It is not Shakespeare whom Handke wishes to attack, though; it is the concepts of tutelage and control that he wishes to explore. So too Quodlibet (a musical term meaning “something liked”) echoes As You Like It. Written in 1969, it draws on characters from “‘world theater,’”⁴⁶ not in order to create a literary puzzle, but to evoke in the audience an awareness of our expectation that certain words, characters and actions belong together in ways that are established by association, not by fact.⁴⁷

My Foot My Tutor marks another shift in Handke's dramaturgy as well. His first plays were primarily language oriented in their effort to identify the habitual connections between language and practice. They were also demonstrations that one could construct works of art out of “pure” language by giving it a formal, choral/acoustical structure independent of any narrative action or symbolic referent. Audiences discovered that the discovery of associations between language, structure and power was not only enlightening, but fun.⁴⁸ With this foundation firmly in place, Handke could begin to reintroduce action in his plays—not action in the old narrative sense, but action freed of the constraints that were targets of his first pieces. My Foot My Tutor, therefore, is a play of movement without words, a play of form, not meaning.⁴⁹ As in Kaspar and the Sprechstücke, we are to pay attention to the shape of the event, not to some pre-established reference point. Each of the actions in the play is constructed on the pattern established in the first scene: movement from a calm, uncomplicated situation to one filled with tension, from the ward’s self-possession to his disorientation and repression through the guardian’s mere presence. Repression is not actively presented on stage, and only once after a minor “rebellion” (he throws burs at the guardian) does the ward show the marks of possible violence—blood trickles from his nose as he begins the following scene. The control and tutelage exercised here are structural, not physical. Like Foucault, Handke has understood that the way in which experience is ordered, the way in which daily activities are presented and supervised, defines much of the view we have of ourselves and our relation to the world.⁵⁰ History and ideology frame our experience because the forms through which we experience are their institutionalized expression. The play does not end on a dark note, however. The final scene shows the ward alone on a brightly lit stage, repeating a series of “meaningless” but free, playful actions.⁵¹ It is left up to the audience to decide what has happened to the guardian.

Once Handke developed a method that would allow him to present both language and action as significant forms rather than as forms of signification, he could proceed to full-length dramatic works. The first, Ride Across Lake Constance (1971), takes up where Kaspar left off. Handke presents “the patterns of human behavior dominant in society. …”⁵² His technique is to deconstruct the apparently formless statements about life heard in those daily interactions based on love, work, buying and selling. By presenting the theatrical forms of these events, Handke hopes to show that these statements are as “exploitative and dependent on the market, on supply and demand, as the ‘false nature’ which they depict.”⁵³

The title of the play derives from a poem by Gustav Schwab, “The Rider and Lake Constance.” In the poem, a rider, who accidentally rides across the thin ice of the Lake, falls dead of fright when he is told what he has done. In Handke's play, it is not the aftereffects that count; it is the immediate danger that lurks below the thin ice of language and form—the abyss of uncertainty which convention and habit help us bridge—that is the source of danger. By enacting the collapse of the rapport between linguistic/formal reality and real reality, Handke allows us to recognize the former as a model of authority and our subjugation to that authority. This recognition comes to us, the audience, as we watch the characters in the play struggle to maintain a firm footing in “life” and safely, thoughtlessly pass through the most common of daily experiences.

The characters, all named after well-known German (originally silent) film stars, act out situations which turn on failures in the assumed connections among language, gesture and reality. These events appear as moments of wakefulness within the dream of life as a simple narrative tale.

Emil Jannings reaches for a cigar box which falls to the floor. “Jannings points at the cigar box. [Heinrich] George misunderstands the gesture and looks as if there was something to see on the box. Jannings agrees to the misunderstanding and now points as if he really wanted to point out something.”⁵⁴ George has successfully rejected Jannings’s power play. Later, both characters make mistakes about each other’s gestural intentions and Jannings ends up with the cigar box after all. The two act out the conventions of power, control and ownership while at the same time revealing the multiple possibilities actually available for interpreting the relationships among word, gesture and situation. In a similar demonstration, Henny Porten almost falls when coming down the stairs because Jannings and George skip a number while counting the steps as she descends. Expectations based on speech acts do not, of necessity, correspond to reality.

Later in the play, Elizabeth Bergner becomes disoriented by seeing “herself” in reverse in a mirror. She is helped back to “reality” by the same kinds of model narrative sentences that were used to instill ordered perception in Kaspar. A short while later, Jannings proves the “naturalness” of social and verbal conventions.

I’d like to pick it up for you, but I have to stick to what I said (To Porten), don’t I? (She nods.) I can’t say something and then do the opposite of what I’ve said. Inconceivable! That would be a topsy-turvy world. … And that’s how it is generally: (As though to the audience) the manner in which one thinks is determined by the laws of nature!

(p. 123)

When Bergner and Von Stroheim act out a love relationship, it takes on the form of a melodrama; the lines are all delivered as if known in advance. Imitation of a love story replaces and eliminates the possibility of real emotional exchange. Love and failure of love are played like all other coded interactions, and with as little conviction. The players have no choice, though. For them the alternative is the “madness” and disorder of unrestrained self-expression and unstructured, unmediated contact with the world.⁵⁵ All the characters prefer instead the security of known forms.

The piece closes with a doll-child being carried around the room. It reaches for the women’s breasts and between the men’s legs. In this drama of imputed meaning and structured significance, these gestures seem to carry heavy symbolic weight, but if we keep Kaspar in mind, it is fair to assume that Handke is simply extending the logic of his dramaturgy. In a world of fictions organized around language and gesture, it is appropriate that an image (fiction) of a child be the one to express direct, unmediated interest in the persons and (pro)creative parts of the characters. But as was the case with the events designated by Kaspar’s first sentence, the subjective value of these gestures remains outside the realm of pre-structured symbol and meaning. We are left to contemplate our need to contain and render harmless uncoded gestures of the “other” by giving them a specific interpretive meaning.

In his most recent full-length work, They Are Dying Out (1974), Handke sets a coda to his prior dramatic activity. Having established the techniques of concrete language and concrete action, he is in a position to dramatize the passion of an individual in search of himself. From the tragedies of Shakespeare and Lessing, Handke takes the themes of impossible love, loss of power, betrayal; then, in “imitation” of Chekhov and Horváth’s plays of socio-linguistic collapse, he builds these themes into a drama of contemporary social, economic and linguistic reality.⁵⁶ To do so, Handke draws his characters from the dominant, capitalist class, since what is at stake is the possibility of having personal, tragic experience that has some bearing on society in general. If a person who has both power and knowledge is unable to grasp reality or find a self-conscious mode of expressing his subjective being within the rationalized framework of contemporary industrial society, then such experience is simply not available. If, on the other hand, one can express the “irrational” self within the rational language of society, what will the terms of this expression be?

In the first act of the play, we see Quitt, the “hero” of the play, in consultation with several other capitalist entrepreneurs about ways to rid themselves of the problems and anxieties created by competition and market fluctuation.⁵⁷ They agree to join together in a cartel which will control prices, production and marketing. They opt for the ultimate in rational planning as a means of making life clear and secure—at least from the producer’s point of view. Before the agreement is reached, each of the would-be business partners expresses his or her concern about the present state of (business) affairs and about the need for a secure social (again business) order. But each of them adopts a different tone and rhetoric. Von Wullnow, the aristocrat, speaks of a need to return to the old days when the owner of an enterprise and his workers made up “one big happy family.” Krober-Kent, the pastor, speaks in a detached, sermon-like style which never gets beyond the level of moral generalization and cliché. Paula Tax, on the other hand, uses progressive socialist rhetoric—in order better to organize her own economic empire.

I would like to go on the basis that we don’t generate any artificial needs but only awaken the natural ones of which people aren’t conscious yet. … Take a look at the socialist states. They have no irrational products—and still they advertise, because the rational needs advertising most of all. That’s what transmits the idea of what is rational. For me advertising is the only materialistic poetry. … [I]t endears us to the objects from which we have been alienated by ideology.⁵⁸

Handke has a rather savage sense of humor here. Marxist analysis of reification, be it through the randomness of the market, the alienation of the working class from the means of production, or the making fetishes of goods as commodities, is transformed into another means of producing greater profit for private enterprise. All rhetoric is equally useful in this sense. It is exactly this transformation of all alternative forms of analysis and understanding into naturalized, goal-oriented systems that produces and maintains the alienated condition of modern art and society. In our world, the average person, like Kaspar, learns to get by with the “answers” provided by these rhetorics. But Handke has not written a play about average people; these ladies and gentlemen of high finance are aware of their own and each other’s rhetorics. “I know my rhetoric,” says Von Wullnow, and is quite capable of willfully borrowing the trope “premature undialectical impressionism” from Paula Tax’s rhetorical lexicon (p. 185). Given this superior knowledge and ability based on and in the abstract models of capital and production, can one manage to allow the subjective and irrational to give meaning to life? Or is there no meaning-free space left in our rationalized and alienated social order?

These questions are broached indirectly in the first lines of the play. Quitt says, “I feel sad today,” then, “ … I felt lonely.” These feelings “cut like a yearning dream deep into … [his] heart” (pp. 165–166). Hans, Quitt’s servant, assumes that these statements are mere “political” rhetoric, part of Quitt’s and his own daily routine of role-playing. But they are not. Driven by these inner, irrational (non-“productive”) feelings, Quitt decides he must express himself at all costs. He first attacks Paula Tax for her failure to escape from a totally rational, business-oriented manipulation of language and people (p. 203). Then, in order to demonstrate the power and importance of his inner being, in order to make contact with the reality of his feelings, he turns on his partners.

… I am playing something that doesn’t even exist. … That’s the despair of it! Do you know what I’m going to do? I won’t stick to our arrangement. I’m going to ruin their prices and them with it. I’m going to employ my old-fashioned sense of self as a means of production. … It will be a tragedy. A tragedy of business life, and I will be the survivor. … There will be lightning and thunder, and the idea will become flesh.

(p. 211)

Unfortunately for Quitt, his desire for self-realization is hopelessly locked into the model of free enterprise and capitalist competition. As can be seen from his rhetoric, he is not able to verbalize his feelings in any other terms. He borrows from the theater and from the Bible, from the literary canon, in order to create an idealized picture of himself as the leading figure in a grand economic drama. His rhetoric not only is self-alienating, but hides the fact that his drama of self-expression is in reality merely another business scheme. The traditional Western thought-complexes of love, loyalty and hate have been reduced to technical manipulations.

In the second act of the play, we see the results of Quitt’s decision. The other members of the cartel try to “bring him to his senses” through rhetorical manipulation. Paula Tax even tries seduction, playing on their earlier unrealized (and in a world of technical abstraction, unrealizable) emotional involvement. Quitt rejects her with brutal self-confidence. Handke next adds an ironic touch by having the “minority-stockholder” and board-meeting gadfly, Kilb, attempt to assassinate Quitt. Kilb, critic of capitalist and institutional practices, turns out to be part of the system after all and is as ineffectual in his attempted violence as he has been in his past efforts to disrupt meetings and draw attention to himself.

Quitt survives these struggles as he claimed he would, but his victory is empty since he has not given expression to the feelings emanating from his “self.” He has in fact alienated his subjective being as a “means of production,” given it over to the world ordered by the abstract value of capital, a world where “Even the Freudian slip from the unconscious has already become a management method” (p. 253). Quitt, who wants “to speak about … myself without using categories” finds he cannot (p. 256). Though he does not “want to mean anything any more …”, all his words have a signification assigned to them already, by what he calls the “superego voices of our culture” (pp. 256–257). He finally ceases to believe in the possibility of anyone escaping from the world of forms into the freedom of self-expression. “While one set of monsters is being exorcised, the next ones are already burping outside the window” (p. 257). Even the act of murdering Kilb, though it marks a release of energy, brings no relief. The rational and the irrational cannot be joined. Quitt commits suicide by running his head against a large, carefully hewn block of stone. In this last mad act, the inner being and the “rationalized” order of the external world meet—in a way.

The events of the play do not produce an entirely hopeless situation, however. Hans, the servant, and Quitt’s wife have moments of self-recognition which indicate that they might be able to create a more fully integrated life. Indeed, for the original production Handke suggested that they be seen dancing together across the stage as Quitt falls dead.⁵⁹ This is not a symbolic dance of victory, though; it is simply a playful gesture of hope.

The tragedy in this drama turns out to be not at all the same as that of its classical models. In a world reduced to the rhetorical fictions found in the theater and repeated in life, there is no place for tragedy—if, that is, tragedy embodies personal/emotional contact with a community struggling for identity. Clearly, Handke's position in this play is that the modern world, its institutions and especially its theater, can only feed on itself, on its own forms, and can produce nothing more of interest—no new awareness of the self or the external world. Handke's effort to escape this cycle of repetition through subversion and transformation of the conventions of the theater has also reached an end point. Having totally theatricalized and objectified the language and process of the drama, he has contributed a great deal to our understanding of art and reality, but his method, built as it is on the carcass of the modern theater can only help us unearth those bones not yet discovered. Handke's dramaturgy too has run up against the stone wall of linguistic and social “reality.” It remains to be seen if he too will fall into the trap of repetition or will be able to escape into a space where new meaning is possible. For the moment, he seems to have recognized that further developments in his dramatic art are predicated on changes in society itself—assuming that the monsters burping outside the window turn out to be benign.

Notes

1. The term “modern” is used here to designate that complex set of cultural and aesthetic notions which have their origins in the social and ideological transformations of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but find their concrete forms in the art and society of the last one hundred years. There is no room in this essay for a full discussion of the idea of the modern. The reader is therefore referred to Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972).

2. Richard Gilman, The Making of Modern Drama (New York, 1974), p. 275; hereafter cited as MD.

3. Peter Handke, “Marcel Reich-Ranickí und die Natürlichkeit,” in Prosa Gedichte Theaterstücke Hörspiel Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), p. 289. This collection will be cited hereafter as Prosa. All translations from Prosa are mine.

4. MD, p. 275

5. MD, p. 277. See also Christopher Innes, Modern German Drama: A Study in Form (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 254, 259.

6. Peter Handke, “Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms,” in Prosa, p. 271.

7. Artur Joseph, Theater unter vier Augen: Gespräche mit Prominenten (Cologne, 1969), p. 27; hereafter referred to as Theater. All translations from Theater are mine.

8. Theater, p. 31.

9. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres Esthétiques, ed. P. Vernière (Paris, 1965), pp. 192–93, quoted in Peter Szondi, Lektüren und Lektionen (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), p. 30; my translation.

10. See, for example, MD, pp. 267–70.

11. See Handke, “Ich bin ein Bewohner” and “Strassentheater und Theatertheater,” in Prosa, pp. 267 and 304–06.

12. Handke, “Strassentheater,” in Prosa, p. 305.

13. This concern with the formal signifying properties of what we usually refer to as the “content” of a work, though clearly semiotic, also has profound connections with the Hegelian, dialectical analysis of form and content as found in the Logic and, more recently, in the works of Lukács, Adorno and Szondi.

14. Theater, p. 30.

15. Ibid.

16. Handke, “Strassentheater,” in Prosa, p. 305.

17. Ibid., p. 304.

18. See ibid., p. 305.

19. Handke, “Ich bin ein Bewohner,” in Prosa, pp. 265–66.

20. Handke, “Strassentheater,” in Prosa, p. 306.

21. Ibid.

22. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1971); The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1976); and Discipline and Punish (New York, 1978).

23. Handke, Offending the Audience, in Kaspar and Other Plays, trans. Michael Roloff (New York, 1969), pp. 24–25.

24. By making the audience a participant in the deconstructive process, Handke overcomes one of the major problems that has faced Foucault in his archaeological deconstructions. Rather than presenting the reader with an already assembled structure of knowledge (as Foucault must, since he presents his analysis in the finished form of a book), Handke allows the spectator to experience whatever knowledge he or she acquires as a personal awakening of consciousness, independent of any pre-structured mode of perception. For a more detailed discussion of the order of knowledge in Foucault, see Paul Bové, “The End of Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Power of Disciplines,” to be published in a special Foucault issue of Humanities in Society, Spring, 1981.

25. Offending the Audience, p. 12. Like Foucault, Handke insists on the importance of recognizing the event and the nature of one’s participation in it.

26. Handke, “Note on Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation,” in Kaspar and Other Plays, p. ix.

27. The dates cited here will always be those of the first performance.

28. Offending, p. 5. Subsequent references to Offending will appear in the text.

29. The term “expectation horizon” is borrowed from Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt am Main, 1970).

30. Innes, p. 238.

31. Peter Handke, Stücke I (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), p. 205; my translation.

32. Ibid.

33. Handke, Self-Accusation, in Kaspar and Other Plays, p. 38. Subsequent references to Self-Accusation will appear in the text.

34. See also Foucault’s discussion of confession in La Volonté du savoir, Vol. I of Histoire de la sexualité (Paris, 1976).

35. See Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, 1961), pp. 27, 47.

36. Cf. Augustine, p. 71.

37. Peter Handke, Prophecy, in The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays, trans. Michael Roloff (New York, 1976), pp. 3–5. Subsequent references to Prophecy will appear in the text.

38. See Uwe Schultz, “Zwischen Virtuosität und Vakuum,” Text + Kritik, No. 24/24a (Sept. 1976), 18.

39. Handke, Kaspar, in Kaspar and Other Plays, p. 59.

40. Theater, p. 35.

41. Kaspar, pp. 60–63. Subsequent references to Kaspar will appear in the text.

42. Theater, p. 36.

43. Handke freely admits his debt to Sartre for the term, but unlike the existentialists, he believes that “nausea” can lead to a positive recognition and transformation of objective social reality.

    My reference to Othello comes from the Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore, 1958).

44. Theater, p. 39.

45. The Yale Shakespeare, ed. C. B. Tinker (New Haven, 1918). Most recent English editions of The Tempest have assigned these lines to Miranda, but since German translations continue to follow the tradition established by Tieck and give them to Prospero (see, for example, Sturm, trans. R. A. Schröder [Frankfurt a.m., 1958]), Handke would associate them with Prospero. Thus, I have cited an early English version which corresponds with the German.

46. Handke, Quodlibet, in The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays, p. 57.

47. Handke's choice of a general, a bishop, a politician and a grande dame as representative social/theatrical forms echoes Genet’s analysis of these form/function relationships in The Balcony.

48. See Manfred Mixner, Peter Handke (Kronberg, 1977), p. 31.

49. Mixner, p. 96.

50. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, passim.

51. Innes calls them “laboriously carr[ied] out meaningless actions” (Modern German Drama, p. 249) and assumes they are signs of the ward’s psychological collapse. In fact, they are just the opposite: they are playful acts of self-expression, unfettered by the omnipresent eye (“I”) of the guardian.

52. Peter Handke, Stücke 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), p. 57; my translation.

53. Ibid.

54. Handke, The Ride Across Lake Constance, in The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays, p. 74. Subsequent references to The Ride will appear in the text.

55. For Handke, “madness” is yet another ideologically bound category, one that is used to institute and perpetuate an hierarchically structured society. At first, persons who threaten this structure are deemed mad in order to remove them to places where they can be observed and controlled. Later, as society’s rules are internalized, the individual personally takes responsibility for avoiding those “mad” events and feelings which would jeopardize carefully ordered social “reality.” Constraint becomes liberty and freedom insanity. Oppression thus becomes productive. Handke pays his debt to Foucault in this play by having Porten cite the lines, “Of water and of madness, of ships of fools …” (p. 133), which Foucault places in the opening chapter of Madness and Civilization.

56. Mixner, pp. 189–90.

57. Their discussion obviously parallels Marx’s analysis of alienation in a capitalist money economy.

58. Handke, They are Dying Out, in The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays, p. 196. Subsequent references to They are Dying Out will appear in the text.

59. Mixner, p. 196.