Peter Handke's newest book [Das Spiel vom Fragen oder Die Reise zum Sonoren Land] is a play, although it seems difficult to imagine the work successfully staged and performed. It is too cerebral and symbolistic to captivate a viewing audience with ease, I fear. Is it then a text destined rather to be read despite the distribution of roles and a cast of characters stemming half from history and myth, half from the author’s increasingly abstract yet sensual vision of things? Or, put differently, what is Handke's intention when he transgresses purposefully the limits between the traditional literary genres?

In Das Spiel vom Fragen Handke seems to violate the foremost demand made on all literary fiction: namely, to create reality instead of delivering analysis. The play is so rich in words that they sometimes stand as obstacles between text and reader. We must watch out constantly to avoid stumbling over these words. Of course, Handke (see WLT 55:4, pp. 603–7) may just want us to stumble. He is too careful and too experienced an author to have fallen unwittingly into such a snare. He is a writer who fully intends what he states, and he lends the signature of his art to every line. These very facts, however, make many of his recent writings (see e.g. WLT 62:2, p. 269, and 62:3, p. 456) virtually inaccessible, above all to his admirers over the past two decades. The priest’s gesture is the poet’s realm ever since antiquity and should not be disputed here. The issue is whether the priest can truly redeem by alienating his community? Why does his new play—and many another of his recent works—have to contain so many cold abstractions, when the poet is mainly concerned with tenderness and warmth?

The dedication, the motto (from Dante’s Vita nuova), the cerebral characters (the “Mauershauer,” the “Spielverderber,” the “native,” and even Parzival) all try to bridge the gap between ancient allegory and our present need for meaning. Handke's invocation of great names from all times is surely no sign of personal ambition, but seems to derive rather from a painful anxiety about the future of mankind that may well be saved only with a new awareness of our finest forebears from all epochs. Handke worries, as do most of us, about the daily increasing loss of our identity, and he therefore comes up with a language and a style intended to preserve, to galvanize, to conjure back, to aid. He risks sounding old-fashioned, solemn, even phony in order to shake up the reader before it is too late.

It is quite possibly our fault alone that we are not willing or able to be shaken. Handke's new tone appears—and only appears—to be old stuff, a music we think we have heard elsewhere. Naturally this is not true; the text is entirely original, yet is it a play? The action does not really matter here; characters without much flesh and blood encircle one another’s inabilities to speak, to question, to exist. The work is set in tones of color and mood rather than in places or actions. What a find—or what a wide field on which to fail—for all future producers of the play!

Is it better then to read Das Spiel vom Fragen? That is difficult to tell. Of course, much beauty is present in the text. We find on every page a flawless picture, a memorable metaphor, a quietly breathing description of nature, and of course a multitude of truths about humankind. Handke mourns our collective and individual inability to ask the questions that matter; he observes our failure in living without them; he encourages the strength to ask these questions, which are perceived as either the great return to our essence or the great beginning of a new humanity; and sometimes, just sometimes, he offers a bit of consolation like a caressing hand.