… As though everyone everywhere in the world, day in, day out, always had his pictorial mission: the mission to be a picture to others: the woman walks “past the train station, along a puddle collecting the falling rain, as ‘the housewife on her way to the market,’ and further in the distance someone walks by as ‘the man with the umbrella;’” thus, offering their pictures of themselves, they help one another (me, at least) …

—Peter Handke: Fantasies of Repetition, 1983

Peter Handke's most recent work for the theater, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, is a play without words. It takes place in a square, inspired by the piazza of a small town near Trieste. Handke had spent an afternoon there watching the goings-on, each passer-by suggesting the fragment of a story which takes its shape only in the context of all the preceding and succeeding moments witnessed by the spectator, who in turn entered his own associations. At one point a coffin was carried from one of the buildings. Then life went on as if nothing had happened. But those who came after would watch the ongoing movement in the square with different eyes from those who had seen the coffin.

In an interview, Handke talked about the play as a “sort of dream play,”

about what one might experience in the square beyond the natural phenomena which are there anyway, and what enters in terms of fantasy, myth, memory. One sits and watches and the longer one watches, the more pictures emerge from (one’s own) background, supplementing the pictures that are moving by. Personal experiences also enter the square. Imagined people move right along. The seasons change. Childhood returns. People one hasn’t seen in maybe 40 years are remembered and hallucinated. And then one wakes up, the dream is over. …

It is Handke's genius—and the greatest challenge to the director of the play—that he keeps the figures on stage open enough for spectators to enter their own associations, allowing them to respond to the “pictures” according to their experiences. The stories suggested on stage can be endlessly varied and expanded through each spectator’s imagination. A play without words turns out to be all about language—its possibilities contained in and released by images.

Always present in the square, though neither named nor suggested, is the challenging spirit of a figure who was crucial to Handke's innovative dramaturgy from the beginning: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Handke's early plays, notably Offending the Audience (first staged in 1966), Kaspar (1968) and The Ride Across Lake Constance (1970), can be seen as dramatic models of Wittgenstein’s investigations of grammar and speech’s traps and errors. Handke's later development also seems to parallel Wittgenstein’s: from the construction of a rather didactic model that exposes the abuse of language to a humble sense of wonder about its nature, possibilities, and even existence; from the famous dictum in Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus—“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—to the moving remark in the lecture on ethics, nearly two decades later: “I am tempted to say … that the true expression, in language, for the wonder of the world’s existence is the existence of language itself.”

A silence that uncompromisingly delineated the limitations of language becomes the resonant silence of the square, which generates language in those who look and see.

Handke's shift from the skepticism of his early plays to the sense of wonder that permeates his later work coincides with his return to Austria after many years of living and traveling abroad. He moved from Paris to Salzburg with his daughter Amina, so that she could attend school in the environment of her own language. They stayed there from 1979 to 1988. His return is reflected in the tetralogy Slow Homecoming, consisting of the dramatic poem The Long Way ’Round (1982) and three prose texts: Slow Homecoming (1979), which follows an Austrian geologist working in Alaska on his gradual homeward drift, a process of inner separation from the vast expanse of the Northern landscape that finally takes him on a night flight back to Austria; The Lesson of St. Victoire (1980), an intensely personal meditation in and on the landscape of Cezanne’s paintings that leads the writer directly into the landscape near Salzburg; and finally Child (1981), which tells how the lessons he learned as a father expedited Handke's decision to return to Austria. In The Long Way ’Round, a successful man returns to his native village in southern Austria (also Handke's birthplace) after many years abroad.

The work is not only “about” a return home, it’s Handke's homecoming into the language of theater. Handke hadn’t written a play since They Are Dying Out, first staged in 1974 (American premiere, Yale Repertory Theater, 1980). After almost a decade, Handke now attempted to locate origin by reaching for his literary ancestors: the Greeks, and, closer to home, Hölderlin’s poetic reimagining of the power and magnitude of the Greek model. His native characters, “simple” working people, balance with dignity the demands of modern survival and of maintaining a connection to their ancestors’ wisdom. In their long ceremonious speeches, Handke seeks to restore to them the theatrical grandeur of Aeschylus and the visual power of Homer. (The loveliness of things in Homer: “The tripod on the fire,” the “well washed cloak,” “the sheath of freshly sawed ivory,” he writes in The Story of the Pencil—Die Geschichte des Bleistifts, a collection of notes, written 1976–1980.)

Handke's next theater work, Play of Questions, was first staged in 1990 by Claus Peymann, the Vienna Burgtheater’s controversial director, who also directed the 1992 premiere of The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. Both productions are still running in the Burgtheater’s repertory. (Peymann started his career with the first productions of Offending the Audience, Kaspar, and They Are Dying Out). In Play of Questions, Handke further explores the game-like dramaturgy he had experimented with in his early plays: in German, Spiel means both play and game. A randomly gathered group of people sets out on a “Journey Into the Sonorous Land” (the play’s subtitle)—a fairytale childhood hinterland where they arrive, through liberating games, at the child’s capacity to ask “the right questions.” Wittgenstein, with his later explorations of language games in Philosophical Investigations, again seems to be the invisible guiding spirit. The participants are theatrical stock characters: an old rural couple; young lovers, both actors; and Parzival, a Kaspar figure, naked and in chains, speaking in disturbed slogans and commonplaces, afraid of the other speaking characters as carriers of the kind of language of commerce and control that has imprisoned him.

Few and far between as these theatrical texts are, they stand out as signposts pointing to the major departures in Handke's other works of this period, which take him further and further away from story and character in his efforts to restore language’s original sacred power of naming. “The most beautiful poetic imagination would be one that no longer creates images, rhythms, wordgames or stories, but where language itself comes to life and makes things nameable,” Handke writes in The Story of the Pencil.

Andreas Loser, the narrator of the novel Across (1983), is a high school teacher of classical languages and, like Handke himself, a confirmed walker, taking long hikes from the modern suburbs of Salzburg to its historic, castle-crowned Moenchsberg. The landscape envelopes the narrator in quietly perceived pictures that shimmer with its long history, from the present to geological times. During one of his walks he comes across a man in the act of spraying swastikas on beech trees and kills him with a rock. Although ostensibly the story of a murder, the work is a text about seeing. It introduces in the most concentrated way the raison d’être of all Handke's subsequent writing; and it leads directly to the theater as theatron, a place to look/see, of The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, which challenges the audience to participate in the imaginative act of seeing. From the Greek verb for seeing, Loser learns about a gift perhaps lost to all but the ancient Greeks:

How can I give a more accurate picture of the sense that I lacked? Perhaps only Greek has a verb expressing that fusion of perception and imagination (which is essential). On the surface, this verb means only “to notice;” but it carries overtones of “white,” “bright,” “radiance,” “glitter,” “shimmer.” Within me there was an outright longing for this radiance which is more than any sort of viewing. I shall always long for that kind of seeing, which in Greek is called leuketin.

If Handke's works exposed the dangerous and misleading speech patterns induced by educational drill and the media, the German language continues to be shaken by its perversion through Nazi rhetoric, which still leaves its mutilating signs everywhere. Loser’s path, his sudden, inescapable confrontation with the instinct to kill, leads into the realm of Greek tragedy. As stand-in for the author—and the reader—he leads his witnesses towards earning language again through the gift of seeing: the pictures in the world around us, which have always contained the words, and, vice versa, the pictures contained in each word.

In this period, Handke was also preoccupied with translations as a way of expanding one’s capacity to experience and name the world. An ardent reader of Greek texts since his high-school studies of classic Greek, Handke has translated Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. He has also translated Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer; a novel by his French translator Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Le miror quotidien; and works from Slovenian, his mother’s native language. Resonances from his encounters with these writers come into play in The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other.

In his novel Repetition (1986), the Austrian narrator travels to Slovenia to trace his brother, who, like Handke's Slovenian uncle, had been missing in action in World War II. He brings along a Slovenian dictionary his brother left him. Through it he discovers the ways of the people who were his ancestors: peasants and farmers in the arid Karst mountains. Their vocabulary and idioms, passed on through centuries, reveal their intimate relationship to their native environment, their history and origin. Language becomes a celebration of survival. In the process of these discoveries the narrator becomes a writer.

It may no longer be possible to affirm continuity through writing new heroic epics; perhaps it can be accomplished by paying careful attention to the rich resonances in individual words and their idiomatic usage: they tell the story of a community, its perception of itself through generations deeply rooted in their native landscape.

The Slovenian word for village idiot is “he who stirs up wind while walking.” The same term applies to an arrogant person; in more practical terms, stirring the wind while walking is a necessary skill in the dry heat of the Slovenian Karst mountains. The expression found its way into The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other.

His most recent prose text, Essay About a Day That Worked (Versuch über den geglückten Tag) is ostensibly an attempt to describe the kind of day where one lives fully in the present, in touch with the smallest, most trivial phenomena. For the writer this also means being completely open to words, that is, being able to receive them from the pictures through which the world (according to Wittgenstein) offers itself; yet what he receives are ultimately his own words, which made him see to begin with. The borders between his inner world and the outer world merge in what Handke, in the title of a much earlier work, called The Inner World of the Outer World of the Inner World. When this happens, the individual becomes one with the world, which constitutes a day that works. The challenge is “To look and to continue to look further with the eyes of the fitting word,” and to pass on to the reader not just the picture but the dynamics of seeing. Reading then becomes another way of looking, seeing. Seeing the picture contained in the words, the reader will then be able to transform the picture back into his own words and the story he tells will be his. “The best thing, story teller: get the others, gently, to tell stories—make it your goal; and do it in a way that afterwards they feel as if they had a story told to them (a wonderful one).”

Often foreign words cause the jolt (a favorite term that reappears in almost all later works) that opens one’s eyes. In The Afternoon of a Writer the narrator remembers that in French, his partner’s language, “now” literally means “holding hands.” And from the letters of St. Paul he learns that the Greek word for “moment” (augenblick in German, as in “the twinkling of an eye”) is literally “the throwing of the eye.” Also through St. Paul he discovers that “to read” literally says “perceiving upward,” a “recognition upward.” The narrator mentions in passing that he is working on a sketch about translating. In a sense the entire book is about translation, as all his writing is an act of translation, of finding the Urtext as Handke calls it on another occasion, the original text that is already and has always been there. In translations, according to Walter Benjamin, this Urtext is contained between the lines. In those spaces between, all translations of a given text merge and the Urtext reveals itself in their silence.

Emerging in the silence of The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other are figures who have emerged time and again from the unspoken Urtext of many times and cultures, as the square itself in the Vienna production seemed to have emerged from an ocean. This Urtext can be sensed in the periodic surge of a mysterious roar encircling the stage, merging with the rustle above, like trees in the wind, which once carried the voices of the oracles. In this silence that can actually be heard like the silence in the desert, the spectator suddenly finds herself listening to her own words in response to what she sees. She is amazed at how clearly these words resound in herself, weaving her stories from and into the many fragments of possible stories suggested on stage. Thus the stage event becomes a continuation of the initial experience that inspired it, rather than its duplication. Handke's theater, in a reversal of the dramatist’s gift of appropriating other people’s speech, is returning the gift, so to speak, to his spectators: the gift of words, not as something drilled in from the outside, but as everyone’s own power of naming, which arises from learning how to look and see, schauen in German.

And the spectator suddenly remembers that in her native language the term for actor is Schauspieler, someone who plays to be looked at. The term for spectator is Zuschauer, a much more active word than spectator or onlooker; zu implies a movement towards, suggesting participation in what is being seen. The English place of action shifts in German to a place of seeing, a Schauplatz (the dramaturgical—and cultural—differences between German-and English-language theater surface in this subtle shift). Furthermore, the German word for square is Platz, place. For the patron of an outdoor cafe looking out on the piazza, it has already become a Schauplatz, a place to see. Transferred to the theater, there is no break in realities; they are contained in the same word. Handke doesn’t cheat when it comes to words. All the possibilities and limitations of any imaginative act, in this case a work for the theater, are already given in language. The “inner (imaginative) world” of the theatron—the theatrical space and its original function of presentation—merge with the “outer world” of the place of action and its function represented by the work. When Handke calls this work a Schauspiel, he means it, literally. It is a play of looking and seeing: what takes place.

Most figures entering this place are introduced as Einer als, literally “one as. …” The emphasis on the theatricality of the endeavor (there is always the actor entering as someone other than himself) is obvious. But Handke is far more consistent and rigorous in his honesty than that. The phrase also contains the original experience of seeing a stranger passing by in a square, and perceiving, imagining him as a certain person. At the same time it puts into question the possibilities of authenticating perception and—throwing the issue back to the theater—any attempt at authoritative “characterization.” The only figures who are directly introduced—e.g. a skateboarder, a jogger—are those who are identified simply by their activities. No further assumption is made about who they might be. The construction someone as is awkward in English, so in the translation the as often is replaced by a comma or a dash to indicate the moment of recognition.

A phrase often used in the text is im Ansatz (which has no English equivalent), meaning “only as a beginning,” not definite, not completely followed through. It points to the most difficult task for the director, who must introduce the figures as the personae described in the text and also leave them open enough to allow the spectator the imaginative process of seeing as. Handke's French translator once pointed out that his most recent prose works concern perception. No wonder he should return to theater, a medium in which the process of perception can be physically examined. His genius as a writer for theater has always manifested itself in his understanding and use of the stage as a model that makes visible. His plays, like all his texts, are not “about” something above and beyond themselves, they are; in the Wittgensteinian sense they are “pictures;” whatever is inside the picture shows, reveals itself through it; it cannot talk about itself in the language that constitutes it. “Do not betray what you have seen. Stay inside the picture,” says the “oracle” that introduces The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other—which Handke has invented, a modern oracle speaking of the limits and the power of language for those who have learned how to perceive it, be it as writer, reader or spectator.

Thus Handke's text isn’t merely a sequence of stage directions. Each passage contains a complete picture, an episode. The structure, rhythm, and tense chosen for each sentence, the pitch and tonality of each word also contain the movement of each scene fragment—that is, the movement not only as it happened, might have happened, or should happen on the stage but as it was perceived by the person watching. The sequence of details, the connections between two separate episodes, follow with painstaking precision the movement of an observing eye, which might first catch that someone’s hands are shackled and then that the person walks barefoot. In German, which allows the construction of many subclauses, each sequence is contained in a single sentence that moves on one breath, up and down a person, following around curves and corners, along circles, straight and zig zag lines, in leaps and bounds, at breathtaking speed, at a leisurely strolling pace, a jogger’s bounce, or a business-like gait. Magicians build their technique on playing games with the human eye. Those games are also a part of Handke's play with and of perceptions; they constitute an important—ancient—aspect of the language of the theater. Sometimes Handke seems to ask for impossible images, and, more practically speaking, impossible transitions and costume changes. But he isn’t telling us what to do, he is telling us what he sees. And what he is asking from a production, rather than literally to realize the impossible on stage, is to make us see the impossible. The English language reminds us that to realize also refers to seeing, to make real through the imaginative act of seeing.