I

“Niemand, fast niemand, kann oder mag Handke noch weiter auf dem Wege folgen, den dieser nun schon seit mehreren Büchern eingeschlagen hat.” This remark by Jürgen Manthey (383) reflects a general trend in the reception of Peter Handke's latest works. Starting with Langsame Heimkehr (1979), Handke's writing has acquired a new tone that, although adumbrated by his preceding works, either surprised or affronted many of his previous readers. Invariably, negative critical response has focused on the subjectivity and solemnity of Handke's new tone. Manfred Durzak, for example, accused Handke of narcissism, criticizing his seeming indifference to literature’s social and political dimension. With Langsame Heimkehr, Durzak judges, Handke is “als Künstler abgestürzt” (159). Jörg Drews discovers an attitude of self-ordained priesthood in Handke's recent work and subsumes his writing under “Spielarten des Kulturkonservatismus, Einfaltsromantik und Intellektualromantik” (951, 954). Judgments of this kind are based on textual evidence. Handke's latest works contain archaic and sometimes solemn and absolutist vocabulary. Emphatic words like “Sehnsucht,” “Bedürfnis nach Heil,” “selbstlose Daseinslust,” and “stille Harmonie” seem to celebrate existence rather than to make it accessible to reason, to lay bare alienation, and to expose the deficiency and imperfection of the world. Instead, Handke seems to enact an absolution of the Word and through it an absolution of the world. This analysis, then, will attempt to elucidate how this absolution can be understood. My view is that Handke's solemn tone cannot be taken at face value but has to be perceived in the context of an aesthetic that is allegorically inscribed in the text. My argument begins not with Handke but with some remarks about criticism of contemporary literature.

Durzak’s and Drew’s charges against Handke betray a particular naïveté in that they avoid the hermeneutical questions they would be willing to ask when approaching classical or romantic texts, such as: what is a text’s use of language, and what is its literary repertoire? What are, in other words, the aesthetic standards to be applied to the text? Only after defining the frame of reference employed by a contemporary text are we able to determine with some accuracy its historical locus and relate it to contemporary social and political realities. Only then are we able to gauge a text’s potential simplicity, naïveté, or romanticism. Given the postmodern narratology within which Handke produces, we have to credit his literary work with the potential of being less accessible than it seems to be. This requires further explanation.

Peter Handke's early prose, including his Sprechstücke, are part of the experimental writing of the 1960s neo-avant-garde. Pop-Art, Concrete Poetry, the writing of the Vienna Group, Heissenbüttel’s Textbooks, and Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum aimed to subvert received notions of literature. They tampered with the textual order of the page, refused to capitalize nouns, and treated linguistic themes in a storyless prose. Like their dadaist and surrealist predecessors, neo-avant-gardists employed formalist innovations in an attempt to blur the line between art and non-art. Thus they aimed to challenge the bourgeois domestication of art in an autonomous but politically irrelevant sphere. However, when all traditional definitions of art were eroded by the virus of avant-garde innovation, formalist innovation lost its function as a work’s historical index. Artistic production had reached the point of “anything goes.”¹

This is the point when postmodernism sets in. In postmodernist literature, both experimental and traditional forms of writing are potentially “avant-garde.” (Today experimental theater such as Publikumsbeschimpfung [1966] is integrated into the repertoire and has lost its provocative bite.) The notion of experimental literature has become obsolete for a definition of a work’s contemporaneity. The literary work aspiring to be “avant-garde” is stricken with historical anonymity.² Deprived of normative aesthetic standards, postmodern“avant-gardism” is doomed to operate in an aesthetic vacuum. If there is no more standard against which the literary work can set itself (and be gauged by the reader), its language becomes opaque. Reading and criticism lose the ground of traditional philosophy. Textual evidence becomes treacherous. This is, in short, the difficulty we are facing in Handke's recent work: we cannot define its avant-gardism or conservativism unless we find a key to disclose its use of language.

Some contemporary authors have written actual decoding manuals to their hermetic books. Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s seemingly factual but actually fictitious biography Marbot (1980) was later supplemented with its “key” “Arbeitsprotokolle zum Verfahren ‘Marbot’” (1984), Christa Wolf’s Kassandra (1983) was followed by “Die Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: ‘Kassandra’” (1984) which allows us to relate the book to its historical situation, and Umberto Eco’s Postscript to “The Name of the Rose” (1984) reveals the “avant-gardist” motives of his novel The Name of the Rose (1980). Whereas such supra-texts provide the necessary frames of reference for an understanding of the hermetic works, other postmodern texts employ techniques such as multiple framing, meta-fictional intrusion, or allegory to indicate ways of understanding.³

In the reading that follows of Langsame Heimkehr and Der Chinese des Schmerzes makes use of decoding material from Handke's explanatory comments in a recent interview and employs an allegorical method of reading.⁴ An allegorical reading perceives the narrative to be located simultaneously in two frames of reference both as narrative “story” and as commentary about the story. Thus allegory can serve as a framing device that allows us to derive meaning from a hermetic text. By applying these indirect approaches to the texts, one is in a position to locate the alleged intransigence of Handke's self-ordained priesthood, lay bare the intricate relation between themes and the status of his narrative, and thus contribute to an understanding of the enigmatic “Chinese” element in Der Chinese des Schmerzes.

II

Handke's Langsame Heimkehr (1979) is the first volume in a tetralogy with the same title.⁵ The “Homecoming” allows interpretation as a reversal of Handke's novel Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (1972). While Der kurze Brief describes an emancipatory, “avant-gardist” westward movement across the American continent, Langsame Heimkehr presents a European’s emotional and intellectual preparations for returning home. Orientation in physical space, narration, and writing now emerge as Handke's dominant themes, themes that indicate the self-reflective, allegorical dimension of the book. Der Chinese des Schmerzes, the book following the tetralogy, is set in Salzburg and illustrates a new perception of Austria. Handke's Langsame Heimkehr and Der Chinese des Schmerzes aim to realize the goal the author had set for himself in 1978 of inventing another Austria outside its definitions through newspapers, statistics, philosophy, and realist writing. Although containing realist details, his new Austria is based on a vision he hopes to accomplish through writing.⁶ In Langsame Heimkehr Handke prepares his protagonist’s homecoming through a painstaking and existential reexamination and redefinition of language and writing. The “lesson” his literary alter ego learns during his “Slow Homecoming” and the subsequent Lehre der Sainte-Victoire will enable Handke to achieve his new vision of Austria in Der Chinese des Schmerzes.

Valentin Sorger, the protagonist of Langsame Heimkehr, is an Austrian geographer, or geologist, teaching at a California university. The first chapter introduces him conducting research in the far North, presumably in Alaska. He later flies to a city on the west coast and then to New York. He intends to spend a sabbatical year at home in Europe. The book ends with his arrival on the old continent.

The narrative is divided into three parts, each corresponding to a crucial phase of Sorger’s homecoming. Part One, “Die Vorzeitformen,” describes his reconciliation with physical space. Whereas Handke enmeshed his previous America traveller in the artificiality of film—the book culminates in an idealization of a cinematographic existence—he now confronts Sorger with a natural space, a terra incognita where primordial forms cry out for orientation. Bewildered by excessive travelling, the geographer seeks a stable place. Handke parallels Sorger’s physical orientation with his verbal orientation in the world.

The cultural bankruptcy brought about by the Third Reich is one component of Sorger’s rootlessness. He feels alienated from his central-European home country and its recent history. Descended from “aufgezwungene(n) Vorväter(n),” “die Völkermörder seines Jahrhunderts,” he too regards himself as a murderer (99). Emancipation from his forefathers is essential for his return to Europe. Homecoming entails a confrontation with the Third Reich’s verbal legacy.⁷

One imprint that National Socialism has left on the post-war era is its legacy of verbal taboos. Avoiding words that were abused by the Nazis, however, includes avoiding their neutral connotations. The taboo on the word “Heil,” for example, has deprived the German language of one word for “salvation.” Handke boldly ignores this taboo in a solemn opening sentence: “Sorger hatte schon einige ihm nah gekommene Menschen überlebt und empfand keine Sehnsucht mehr, doch oft eine selbstlose Daseinslust und zuzeiten ein animalisch gewordenes, auf die Augenlider drückendes Bedürfnis nach Heil” (9). Another emotionally laden word, “Heimat,” evokes the fanatic nationalism of the Third Reich and carries overtones of oppressive provincialism.⁸ Handke's Langsame Heimkehr can be read as a cautious reevaluation of these banned vocabulary items. Without once using the word “Heimat,” Handke insists on the existential necessity of a place to be home.

Sorger’s mapping of the Alaskan “Vorzeitformen” includes an experience of primordial naming. Unlike civilized spaces, the forms of the Alaskan landscapes are unnamed. “Nach Namen schreiende Einzelformen” (71) invite Sorger to approach this landscape as “his” (72). Because his experience of the unnamed landscape is not mediated by language, he has, like an explorer, immediate access to it and can see it for what it is. He now tentatively applies to these unnamed topographical features such geological terms as “Pferdehufseen,” “Quelltöpfe,” “Trogtäler,” and “Lavafladen” (72). Realizing that these terms fit the characteristics of “his” landscape, he shares the experience of other scientists who invented these names. Verbal conventions acquire new life for Sorger. The guilt of language, arising from the arbitrary relation between sign and signified, seems redeemed for him; objects and words appear to be one.

The “Heil” Sorger experiences in such “just” language enables him to overcome his feelings of alienation. Taken by a sudden affection for the river, he names it “Schönes Wasser” (73). This intuitive act of naming makes him confident because he is no longer doomed to be at the mercy of a language that is not his own. It has taught him that language, a “Friedensstifterin,” can reconcile the beholder with the outside world (100). Leaving Alaska, he is convinced that he will now be able to write a long-planned study on spaces “Über Räume.”

In the second chapter, titled “Raumverbot,” Sorger returns to a west coast city where his delicate sense of a personal space is radically shattered. Noticing his neighbor in a bus, he waves at her. Looking at him from top to toe, she fails to recognize him. This traumatic experience of invisibility annihilates Sorger’s newly acquired sense of place. He feels erased, excluded from space, an experience he names “Raumverbot!” (132). Even his voice seems to belong to someone else (133). The experience of this “lebensentscheidende Stunde” (131) is pivotal for Sorger’s life. He is confronted with the necessity of defining himself socially. Sharing the harmonious family life of neighbors, Sorger suddenly regains speech and proclaims a new life-plan. He intends to return to his home country and stop being an outsider:

Ich kann leben! Ich spüre die Macht, zu Sagen, wie es Ist, und möchte doch gar nichts sein und gar nichts sagen: allen bekannt sein und niemandem, durchdringend Lebendig. Ja, ich fühle ein zeitweiliges Recht auf den Weltraum. Und meine Zeit ist Jetzt; jetzt ist Unsere Zeit. Ich erhebe also Anspruch auf die Welt und dieses Jahrhundert—denn es ist meine Welt und mein Jahrhundert.

(141)

Sorger’s grandiose verbal claiming of the cosmos includes “his” century, which he had earlier defined as the century of “Völkermörder” (99). His confidence is inspired by the “lesson” he had learned in the Alaskan wilderness: if he can find a “true” name for an unnamed river, he can with luck extend this verbal appropriation to the entire universe.

Sorger’s verbal re-creation of his world is based on an old-fashioned vocabulary pervading the entire book. Capitalized verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (“Sagen,” “Jetzt,” “Lebendig”) indicate an enunciative act that aims at primordial creation reminiscent of the biblical creation of the world through the Word (John I, 1: “In the beginning was the Word”). Handke's ambitious literary project reclaims the “Heimatlichkeit des irdischen Planeten” (12) by the arrogation of the Logos. It aims to restore a “fallen” unity between words and things and sanctions this unity by the authority of a god-like author.

Speech act theory offers another approach to an understanding of Handke's solemn language. His use of language is performative rather than constative.⁹ Whereas constative language describes or reports facts (for example, “I am twenty years old”), performative language aims to do things with words (for example, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” “I apologize,” and so on). For performative utterances the category of verifiable truth is substituted for the speaker’s sincerity or good faith that elevates mere saying to “doing.” Only when spoken in good faith does the performative utterance “perform.”¹⁰ The same is true of religious language. Its “truth” is not the truth of a verifiable fact but is grounded in God’s authority and sincerity. Thus, both performative and religious language are ultimately rooted in a “sincere” unity of speaker and word.

In the context of Handke's work the use of a transparent or “true” language is grounded in the speechlessness of epiphanic experience.¹¹ Since Der kurze Brief his protagonists have attempted to make their episodic experiences of otherness last. In Der kurze Brief the traveller’s experience of an “ANDERE ZEIT” leads to his acceptance of a “flattened” cinematographic existence. A similar solution is attained in Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung (1975), in which the hero accepts an anonymous existence in the masses (Bartmann 192). Both a cinematographic existence in the plot of a film and the anonymity of city life are metaphors for a negated individuality. Erasure of individuality corresponds to the loss of the words Handke's heroes tend to experience in moments of epiphany.¹²

In Langsame Heimkehr, however, epiphanic experience becomes the negation of the negation of words: Sorger’s solemn enunciation paradoxically verbalizes his epiphanic speechlessness. Overcoming speechlessness in his neighbor’s company, Sorger experiences a metamorphosis of his former self. The language defining his new identity is solemn, untainted by nominalist guilt. In his previous epiphanies Handke faced the guilt of language by lapsing into the innocence of silence. Now he negates this guilt through a reinvestment in an innocent language.

Despite its pompous intransigence, Handke's arrogation of the Logos is relative. It is contextualized as a game. Sorger announces his new life-plan during a game of chess: “Sorger setzte sich wieder an den Tisch und fing, statt im Spiel die Schachfigur zu ziehen, zu reden an” (139, my emphasis). Sorger’s claim for the universe appears as a move in the “chess game of life.” This alignment of life and game relativizes his absolute claim. Perceived as a move in a game, the arrogation of the Logos is transformed into the mode of as if. This playfulness of Sorger’s existence is repeatedly related to hoax and counterfeit. The geographer is called the “Joker” (192) who regards the conventions of his science as a “fröhlicher Schwindel” (18). Suspecting the possibility of an entirely different schema for representing the correlation between time and geological formations, he sees himself “wie seit jeher die Umdenker …, der Welt seinen eigenen Schwindel unterschieben” (18). Accordingly, he can declare his study “Über Räume” to be both a gospel of counterfeit and an idea of salvation (191).¹³

The third and final chapter, “Das Gesetz,” brings Sorger to New York after a stop-over in Colorado, where he learns of the death of a friend. Realizing that his existence is governed by no law, he decides to establish a personal law for himself that he will have to observe. In a coffee shop he experiences a decisive legislative moment when history is revealed to him as more than a random sequence of evils. Its dominant lies in the tendency toward form, “eine von jedermann (auch von mir) fortsetzbare, friedensstiftende Form” (168).

The book’s epigraph (“Dann, als ich kopfüber den Pfad hinunterstolperte, war da plötzlich eine Form …”) proclaims as its goal the finding of a form. Having established a form of spatial orientation in the Alaskan wilderness and a form of social orientation in the city on the west coast, the narrator now realizes that the creation of a narrative can provide the form for an experience of continuity. Its accomplishment, directed against a “Groβe Formlosigkeit” (16), results from a conscious “Zusammenschau” (80) and depends on a constant creative effort which Handke names “freiphantasieren” (113).¹⁴

Sorger’s epiphany in the New York coffee shop is pivotal in Peter Handke's oeuvre. Langsame Heimkehr appeared two years after the fragmentary observations of the journal Das Gewicht der Welt. Fragmentation and the absence of a plot can be understood as an avant-gardist negation of the “false” linearity of narrative realism. With Langsame Heimkehr, Handke negates this negation of formalist avant-garde (Bartmann 6). In Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire he rejects fragmentation because it would have resulted not from a possibly unsuccessful striving for unity but from a deliberate method (“das Wohlfeile”) known in advance to be safe (100). Instead of subverting by fragmentation an exhausted law of narrative linearity, Handke aims in this novel to reconstruct narrative coherence through the recognition (“freiphantasieren”) of analogies that integrate the narrative (100).¹⁵ Following Cézanne’s “Lehre,” Handke perceives the French master’s paintings as constructions and harmonies parallel, or analogous, to those in nature. He formulates the ideal of a “Ding-Bild-Schrift” comparing the outline of an object before the background of the landscape to a Chinese character on a page (76).

Unlike Western writing, Chinese characters are (or more precisely: originally were) physically analogous to real-world objects, recognizable images of the things themselves. In terms of Western semiotics they inhabit a middle ground between the signifier and the signified. (The word for “sun,” for example, is a circle.) Michel Foucault has observed that in pre-Renaissance time Western perception of language was based on a similar merging of thing and script:

Ever since the Stoics, the system of signs in the Western world had been a ternary one, for it was recognized as containing the significant, the signified, and the “conjuncture” (the τνγχανον). From the seventeenth century, on the other hand, the arrangement of signs was to become binary since it was to be defined … as the connection of a significant and a signified. At the Renaissance, the organization is different, and much more complex: it is ternary since it requires the formal domain of the marks, the content indicated by them, and the similitudes that link the marks to the things designated by them; but since resemblance is the form of the signs as well as their content, the three distinct elements of this articulation are resolved into a single form.

(42)

Originally, when language was given to men by God, Foucault explains, it “was an absolutely certain and transparent sign for things, because it resembled them. The names,” Foucault continues, “were lodged in the things they designated, just as strength is written in the body of the lion, regality in the eye of the eagle … by the form of similitude” (36). This similitude is destroyed with the multiplication of languages at Babel making the relation between signs and things an arbitrary, nominalist one.¹⁶

Handke's ideal of a Chinese “Ding-Bild-Schrift” ties in with the religious and performative use of language we have aligned with his writing above. Handke attempts to reinstate as an aesthetic program a transparency of language in which thing and script are consubstantial and saying approaches doing. The imaginative act of “freiphantasieren” aims to decipher and recreate the language set down in the world. Writing becomes the attempt to copy (“um-schreiben” [Zwischenräumen 106]) this hidden script, containing the “Heil” that resides in the world.

In contrast to his previous revelations, Sorger does not vocalize his intuition in the coffee shop. Instead he turns it into script, “um das Geschehene, bevor es sich wieder verflüchtigt, rechtskräftig zu machen.” He concludes: “Ich glaube diesem Augenblick: indem ich ihn aufschreibe, soll er mein Gesetz sein” (168). Sorger’s writing is a paradox: he recognizes that there is no language for the visionary moment (“es gab für diesen Moment ja keine Sprache” [168]), and yet his writing transforms the present into history (“Gegenwart wurde Geschichte” [167–168]). The word “history” here unfolds the double meaning of “Geschichte” as both “history” and “narrative.” The legislative moment provokes Sorger’s feeling of contemporaneity in the twentieth century (“Zum ersten Mal sah ich soeben mein Jahrhundert im Tageslicht … und ich war einverstanden, jetzt zu leben” [169]). His historical self-definition depends on his act of writing a narrative which assumes ontological primacy over history. His being part of history is predicated on his recreating this world as writing, as “Geschichte.” In the creative act of “freiphantasieren” Handke reads the world as a texture of analogies that he re-creates as “parallel constructions” in the narrative texture of his book. For Handke, reading and “writing” the world are analogous.

In Langsame Heimkehr repeated allusion to a direct analogy between printed texts and the forms of physical reality points to a static, simultaneous existence of writing and the physical world. Looking through the window of his California house, Sorger watches the wind whirling through the trees; he sees an entire newspaper spin around among leaves and scraps of paper, opening and closing in its flight; “gefaltet kam es jeweils im Dunkeln auf das Fenster zugerast, drehte aber immer knapp davor ab und breitet sich im langsamen Wegflattern (‘für mich’) wieder auseinander. Dahinter schwankte das Gras wie Getreide …” (100). The text of the paper and the “text” of physical space are aligned in order to suggest a similarity between the forms of nature (grass) and the printed text.

After his annihilation through “Raumverbot” Sorger is picked up by his neighbor whose car appears to him as “Schrift” (135). Leafing through his notes “Über Räume,” Sorger sees himself disappearing in the writing. Anticipating his homecoming in a dream, he perceives Europe as a “Groβe Handschrift, in der sein Leben beschrieben wurde …” (191–192).

The Europe Sorger returns to is not geographical. It is Sorger’s inner Europe, a continent based on his imaginative verbal recreation. Affirmation of the narrative texture as form, retrieval of an ancient vocabulary, and the use of analogy make Sorger’s slow homecoming possible. Endowed with Sorger’s self-confidence in naming primordial forms and Cézanne’s aesthetics of a “Ding-Bild-Schrift,” Handke/Sorger approaches Austria as “das Reich der Erzählung … das Reich der Schrift … das einzig vernünftige und nicht metaphysische Reich” (Zwischenräumen 158).

III

The book following the tetralogy, Der Chinese des Schmerzes, opens by asking for a “Chinese” reading of itself. The letters on the page are not to be perceived as phonetic symbols but as formally akin to physical phenomena. Writing and the physical phenomena are presented as analogous: “Schlieβ die Augen, und aus dem Schwarz der Lettern bilden sich die Stadtlichter” (7). Representation of the world through language defies reconstruction through the temporal medium of narration. Instead, a direct similarity between the letters on the page and physical objects is claimed, a similarity which goes against the grain of Indo-European writing. This magic parallelism between represented phenomena and the characters on the page opens an aesthetic space: the reader is solicited to perceive the represented universe to be consubstantial with script. How does this transition from letters to lights come about? How are we to read this book?

When fiction denies a definition of its limits—here the limit between the letters and the lights—the definition of limits must resurface as a thematic structure within that fiction. In Der Chinese this thematic structure is the threshold theme. It allegorically indicates the limits from whence the reader can approach and understand the text. Andreas Loser, the protagonist of the book, defines himself as a “Schwellenkundler” or “Schwellensucher” (24). A teacher of classical languages in Salzburg and an amateur archeologist, he is on temporary leave to participate in the excavation of a Roman villa. He hopes to investigate thresholds in order to reconstruct the outlines of the ancient building.

Whereas a threshold is ordinarily associated with passage from one sphere to another, Loser recognizes it as a dwelling place in its own right: “Schwelle, das heiβt ja nicht: Grenze … sondern Zone” (127). For Loser, this spatial zone is also a “zone” of suspended time. Suspended from work, he is in a state of interregnum between two periods of social and biographical identity. This biographical suspension of time can be understood as a metaphor for an epiphany (which is also a moment of arrested time). In contrast to Handke's previous books, this epiphany is not psychological, a moment of privileged insight in the narrative process. Here the epiphany comprises the entire book. Der Chinese des Schmerzes is a direct expression of temporal “betweenness.” Loser’s “Stand der Schwebe” (19) corresponds to the “threshold” between the letters on the page and the “things” they represent. The threshold theme on the story level and the “Chinese” aesthetics of a “Ding-Bild-Schrift” interact.

The Austria to which Handke returns is associated with entropy. Although boundaries are on the increase, “Aufenthaltsort(e)” (126) between defined spheres are growing smaller and rarer. In new buildings thresholds are reduced to mere strips of metal or grooved hard rubber; for people even the threshold between waking and dreaming is barely perceptible. This lack of thresholds between defined spheres indicates a lack of neutral places that would enable Loser to approach Austria as Sorger approached primoridal Alaska: as a country outside human labeling by arbitrary names.

Handke's creation of his “written” Austria in Der Chinese des Schmerzes provides thresholds for both the protagonist and the reader. In a central scene of the book, the motif of life as game recurs. “A painter,” “a politican,” “a priest,” “the master of the house,” and Loser play a game of Tarock during which each player tells a “threshold story.” The evening concludes with a polyphonic narrative to which each “player” contributes a part. Speaking to his son toward the end of the book, Loser names his story a “Schwellengeschichte” (241). The epilogue, a description of a medieval bridge, represents both another physical threshold and such a threshold story. It is preceded by Loser’s telling a dream that culminates in the enigmatic sentence: “Der Erzähler ist die Schwelle” (242).

According to these allegorical definitions, the concept of “threshold” can be applied to physical thresholds, to narratives, and to a narrator himself. Read as an allegory, Der Chinese des Schmerzes itself is a threshold text. Der Chinese is located in the “dwelling place” between its letters and the phenomena signified by them. Handke's yet uncreated Austria, then, extends in the magical zone indicated by the first sentence of the book: between the black letters and the city lights. As we have observed above, the “Chinese” analogy of letter and object elevates writing from the vicarious/referential to the actual. Handke's writing of Der Chinese parallels its hero’s actions in Austria. Loser “edits” the “text” Austria: he crosses out a slogan on a church wall, removes trail marks from the willow trees, and disposes of signboards covered with posters of political parties. He tears down a birdhouse, destroys a theater showcase, destroys a poster advertising a hairdressing establishment, and sets fire to a sign saying “Land suitable to development” (65–68). In the second chapter, “Der Betrachter greift ein,” Loser takes action against a writer who represents an “evil” Austria. He kills a man who has just sprayed swastikas on trees and battlements. Reminiscent of the world of Sorger’s “aufgezwungenen Vorväter” (Langsame Heimkehr 90), the swastika symbolizes for Loser the cause of all his melancholy, and of all melancholy, ill humor, and false laughter in his country (97).

Loser’s “execution” of the swastika sprayer has stimulated negative critical response. It has been interpreted as “moralische Skrupellosigkeit und richterliche Selbstherrlichkeit” (Dinter 277). Even Handke himself has commented about it negatively as a regrettable remnant of narrative plot (Zwischenräumen 19). On a realist level, Loser’s destructiveness can indeed be read as a rather crude literary reaction against Austria’s repressed confrontation with its Nazi past.¹⁷ On a more fruitful level, however, Loser’s destructiveness is elucidated by an observation Handke makes in Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire. He condemns the violence of a world that is reduced to “functional forms,” a world which is “bis auf die letzten Dinge beschriftet und zugleich völlig sprach-und stimmlos” (91). Loser’s destroying of labels, including one of the notoriously dangerous labelers, challenges the violence of the labeled world, a world which is like Austria without thresholds, without spaces spared from reductive, that is, arbitrary, naming. Loser’s actions tie in with the logic of the “Ding-Bild-Schrift” and form a part of Handke's editing, or “freiphantasieren,” of the “Groβe Handschrift” Austria. With Der Chinese des Schmerzes Peter Handke has accomplished the goal he set for himself in 1978: he has invented an Austria outside its definitions through newspapers, statistics, philosophy, and realist writing.

Located on the threshold between the letters on the page and the physical phenomena, the Austria evoked in Der Chinese can be aligned with a perception of space through slanted eyes. The scene that introduces the book’s title permits a phenomenological explanation of its enigmatic Chinese element. Loser’s woman-friend compares Loser to a man who, although very ill, went to visit a good friend. In leaving, he stopped at length in the doorway and tried to smile; his tense eyes became slits, framed in the sockets as by sharply ground lenses: “Auf Wiedersehen, mein Chinese des Schmerzes!” said his friend (217–218).

Several motives of this scene relate to other “Chinese” elements of the book. The existential situation of the last farewell is located in a doorway, a threshold. The “Chinese” Loser perceives the world through twofold slits: the “Türspalt” (218) and his “Chinese” eyes. The narrowing of the “doors of perception” accentuates the threshold between inner and outer world. European eyes forcibly “verspannt zu Schlitzen” (218) make physical objects appear blurred. As a result, the world and the strain of perception are perceived simultaneously. This looking through slanted eyes suspends the object of the exterior world from coarse physicality. “Chinese” perception can be interpreted as the perceptual analogy to the “Chinese” “Ding-Bild-Schrift” which merges object and its representation, “die Schrift,” toward a “blurred” middle between signifier and signified. The woman’s last remark, “Endlich ein Chinese—endlich ein chinesisches Gesicht unter all den einheimischen” (218), relates Loser’s Chinese-looking face to Austria, thus indicating his alienation from Austria and his existence “auβerhalb des üblichen Rechts” (217).

In both Der kurze Brief and Langsame Heimkehr an American sphere of alterity enables Handke's protagonist to emancipate himself from Austria and its history. In Der Chinese des Schmerzes the expatriate Handke has returned home as a Chinese of sorrow. He has prepared his homecoming through a purification of his language in the Alaskan wilderness and through the acceptance of Cézanne’s “Ding-Bild-Schrift.” Returned to Austria, Handke's literary self undergoes further metamorphosis in the direction of a “Chinese” existence. The “Chinese” Loser searches for thresholds within Austria, the most remarkable of them being the zone between the represented space (“Stadtlichter”) and the letters on the page. The “Zwischenräume” are the mental dwelling places of an internal expatriate; they represent hidden Elsewheres within Austria. In the “Chinese” ideal of a “Ding-Bild-Schrift,” aesthetic, political, and moral life merge toward a synthesis. Loser’s political action against the swastika sprayer has an aesthetic motivation in a disfigured “script” of Austria. An esoteric project, Handke's slow homecoming as a “Chinese” aims to reinstate in his home country the “Heil” his forefathers dispelled.

Notes

1. Extreme forms of avant-gardist rebellion against tradition can be found in “happenings,” in random collage (as exemplified by John Burroughs), or in the aesthetics of the empty page, corresponding in music to the change from atonality to noise, or silence. For a more detailed discussion of this process, see John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” and Peter Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde.

2. For a more detailed discussion of this problem in Peter Handke's work, see Christoph Bartmann’s introduction to his Suche nach Zusammenhang (3–23).

3. The revival of the annual Frankfurther Poetikvorlesungen in 1979 entailed contributions by most contemporary German language authors of stature. This institutionalized investigation in aesthetics reflects a need on the part of both authors and readers to outline conditions and standards of post-avant-gardist literature. See Horst Dieter Schlosser and Hans Dieter Zimmermann, editors, Poetik.

4. See Peter Handke, Aber ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen: Ein Gespräch geführt von Herbert Gamper.

5. Besides Langsame Heimkehr, the tetralogy includes Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, Kindergeschichte, and Über die Dörfer.

6. “Et j’ai envie d’inventer un autre pays, une Autriche qui existe surement, mais qui n’est ni dans les journaux, ni dans les statistiques, qui n’est pas dans la philosophie, ni dans la manière qui ne soit pas réaliste; avec des détailes réalistes; mais une vision que j’espère acquérir à travers l’écriture” (Handke, “Voix de l’Autriche” 15).

7. In 1986 Handke articulated his rage at continuing Nazi cultural influence in Austria: “Ich wüte und bin zornig über die Nachwehen des Dritten Reiches, die vor allem in Österreich noch fast ungehemmt weitergehen” (Zwischenräumen 116).

8. Jürgen Koppenstein has traced an impulse against provinciality in Austrian literature of the 1970s. “Heimat” is also the title of a Nazi film glorifying Hitler’s annexation of Poland.

9. See J. L. Austin.

10. Austin emphasized that “a person participating in and so invoking the [performative] procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings” (15).

11. Linda C. DeMeritt has defined Handke's moments of visionary insight negatively as “alienation” and “loss of context.” For a detailed analysis of epiphanic experience in Handke's work, see Bartmann’s Zusammenhang; for a more general discussion of the epiphany in modernist aesthetic, see Karl Heinz Bohrer’s Plötzlichkeit.

12. Bartmann speaks of Handke's epiphanies as “unbegrifflich” (201).

13. For an analysis of the “counterfeiting” element, see Cecile Zorach.

14. The term recurs in Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (100).

15. In his interview with Peter Gamper, Handke asserts his struggle to narrate. However, he rejects story-telling: “Ich mag schon erzählen, das ist das Problem—das schönste überhaupt ist der erzählende Mensch für mich—aber ich mag keine Geschichte erzählen. Dieses ganze Romanzeugs, das kann mir wirklich gestohlen bleiben, das ist eine Verirrung des 19. Jahrhunderts für mich” (Zwischenräumen 41).

16. In the interview with Peter Gamper, Handke remarked that while writing Langsame Heimkehr it suddenly occurred to him that nothing like this had been written since the Middle Ages (Zwischenräumen 149). Such a reference can be taken as an indication of Handke's reliance on a prenominalist use of language.

17. See footnote 7.

Works Cited

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962.

Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Atlantic Monthly (Aug. 1967); 29–34.

Bartmann, Christoph. Suche nach Zusammenhang: Handkes Werk als Prozess. Vienna: Braumüller, 1984.

Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Plötzlichkeit, Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981.

Bürger, Peter. Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974.

DeMeritt, Linda C. “Peter Handke: From Alienation to Orientation.” Modern Austrian Literature 20 (1987): 53–71.

Dinter, Ellen. Gefundene und erfundene Heimat: Zu Handkes zyklischer Dichtung “Langsame Heimkehr” 1979–81. Cologne: Böhlau, 1986.

Drews, Jörg. “Über einen neuerdings in der deutschen Literatur erhobenen vornehmen Ton” Merkur 8 (1984): 949–954.

Durzak, Manfred. Peter Handke und die deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur: Narziβ auf Abwegen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1970.

Handke, Peter. Aber ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen: Ein Gespräch geführt von Herbert Gamper. Zurich: Ammann, 1987.

———. Der Chinese des Schmerzes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983.

———. Kindergeschichte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981.

———. Langsame Heimkehr. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979.

———. Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980.

———. Über die Dörfer. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981.

———. “Voix de l’Autriche et de l’Europe Danubienne.” Les Nouvelles littéraires artistiques. June 22, 1978. 22–27.

Koppenstein, Jürgen. “Anti-Heimatliteratur in Österreich. Zur literarischen Heimatwelle der siebziger Jahre.” Modern Austrian Literature 2 (1982): 1–11.

Manthey, Jürgen. “Franz Kafka, der Ewige Sohn.” Peter Handke. Ed. Raimund Fellinger. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. 375–385.

Schlosser, Horst Dieter and Hans Dieter Zimmermann, eds. Poetik. Essays über Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Bichsel, Heinrich Böll (u.a.m.) und andere Beiträge zu den Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen. Munich: Athenäum, 1988.

Zorach, Cecile. “The Artist as Joker in Peter Handke's Langsame Heimkehr.” Monatshefte 2 (1985): 181–194.