Andreas Loser, the symbolic narrator-protagonist of Handke's 1983 novel Der Chinese des Schmerzes (Across) is a brooding, mediative teacher of classical languages at a school in the suburbs of Salzburg.¹ Loser, as his name connotes in English translation, is an outsider and loner, a type familiar to readers of Angst and Stunde. Loser is also an amateur archeologist who spends his spare time uncovering historical and cultural artifacts. His specialty is finding thresholds of houses, churches, and temples in the vicinity of the city. He writes an occasional scholarly article on his researches for the Salzburg Yearbook for Regional Studies. Early in the text Loser explains that his passion for archeology and his unique approach to the study of ancient thresholds are a consequence of an observation once made to him by an older archeologist. This man told Loser that he only “wanted to find something, so that during our digs, I tried more to avoid what was there than what was not, no matter how it had ‘gone away.’ What was missing was in fact still there, either in ‘space’ or as an ‘empty form.’ In this way, I acquired skill in finding [thresholds], which are missed by trained archeologists” (Chinese, 24).

Handke's novel, 255 pages in its German edition, consists of three parts and a brief epilogue. Each part furthers the account of Loser’s spiritual and philosophical development as a “crosser of thresholds” and a storyteller, “threshold” signifying a moving over, a transition point, a rite of passage from personal isolation to social integration. Loser is his own narrator in the novel and is referred to by Handke as the “viewer” in each part title; he is initially depicted as a man in a state of existential suspension, a symbol of a contemporary Everyman whose fate has parabolic significance and narrative interest. As Renner states, “The story that Loser tells is not only his own, but is about the act of narration, too” (161).² Loser’s storytelling in Chinese is thus intended by Handke as a confession of a life, as well as a way in which it can be told.

In the first part of the novel “Der Betrachter wird abgelenkt” (The Viewer is diverted), Loser is living alone in a functional suburban apartment, separated by choice from his wife and children. He is on a voluntary leave of absence from his teaching duties and spends a good amount of daylight time looking down onto the panorama of the landscape. Nature and objects interest him, and his nighttime reading of Virgil’s Georgics gives his “viewing” a purpose, focusing as it does on elements of nature. Virgil’s words and sentences bring Loser down to earth, into the realm of animals, horticulture, and the concrete details of life, those connections that Loser feels he has lost. Loser values Virgil’s account of the ancient world not only for the “living” adjectives that grace the poet’s nouns but also because he offers an accessible entry into another “story”: the one-on-one identity of the writing of poetry with things themselves. But Loser is also a connoisseur of privation; always aware of rifts and absences, he is a man who understands the fine distinction between “emptiness” and “being empty,” the latter being an “empty form.” In this sense, “being empty” affords Loser esthetic and spiritual possibilities: direct awareness of nature; insight into the naïveté of nature; and the recovery of a pastoral world in which civilization and nature are one internal experience (the classical dream of Arcadia). Hence Loser’s intense preoccupation with excavating and internalizing the threshold experience.

Handke points out, however, that Loser’s present reclusiveness began as a consequence of conflict between himself and the external world. As Loser recalls: “One afternoon in the Getreidegasse, less crowded than usual, a man overtook and ran into me. He turned toward a display window, and we both ran into one another. The truth is, this wasn’t a ‘real’ collision, since I could have stepped aside. I had given him a shove intentionally” (Chinese, 19).

Loser discovers within himself a facility for violence. This incident, however, occurring as it does on a not-so-busy street in Salzburg, is an acte gratuit, a gratuitous or inconsequential action performed on impulse, possibly to gratify a desire for sensation. It is the first of two such actions—the second happens in part 2—that lead to Loser’s insight that he is a “repository” of patent facts and unanswered questions. Loser is overcome by depression (Schwermut) over the incident in downtown Salzburg. He knows that his treatment of the stranger is morally suspect, and at the very least that he is someone vulnerable to becoming indiscriminately violent. Like André Gide’s young antihero Lafcadio in the novel Les Caves des Vatican (1924), Loser is willing to confront the fact of his impulsive action, but unlike Lafcadio, Loser moves at first into a state of moral and ethical indecision over the consequences of his act. He is not rendered entirely immobile by his action, however, and he ascribes his passivity to a state of “having time,” which he construes as a “state of grace.” In crossing this specific threshold Loser is neither guilty nor innocent, and Handke defers final judgment in this affair since Loser is destined to undergo another threshold crossing.

The second incident occurs in part 2, “Der Betrachter greift ein” (The Viewer takes action), during his walk to a monthly card game at the home of a friend on the Mönchsberg, mountains in the Salzburg environs. Loser picks up a stone and kills an old man who is busy painting a swastika on the trunks of birch trees. Loser’s discovery of the swastika had made him furious. The painted swastika for Loser symbolizes more than the survival of marginal politics, and certainly more than a prankster’s desecrating of the forest. Loser reflects that the swastika defines not only his special melancholy but all melancholy and artificiality in Austria (Chinese, 97). He must make a fast decision—another threshold crossing—and in doing so, he takes deadly aim at the head of the swastika painter. Handke, however, asks his reader to suspend credibility that Loser has committed murder, since Loser escapes an encounter with the law over the civil consequences of his act. While Handke does not ignore the legal or moral implications of what has transpired, he seems more interested in pointing out that the murder is carried out with a stone, not a gun or a knife. The episode, in fact, is an occasion for a visionary passage in which Handke transforms the setting of the murder (a forested, secluded area in the mountain) into a romantically inspired fantasy. For a moment, the killing is suspended between reality and esthetic feeling. Loser feels like an outcast, yet he is “transformed,” a witness to the world’s power and beauty. Strong wind on the mountain ushers in the “groaning” appearance of a “swan” flying above Loser and his victim. The scene is both magnificent and ambiguous (Chinese, 104). The murder of the swastika painter is placed by Handke in the context of spiritual and esthetic regeneration and thus becomes, through the image of the white swan, a positive sign, a symbol for Loser’s growth and change. Handke intends for the murder and its aftermath to function as a process of catharsis and regeneration. In this second key incident of the text Handke stresses the existentialist import of Loser’s act. In a 1987 interview with Herbert Gamper, Handke noted that Loser’s fury at the discovery of the swastika is not only anger at the continuous presence of past history in his homeland; for Loser the swastika is also a symbol of his personal depression (22). He has no other choice, he believes, but to kill the perpetrator. Loser finally throws the body over the mountain cliff, and for a moment, perhaps as a sign of “higher” justice, he is pulled downward with the falling body.

From this point on Loser is intensely preoccupied with the reconstruction of his life, an endeavor that requires both acknowledgment to himself that he is a murderer and the devising of a unique plan to reenter the world. He resolves to become a “listener” and attends carefully in part 2 to the wide-ranging explanations offered by his fellow cardplayers when, at the end of their game, the group is drawn by Loser into a discussion of “thresholds.” Loser is especially interested in the response of one cardplayer, a priest from whom he expects a moral and ethical exegesis on the pitfalls of crossing over onto the “wrong side.” The priest says no such thing, only noting that though religious tradition has little to say about thresholds as material objects, it does reflect on them as the symbolic passage from one “zone” to another. Thresholds, says the priest, exist in a state between waking and dreaming. Every threshold is both an instance of and an opportunity to achieve threshold consciousness. Finally, thresholds are a resource of inner powers for those who cross them. This episode is one of the most original and brilliant parts of the novel. Handke suggests that the priest’s ideas on thresholds are not entirely the author’s own thoughts; the priest refers to the ideas of an unnamed “modern teacher,” perhaps Heidegger (Chinese, 67).

Themes of rebirth and renewal are predominant in the third part, “Der Betrachter sucht einen Zeuger” (The Viewer seeks a witness). The epilogue’s closing image of Loser is no longer the mournful one of the “suffering Chinaman” alluded to several times in the text, and in the German title of the novel; now he is a contemplative and joyful man, standing on a bridge near his apartment, an observant figure watching the ebb and flow of daily life in Salzburg. The canal, the light, the willows will all “survive.” This final scene signifies both a spiritual and secular acceptance by Loser of the “real” world, however mundane or trivial it might be. Submission to the unnamed “giver,” however, is not achieved by Loser without struggle or cost, for at the beginning of the third part Loser is still depicted as a man living within the trauma of an experiential process. A crossing of thresholds has heightened Loser’s receptivity to change and metamorphosis, a process providing him insight that whatever was deadly or life-inhibiting within himself could be overcome.

Loser has lived between depression and cheerfulness. Reflecting that throwing a stone at the swastika painter marked the beginning of his own “death,” Loser, like Faust before his attempt at suicide, was plunged into another depression, fearful of dying without love or human contact (a witness). In an episode in part 3 reminiscent of Faust’s rebirth on Easter day, Loser is inspired by the sounds of ringing church bells inviting the citizens of Salzburg to celebrate the Easter feast. Loser is impelled to make a physical journey of renewal that includes visits to people and places bound to the shards of his former life. This journey not only bears witness to a previously unfulfilled life; it is also a seeking of witnesses—that is, a search for people who will listen to his story, the parts of which Loser is careful to recall in the right order. Loser, whose story is finally a meditative threshold story, and whose identity as a human being merges into that of a parabolic storyteller, begins to retrace his steps at the city airport, which is revealed as a barren place except for Loser’s unplanned sexual encounter. He visits his senile mother, an encounter that forces him to reassess their relationship. He makes an ex tempore flight to Italy and visits Virgil’s birthplace in Mantua; there he searches for the geographical sources of places mentioned in Georgics. He returns eventually to his teaching career. His principal cites Loser’s eccentricity and deviation from the norm as the reasons for his popularity with students. Most important, Loser visits his wife and children, but he moves among them only as a familiar face and a tolerated occasional visitor. He wins anew the respect of his son, who, when he hears his father’s story, is incredulous. The son relates to the meaning of his father’s rebellion: the redefinition of personal values and the rebirth of identity. Both Loser and his family are comfortable with this confession that portends hope and redirection. The final image of Loser in the epilogue, standing on a bridge, is thus an apt symbol to close with inasmuch as it portrays the dual functions of Loser as a doer and an observer. Doing and observing have coalesced at a transition point, at a threshold, strongly denoting that Loser might move in one of two directions; but he has learned to stop and reflect, to gather himself.

Chinese is clearly a novel that challenges conventional morality and ethics through its implied defense of heightened experience, but the finality of such a judgment is obviated through Handke's convincing portrait of a man in spiritual and existential crisis; or, as Renner has noted, the reader is confronted with the “apotheosis of the storyteller,” who, as it turns out, is equally the center of philosophical probity in the novel (172).

DIE WIEDERHOLUNG

Handke continues his self-revelation in Die Wiederholung (Repetition), a 1986 text that expands the autobiographical themes first adumbrated in Brief, Unglück, and the Heimkehr tetralogy.³ These earlier works contain relevant details about the writer’s birthplace in Altenmarkt, the painful and agonizing trauma of economic privation, and, finally, the lingering specter of recent Austrian political history. Within this context of the unresolved cultural and social problems Handke is now integrating into the narrative structures of his recent fiction stands the question of ethnic identity. As an Austrian citizen of Slovene ancestry, Handke treats cultural issues related to home, family, and language. In Wiederholung Filip Kobal (the author’s mask), now a much older man, tells of a 1960 trip to Jesenice, a neighboring Slovene city, to search for his missing brother, Gregor. His classmates had set out for Greece, but Gregor went off to Yugoslavia by himself. Since he came from a bilingual area of southern Carinthia, he felt he had an excuse to cross the border.

Filip was searching for clues about his lost brother, but the facts about his brother’s disappearance were scarce. There were only the family’s memories, encompassing both reality and fiction, in which the truth was hidden by an adoring mother and a dour father in his role as a cruel paterfamilias. Gregor, about 20 years older than Filip, was once an agricultural student in Maribor, the capital city of neighboring Slovenia, the Yugoslavian republic south of Austrian Carinthia. Slovenia, with its own language and distinct culture, is regarded as the ancestral and linguistic home of those Austrians “confined” to Carinthia under the exigencies of twentieth-century European history. Slovenia and Carinthia once shared a common destiny under the hegemony of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. We learn that at the beginning of World War II Gregor was inducted into the Austrian army but went AWOL, probably to join a group of antifascist partisans. Filip, after graduating from a Gymnasium in Klagenfurt, decides only later to search for his missing brother, a quest that begins with little more than Gregor’s student copybook containing notes on horticulture and a Slovene-German dictionary. A genealogical and linguistic trek into the interior of neighboring Slovenia develops into a leading motif of Handke's book. Wiederholung emulates the framework of a bildungsroman, if only for its obvious borrowing of the prototypical protagonist’s journey into a wider world. In Wiederholung this is a journey into the meaning and pattern of ethnicity, Gregor’s family history, and the art of living itself.⁴ Feelings, thoughts, and memory—25 years have passed for the middle-aged narrator of Wiederholung—are the devices through which Handke develops the narrative. The style of the narrative is rhapsodic and epiphanal, secular and religious, singular and simultaneous in the expression of emotions and feelings, and never straightforward chronologically. For Filip, however, the quality of memory becomes most important, remembering being a more exacting activity than random thinking. Memory, he notes, is “work” and as such situates experience in a definite sequence. It is because of memory that Filip the older man can tell the story of his search.

In the first part, “Das blinde Fenster” (The Blind window), the narrator as a young man crosses the border between his country and Yugoslavia. The journey brings to mind the extended memory of local schools, the village of Rinkenberg, conditions in his father’s home, and his estranged feeling that he was not what he “purported to be,” that he was “only pretending” to be a viable part of village and family life. Part 1 sets the background and explains why Filip Kobal is the author’s ideal figure to begin this special journey into the linguistic and cultural elements of his ethnic past. The narrator reveals that his mother was a woman whom he remembers as a busy, running figure in the kitchen, where she showed her skills as a housewife; but she daringly intervened to save him from the tyranny of classmates and teachers at the Gymnasium as well as at the seminary. Handke includes an autobiographical episode in Wiederholung, told through his narrator. Filip recalls an especially mean encounter with a seminary teacher (without religious orders) who tried to define his young student and protect him from the mark of academic mediocrity: “I was driven to break the picture [das Bild] he had conceived of myself. I wanted to retreat, as I had hidden for sixteen years” (Wiederholung, 36).

Filip, gradually becoming an outsider in the village, haunts the streets and places where he can revel in his anonymity, longing for contact with buses, trains, and stations. His restlessness is reflected in, if not supported by, the discovery that his parents, like himself, were village “strangers.” This is a judgment, however, that the parents have made of themselves. Filip recalls the aberrant behavior of these self-styled exiles, with their brooding and fits of melancholia, as the result of a combination of factors—chiefly, those events surrounding the execution of a rebel Slovenian ancestor, the emigration of others into Austria, and the effect of this episode on Filip’s father. His father was obsessed by the execution and the forced emigration, which accounted for the family’s poverty, unemployment, and homelessness. Filip’s mother, taking her cue from her husband’s indignities over the course of his life in the Austrian village of Rinkenberg, lives with the dream that her two sons might reclaim “their place” in the southwest, over the border, though Filip notes that she never made a trip to Yugoslavia. Place names and ethnic conflicts over the years become lyrically and mythically embellished in young Filip’s imagination. He admits that the essence of modern Slovenia lies somewhere between his parents’ stories and those several letters from his brother in the years between the wars. Filip faults his father’s inability to live peacefully and harmoniously with himself and his family; this is an additional reason for Filip to search for a solution to the riddle of his marginal life at home and in the village. At best, Filip can only dream of a family reunion in the dark, Rinkenberg living room, with his brother reappearing in tears but thankful for his family’s lingering affection. This dream seems to be the prime reason behind young Filip’s decision to cross the Austrian border and begin his odyssey into the Slovene interior, a trip that is as yet neither defined nor clearly explicated. He finds inspiration, however, in a “blind window” set in a wall of the local train station, from which he departs for his short journey over the frontier. The window not only reminds him of the lost eye suffered by Gregor during a failed bout with ophthalmic fever but seems to him a portent of other “blind windows” that will accompany him as “objects of research” and “signposts” in the recovery of his past.

The full meaning of the second part’s title, “Die leeren Viehsteige” (The Empty cow paths), is revealed only at its end. In Jesenice, Filip finds the Slovene world awash with details of life presented to him as signs joining to form legible writing (Wiederholung, 114). If this is Handke's language to indicate that Filip, like the author, is preoccupied with the perception of signs and names, then Filip’s first hours are a deciphering, a “reading” of cultural differences between life in Austria and Yugoslavia. He feels that he has lived for almost 20 years in a country without a definite identity. On the other hand, Yugoslavia did not claim him for compulsory schooling or military draft. This was the land of his ancestors, and he therefore embraces it freely. Filip feels free because he is finally “stateless” (Wiederholung, 119).

Filip’s first morning in Jesenice is suffused not only with the rosy glow of youthful, impulsive sensation but with a feeling of liberation, which he ascribes to an unbelabored experience of congruence, to the simultaneity of two activities that are each voluntarily offered and accepted. Serendipity characterizes congruence, Filip notes, along with an absence of appraisal and judgment by the cultural majority. People on the street in Jesenice are, like Filip himself, “kingless and stateless,” members of a race of journeymen and hired hands. Pedestrians and objects suit one another. He breathes anew. He gets a second wind, an ability to “read” a Slovene newspaper whose headlines, he notices, are pure news, the opposite of his German-language newspaper back home. And he even understands the conversation of people around him (Wiederholung, 132).

Filip is thus not tempted to return to Austria on the morning train. Instead he buys a ticket to the southwest, the Bohinj region of legend and the subject of his mother’s prayers. There he goes to a hamlet named, appropriately, Pozabljeno (“the forgotten place,” or “the place of forgetfulness”). His being left alone is natural and of little consequence. He has his privacy.

Filip begins the job of reading and deciphering Gregor’s copybook and German-Slovene dictionary. In translating Slovene words from Gregor’s copybook, Filip moves from “blind reading” to “sighted reading,” a transference first into imagery and then into words, especially when Gregor’s way of explaining a simple matter leads him to imagine a tale out of fiction, a story of a hero’s attachment to a place. The memory of his brother’s “airy radiance” as opposed to his mother’s “heaviness” reveals Filip’s adulation and near worship of his brother. Filip’s discovery of the Slovene dictionary becomes an icon of his Bohinj stay and contributes to his understanding of the people and culture of that region, especially in their specificity and ahistoricity—timeless, yet living in seasonal time. Filip finds that the Slovene language has only a few borrowed words for war and authority, whereas his native German has many. Slovene excels, too, in the construction of diminutives. The Slovene dictionary is a portal into Filip’s memory of village life in Rinkenberg. Words in the dictionary communicate images of the long-forgotten childhood landscape: animals, food, grass, and trees. These words also give Filip “images of the world” for which actual experience is not a necessity. A world takes shape around any random word from the dictionary, such as a chestnut husk, or even the words for tobacco left in a pipe. Other words create circles and images from ancient times—that is, the era of Orpheus.

Wiederholung suggests that, for Filip, Gregor’s copybook, especially his dictionary, is an illuminating text allied to a special law of writing, evoking the breath of life. Specific words from the language of the Slovenes are signs or emblems of universal experience. Slovene words (Gregor’s words) free Filip from melancholy and depression. They are therapeutic. The dictionary teaches Filip that there is a word for everything and every situation. The copybook is likewise an educational device, containing the notes of a man about to embark on a project similar to Filip’s: research, reflection and mediation. The copybook, Filip notes early on, resembles a bildungsroman in instructing the reader on the cultivation and husbandry of apple trees. Gregor’s metaphors and allusions to human growth in the care of fruit trees actually relate to stages of the human condition. The story of a particular fruit orchard (described in Gregor’s copybook) is in fact Gregor’s in Rinkenberg, and it reveals Gregor as Filip’s doppelgänger in seeking wisdom for the meaning and pattern of life.

In the Bohinj, the dictionary as a revelatory text mystically directs Filip’s eyes toward the southern chain of mountains and an adjacent slope of pasture laced with “empty cow paths.” These cow paths, so integral a part of the regional rural landscape, inspire Handke to meditate on the symbolism of emptiness and annihilation, the image of a migration of unnamed people and animals reaching back to the origins of time. Now the cow paths lead to nowhere. As “stairs” they remain unused. Young Filip mourns and grieves, and he “reads” the paths as a metaphor linked to his missing brother, whose disappearance symbolizes the absence of all those who can no longer speak or even write with words.

In the last part of the novel, “Die Savanna der Freiheit und das neunte Land” (The Savannah of freedom and the ninth country), Filip is in the final stage of his genealogical and linguistic journey. This is played out in the coastland area of the Karst, a Slovene landscape that is physically and geographically similar to Gregor and Filip’s native village. The Karst is an archaic region. Its utilitarian simplicity is reflected in the style of its people and the architecture of their dwellings. Household furniture and implements teach Filip the heritage of his ancestors. The most outstanding image (and discovery) for Filip in the Karst, however, occurs in the context of a metaphorical vision. Believing himself lost in the wilderness, Filip arrives at the edge of a dolina, a deep recession in the earth. This bowl-shaped hole is lined with terraces covered with small fields and gardens being worked by an entire population. Their work is slow and graceful; the sound of a hoe working the ground characterizes and defines the Karst (Wiederholung, 287).

For Filip, this image is sensual to the point of rapture, a vision simultaneously of continuity and renewal on the one hand and a goal to strive for on the other. Filip comes to the point when he must admit that his motives for coming to Slovenia and the Karst were many, among them, to fulfill the gaps in his ancestral memory and earn the respect of his forebears. The meaning of Gregor’s passage through Slovenia becomes clearer to Filip. Here Handke shifts thematic direction on the unsuspecting reader, who, still concerned that Filip’s trip into the Slovenian interior may uncover traces of the missing brother, will have failed to notice that Filip has found the true object of his quest. He perceives that the best way to preserve his brother’s memory is not to “find” him but to tell a story about him.⁵ Filip will become a writer, a creator of word images. And the meaning of one of Gregor’s last letters to his family, sent from the World War II front, is also clarified—namely, that access to the Ninth Country, the legendary country of Slovenia and the collective ancestral goal of the Kobal family in Austria, can be gained through writing and through storytelling. Filip has found his vocation: he will be a storyteller. “Story,” says the middle-aged narrator at the end of the novel, “[is] the most spacious of all vehicles and heavenly chariots. Eye of my story, become my reflection” (Wiederholung, 333). Filip prays as an adoring worshiper before the statue of the storyteller’s muse. Had Filip chosen not to search for Gregor, the art of storytelling would never have changed the course of his life. Filip never finds Gregor in the Karst or in the whole of Slovenia. Only the letters of his name survive, carved into the face of a school chapel, a not insignificant reminder that Gregor, too, “passed” through the city of Maribor on a journey of self-discovery and revelation.

NACHMITTAG EINES SCHRIFTSTELLERS

Both the title and content of Handke's 1987 novella Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers (The Afternoon of a Writer) allude to the American short story “Afternoon of an Author,” written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1936.⁶ “Author” is a fictional account of a day in Fitzgerald’s creative life, from morning to early evening. Arthur Mizener says that “Author” is a late work and that Fitzgerald makes the “tension of his feelings” the central focus of the reader’s interest (Mizener, 11). These tensions, it turns out, are strikingly similar to those of the writer-protagonist in Handke's book, a text actually dedicated to Fitzgerald. A key question in both texts is, How does a writer achieve sustenance and balance in the slippery relationship between life and art? For Fitzgerald, there is a writer’s ironic but “unquestioned acceptance of what he and his world are and an acute awareness of what they might be and, indeed, in some respects at least once were” (Mizener, 10). Handke's unnamed writer (probably Handke himself) is a European living in an unidentified European city that resembles Salzburg. Fitzgerald’s setting is Baltimore, near the campus of Johns Hopkins University. Both Fitzgerald’s story and Handke's novella track a complicated set of feelings and perceptions that mark the creative paths of their protagonists. Right at the start, both Handke's and Fitzgerald’s writers are confronted with a dilemma that reflects upon their future ability to continue writing. For Fitzgerald’s protagonist, “the problem was a magazine story that had become so thin in the middle that it was about to blow away. The plot was like climbing endless stairs, he had no element of surprise in reserve, and the characters who started so bravely day-before-yesterday couldn’t have qualified for a newspaper serial” (Mizener, 178). And for Handke's: “Didn’t the problem found in his craft parallel that of his existence, that he could not be consistent and disciplined? That is, a problem not of ‘I’ as a writer but rather, ‘the writer as I’” (Nachmittag, 5–6).

The two writers both stop working in early afternoon. Handke's protagonist declares that the day’s work has gone well; he can thus leave his house with a safe professional conscience. He hopes that a walk will open up his senses to sounds and sights, in short, bring about a restoration of the business of living. Fitzgerald’s author tears up everything he has written after “redlining good phrases in red crayon” (Mizener, 178)—there will be, he declares, no more writing today. Both men have a plan for their outing, and as Handke and Fitzgerald point out, that plan seems to validate an escape into the outside world, the realm of life beyond the seclusion of the writer’s study. Handke's writer will walk down a stairway into the city, then return to the suburbs. Fitzgerald’s character simply boards a city bus, from which there is much to see: a football field, pedestrian traffic, the entrance into downtown Baltimore. He will go to a hotel barbershop, and to that end he leaves home with a bottle of shampoo ointment in his hand.

A primary question for Handke, however, is whether his writer will gain anything from this decision to establish contact with life, whether it be crossing a bridge, eating a meal in a restaurant, or reading a postcard from a “lost” friend in America. He tries to overcome his basic fear that writing and the writer are anachronistic relics of twentieth-century culture. Observation and intuition emerge in Handke's text as the strongest tools of the writer’s vocation, and they are conveyed in several detailed encounters that the writer has with the “real” world, actual or imagined, fateful meetings between the creative personality and its fragile vision of the “other” environment. This vision, though eccentric, is shown to be relevant to the writer’s solitary life. Connections between life and art are made. For example, the squares of the unnamed European city, which Handke's writer is shown entering from the back, are a metaphor for the structural features of his writing. The texture and the composition of the squares are what intrigues him; he sees what the average viewer cannot discern. Their parts mirror the elements of his prose. Once he perceives this correspondence, however, he starts to run: “Even though the square [he had just crossed] was near the river and in the lowest area of the city, he made a diagonal as though it was a high plateau” (Nachmittag, 28). Reading a city paper, with the jealousy and feuding between critics and writers on its arts pages, is disorienting and depressing. Though the writer has now retreated from open controversy, relying on his own strength, the newspaper brings back the memory of his apprentice years as a younger writer.

Handke next sets his writer down on a crowded downtown street, in the midst of Christmas shoppers. The bends and turns of this street (Trossgasse) move along with the stream of perceptions that flows into the mind of the writer-protagonist. The street is not a guarantor of anonymity, and he tries to avoid recognition; yet he looks into bookstore windows to spot his books. He feels assaulted by stares from the public, since he embodies what it hates: dreams, writing, disagreement, and, finally, art. He is cornered into giving a stranger an autograph, an act he resents because it compels him to play the part of a writer. Any similar episode denoting confrontation or antagonism between the writer and his public is missing from Fitzgerald’s story, which conveys only a hint that the author questions the earlier adulation of the critics about his writing, who said that his artistic viability was “indefatigable” and therefore his writing career seemed full of promise (Mizener, 181). In fact, Fitzgerald’s protagonist, in contrast to Handke's, avoids bitterness when he reflects on the real state of his affairs. The reader’s walk with Handke's writer, on the other hand, seems like a stroll with a misanthropic bachelor who is ready for a confrontation over any imagined slight. Given the opportunity to begin again, there would be no more photographs, or even autographs, for the adoring public.

As an examination of the processes of artistic creativity, Nachmittag reveals that both the artist and the nonartist depend on experience, that both use experience as a primary point of departure. For the artist, however, experience is then transformed into the stuff of art, which is abetted by observation, intuition, and the related necessities of “namelessness” and “isolation” (Nachmittag, 49). A key comment in Handke's text is that loneliness and anonymity are catalysts to creativity (Nachmittag, 55). Nameless “things” can be reduced (as they often are) to bare objects and a sense of emptiness, even after the writer’s experience in the real world. Emptiness teaches the writer-artist that it is a source of inner richness and esthetic plenitude, the wellspring of true creative renewal. (Handke espouses similar ideas about the origins of artistic inspiration in Chinese.)

Nachmittag includes a telling episode set in a suburban bar. The writer decides to go there before he retires for the night. A drunk, suspecting that the writer is scarcely listening to him and that the writer is a “fraudulent” outsider in this environment, is almost successful in making the writer question his “business”—that is, he nearly gains an admission from the writer that he is a failure in the social community. The drunk calls him a liar and a weakling, words with which the writer seems to agree, for they appear to be true. This is a splendid opportunity for the writer to pity his abused and misunderstood state and to relish his morbidity. This incident is echoed in another key dialogue of the text, one between the writer and his translator, an elderly man who has come to the city to confer on a problem of translation. In a peculiar turn of events, the translator seizes the occasion to confess that, in years gone by, he had the wisdom to abandon plans to become a writer. Unlike a writer, he notes, a translator “knows he will be needed by society. Therefore I have lost any anxiety. … I have become relaxed in a superficial way. When I cover up your ‘wound’ as well as I can, I’m also hiding my own” (Nachmittag, 81–82). Handke's writer not only understands but assimilates the messages behind the translator’s speech.

After returning home, the writer wonders whether the experiences of his enervating walk were reality or hallucination. He feels as if he has been engaged in a personal battle with the outside world, yet he goes to bed intending to reclaim himself for the next day: “I began as a narrator. Endure. Let things be. Let them matter. Transmit. Let me be the craftsman of the most sensitive materials” (Nachmittag, 90–91). These affirming words answer those unsettling doubts that earlier challenged the stability of the writer’s vocation: he accepts his original decision to be a writer; he agrees to let the outside world go about its business; he has his place and a role in society. He manages to connect his art to his life. Fitzgerald’s writer, on the other hand, returns home from his excursion with a lesser sense of artistic and cultural mission. Fitzgerald says of him, “He needed reforestation and he was well aware of it, and he hoped the soil would stand one more growth. It had never been the very best soil for he had an early weakness for showing off instead of listening and observing … he was quite tired—he would lie down for ten minutes and see if he could get started on an idea in the two hours before dinner” (Mizener, 182).

Confrontation, bitterness, and paranoia can be the writer’s fate, but they are burdens that Handke's writer accepts in his persona as a hermetic, obsessed creature. For a solitary craftsman, there exists a singular reward. This reward, however, is centered on the answers found to those mysteries generated in a writer’s study whenever he begins to write. “Readership, a public, and public attention seem violations, embarrassments, beside the point,” noted John Updike when he reviewed Handke's novella. Aptly commenting on its implications for the writer’s craft, he added, “The Mysteries the writer nurtures in his or her study are beyond explaining. … The writer’s artifacts are like shoes that disdain actual feet.”⁷

DIE ABWESENHEIT

The short text Die Abwesenheit (1987; Absence) is subtitled “A Fairy Tale,” the only one of Handke's prose writings with this distinction.⁸ Thematically, Abwesenheit is a meditative, philosophical tale that offers an Eastern solution to Western problems of aberration and social estrangement. In this sense, Abwesenheit is linked to Handke's other texts that focus on contemporary isolation and separation. Generically, Abwesenheit brings to mind the fairy-tale collections of the Brothers Grimm and related tales (Kunstmärchen) written by Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Clemens Brentano, German romantics of the early nineteenth century. In its standard form, the German fairy tale contains experiences bordering on the supernatural and motifs of magic, metamorphosis, and witchcraft. They usually have a happy ending in which virtue is rewarded and evil punished. The primary setting of Handke's modern fairy tale is an unnamed European city from which four characters make a common journey to a desertlike plateau, “an oval reaching out to the horizon … its own kingdom, separated from reality, not a mere landscape, but a unique country, a continent above our continent” (Abwesenheit, 121). Journeys, dreams, and wanderings through paradisiacal landscapes are other common characteristics of the German fairy tale, yet these same devices have also been assimilated into Eastern fairy tales in which such traveling is often synonymous with inner development or spiritual roaming. The Eastern traveler becomes an adept, a potential disciple, and is accompanied through a higher world by a practitioner of mythic realization. The magician figure of the German (i.e., the Western) fairy tale thus becomes the wordless sage in the Eastern one. At the conclusion of their common adventures, the Eastern sage may abandon his disciple, leaving little trace of himself behind. Their journey finished, the sage intentionally dissolves the pupil-teacher relationship.

One can only speculate on the literary sources of Abwesenheit, but the text is preceded and concluded by two short excerpts from the writing of the Chinese Taoist master Chuang-tzu, from the fourth century B.C. His work is a sophisticated yet practical commentary on Lao-tzu, the patriarch of Taoism whose teachings (unlike Chuang-tzu’s) focused on the role of the Tao (the Way) in civil government. The singular message of the first excerpt relates to the central theme of Handke's book: “A horse of the kingdom—his qualities are complete. Now he looks anxious, now to be forgetting himself. Such a horse prances along, or pushes on spurning the dust and now knowing where he is.”⁹

This short parable says much about Taoism. According to Chuang-tzu, the “perfect horse” is the “perfect Taoist,” who is attuned to the Way and moves with the “imperceptible” and the “indiscernible,” accepting both the invisibility and the latent particularity of the Way. Abwesenheit proposes at the very least a similar religious or philosophical thought—namely, that man must learn to interact with the universe, which, in turn, contains a society functioning within a cyclical movement of time, rhythm, and the law of return. These fundamental Eastern (Taoist) concepts define the structure and meaning of Handke's book. All four parts demonstrate, in this sense, wider aspects of Eastern religious teachings; it is possible, however, to read Handke's text within Taoist terms alone.

The four characters in Abwesenheit are generic figures who typify segments of twentieth-century social and cultural alienation: an old man, a young woman, a soldier, and a gambler. The old man views the outside world with indifference; he lives in a sanatorium for the elderly. He is literally an observer and recorder of exterior activity: he spends days looking out the window of his room and encoding images, using mysterious symbols and signs, in a book. The young woman is also engaged in writing a book. She is imagined by the reader as defiant and despairing, a combatant, perhaps, for self-identity. Her lover has called her a bundle of contradictions and claims that she has no response to anything other than themselves, that she is unresponsive to work, nature, or history. He has accused her of being obsessed with love and thus failing to see that even lovers need something other than themselves. Introduced next in the first chapter of the text is the soldier, an unhappy man who is clearly in the wrong profession. In the text he is the subject of a stinging, vindictive attack by his mother who, on the point of his returning to duty, says that she had always hoped for a “different” son, a different person: “Instead of becoming someone else, you’re more removed than you ever were. After all this time in the service, you haven’t got any award. You have never claimed your ‘place,’ either in the military or anywhere. Your comrades treat you as though you were only air. Nobody looks at you” (Abwesenheit, 30–31). Finally, the gambler is introduced. He may be an “artist” at gambling, but he is so dependent on being “alert” that he is never, paradoxically, anywhere. He longs to begin a new life, to feel and grieve the loss of love, to know true danger.

These strangers will board a common train in the middle of the city. What they share is a sense of deeply felt exclusion in an interventionist society. Their community functions beyond the pale of the Taoist ideal, the ideal of the unselfconscious symbiosis of a society attuned to the cycles and rhythms of nature. Handke's characters in Abwesenheit choose to flee their society rather than remain; they opt for the life of the adept and the spiritual adventure into the unknown. They choose to renounce contrivances set up by their society for acceptance and recognition. The young girl gives up a lover, the soldier the ideal of military heroism. The gambler stops a roll of the dice before he joins the others on a special train for people like himself, emigrants from the culture, even pilgrims.

In the second chapter of Abwesenheit the old man, in his slowly emerging role as Chuang-tzu’s prophetic sage and teacher, offers an interesting parable to the assembled group on the “identity” of names and places. The theme of his parable relates to the unnamed destination of their unique journey. The landscape outside the train is increasingly charged with physical change and transformation—desert becoming forest, built-up cities, and abandoned roadsides. The landscape changes into cultivated land, the sea, and high mountains, all of which represent the visible world. Place names, the old man says, are only “apparently” real; they are temporary tags given by man to both real and fictional places in the present and past. The old man notes the unknown countries that must have existed, whose only reality was the name indicating their direction: north, south, east, west. Atlantis disappeared and became part of a legend. History, civilization, and cultures, the old man suggests, exist at the pleasure of the moment: “But I continue to believe that places have their own power. Those are places that are small, not large. They are unknown, abroad and at home. They have no name, distinguished only by their having nothing. Those places have power because nothing is there anymore. I believe in oases of emptiness” (Abwesenheit, 82).

Such an argument not only alludes to the spiritual nature of the group’s train journey into “emptiness”—or the nonspecificity of destination—but suggests that an empty place portends fullness. It is enough for an adept to have simply been “there” rather than “here.” The journey of the group is from “here” to “there.” Names and places are temporal, and in the Eastern religious concept of the universe, nothing is static. Change “there” is an illusion, and as the old man reminds the young woman, her wish to stay somewhere forever is an impossible one, for there is no permanence in fulfillment, here or anywhere. The old man’s point is, once again, that the fundamental nature of the universe is to avoid stability, that creation is renewal, a generative urge to shape and transform. The enigmatic meaning behind Handke's title Abwesenheit becomes clearer for the reader: in Taoism absence is a relative word, not a true opposite of fulfillment; it denotes fulfillment or a potential for fulfillment. This idea also seems to be suggested in a closing image of the second chapter—namely, the group’s arrival (on foot) at a military cemetery that “magically” appears as an element of the shifting landscape. Over the grave of each soldier is a marble slab with a name and the word present. Here life and death are not in opposition but merely two sides of the same reality. Man is no exception to this rule of duality. Soon after this encounter, the group leaves the flat plain and climbs to the threshold of a vast plateau, where a further stage of their spiritual journey will continue to unfold.

This is the group’s entry into a chimerical, illusory country. It seems to be a place of prehistorical beginnings as well as a place for the burial of cultures, an area of anticipation betraying shards of man’s past history. The area is described by the group leader as the goal, the ultimate destination of the journey. The presence of life in this land is nevertheless an illusion, for it is the stuff of man’s dreams and the instigator of “deceptive” images and perceptions. The old man intimates that if the group is “new” to this place, they are not strangers to it, since it defined them as “wanderers” in the conventional world. As “readers” they were “dreamers” and perpetual outsiders for whom this land was a goal (Abwesenheit, 134). Here Handke follows the Taoist precept that books finally fail to articulate and express the adept’s (and the teacher’s) felt desire for the achievement of mystic unity. Sages, even sustaining Taoist masters, prefer to teach through example and oral preaching. The old man decides to hide his “accursed notebook,” the arcane listing of symbols and ciphers he was compiling in the city before he undertook this journey. He leaves the group, retreating into the desert, into silence, the “source of images” (Abwesenheit, 179). Writing failed him in his effort to apply his insights to spiritual teaching. This is a reference to the Taoist teaching that the unity within the flow of life is impossible to learn as public, systematized knowledge. This sentiment is noted in a key line of Handke's text, when the old man says of himself that only in being alone did things become significant and communicable. The old man’s abandonment of the group, however, leaves them to their own devices as they make their way back to the European city. The soldier especially mourns the loss of a leader who led him like a magician into a “labyrinth,” the bearer of false information (Abwesenheit, 217). Within the context of Eastern mysticism, however, the labyrinth may be understood as a metaphor for the soul’s wandering, its longing for perfect unity.

The group’s journey, though in its final stages of realization, will last another year. Through consensus, the group will search for its absent leader. They will find his missing notebook, whose location is revealed to the young soldier in a dream, and they will attempt to decipher it. In Eastern religious and spiritual fables, an adept often begins his search for a divine teacher in a great country, enters a barren wilderness, and moves from there into the void, where he discovers that the teacher is within his head. The missing sage of Handke's fairy tale is of that very special class. He has turned invisible owing to his perfect evolution as a great teacher, and he gives the group the unfettered gift of spiritual liberty, which is a central theme of Abwesenheit. They are unburdened of estrangement and alienation. An excerpt from a text by Chuang-tzu concludes Handke's book: “Man’s life between heaven and earth is like a white colt dropping into a crevasse and suddenly disappearing. … Suppose we try to roam about in the palace of Nowhere, where all things are one” (Manheim, 119). Abwesenheit is an invitation to the reader to undertake such a journey under magical, fabulous auspices into a spiritual realm.

Notes

1. Der Chinese des Schmerzes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983); hereafter cited in text as Chinese.

2. Renner’s chapter on Chinese is basic to my reading of Handke's novel.

3. Die Wiederholung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986); hereafter cited in text as Wiederholung.

4. David Pryce-Jones, review of Die Wiederholung, New York Times Book Review, 7 August 1988. The word bildungsroman is used by Filip in Wiederholung.

5. Ralph Sassone (“Brotherland,” Village Voice, 14 June 1988) suggests that Wiederholung is ultimately as much Gregor’s story as it is his brother’s.

6. Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers (Salzburg: Residenz, 1987); hereafter cited in text as Nachmittag. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Afternoon of an Author,” in Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Unpublished Stories and Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 177–82; hereafter cited in text as Mizener.

7. John Updike, review of Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers, New Yorker, 25 December 1989, 108.

8. Die Abwesenheit: Ein Märchen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987); hereafter cited in text as Abwesenheit. Märchen translates as “fairy tale.”

9. Absence, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), v; hereafter cited in text as Manheim.