Thirty years after his disgust with the straitjackets of language and received ideas led him to write his polemic-based Sprechstücke, Peter Handke has arrived at a surprising paradox. Despite his enduring conviction that language is to blame for the narrow culture of his native Austria, Handke's own poetic gifts have multiplied. Now the most important European writer in any medium, Handke forges exquisite dialogue and turns of phrase, and crafts sensuous, evocative literature—while he continues to discredit language and deny the authenticity of words.

Since publishing The Long Way Round in 1981 (translated in 1989), Handke has produced little new work for the stage, making Gitta Honegger’s fine translations of these two 1992 plays [Voyage to the Sonorous Land and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other] welcome indeed. They reveal that Handke's dramatic sensibility has not softened since his early days: he’s only changed strategies to reflect his achievements in prose fiction.

Like his 1987 novel Absence, Voyage to the Sonorous Land follows a band of strangers who have joined together to take a journey (a theme with a long tradition in German literature, as Honegger points out in her introduction). The travelers include a young Actor and Actress, an Old Couple, a Local Man (who undergoes various transformations), Parzival (from the medieval epic), the Wide-Eyed man (playfully revealed to be Austrian playwright Ferdinand Raimund), and Spoilsport (later Anton Chekhov). Their journey develops into a mythic, abstract pilgrimage into the “hinterland” of their psyches as they search for a place where thought and feeling can coexist.

All seek passage out of the modern world—the set is littered with billboards, gutted parks, and sterile roadsides—into “the land of questions” situated somewhere beyond the steppes of an unnamed country. To get there, they must pass through the detritus of their homelands and their minds. The fragmented dialogue reveals their speculations and puzzlement as they seek this euphoric Wonderland: as the world around them grows stranger and stranger, are they moving closer to or further away from a putative “home”? What do they expect to find when they arrive? A child-like state of wonder? Mature wisdom? Completeness?

Like so many of Handke's characters, these figures travel listlessly, fueled mainly by their desire to know a single moment of true feeling. “The dialect spoken in our part of the world is called wonderers’ lilt,” observes the Old Man in an early scene: “our voices are pitched in perpetual wonder.” The Actor and Actress, too, want their self-consciousness to disappear and wish for a state where they won’t falsify their experiences by “naming” or “acting” them. Only then, they believe, can unfettered consciousness begin.

In one of his frequent pontifications, Spoilsport declares that “my affection, the fugitive’s affection, goes to people without destination, travelers forever in transition—the new humankind!” Handke's own preoccupation with travelers and strangers figures prominently in his recent essays and fiction; when immigrants, visitors, and tourists enter his field of inquiry, they pose problems about knowing an alien other, about how fully individual experience can be shared. Here Handke dramatizes that proposition; all these characters are strangers to us; though the character names suggest archetypes, nothing about them is finally “knowable.” Handke gives us glimpses of their relationships and psychology (the old man and woman finish each other’s sentences “sing-spiel style,” their age fueling their need for closures). The travelers’ most intimate wishes and thoughts are divulged as a matter of course.

But beyond all the wonder and transition, what is home? The Old Couple wonder if a “home” is really possible after encountering so much strangeness, and, if so, how one reaches it. They intuit that the discovery depends on questions, so they ask lots of them. “The older I get, the more questions I have,” they remark, “everything I think takes on the form of a question.” They wonder what their grandchildren—if they actually have some—are doing at any given moment at “home”; if the weather will be nice there; if they left the iron on; if a tornado has wrecked the house while they’re away; even if “the world outside our air bubble has long since perished, all breathing choked to death, all life extinguished.”

The literary duo naturally conduct their search for the Land of Questions on a higher plane of discourse. Spoilsport and Wide Eyes compete with rival sensibilities; hazy Chekhovian vistas of form and being tussle with Raimundian fairy-tale awe. Each character engages in self-fulfilling expectations; Wide Eyes imagines magical endings to the journey in a suddenly-discovered leafy clearing, Spoilsport always senses some nascent disaster or darkening mood around the corner, and each finds what they expect.

The solution to the travelers’ dilemma comes not from this pair but from Parzival, the boy who (in the original epic) failed to ask his dying king the “correct” question. In Handke's early scenes this Parzival writhes in anguish, naked, wild, and dumb (recalling the title character of Handke's Kaspar). His fellow travelers teach him to find experience in words, and when his speech is finally liberated so are the travelers. They all but evaporate in ecstasy, imagining that they have arrived in “the sonorous land” of rejuvenated consciousness. Though their happiness is real, their faith is misplaced; only the Local Man, left behind like Firs in The Cherry Orchard, understands that “the solution of the problem [is] in the disappearance of the problem.”

Wittgenstein, whose influence on Handke has become a matter of axiom by now, once wrote that “the aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.” In The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other (first published in this magazine in 1993), Handke makes the familiar strange. His wordless play—the text consists entirely of stage directions—turns the stage into a public square, with an endless procession of figures crossing through it.

The drama consists entirely of entrances and exits, with more than 400 “actors and lovers” (as the playwright calls them) performing “aspects” of public life and private language. At first much of the action appears quotidian; thunder sounds and a moment later a woman runs across the stage carrying “a gigantic pile of unfolded laundry”—and the cause and effect seem clear. Later the sequences veer from the recognizable into the writer’s personal hallucinations. Aeneas puts in an appearance, as do Abraham and Isaac on their way to the chopping block, followed by Charlie Chaplin. Or so it is written; what Handke names in the script and what the spectator reads on stage may not line up. Even such readily identifiable icons as Charlie Chaplin may simply be “aspects” of Handke's description or our perception. What looks like Chaplin shuffling across the stage could actually be a character imitating the silent movie star, or an actor’s game, or an author’s fantasy.

Handke describes stage actions with terms like “as” and “as if” (a thorny translation problem Honegger has approached with apt sensitivity). In one sequence “someone paces as Peer Gynt, peeling an onion.” In another, “one man is terrified by another approaching him as his doppelgänger.” With this grammar of adverbs and conjunctions, the playwright insists that all acting (and all spectatorship) makes a speculative leap. Inside that “as,” Handke suspends empirical certainties and possibilities of authenticity for both actor and audience. Actions performed in the conditional “as if” force both parties’ hands. Surrendering our pretensions to answering reality in the theater, we’re left instead with our ability to perceive stage behavior as a question mark, to see (or perform) the multiple possibilities for meaning dramatized in the actor’s gesture “as …”

Wittgenstein famously proposed that all philosophical problems assume the shape of a single question: “I don’t know my way around.” In Voyage it’s the characters who don’t know the way, in Hour it’s the spectator. Handke brings this maxim alive on stage not as some kind of ideological exercise, but with singular grace and intelligence. He has written two plays in the shape of a question mark: curving around dense thematic turns, straightening into brief narrative strokes, and dotted with sumptuous poetry.