Stephanie Hammer

Department of Literature and Languages
University of California, Riverside
HAMM@ucrac2.ucr.edu

The time is past when we can plant ourselves in front of a Vernet and sigh along with Diderot, “How beautiful, grand, varied, noble, wise, harmonious, rigorously colored this is!”

 

(Lyotard, “Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity”)

 

What a wise and beautiful book . . . .

 

(Erich Skwara’s review of the Essay on Fatigue)

 

Today what subject would the great metaphysical narrative tell about? Would it be the odyssey and for what narratee?

 

(Lyotard, “Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity”)

 

We are dealing with another one of those postmodern texts in which a funky object de pop-art serves as the pretext for self-reflexive excursions through the time and space of memory . . . .

 

(Theodore Ziolkowski’s review of the Essay on the Jukebox)

 

Autobiography is abject unless, in the words of Michel Leiris, it exposes itself to the “bull’s horn.”

 

(Ihab Hassan, “Parabiography”)

 

This essay obeys two imperatives;¹ it is being torn in two directions: a critique of Handke’s critical reception as it pertains to the postmodern and a close read- ing of Handke’s recent Essay Versuch) series. I will allow my text to tear, and rather than suturing it together, I display, in advance, the wound that cannot–at least in this space–be closed. As a tribute to and as a critical apparatus for Handke, I will allow it to split, to be uncertain, to be ambivalent. This move will court failure and ensure insufficiency, but it might “correct” the flatness of most Handke criticism: the thematic studies, the stylistic studies, the countless influence studies on him, and more insidiously, the frequent, incestuous comparisons of him with himself. I will try to show that, for the most part, the articles and books on him cannot understand his work because they would master it (with all that such a term implies), and as Handke’s texts resist such hermeneutic sub- jugation, his critics have often descended either to righteous indignation or into summary and description² –colorless repetitions of the objects which they want to comprehend but cannot fasten upon. Can one surrender without submitting to the writing of Peter Handke? Can one’s own writing on him allow itself to be gored by his textual challenges to authority and reconstitute itself through that (fatal? pleasurable?) blow to its own integrity? Perhaps.

 

In his turning-point exercise of the mid 70’s, The Weight of the World Das Gewicht der Welt), Peter Handke exerted a renewed resistance to the narrative tyrannies of form, which he at once invoked and subverted in such novels as The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Short Letter, Long Farewell. In Weight he rehearsed the Russian Formalist view of contemporary society gone numb, but rather than just making language “strange”, he exploded the diaristic form (that humble, non-literary history of the every day that anyone can produce) into an elusive encyclopedia of linguistic snippets–autobiographical sound bytes which might contain information, citation, observation, opinion, dream, or memory. Indeed, as several critics have noted (among them Axel Gellhaus and Peter Putz) most of Handke’s output during that decade consisted of narrative forms made difficult by a perceptual loss of one kind or another which they simultaneously narrated and enacted. But The Weight of the World radicalized the problem of narrative; it documented the author’s hardening refusal to tell, and harnessed that refusal to both a utopian dream of a new mythology and an ironic critique of language practices, including and especially his own.

 

Much critical energy has already been expended on Handke’s evolution during the 60’s and 70’s, so I will not retread that familiar territory here, although I will, inevitably, refer to it. Instead I would examine an apparent problem–namely the fact that, as difficult as Handke’s narrative forms have always been for even the most agile of critical readers, his prose works of the past decade seem, unbelievably enough, to pose even more daunting challenges. As examples of this new difficulty I will read the trilogy (at the time of writing) of slim volumes entitled Essays produced by Handke in the late 80’s and early 90’s against a variety of concerns, including the resonance of that father-essayist, Montaigne. But before doing this, I am compelled to dismantle the discussions of Handke’s “difficulty” during the past decade–a difficulty which has been discussed, increasingly, in terms of the author’s postmodern affiliations–hence the oppositional pairings of Lyotard and Hassan with recent reviews of Handke’s works by way of preface to my own problematic/problematized “essay.”

 

What is the origin and history of this connection? Handke’s relation with the postmodern was first articulated by the Klinkowitz/Knowlton book Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation in 1983. In a brief opening chapter on postmodern art, that book aligned Handke’s work of the 60’s and 70’s with that of Jacques Derrida (assuming, by implication, a congruence between deconstruction and the postmodern [3-6]), and it argued for a view of Handke’s corpus from 1966 to 1981 along a trajectory which shifted from negative to positive poles of postmodern aesthetics (Klinkowitz and Knowlton, 128-9); the book’s conclusion also made a quick appeal to the category of “new Sensibility”– ostensibly as a corrective to Manfred Durzak’s deployment, a year earlier, of “neue Subjektivitat” in a hostile reading of Handke’s repeated usage of autobiographical material. Ten years later, the Klinkowitz/Knowlton perspective looks simplistic when compared to the complex theoretical dis- cussions of postmodernity offered by Hassan and Hutcheon, among others, but the book’s attempt to move Handke out of the prisonhouse of Austro-German literary traditions was brave and continues to be valuable. Yet, far from being settled, the question of Handke’s connections to postmodernism/ity has taken on an odd intensity and a kind of built-in futility in subsequent discussions. This is, for example, the essential non-dynamic which characterizes Norbert Gabriel’s 1991 essay on Handke’s recent prose work; tellingly, the essay raises and then defers the question of Handke’s place to an unwilling conclusion that the Austrian author’s works, unpleasant as they are to read, are in fact “not bad books.”

 

The lofty tone of Gabriel’s pronouncements and the strategic use of the issue of postmodernity to damn Handke with faint praise are, I think, symptomatic of a theoretical tack which has proven at least as problematic as the problem it wants to solve; namely, the question of Handke and the postmodern has provided critics with an outlet for an anxiety-ridden false debate about his aesthetic worth, as though the question of his place, once settled, could somehow legitimize (or more likely invalidate) his writing practices once and for all. The gesture of invoking the postmodern works in paradoxical ways in assessments of Handke; sometimes it might imply a comforting, and curious understanding of postmodernism as part of an aesthetic/ethical/political duality wherein it must play the part of the good, the beautiful, the true, and the politically progressive to modernism’s shopworn aesthetic program–a duality which ringingly repeats the binarism of classic/romantic.³

 

This is the agenda of Hans Joseph Ortheil, who uses an earlier, postmodern Handke to condemn the work of the later, reactionary Handke in Die Zeit Die Zeit 24.4, 1987). Such an outlook also indirectly informs the article of Eva- Maria Metcalf, who argues that Handke is an arrogant, impotent modernist: “in 1967 Peter Handke built himself an ivory tower, and he has resided in it ever since” (369). But elsewhere, as in Ziolkowski’s review, the “fact” of Handke’s postmodern aesthetic becomes a way to dismiss him as unoriginal, leaving Erich Skwara the uncomfortable task of defending Handke’s essay on fatigue through an appeal to neo-romantic accolades which would (while they seemingly challenge Lyotard’s contentions) rehabilitate the con- temporary author into a reincarnation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, or worse, Goethe. Finally, there are those like Handke’s French apologist/translator G.-A. Goldschmidt, who insist on Handke’s essential realistic simplicity, all the while offering a “modest” commentary of 200 pages (supplemented by photographs and utterances of Handke) to assist in this easy enterprise.

 

The only person who comes close to articulating the relationship between Handke and the postmodern is Diane Shooman, who boldly compares Handke’s work to Ulysses, Wordsworth, and contemporary painting, and then challenges the Handke/Derrida congruence proposed by Klinkowitz and Knowlton (Shooman 94). She does something else remarkable and controversial; she compares Handke’s work, primarily, to that of a female painter–highlighting, by implication, an aspect of his work which had heretofore gone unnoticed: the gender trouble at work in his writing, and its specifically “feminine” markers (when she presented this analysis at the Modern Austrian Literature Conference a few years ago, it was vociferously decried by practically everyone in the room).⁴

 

For the most part, Handke’s critical reception veers between an angry dismissal which openly hates what he does and a swooning, predominantly masculine, denial which buries whatever the books might really up to.⁵ He is postmodern when he writes badly, and he is a bad writer because he is not postmodern. He is difficult, he is almost unreadable (Michael Hofmann TLS), he is arch (J.J. White TLS), he is in a literary cul-de-sac (Anthony Vivis TLS); or he writes books which are our “friends” (Skwara) and which are glowing and moving classics (Volker Hage, blurb on Versuch uber die Jukebox, on the last page of Versuch uber den gegluckten Tag, excerpted from Die Zeit). These discussions about Handke contrast so profoundly with the statements of both theoreticians and ex- plicators of the postmodern such as Ihab Hassan and Steven Connor (who simply include Handke on a list of postmodern writers [Hassan 85; Connor 123] without further comment), that I cannot help asking, as does Warren Montag in his angry indictment of the postmodern debate, what lies be- hind this vociferous, yet strangely off-kilter posturing. What is at stake in these critical (mis)readings of Peter Handke?⁶

 

Much. First, Handke has succeeded too well in the formalist challenge which I invoked earlier; he makes the forms so difficult that we feel the difficulty, rather than the feeling, and get deflected by the perception rather than examining (or sharing) the mood which informs it. Second, Handke enrages German critics and American critics alike, because his recent writing repeatedly indicts Austro-German culture, while at the same time using an increasingly high- style literary language that represents, for Wim Wenders at least, “the most beautiful German written nowadays” (Kunzel 212)–as though Kafka were channeling the spirit of Goethe to write “In the Penal Colony.” Third, he plays a scary, threatening game with male subjectivity, and his recent works are disturbing and destabilizing in ways that his early plays and novels rarely were, for all their violent histrionics, and it is this aspect of his work that his defenders most want to deny.⁷ These threats against male subjectivity are important in another, more immediate way, for they are vocationally and practically, as well as psychically, troubling to literary professionals. By their very nature, Handke’s games with the male subject undermine any “penetrating” analysis which would get to the core of his writing, and so the greatest danger that Handke’s writing incurs on the critic is the almost certain invalidation of the literary-critical project itself, as it is usually constructed; there is throughout Handke’s recent work a questioning of the critical stance as such, and, more precisely, the form through which that stance attempts to legitimize itself and ensure its authority. That form is the essay, and it is no coincidence, both that the essay is the genre of choice for Handke in his work of the late 80’s and early 90’s, and that critical essays about him seem so often doomed to failure. More productive, clearly, would be to shift the ground for the discussion entirely, as Alice Kuzniar has already provisionally done in her powerful Lacanian reading of Across. Her analysis of Handke in terms of the Lacanian “gaze” and what she calls Handke’s “Antwortblick” (seeing oneself being seen [Kuzniar 357]) furthers the critical conversation’s migration out of Germanistik, toward a different realm of poststructuralist theory (psychoanalysis rather than deconstruction) as it pertains to the visual in general and the cinematic in par- ticular–concerns, which as she observes, are sources of continuing interest in Handke’s writing.

 

But before sketching out the critical venue opened, not only by this shift into visual media, but more importantly, by her invocation of the word “desire” (the ramifications of which Kuzniar does not pursue in her essay), I want to address this difficulty of Handke’s place one more time. The problem is, the non-debate notwithstanding, a fertile one because it points both to the specialness of Handke’s project and to the impossibility of “defining” the postmodern. This impossibility becomes both clear and humorous when, we think of Handke’s aesthetic practices, not against a definition or in terms of a category, into which we must forcibly stuff his corpus, but rather, with the ponderings of Lyotard, who has discussed the postmodern within the following, very large parameters⁸:

 

The powers of sensing and phrasing are being probed on the limits of what is possible . . . . Experiments are being made. This is our postmodernity's entire vocation . . . . Today's art consists in exploring things unsayable and things invisible. Strange machines are assembled, where what we didn't have the idea of saying or the mat- ter for feeling can make itself heard and experienced.("Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity" 190)

 
This non-definition might certainly adhere to Handke’s writing of the 80’s, where he writes repeatedly about the marginal (the threshold in Across), the invisible, the unsayable, and the downright absent, and this fascination with the presence of absence and with the limits/possibilities of repeatability (overtly marked by such titles as Absence and Repetition) expresses itself most typically in Handke’s Essay on the Jukebox Versuch uber die Jukebox), where the quest of the medieval romance is transmogrified into a writer’s futile meanderings in the Spanish countryside, as he looks repeatedly for a jukebox, and for a hotel room that he can be comfortable in.

 

But listen to how Lyotard describes the postmodern’s adversary–classical aesthetics:

 

an aesthetics stemming from Hegel, for whom what was at stake was indeed "experience" in the sense of a passion of the spirit traversing perceptible forms in order to arrive at the total expression of self in the discourse of the philosopher . . . . It can indeed be said that there is no longer any experience in this sense . . . . (191)

 
Here again we find Handke, for this is precisely the challenge to which he returns over and over again–the challenge to create a new narrative and a new experience which will rectify and make good the very real loss of the feeling of experience; Handke’s writing elaborately and ironically mourns the irrecuperability of traditional, western subjectivity as he uses that grief-ritual to look beyond it (as in Nova’s speech at the end of Beyond the Villages Uber die Dorfer]).

 

In short, can we not rethink Handke’s relation to the postmodern (both in terms of postmodernity, the moment, and postmodernism, the movement), and in so doing rethink the “use” of this term? Is this not one of the reasons why the Handke case is important insofar as it tests the notion of the “postmodern” even as it testifies to the miscalculated ways that it is being invoked? The postmodern is not, after all a category in an aesthetic periodic table (Hassan 33), it is not an either/or proposition, but a “cluster concept” to be explored, to be expanded (hence Lyotard’s title–a contribution to an idea).⁹ If the postmodern can be deployed in this manner, does not Handke’s very slipperiness –this ability to fit in everywhere and rest nowhere; to be at once classical, romantic, modernist and at the same time resolutely anti-classical, anti-romantic, and anti-modernist –suggest, in and of itself, not that Handke is postmodern in the way that Schlegel is Romantic or Joyce is modernist, but that Handke uses the postmodern, ably manoeuvering through the different layers of history–where Schlegel, Buddha, and Credence Clearwater Revival are all equally (non)present?¹⁰ And, if Handke uses the postmodern, he also uses just about every other possible cultural tool: the language and terminology of German idealist philosophy, the topoi of classical literature–both German and foreign, Western and Asian–as well as autobiography and mass media, and, I would argue, a strong awareness of the thematic/formal structures of psychoanalysis–an awareness which Kuzniar has already signalled.

 

How might such a comprehension of the postmodern reforms and re-forms critical practice vis-a-vis Peter Handke? It tells us this: any reading of his work according to one thematic line, one theoretical approach, or one periodic “place,” or even one question is–as Michael Hays astutely notes in his reading of Handke’s plays–bound to founder; it must automatically invalidate the critical enterprise by its distortion of the text under critical scrutiny, for Handke’s most recent texts are, to misquote Luce Irigaray, not one. Handke’s recent work can, then, be approached only by circuitous navigation through a series of vectors, such as the ones I just suggested above (but not limited to them), which may or may not form a coherent grid and which may not possess a thematic destination–and this irregular flight-pattern might enable us to begin to appreciate the complexity, richness, and the density of his current project. And if this is so, then perhaps Peter Handke can be defended, after all.

 

Handke’s defense is, I confess, the directive which orients this essay. But against what charge? Difficulty– insofar as his work refuses to be categorizable? Treason –insofar as his work refuses not to change? And here I sense that I am near the mark, for isn’t Handke the subject of so much argument because he will not compose repetitions of Kaspar for the rest of his life, will not cling to the chic malaise of Short Letter? But, even if I can defend Handke, how am I to defend the form which the present defense takes? If form is to be distrusted, including and especially the essay, then the problem of doing Handke “justice” must become potentially overwhelming, for won’t the (my) literary essay also founder in its attempt to analyze his work at all? Perhaps we should elect not to perform an analysis of Handke; instead, we should make him an instrument rather than an object of scrutiny, as Kathleen McHugh has argued in the case of a very different late 20th Century artist/phenomenon–Madonna. I shy away from this possibility, even as I feel obliged to marshall it, because the unlikely comparison interweaves yet another thread in this tangled grid of Handke-difficulties–namely, the degree to which Handke’s public “persona” shapes and predetermines understandings of his work. I would like to deny that Handke has anything in common with Madonna. He is not the pure object of consumerism, as she is; he is not altogether reducible to a media image; he is the creator of texts more than he is the subject of them. Indeed, the plethora of texts represents yet another one of Handke’s features that drives critics crazy; his productivity ensures that he can not be “kept up with”; he remains always ahead of the critical game and seems determined to hold on to his lead till the finish.

 

But here the contrast falls back into comparison and further, into a near identity between the two “artists.” For Handke’s maneuvers–his melancholic, apolitical posturing, his deployment of various literary-theatrical media–are by no means dissimilar to Madonna’s–to her continual shift of “subversive” fashion affect and to her multiple appeals to different sorts of media expressions– videos, television interviews, magazine interviews, c.d.’s, books. Certainly, Handke wants to manipulate his own public “image” every bit as much as Madonna does–a fact which, like her, he does not conceal but rather foregrounds. There is a stunning example of this tactic in Goldschmidt’s book about Handke. The study is filled with emotionally charged photographs such as one of Handke as a baby in the arms of his young and beautiful mother (whom the critic will recognize as the heroine of A Sorrow beyond Dreams); near the end, however, appears a photograph of the author kneeling on a living room floor, sorting through a box of photographs. Goldschmidt’s caption explains that this is a picture of the author choosing the photographs for the present book. In this terse undermining of the operator/spectator/spectrum trinity proposed by Roland Barthes Camera Lucida 9), the “subject” Handke–the primary spectator of his own spectral image–ironically imposes his authorial (operational) presence on the work meant to objectify him (make him a spectrum)–signalling among other things, that he will brook no unmediated hermeneutic “mastery” of that cognitive object, the author Peter Handke. He will not, to use the parlance of photography, be captured; instead he will own and use all of photography’s image-repertoires in order not to be seen.¹¹ Autobiographical material becomes, then, for both Madonna and Handke, the screen–the veil and the site of media image–that plays out and thwarts fantasies of control–ours and theirs. And if Madonna struts the stuff of self-conscious, parodistic phallic womanhood with a redundant physical presence, Handke’s mournful, aggressive passivity approaches a hysterical masculinity which would pillory itself in one grand performative gesture–a disappearing act.

 

Thus, even as I attempt to contemplate the receding object of my inquiry–Peter Handke–even as I essay this essay, I must retain something of McHugh’s Madonna argument; I will have to try to read with him as well as about him. How might one read with as well as about Handke? What would such a reading look like? This is one, tentative, possible, version.

 

And I can use this digression on Madonna and Handke to circle back to the question of desire raised by Kuzniar and to the constant interpretative reduction of Handke’s work to bloodless readings of one kind or another, which are stripped of any affect other than anger/adulation and inattentive to questions of emotionality and sexuality.¹² While Handke’s own writing would appear to shore up such disembodied interpretations, do not readings of his emotionally understated, repressed texts, neglect the very real passion which infuses even his recent works? The question is begged first, by the sheer mass of emotions and violent passions which seethe and explode within the corpus, and second, by the critical oblivion to which they have, for the most part, been relegated. Professional readers of Handke have reflected very little upon the sexually motivated murder in The Goalie’s Anxiety, the conjugal rage between husband and wife in Short Letter, the resentful Oedipal longing to resurrect the dead mother in Sorrow beyond Dreams, and the complementary adulation of the girl-child as muse in Child’s Story. But what of the problematic patriarchal loves invoked in both Across (the father for the son) and Absence (the son’s elegiac adoration of the lost father)? I will speak more of the loves and pleasures of the Essay series in a moment. Finally, we should not forget that there is a profound adoration of the written word in Handke’s writing–an adulation which has become, visceral, desperate, sensual, and topographical.¹³ Throughout the work of the 80’s we wander the divergent landscapes of Europe: Austria, Slovenia, France, and Spain, and these wanderings are chocked full of literary, cultural evocations, providing a simultaneous geographical and archaeological pleasure–clearly announced as late 20th Century humanity’s only possible, imperfect consolation, at the end of Handke’s strange mock-pastoral, Beyond the Villages. Seen from this point of view, it seems no coincidence that, in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire Himmel uber Berlin–for which Handke helped compose the screenplay), Damiel chooses to enter the world of “History” (Geschichte)–at once his story and history through desire; though he is bearer of the divine Logos, the male angel recognizes that the word yields meaning when it is made female flesh–and he must descend from rather than transcend his male sterility by falling down to, not rising with the Goethean “eternal feminine.”¹⁴

 

How then can we not speak of passion, desire, and pleasure when we speak of Peter Handke’s writing? The critical “We” haven’t until now, because to speak of those things in Handke’s writing is to truly expose both him and “us”; to speak about passion/desire/pleasure in his books is to speak about, among other things, misogyny, sado- masochism, womb-envy, paedophilia, passivity, impotence, and castration, and to speak of those things is to come face to face with the deeply problematized vision of male heterosexuality articulated there. Handke is, to paraphrase Woody Allen, polymorphously perverse, but in contrast to Woody Allen’s smugly neurotic eroticism, there is no self- congratulation of that fact in his work.

 

Within and against this net of observations/questions about Handke, I circle back once more around the tear which originated this essay: Handke and the postmodern/Handke and his refusal to tell in the Essay series. In these pieces, rather than merely detonating logocentrism from the outside, as he had done before, Handke’s work has another exercise in mind. It seems to actively quest for the missing Logos, by looking for it in the “wrong” places. “Fantasy is my faith,” the first-person narrator/actor tells us in Essay on the successful [prosperous, auspicious] Day (55), and a page later proclaims:

 

And what did this Nothing and again Nothing do? It meant . . . . And so it went here: as for the Nothing of our time, the main thing now is to let it ripen from morning till evening (or even to midnight?). And I repeat: the idea was light, the idea is light.

 

[Und was tat dieses Nichts und wieder Nichts? Es bedeutete . . . Und darum ging es hier: das Nichts unsrer Tage, das galt es jetzt "fruchten" zu lassen, von Morgen bis Abend (oder auch Mit- ternacht?). Und ich wiederhole: die Idee war Licht. Die Idee ist Licht.](56)

 
Yet, even as the possibility of Logos is erected, Handke whittles away at the authority of the traditional male subject in increasingly graphic ways as though performing a process of aesthetic self-castration in payment for a new, legitimized, subjectivity. Particularly because he is a male writer–and ostensibly a heterosexual one–it is impossible for me to contemplate the veritable parade of chaste, solitary, passive male speakers who inhabit his works and not see them as postmodern Abelards; nominally heterosexual, but mysteriously incapacitated, they repeatedly express their feelings of and distance from a sexual desire which seems connected to and yet severed from the desire to put the pen to paper. And are not Handke’s cloistered male porte-paroles markers of what Handke is “doing to” meaning, and to meaning’s traditional receiver/producer? To reparaphrase Hassan’s use of Leiris, Handke’s autobiographical doubles not only expose themselves to the bull’s horn, they allow themselves to be gored (they welcome the penetration); this reverse matadorian spectacle is at once the performance to which we are constantly invited to watch in the Handke texts of the 80’s and the radical cure which we might also enact upon ourselves.

 

The Essays arguably take their cue from the work of Michel de Montaigne,¹⁵ whose work sought also to interweave a number of discursive threads and to create a complex junction where bellettristic (in the literal sense of beautiful writing), philosophy, politics, autobiography, psychology, epistemology and scientific experiment meet. Montaigne has been seen, recently with increasing enthusiasm, as the herald of modern narrative subjectivity in the West (Auerbach), and there are good reasons for this. Relentlessly anecdotal, understated, erudite, and often ironic, Montaigne’s essays bore curious titles which sometimes had only the slightest relevance to the matter at hand (as in “On Cannibals” [“Des Cannibales”]–where cannibalism is mentioned in a sentence), were peppered with epigraphs and textual references, while the arguments were typically roundabout, if they were in fact discernible, and closed with a lack of authoritative conclusiveness which can still be gleefully frustrating to readers. Montaigne was one of the first Western authors to choose to write about mundane subjects (in both senses–worldly things and unimportant things) in an ongoing project which–in his own resistance to narrative–he came to call, not the His- toire de moi, but the Livre de moi, the book of me. Not coincidentally, the essays derive from and return to a sense of physicality–to the limits of the body, its sicknesses, its death–for the “me” in question here is “matiere,” material, stuff, flesh and bones.¹⁶ There is no transcendental subject in Montaigne, but a quirky mind-body which thinks/feels his way through a writing enterprise that, Lawrence Kritzman writes, becomes both “self- generating” and “autoerogenous” (Kritzman 91), and where a neo-stoic masculine impermeability is repeatedly undercut –but not canceled out–by other subject-voices telling fragments of other stories.¹⁷

 

Handke uses Montaigne–specifically, but not only, the elements mentioned above–and empties him: the eccentric, hidden relevance of the essay titles in Montaigne become non-topics in Handke–passive interim states (Lyotard’s “things unsayable”), useless, peripheral machinery (“things invisible”), and greeting-card cliches which take the place of such idealistic maxims as “to philosophize is to learn to die.” The jouissance which, as Kritzman notes, is appealed to in Montaigne, and which has characterized the modernist sensibility from Joyce to Barthes (and Barth), is excised and–its absence profoundly felt–the procedure leaves Montaigne’s autoerogenous text as a body with uncertain orientations–a masculine text without qualities, though it still desires. And the “subject”–the controlling ego that informs Montaigne– shudders and splits, becoming a series of impossible “selves,” flat subject speakers–at once solemn and droll, lugubrious and elegant–who posture their ways through language gestures in a spectral conversation. Handke’s radical surgery on Montaigne resembles in respects an autopsy performed by a vampire doctor; the postmodern essay drains the life from the modern and lives on, pumped up momentarily with the knowledge and blood of the dissected deceased–undead, glamorous, meticulous, analytical, thirsting. Montaigne’s cannibal text–the admiring com- mentary which devours classical literature whole and becomes itself a literary product–becomes simultaneously Dracula and Von Helsing–the kiss of death and the cure for modernism.

 

Thus, Handke’s essays tear much further than ever Montaigne did into anecdotal fragmentation, and where Montaigne is smooth, Handke is jagged, jumpy, and pained. The Versuche function ostensibly as ludic reflections upon the interstices where–officially, as far as traditional Western narrative is concerned–nothing is happening,¹⁸ but these exercises are both playful and sad; they play with melancholy, they are melancholy games, and the game consists at once of formal experimentation and of a deadly serious self-practice–a practice which is in turns therapeutic, mutilating, and transformative; pleasurable, and painful. A somber I comments on the combination of comedy, mundanity, and death in Essay on the successful Day:

 

Yes, it is as though a certain irony belonged here, in the face of my own self as day by day regularities and episodes--irony from in- clination--, and still, a kind of humor, which named itself after the gallows.

 

[Ja, es ist, als gehorten dazu eine besondere Ironie, angesichts meiner selbst wie der tagtaglichen Gesetzlichkeiten und Zwischenfalle-- Ironie aus Zuneigung--, und noch, wenn schon eine Art von Humor, der nach dem Galgen benannte.](41)

 
The first in the series, Essay on Fatigue (1989), furnishes the clearest intertextual response to Montaigne in so far as it may be read as a re-vision of the essays on idleness and sleep, but it frames its non-subject matter within a strange dialogue which unfolds between a writer (possibly, but not necessarily Handke) and another speaker. Although much of the discussion is aesthetic, there is a therapeutic thrust to the proceedings; the writer opens the discussion by manifesting an anxious connection between fatigue and fear, while his analytical interlocutor guides him with short, pointed questions, toward a recognition and articulation of his motivations for wanting to talk about fatigue.

 

The recognition is both utopian and disappointed/ing, and the narrative circling, linking apparently unrelated personal memories and images, resonates with the trauma of a Freudian case-history, where, to quote Peter Brooks, “narr- ative discourse works intermittently in a dialogic manner (Brooks 57). But the psychoanalytic process is flattened even as it is pursued–its “significance,” its deep personal meaning, and claim to utter seriousness are simultaneously posited and erased. Typically, as in those histories, much is said about childhood, school, first feelings of difference from others, but the conversation glistens with artificiality, even as it assumes a predictably sexual character, focussing on the exhaustion that occurs between men and women and what that signifies in their relationship. These observations lead in turn to a revealing and ludicrous reworking of that masculine erotic icon, Don Juan:

 

I imagine Don Juan . . . not as a seducer, but rather as a tired, always tired hero, into whose lap, at any given time, at the right moment, in the presence of a tired woman, every one of them will fall.

 

[Den Don Juan stelle ich mir . . . nicht als einen Verfuhrer, sondern als einen jeweils zur richtigen Stunde, in Gegenwart einer muden Frau, muden, einen immer-muden Helden vor, dem so eine jede in den Schoss fallt. . . .](Uber die Mudigkeit 48)

 
This image of a passively erotic, feminized (the German “Schoss” means both “lap” and “womb”) masculine exhaustion, that drastically revises a traditional Western image of energetic masculine prowess (providing an ironic gloss both on Mozart’s and on Camus’ Don Juan–the man driven by an excess of love/eros), opens the possibility of a new kind of narrative which would fuse poetry and prose as well as “high” and “low” artistic enunciations:

 

The inspiration of fatigue says less, what there is to do, as than can be left to happen . . . . A certain tired one (masculine) as another Orpheus, in order to gather the wildest animals to himself and to finally be tired with them . . . . Phillip Marlowe--still a private detective--became better and better, more and more clear-sighted in the solutions of his cases, the more his sleepless nights added up.

 

[Die Inspiration der Mudigkeit sagt weniger, was zu tun ist, als was gelassen werden kann . . . . Ein gewisser Mude als ein anderer Orpheus, um den sich die wildesten Tiere versammeln und endlich mitmude sein konnen . . . . Phillip Marlowe--noch ein Privatdetektiv--wurde im Losen seiner Falle, je mehr schlaflose Nachte sich reihten, immer besser und scharfsinniger.](74-75)

 
And yet, the speaker cannot practice this art, he doesn’t know the recipe/prescription [Rezept], and the project of Fatigue reveals itself to be a failure on both culinary and medicinal fronts; it cannot nourish and it cannot cure. The speaker can only defer his failure to a future project, as he looks forward at the close of the discussion to another Essay, whose failure is also already pointed out as imminent, by his skeptical interlocutor:

 

But in all of Spain there is no jukebox.

 

[In ganz Spanien gibt es doch keine Jukebox.](78)

 
The curious picture of Don Juan and the sexual problematic which it implies, the warning of failure, and the formal challenges of telling otherwise are progressively radicalized in the next two Essays. If Essay on Fatigue wants (and yet refuses) to be a therapeutic dialogic text which, to paraphrase Freud’s title–remembers, repeats and works through (Brooks 57)–the non-dialogic format of Essay on the Jukebox (1990) plays out a personal obsession; it is a neurotic monologic text which repeats instead of remembering the origin of its trouble. But here again, the “trauma” is trivialized (although it still hurts), for the loss/absence which motivates the text is situated within the boundaries of post-World-War 2 Western popular culture, and as such, it plays out as both a truncated travesty of a 60’s road movie–the meanderings of a disenfranchised, blocked, obsessed writer on a futile quest in the Spanish countryside for a jukebox (whose image only he glances in a B-movie)–and a stripped-down reverse of Proust’s self-reflexive narrative project¹⁹–the epic novel about the writer’s aesthetic education, which prepares him to compose that same epic novel, pares itself to an essay about an essay (by the same title) which cannot get written. Again, as in Fatigue, the crucial moment of the text concerns a heterosexual encounter, which is once again, viewed in terms of non-action. In the middle of the essay, the writer remembers a chance meeting with an Indian woman in Alaska (an intertextual reference to Slow Homecoming), and compares his refusal of her erotic invitation to Parzival’s failure to ask Anfortas the necessary questions to cure him of his terrible wound (a wound in the testicles). This odd simile suggests that what the chaste, frustrated protagonist of Jukebox may fail to admit, is that his impotence with the pen and with the woman links him not with Parzival but with the castrated Lord of the Grail. The connection with Parzival is not coincidental, for the goal of this essay is, unlike the other two, indeed the obtaining of an object, a feminine vessel which, grail-like, incorporates in its musical contents all of the memories, and well-being of the impotent, exiled protagonist (it is the thing that makes him feel safe, grounded, connected)–all of which suggests that this Versuch can be read, among other things, as an always-already failed quest for the eternal feminine, now recognized as a mere machine, and an outmoded one at that (which connects this work with the impossible quest for the mother’s lost history in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams).

 

At once a companion piece to and a skeptical corrective of the earlier, more mock-impressionist Afternoon of a Writer, Essay on the Jukebox uses the futile pursuit of the feminine machine as a metaphor to talk about not just desire, and writing, but that other elusive feminine machine called “Geschichte” (the feminine German word for “history”). Writing at the time of the demolition of the Berlin wall, the impotent writer bears symbolic witness to the problem of defining historical moments in our time and questions the rhetoric with which the demise of communism is so celebrated, even as the “execution” of its leaders mimics the violence of the deposed regimes. I read the jukebox as the feminized, fetishized repository of ideological formation, and although the writer can neither vanquish his obsession with it nor replace it with something else, he can bear witness to his own discomfort–aesthetic, sexual, political, historical, physical–and, by transference, to ours. At once a critique of history and HIS STORY, Essay on the Jukebox suggests that any story that the masculine, European, and particularly German subject tells may be a dangerous falsification, but still he is driven to try and fail to write. Like Anfortas, the essayist can neither die nor recover and we, like Parzival, cannot choose but watch the ritual with wonder. “Write yourself free” said the priest to the war traumatized protagonist of Gunther Grass’ Cat and Mouse, but Grass believed in an alternative narrative coherence which might guarantee, if not salvation, then at least a cure to male, German guilt–a grace which Handke’s essayist/assayer both fantasizes about and pointedly denies himself in an act of interrupted metaphysical-political onanism.

 

Essay on the successful Day (1991) is the most overtly ludic of the three texts. Formally indecisive, it plays compulsively with combinations–the dialogic with the monologic, third, with first and second persons, and verb tenses and moods with each other–toward the accomplishment of a key admission (which comes at the end of the “session”)–namely that the essayist/attempter has never experienced the very day of happiness, success, fulfillment which he repeatedly and unsuccessfully tries to describe. It is here that telling otherwise, pleasure, castration, failure, and writing “come” together in one strangely compelling scene. Telling the story of another person (probably himself) the essayist describes an attempt to saw through a log of wood. The description conveys for seven pages the rhythm and pleasure (“Vergnugen”) of the operation–

 

but then something threatened, if not the overlooked fork in the bough, (which was about a finger's breadth away from the point, where, the already cut through wood fell anyway, of itself into the lap of the sawer), then that very small and hard layer, in which the steel struck on stone, on nail, on bone in one and so to speak, wrecked the undertaking in the last stroke... There it would have been so close to it, that the sawing for itself, the mere finding-itself- together and being-together with the wood there, its roundness, its fragrance, nothing as the traversal/dimension taking of the material there . . . incarnated for him an ideal from a time of disinterested satisfaction/pleasure. And just as the breaking pencil . . . .

 

[dann drohte aber, wenn nicht die ubersehene Astgabel, so (meist gerade um eine Fingerbreite weg von dem Punkt, an dem das so weit durchschnittene Holzstuck ohnehin dem Sager von selbst in den Schoss fiel) jene sehr schmale und um so hartere Schicht, in der der Stahl auf Stein, Nagel, Knochen in einem traf und das Unternehmen sozusagen im letzten Takt scheiterte . . . . Dabei ware er doch so nah dran gewesen, dass das Sagen fur sich, das blosse Sich-Zusammenfinden und Zusam- mensein mit dem Holz da, seiner Rundung, seinem Duft, seinem Muster, nichts als das Durchmessen der Materie da . . . ihm ideal den Traum von einer Zeit des Interesselosen Wohlgefallens verkorperte. Und ebenso hatte der abbrechende Bleistift. . . ](48)

 
This pleasure in pain, this union of the cutter with thing cut which in turn becomes imaginative flesh and bone, suggest that Handke is doing far more than just whittling away at Western literature. His autobiographical narratives, in the Essays at least, have become literally experimental operations–performative attempts (and here narrative becomes for Handke the newest of the new drama)–to enact a bloody refinement, to chop away at himself and at the marker of his writerly masculinity, the pencil and to make this aesthetic unmanning serve to create a new narrative. What is or can be the result? “Not nothing,” says Handke’s essayist–neither nothing nor something, which tells itself in past, present, future, and subjunctive, and which not fear its own demise, its own self-forgetting:

 

And at the end of the day, this one (masculine) would have called for a book--more than just a chronicle: "the fairy-tale of the successful day." And at the very end the glorious forgetting would still have come, that the day had to succeed.

 

[Und am Ende des Tags hatte dieser nach einem Buch gerufen--mehr als bloss eine Chronik: "Marchen des gegluckten Tags". Und ganz am Ende ware noch das glorreiche Vergessen gekommen, dass der Tag zu glucken habe . . . . (75)

 
As the epistle of the imprisoned Paul urgently requests sustenance from Timothy in writing (this is how successful Day closes), so does Handke’s unfolding livre de moi– his postmodern odyssey turned gospel (not “truth,” but “godspell”–good spell, magical phrase, discourse, and tale) according to Peter (the shifting rock of an un- derstanding which must always already deny its ground)– supplicate his fellow-neurotic (the reader, us, me) to move beyond a castrated masculine history towards a feminized (?) narrativity which is by its very nature not one, not finished, which may always give birth to another Essay. “Through our own wounds we shall be healed,” observes the card-playing priest in Across (127), and the Essay series empowers us to reread that resonant line differently, and through that rereading to remap the contours of that gargantuan aesthetic anatomy which we name Handke’s. For is it not precisely within the borders of the wounded space carved out by Handke’s pencil upon the body of his own autobiographical text that we are summoned to perform our own flawed testaments and through that spectacle of failure be made, not whole, but perhaps wholly other and new?

 

Notes

 

1. Conversations with Robert Gross, Kathleen McHugh, and John Ganim made this essay “happen.”

 

2. See for example, June Schleuter’s book.

 

3. This is a repeat of what Ihab Hassan sees as Richard Porier’s problematic attempt to mediate between the two, The Postmodern Turn, 32.

 

4. A certain “moral” disgust also permeates many of the recent conversations about Handke which I have been a party to. He was pilloried outright at a special section at the MLA in 1986, where he was accused both of selling out and of writing bad books, and in a more recent MLA session (1992), the post-presentation discussion veered strangely between an outright dismissal of his work as postmodern (which in this context, seemed to mean that it was formulaic and predictable) and a neo-conservative insistence that his art was now concerned purely with “aesthetic problems.” In less formal venues, friends of mine in Germanistik usually roll their eyes in annoyance when I tell them I work on the recent Peter Handke, while acquaintances more directly involved in the arts (in my case, a straight female sculptor from Germany and a gay American director) seem to value what he is doing now.

 

5. This sexually charged denial has been beautifully evidenced in Peter Strasser’s introduction to his essays on the author in which he declares that he has literally “fallen in love” with the work of Peter Handke twice (the first time being a “naive fascination” in contrast to the second, mature alert understanding of the object), only to insist that such a feeling ensures critical objectivity (Strasser 5).

 

6. That is not to say that Handke’s earlier work has not encountered negative reception. See Rolf Michaelis, “Ohrfeigen fur das Lieblingskind” in the Works Cited.

 

7. Skwara is a case in point. He discusses the erotic tiredness in Fatigue without realizing the role it plays–not as a state following the act, but as a replacement for the act itself.

 

8. I invoke Lyotard here, not because he is the ultimate “authority” on the postmodern, but because the tenor of his writing, his interest in language-games, and his gleeful flirtations with pessimism provide a productive ground on which to think about Peter Handke.

 

9. Bernd Magnus calls postmodern philosophy a “complex, cluster concept” which includes at least ten elements, but probably more. See “postmodern,” Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (in production).

 

10. This is a corollary to Stanley Fish’s suggestion that we ask, not what postmodernism means but what it does. See Connor on Fish, 10.

 

11. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. (Barthes 13)

 

12. An important exception to this rule is Tilmann Moser’s smart, if anxious, discussion of A Moment of True Feeling and A Sorrow beyond Dreams in his general psychoanalytic reading of contemporary German fiction.

 

13. Richard Arthur Firda is right when he links Handke and Barthes, but the connection has as much to do with erotics as with semiotics (a false dichotomy if ever there was one). See Firda, 51.

 

14. This is not to say, however, that there are not real problems with this film as bell hooks has observed in her essay.

15. I am not arguing for an interpretation of Handke in terms of “influence;” rather I am using Montaigne as a concrete example of the many occasions when Handke avails himself of the “common discursive ‘property'” of texts (Hutcheon, 124). Certainly, there are other important essayist-mediators, among them, Barthes, himself an admirer of Montaigne.

16. See Jefferson Humphries’ discussion of “matiere” in “Montaigne’s Anti-Influential Model of Identity.” In Bloom.

 

17. See Zhang Longxi’s intriguing reading of Montaigne in conjunction with representations of the Other in Western Literature.

 

18. This narrative of the interstice is one of the possible answers which Handke explores in conjunction with Lyotard’s question about the odyssey.

 

19. And also Thomas Wolfe’s You can’t go home again.

Works Cited

 

• Auerbach, Erich. “L’Humaine Condition.” In Bloom, 11-39 (originally published in Mimesis 1953).
• Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
• Bloom, Harold, ed. Montaigne’s Essays. Modern critical interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
• Brooks, Peter. “Psychoanalytic constructions and narrative meanings.” Paragraph 7, 1986. 53-76.
• Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Basil Blackwell: Oxford and Cambridge, 1989.
• Durzak, Manfred. Peter Handke und die Gegenwartsliterature: Narziss auf Abwegen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982.
• Firda, Richard Arthur. Peter Handke. Twayne World Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1993.
• Gabriel, Norbert. “Neoklassizismus oder Postmoderne? Uberlegungen zu Form und Stil von Peter Handkes Werk seit der Langsamen Heimkehr. Modern Austrian Literature 24.3/4, 1991. 99-109.
• Grass, Gunther. Cat and Mouse. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963.
• Handke, Peter. Across. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1986.
• —-. Versuch uber den gegluckten Tag. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1991.
• —-. Versuch uber die Mudigkeit. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1989.
• —-. Versuch uber die Jukebox. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1990.
• Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Ohio State, 1987.
• Hofmann, Michael. “A superior reality” [a review of Absence]. TLS May 24, 1991, N4599:20.
• Hays, Michael. “Peter Handke and the End of the Modern.” Modern Drama 23:4, 1981. 346-66.
• hooks, bell. “Representing Whiteness: seeing wings of desire.” In Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End, 1990.
• Humphries, Jefferson. “Montaigne’s Anti-Influential Model of Identity.” In Bloom, 133-44 (originally published in Losing the Text: Readings of Literary Desire, 1986).
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge: New York and London, 1988.
• Klinkowitz, Jerome and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983.
• Kritzman, Lawrence. “My Body, My Text: Montaigne and the Rhetoric of Sexuality.” In Bloom, 81-95 (originally published in the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13.1 [1983]).
• Kunzel, Uwe. Wim Wenders: ein Filmbuch. Freiburg: Dreisam, 1989. [contains an interview with Wenders concerning his collaboration with Handke for Himmel uber Berlin]
• Kuzniar, Alice. “Desiring Eyes.” Modern Fiction Studies 36.3, 1990. 355-67.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity.” In The Lyotard Reader, Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
• Magnus, Bernd. “Postmodern.” Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. In production.
• McHugh, Kathleen. “Acrostics.” In Sex? Deconstructing Madonna, Ed. Fran Lloyd. London: Batsford Press (in production).
• Metcalf, Eva-Maria. “Challenging the Arrogance of Power with the Arrogance of Impotence: Peter Handke’s somnambulistic energy.” Moder Fiction Studies 36.3 (1990).
• Michaelis, Rolf, “Ohrfeigen fur das Lieblingskind. Peter Handke und seine Kritiker.” Text + Kritik, 24/24a (1976). 80-96.
• Moser, Tilmann. Romane als Krankengeschichten. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985.
• Ortheil, Hans-Joseph. “Das Lesen–ein Spiel. Postmoderne Literatur? Die Literatur der Zukunft.” Die Zeit 24.4. 1987
• Schlueter, June. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsrugh P, 1981.
• Slovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism, Ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 11-12.
• Shooman, Diane. “From Episodic Space to Narrative Space: The Search for Unity in Peter Handke’s Fiction and the Paintings of Ursula Hubner.” MAL 23.3/4, 1990. 87-97.
• Skwara, Erich Wolfgang. “Peter Handke, Versuch uber die Mudigkeit.” World Literature Today 64:3, Summer 1990. 460-1.
• Strasser, Peter. Der Freudenstoff: Zu Handke eine Philosophie. Salzburg: Residenz, 1990.
• Vivis, Anthony. “Own goal” [review of Handke’s Versuch uber die Jukebox]. TLS N4566:1073, Oct. 5, 1990.
• White, J.J. “The elusive perfect day” [review of Handke’s Versuch uber den gegluckten Tag]. TLS N4618:34, Oct.4, 1991.
• Zhang, Longxi. “The cannibals, the ancients, and cultural critique: reading Montaigne in postmodern perspective.” Human Studies 16.51-68, 1993. 51-68.
• Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Peter Handke, Versuch uber die Jukebox.” World Literature Today 65:2, Spring 1991. 360.