Kyle Gillette
Stanford Drama
December 7, 2001
Words and Things:
Language, thingness, and epistemology in Handke’s Kaspar
Words and things. Chair and shoelace. Words without things. Chair without broom. Things without words. Table without thing. Closet without shoelace. Words without table. Neither words nor things. Neither words nor shoelace. Neither words nor table. Table and words. Words and chair without things. Chair without shoelace without words and closet. Words and things. Things without words. Neither word nor things. Words and sentences. Sentences: Sentences: Sentences:
—Peter Handke, Kaspar

But if things ever had already shown themselves qua things in their thingness, then the thing’s thingness would have become manifest and would have laid claim to thought. In truth, however, the thing as thing remains proscribed, nil, and in that sense annihilated. This has happened and continues to happen so essentially that not only are things no longer admitted as things, but they have never yet at all been able to appear to thinking as things.

—Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

The sentence, in Heidegger’s thinking, has always already failed to include the thing qua thing, not only in language’s long historical evolution, but more immediately in the individual subject’s passage from a nonlingual to a lingual being. To connect words as thinkable abstractions into meaningful sentences seems inherently to exclude the thingness of things and words alike. Human subjects must make words of words, and even words of things, in order to render the world coherent. That is, a word becomes useful in a lingual thought pattern only insofar as it becomes abstract and referential. Even a thing is useless to linguistic thought except to the degree in which it is not merely thingly but also objectified. An object becomes in this codifying sense its own kind of word, abstractable and thereby conceivable. As individuals pass into sanity under the totalitarian power of logos, they become speakers to the degree that they substitute words for reality. Language shapes reality, names objects, and thus defines a rigid relationship between subject and world, necessarily excluding parts of reality in favor of others and thereby codifying perception itself. As Kenneth Burke writes, language is essentially a terministic screen that filters perception by eliminating parts of perception: =Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality.= It is precisely in this deflection of reality that language does violence to that reality, absorbing objects while deflecting things (for instance), ordering the world through a manic and paradoxically delusional sanity. But this delusional sanity – a finite order based on the willful ignorance of materiality’s infinite disorder – violates nothing more than the speaker through whom language speaks. The speaker has no control over the particular order that language invents, and therefore becomes the ultimate subject of delusion. =Language speaks,= as Heidegger puts it, =not man. Man speaks only in so far as he skillfully conforms to language.= The violence of this coercive terministic screen, the sentence, drives a wedge between the speaker and her or his world.
It is fitting, then, that Jeanette Malkin would include Peter Handke’s Kaspar as the first case study in her book, Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama. As she writes, Heidegger’s assertion that language speaks through the human speaker could just as easily have been written by Handke about Kaspar, a bizarre and troubled dramatic exploration of language and epistemology. She posits the chief function of language in this play as a torturous process through which lingual codes annihilate their puppet-like speaker; she summarizes the =‘story’ of the play= as =that of one speechless man – Kaspar – and how he is created and destroyed through his forced acquisition of language.= Indeed, the character Kaspar does come to be created and destroyed in and through language, and Malkin goes on to detail language’s sinister ordering powers, but language’s violence to its speaker also precedes a conceptual structuring more specifically. The word, the phrase, and the sentence, the first units of verbal violence, structure thoughts and therefore character in a particular fashion – through a journey from the thingly to the wordly, annihilating the former in the pursuit of the latter.
In addition to revealing by this journey the sheer violence of linguistic codification, Kaspar complicates the Heideggerian thing-word issue through an application of the problem to multiple subjectivities. The other Kaspars that enter the stage (after the original Kaspar’s more infantile adventures) sometimes mimic his early explorations of thingness, sometimes undermine his later logocentrism, but always manage to re-emphasize the sloppiness and humanity of coming-into-thought. In this sense, an old philosophical issue finds human concretization through literal, actorly embodiment. Kaspar, even as it distills the philosophical challenge into a form approaching coherence, simultaneously complicates its own distillation process and brings an old abstract debate – thought through even now almost exclusively upon the page – into the grounded and gritty realm of vaudeville-esque performance. The original Kaspar’s struggle with language is cute and appealingly naïve before it becomes violent. His journey and the complex and frantic interplay of the other Kaspars potentially offers the audience something beyond – or, rather, before, conceptually prior to – illustration or elucidation. The sheer awkward humanity of the play brings the philosophical ideas back to the thingness from which they emerged, not merely representing the journey from the thingly to the wordly, but in fact enacting the journey itself in real space and time.
Language does not operate on Kaspar’s actions upon his first entrance. At this moment, Kaspar experiences the world in all its thingness, without any linguistic pattern to codify it. He is =the incarnation of astonishment,= as Handke puts it, profoundly unassuming and naive (63). Of course, part of the allure of this clownish image is that we as an audience cannot know what Kaspar is astonished about, but we can guess from his progressive disastonishment throughout the play that it has something to do with a virgin reality not yet subjugated to a codified order. Much later, after language has co-opted and ordered Kaspar’s mind, he will declare his unastonished mastery of the very things that previously astonished him, saying that =Every object/ has become/ accessible/ to me/ and I/ am receptive/ to each object= (111). If this latter self-assuredness is a delusional sanity that has falsely simplified the world through codification, then his early astonishment may result from the overwhelming materiality of perception, or the startling thingness of things. He does speak one sentence –=I want to be a person like somebody else was once= – but the sentence is obviously meaningless to him: =He utters the sentence so that it is obvious that he has no concept of what it means, without expressing anything but that he lacks awareness of the meaning of the sentence= (65). Certainly the sentence taken as such elucidates Kaspar’s crisis of character, and historically it plays on Kaspar Hauser’s famous solo sentence in the town square of Nuremberg, Germany, in 1828: =I want to become a horseman like my father once was.= But the sentence more primaly remains an ungainly thing for the character Kaspar. Words, at this point, exhibit their own sort of thingness. Kaspar uses this sentence to yell, to mourn, to speak to other things, but not at all as a sentence proper (wherein word-concepts collaborate through a particular structure to complete an idea). Before language determines Kaspar, everything remains essentially thingly.
If, as Malkin has it, language violates and destroys Kaspar over the course of the play, it does so insofar as it deflects the thingness of reality and selects the material it can use for signification. This selection and deflection extends to words and things, alienating both from the perceiver who once confronted them naively, inquisitively, and as =the incarnation of astonishment.= I will suggest here that it is precisely in the persistent confusion of words and things that Kaspar’s language and actions confound him, and through which he ultimately fails to control the monstrously independent =delusional sanity= of linguistic thought. Conceptually prior to the many readings of Handke’s Kaspar as a dramatization of Wittgenstein’s language theories, a parody of those theories, a critique of bourgeois culture, a problematization of all codified systems, a contemplation of actorly rehearsive energies, or a clash of popular and text-based performances, I propose a more basic reading (that may elucidate the basis for all other readings): Kaspar as a conceptual shift from thing as thing and even word as thing to thing as word and, as an obvious but destructive endpoint, word as word.
I mean =thing= here in the Heideggerian sense of the word, as that slippery term that Heidegger himself mostly describes in the negative. The thing is not reducible to its objecthood, which is to say its representable qualities, or to its making. It bears traits, but is not reducible to the traits or to the bearing. The thing is moreover not merely perceivable. We can perceive it, but its thingness lies not in our perception. It is formed matter, but also not essentially that because the verb =to form= privileges the process of the thing’s coming-into-being, or making, which indeed has always happened but which misleads the thinker looking for thingness. The thing poses this definitional conundrum precisely by being that which is not talked about, or that which is not incorporated in the sort of linguistic codification that destroys Kaspar. When I call something =thingly,= I essentially mean all that in relation to a thing that is not quite speakable, or that which maintains a material existence prior to thought. I will not dwell here on its onefold staying of the Earth, Sky, Divinities, and Mortals as Heidegger does in his chapter =The Thing= (from Poetry, Language, Thought, 165-186); I am primarily interested in the thing’s relationship to language.
By language I mean, of course, the codified systems of verbal signifiers that speak through us, and primarily language insofar as it operates as a Burkean =terministic screen.= Heidegger himself contemplates language’s =bidding= power in the chapter following =The Thing= (=Language=), suggesting an ultimately thingly capability through poetic attempts at the pre-objectified, but I will discuss only language’s more typical un-thingly behavior – the sort that speaks through and destroys Handke’s Kaspar. However, though language is an abstract codifying system, its material existence in words and speech can take on a thingly character as well. When I refer to the =word,= I mean either that formed aural sound created by human vocal efforts (whereby I can conceive of word as thing), or the rigid semiotic unit that makes up linguistic thought (whereby I can conceive of thing as word). Likewise, =the thing= has two meanings: that which is thingly (including, in some cases, words) or the thing itself (which can yet be rendered an object by language). If these dual meanings confuse or limit what I can write about Kaspar, it is because language limits my thoughts as it speaks through me, and will also inevitably limit the reader in the journey from the page to the mind. Language does not even simply limit or proceed awkwardly from thought; it produces and is entirely interdependent with thought. The conflation of the semioticaly wordly and the phenomenally thingly around the flexible words =word= and =thing= (and any ensuing confusion produced by this conflation) is not only unavoidable; its inevitability is precisely the subject of this paper.

Thing as Thing
Before Kaspar ever arrives on stage, Handke confronts the audience with an indecipherable set of things that have no relationship to one another or to any signifying history they might tell. These props are props as props. Indeed, =as props= already objectifies them, but this thought pattern is not dictated by any semiotic principle other than the fact that the things are on stage. As Handke writes in his introduction to the play,
On first glance, the objects on the stage look theatrical: not because they imitate other objects, but because the way they are situated with respect to one another does not correspond to their usual arrangement in reality. The objects, although genuine (made of wood, steel, cloth, etc), are instantly recognizable as props. They are play objects. They have no history. The audience cannot imagine that, before they came in and saw the stage, some tale had already taken place on it. (60)

Handke continues to refer to the things on stage as =objects,= and indeed to a degree they are just that. They mean, even if not in the way that objects usually mean. But this deliberate decontextualization from common or decipherable arrangements also privileges a thingly character in the objects’ presence. Although they may immediately begin to mean to an audience, the things do not actively signify as would, for example, furnishings arranged to indicate a living room. Handke predicts the spectator’s objectification of things; he does not dictate this objectification. In fact, he undermines the path of objectifying, insisting that =the objects are situated without any obvious relationship to each other= (60-61). The objects may even be said to contradict each other’s meaningfulness, refusing each other’s objecthood by denying each other’s context. Handke wants each spectator to come to terms with the stage things as items that are interesting or uninteresting based on the spectator’s own care. =Every theatergoer,= he insists in the introduction, =should have sufficient time to observe each object and grow sick of it or come to want more of it= (61).
Kaspar will begin the play by naïvely reproducing the spectator’s encounter with each thing’s thingness. His naïveté – or what Faye Ran-Moseley calls his =babyishness= – amounts to a humorous but appropriate stance to take in relation to thingness. After he stumbles around and tries out his original sentence with different intonations, he addresses the things on stage. He speaks to the chairs in a manner revealing his ignorance of their inanimateness, speaking his sentence to the second chair and =expressing with it that the first chair has not heard him= (66). This appeal probably does not continue long enough to personify the chairs, or even to convince a spectator of Kaspar’s delusional personification. Instead, speaking the sentence uncomprehendingly looks more like an appeal to each thing’s thingness – an earnest and simple confrontation between Kaspar and the things he has never encountered before. He continues the appeal to the table and the closet, and then goes on to disrupt each thing’s integrity, approaching, thereby, a real inquiry into its thingness. He kicks the closet, accidentally opening its doors. Within the closet hang several colorful costumes that may be, in the context of Kaspar’s infantile discoveries, a colorful representation of thingly unconcealing itself (66). To appeal to a thing’s thingness is to lean close and experience its unobjectified nearness, waiting for a phenomenological epiphany that unfolds the thing in question to the spectator as she or he has never experienced it. Kaspar confronts all of the furniture in this fashion, saying =I want to be a person like somebody else was once,= but also seeming to beckon each thing to unfold. The spectator can almost hear him whispering =thing…?= and waiting for the closet’s nonverbal reply.
All of Kaspar’s initial (prelingual) confrontations with his surroundings have this beckoning character. He begins to delve into the materiality of each thing on stage, discovering the gaps between the cushions of the sofa and pulling the drawer our of the table, scattering its contents on the floor. He becomes entangled with a chair, destroys the small table, and overturns the rocking chair (67-69). In each case, Kaspar creates a mess by probing not the thing’s meaning but its material nature. In the case of the rocking chair, he gets at the very essence of its being – at the rocking chair qua rocking chair – by forcing it to do what it does. He rocks it, over and over, more and more rapidly, until at its peak of falling over he tips it with his hand. It is tempting to think of the rocking of a rocking chair as an objectifying action: one forces a thing to conform to its manufactured purpose and furniturial utility. But the rocking of the chair is actually tied very closely to the rocking chair’s rocking-chairness, in the same way that Heidegger’s famous jug jugs by holding liquid. Even divorced from its making, the rocking chair is essentially a chair that rocks. Kaspar could hardly do better to arrive at the rocking chair’s thingness than to explore its self-evident presencing.
Of course, Kaspar does not only bid the rocking chair’s presencing – he bids it to death. If a rocking chair is a rocking chair only to the degree that it rocks, then Kaspar forces this rocking chair to presence itself so strongly that it finally loses its ability to presence at all. Once the rocking chair falls, it cannot rock, and must lose its thingness as a rocking chair qua rocking chair. This ultimately self-consuming presencing gives Kaspar a fright, and he runs away (69). The death of the rocking chair, along with the table drawer, the three-legged table, and the broom, reveals Kaspar’s essential orderlessness and incompetence before he begins to embrace language’s ordering power. Perhaps the only event that could deliver thingness more than its presencing is that presencing’s sudden cessation. This alternating presencing and unpresencing manifests thingness’ unthinkability and exemplifies the chaos of Kaspar’s preverbal world.
After the intermission, Kaspar reflects on his former preverbal state and seems grateful for his acquisition of language: =Already long/ in the world/ I realized nothing/ I wondered/ about the self-evident/ and found everything finite/ and infinite/ laughable/ every object filled me with fear/ the whole world galled me/ neither did I want to be myself/ nor somebody else/ my own hand/ was unknown to me/ my own legs/ walked of their own accord= (121-122, emphasis mine). This lingual Kaspar recalls what it was like to engage with a world that he could not appropriate. Every thing’s thingness presenced itself to him, but frightened him in its profoundness. Even his own body seemed to have thingness to it, moving by itself and defying his ability to control it. This self-thingness, or non-identity with one’s own body, parallels Kaspar’s early struggle with language as well. Speech is a part of him, it comes through him – and, importantly, emerges from the very same body that seems like a foreign thing to him – but he does not possess it. Speech, until Kaspar begins to master it, presences its own terrifying thingness.

Word as Thing
The word can never be as thingly as things. Its fundamental wordness depends on its meaning, which is always already an inherently anti-thingly process. But Kaspar’s initial words do have a thingly character in that they do not yet seem to mean for him. He speaks words that haunt and terrify him, and he thinks of those words not only as signifiers that fall short of meaning, but more basically as sounds with their own particular materiality. Still, Heidegger would never allow for words to be thought of as things, as they do not stay the fourfold unity of Earth, Sky, Divinities, and Mortals. In this sense, he would be correct to deny the word’s thingness.
But a word can have a similar phenomenological unfolding. When a thing’s thingness suddenly appears to a spectator, it seems radically new and strange. This epiphany is nearly unexaminable, but perhaps describable: a smoker suddenly becomes overwhelmed by her cigarette, throws it on the ground and shouts, =it’s on fire!= Her friend reassures her that of course it is on fire; it is a cigarette. The smoker responds, =No, but look!= She points to the cigarette on the ground, obsessed with the shape and the cinders and the way in which the cigarette consumes itself. She has smoked thousands of cigarettes, but this one has popped out of reality and revealed its thingly character. A similar unfolding occurs when a speaker repeats a single word or group of words over and over. After several repetitions, the word or sentence loses its meaning and takes on a strangeness, forcing its listener to hear the word as never before, as if listening to the word’s aural unconcealing.
Kaspar repeats the words of his original sentence (=I want to be a person like somebody else was once=) so many times from scene 4 to 17 that they can hardly help but to unconceal their strangeness exactly along these lines. Moreover, as he begins to break his sentence up into its parts, Kaspar rearranges his words into new configurations, still devoid of meaning and gradually with a greater focus on their phenomenal qualities. His =first divergence= depends on a repetition of his particular sounds: =I want to be like somebody else like somebody else once was somebody else.= He breaks the sentence into parts: =One./ Be./ Somebody./ Was./ Want./ Somebody else.= Already he begins to isolate the words’ individual meanings as well, but this process will become more sensual before it becomes more meaningful: =Waswant!/ Somelike!/ Someonce!/ SomeI!/ Besome!/ Likeonce!/ Elsh= (73). These words are no longer words at all; they are a destruction of wordness by a frustration with Kaspar’s inability to mean. He goes further still, descending into pure sound: =Olce ime kwas askwike lein.= He explores the aural qualities of individual letters, uttering =a very long e,= an =n for not quite as long a duration as the e,= a =shorter s,= a =brief, formally difficult, r= and a comically frustrating attempt at a =p,= which he =tries to stretch… like the other letters, an endeavor in which he of course fails utterly.= All the while, the Einsager (which Michael Roloff translates as =prompters=) bark orders at Kaspar: =Order. Put. Lie. Sit./ Put. Order. Lie. Sit./ Lie. Put. Order. Sit= (74), at least tonally insisting upon a clear structure. Kaspar can finally speak nothing at all, robbed of the one sentence with which to arm himself. He tries to make sounds with his feet and with objects, and even these attempts become gradually weaker until he is rendered completely silent. =His sentence,= Handke declares in the stage directions, =has been exorcised= (75).
But what about the sentence has been exorcised? Kaspar’s sentence has not up to now given him meaning. If it has meant anything at all, it has meant that it does not mean, or that Kaspar fails to mean in speaking it. The disembodied voices of the prompters try to banish the sentence’s thingness from their very first utterances. They do not yet insist on the sentence as meaningful, but they recognize the nonmeaningful value of a sentence as a tool:
Already you have a sentence with which you can make yourself noticeable. With this sentence you can make yourself noticeable in the dark, so no one will think you are an animal. You have a sentence with which you can tell yourself everything that you can’t tell others. You can explain to yourself how it goes with you. You have a sentence with which you can already contradict the same sentence. (67)

These uses for a sentence are not yet bound to semiosis, but they already shy away from the materiality of words in favor of utility. To think of anything as an instrument or tool is to think away from its thingness. And it is precisely this usefulness that fuels the prompter’s insistence on the unthingly. =The sentence,= they say, =is more useful to you than a word. You can speak a sentence to the end… . Play off one word against the other. With the sentence you can compare one word with the other. Only with a sentence, not with a word, can you ask leave to speak= (67). Embedded in this value judgment lies an implicit nod to the thingness of words when left alone. If the word is less useful on its own, both as a tool and a signifier, then it is proportionally more thingly. A word alone lacks order; it may arouse or connotate, but only through syntax can it combine with other words to attain its fullest wordness. The ordering structure of a sentence would organize the word’s power by contextualizing it, unlike Kaspar’s =sentence,= which, at least in his usage, does little more than let the sounds exist – for the most part in a consistent order, but not at all with the semiotic shapeliness that the prompters’ sentences master. The prompters thus exorcise Kaspar’s obsession with the sentence’s thingness, or rather his obsession with the sentence’s words’ thingness, demanding instead an order that renders each word particularly meaningful.
The prompters urge Kaspar toward mastery, in a move that gives him the ability to utter according to his communicative wishes. Until his mastery, Kaspar does not utter words so much as he summons each word’s mysterious thingness. Like with the terrifying thingness of things, Kaspar in his later reflections seems glad to be rid of his words’ magic. He reflects that =Once plagued by sentences/ I now can’t have enough of sentences./ Once haunted by words/ I now play with every letter.= His gladness, though, seems to proceed more directly from language’s domination of his thought than anything else, because even more than his words’ materiality, he once feared their wordness, their movement toward rational discourse: =Earlier on, each rational sentence was a burden to me/ and I detested each rational order/ but from now on/ I will be rational= (111). Kaspar simultaneously masters and becomes mastered by the sentence, rendered rational by its authority, and consequently proscribes and annihilates the thingness he once respected, even if that respect was primarily fearful.

Thing as Word
If words must conform to a structured sentence, so, eventually, must things. Language takes over Kaspar’s thinking, and in this conquest it demands an order not only to his conceptual world also but to his real world. In fact, it orders the real world through the conceptual world, vanquishing the thingness of things by the naming of things, and thereby turns the real world into not only a victim of but an extension to the conceptual world. In this process of conceptualization – an appropriation of things by words – things lose their unthinkable excess. =Each object you perceive,= the prompters tell Kaspar, =is that much simpler, the simpler the sentence with which you can describe it= (79). The things that pose such indescribable unconcealing for Kaspar in his first few minutes on stage become, through language, comprehensible objects, complex only to the degree in which his words allow them to be. Kaspar thus vanquishes his fear of thingness: =every object/ that I find sinister/ I designate as mine/ so that it stops/ being sinister to me= (112).
Of course, this terministic screen inevitably aids comprehension, but it eschews thingness in the process. Kaspar recalls his journey to cognition exactly in this way. In his infantile (or =babyish=) state, he says, =every room/ looked flat/ to me/ and hardly/ was I awake/ when the flat objects/ fell all over me/ like a dream image.= The things have a bizarre subjectivity to them, threatening Kaspar’s consciousness: =they became obstacles/ all the unknown objects/ interrogated me/ at once/ all indistinguishables confused/ my hands/ and made me wild.= He could not escape this wild confusion except by sacrificing the things that terrorized him, and he admits as much: =I was lost/ among the objects/ lost my way/ and/ to find my way out/ destroyed them.= Kaspar may seem to refer here to his literal destruction of the table and disruption of several furniture pieces, but in this context of referring to linguistic domination he at least conjures a sense of verbal violence-by-appropriation. As he claims after a short pause, his painful coming-into-language helped him =drive/ a wedge= between himself =and the objects/ and finally extirpate my babbling:/ thus the hurt finally drove/ the confusion out of me= (124). Kaspar, in his later (admittedly language-dominated) thinking, importantly aligns confusion with nearness to things, finding his only solace from confusion in a remoteness from thingness. The prompters go so far as to discount the unspoken qualities of things entirely, telling Kaspar, =if you see the object differently from the way you speak of it, you must be mistaken: you must say to yourself that you are mistaken and you will see the object= (102). Kaspar takes this advice and begins to filter all of his perception through the terministic screen of language. In this sense, he destroys his surrounding things not literally but by ignoring their nearness, which Heidegger designates as the most essential quality of thingness.
Naming things, however, does not completely write the thing out of thought. At least the thing’s material traits can continue to haunt language. Kaspar reports how colors originally confused his very ability to name:
Because the snow was white and because snow was the first white I saw, I called everything white snow. I was given a handkerchief that was white, but I believed it would bite me because the white snow bit my hand when I touched it, and I did not touch the handkerchief, and when I knew the word snow I called the white handkerchief snow: but later, when I also knew the word handkerchief, when I saw a white handkerchief, even when I uttered the word handkerchief, I still thought the word snow, because of which I first began to remember. (134)

It would be misleading to suppose, in this case, that thingness infects Kaspar’s ability to name, because the biting by the snow and the color of both snow and handkerchief cannot be called the snow’s or the handkerchief’s thingness. Both are rather merely traits that the things themselves bear, but it is interesting to note that it is the snow’s phenomenal qualities that shaped his perception, not the snow’s meaning. Kaspar recalls here a mistake that he made in his more primitive stages of language acquisition, still associating words as somehow magically tied to the objects they signify. As he comes closer to total cognition, however, he imagines a reverse order of causality, supposing the word to be the cause of phenomenal qualities:
Finally I even used the word snow, out of curiosity, for something that was not white, to see whether it would turn to snow because of my uttering the word snow, and even if I did not say the word snow I was thinking it and remembered at every sight if not the snow itself at least the word snow. (134-135)

Amazingly, Kaspar does not seem to mind that the phenomenal qualities of snow do not actually appear in the objects he experimentally names snow; it is enough that the word itself lurks in the back of his mind. In this way, he substitutes the word’s power for the thing’s qualities. The audience does not see this story take place, and it is indeed difficult to imagine when the story could have occurred, since the audience has seen Kaspar’s cognitive journey from its incognitive beginnings, all of which ostensibly occurs onstage. This story’s actuality is clearly unclear – but that fact is only peripheral to the story’s importance. The story is primarily important because it emphasizes that things will affect all thought, including the codifying thought that drives a wedge between subject and thing. Even the prompters, the authoritarian arbiters of language’s ability to proscribe and dominate, admit a relationship between material and conceptual structure. As Kaspar is =taught the model sentences with which an orderly person struggles through life,= the prompters call attention to this structural relationship: =the door has two sides: truth has two sides: if the door had three sides, truth would have three sides: the door has many sides: truth has many sides: the door: the truth: no truth without a door= (90). Whether or not this nearly nonsensical dictation represents an actual meditation on the number of sides truth has is irrelevant. Material structures, including things, certainly influence the ways in which people think.
And if things will inevitably have this effect, tyrannical language can hardly let that effect be arbitrary. Language cannot afford to leave the stage things (dis)arranged without any relationship to each other; this arrangement allows them to emit too much thingness. Hence Kaspar ties his shoes (80), tightens his belt (81), buttons his jacket (81-82), and =puts the stage in order= by righting the fallen furniture, replacing the three-legged table’s removed leg, and arranging the stage objects into a coherent and inhabitable whole. By the time he finishes, =everything on stage goes with everything else,= including his now-matching jacket and the painting and plastic fruit that he brings on stage for decoration (82-87). In this process of coherent arrangement, the stage directions also clearly make his actions subservient to the prompters’ words: =As he nears the completion of his task, his actions more and more obey the sentences of the prompters, whereas in the beginning the prompters’ sentences adjusted themselves to his actions= (83). Not only by creating what amounts to a visual sentence composed of physical words, but also through a submission of that very process to disembodied language, Kaspar renders his entire world meaningful, or wordly.
The other Kaspars that enter the stage and, in the end, subvert the original Kaspar’s authoritarianism do so in part by bringing in exaggeratedly strange things. Before the original Kaspar unwittingly deconstructs his own linguistic project, the other Kaspars pull out oversized fingernail files and file their nails, clothes, and other nearby materials (139-140). This profoundly odd preoccupation with thingness and nonsensical materiality comes long after the original Kaspar has already appropriated the stage as his real-world extension of order, and – through a reiteration of his preverbal world – undermines this newly ordered stage. As Malkin writes, these =multiple Kaspars do not act merely as reflections of the original Kaspar but also – increasingly as Kaspar becomes more like the Prompters – as rejections of the conformity which Kaspar has accepted.= Materially speaking, this conformity essentially sentences to death the thingness of things, and the other Kaspars’ rejection of that conformity would naturally take the form of reintroducing his forgotten thingness. They remind Kaspar of the thingness of things while simultaneously reminding him of the thingness of words, ultimately destroying him with thingness’ unresolvability. The cacophony they create by rubbing things together juxtaposed against Kaspar’s meticulously ordered words, along with the oddness of the things themselves juxtaposed against Kaspar’s meticulously ordered objects, becomes an aural and visual madness. This madness is made all the more mad by Kaspar’s painstaking journey to a delusional sanity that values the thing only insofar as it can be seen as an object – a kind of material word. His position of thing-as-word finally effects his destruction, unable to retain its conceptual integrity against actual thingness.

Word as Word
Kaspar’s first words following intermission still come from Kaspar’s body, but he speaks into a microphone that makes his voice sound like the voices of the prompters (121), which Handke describes earlier as eerily inhuman:
The prompters – three persons, say – remain invisible (their voices are perhaps pre-recorded) and speak without undertones or overtones; that is, they speak neither with the usual irony, humor, helpfulness, human warmth, nor with the usual ominousness, dread, incorporeality or supernaturalness: they speak comprehensibly. Over a good amplifying system they speak a text that is not theirs. (67)

The amplifying system drives a wedge between the voice and body, making text not an expressive utterance so much as pure, disembodied meaning. Perhaps most vitally, the prompters speak a text that is not theirs; they overtly manifest language’s tendency to speak through the speaker. Kaspar, in taking on this amplified voice for the remainder of the play, completes his transformation into a slave of language’s codification. Before intermission, the prompters seem to posit speaking as an expression of thought, telling Kaspar to =Say what you think. You can’t say except what you think. You can’t say anything except what you are also thinking.= These commands might have misled Kaspar into thinking of thinking as somehow prior to and productive of speech, but the prompters ease him into recognizing a more accurate and sinister relationship between language and thought:
Say what you think. Say what you don’t think. When you have begun to speak you will think what you are saying. You think what you are saying, that means you can think what you are saying, that means it is good that you think what you are saying, that means you ought to think what you are saying, that means, on the one hand, that you may think what you are saying, and on the other hand, that you must think what you are saying, because you are not allowed to think anything different from what you are saying. (100-101)

As Jerome Klinkowitz and James Knowlton note in Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation, =the speaker can control language only to the extent of initiating it – after which it systematically takes care of itself, with all the logical consequences for the speaker.= Although the prompters ease Kaspar into this realization, the fact of ultimate dependence of thought upon language becomes precisely the enslavement that destroys him. His ordered speaking affects his internal thinking, and kills within him the ability to respect the world (and the word) in its unordered thingness.
The prompters suggest a fascistic sort of joy in coming to this order, no matter what violence it has done to thingness or how painful was the ordering: =In the process of putting-into-order/ one is not as calm/ and orderly/ as later on/ when one—/ having been brought into order/ oneself/ by the thrashing one has given to/ others—/ with one’s conscience at ease/ wants to/ and can/ enjoy/ a world made orderly= (118). The prompters earlier put this ordering in terms of enlightenment, saying =[w]hat is a nightmare in the dark/ is/ joyous certainty/ in the light= (88). Enlightenment and calm both relate to certainty, a belief that the world will behave in a continuous and sensical fashion. Kaspar takes his desire for this belief to an extreme, insisting that =every word that does not mean/ well/ must be cut= and commanding some unknown listener (himself? the other Kaspars? the audience?) to =kill every paradox= (130).
This impulse to obliterate the paradoxical no longer even comes from Kaspar’s desires, but from the linguistic ordering that has taken on a life of its own. Since this ordering is also tied to curiosity and self-curiosity (the rationalist search for knowledge which always comes back to itself), Kaspar’s command of language (or its command of him) does not give him the same =joyous certainty= in relation to his idea of self as it does in relation to the world. As Robert Baker-White notes in The Text in Play, =Kaspar’s response to his accelerating linguistic competence is alienation and self-interrogation. He is, in a certain sense, unable to stop the processes of curiosity that the Einsager prompted.= Language has up to now functioned on its consuming process; Kaspar thrived on the journey of things from thingness to objecthood and the journey of words from sounds to sentences, but as language runs out of material to consume, it has left only itself. As language then consumes itself as well, it loses its pleasure and even its sanity:
with each new sentence I become nauseous: figuratively: I have been turned topsy-turvy: I am in someone’s hand: I look to the other side: there prevails an unbloody calm: I cannot rid myself of myself any more…: the pain and its end come within sight: time must stop: thoughts become very small: I still experienced myself: I never saw myself: I put up no undue resistance: the shoes fit like gloves: I don’t get away with just a fright: the skin peels off: the foot sleeps itself dead: candles and bloodsuckers: ice and mosquitoes: horses and puss: hoarfrost and rats: eels and sicklebills: (139)

Thus language turns in on itself, and the word as word deconstructs itself and its speaker by revealing the emptiness of its own rhetoric. Kaspar can no longer conceive of himself, his thoughts become reduced (no doubt through the terministic screen that deflects thoughtful complexity), and he finally descends into sheer nonsense. The word as word, by the end of the play, dies, and takes its faithful puppet with it. His last words are a repetition of the peculiar phrase =goats and monkeys,= a highly decontextualized quote from Shakespeare’s Othello. There, the title character contemptuously yells =Goats and monkeys!= as his hypocritical countrymen call him back to Venice, seeming to condemn docility and conformity (Othello, IV, i, 274). As an intertextual reference, Kaspar would then seem to condemn his own mindless conformity to language. But for most of Handke’s audience who presumably will miss the reference, =goats and monkeys= seems like either a reference to the notorious proclivity of those animals to fornication or a continuation of the nonsensical pairings of candles and bloodsuckers, ice and mosquitoes, horses and puss, hoarfrost and rats, and eels and sicklebills that directly precede it. Whether Handke intended one interpretation or the other is irrelevant; all meanings (or non-meanings) are potentially there, and together they unite into Kaspar’s final linguistic failure. He lashes out against his =screwed-over= position but only sounds ridiculous in the process.
By the end, the play’s arc has weaned Kaspar from his attention to words and things as things, instilled him with an appropriation of words and things as words, and finally stranded him in a position in which he can neither think once again of thingness nor believe in the truth of wordness. Language’s codifying process has processed him, and he realizes toward his last moments, rightly, that =[a]lready from my first sentence I was trapped= (137). This entrapment is not simply an examination of autism or a tragedy of one character; as Handke writes in his introduction, =[t]he play Kaspar does not show how IT REALLY IS OR REALLY WAS with Kaspar Hauser. It shows what IS POSSIBLE with someone. It shows how someone can be made to speak through speaking= (59). In this sense, the play is a dramatization of language’s coercive and ordering power on all speakers, on every person who attains language and thereby fails to include thingness in her or his perception. The word as word is the tool by which all subjects remove themselves from reality, indeed as a necessary prerequisite for coherence, but also as a dangerous and unstoppable self-enclosure.
Peter Handke. Kaspar and Other Plays. Trans Michael Roloff. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969. 77.
Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans Albert Hofstadter. New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, and London: Harper Colophon Books, 1971. 170.
Kenneth Burke. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1966. 45.
Martin Heidegger. Der Satz vom Grund. Pfullingen: S. Neske, 1957. 161. Qtd in and translated by Jeanette R. Malkin. Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 10.
Malkin 10.
Ibid 10.
June Schleuter. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. 49.
Robert Baker-White. The Text in Play. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999. 130. The last two “readings” of Kaspar are Baker-White’s own, of which the “contemplation of actorly rehearsive energies” is his project in this very book.
See “The Thing” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 165-86.
For a more detailed discussion of the ineptitude of these definitions, see “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, especially pp. 20-39.
Faye Ran-Moseley. The Tragicomic Passion. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. 73.
Poetry, Language, Thought 165-166.
Malkin 29.
Jerome Klinkowitz and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1983. 114.
Baker-White 138.
Malkin 31.

Works Cited

Baker-White, Robert. The Text in Play. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999.

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
University of California Press, 1966.

Handke, Peter. Kaspar and Other Plays. Trans Michael Roloff. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1969.

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans Albert Hofstadter. New York,
Hagerstown, San Francisco, and London: Harper Colophon Books, 1971.

— . Der Satz vom Grund. Pfullingen: S. Neske, 1957.

Klinkowitz, Jerome and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern
Transformation. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1983.

Ran-Moseley, Faye. The Tragicomic Passion. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

Schleuter, June. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1981.














And further down YOU WILL FIND TWO WILD PIECES BY STEPHANIE "BARBE" HAMMER, U.C. RIVERSIDE, WHO SEEMS TO HAVE KEPT MORE OF THE DANCE STEPS THAT SHE LEARNED AT THE pyramid ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE, ALTHOUGH WE NEVER MET ON THE DANCE FLOOR, THAN HAVE I WHO THEN WENT ON TO THE CLUBS THAT DIDN'T CLOSE UNTIL SUNRISE.
august 2001, michael roloff




A PHOTO OF "DIE KUECHE" LOTS OF DIFFERENT KINDS OF NEWS BELOW, WHAT OUR MAN IS UP TO, HAS BEEN UP TO RECENTLY, SAY AT PRESS CONFERENCES IN GREECE, "THE GREEK" IS A WONDERFUL REPORTER FIGURE IN THE PLAY "EINBAUM", A HANDKE MUSEUM BEING INSTALLED AT THE BOARDING SCHOOL SEMINARY THAT HE ATTENDED THE FIRST FOUR YEARS AWAY FROM HOME [ANYTHING ABOUT THE NAUSEA INDUCED BY HIS FELLOW STUDENTS' BODIES?], ETC ETC.


THESE PASTE FEW WEEKS I WAS THINKING I suppose is it news of sorts if there is NO NEWS,if our man manages to stay out of the literary and all other headlines. For there is none of any new publications or plays. The veritable orgy of self-display during the Yugoslav controversy can of course suffice for a life time.Our man even finally made the cover of a magazine, albeit be it of the fine NOVO.



Last year's UNTER TRAENEN FRAGEND, which contains the two pieces resulting from the 1999 NOTES that Handke made during his trips to Serbia that spring, was it for the year 2000. This year's Suhrkamp catalog sees the Suhrkamp Taschenbuch reprint of five terriffic earlier titles, and a "collected poems." Nor does Residenz Verlag in Salzburg offer anything new by Handke. With his NIEMANSBUCHT, that region where he lives outside Paris, so totally absorbed in the book of that name [NO-MAN'S-BAY], with the mushroom footnote LUCIE IN DEM WALD MIT DEN DINGSDA also out of his system; with ONE DARK NIGHT I WALKED OUT OF MY SILENT HOUSE the last, albeit tangential, reference to Salzburg [AND NO REGULAR OLD NOVEL ABOUT THE DREADFUL PEOPLE HE LIVED AMONGST, ALBEIT AT HIS FELSFENSTER AERIE IN THE OFFING] it may of course be possible, so I thought, that Handke is translating, an activity that he regards as the equal of original composition.

I was going to go oN speculatinG -- say, in the words of the indefatigable Erich Wolfgang Skwara's "Who knows what he's [Handke] up to now" -- when I came on the following item which I am prefacing with a wonderful quote I came upon on reading a piece in Lingua Franca why my friends the Bulgarians pretty much abstained from exterminating Jews during World War II

"Do not persecute, lest you be persecuted. For with the judgment you make, you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Know, Boris, that God watches your actions from heaven." THE METROPOLITAN OF SOFIA

GOD KNOWS HOW MURDEROUS THE CREATURES MADE IN HIS IMAGE ARE, THUS THE TABOO, AND THE INTERDICTION.


BUT BEFORE YOU READ ON TO WHAT OUR MAN IS UP TO THIS YEAR, I WANTED TO ANNOUNCE A COMPETITION THAT RELATES TO ABOVE SPECULATION: IT CONCERNS THE QUESTION WHAT HANDKE'S "ALTERS-STIL' [LATE STYLE, THE DERNIER CRU] WILL BE LIKE. HE HIMSELF BRINGS UP THE SUBJECT IN A NICELY HUMOROUS WAY IN AN INTERVIEW WITH A STERN INTERVIEWER A FEW YEARS BACK, IT'S ONE OF THE INTERVIEWS ON THE HANDKE,.YUGO SITE, AND HE MAN WHO VISITED HIM IN CHAVILLE IS EVIDENTLY A FRIEND. AND EVER SINCE I RAN ACROSS THAT BIT OF ADVANCE WARNING I'VE BEEN TRYING TO IMAGINE WHAT THAT STYLE IS LIKE. I OF COURSE HAVE GIVEN SOME THOUGHT TO THE NOW FIVE WRITING PHASES THAT OUR MAN HAS PASSED THROUGH. TO PUT IT IN TELEGRAPHIC TERMS [1] HORNISSEN/HAUSIERER/GOALIE
[2] SHORT LETTER/MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING/WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
[3] SLOW HOMECOMING/KINDERGESCHICHTE/ CHINOIS DE DOULEUR
[4] THE REPETITION
[5] THE THREE ASSAYINGS/NO-MAN'S BAY/ DARK NIGHT
CERTAINLY PHASE FIVE IS A WELL MATURED STYLE, NOT THAT I LIKE THE WORD STYLE IN THE CONTEXT OF HANDKE
STYLE IS ALWAYS IDIOSYNCRATIC, HANDKE PERSONALLY MAY BE A BIT OF AN ODDBALL, BUT HIS STYLE IS NOT...

HOW "URWORTE ORPHISCH" [GOETHE] WILL THE LATE STYLE BE? CERTAINLY, ONE COULD EVEN MAINTAIN THAT THERE ARE NO PHASES, THOUGH I AM AS INTERESTED IN THE TRANSITIONAL BOOKS, SUCH AS LEFT-HANDED WOMAN, AS THE DEMONSTRATION OF TOTAL MASTERY, SUCH AS "THE ASSAYING OF THE DAY THAT WENT WELL" , AS I CALL "vERSUCH UEBER DEN GEGLUECKTEN TAG"


MORE LIKELY THAN NOT, HANDKE'S FIRST ASSAYING OF HIS "ALTERS STIL" WILL ALSO HAVE SOMETHING TENTATIVE ABOUT IT. MUCH AS HE CAN GRASP THE READER BY THE SYNTACTICAL HAIR, YET THERE IS ALSO A TENTATIVE QUALITY TO HIS OPENINGS, AT THE BEGINNING OF A NEW PHASE THERE IS... SO THE QUESTION REMAINS: HOW "URWORTE ORPHISCH" [GOETHE] WILL IT BE?
THINK OF HANDKE'S FIVE PERIODS, OF HIS EXTRAORDINARY VERSATILITY, WHAT MOUNTAINS REMAIN TO BE CONQUERED?

AT ANY EVENT: SINCE HANDKE WILL BE 60 YEARS OLD IN ANOTHER YEAR, AND SINCE IT IS MY GUESS IS THAT HE WILL LIVE UNTIL AGE 85, HIS GRANDFATHER'S AGE AT THAT MAN'S DEATH, UNLESS HANDKE HAS SET HIS SIGHTS ON OUTDOING ERNST JUENGER: AS OF 2002 OUR MAN WILL BE AT ANOTHER STAGE OF THE CONSOLODIATION OF HIS ACHIEVEMENTS.

THE COMPETITION REQUIRES THE SUBMISSION OF ONE PAGE THAT I WILL JUDGE TO COMING CLOSEST TO THE STYLE THAT HANDKE WILL USE IN A BOOK THAT IS WRITTEN IN 2001 OR LATER. THE PRIZE IS A COPY OF THE 50 LETTERS THAT HANDKE HAS WRITTEN THIS SITE MASTER, MICHAL ROLOFF. THE SUBMISSIONS, WHICH NEED TO BE IN GERMAN, WILL ALL BE PUBLISHED ON THIS SITE, OR PERHAPS I WILL CREATE ANOTHER SUBSITE JUST FOR THIS THE CONTEST. I MYSELF AM NOT PLANNING ON BEING AROUND AFTER AGE 75, WHICH MEANS I MIGHT BE AROUND FOR ANOTHER TEN YEARS OR SO. THE SUBMISSIONS MUST BE submitted to "webmaster@handke.scriptmania.com

THERE ARE A FEW RULES I THINK I NEED TO INSTITUTE: EMPLOYEES OF HANDKE'S GERMAN LANGUAGE PUBLISHERS, SUHRKAMP VERLAG or RESIDENZ VERLAG ARE EXCLUDED, AS ARE EMPLOYEES [INCLUDING "SIGNIFICANT OTHERS"] OF ANY OF HANDKE'S NON-GERMAN PUBLISHERS. SO ARE FRIENDS OF PETER HANDKE, SUCH AS ERICH WOLFGANG SKWARA, WHO HAS THE TALENT TO IMAGINE WHAT SUCH A STYLE MIGHT BE LIKE, BUT TO WHOM HANDKE USED TO READ PASSAGES FROM FORTHCOMING TITLES, SO ARE ALL LOVERS OF ANY KIND WHO MIGHT HAVE ESCAPED WITH THE STRAY PAGE...

NOW THE VERY INTERESTING BIT OF NEWS:

"...UND PETER HANDKE, FUER SEIN POLITISCHES SERBIAN-ENGAGEMENT KRITISIERT, BRINGT "DIE KUECHE" MIT EINEM SERBISCHEN ENSEMBLE AN DIE RUHR

http://www.ruhrfestspiele.de

La Cuisine Ein Projekt von Peter Handke und Mladen Materic Gastspiel Theatre Tattoo in Zusammenarbeit mit Theatre Garonne, Toulouse und mit Art Bureau Muenchen Auffuehrungen im Kleinen Theater im Ruhrfestspielhaus 21. Juni, 20.00 Uhr Premiere Weitere Vorstellungen 22. Juni, 20.00 Uhr; 23. Juni, 19.00 Uhr und am 24. Juni, 18.00 Uhr

Finden Sie, die Kueche ist ein ungewoehnliches Thema fuer einen Theaterabend? Befuerchten Sie vielleicht, dass Sie den ganzen Abend zusehen muessen, wie andere essen? Haben Sie schon darueber nachgedacht, was sonst noch alles in einer Kueche passiert? Abgesehen davon, da hier gekocht und gegessen wird, wird in Kuechen gestritten, geliebt, gezeugt, gelacht, verletzt, verbrannt, gewuetet, geschrieen, gehasst, gelitten, geredet, geweint und noch vieles mehr. Es kann also spannend werden. In der Kueche vereinen sich die Elemente, hier trifft Feuer auf Wasser, Pflanze auf Tier, hier spielt sich das Leben ab. Die Kueche ist Hort der Nahrung und des Abfalls, der Einsamkeit einer Fertigmahlzeit und des taeglichen Familienrituals. Hier scheiden sich die Geister und Generationen, und hier geht die Liebe durch den Magen. Es gibt die Kueche der Reichen und die der Armen; der Unterschied ist nicht immer offensichtlich. Es gibt die Kueche des 18. Jahrhunderts, die Kueche mit oder ohne Elektrizitaet, mit oder ohne fliessendem Wasser, die in Toulouse oder Moskau, die der Antike mit Goettern im haeuslichen Herd und die, die von ihrer Herrschaft nie betreten und zum Reich der Bediensteten wurde. Es gibt Kuechenlieder und Kuechengedichte, Kuechengemaelde und Kuechenfilme, und dies ist eben ein Kuechendrama. Mladen Materic, Gruender der Gruppe Theatre Tattoo, hat sich zusammen mit seinem Ensemble diesen Wohnraum, der soviel mehr ist als ein blosses Zimmer, zum Ausgangspunkt eines seiner ganz besonderen Projekte erkoren. Die serbisch-franzoesische Gruppe wurde Anfang der 80er Jahre in Sarajevo ins Leben gerufen und hat seitdem durch aussergewoehnliche Produktionen Aufsehen erregt. Mit ihrer Suche nach einer neuartigen Theatersprache hat sich das Theatre Tattoo immer wieder um den Kern einer grundlegenden Erkenntnis bewegt: Da sich die menschlichen Beziehungen in Wahrheit jenseits der Worte und ihrer Bedeutungen abspielen. Fast ohne Sprache gehen sie tief auf die Ablaeufe und Emotionen des Zusammenlebens ein und zeigen so die Tragik und Komik der Zustaende menschlicher Existenz. Auch Die Kueche ist Theater fast ohne Worte. Ihre Projekte wurden zunaechst im ehemaligen Jugoslawien, dann auch international von Kritik und Publikum enthusiastisch aufgenommen. Mit Auftritten bei grossen europaeischen Festivals machte sich die Gruppe in der Theaterwelt einen Namen. 1992 kam das gesamte Ensemble von Sarajevo nach Toulouse. Cooperationen mit renommierten franzoesischen Theatern folgten. Dass die serbische Gruppe ihr neuestes Projekt zusammen mit dem Autor Peter Handke entwickelt, liegt nahe. In juengster Zeit provozierte Handkes Engagement fuer Serbien, das auch in seinem Stueck Die Fahrt im Einbaum oder Das Stueck zum Film im Krieg (1999) deutlich wurde, im deutschsprachigen Raum kontroverse Reaktionen. Bekannt wurde Handke als Theaterautor mit seiner fruehen dramatischen Produktion (Kaspar, Publikumsbeschimpfung), in der es um die Verneinung aller theatralischen Konventionen geht; in seinen spaeteren Dramen schuf er mittels hochstilisierter Sprache eine an imposanten Bildern reiche, zeitlose Buehnenwelt.

Alas, it is a sign of true toryist arrivistentum once an artist becomes too preoccupied with the preparation of food...
I HAD WONDERED A LONG TIME WHY HANDKE DID NOT DIRECT PLAYS AND ONLY THE OCCASIONAL FILM, AND HAD CONCLUDED THAT HIS DIFFICULTY WITH THE PROXIMITY OF BODIES MILITATED AGAINST A KIND OF BRECHTIAN ENDEAVOR IN THAT RESPECT. HOWEVER, READERS OF "UNTER TRAENEN FRAGEND" MAY HAVE NOTICED THAT HE, WHO COULD BE SUCH A DIFFICULT HOST, WAS ASTONISHED BY THE HOSPITABLENESS OF THE SERB PEOPLE... WELL, WAR TIME BRINGS US CLOSER, MAKES US HUDDLE TOGETHER. WELL, MY SPECULATIONS FIND PETER HANDKE if not in SERBIA, at least REHEARSING with Yugoslavs, A NEW CHAPTER IN OUR MAN'S LIFE, WHICH WAS DUE FOR ANOTHER CHAPTER...THE QUESTION IS WHAT IS "DIE KUECHE"??? THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION READS VERY MUCH LIKE THE WORDS OF PETER HANDKE. AND WHO IS ITS' AUTHOR. All the people, a multi-cultural project if ever there was one.

APRIL 3, 2001


NACHRICHTEN NEWS NOTIZIAS NOVIDADES....
Handke-Museum / Griffen ergriffen
DPA. Im Geburtsort des oesterreichischen Schriftstellers Peter Handke, der kleinen Gemeinde Griffen in Kaernten, soll ein Handke-Institut eingerichtet werden. Der wissenschaftliche Leiter des Projektes, der Philosoph und Germanist Bernd Liepold-Mosser, plant die Einrichtung einer oeffentlichen Bibliothek fuer Handkes Gesamtwerk und zum Auftakt eine biographische Ausstellung. Ausserdem soll das Wiener Burgtheater mit Handkes Weissagung und Selbstbezichtigung in Griffen gastieren. Der Dichter, heisst es, begruesse die Initiative.
Datenbank BAZ

Meeting of journalists on Kosmet: Lies and manipulations in the service of politics
April 01, 2000

Journalists step forward against manipulations

Athens, March 31st - Two-day talks between the Greek and foreign journalists were completed today in Athens, titled "War and information - the Kosovo experience", held in the Journalist Association of the Athens daily press.

Aside from the local journalists, Robert Fisk from the "Independent", Philip Nightly from the "Sunday Times", John Pilger from the "Statesman", Eva Ann Prentice from the "Times" and the renowned writer, Peter Handke, participated in the meeting.

The Greek daily, "Elefterotipia" has, while evaluating the assembly, stressed that the Greek media, regardless of the fact that some of them are being accused of "Serbophilia", have mainly in an accurate and timely manner, published information regarding the events in Kosmet and the bombing of Yugoslavia.

The Greek daily devoted most of its attention to the statements made by the veteran journalist of the British "Independent", Robert Fisk, who spoke of the war against Yugoslavia mainly by viewing the consequences of the bombing and by comparing them to the consequences of the bombing of Iraq.

Fisk reminded that ten years after the war in the Gulf, thousands of people are struck with diseases and the "Gulf syndrome", and that, among the sick, there are some veterans of the allied forces, and added that the number of victims in Iraq is still increasing.

"What will happen to Kosovo where bombs with Depleted Uranium were also used", asked Fisk, adding that still there are no NATO official reports on the consequences of the bombing of Yugoslavia. This British journalist asked Jamey Shea the same thing, but always received calming answers saying that this kind of lethal weapon, which NATO uses in its newest operation, "is not dangerous".

"This was a great lie they told to the journalists, because I have in my possession a classified document with a report in which it is clearly stated that the use of bombs with DU is very dangerous for the environment", stated Fisk.

Answering Handke's question - why did not he publish all that in his country and other NATO member-states, Fisk said that he just made agreements for series of visits to US cities where he would speak of the consequences of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

According to "Elefterotipia", Fisk has, while answering the question regarding the bombing of the RTS (Serbian Broadcasting Co.) building in Belgrade, said that "the moment when you start killing people just because you do not like them and because they do not speak the same things as you do, you are drastically changing the rules of war".

Peter Handke, an Austrian writer, speaking about his experience during his stay in Serbia under NATO bombs, bitterly stated that "unfortunately, thanks to the media, an image of an executor was made out of the Serbian people" and that mass media do not longer exist.

"NATO is a gangster organization. In fact, NATO is worse than gangsters, because it is hiding behind the mask of morality, putting its efforts in, allegedly, higher humanitarian goals", stated Handke.

"Germany has", he added, "destroyed the most beautiful 'state utopia' which existed - former Yugoslavia, because they could not stand a country which had a future in every aspect possible. By killing Serbs, the Germans and the Austrians "wash their hands" and clear their conscience of the crimes they committed against the Jews in the WW II".

While talking about the policy of manipulation, Handke stated that there is no leadership of a sovereign country, which would accept the planted offer from Rambouillet.

Everything was a farce and a premeditated game in which, from the start, NATO had a planned scenario of the development of the situation, stated Handke.

The other participants of the two-day meeting, Pilger, Nightly and Prentice also spoke of the obvious "media manipulation" in which "truth was sacrificed" in order for certain political interests to be achieved.
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Email: mirs@srbija-info.yu

FURTHER REVIEWS OF CURRENT WORK CAN BE FOUND ON THE reviews PAGE OF THIS SITE, but especilly at the
HANDKEPROSE.SCRIPTMANIA.COM news page; and the HANDKEDRAMA.SCRIPTMANIA site & also at the HANDKEYUGO.SCRIPTMANIA.COM site

RICHARD BERNSTEIN WROTE A HALFWAY THOUGH NOT ESPECIALLY WELL-INFORMED REVIEW OF "One Dark Night I Left My Quiet House" in a late November issue of the NY Times Daily, a first after 35 years. A singularly stupid review by the Pulitzer PriZe winner Margot Jefferson of Three Essays a few years back had been Handke's only other appearance on the daily's book pages these many years.
A fine Viennese Review of NIGHT can be found on the REVIEW PAGE of this SITE. My own "commentars" - not a review is there too, as well as a slew of other interesting reviews.

THE EARLY SEPTEMBER ISSSUE OF THE NY REVIEW CONTAINS A SINGULARLY STUPID REVIEW BY ONE J.S. MARCUS, WHICH WILL BE DISMEMBERED HERE IN THE FORM OF A LETTER TO THE EDITOR. IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN ANTICIPATED THAT "MARK WINNER NYRB", ONE OF THE "INTERNATIONALS" WHOM HANDKE HAS POP UP IN HIS FILMPLAY ABOUT THE WAR [DUGOUT CANOE] MIGHT FIGHT BACK, BUT THAT THAT FIGHTING WOULD TAKE THE FORM OF A NON- AND MIS-READING IF AT ALL READING OF THE TEXTS IS WHAT I TRY TO ADDRESS.
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Handke's interview from Spring 1999, on his return from Serbia and matters pertaining to that controversy can be found on the "handkeyugo.scriptmania.com" sub-site that can be accessed directly throug he LYNX page on this site.
It is always good to see what a controversial author says before reading the conclusions that others, including myself, may draw from it. I myself took the occasion of Handke's intervention to try to puzzle out the reasons for his slavic connection, overdetermined as usual, complicatedly configured, in a little book entitled
'SORTING OUT HANDKE'S SLAVIC CONNECTION' which Franz Angst of Wages of Anguish Publications has been so kind as to express the willingness to publish if ever I can put the finishing touches to it. A year and a half after the Kosovo war, subsequent to the fading of Miloscevics, it would be interesting to find out how the various Serbian factions feel about Handke's intervention. I myself, retrospectively, am most impressed by the degree to which Handke's "amour fou" invested Serbians with the kind of inviolable idealization ususally reserved... yes, for an "amour fou".
ALLTHOUGH IT SEEMS TO HAVE UPSET OUR MAN THAT THE "CORRIERE DE LA SERRA" CALLED HIM A "CRIMINAL" FOR THE POSITION HE TOOK ON MATTERS SERBIAN IN 1996, THIS DOES NOT KEEP HIM FOR GIVING AN INTERVIEW TO THE PAPER IN THE YEAR 2000.

AnlÃÃÆ’â€Â ÃƒÆ’¢â‚¬â„¢esslich des kulturellen Widerstands gegen Haider hat sich der Oesterreichische Autor Peter Handke mit dem ihm ueblichen Sarkasmus in der italienischen Tageszeitung "Il Corriere della Sera" geauessert. Dabei verglich er die europaeischen Reaktionen auf Oesterreich und den Boykott der EU mit dem Eingreifen im Kosovo-Konflikt: "Die Loesung lautet wahrscheinlich, dass die NATO Wien bombardiert, so, wie sie das mit Belgrad gemacht hat. Und danach, sofern das noetig ist, auch Djakarta und Moskau". Erst dann sei die Welt nach europÃÃÆ’â€Â ÃƒÆ’¢â‚¬â„¢ischer Sicht wohl wieder in Ordnung. Haider, so Peter Handke mit Verweis auf Lionel Jospin, Jacques Chirac und Tony Blair, sei nicht gefÃÃÆ’â€Â ÃƒÆ’¢â‚¬â„¢ehrlicher als andere europaeische Politiker. Auch wenn jenen keine faschistischen ÃÃÆ’â€Â ÃƒÆ’¢â‚¬â„¢usserungen nachzuweisen seien, habe Europa "nach seinem faschistischen Gewaltakt gegen Jugoslawien keinerlei Recht, Oesterreich moralisch zu beurteilen". In diesem Sinne schliesst sich Handke der Ansicht Joerg Haiders an, die EuropÃÃÆ’â€Â ÃƒÆ’¢â‚¬â„¢er sollten sich um ihre eigenen Angelegenheiten kuemmern. Dennoch beruhe Haiders Haltung auf falschen Argumenten, betonte Handke gegenueber dem "Corriere della Sera". und bezeichnete den KÃÃÆ’â€Â ÃƒÆ’¢â‚¬â„¢rntner Landeshauptmann als "ungeschicktes Grossmaul ohne Substanz".
THIS INTERVIEW WAS GRANTED TO THE SAME PAPER THAT HAD CALLED HANDKE A CRIMINAL IN IN THE 90S FOR HIS POSITION ON THE YUGOSLAV CONFLICTS, AN APPELATION THAT SEEMED TO HAVE CONSIDERABLY UPSET OUR MAN, AS YOU CAN DISCOVER IN A LETTER OF HIS ON THE
handkeyugo.scriptmania. com SITE

That status of the various sub-sites is described on the PURPOSE PAGE

michael roloff may 2001
webmaster@handke.scriptmania.co


Die Uni Eichstaett und Peter Handke:
Der ungeschickte Ehrendoktor

Als selbsterklaerter Serbenfreund ist er nach Jugoslawien gefahren, um sich mit der dortigen rechtmaessigen Regierung solidarisch zu erklaeren. Und er ist Ehrendoktor der Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftlichen Fakultaet. Vor fuenf Jahren hatte die Uni Eichstaett den Autor Peter Handke fuer sein schriftstellerisches Gesamtwerk geehrt - aus tiefem Respekt vor seiner Arbeit und durchaus im Bewusstsein, dass er ein sehr provokanter Mensch ist. Darum zeigt sich Unipraesident Ruprecht Wimmer nicht besonders schockiert von Handkes neuesten Aktionen.


Peter Handke (Foto: Residenz Verlag).
Handke war immer ein Mann, der durch sehr ungeschuetzte AEusserungen auffiel. Wir haben dafuer auch in diesem Fall Verstaendnis und reagieren nicht sofort allergisch , sagt Wimmer. Bei einem so hochsensiblen Autor wie Handke muesse man eben auf denkerische Knicke in der Biographie gefasst sein.

Dennoch: Solidaritaet mit Serbien, Rueckgabe des Buechner-Preises und Austritt aus der katholischen Kirche aus Protest; dazu noch Beschimpfungen der Nato-Angriffe als eines der groessten je veruebten Verbrechen - besonders schmuecken kann sich die Uni Eichstaett mit Handke zur Zeit nicht. Darum will sich Wimmer inhaltlich auch von ihm distanziert wissen: Ich finde es ungeschickt, sich mit solcher Wildheit fuer eine Partei zu erklaeren, die im Verstaendnis der demokratischen Welt wohl eher die schuldigere ist.

Fuer den Praesidenten und die Unileitung stand aber dennoch von Anfang an fest: Eine Aberkennung der Ehrendoktorwuerde - prinzipiell moeglich bei sogenanntem unwuerdigen Verhalten - kommt in diesem Fall nicht in Frage. Wimmer: Handke kann von uns nicht verlangen, dass wir ihm beipflichten. Aber dass wir ihm die Freiheit lassen, das zu tun, was er fuer richtig haelt.

Die einmal verliehene Wuerde bedeute schliesslich nicht, dass die Universitaet zur Aufpasserin seines weiteren Lebensweges werden muesse. Und schon gar nicht, bei Handlungen, die ihr nicht gefallen, die Ehre sofort zu entziehen. Zumal man bei einem Autor wie Handke ja nie wissen koenne, wie es weiter geht: Es waere doch zum Beispiel - so Wimmer - eine unmoegliche Situation, wenn er dann wieder in die Kirche eintreten wuerde: Sollen wir ihm dann die Ehrendoktorwuerde zurueckgeben?

10.05.1999 Antje Kueckemanns



Mitterhofer Hermann
Die deutschsprachige Presse und der Krieg in Bosnien. Eine Analyse journalistischer Kollektivsymbolik und elementar ideologischer Analogien anhand ausgewaehlter Texte unter Anwendung der Diskurstheorie Juergen Links
The German-speaking press and the war in Bosnia. An analysis of collectiv-symbols of journalism and elementary ideological analogies based on a variety of texts using Juergen Links theory of discourse

Pagination: 205 p.

Publikationsdatum: 03/1999

Sprache: deutsch

Affiliation: UIGW500; Universitaet Innsbruck;
Geisteswissenschaftliche Fakultaet;
Institut fuer Politikwissenschaften

Begutachter: Rosenberger Sieglinde
Gaertner Reinhold


Akad. Grad: Dr. phil.

Schlagworte deutsch: Link Juergen; Bachtin Michail; Gramsci Antonio; Foucault Michel; Althusser Louis; Mocnik Rastko; deutschsprachige Presse; journalistische Kollektivsymbolik; Balibar Etienne; Handke Peter; Diskurs; Ideologie; Hegemonie; Kollektivsymbol; Subjektkonstituierung; Bosnien; Deutschland; Nationalismus; Bosnien-Krieg;

Schlagworte englisch: Link Juergen; Bachtin Michail; Gramsci Antonio; Foucault Michel; Althusser Loius; Mocnik Rastko; German-speaking press; war in Bosnia; Balibar Etienne; Handke Peter; discourse; ideology; hegemony; collectiv-symbol; constitution of subject; Bosnia; Germany; nationalism;

Zusammenfassung englisch:
In the preface of this work I present the thesis that the pictures of Trnopolje and Omarska (Bosnia) from August 1992 - during the first time of war in Bosnia - represent a discursive occurrence: the discursive reproduction of a dominant collective-symbol, the collective-symbol concentration camp. In chapter 2 I argue and demonstrate how the pictures were seen in German-speaking newspapers from August 1992. The main idea of this chapter is that the reception of the pictures actualizes specific notions, semantic fields, etc. of the discourse about Nazi-concentration camps. In relation to Juergen Links (University of Dortmund, Germany) method of discourse-analysis, general dimensions of the structure of journalistic discourses are being examined closely. Chapter 3 deals with the discursive meaning of this actualization for the political discourse in Germany in relation to the German reunification. In this context the German demands for a normal position in foreign policy, a so called neue Normalitaet, need to be discussed. A new hegemonic discourse-position comes to the forefront: this position constructs a discursive antagonism (Ernesto Laclau) we (Europe) vs. the Serbs and rearticulates different discourse-positions using other dominant collective-symbols. This rearticulation causes a shift on the symbolic left/right-axis. The elementary ideology of this discourse-position is nationalism (Etienne Balibar). One may argue that this new hegemonic discourse-position relativizes the meaning of the signifier Auschwitz. In chapter 4 I analyze the debate on Peter Handkes essay Eine winterliche Reise zu den Fluessen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit fuer Serbien at the beginning of 1996 in German-speaking newspapers. The analyzing method of this work is based on the theory of discourse by Juergen Link. In chapter 1 this method is understood as a possibility of articulation of the Marxist theory of ideology according Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser on the one hand and to Michel Foucaults theory of discourse (The Archaeology of Knowledge) on the other hand. In the center of interest are such notions as discourse, collective-symbols, etc. I attempt an articulation of the method described above with Louis Althussers theory of ideological interpellation and its reinterpretation by Rastko Mocnik.

Availability: Universitaetsbibliothek der Universitaet Innsbruck,
Innrain 50, A-6010 Innsbruck, Austria