The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke by June Schlueter (review)

242 Book Reviews and contemporary solutions to the problems inherent in arts management, and such programs would have a great impact on the national scene. Finally, for those readers interested in starting their own theatres, the book comains much useful infonnation on perfonnance codes and methods of raising money especially the need to tap large corporations; data about such helpful organizations as the Off-Off-Broadway Alliance (OOBA), Theatre Development Fund (TDF), Foundations for the Extension and Development of the American Professional Theatre (FEDAPT). National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). artist collectives, and theatre consortia, as well as about bridge-financing at little or no interest - all this material presented clearly to the reader. I find this book indispensable for the theatre student, theatre professional, and anyone truly interested in the survival of our artists and our art institutions. MICHAEL E. RUTENBERG, HUNTER COLLEGE JUNE SCHLUETER. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke. Pittsburgh: University of Pillsburgh Press t9BI. Pp. xiii, 213· $ t3·95; $7.95(PB). June Schlueter's study of Peter Handke is a survey of Handke's plays and novels from the speech-plays ("Sprechstilcke," 1966-67) through The Left-Handed Womall (1976), with references to his biography, earlier works, essays, and poems, and a preview of The Weight of the World (1977) and Slow Homecoming (1979). The book includes an interview with Handke, and a bibliography of his writings (except for single editions of They Are Dying Ollt, 1974) and of publications on Handke. Quotations are given in the original and English translation. Schlueter emphasizes that Handke's works are examinations of language and literary tradition. Citing Jakobson and Lukacs, she interprets even the autobiographical A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972) as an analysis of the artistic convention of rea1ism (pp. 124-30). Although her concentration on language is consistent with her quotations from Handke's essays and interviews, she tends excessively to insulate his plays and novels from the nonliterary world. Many of his works can be read as cultural criticism, an approach which is especially suitable for the third-person autobiographical sketch Killdergeschichte (Children's Story, 1981) and the play Uber die D6ifer (Over the Villages, 1981). In these two most recent books, Handke continues his attack on sloppy and deceptive language, but devotes more attention to interaction among people and to the ideals of tradition, nature, and hannony. To be sure, Handke has a habit of overturning interpretations of his Q?uvre with each new book. Consistent with her perspective, Schlueter interprets Handke's plays as "a selfconscious theater which exists not mimetically but as its own spontaneous, self-defining reality" (p. 70). The speech-plays are discussed as attempts to heighten audience awareness of language and the theater through the irritatingly extensive use of cliches. Schlueter traces the hero's forcible education in Kaspar (1968) without considering the paradoxical double function of language, which both subjugates Kaspar to the social order and enables him to subvert order. In her interesting chapter on My Foot My Tutor (I969), she comments on the scenes which do not illustrate the characters' master-slave Book Reviews 243 relationship. She adopts the standard interpretation of Quodlibet (1970) as an exposure of conditioned responses to language, adding that the play "point{s] to the equivocal nature of a language that can distort reality as well as control it" (p. 61). Similarly, The Ride Across Lake Constance (197 I) is "an attempt to disturb our comfortable sense of the way language corresponds to our perceptions ofreality" (p. 67). Schlueter sees They Are Dying Out as a work in which aesthetics is more important than economics: "For the artist himself, for Handke, the tragedy expands beyond the world ofthe play. accounting for QUitt's - and modern man's -loneliness and alienation in terms of no less magnitude than the decline of western civilization and the consequent loss ofa poetic language" (p, 110). Yet she finds some hope in the survival of Qmtt's servant Hans, whose development she analyzes well. In discussing the plays, she comments on performances. Schlueter's contribution to Handke scholarship is limited by her ideological preoccupations, of which the last quotation is typical, and her apparently inadequate...