Blotting and the Line of Beauty: On Performances by Botho Strauss and Peter Handke

Blotting and the Line of Beauty: On Performances by Botho Strauss and Peter HandkeI ALFRED NORDMANN The performance of a text or the staging of a play is often and easily imagined as the representation, in another medium, of its content or meaning. On stage can be shown what the script merely says; the rehearsal process and the production itself thus appear as means towards the end of communicating to the audience what an author has set down on paper. When this picture of what goes on in perfonnance is extended to dance or the realization of musical scores, the notion of "representation" proves too narrow, and performances are, therefore, often said to "express" a feeling. content, or intention. While the two notions of "representation" and "expression" are theoretically rich and lend themselves to sophisticated explorations of just what it means to represent or express something. Nelson Goodman proposed that performance might be conceived also in different terms entirely. He suggests that performance can be likened to the exemplification of a pattern or form and that the transition from a dramatic text to its theatrical production involves no ontological leap into a different realm of being: the recorded piano sonata exemplifies the musical score (and vice versa) just as a swatch exemplifies a fabric (and vice versa).' On this account. the term "performance" no longer designates a set of attributes which come into play only once the text ceases merely to be read but is enacted on stage. Instead, the dramatic text is on a par with the staging in that both involve performance. both establish a form. set a pattern, or inscribe a motion: performance is the execution of a work, whether this execution takes the form of writing or reading. (en)acting or staging.3 Rather than discuss the theoretical merits of Goodman's proposal. the following investigation playfully takes it up by treating "mere" texts as performances of sorts. It does not discuss theatrical performances of the plays by Peter Handke and Botho Strauss. but seeks to appreciate how their writing performs very different motions. [ wish to clarify these differences between Handke and Strauss by comparing them to two British painters of the eighModern Drama. 39 (1996) 680 Blotting and the Line of Beauty 681 teenth century, William Hogarth and Alexander Cozens. In doing so, I am following the lead of Handke and Strauss, who themselves suggested that the antagonism of their scientific ways of literary world-making can be mapped on to the antagonism between Hogarth's and Cozens's techniques of artistic invention. This will allow me to return in a brief conclusion to further remarks on the relation between performance and script. They are reclusive, rarely appear in public, cultivating a proper distance to the culture industry and the quick circulation of ideas and trends. Peter Handke and Botho Strauss serve as high-priests of literature and guardians of the German language, and unabashedly see themselves in the long line of descent from Homer to Hblderlin to Heidegger, from Gottfried Keller to Ernst JUnger to Handke and Strauss. They are prolific and successful playwrights and selfconsciously reinvented the novel in its long and short forms; both experimented with the literary essay. Charges of mannerism, arrogance, or elitism are deflected by their earnest persistence. After all, they represent the dying breed ofthe truly sensitive person who is finely attuned and reacts viscerally to the nuances of speech. who hears the murderous in a wrong tum of phrase. Their plays create artificial and poetic worlds which take up and transcend the cultural sensibilities of a very literate middle class. Even when their plays experiment and expand the language of the theater, they arrive on stage with the assuredness of the modern classic, written for posterity.4 In the early 1980s, Handke and Strauss were considered representatives of a New Inwardness (Neue Innerlichkeit), epitomizing a kind of subjectivism which seemingly surrendered political aspirations of the sixties and seventies. For the 1996/97 season, however, the premieres of their new plays are greatly anticipated , since both have recently politicized their own work, creating considerable scandal in the literary world - Strauss claiming his poetic home on a vaguely defined...