Peter Handke: Stationen, Orte, Positionen ed. by Anna Kinder (review)

Just as the widely used term kafkaesque testifies to that author’s lasting impact on literature, so too the term Handkehaftigkeit, seen in a January 2013 issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, signals Peter Handke’s literary prominence. Anna Kinder introduces the volume of nine essays on Handke with this striking claim. She goes on to define Handkehaftigkeit as a contemporary benchmark for literary language and quality established by the author’s signature topoi and aesthetic approach as well as his provocative stance that frustrates attempts to describe a fixed aesthetic program and that has earned him his notoriety. This lexical testament to Handke’s literary standing can also be seen in the vast body of research on the author. Materials such as his notebooks (through 1990), letters, manuscripts, galley proofs, original scripts, press reports, statements, and interviews comprise one of the largest collections of a living author in literature archives. The analyses in Peter Handke: Stationen, Orte, Positionen focus on this research.

Based on a conference at the German Literature Archive in Marbach in February 2012, Anna Kinder’s edited volume on Peter Handke distinguishes itself from the countless others by considering the author as a research phenomenon. Accordingly, the essays explore current debates and discussions around Handke, and they discuss and record current trends in Handke scholarship. The significance of the volume’s contributions lies in the awareness they bring to the processes that create the image and understanding of an author. Suggesting how knowledge of the author and the factors that condition his writing can enrich a literary understanding of his work, the articles also imply an end to the “death of the author” in scholarship, as famously proclaimed by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.

Kinder’s informative introduction provides the framework for nine articles that are divided into the following subject areas: 1. Poetics and Politics; 2. Experience and Language; 3. Reading and Writing; and 4. Documentation. The two articles in Section I discuss Handke’s political views in relation to his aesthetic responses to the war in the former Yugoslavia. Jürgen Brokoff’s article sets the tone and revisits Handke’s changing position on the war from a neutral view into a radical attack against the media. Brokoff notes that while Handke derides the foreign press for one-sided, fabricated, anti-war propaganda, the politically infused symbols in his Yugoslavia works reveal the author’s own ideological biases in support of the war and the state-run media in the Balkans. Christian Luckscheiter’s contribution builds on the integral connection between Handke’s poetics and politics, demonstrating how stylistic choices in the Yugoslavia novels such as the detailed descriptions of seemingly trivial details (“das Nebensächliche”) reveal Handke’s political bent.

The three articles in Section II, “Experience and Language,” move from politics to a closer consideration of Handke’s literary style. The analyses explore topics such as experiences of “Eingrenzung” or “erfüllte Augenblicke” in Handke’s works—which Tim Lörke sees as a mystical experience that trains readers to live such moments; his use of “trinities”—through which, Tanja Angela Kunz claims, Handke mediates the dichotomy of “self” and “other” in the world; and Handke’s vision of art—which Katharina Pektor identifies as the attempt to objectify an eternal “mystical” experience through a process of continuous questioning and searching. Section III then turns its focus to Handke as a research phenomenon. The three analyses in “Reading and Writing” examine in particular the interplay between the physical author, his texts, archival material, and extratextual commentaries. Ulrich von Bülow demonstrates how recurring terms in Handke’s notebooks such as “Leere” or “Unauffälligkeit” draw on cornerstones of Heidegger’s philosophy that recur in the author’s literary work. Next, Malta Herwig considers what Handke’s hands (e.g., his use of them, his discussions and pictures of them) say about his aesthetic program. Dominik Srienc similarly connects the biographical author and his work by suggesting that the rhythm of Handke’s...