“Haushalten”: The Economy of the Phrase in Peter Handke's Wunschloses Unglück

Abstract

Peter Handke's Wunschloses Unglück examines the stereotypical speech patterns that help socialize individuals into stifling roles, but the narrator is gradually forced to recognize his inability to distance himself from this linguistic corpus. This article enquires into the mechanisms behind his linguistic complicity by reconstructing the novella's discourse on the practice of domestic economy. The critique of language present in Handke's texts elucidates how the deployment of fixed phrases reduces mental effort. Since he defines his writing as an expenditure of labor, however, the narrator of Wunschloses Unglück points to his own use of phrases as a form of cautious management of resources in the production of a text. He does not necessarily fail to criticize the language of a repressive social world, but he must simultaneously match his critical ambitions with the limited means at his disposal. The result is a textual strategy of quotation that appears both critical and collusive.