Peter Handke's Landscapes of Discourse. An Exploration of Narrative and Cultural Space by Christoph Parry

Abstract

284 Reviews of the intellectual debates of the late twentieth century. Grotesque Ambivalence. Melancholy andMourning in the Prose Work ofAlbertOrach sets a new standard for the discussion of thework of Drach and may serve as a conceptual paradigm for the discussion of other Central European writers. University of Illinois at Chicago Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Peter Handke's Landscapes ofDiscourse. An Exploration ofNarrative and Cultural Space. By Christoph Parry. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press. 2003. 251 pp. $29.00. isbn 1-57241-12 l-x. In an essay published over twentyyears ago, Manfred Durzak criticizes Handke's prose for being both banal and artificial ('Handkes "neues Gesetz": die Entdeckung der Natur', in Zu PeterHandke. Zwischen Experiment und Tradition, ed. by Norbert Honsza [Stuttgart, 1982], pp. 101-17). The effect isdeliberate, insofar as Handke sees banality as one of the things that bind us and artificiality as a hallmark of the literary text.The risk is that these qualities consign one of the most interesting contemporary writers in any language to an undeserved obscurity, and in this respect Christoph Parry's book offers a welcome overview of and way into Handke's novels from the 1970s to the 1990s. As the title suggests, Parry's treatment turns on the 'possible uses towhich landscape can be put in writing and the kind of poetics and aesthetics they imply' (p. 5). He begins with a discussion of the cultural status of nature and landscape, considering both the conventional 'framing' of nature in art and its function as a token of 'otherness'. A discussion of Handke's Die Lehre der Saint-Victoire follows, then four longish chapters treat the novels (Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied, Die Stunde derwahren Empfindung, Langsame Heimkehr, Die Wiederholung, Die Abwesenheit,Mein Jahr in derNiemandsbucht). The penultimate chapter gives a succinct if somewhat tangential overview of debates surrounding Handke's controversial support of Serbia, followed by amore theoretical conclusion about the 'fundamental connection' (p. 230) between spatial ambiguity and Handke's ambivalent narratives. Parry somewhat simplistically associates nature's 'otherness' with the visual plane of landscape, contrasting itwith the temporal plane of narrative. This touches on another point of Durzak's critique, thatHandke's 'kompilatorische Beschreibungsaddition' (Durzak, p. 109) disregards Lessing's distinction in the Laoko?n essay between painting as representing objects and writing as representing events. Parry does not take Handke to task for the stasis that characterizes his texts, rather celebrating their visuality and their 'spatial' aesthetic as an increasingly marked departure from conventional narrative's reliance on linear, event-oriented plot. Thus, in the earlier Der kurze Brief landscape is deployed as a shared reservoir of cultural images, quoting such visual 'intertexts' as John Ford's Westerns, and deploying genre clich?s ? here, the road novel, Bildungsroman and crime fiction. In the later works, landscape also contributes to Handke's strategy of narrative unhinging. The absence of place names in Langsame Heimkehr is symptomatic of this, as is the uncertain AUSTRIAN STUDIES, I3, 2OO5 285 demarcation between objective narration and subjective impression in Die Stunde. Though not signalled in the titleor in the (more stylish than useful) chapter titles,Parry's book is as much about Handke's narrative technique as it is about his representation of nature and landscape. But at variance with any 'otherness' of nature, the visual dimensions of Handke's texts are said to represent the 'process of observation itself (p. 34), precipitating a subjectivization of nature: in Langsame Heimkehr the natural world supposedly belongs to the geologist Sorger as a painting belongs to a painter. Of course thisunremittingly subjective focus has been associated with narcissism, but Parry usefully distinguishes this reading from the more self-reflexive (and unsettling) toying with the position of the focal subject. That said, his argument occasionally reverts to a preference for the 'subjectivity of the paintbrush' (p. 40). He is also less sure-footed on the treacherous relationship between narrator and author, at one point referring casually to 'the (implied) author', whilst eschewing other resources of narrative theory thatmight allow for amore differentiated treatment ofHandke's slippery narrative positions. Combined with thisnarrative indeterminacy is the intertextuality ofHandke's prose writing, also central to Parry's discussions...