302
PARTISAN REVIEW
... FICTION
SHORT LETTER, LONG FAREWELL,
By
Peter Handke. Translated
by
Ralph
Manheim. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $7 .95.
The only thing that preoccupies me as a writer is nausea at srupid speechi.
fication and the resulting brutalization of people .
.
Handke in an interview
The most important dramatist
to
have emerged since Beckett,
Peter Handke responds impertinently to the perennially predicted death of
the theater. Most of the interesting stage works of our time undermine one of
the major assumptions ofWestern theater since the Greeks, the primacy of the
literary text; but not Handke's. In a period dominated by dirr:ctorial
auteurs
(Grotowski, Robert Wilson, Judith and Julian Beck, Meredith Monk, et al.),
whose best works are essentially non-verbal, Handke, a thirty-two year old
Austrian , not only continues to write plays, bur plays which are literally
nothing but
language andlor are
about
language .
Offending the Audience
and
SelfAccusation
consist of "speakers" reading to the audience from
Handke's text and eliminate characters, stories, scenery, and costumes.
Kaspar
concerns the terroristic coercion of language. And the severely
attenuated "action" of
The Ride Across Lake Constance
turns on the
problematic nature of speaking.
Handke has also published four novels:
Die Hornissen
(1966) and
Der
Hausierer
(1967) have not yet been translated;
The Goalie 's Anxiety at the
Penalty Kick
was brought out here three years ago;
Short Letter, Long Fare–
well,
last fall. Although these lack the formal inventiveness, the vivacit'y, and
the masterly control ofHandke ,s best plays, they are scarcely second-rate and ,
li~e
the plays, have received only a fraction of the attention they deserve in this
country.
The Goalie 's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,
a tragedy in the guise of a
crime novel, chronicles an ex-soccer player's futile efforts to formulate a
language adequate to the physical , social, and psychological pressures that
bombard him . The murderous hero's flaw is that the language of sport is the
only one he
~qow~ .
The book studies moral deadness, "feeling in deep
freeze,"
tq
borrow a phrase from Annette Michelson. The new novel also
takes its narrative
fra~e
(as well as its title) from the Raymond Chandler
school offiction: as the book 's hero travels across the United States his ex–
wife, a mysterious fqnr'ne fatale , pursues him with intent to kill . But
Short
