Based on scholarly analysis, Peter Strasser’s view that Peter Handke’s aesthetic provocations act as a mask for "latent conservatism" is a recognized interpretation, particularly in discussions of Handke's shift from avant-garde to more traditional narratives. However, this view is not universally supported, as critics are deeply divided, with some focusing on his linguistic innovation while others focus on his politics
- The Theme of Joy: Contrary to readings that focus solely on the alienation or melancholy in Handke's work, Strasser argues that Handke's prose is deeply infused with a sense of joy, which he terms Freudenstoff.
- A "Love Letter" to the Work: Strasser approaches the subject with profound admiration, declaring in his introduction that he "fell in love" with Handke’s work twice—first through a naive fascination and later with a more mature, alert understanding.
- Critical Objectivity: Despite his admiration, Strasser argues that this intense engagement with the work actually allows for "critical objectivity" rather than blind adoration.
- Context: The book is a philosophical examination of Handke's literary output, aimed at understanding the emotional and philosophical substance of his writing.
- The "Success in Failure" Thesis: Strasser argues that Handke's characters and narratives often fail to mask a darker, chaotic reality (a "hell") within the "paradise" or utopian, joyful vision they are trying to create, suggesting the work is deeply ambivalent.
- Contextualized Appreciation: Strasser is cited for placing Handke's work within a broad philosophical context, exploring his ability to help readers see the world with gratitude (a form of "joy").
- A "Critical Note": Among reviewers, Strasser is noted for including one of the few critical notes in scholarly volumes regarding Handke, specifically by refusing to follow Handke’s critique to its full, potentially extreme, conclusion.
At this point—around three-quarters of the way through this nearly hundred-page essay—I wrote in the margin, “I’m starting to wonder whether this is really about mushrooms.” I was beginning to see echoes of Handke’s obsession with Serbia. The mushroom hunter is a lawyer whose work exonerates war criminals, and the account ends with something like an acknowledgment of error: “Mushroom seeking, and seeking of any kind, caused one’s field of vision to shrink. . . . And how one’s eyes weighed down one’s head when they remained fixed on the ground, and became dulled.”
But Handke has shown no remorse for his own error, no recognition that his single-minded line of inquiry might have shrunk his perspective. He continues to assert that he has done nothing wrong, that the questions he has asked—about the motivations for the Srebrenica massacre, which he considers unexplained; about the bias he perceives among Western journalists who reported Serb aggression and Bosnian suffering—serve the goal of “justice.” His defenders have argued that, since he writes “dialectically,” it is easy for individual sentences, taken out of context, to be misunderstood. When I began reading “A Journey to the Rivers,” I was prepared to believe that Handke had been misinterpreted, but the book was even more maddening than I could have imagined. Handke states outright that he rarely asks questions of people he encounters, relying instead on his imagination and assumptions.
Some erstwhile Handke admirers have tried to explain his obsession with Serbia as driven by dismay over the breakup of the “great Yugoslavia” that his mother’s stories had primed him to cherish. “After 1991, Handke needed a new myth, and he discovered it in Serbia,” J. S. Marcus wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2000. Handke prefers to identify with the underdog, as he perceived Serbia to be in the face of the West. And he has said that when Slovenia declared independence it was “as if I had lost my home, which became a state, where there was really only a people and a landscape.”
In a way, however, “A Journey to the Rivers” is no more maddening than Handke’s fiction, which relies on a similar dialectic of push and pull, denying resolution or reality for a world that appears to be willed into being through language. And as such it forms a logical, if regrettable, end point for Handke’s ideas. As Eugenides has pointed out, American postmodernism, as practiced by writers such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover, was political in nature: these writers’ distrust of narrative omniscience was linked to their distrust of the U.S. government. By contrast, Handke’s fiction, though similar in appearance—the circling and recircling style, the rejection of literary conventions—was always centered on language rather than on politics. “The American postmodernists gave up on traditional storytelling out of an essentially playful, optimistic, revolutionary urge,” Eugenides writes. “Handke despairs of narrative out of sheer despair.”
In Handke’s literary universe, only the self can be the final arbiter of meaning. The eye gazes from the window and records what it sees, while acknowledging that another observer might see something different. When some music plays in “The Fruit Thief,” we are told, “It did not really matter what music it was. Everyone who reads this is welcome to imagine any music that seems to fit.” But the idea that the facts of a situation can be whatever we say they are sounds different now from the way it may have thirty or forty years ago. Some realities—the mass graves at Srebrenica, or, more recently, the outcome of an election legally conducted—cannot be treated “dialectically.” Another line from Wittgenstein comes to mind, one often invoked to express the dangers of trying to describe the enormity of the Holocaust: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” ♦
so if we Strasserize Eugenides . . . "Handke despairs of narrative out of sheer joy." Trying too hard, too much ?? Without knowing more AI seems to say Strasser somehow didn't stay long with his joy readings?
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