Peter Handke: Theatre and Anti-Theatre

by Nicholas Hern

Book by Hern, Nicholas

122 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1972

Reviews

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short work on Peter Handke is volume five in a series called Modern German Authors: Texts and Contexts. Peter Handke, the 2020 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has been writing for over fifty years, since about 1966; I read many of his books last year, including all his early plays. This book, published in 1971, obviously only deals with those early works. It begins with a short overview of the author, his reputation as an enfant-terrible, his provocations and self-promotion, his general ideas and political opinions (at that point more or less left-wing and anarchist). The greater part of the book, however, consists in analysis of his first eight plays. There is a short appendix of translated excerpts from the works discussed, and a bibliography of critical articles that had appeared about him by that time.

I wish that I had found this book and read it when I was reading the plays; I might have gotten more out of them. The series title refers to contexts, and that was what I was missing. I did note generally in my review of the Theaterstücke that he was influenced by Brecht and Beckett, but this book demonstrates how much in the plays was based on specific allusions to certain plays of Beckett and to Ionesco, most of which I haven't read. I didn't really understand how intertextual his writing actually was. He was also apparently very influenced by the later writings of Wittgenstein; I've only read the early Wittgenstein (the Tractatus) so I missed that also. To be sure, I did appreciate his plays more than his fiction -- but now I wonder how much of that was also intertextual.

Perhaps after I have read more of Beckett, Ionesco and Wittgenstein, all of whom are on my TBR list for the next two or three years, I will come back to Handke's plays.