6 6 das Jetzt, das auch das Jetzt des Zuschauers ist.'

The supposed elimination of any references in the play to any reality other than the 'here and now' forces the audience into a central position as they themselves are also clearly part of this 'here and now'. The intention of the 'speaking play' then becomes clear. Not only is the traditional concept of the theatre 'denaturalised', but also the audience, as essential a component of theatre as the play itself, is made aware of its own part within that tradition: 'Dadurch, daß wir zu Ihnen sprechen, können Sie sich Ihrer bewußt werden. Weil wir Sie ansprechen, gewinnen Sie an Selbstbewußtsein' (PB 34). An audience, which had hitherto clung rigidly to its 'natural' theatre in all its aspects is shown the artificial construction of such a theatre. In this way the piece earns its title of 'Vorrede', because it is the first step in the process of awakening out of the acceptance as natural of whet is a specific historical phenomenon. Handke's later banning of further performances of the piece and his declared intention, as yet unrealised, to write a second

'here and now'y but becomes itself an historical event, part of a tradition, which is merely reproduced and imitated in subsequent performances.

Some critics have indeed argued that Publikumsbe—

schimpfunq employs methods, which are by no means innovative R7

in terms of the history of the theatre , and one cannot but agree that speaking directly to the audience and even insulting it are devices, which have been used before. One might, in Handke's defence, argue that what is crucial is precisely the use to which these devices are put - al­ though this would be contradictory to his own arguments about methods of representation losing their effectiveness with time — , tut even here one finds oneself arguing against Handke. With particular reference to the actual offending of the audience at the end of the piece, any defender of Handke finds him— or herself in a dilemma. He cannot

argue that the device is particularly innovative in keeping with Handke's intention, or indeed with his understanding of the intention, as Handke sees it, of the whole of modern theatre: 'Das moderne Drama besteht aus flusbruchversuchen. Es versucht auszubrechen aus der UJelt des Theaters, in die

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es jahrhundertelange Konvention eingekapselt hat.' Nor, indeed, can he argue that the particular use of the device is significant, because, as we shall see, Handke's use of it contradicts the argument of the first two thirds of the play.

Handke's own explanation in the text of the function of the insulting ic confusing: 'Sie werden beschimpft

werden, weil auch das Beschimpfen eine Art ist, mit Ihnen zu reden' (PB 44). But, is insulting someone a method of communication, of speaking with someone, or a method of not allowing two-way communication to take place? 'Indem wir beschimpfen, können wir unmittelbar werden. Wir können einen Funken Überspringen lassen' (PB 44). This is in direct contradiction to an earlier sentence: 'Es wird kein Funken von uns zu Ihnen überspringen* (PB 21). The reason for this latter statement was that the gap between actors and audience, over which the spark was to jump, had

supposedly been eliminated. However, the justification for the insulting - to get 'closer' and more 'direct' - presupposes the continued existence of this gap and, what is more important, serves in any case only to re— inforce it by casting the audience in the role of actors in a performance and the speakers on the stage in the role of critics or audience.

Handke's claim that Publikurnsbeschimpfunq is 'un- 69

mittelbares Theater' does not only mean that it speaks directly to the audience, but also that it has no need for indirect fictional arrangements to transport its meaning: 'Es braucht nicht die Vermittlung einer Geschichte, damit Theater entsteht.'69 But, of course, fiction is only one of many ways of arranging material into an organised text, and Publik urn sbeschimpfunq is definitely an organised text. The piece may concentrate on the 'words and sentences' of reality, but, as in Oer Hausierer. Handke constructs an organised text through unity of theme, repetition of words, rhythms and sentence constructions, and associative links between the sentences , and this in spite of the intention

of breaking through the established organisation of the­ atrical experience. Although Handke*s play sets out to disrupt traditional theatrical relationships, its oun disruption in turn at its second performance in Frankfurt highlights and underlines its ultimate dependence upon such relationships:

Die Besucher, vornehmlich die jüngeren Jahrgänge, vermehrten den an diesem Abend gesprochenen Bühnen— text um etwa ein Drittel: durch Zurufe, Beschimpf­ ungen des Autors, des Verlegers und (ungerechter— weise auch) der Schauspieler. Manche Teile des Handke— Stückes wurden akustisch im Saal gar nicht mehr wahrgenommen. Andere forderten das Publikum zum Mittun auf (...) rechneten aber nicht mit den Konsequenzen, die sich prompt einstellten. Eine Handvoll Besucher erklomm schließlich die Szene, trug Tisch und Stühle aus den Kulissen herbei und wollte sich unter den vier schwitzenden und die Augen doch sehr irritiert rollenden Schauspielern niederlassen. 71

The irritation and lack of flexibility in such a situation is a token of the rigidity of the text. Handke's Pub- likumsbeschimpfunq would seem to be no more able to cope with the consequences of the abolition or suspension of the traditional voyeuristic relationship between audience and stage than a production of Agatha Christie's The Mouse­ trap would be. Hence, although Handke calls them *V/ier Sprecher', the speakers in his play are really actors, reproducing rather than producing a text. 'Das Ergebnis steht nicht auf dem Papier fest' (PB 29) is thus one sen­ tence, which is flatly contradicted by the play itself. Free improvisation by the actors around the theme (as Handke allows for in his later play Quodlibet) would perhaps be a step in the direction of consistency, and would also serve to overcome another contradiction, the illusion of the 'here and now'. Within the text this

contradiction is apparent in the references to the audience's preparations outside the 'here and nou' in spite of the

text's assertion that 'Sie haben kein Schicksal. Sie haben keine Geschichte. Sie haben keine Vergangenheit' (PB 24). On another level, the idea also clearly becomes problematic as soon as the piece is staged for the second time, where the words are not only a previously organised text, but also have a performance history. The audience's view is directed and manipulated then by the author's original organised text, by its interpretation in performance, and also by the actors' experience of past performances, which in turn further influences the play's presentation. The play acquires a past, a history, a tradition of pro­ duction. As such, it runs the risk, in Handke's terms, of becoming one of the established ways of seeing the world, of becoming mannered and 'natural'. Perhaps with this in mind, Handke withdrew the play from further performance

for a while in 1969, and in the collected edition Stücke I published in 1972 he recognised the importance of finding new ways of performing the piece: 'Wichtiger wäre es,

neue Aufführungsmöglichkeiten für die Stücke zu beschreiben: Publikumsbeschimpfunq wirklich nur als ruhige, vernünftige Anrede ans Publikum, nicht mehr Körpersprache als nötig' (PB 7). This somewhat tame suggestion only serves however to highlight the friction in the play between its intention to disrupt and its reliance upon those same relationships, which are the targets of its attack.

A similar situation exists in Der Hausierer, the third work referred to in 'Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbein­ turms', where defamiliarisation goes hand in hand with

reaffirmation of a tradition, in this case the genre of the detective story. For Handke, the detective story, once a realistic method of writing showing 'real fear' and 'real pain', had become schematised, cliche-ridden and automatic. The work of defamiliarisation and renewal involves a division of each chapter of Der Hausierer into a theoretical and an expositional section. Mithin each theoretical section the process of defamiliarisation is undertaken by attempting to make the mechanics of the genre clear, though Handke approaches and analyses it from only one of many possible points of view. This is a process, which, Handke maintains in the essay, will be productive in that it will enable him to use the revi­

talised method to show again the 'real fear' and 'real pain', which it was once able to convey: 'Würde ich also nur mir diese Schemata des Sterbens, des Schreckens, des Schmerzes usw. bewuUt machen, so könnte ich mit Hilfe der reflektierten Schemata den wirklichen Schrecken, den

wirklichen Schmerz zeigen' (BE 28). This then is the task of the second section of each chapter, where possible

sentences from possible detective stories are listed, which the reader then has to reconstruct as far as possible. The fear and pain results as much from the alogical sequence of sentences in this second part as from the content of the sentences themselves. The practice resulting from the theory constantly falls between two stools however.

Handke dismantles the detective story into twelve stages, but then runs the risk of a particular story being re­ constructed — in spite of his statement that 'eine "bes- andere, erfundene" geschichte wird (...) nicht erzählt' -

by firstly introducing connections between the sentences of the expositional section, — there are many sentences, which deal with the same figures or objects — , and secondly by calling the whole enterprise a novel, which awakens just those notions of organisation and plot, which Handke is trying to avoid.

The reader is, according to one critic, confronted here with an 'open work of art', which is characterised by its calling into question of the fixed division of labour between the writer as the issuer of meaning and the reader as its receiver: 'Dem Leser wird nicht ein in sich abge­ schlossenes Werk mit festgelegtem Bedeutungsgehalt darge— boten, sondern die Romane sind offen für die Mitwirkung des Lesers bei der Organisation des Textes wie bei der

7 3

Sinngebung.' But it is difficult to believe that

Handke would have wanted to place so much freedom with the reader to organise the text, indeed an organisation of the text into a 'story' is something, which he would have wanted to obstruct, even though there are these beginnings and echoes of just such a story distributed throughout the book. This underlines one of the main problems with this text, that of re-montage. If the organising principles behind a piece of literature are exposed - and also of

course emphasised - to the extent they are in Der Hausierer, then far from their presence being overcome in the mind of the reader, they are surely highlighted. This may then on the one hand be a source of anxiety within the reader if he is confronted with a series of seemingly unconnected. disorganised sentences, as was partly Handke's intention: •ich wollte Verfolgung, folterung und tod auch nicht mit

den üblichen mittein der logisch glatt aufeinanderfolgenden sätze zeigen: die anordnung der sätze zueinander sollte schon an der darstellung des Schreckens mitwirken.• But on the other hand it may lead the reader to attempt to overcome the lack of logic by trying to re-arrange the sentences within the boundaries of the traditional structures so fresh within his mind from the theoretical section of the chapter. As such, it is clear that the sentences do not contain experiences of fear or anxiety, as Handke would like to maintain, but rather attempt to generate them through their lack of logic and through their context within a demontage of the detective story. de are not anxious because a sentence speaks of a murder, but because it is flanked on either side by sentences, which speak of something totally different and unconnected. The reader apes the detective in trying to re-establish this connect­ ion, but in doing so re-affirms the genre of the detective story.

Even Handke's analysis of the twelve stages of the detective story concentrates on the notion of order, its subsequent disruption and its eventual re-establishment or re— affirmation. The murder is presented as a disorder breaking through a seemingly fixed order at the beginning of the story, an order, which has existed outside the boundaries of the story: 'Uer Anfang der Geschichte ist

75

also kein Anfang, sondern eine Fortsetzung.' Indeed, such is the pervasiveness of the order, that it adopts the appearance of a ritual or ceremony:

Die besondere Urdnung zeigt sich dem Dazukommenden in der Form eines Zeremoniells (...) Die besondere Urdnung äuQert sich in Verbeugungen, in einem Tanz,

in einem Kniefall, in einem paarweisen Schreiten, in einem gemeinsamen Glasheben, in der Zeremonie einer Mahlzeit, in einem Spiel. (H 9)

Such is the intensity of the order, that in the context of the detective story, where a murder is to take place, it appears paradoxically as a disorder. Its intensity is marked by the fact that it is composed not only of positive elements, but also of negative ones: 'Oie Straße ist nicht leer (...) M e mand wischt sich mit dem Taschentuch schnell über das Gesicht' (H 10). The order is determined just as much by an absence of events as by their presence. The hawker's separateness from this order is communicated by sentences, which show a disparity between him and the order. This is conveyed through individual eccentricities within the ritualisation of behaviour — 'Der Hausierer klopft mit einem Bleistift gegen die Mauer' (H 10), or

'Er ist so weit gegangen, daß sich beide Schuhbänder gelöst haben' (H 11) - or through the breaking of traditional descriptive models when imparting information about him, e.g. 'Er atmet aus und ein' (H 11), which is a reversal of the normal progression and description of breathing. After the first disorder, the murder, there is the attempt at ordering it in turn by recounting in the minutest detail all the events leading up to it, so that

the murderer can be exposed: 'Die Ordnung der durch den Mord entstandenen Unordnung dient der Klärung der Un­ ordnung' (H 30). This also extends to a registration of what did not happen as well as what did: 'Niemand hat aus der Nase geblutet. Niemand hat gedroht. Niemand hat gelacht. Niemand hat den Wasserhahn so stark aufgedreht, daß der Schrei nicht zu erkennen war' (H 38). This

ordering of the disorder also serves to expose the original order before the murder as merely the semblance of an order, a facade to cover the turbulence underneath. Handke's analysis then proceeds through stages of 'die Verfolgung', 'die Befreiung', 'die zweite Unordnung' (a second murder), 'die falsche Entlarvung', 'die Ruhe vor der Entlarvung' and 'die Entlarvung'. The final chapter is the triumph again of order, in that the disorder is fully assimilated and

rendered harmless: 'Die Kinder spielen schon den Mord* (H 119). Clearly, Handke's analysis of the nature of the detect­ ive story is only one of a number of possible analyses, and its weakness lies in the rigidity of construction he ascribes to such novels, a reflection perhaps of his evaluation of

7 6

them as trivial literature. He was not the only author at this time to attempt to come to terms with the detective story from the point of view of theory. Helmut Heißenbüttel and Dieter Wellershoff offered their own analyses. Heißen- büttel's essay 'Spielregeln des Kriminalromans', written four years before Der Hausierer, concurs in many respects with Handke's account. Heißenbüttel speaks of 'eine Ex- empelgeschichte, die nach einem bestimmten Schema etwas ein­ übt', and of 'ein festes Schema, das zunächst drei Faktoren

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