‘Haushalten’: The Economy of the Phrase in Peter Handke’s Wunschloses Unglück

Literature can give voice to the repressed and the silenced, or so we would like to think. Not the least, postcolonial critics have sensitized us to the ironies of literary and political representation. Those who endeavor to speak about and on behalf of the underprivileged are often conditioned by the socialization and education through which they have gained access to the public realm, and they may come to rely on perspectives and discourses that perpetuate the very exclusion they seek to counter.1 The wish to intercede as an advocate for a disadvantaged group may be driven by the lure of a supposedly unspoiled community, and a concomitant assumption of its helplessness - a mixture of exoticism and condescension that threatens to reinforce rather than unsettle prevailing hierarchies. Peter Handke is an author who has continually, and very controversially, tried to speak for marginalized individuals or peoples. In his ongoing defense of a stigmatized Serbia, he has become almost too obvious a target for the critique of the presumptuousness and nostalgia that can sometimes inspire acts of representation. He appears as a figure with an inflated sense of vocation professing to be in touch with an embattled people.2 But Handke, or at least an earlier version of him, never claimed to be exempt from existing structures of privilege and subordination. A relatively early work, Wunschloses Ungluck, is a case in point. This 1972 novella seeks to remedy the inarticulateness of the subject it portrays, but comes to reflect on how it is bound to rehearse the cultural and linguistic patterns that produced and policed this inarticulateness in the first place. Indeed, the novella is not simply troubled by the "unavailability of a form uncompromised by everything it wants to escape" (Bewes 38); the predicament of inescapable complicity is its principal focus. To begin with, Wunschloses Ungluck can be read as a case study in the multiple repressive forces at work in the poor and patriarchal milieu of rural Austria; it records the interlocking dictates of custom and religion, the pressures of economic constraints and social norms, the stifling gender roles and their most brutal manifestation - the physical abuse of women. The central figure is the narrator's mother, whose suicide prompts him to reconstruct her life story in roughly chronological fashion, to the point of her complete psychological collapse. Denied a place outside the home and taught always to contain her wishes and desires, she tries to adapt her life to the scripts outlined by tradition and monitored by village gossip, all the while being systematically worn down by heavy housework and meager living conditions. Pained by this fate, the narrator wants to speak about and for the deceased, and make her life story available in the public realm to which she never gained entrance. But despite the sense of purpose and urgency that drives the book, and the intimate knowledge that supports the veracity of the account, this ethical and literary mission must fail. The main textual problem of Wunschloses Ungluck is in fact the narrator 's involvement with the forces of repression that he aims to expose. As the narrator himself realizes, the mechanisms of control and integration that devastate the mother's life reach far into the domain of language : the battery of prohibitions and expectations that circumscribe a female life in the province are bound to linguistic molds such as facile proverbial expressions and conventional storylines, all of which crowd in upon the subject. Language is already arranged for the speakers into tight, easily memorized formulas that encapsulate judgments and attitudes, thereby aiding the enforcement of norms. These circulating "idioms and axioms" conveniently encode and disseminate an entire social education, which prescribes how to live and feel in the community (Varsava 120) . Describing the social stratification of the province, for instance, the narrator of Wunschloses Ungluck cites the ideals that govern the interaction: "Zumindest beim Vergnugen gab sich die landliche Gesellschaft klassenlos, sofern man nur GEPFLEGT und LUSTIG UND FIDEL war" (54; Handke's emphasis). …