DESIRING EYES

Author(s): Alice Kuzniar

Source: Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE (Autumn 1990), pp. 355-367
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26282967
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DESIRING EYES

irù

Alice Kuzniar

Und ich wußte dabei; Keine schöneren Augen

auf der Welt als die Augen meines Begehrens.
—Das Spiel vom Fragen (95)

In Handke's novel Kindergeschichte a traveler, alone in a train

station, observes how all the children have eyes for everyone there. Like
the traveller, the children seem both to miss and to expect something
and hence search for the "returned gaze" ("Antwortblick" [125]). The
lone passenger can depend on being helpfully noticed by them. In com
mentary on Die linkshändige Frau Handke considers a scenario that likewise
takes place in the public domain: he finds himself unable to appreciate
the dignity of people he espies on train platforms, in cafés, and in air
ports. But he is then shocked when he, also isolated in urban time and
space, perceives himself in them. It is this sudden perception of the self
in the other that, Handke remarks, stops him from systematizing him/her
("Durch eine mythische Tür" 240). The other person mirrors back not
just isolation but also uniqueness.1

'In a similar passage from Das Gewicht der Welt Peter Handke writes that self-alienation leads
him to see others as equally isolated (47). The effect is the same as in the previous passages: again
Handke feels drawn suddenly very close to strangers.

Modem Fiction Studies, Volume 36, Number 3, Autumn 1990. Copyright © by Purdue Research Founda
tion. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

355

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 The above scenarios resonate with the meaning Handke appoints the
gaze in his later work, in particular, the gaze that passes between persons
and creates empathetic understanding between them.2 They read like a
prism of the reflections that play between viewer and viewed. In the first
passage the self sees himself being seen, whereas in the second, he sees
himself seeing. In both instances viewing redounds back to the self. The
second passage further resembles the first in that Handke realizes that
he, too, is seen as he sees others—indistinguishable in the crowd. This
look alienates, stays on the surface, refuses to acknowledge the other's
eyes—eyes that, as the first excerpt indicates, endow their recipients with
identity. It is this other look—the returned, signifying one—that Handke
wants to capture, both from others but also in his own writing. The second
passage continues: the noncategorizing "Blick"—which is simultaneously
a moment of illumination or "Ein-blick"—steers Handke to writing in
order to recreate there a meaningful way of viewing. As he muses in
Phantasien der Wiederholung, writing (or silence) must be like opening one's
large eye onto the world (9). Both the gaze and writing arise out of com
municative isolation; while trying to overcome silence, they recall it. The
gaze is thus both expectant and sad: "Jeder Blick wartet auf den
trauernden Gegenblick" (Phantasien der Wiederholung 36). The "Antwort
blick" or "Gegenblick" is one that mourns, for, although it grants its
recipient a sense of worth and identity, it also testifies to unbridgeable
separation.
In these passages Handke underscores the signifying dependency of
the (lone) self, its constitution in the field of vision. In this emphasis he
resembles Jacques Lacan and numerous film theorists who have been in
spired by Lacan's work on the gaze; in particular the paradigm of suture
in Lacanian film studies bears on the multiple reflections between viewer
and viewed in Handke. Although Handke recognizes that the subject is
constructed in the scopic register, by associating with what it sees, he
also demands that specularity be broken. The true, unexpected "Ant
wortblick" is Handke's answer to the gaze in Lacan.
Originating in Lacan's eleventh seminar and developed by his pupil
Jacques-Alain Miller, the term suture was applied to film studies by Jean
Pierre Oudart where it refers to how the spectator acquires subjectivity
through cinematic signification.3 Suture is premised on the viewer identify
ing with the gaze of a fictional character, letting this figure stand in for
it and define what it sees. The initial identification is jubilant, for the
viewer is privy to a visual plenitude—a previously unseen vista which
s/he imagines to command. Once the viewer senses that his/her vision
is restricted by the frame, however, s/he anxiously awaits another shot
'Thoughtful, predominantly phenomenological studies (see Egila Lex and Gerhard Melzer) have
been devoted to seeing in Handke. Unlike the present article, they focus primarily on Handke's percep
tion of objects in his environment.
3For an excellent overview and explanation of the various definitions of suture, see Kaja Silverman.

356 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

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or camera angle that will complement and comment on the preceding
view. Above all, the viewer wants to see the person through whose eyes
s/he has been seeing. Classically, but not exclusively, suture is defined
as the shot/countershot formation, whereby the camera takes a 180 degree
turn to reveal the field from which the initial shot was taken and with
it the out-of-frame character. The spectator thus comes to identify with
alternating subject positions: s/he overcomes the isolation that the restricted
camera frame causes by suturing together a subjectivity that associates
with more than one gaze. Anxiety and alienation are never alleviated,
though, for one shot becomes the signifier for the next, propelling the
cinematic narrative forward. The editing or cutting operations create new
absences. Furthermore, the sense that the viewing subject accompanies
and joins successive gazes has its price: the subject is divided by their
succession. At the same time it enunciates itself in the filmic discourse,
the subject is split off from it. In other words, although desiring, in
Lacanian terms, an imaginary fullness and fusion, the spectator remains
in the symbolic order (of separation and castration) that initiated this
desire.

Handke's "Antwortblick"—the seeing oneself being seen—invites

comparison with the signifying countershot and the splitting/suturing it
engenders. But prior to anticipating the returned gaze, the spectator, as
indicated, adopts the seemingly limitless gaze of shot one. This self
doubling—a seeing oneself seeing—merits closer analysis for its implica
tions in Handke. In his Lacanian reading of film, The Imaginary Signifier,
Christian Metz notes that the spectator imagines himself or herself to be
"all perceiving" (48). He continues: "the spectator identifies with himself,
with himself as a pure act of perception (as wakefulness, alertness): as
the condition of possibility of the perceived and hence as a kind of
transcendental subject, which comes before every there is" (49). The viewer
thus apprehends him/herself as look; in so doing s/he stands in for the
camera. For Metz, grounding any identification with a fictional character
as in suture is the viewer's identification with the seemingly ubiquitous
camera. The viewer fancies being the source and vehicle of what s/ne
sees and, as such, duplicates (although is actually manipulated by) the
cinematic apparatus. Underlying this self-doubling in the camera (and/or
projector) is the desire to see oneself seeing; the viewer courts the illusion
of being both subject and object of its gaze.
As the references in this article indicate, Handke frequently thematizes
the gaze. This attempt to see oneself seeing perhaps stimulated or derived
from Handke's intensive involvement with cinema. He has written and

directed his own films Chronik der laufenden Ereignisse and Die linkshändige
Frau (subsequently the basis of his novel by the same name), and he has
translated Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. In addition, he has collaborated
with Wim Wenders on Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, Falsche Bewegung,

KUZNIAR 357

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and recently Der Himmel über Berlin. The last film, in particular,
demonstrates the auratic powers that Wenders and Handke attribute to
the camera. By observing ordinary incidents in Berlin life, the angels in
the film, and with them the camera, bestow meaning. This framing of
reality appears in Handke's writing too—as if through the lens of a camera.
He endows the act of seeing with the same wakefulness and alertness that
characterize the angels' vigilance in Wings of Desire. Looking envelops its
object with light (Die Abwesenheit 15). But the self-conscious look not only
witnesses others as in Wings of Desire'* it also, as Metz suggests, validates
the self. An example of this self-reflexive turn occurs toward the end of
the novel Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung when the protagonist, Gregor
Keuschnig, sees a girl putting down her book to return his glance. While
observing her, Keuschnig slowly comes to see himself better. His seeing
(another watching him) ratifies his identity. He then, becoming attentive
to his surroundings, notices everything in his path "als ob auch etwas
für ihn dabei sein müßte" (161). The precise meaning of the seen is not
specified; significant instead is Keuschnig's self-affirmation in the visual
field.

The danger of specularity is, of course, that it annexes and dissolves

its object. Lacan writes: "The privilege of the subject seems to be estab
lished here from that bipolar reflexive relation by which, as soon as I
perceive, my representations belong to me" (81). In Metz's words, the
spectator as projector becomes the spectator as internalized screen. A
passage from Die Abwesenheit, a novel about deciphering nature's minute
signs, stages this reversibility: first, by the grace of an enlivening look,
through pure watching, a rigid stalk begins to sway. The next glance
promptly internalizes the image: for an instant, in front of a tree our
inner self develops into its corresponding "tree-image" ("Baumgestalt"
[83-84]). Severed other instances of introjection spot Handke's texts. In
Das Gewicht der Welt, a work scattered with photographic "Augen-blicke,"
Handke exhorts: "So sorglos die Leute anschauen können, daß sie sich
zugleich in einem selber bewegen" (232). Immersion in others paradox
ically translates as their absorption into the self. The gaze hereby alights
randomly on particular persons and objects: "Die mürrische Zeitungsfrau,
der Garten im milden dunklen Licht, die Fratze der hundausführenden
Frau—das bin doch alles ich" (22). Almost identical phrasing surfaces
in Handke's much later Versuch über die Müdigkeit, a work that examines
the tired but kind gaze that rests on others: "Das andere wird zugleich
ich. Die zwei Kinder da unter meinen müden Augen, das bin jetzt ich"
(68). Handke's writing not only describes the assimilative operation of

•See the forthcoming article by Xavier Vila and Alice Kuzniar.

358 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

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the gaze; it also enacts it. By so completely immersing oneself in depicting
others, he writes, they become the self (Die Geschichte des Bleistifts 31).
Indeed, Handke literally inscribes Metz's internalized screen onto the
body. The shutter of the eyelid captures all the people coming toward
the viewer, an activity Handke calls "[m]eine Art Macht" (Das Gewicht
der Welt). In Langsame Heimkehr the protagonist Sorger also experiences his
drooping eyelids as "Empfangsschirme" (71). Moreover, his gaze, catch
ing other gazes, seems to have created them in the first place (71). Handke
strikes a precarious balance between viewing as preserving and viewing
as the creation of images. With the latter ("[m]eine Art Macht") Handke
and his protagonists verge on what Lacan decries as "the power of an
nihilation" (81).
But Handke knows full well the lure of specularity: "Die Gefahr bei
diesem Nachdenken, Alleinsein, Sehen, 'Sinnen' usw. ist, daß man sich
schließlich nicht mehr locken kann für eine andre Existenz, für jemand
andern" (Das Gewicht der Welt 32). Handke here aligns solitary reflection
with seeing, indicating that, despite its apparent receptivity, the gaze may
also be narcissistic. He consequently attempts to break such mirroring
by insisting on the other's difference as well as by withdrawing the in
trusive self. Both movements structure a scene toward the close of Langsame
Heimkehr where Sorger sits in a New York restaurant across from a stranger
named Esch. For one frightening instant when he looks up it seems to
Sorger as if he were gazing into his own wide-open eyes. But the specular
moment dissipates as the color of these eyes becomes a thing in itself.
Specularity is then halted a second time: Sorger gives Esch "ein stark
alles anders wollender Blick" that holds and comforts his interlocuter.
But he subsequently looks away, as if the infirm world were to be healed
by turning from it (183). Sorger's attentive but nonintrusive listening and
watching—as well as the willingness to avert the glance respectfully—
give Esch the confidence to speak freely. Esch in turn becomes mindful
of his audience, his "notwendigen Gegenüber" (184). Seeing himself be
ing seen, Esch checks his self-preoccupation and distances himself from
the anxieties he narrates. Dialogue allows him to present an image of
himself to the other, to signify for another.
The reciprocative look thereby corrects the all-perceiving yet self
enclosed look that Metz discusses. The latter is blind not just because
it blocks out the other but because it does not take into account that one
is seen. The spectator is not just the camera and projector; s/he is also
"photo-graphed."5 But the resulting self-estrangement need not always
be beneficial as in this scene from Langsame Heimkehr; it can also be menac

'Jacques Lacan writes: "What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the
gaze that is outside. ... I am photo-graphed" (106).

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ing as a lengthy "film sequence" from Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers sug
gests. Walking down the street, the writer (the story is told in third-person)
imagines himself in a film, his eyes the camera and his ears the tape
recorder. The passersby glance at him mistrustfully. They seem to recog
nize him but are unsure where they saw his picture, perhaps from the
wanted list (though presumably from jacket covers). The writer then briefly
catches the eye of someone he takes to be a well-meaning reader. But
the enemy army returns in full force.
The alienating effect of the "Gegenblick" paradoxically does not frac
ture specularity. Doubled as it were in both shot and countershot, the
writer gleans in the bared teeth and wrinkled foreheads of others his own
"reproduction" ("Abbild" [45]). The key chain that stares at him from
someone's fist causes him to look down at himself, as if he were the one
armed with keys.6 The viewed becomes entangled with the viewer, the
other with the self. Accordingly, the evil eye in this scenario seems to
embody the writer's desire for punishment: he admits to feeling guilty
for writing, as if he had broken some taboo (42). Sartre observes in Being
and Nothingness that the look of the other chastizes with the reminder that
others see me as I can never see myself. When the other looks, I am
apprehended as an object, a non-self. Yet although this look disrobes the
self of its unity, it also hypostasizes and constitutes the self by reminding
the latter of its separateness. The writer in Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers
desires the "Gegenblick," however alienating and judging it may be, for
it sutures together an identity for him. Indeed he not only desires this
look; as the cinematic, hence fictive, reference intimates, he conceivably
imagines it.
The above filmic scenario thus underscores that the gaze belongs to
the other, even when imagined. We are caught, circumscribed, sustained,
and manipulated by the gaze, forced to adapt to it. It reminds us that
what others see is not how we see ourselves but a mask, an image—in
the above passage, that of a criminal. Lacan has pointed out, moreover,
that we are engaged in making a picture/image/screen of ourselves for
the eye of the other. Modifying his formula "man's desire is the desire
of the Other,"7 Lacan speaks of "desire on the part of the Other, at the
end of which is the showing (le donner à voir)" (115). To gratify and be
what he fancies the other to desire, the subject poses.
For Handke, too, proffering one's image stills the appetite of the eye,
although not, as with Lacan, solely "the eye filled with voracity, the evil
eye" (115). In Phantasien der Wiederholung, for instance, he observes that

6This scene is prefigured by another example of specular viewing, one, however, that is grounded
in empathy: the writer understands the faces in the throng of passersby as if his own face were mirrored
in them (21).
7Handke cites Lacan's phrase in Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (21).

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everyone has the duty to provide an image for others (35); one's "Bildauf
trag" is precisely to present an image, "ein Bild auftragen." Handke thus
not only accepts but affirms—as in the interchange between Esch and
Sorger—that one is a signifier for another viewer. Conversely, the self
needs to be signified by its interlocuter: "Erzähl mir eine Geschichte von
mir; vielleicht stimmt sie nicht—aber erzähl mir von mir!" (Das Gewicht
der Welt 149). The self longs to be edited and sutured by his/her narrator;
the story need not even fit. Embracing deception and dissimulation,
Handke thus writes: "Ich brauche immer wieder den Anblick der Leute,
um mich verstellen zu können. Ich habe es nötig, mich zu verstellen,
und brauche den Anblick der Leute" (Die Geschichte des Bleistifts 231). Not
unlike the spectator's displacement onto cinematic characters, here too
the self identifies with a mask to be seen and interpreted by others. In
other words, the subject derives meaning from its viewer at the expense
of its being or subjectivity.8 The latter fades as the self turns into a mask
that others register. The look as well as what it perceives, the self as im
age, is externalized.
Taken together, these various passages reveal that the gaze obeys an
alternating and parcelling modus operandi. To repeat: the subject identifies
with its field of vision, but its objects remain remote: the separation then
calls to mind that one is seen and objectified in turn. This bipolar agency
of the gaze militates against dissolving or sublating, as one critic would
have it, the subject-object division (Melzer 133 and 138; see also Lex
59 ff., and Renner 107-109). To be sure, the self desires to merge with
its varying positions in the scopic regime, but their very succession
destablizes the former.9 The self does not occupy the center of its im
aginery relations. For Handke, however, the recompense is one of
liberation—a travelling "aus sich heraus" (Aber ich lebe nur von den
Zwischenräumen 137-138; Das Gewicht der Welt 144, 262). In Langsame
Heimkehr10 Sorger, by intently watching the woman at whose house he
is a guest, finds his limited personal life metamorphized in her features.
Sorger becomes a pure receiver, invisible to himself. His individuality
as well as his solitude vanish as the woman signifies in his place. Her
lips will form the correct words for others and, even after having fallen
silent, will remain eloquent for him. Once he does begin to speak (think
ing meanwhile that he only is what he tells his hosts), Sorger still seems
indiscernable to himself, as if divided from the others.

8See Lacan's definition of alienation, whereby Being (the subject) excludes Meaning (the Other)
and vice versa (211).
'Jacqueline Rose discusses the potentially aggressive reversal operative in suture. When the sub
ject is looked at from the point of its own projection, it becomes, as in paranoia, radically alienated
from itself.

l0The phrase is taken from Novalis (2:220). Handke also cites Novalis' "Perception is attention"
("Die Wahrnehmbarkeit eine Aufmerksamkeit" [Das Gewicht der Welt 263; Novalis 2:147]) and explains
that attentiveness comes from the perceptible object (rather than, as one would expect, the other way
around).

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 Once the mirror is thus veiled, the viewed no longer functions as
a specular apparition. Instead obliquity and separation reign: "Und ist
es bei dem allen nötig, zu sagen, da/3 . . . die Trennungen bestehen
bleiben?" ( Versuch über die Müdigkeit 76). Insofar as it discerns not the other
but an image, an intervening screen, the gaze conveys distance, priva
tion from the beheld. Moreover, the viewer perceives not just him/herself
as isolated but also the viewed. Even the caressing gaze cannot relieve
another's solitude: "Ich sah die unheilbare Einsamkeit des Geliebten; als
sei Liebe das Mitgefühl mit des anderen unheilbarer Einsamkeit" (Die
Geschichte des Bleistifts 209).11 Even though the goal would be to see the
other in his/her entirety (Die Geschichte des Bleistifts 44), as this cannot occur
without erasing the other's particularity, separation must be upheld: "Ich
lasse sie [die Leute], betrachtend, sein" (296). Because it thus sustains
distance, the gaze paradoxically allows for proximity: "Uber eine Idee
komme ich dir nicht nahe, nur über einen immer wieder neuen Blick"
(Die Geschichte des Bleistifts 133). By categorizing, thought imposes itself
on others in a way the gaze, always startled by difference, does not.
So far these multifaceted operations of the gaze have been gleaned
from isolated scenes and journal entries, whose fragmented diversity alone
attest to the cutting, cinematographic agency of the gaze. But the gaze
may be more systematically observed in three of Handke's latest works:
Der Chinese des Schmerzes, Die Wiederholung, and Versuch über die Müdigkeit.
These texts confirm how specularity, unavoidable from a Lacanian perspec
tive, may in fact be restrained and even averted. The first of these texts,
Der Chinese des Schmerzes, indicates in its chapter divisions the dialectics
of the scopic field: "Der Betrachter wird abgelenkt," "Der Betrachter
greift ein," and "Der Betrachter sucht einen Zeugen." The protagonist,
Andreas Loser, is the quintessential viewer. His name derives from the
dialect word "losen" meaning "lauschen," to listen. True to his name,
Loser passively listens and observes, sensitively attuned to every external
stimulus. The narrative consists of a paratactic alignment of what this
"man without qualities" momentarily hears and sees. Loser's recep
tiveness, in Handke's terms his "Leer-Form" (11), enables the coming
into being of his surrounding world; it enables narration itself.
Loser's attentiveness is insufficient, however, for he does not take
into consideration the extent to which his subjectivity relies on the gaze
of others. Initially, this gaze is Sartrean. On the street Loser purposely
collides with a man. The only dialogue between them is the sharp glance
the fellow casts, as if to say "he understood." The incident recalls an
episode from Loser's youth when he hit a younger classmate. The unre
lenting look from the boy, accompanying Loser through the years, says

11 In Das Gewicht der Welt Handke similarly describes how, looking at a child, he relives the painful
distance he felt as a child seeing a beloved grownup only a few steps away (144).

362 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

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"now I know you" (22). What Loser remembers is not the pair of eyes
but the look, as if from one eye—a look that rendered him impossible
unto himself. These violent incidents prefigure the main act of the novel,
Loser's unpremeditated murder of a man he espies spraying swastikas.
In throwing the stone that strikes the man dead, Loser sees with open
eyes not his surroundings but his own face, in an out-of-body-experience.
As the man then plunges down a cliff, Loser feels for one moment as
if he were falling with him (106), indicating his signifying dependency
(now forfeited) on another human. As Loser confesses much later, part
of him stayed with the murdered man as he fell (231). In other words,
Loser's own face is erased with that of his victim, for there is no external
eye to perceive and judge him.
In the third part, it is clear that Loser must restore the gaze of others
for a sense of self; he searches for a self image bestowed by another. For
instance, he requests of the woman at the airport hotel: "Gib mir ein
Bild von mir: Es kann auch ein Schwindel sein" (217). She perceptively
notices that he has something on his conscience and then compares him
to a man, standing in a doorway, whose friend names him "my Chinaman
of pain" (218). Like a foreigner Loser is markedly different from others;
he stands on the threshold to self-exile. But the comparison also
acknowledges his uniqueness: the friend says in parting, "Endlich ein
chinesisches Gesicht unter all den einheimischen" (218). Being personally
recognized indeed moves Loser to tears, as when his boss calls him by
his first name (187). Loser subsequently visits his mother, who also en
dows him with an image, comparing his father and him to
"Sägemenschen" who seesaw back and forth but never find their right
place (220). As with the Chinaman, the comparison is notably layered,
preventing immediate, specular identification: Loser resembles someone
who resembles someone else.
The search for an answering gaze reaches its nadir when Loser stares
down an infant and a mentally ill person (227). But the turning point
comes soon after, when a glance into a supermarket mirror reveals to
Loser not his own eyes but those of his son (232-234). Loser notes that
it is not that his son looks like him, as third parties sometimes remark,
but that he resembles his son. In other words, it is not that others are
defined through us but we through others; Loser then seeks out the eyes
that his resemble in order to confess.12 Loser requires a witness to con
firm his identity, in other words, so that he can see himself through the
eyes of another. The son stands in this case for familial integration and,
in a broader sense, the community Loser had set himself apart from by
committing a murder.

,2This incident likewise motivates the other confession—the narration of the story (232-233).

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 Family and communality play an even more pronounced role in
Handke's subsequent novel Die Wiederholung. In this variation of the
bildungsroman, a young man, Filip Kobal, undertakes a journey from
his native Austria to Jugoslavia in search of a lost brother. The many
scenes of doubling in this work are tinged with the melancholic awareness
of separation, evocative of this initial loss. Despite his empathy for the
people he encounters, Kobal remains a foreigner, in part because of his
weak command of Slovenian. But paradoxically his empathy depends
precisely on maintaining a certain appreciative distance from those observed.13
In recounting his trip, the narrator names this aloof doubling
"Gleichmaß" as opposed to "Gleichschritt" and "Gleichklang," the latter
implying coercive superimposition (121). One example of "Gleichmaß"
involves a couple Kobal glimpses at daybreak in a highrise window. He
imagines the man not awakening to a day's work but returning home
after an exhausting night's labor. The man's tiredness then infects the
narrator as if it were his own. "Gleichmaß" here implies a commen
surateness that eschews homogeneity or uniformity: the worker is after
all framed and hence distanced by the window. In addition, his distinc
tiveness is preserved by anonymity. On other occasions Kobal also iden
tifies with the particularity and isolation of others, thereby respecting their
difference despite his empathy. For instance, he discovers years later in
a man on a streetcar the image of his former self as a student. The man
is encircled by friends who tell jokes, but he does not quite get them
and laughs too late, taking their stories literally. Only a third party ("einer
von außen"), as Kobal was in the streetcar, would have noticed how this
one person failed to fit in (60-61). Again it is the distance despite the
doubling that enables perceptive understanding. And again the man is
framed, this time by his circle of friends, as if in a picture. An image
intervenes to arrest the viewer from seamlessly identifying with the viewed.
Capitulation to the imaginary is similarly averted in a scene where
Kobal discovers his double in a soldier. Kobal first closely observes the
back of the soldier in a bus, and then follows him into a moviehouse,
to a bar, and finally to the army base. He does not attempt to engage
his double in conversation. The soldier, moreover, like the man in the
streetcar, seems set apart from the friends to whom he talks. One could
surmise that the narrator keeps his distance in order to indulge voyeuristic
leanings. But it is not as if Kobal fantasizes about what he sees, project
ing himself onto his field of vision.14 As in the other two scenes, the nar
rator does not describe himself or elaborate on his similarity to the double;

lsHandke here upholds a tenet from Die Geschichte des Bleistifts: every description of the interior
of another is suspicious (165).
14Lacan notes that the voyeur fantasizes about what is behind the curtain (182); in other words,
his desire is specular.

364 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

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instead it is the other who is minutely depicted. As the narrator declares
elsewhere, in watching others he discovers a similarity that no mirror could
ever divulge. The soldier too, strictly speaking, does not hold up a mir
ror: by emphasizing the young man's unique profile, Kobal exits from
the confines of specular viewing.
Allied with the motifs of the window and mirror is that of "the blind
window." Indeed the first chapter of Die Wiederholung is so entitled. On
his travels Kobal occasionally encounters a window that does not look
into an interior. It catches the eye, for it arouses the expectation that it
is transparent. It thus signals resistance, teasing its viewer into reading
it. For Kobal the window evokes the memory of his brother's blind eye,
and he takes it as a good omen. But in addition, it suggests the blindness
of its beholder, reminding him that his gaze is not all-pervasive. This
reminder of limitations bears a certain comfort. Catching the rays of the
sun, the window seems to emit a light—but only momentarily (137). A
certain beauty and pathos thus reside in the separation and fragility the
opaque glass evokes: it stands for the distance every "Antwortblick"
recalls.

Care to preserve visual distance also characterizes Versuch über die

Müdigkeit, a slender volume composed of vignettes illustrating the various
frames of mind fatigue brings on. In a key episode, the narrator arrives
in New York after a long plane trip from Alaska. Instead of sleeping in
his hotel, he goes out to sit in a cafe in the vicinity of Central Park where
he watches the people go by. Handke calls this langorous, benign
looking—which is not identical with the flaneur's gaze fatigued by the
surface of things—"das selbstlose Schauen" and being "nichts mehr als
die gelösten Augen" (53). In other words, he avoids the intrusive I/eye.
Above all, old men, children, and beautiful women respond to his gaze.
Aware of being a picture for another, they become even more beautiful.
They notice that this bystander sees them together with their accompany
ing image: the tree underneath which they walk, the book held in the
hand, the sky above their heads. The person who until then had been
wandering lost in emptiness suddenly senses the aura that surrounds him.
Das Spiel vom Fragen, Handke's recent play about the necessity of posing
meaningful, engaging questions, likewise testifies to the response the gaze
draws forth. The "spoilsport" asks the "watchman" if his way of seeing
is not perhaps "Vereinsamung, im Sinne von: Für nichts mehr in Frage
kommen" (77). In what reads as a justification of Handke's aesthetics,
the latter responds that the beautiful returns his gaze, speaks to him, and
in turn moves him to speak (78).
In Versuch über die Müdigkeit, too, the gaze initiates discourse. Under
the fatigued look everything appears interconnected, never alone, a part
of a whole. The myriad, chaotic phenomena of Manhattan life arrange
themselves into a sequence, form in the narrator's tired eyes a story of

KUZNIAR 365

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peace, one of epic proportions. Strains of Metz's projector/screen duality
echo in this passage: as perceiver, Handke authors the beauty before him,
and he internalizes what he sees ("jeder ging in mich ein" [55]). Break
ing this circularity, however, as in Die Wiederholung, is an insistence on
the autonomy of what is seen: the world narrates itself. In the words of
this earlier story, what the eye beholds are eyes—their colors alone, the
blacks, browns, and greys—that reveal "the world" (131). Far then from
accusing Handke of mindless narcissism, as in much prevailing criticism,
one may chart how he splits and sutures the subject in its field of vision.
But Handke does not solely delineate the destabilization of the postmodern
subject: he also witnesses the grace that the other's look bestows.

WORKS CITED

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Die Geschichte des Bleistifts. 1982. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985.
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Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington:
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Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]. Werke, Tagebücher, Briefe. Munich: Hanser,
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KUZNIAR 367

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