Modern Language Review

 Reviews Der Erd-Erzähler: Peter Handkes Prosa der Orte, Räume und Landschaen. By A H. Stuttgart: Metzler. .  pp. €.. ISBN – –––. In  the Romantic landscape painter Carl Gustav Carus introduced the concept of ‘Erdlebensbilder’ into the aesthetic debate, thus infusing Alexander von Humboldt ’s physiognomic approach to landscape with a sense of deep time and deep structure. Obviously, the felicitous coinage is also a pun on ‘Erleben’ and thus inherits the geographic tradition of thinking about landscape in transcendental terms, i.e. by negotiating the conditions for the possibility of perceiving landscape. e contemporary author who has put this quintessentially modern epistemological concern at the heart of a lifetime’s aesthetic explorations is Peter Handke. Much ink has been spilt on Handke—aer all, he has worn many hats over the course of his long career: enfant terrible, pop writer, ascetic aestheticist, writers’ writer, among others. His commentators have busily explored anything from intertextuality to global social imaginaries, from an aesthetics of difference to a poetics of meta-reflexivity. However, except for a range of specialist essays and Carsten Rohde’s study Träumen und Gehen: Peter Handke’s geopoetische Prosa seit ‘Langsame Heimkehr’ (Hanover: Wehrhahn, ), there has been no sustained effort to understand the entire Handke from within his poetics of space. Alexander Honold’s magisterial monograph offers a fascinating investigation of Handke’s obsession with space. is begins, he argues, much earlier than , when Handke wrested himself from the stranglehold of a major crisis by adopting the narrative lens of a geologist (Langsame Heimkehr ()). He shows how Handke’s increasingly complex art of rooting the temporal drive behind his narratives in a dramaturgy of space, place, and movement is underpinned by an ‘Ethik der Nähe’ (p. ). roughout Handke’s rhizomatic œuvre Honold traces patterns of humane attention that are pitted against the prerogatives of disembodied mobility . Increasingly, Handke’s narrative perspective commands a reception attitude of ‘rückwärts fortgehen’—a contradictory movement of concurrent ‘departing from’ and ‘looking back to’; an epiphanic moment of assuring oneself of one’s place in the here and now; a gesture of emancipation and political resistance. is oen leads to moments of tripping, stumbling, or falling, including comic moments of katabasis, where the protagonist has to confront his or her mortality in an accelerated social space that is marked by an oblivion of death. In nuanced close readings Honold shows how geological forces, e.g. the Yukon River or the Sierra de Gredos, infiltrate writing processes and become active textual agents. e resulting ‘Raumvertrautheit ’ (p. ) is established by giving up total artistic control—and ultimately prevents both narrator and reader from gaining a Humboldtian total perspective on landscape. Honold carefully investigates the underground watercourses that nourish Handke’s writing project, ranging from medieval epics to eighteenth-century aesthetics and Goethezeit morphology, from the poetic realism of Stier to the dramaturgy of tactile friction in Hofmannsthal. e conversation with these traditions is unified by one central goal, the commensurability of the eidos of space and its MLR, .,   aesthetic reflection. Both the narrator’s gaze and the narrative momentum adapt to the forces manifest in the geological reliefs. is includes the waterways that define and concurrently open up historic Serbia in Handke’s controversial essays on Yugoslavia that are inspired by his ideal of a multiethnic state that blinded him to Serbia’s ethnocentric realpolitik (pp. –). In many of Handke’s texts, Honold shows, narrator and reader are united in the movement of a wanderer or pilgrim who exposes himself to spatial forces rather than superimposing their preconceived notions on them. is leads to a contemplative training of attentiveness, an aesthetic veneration of the thingness of objects (akin to Rilke or Hofmannsthal), a phenomenological piety of reality that comes with its own blind spots: for all its intuition and sanity, Handke’s attempt to endow his narrators with a primordial trust in their senses, codified during the s, also comes across as strangely out of sync with the challenges of a ‘global risk society’, which Ulrich Beck analysed during the same time. In an age of global digital industrialism...