The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke

First published:Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, 1970 (English translation, 1972)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The late 1960’s

Locale: Vienna and a small Austrian village bordering on Yugoslavia

Principal Characters:

• Joseph Bloch, a former soccer goalie now working as a construction worker
• Gerda, a film-theater cashier

The Novel

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick presents, on one level, a psychological case study of a man undergoing an apparent schizophrenic break-down. The novel, which is written in the third person, follows the former soccer goalie turned construction worker, Joseph Bloch, as he wanders around the city of Vienna, commits a senseless murder of a cashier, and finally flees to a small Austrian border village. The plot is minimal, and the narrative focuses primarily on the character’s disturbed perceptions of his surroundings.

The novel begins as Bloch enters the workers’ hut on the construction site where he has been employed. It becomes immediately clear that his perception of reality is disturbed. The former goalie interprets an insignificant occurrence—that no one looks up to greet him when he walks in—to mean that he has been fired from the job, and he goes to collect his final paycheck. He tends to find meaning in random objects and gestures. A woman adjusting her skirt as she sits in a car is read as being some kind of answer or reply to him. In his agitated and disoriented state, Bloch walks around the city, compulsively reading newspapers and sitting in motion-picture theaters. These activities seem to make him feel more comfortable.

He follows Gerda, a theater cashier, home, and they spend the night together. In the morning, Bloch is extremely disturbed, unable to visualize the objects in his surroundings or carry on even a simple conversation. Suddenly and without reason, he strangles the young woman. After the murder, he buys a bus ticket to the border town where a former girlfriend owns a small inn. The difficulties with the perception and interpretation of his environment continue. As a drop of water rolls down the side of a glass, for example, he feels compelled to gaze not at the drop as most would do, but at the spot where it will land. On another occasion, he perceives a plate of fish-shaped crackers as a kind of special message that he should be silent as a fish. He tends, in general, to see various objects as metaphors or signs that carry a special meaning for him. He is often jolted out of sleep by loud, abrupt noises.

At the conclusion of the novel, Bloch attends a soccer game, where he discusses with another man his past experiences as a goalie. He explains how the goalie, in order to block the penalty shot, must intensely observe every gesture and movement of the kicker so that he might predict where the ball will land. He says that the anxiety for the goalie is tremendous. Although Bloch has not been found by the police, it is clear that his capture is imminent.

The Characters

The figure of Joseph Bloch has several sources. The character is based, in part, on a psychiatric study of schizophrenia which Peter Handke read in 1968. This work describes a type of disturbed thought process called apophanic perception, in which the patient perceives random objects as having some secret meaning, usually of paranoid significance. The usual contexts that establish meaning in the everyday world are lost during this state of mental delusion, and the patient’s environment becomes a shifting complex of hostile and threatening dimensions. In an interview, Handke claimed that this was one of the best books he had read that year.

Bloch’s character is also intended to represent certain ideas Handke came across in his readings of structuralist and semiological thinkers and writers such as Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The central notion here is that reality, or rather one’s perception of it, is deeply influenced by language. Discussing this novel in another interview, Handke claimed that Bloch’s behavior is only an exaggerated form of what is found in everyday perception, that his tendency to construct reality is essentially typical of all people.

A third source for the figure of Joseph Bloch is Handke’s own experience. According to Handke, all writers have occasional schizophreniclike states of mind, almost mystical moments of transcendence when they are transported from the regularity of the everyday world. The world of the imagination is one of “unreality” or fantasy. Such moments are often the origin for the creative energy that fuels artistic activity. Bloch, in this work, exhibits extreme versions of tendencies present in the author himself.

Critical Context

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick was Handke’s first commercially successful novel. His earlier two narratives, Die Hornissen (1966; the hornets) and Der Hausierer (1967; the peddler) were experimental texts and rather inaccessible to the general public. This third work evidences, in the character of Joseph Bloch, a concern with issues of language and perception. These ideas are prominent in Handke’s early writings—the plays Publikumsbeschimpfung (1966; Offending the Audience, 1969) and Kaspar (1968; English translation, 1969), for example. Handke clearly proves here that he is a major postmodernist author, whose writing seeks to illuminate the ways in which meaning is constructed.

The autobiographical and existential themes which predominate in the author’s later texts are also apparent in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick but are not as pronounced. Because of its concern with seemingly abstract issues of language theory and psychology, the novel drew criticism from those who, during the 1960’s, demanded that all literature be socially concrete and politically relevant.

The personal themes of isolation and alienation and the notion of art as transcendence in this novel clearly place Handke in the tradition of modern existential fiction. He stands in the company of writers such as Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.

Bibliography

Barry, Thomas F. “Language, Self, and the Other in Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,” in South Atlantic Review. LI (1986), pp. 93-105.

Heintz, Gunter. Peter Handke, 1974.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and James Knowlton. The Goalie’s Journey Home: Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation, 1983.

Mixner, Manfred. Peter Handke, 1977.

Schlueter, June. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke, 1981.