A Moment of True Feeling by Peter Handke

First published:Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung, 1975 (English translation, 1977)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: The mid-1970’s

Locale: Paris, France

Principal Characters:

• Gregor Keuschnig, a press attache at the Austrian Embassy in Paris
• The Writer, a friend of Keuschnig

The Novel

Gregor Keuschnig, a press attache with the Austrian Embassy in Paris, is married and has a four-year-old daughter. One morning, he has a dream in which he murders someone. From that point onward, his inner life is in upheaval, although he pretends to be normal and to go about his everyday business. He is often in an extremely agitated state, and he believes that he has fundamentally changed. Keuschnig realizes that he is divorced from his own “true feelings.” In this alienated condition, he wanders around the streets of Paris. As in Peter Handke’s earlier novel Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1970; The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 1972), there is little overt plot. The narrative focuses primarily on Keuschnig’s perceptions of himself and others.

Keuschnig goes to work but leaves soon after arriving. He finds a phone number, written on the sidewalk, which he then calls. A woman answers, and he makes a date to meet her the next evening. He visits an old girlfriend but is constantly plagued by feelings of estrangement. Returning to the office, he has sex with a woman worker whom he hardly knows. He has a strong desire to disrobe in public. Keuschnig’s behavior is the extreme opposite of his actions prior to his dream. He seems to exist in an almost schizophrenic, disoriented state. Random objects that he sees on the street suggest strong feelings to him. He longs for a new “system” of perception, to be able to experience life in a new way.

This longing for a change in the way he perceives reality is satisfied in a section toward the middle of the novel. He is sitting on a park bench at sundown and sees three objects on the ground before him: a chestnut leaf, a piece of a broken pocket mirror, and a child’s hairclip. Suddenly these insignificant items become miraculous objects that give him a sense of well-being and harmony with the world. He experiences a kind of semimystical epiphany or revelation and realizes that he has the power to change his life.

Keuschnig returns home, where he and his wife have a dinner party with several friends, including a writer who always seems to be taking notes on Keuschnig’s behavior. Keuschnig becomes increasingly paranoid during the dinner; overcome by a sense of alienation, he spits at the writer and then begins to undress, smears his own face with food, and starts fighting with the guests. Later, Keuschnig and the writer go for a walk. He continues to perceive objects as representing his subjective visions. Dreams of his mother also haunt him. He again becomes so desperate that he feels like committing suicide. He grasps the meaning of his experience with the three objects in the park: Insofar as the world can become “mysterious” for him—as opposed to routine and typical—he can connect himself to it. At the end of the novel, he decides that he must find a new kind of work, a new perspective on life. He begins to experience himself as if he were a character in a novel. He goes to a cafe to meet the strange woman whose number he had called. The text ends with a paragraph that suggests the beginning of a new novel.

The Characters

As with all Handke’s characters, the figure of Keuschnig is a fictionalized projection of the author himself. In an interview, Handke once remarked that this text was the most personal that he had written up to that point. As does his character, the author lived for a number of years in Paris during the 1970’s. The extreme alienation experienced by Keuschnig is a reflection of the estrangement that Handke has also discussed in interviews on several occasions. The author writes from a strongly autobiographical standpoint, and the figure of Keuschnig is an excellent example of this approach to character.

Although Keuschnig remains a projection of his author’s inner life, the character is not typical of those found in the traditional modern novel, in which authorial comment often provides the reader with insight into the motivation of the characters. Influenced by postmodernist authors such as the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, Handke does not provide the reader with an in-depth narrative discussion of his protagonist’s psychology but rather remains on the surface of the character’s consciousness, giving the content of the individual’s behavior but little explanation for it. What Keuschnig does and thinks is reported without psychological analysis of its significance. Thus the character appears somewhat opaque, and the reader is forced to create an interpretation of the individual’s situation. This is consistent with Handke’s thematic intentions, which emphasize the postmodernist view that “reality” is a construction, the product of an individual perspective that is expressed primarily through language.

In A Moment of True Feeling, the figure of the writer—who is always silently taking notes on Keuschnig’s actions but never offering comment—is also a reflection of the author himself. Handke the author (the writer) reflects here upon himself as human being (Keuschnig); his analytical-creative self confronts his experiential self. For Handke, the creation of character becomes a mode of literary self-analysis, a way of orienting himself in the real world through the reflection of fictions.

Critical Context

A Moment of True Feeling stands in the tradition of modern existential literature. Handke is well aware of this, and it is no mere coincidence that the first name of the novel’s character is Gregor. The association is to one of the most famous alienated figures in modern literature: Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s novella Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936). In both stories, a dream signals the awakening of the figure’s true self, and both characters undergo transformations in which their estranged consciousnesses are revealed. Kafka’s story presents this theme in a more grotesque and dreamlike style. Handke’s theme also links his novel with other major existential writings of the twentieth century, such as Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1930, 1958), Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausee (1938; Nausea, 1949), and Albert Camus’s L’Etranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946). The novels of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard also treat the same issues developed in Handke’s texts. All these existential writers view art as a mode of momentary transcendence for estranged consciousness.

What distinguishes Handke from the writers cited above is his awareness of the semiotic processes that condition the perception of “reality.” The ideas and theories of structuralism and semiology inform all of his works. Language and sign systems become, in the course of time, routine, automatized, and eventually mistaken for real experience. As Handke suggests in one of his early essays, human beings confuse nature (reality as it is) with the forms of their language (“reality” as they construct it). This confusion becomes a major source of the alienation that plagues his characters and is certainly the case with Gregor Keuschnig. He feels like “a prisoner in Disneyland,” confined in a prisonhouse of signs that are ultimately artificial and divorced from his experience. His moment of liberation or “true feeling” comes when he can create unique signs—such as the three objects in the park—that speak to his own existence.

Bibliography

Hansen, Olaf. “Exorcising Reality,” in New Boston Review. IV (Summer, 1978), p. 5.

Jurgensen, Manfred, ed. Peter Handke: Ansatze-Analysen-Anmerkungen, 1979.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation, 1983.

Renner, Rolf Gunter. Peter Handke, 1985.

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

Wilkie, Brian, and James Hurt. “Peter Handke,” in Literature of the Western World, 1984.