SOURCE: “Seeing Through the Eyes of the Word,” in Theater, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1993, pp. 87-92.

In the following essay, Honegger examines Handke's approach to the problem of language and verbal expression in his dramatic works and prose experiments, particularly the use—or absence—of words to reveal both the limitations and interpretative potential of language and its associated meanings.

… As though everyone everywhere in the world, day in, day out, always had his pictorial mission: the mission to be a picture to others: the woman walks “past the train station, along a puddle collecting the falling rain, as ‘the housewife on her way to the market,’ and further in the distance someone walks by as ‘the man with the umbrella;’” thus, offering their pictures of themselves, they help one another (me, at least) …

—Peter Handke: Fantasies of Repetition, 1983

Peter Handke's most recent work for the theater, The Hour We...