The Chinese of Pain
The Chinese of Pain is a Peter Handke murder story .
content
A lonely philologist, living apart from his wife and children, notices a swastika sprayer on the way to the evening card game and kills him by throwing a stone. There is no investigation of the crime. But the act has an effect on the perpetrator, at the same time on the narrator, and creates self-assurance and identity formation.
The first chapter deliberately refrains from describing the origin of the motive for the crime and the planning of the crime that emerges. Only the life situation of the perpetrator, teacher of classical philology and to that extent a representative of the occidental cultural tradition, is described and a certain disposition to the act is outlined in the form of a previous history of the perpetrator.
The second chapter describes the course of events. The victim is a swastika sprayer who was caught inflagranti. The narrator kills him by throwing a stone and continues his daily routine in the evening card game as if nothing had happened. Following the card game, there is a dispute about the threshold , a central concept that runs through the entire work as a leitmotif and clearly evokes the idea of an initiation rite. As a result, the narrator understands his act as creating identity: a loser , the spectator, becomes a thrower . Instead of remorse about the act, the perpetrator feels more self-confident. If one takes into account that the whole work is interwoven with the Easter theme (death - resurrection), the explosive statement emerges that the perpetrator through his act, namely through vigilante justice against a neo-Nazi, dies at the same time (as the coward loser) and is reborn will (as the hero thrower).
The third chapter deals primarily with the intrapsychic coping with the crime by the perpetrator. Traditionally, the witness is feared by the perpetrator because he plays a key role in uncovering the crime. But in Handke's story, in which there is no witness to the crime, the perpetrator, aware of the morality of his crime, goes looking for a witness himself. Rewarded by a love experience with a woman, the narrator finally finds the desired witness in his son. It is now a matter of testifying to the deed to whom he once fathered. In the same double sense of witness and testimony, history finds its goal in the definition of authorship.
The epilogue essentially describes the image of the averted danger as well as the idyll of the saved world.
History of origin
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the state's monopoly on the use of force was seriously questioned in Germany, caused by the student movement, from the APO to the RAF . 1983, the year Peter Handke's murder story The Chinese of Pain was published , these waves had already smoothed out again. The state's monopoly of force seemed to have been restored, at least on the face of it, and there were now more interference from the right in the form of the neo-Nazi movement. Handke, whose story refers to it, had lived temporarily in Germany and of course followed the events. At the time the story was written, he was already living again in Salzburg in an Austrian tranquility that was never entirely credible. The subject of violence is one of the basic themes of Handke's poetry. If you also take into account the fact that Peter Handke is a trained lawyer, it is not surprising that one day he will also write a murder story. What is striking, however, is that Handke abstains from any spectacular (voyeuristic) criminalistic interest, moves his story as far as possible from the genre of the crime novel, and concentrates entirely on what is going on inside. Instead of fulfilling an external framework (plot), The Chinese of Pain is about tracing the inner driving forces of violence and counter-violence, which are constantly being created anew.
Generic tradition, dissolution and attempt at revaluation
Dostoyevsky's novel Guilt and Atonement probably forms the paradigmatic classic murder story within the genre. The perpetrator's motives can be understood as a mixture of hubris (in the ancient sense) and psychopathology (in the modern psychological sense). The act appears on the one hand as a rebellion against the divine law, on the other hand as a psychopathological form of contact, which reaches and destroys the other person at the same time. By seeking and preventing closeness at the same time, the desperate and pointless of the murder reveals itself. As preparation (planning) precedes action, so repentance follows it with equal necessity. The guilt can be clearly assigned to the perpetrator: murder as an offense can be explained with all sympathy with or empathy in the hero, but not excusable. The victim is wholly or largely innocent.
In Handke's murder story, this tradition is paradigmatic in the background, but as a mere foil from which the text stands out. Handke seems to want to dissolve, counteract and redefine all traditional components of the murder story. The clear distribution of guilt and innocence begins to dissolve (the "victim" is neo-Nazi), there is no deliberate planning of the crime, but rather it owes to an unforeseen chance, to a certain extent a short-circuit reaction of the perpetrator. The crime is not solved, there are no prosecutors, defendants, witnesses or judges: only their surrogates (rudiments) are included in the narrative function. The act is not followed by remorse, but by relief and pride.
criticism
In 1983 Die Zeit wrote under the heading "The (re) enlightening world": "He always knows that the literary expedition must remain one into the unknown, that guessing knows more than knowing. Only in an inkling do the involuntary and reason know each other in harmony that recklessness and melancholy are allowed to permeate each other significantly. What Handke does could be called philosophical writing, but in the sense that what is thought is not presented as thinking, but has gone back into thoughtful things - as their warming or also their enlightenment. And what else could save the world than this, that it illuminates again, instead of only frightening us off and sleeping around? What else could be peacemaking than a world that has become illuminating again? Peter Handke is to be thanked for this book " .
Brigitte Kronauer drew the following interim conclusion for SPIEGEL : "A treatise made up of a lot of things, moods, developmental steps that submit to Handke's argument without objection. Whether Loser kills someone or wants a loved one who promptly floats out of the sky, whether the world is his own suddenly "rejuvenated", it does not happen through formative persuasion, but at the reckless command of the author ".
expenditure
- Peter Handke: The Chinese of Pain . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-04512-1 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ The one who no longer denies: In search of beauty and the shock of beauty: The (re) illuminating world . In: The time . September 16, 1983 ( zeit.de [accessed August 7, 2015]).
- ↑ Brigitte Kronauer: The mandarin in the supermarket . In: Der Spiegel . tape 40 , October 3, 1983 ( spiegel.de [accessed August 7, 2015]).