While space and anxiety are central elements in the oeuvre of the eminent Austrian writer and Nobel laureate Peter Handke, the function of spatial anxiety in shaping plot and character development remains underexplored. This article examines the first and second sequels of Handke’s Slow Homecoming trilogy and the effect of spatial anxiety on the novel’s protagonist, the geologist Sorger. Sorger’s spatial anxiety is analyzed through Lacan’s concept of anxiety as a “lack of lack,” which, in spatial terms, manifests as the collapse or undistancing of distance. The irresistible formlessness of space transforms the spatial narrative of the novel, from a scientific or rational mode, in which geology initially functions as a form of soteriology used to mask spatial anxiety, into a poetic or imaginative mode that emerges in response to the protagonist’s experience of anxious affect. Homecoming thus becomes a process of poetic sublimation of spatial void.
FelskiR. (1984). Peter Handke’s Langsame Heimkehr [Peter Handke’s Slow Homecoming]. Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 62(1), 208–225. https://doi.org/10.1179/aulla.1984.007
5.
FinkB. (1995). The Lacanian subject: Between language and jouissance. Princeton University Press.
6.
FirdaR. A. (1993). Peter Handke. Twayne Publishers.
7.
FreudS. (1926). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. In StracheyJ.FreudA. (Eds.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 20, pp. 77–175). The Hogarth Press.
GerstenbergerK. (2024). The representation of Alaska in Peter Handke’s Slow Homecoming (1979) through the lens of nature writing. In DürbeckG.KanzC. (Eds.), German-language nature writing from eighteenth century to the present: Controversies, positions, perspectives (pp. 255–272). Springer.
10.
GiaccariaP.MincaC. (2016). For a tentative spatial theory of the Third Reich. In GiaccariaP.MincaC. (Eds.), Hitler’s geographies: The spatialities of the Third Reich (pp. 19–44). University of Chicago Press.
GrosserF. (2021). Handke’s doubt: Slow Homecoming in conversation with Heidegger. In GrosserF.SahraouiN. (Eds.), Heidegger in the literary world: Variations on poetic thinking (pp. 103–121). Rowman & Littlefield.
13.
HalsallR. (2005). Place, autonomy and the individual: Short letter, long farewell, and a sorrow beyond dreams. In CouryD. N.PilippF. (Eds.), The works of Peter Handke (pp. 46–79). Ariadne Press.
HaubenreichJ. (2019). Poetry, painting, patchwork: Peter Handke’s intermedial writing of Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire. German Quarterly, 92(2), 187–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12102
20.
HeideggerM. (1962). Being and time (MacquarrieJ.RobinsonE., Trans.). Blackwell Publishers. (Original work published 1927)
21.
HeideggerM. (1971a). On the way to language (HertzP. D., Trans.). Harper & Row.
22.
HeideggerM. (1971b). The thing. In HofstadterA. (Trans.), Poetry, language, thought (pp. 163–180). Harper & Row.
LacanJ. (1981). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (BookXIMillerJ.-A., Ed.; SheridanA., Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.
25.
LacanJ. (1997). The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The seminar of Jacques Lacan (BookVIIMillerJ.-A., Ed.; PorterD., Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.
26.
LacanJ. (2014). Anxiety: The seminar of Jacques Lacan (BookXMillerJ.-A., Ed.; PriceA. R., Trans.). Polity Press.
27.
LeopoldA. (1992). A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press.
28.
Merleau-PontyM. (1964). Cézanne’s doubt. In DreyfusH. L.DreyfusP. A. (Trans.), Sense and non-sense (pp. 9–26). Northwestern University Press.
29.
ParryC. (2003). Peter Handke’s landscapes of discourse. Ariadne Press.
30.
Plato. (2016). The Republic (BloomA., Trans.). Basic Books.
31.
PohlL.GenzC.HelbrechtI.DobrusskinJ. (2020). Need for shelter, demand for housing, desire for home: A psychoanalytic reading of home-making in Vancouver. Housing Studies, 37(9), 1650–1668. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2020.1857708
SchröderS. (2015). Transient dwelling in German-language nature essay writing: W.G. Sebald’s Die Alpen im Meer and Peter Handke’s Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire. Ecozon@, 6(1), 25–41. https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2015.6.1.636
34.
SchröderS. (2024). From both sides now: Nature writing at literary festivals. In DürbeckG.KanzC. (Eds.), German-language nature writing from eighteenth century to the present: Controversies, positions, perspectives (pp. 313–332). Springer.
35.
ShoomanD. (1990). From episodic space to narrative space: The search for unity in Peter Handke’s fiction and the paintings of Ursula Hübner. Modern Austrian Literature, 23(3/4), 87–98. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24648237
36.
ThoreauH. D. (2016). Walden. Princeton University Press.
37.
VerhaegheP. (2001). Subject and body: Lacan’s struggle with the real. In VerhaegheP. (Ed.), Beyond gender: From subject to drive (pp. 65–97). Other Press.
