I Want to Teach the Landscape to be Rational: Space,Anxiety,and Sublimation in Peter Handke’s Slow Homecoming

Abstract

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.