The Transformation of One’s Own Writing

Abstract

The text, written in 1994, forms a central mediating link between Handke’s fictional texts and the author’s authentic notes. It is linked to both in multiple and complex ways. On the one hand, the text autobiographically reconstructs a phase of the author’s life and at the same time, it opens perspectives on the fictional work: It provides clues to the genesis of some of the texts and explicitly incorporates not just a few of their guiding words. Second, by the fact that the I who speaks in Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht (My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay) bears traits of both the author and his characters. The I speaking there can be compared to the first-person narrator of Proust’s Á la Recherche du temps perdu, who is also intertwined with his author. Proust paraphrases this fact with the words: “qui dit je mais que je ne suis pas toujours” (Proust 1963, 61; Keller 1991, 207 f.). However, because Handke’s first-person narrator Keuschnig bears the name of the character in another text, the relationship between fiction and reality, author and character, takes on a further dimension; it points into the author’s work history and intertwines a biographical and an intellectual phase of development so closely that one has spoken of “Erzählen in Echtzeit” (Honold 2017, 400). This work-historical contouring gives the narrative concept of autofiction, the deliberate interweaving of factual and fictional narration that characterizes this text, its particularity (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2006, 358). The demarcation between Handke the narrator, the author in Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht, and the figures of Handke’s work, who appear in altered form in Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht, is playfully transgressed again and again in the narrative. The figure of the doppelgänger, with which Handke inscribes himself in his texts, has therefore been deciphered with good reason as a central configuration of all his texts (Müller 2017).