On Handke's 'The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick'

Handke's book, The Golie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, (in original German Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter) was not a relaxing (entspannend) one for me to read. The book is depressing, very realistic, and follows the prolonged mental agony of its protagonist. The main character whom we follow, called Bloch, is a former goalkeeper. He has lost his job and can't find his place in the world. The novel documents how he loses his connecting with community, and how he can't find his place in the world, leading him to perceive his surroundings more and more absurdly.

We learn from the novel that Bloch's career as goalkeeper had its ups and downs, although he played for a big club, and he loses the job that he is doing after his retirement from football. He is divorced, not talking with his child, and has no money. As we could say, he is in a very bad position.

He commits a crime, but that's not what triggers the process of his losing his ground. Rather, it is a result. As Bloch realizes that he lost most of the important things that constituted the main frame of his life, he tries to cling on to smaller joys and habits: going to the cinema, getting drunk, picking up girls, going to his favourite bars. But nothing helps. Without a proper life within which these activities would have their place, within which they would give him pleasure or pain, they would be bad or good, would make him jump or feel guilty, they don't offer anything, just more of the same bleak grayness.

Bloch eventually ends up in a small village near the border. Initially the reader is tempted to think that he wants to flee across the border to escape punishment for his crime. However, Bloch is too passive and confused. When exploring the countryside around the little village in the direction of the border he starts thinking about the geometrical properties of the location, perspective, unexpected encounters, and space. Seemingly all could be related to planning an escape, but Bloch's thoughts drift far from making practical arrangements. The only time he appears to find some peace is after he gets extremely drunk, provokes a fight in a pub, gets beaten up, and then just sits at a table in the tavern with a beer, half awake and half asleep.

Bloch is not obsessed with his crime as Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. He is much more like the narrator of Camus' The Stranger/The Outsider. Someone who hasn't found any attachment in life, and is unwilling to invest the needed energy, emotion, and commitment to care. Without the needed emotional connections, without valuing things, he drifts, and gets into situations which could have been easily avoided. Bloch is somewhat more active, more of an agent. But an agent without much direction. It is obvious that he is a middle aged, energetic man, who is used to action. A normal, confident grown up. But without aims he just steps into situations, but then fails to see why they would matter, what would be their significance.

Peter Handke

In the novel's closing scene Bloch tells the story of a goalkeeper who thinks so much about where the striker is going to shot the penalty that he is eventually rendered motionless, stands still in the middle, and the striker - expecting the goalkeeper to jump to one side - shoots the ball in his hands. Bloch is similarly unable to move. His thoughts throughout the novel run in all directions, usually into usually abstract, depressed and disattached directions. He persistently fails to find significance in anything. Whether he ends up with the ball in his hands? Unlikely that this would work the same way in the real life. One cannot be always lucky.

In many ways this is a sad tale of a middle aged person, who finds that he doesn't have the imagination, the will, and/or the energy to start life anew. He doesn't know how to build up again a network of caring relations, how to relate to people he has lost and should forge new types of relations with - his ex-wife and child - and what he should do with his life. The drifting highlights that since what he was good at he cannot do anymore - he is too old to go back to professional football - and he doesn't have any other genuine interests or connections, he falls apart, inflicting tragedy and confusion on others, as well as himself. We could understand the novel both to highlight how sad life is for many, and also to underline the importance of cultivating a genuine personality, capable of existing alone, with genuine interests, valuing things and people for their own sake. That is what enable most of us to survive continuous change in our life, and even very difficult times.