Kaspar is thus systematically socialized. He makes visible progress. But then suddenly he finds himself in crisis. His identity is undermined by the passing of time. “When I am, I was.”21 He formulates this problem of shifting phases in the most confusing variations, constantly mixing up the grammatically possible and the grammatically impossible, his reality and his irritation constantly becoming confused. When he finally says, “I will have become because I am,” we can no longer tell if he has it the wrong way around or is simply expressing hopelessness.22 Kaspar, now uncertain of himself, three times repeats the magical formula “I am the one I am.” But the affirmation sounds wide of the mark. In its abstraction it does not offer anything sufficient to counter Kaspar’s growing doubt of what he represents. As if in alarm he stops rocking and cries, “Why are there so many black worms flying about?” It is an image of the utmost distress. Kaspar is in danger of regression. The stage darkens, and once more the prompters must try persuasion. It grows light again, and they begin to speak. “You have model sentences with which you can get through life.” The light grows brighter. “You can learn and make yourself useful.”23 And the brighter it becomes, the quieter Kaspar is; he is all right again, enlightened, ready for the shock of confirmation, for the test of a total blackout, in which a prompter tells him, “You’ve been cracked open.”24 This time the darkness of the stage is not a fear that Kaspar already has but one that is instilled into him. Only after a long moment does a voice suggest, in the darkness, “You become sensitive to dirt.” When it is light again, Kaspar’s socialization finally seems complete. His alter ego enters with a broom, sweeping the stage. Kaspar is now his own matrix, with unlimited powers of reproduction. More Kaspars appear, clones of his reformed person. But now Kaspar will begin to suffer from this fact, from everything that is repeated, and thus not least from himself. “I was proud of the first step I took, of the second step I felt ashamed: I felt ashamed of everything that I repeated.”25 Only with speech was it the other way around, for, says Kaspar, “I felt ashamed even of the first sentence I uttered, whereas I no longer felt ashamed of the second sentence.” Speech, as it were, had removed his shame, teaching him to become accustomed to identities. The fact that he still remembers it is the beginning of the story he tells of himself toward the end of the play. This story is the clear signal that all is not yet right with him, for “an object is orderly when you don’t first have to tell a story about it.”26 Kaspar’s education thus seems to have failed. He remembers, but too well. He knows not only about himself but about his origin and development, about his indoctrination, the prelude to his despair.
In reflecting on the changes that have happened to him, Kaspar breaks out of the role that he was given to play. His inquiries take him back to a point when, entering paradise through the gateway of thought, he regains the naïveté of his pre-existence. He remembers uttering his first sentence, and in the nostalgia of such memories he encounters the unconscious perfection of his lost self. “Then once I took a look into the open, where there was a very green glow, and I said to the open: I want to be someone like somebody else was once? — and with this sentence I wanted to ask the open why it was that my feet were aching.”27 Sinking into such reminiscences, he gauges time, seeks the darkness of his life, which is now almost stripped of any mystery, until he comes upon things that are identical with his own reality, not just the reality he has assimilated. He remembers the snow that stung his hand, the landscape that “at that time was a brightly colored window shutter” and was then like a colorful shopwindow, and a gloomy legacy of “candles and bloodsuckers; ice and mosquitoes; horses and pus; hoarfrost and rats; eels and sicklebills.”28 These images, retrieved and re-created from his pre-existence, images in which Kaspar’s earlier life shows a relationship with Sigismund’s in Hofmannsthal’s Der Turm, seem to him like authentic documents of his being. Thanks to them he can say, “I still experienced myself.” The training to which he has been subjected could not entirely obliterate his memory of his beginnings. He can still go back behind what he has learned. The wild metaphors he brings back from such excursions are, in their disparate nature, like the “metaphors of a paranoia … a poetic protest against the invasion of others.”29 The crystallization point of this sign of intended rejection comes at those moments when, as Handke says in Wunschloses Unglück (“A Sorrow Beyond Dreams”), “the utmost need to communicate comes together with the ultimate speechlessness.”30 However, where images escape that paralytic confrontation, they feature, being impenetrable ciphers, as examples of broken rebellion. Their structure is that of the myth in which fact and fiction are, so to speak, inseparably linked together. And like that myth, they “involve the same sort of outrageous distortion … all symbolism harbors the curse of mediacy; it is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal. Thus the sound of speech strives to ‘express’ subjective and objective happening, the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ world; but what of this it can retain is not the life and individual fullness of existence, but only a dead abbreviation of it.”31 Literature can transcend this dilemma only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication.