BOOKS
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another " boring" Antonioni movie. Perhaps it is good , then , to remember
what America's leading ontologist, Walter Cronkite, says everytime he
completes a TV newscast: "that's the way it is." He can apply this appre–
hension to revolutions , crime in high places, or the birth of a Jewish
elephant. Is it impertinent to suggest that Cronkite is the unacknowledged
genius of our literary avant-garde? After all, his apprehension is crucial to
the best contemporary writing.
It
appears in Handke's work even before
the housewife's suicide. She happens, by the way,
to
be his mother, and
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,
largely her biography, is an extremely moving,
immensely sad, reportorial performance.
If it turned out to be fiction, if Handke's mother did not in fact
commit suicide, it would be contemptible. On the other hand, since the
newspaper says she did commit suicide, it is contemptible exactly to the
degree that it is fiction . All this occurs to Handke . He says that the powerful
facts must not overwhelm him, must not merely become a story. In this
passage his scruples are subtle :
. .. I affect the usual biographical pattern and write: .•At that time .. .
later, " " Because .. . although," "was . . . became . .. became
nothing, " hoping in this way to dominate the horror. That, perhaps,
is the comical part ofmy story.
To dominate the horror-which is Handke's theme-requires self-conscious
artificiality, or the rhetoric of no rhetoric, in which a story becomes a
" story." Handke even stops the narrative momentum (like the" 51" in the
newspaper report), and, whenever relevant, gives historical information
about Austrian life before, during, and after the war, generalizations about
small town behavior, aesthetic speculations, and exceedingly particular
descriptions of his mood since the suicide. In this manner, an extraordinary
distance is created between himself and his mother; virtually as if Handke
were competing with the newspaper. Specifically, he claims to be writing the
book because he is better equipped to do so than an outside investigator
(who might, for example , be a student of sociology), but it almost seems
that his personal relation
to
his mother left him insufficient reason to write
the book any other way. Indeed, a first born son might find reasons for
not writing this book at all. However, as Handke explains above, his inten–
tion is to dominate the horror-in itself a strange, or estranging, word–
and , at the same time , never to slide into that ancient habit of mind, that
neurological cliche-a story. He says:
.. . isn 't all information, even of things that have really happened,
more or less a fiction ?
Less.
if
we content ourselves with a mere record
of events;
more.
if
we
try
to
formulate in depth?
