298
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
is, then, precisely between
less
and
more
that Handke wtites, and he is
always quick to notice and to despise any necessary suomission to formu1ait
elements-literary conventions, personal tones, the grammatical pafts of
speech-and even his explicit, rational justifications of his procedure strike
him
as "arbitrary." He thinks, whatever he thinks, he might well have
thought something else. In other words, procedure is posture. This, too, is
an odd reflection for the recently bereaved, but Handke makes it coincident
with his theme in the final paragraph:
Horror is something perfectly natural: the mind's horror vacui. A
thought is taking shape, then suddenly it notices that there is nothing
more
to
think. Whereupon it crashes to the ground like a figure in a
comic strip who suddenly realizes that he has been walking on
air.
True, comedy lives in the
imago veritatis,
but it is tempting to ask: Did
Handke's mother commit suicide or did he think it? Is the horror in her
suicide or is it
in
the nature of thinking? Is the former what T .S. Eliot would
call the "objective correlative" of the latter? To pursue connectiorlS and
discriminations implicit in these questions is nauseating preciosity, charac–
teristic of bourgeois intellectuals, and, therefore, Handke's notes of self–
qualifying irony are always apt, giving a sort of wretched piquancy to his
controlled vacillations in tonal narcissism. This is the last line:
Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail.
All what? Even if I grant that Handke is determined
to think,
I must
wonder if somebody hasn't told
him
the news. Literally, the news. Shortly
before
this
book was written, his mother, the village housewife, blew herself
away on downers. But early in the book, Handke says:
The worst thing right now would be sympathy, expressed in a word
or even a glance. I would turn away or cut the sympathizer short.
because I need the feeling that what I am going through is incompre–
hensible and incommunicable; only then does the horror seem mean–
ingful and real.
The implications of this remark make sympathy irrelevant, but they leave a
place for pity. Handke knows what he feels; he also knows what he needs to
feel; beyond all that, he knows what you might mistakenly feel about the
way he intends to review-not simply his mother's life-but his needs and
feelings . Advertising all that knowledge makes this a very self-consciously
impersonal book. To repeat: it is extremely moving, immensely sad. I will
