BOOKS
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mention the specifically affective contents , hut I want to pay my respects
flrst to the artist. I return then
to
Handke in the same spirit, I hope, in
which he returns so remorselessly to himself. Whatever its genre may be,
A Sorrow BeyondDreams
is not the following:
(1)
A story that betrays the sheer chronological facticity of his mother's
life by giving it, in dramatic organization, a speciously organic character, a
traditional shape of
art
wrought with intimations of meaning.
It
is a
"story," not a story.
It
is also not an essay.
(2)
A story that carries the stench of a commodity.
(3) A story that displays a grossly self-indulgent need to beautify
peculiar, personal feelings stimulated by the suicide of his mother. (Handke
is never guilty of being like a poet who , according to Nietzsche, exploits
his own experience. Such exploitation, commercial or not, is a deplorable
act, comparable to masturbating in public; but it would be especially
deplorable if Handke also exploited the experience of his mother, which
led not to lyric consummation but to self-annihilation.)
(4) A story that incurs the shameful risk to which every writer is sub–
ject-seeming
to want emotional effects in his readers, and , in this seeming,
to desecrate their interiority, the writer's own interiority, and the language
that binds all to all. (Handke thinks language binds all to all in lies, and he
substantiates this idea by ,using cliched language to describe humanized
objects or formalized relations which, in a naive traditional view, might
require honorifics; for example, Handke's use of cliched description for
man and wife behavior suggests that marriage is a species of hypocrisy, along
with its attendant things , like ironing boards and pots .)
(5) A story qualified by the ultimate abomination, wherein the in–
expressible is made
to
seem expressed. (The book's last line, quoted above ,
answers to this.) However, the abomination must be built into language
itself. If language is a lie , it follows that this idea is also a lie, since only
language can make it manifest. But, in any event , the abomination is so
complex and subtle that nothing but a "story" can represent it. Handke,
who is aware of all these considerations, has written such a " story" in
A
SOmJw Beyond Dreams,
which is not a story. (Shakespeare, Cervantes,
Diderot, Hegel, and others touch on all the problems I've listed. Even the
desire to make things new isn' t new, except for the way it's made .) Handke
says:
Often while at work on my story I felt that writing music would be
more in keeping with its incidents. Sweet New England ...
