300
PARTISAN REVIEW
Briefly, then, the ultimate abomination comes to this:
If
the extraordinary
state of feeling from which a story emerges would be true to itself, it
would be silent. Only a stone is authentic, let alone sincere. So let's sing
Sweet New England. When Handke is inclined to sneer, he doesn't overlook
himself.
Here now, as relief from universally corrosive valuations, and from
reasons for not telling a story so tellingly, and, as an example of classic
silence which involves similar aesthetic-moral considerations, is an epitaph
for a dead child:
Rest in soft peace, and , ask'd , say here doth lye
Ben:Jonson his best piece
ofp oetrie.
Self-conscious wit sublimates into natural, poignant surface. Jonson renders
a personal statement; in the whole poem,
his
cultural era-manners, values,
relation to the nature of things-is beautifully implicit. But we don't
talk
like that anymore. Handke's literary achievement, in
A Sorrow Beyond
Dreams,
includes more and less than Jonson's poem. The cultural era
is
symbolized by the newspaper repon. A key to personal statement-every–
where explicit in impersonal repetitions-is fIrst announced by an epigraph
from Bob Dylan:
He not busy being born
is
busy dying.
Graceless and a little stupid, but incontestably appropriate. In writing
this
book, says Handke with Dylan, he will be busy, lest he die with his mother.
The second paragraph, which makes a slightly shocking contrast to the fIrst,
begins:
My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to
work before the need to write about her, which I fdt so strongly at her
funeral , dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with
which I reacted to the news of her suicide.
Handke obviously isn't the classic Jonson who, in magnillcent verse,
mourns. In this contemporary, too human world, Handke's mother killed
herself-perhaps you read about it in the newspaper?-and the thing about
suicide is that it kills more than its immediate victim. It can even seem
viciously indiscriminate, because whomever else it may concern is seized
abruptly and permanently, and forced to confront the horror, the ineluc–
table horror otherwise delivered to us flatly , regularly, copiously, and
bear-
