BOOKS
301
ably in our newspaper. In suicide, the way it is, actually is the way it is. This
becomes especially evident in the "case" of Handke's mother. Denied the
gratifications of her superlative individuality, by traditional crushing atti–
tudes toward women, she became increasingly a type, an example of the
evetybody whose voice is newspaper prose. Suicide was the logical-psycho–
logical nothing of her woman's fate .
From his deathbed, Rabbi Schneur Zalman reported: "I see as yet only
the Divine Nothing that gives life to the universe." In radical agreement,
Meister Eckhart sings: "God is the denial of denials." But Handke is in no
mood to affirm the something of nothing, unless to write anything at all
is to make this afftrmation-even if he would exhibit only and precisely
the ubiquitous, numinous, mysterious nil-the horror, his theme, the
nothing of something. For his self-consciously ironical modernist conscience,
and perhaps for reasons never directly given in the book, his "stoty" must
include old fashioned aesthetic attitudinizing and even moments of frivolity
that are, if not necessary, not exactly unjustified. Despite this objective,
impersonalized treatment, the horror grows and intensiftes. Like a stoty, it
gathers tremendous power, a literary effect that represents, perhaps even
resembles
in the traditional way, the gathering, excruciating vacancy which
became his mother's life, and which was neither a story nor a "story." As
Handke assures us, his mother's life was not atypical enough to be anything
at all. "I would like to present this VOLUNTARY DEATH as an exemplary
case." In this sentence, lest we fail to see it, irony is hammered into capitals.
His mother's life was, in short, a vehicle of sociological
significance,
a kind
of psycho-social-historical-accumulation-toward-suicide. In German, cer–
tainly, there is a word for it, for the way
it
is , that sorrow beyond the dreams
of
art,
beyond even the slithery distortions of language.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
contains lines that are worth whole bloated
novels wheezing truth and deep feeling. Amid the misery of
his
fmal
reflections, Handke says, "I felt mocked and helpless. All at once, in my
impotent rage, I felt the need of writing something about my mother, " and
shonly thereafter he says, "When she was angry, she didn't beat the
thildren; at most, she would wipe their noses violently." Is it insufferable,
especially following my own self-righteous strictures, to say that a literary
work has made one weep? I'll put it this way: in the dazzling tensity
between Handke's treatment of himself-bereaved son, philosophical
writer, hip contemporary-and the stunning penetration given by the
images of
his
mother, she lived exquisitely for me. I think I loved her. I
know that I wept for her, not for the Cronkite apprehension, Handke's
honor, or the reportorial art of this fascinating book.
LEONARD MICHAELS
