BOOKS
303
Letter, Long Farewell
is a comedy, and its inner drama concerns a man's pain–
ful but successful attempt to thaw himself out. It is about the rebirth of
language, the creation of consciousness.
Like most ofHandke's writing,
Short Letter, Long Farewell
is
meta-art, art
concerned with its own methods and with those of previous art, and it echoes,
and bristles with references to, many literary sources besides Raymond
Chandler. "I had been enjoying all of the poses of alienation available to
me," the book's narrator remarks ironically, and these poses include: en–
countering a terrifying, Dostoevskian double at moments of crisis; suffering,
very much like Sartre's Antoine Roquetin, from intellectual nausea; being
haunted by the threatening opacity of objects in the manner of Robbe–
Grillet's characters. The fact that these poses have been acted out many times
before, both in life and in art, does not diminish their force here. On the
contrary. That the protagonist's suffering has an historical as well as a subjec–
tive dimension, that the suffering may even be a case of his life imitating art,
increases its pathos, makes it even more excruciating.
Because he cannot find a proper language to deal with the split between
his subjectivity and the world, this nameless hero's prose consists mostly of
naming. In the book's opening passages he simply names the objects which
cross his sensory field and records his own movements in and out of hotel
rooms and through city streets. When he encounters people he notes this, as
though putting an item on a list, then turns away, .. disgusted as usual with
everything that [is] not myself." The flat, repetitive narrative style barely
masks his inarticulate terror:
I compulsively described all the partial anions of which the total action
was composed.... I tried to deceive my own sense of ignorance and
inexperience by dissecting the few activities within my reach as though
speaking of monumental undertakings.
The dilemma of Handke's protagonist (an Austrian writer) is very
familiar, by now almost classical. How can he create a selfwhen the only tool
available for the task, language, disgusts him? For Handke, language means a
series of interlocking but often conflicting signs, including those of movies,
rock music, advertising, etc., as well as written and verbal expressions. Rad–
ically divergent claims on his attention swarm through the narrator's head like
bees: Tarzan and Thomas Jefferson, Schiller and ..Canned Heat," a Claes
Oldenburg-like "catchup bottle as big as a lighthouse" and cryptic letters
from his wife.
The man reacts to this ghastly, overloaded cultural situation with a
