304
PARTISAN REVIEW
distrust of all languages, all claims to truth. Written language, particularly
literary and philosophical, is historically devalued, encrusted with too many
associations and predetermined "meanings." Speech functions not as
genuine social interchange, but has become nervous, egotistical babbling,
which brutalizes the mind and the senses. The prisms of pop culture and of
mass communication reflect a banal, miragelike, deforming reality. To find
its proper home here the self must triumph over this ceaseless flow of infor–
mation, which encourages the mind to turn outward in a feckless voyeurism:
Whatever I saw in print aroused a compulsive sympathy in me ; I felt
drawn to every person and place mentioned .
and destroys experience :
It
had already become inconceivable
to
me on the plane that I could be
curious about anything in Tucson. I'd seen pictures of everything the
place could possibly offer.
Global village indeed!
The narrator leaves the cities of the East and goes to St . Louis, "gateway
of the West." A fan ofJohn Ford's movies , he compares his inner quest with
the settlementofa new land by Ford's heroes; he' 'pioneers reality." Slowly,
he begins to make connections between his inner and outer worlds,
to
pay
attention:
I think I'm developing something that looks like an active memory. Up
until now I had only a passive memory .
He learns when to assign meaning to the world, when to leave it alone.
Moving out of his paralyzing solipsism, he lives , sensitively and intelligently,
with an American academic woman and her young daughter. He reads aloud
from
Der griine Heinrich
and measures himself against Gottfried Keller's
romantic hero. A great sifting and winnowing takes place, as the protagonist
gleans what is useful
for him
from the available languages . The novel's prose
becomes richer ; at times Handke allows himself a rare lyricism. Briefly, the
hero relapses into passivity and the anaesthetized narration; the shaping of
consciousness involves a continual beginning again . The line from Bob Dylan
that Handke uses as the epigraph for another book could serve as well here:
"He not busy being born is busy dying."
