422
PARTISAN REVIEW
A. (G. township)," reads the paper, "a housewife, aged 51, committed
suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills." The
meaning of his mother's death must be put into words; otherwise, the
narrator wi ll be as lost as Joseph Bloch. He read ily admits that "for,
intensely as I sometimes feel the need to write about my mother, this
need is so vague that if I didn ' t work at it I would, in my present state of
mind, just sit at my typewriter pounding out the same letters over and
over again." His method for composition, though, will be the same as
for his fiction: "As usual when engaged in literary work, I am alienated
from myself and transformed into an object, a rem embering and
formulating machine. " The act, however, brings him " back to life."
From the beginning, the story of his mother's life tells of her
attempts to distinguish herself from the hopeless mediocrity prophes–
ized for women in h er culture. She lea rns the manners of the bourgeo is
class, but in so doing forfeits her individuality:
And so an emotional life that never had a chance of achieving
bourgeois composure acquired a superficial stability by clumsily
imitating the bourgeois system of emotional relations, prevalent
especiall y among women, the system in which "So-and-so is my type
but I'm not his," or ''I'm his but he's not mine, " or in which "We' re
made for each other" or "can't stand the sight of each other" -in
which cliches are taken as binding rul es and any
individual
reaction,
which takes some account of an actual person, becomes a deviation.
For instance, my mother would say of my fath er: "Actually, he
wasn't my type." And so this typology became a guide
to
life; it gave
you a pleasantly objective feeling about yourself; you stopped
worrying about your origins, your possibly dandruff-ridden, sweaty–
footed individuality,
or
the daily renewed problems of how
to
go on
living; being a type relieved the human molecul e of his humiliating
loneliness and isolation; he lost himself, yet now and then he was
somebody, if on ly briefly.
In terms of system, this typology is simi lar to the power of words in
shaping reality. " In symbolic terms," Handke says of his mother, "sh e
was no longer a NATIVE WHO HAD NEVER SEEN A WHITE
MAN ." Her type is as definite and defining as the objects in her
kitchen: "the GOOD OLD ironing board, the COZY hearth , the often–
mended cooking pots, the DANGEROUS poker, the STURDY wheel–
barrow, the ENTERPRISING weed cutter, the SHINING BRIGHT
knives , which over the years had been ground
to
a vanishing narrow–
ness by BURLY scissors grinders, the FIENDISH thimbl e, the STU–
PID darning egg, the CLUMSY OLD flatiron , which provided variety
by having to be put back on the stove every so often, and finally the
