JEROME KLiNKOWITZ
423
PRI ZE PIECE, the foot-a nd-hand opera ted Singer sew ing machine."
T he roo ts fo r her sui cide are apparent quite earl y. In the midst o f these
o bj ectifi ca ti ons, "you ceased
to
exi sl. " Her life has become so unima–
g in abl y a bstract tha t she can be forgotten . Once she di es, "The burial
ritual depersona li zed her once and (or all , and reli eved everyone.
It
was
snowin g hard as we foll owed her mortal remains. Onl y her name had
to be inserted in the reli gio us formul as. 'Our beloved sister. ... '"
In
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Peter Handke has assumed the
fun cti on of Joseph Bloch in
The Goa lie's A nxiety
and th e narra to r/
pro tagoni st of
Short L ett er:
he himself is making the words, and so
craftin g rea lity. Handke di scusses hi s fea r of being los t within the
language, where " the res ult is a litera ry ritua l in whi ch an indi vidual
life ceases to be anything more than a pretext" -the very mi stake his
mo ther made with her own life. Fea rful of losin g his ba lance in each
sentence, he ado pts a new approach, "starting not with the facts but
with the already avail able formul a ti o ns, the lingui sti c depos it of man 's
socia l experi ence. From my mo ther's life, I sifted out the elements tha t
were a lready forseeen in these formul as, for onl y with the help of ready–
made p ubli c lan g uage was it poss ible to single out from among a ll the
irrelevant facts o f this life the few tha t cri ed out to be made public." H e
wishes to penetra te the essence o f her existence, but words are made
onl y for the surface. " She refuses to be isola ted and remain s unfa thom–
abl e; my sentences crash in the da rkness and lie sca ttered on the paper. "
T he mos t refreshing aspect of H andke's work is tha t it is no t
comba ti ve. There are no belli gerent allempts
to
prove
the writer's
ina bility to adequately portray hi s mother; instead, he simply goes
about ma kin g an analys is of her sui cide within the rul es o f lang uage
whi ch any knowl edgea bl e ling ui st or philosopher would agree de–
scribes the communal rea lity of the twentieth- century world . In a
simil ar manner, Ha ndke's innova ti ons in drama disca rd illusioni stic
conventi ons onl y
to
work simpl y and directl y with the rea l ma teri a ls o f
thea ter.
Offendin g the Au dien ce,
Handke's first published work , is a
p lay whi ch stri ps itself of all suspensions of di sbelief until the ma tter a t
hand is just the actua l audi ence experi ence; and even when the event
has been reduced
to
the experi ence of the audi ence sitting there
wa tchin g the " pl ay," words alone become its substance-disembodied
and often contradi ctory insults, representing no thing but themselves .
In the preface to
Kaspar
(1967 ), one of H andke's " speak-ins"
(S prech–
stucke),
the a uthor
te~ l s
hi s readers tha t such pieces " po in t to the world
not by way o f pictures but by way of words; the words of th e speak-ins
don 't po int at the world as something lying o utside the words but
to
the world in th e words themselves."
