BOOKS
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dering reality, but omit issues of profounder meaning- the psyche's
role in construing a certain factual order, for example, and, beyond
this , questions of a larger meaning to existence, which Wittgenstein
returned to in his later years, although he could only pose and answer
such questions with silence (by which he meant, as William Barrett
has remarked, that there was something to be silent about). Facts
give reasons, but no reason to live. And, at bottom,
Slow Homecoming
is an interior narrative of Sorger's quest to find meaning in his life.
"What do I want? What is real for me?" he asks. At first Sorger,
who is "nowhere at home" and "has ceased to long for anything,"
simply struggles to "keep himself together" by scrutinizing reality "in
the least of its forms - a groove in the rock, a change of color in the
mud, a windblown pile of sand at the foot of a plant." Indeed, lengthy
passages on the surrounding landscape dominate much of the narra–
tive , which is organized in three sections-"Long Way Around" (the
American journey), "Mount Ste. Victoire" (a pilgrimage to a mountain
painted by Cezanne, which appears on the novel's jacket cover), and
"Child Story" (a description of Sorger's relationship with his daugh–
ter). Yet these descriptions of time and place really serve as medita–
tions on the relationship between the psyche and the world, or on the
role of form in an abstract sense, rather than as realistic accounts.
For Handke , such entities as form or fact are never unambiguous .
Thus the geologist Sorger "never ceased to regard the linguistic for–
mulas of his science as a hoax; the rites in which it apprehended the
landscape, its conventions of description and nomenclature, its con–
ception of time and space, struck him as dubious." Sorger fluctuates
between wanting the landscape to reflect his psyche ("I would like to
teach the landscape to be rational and the heavens to mourn") or to
be entirely alien, so that he can possess a sense of self by differentiat–
ing his inner turmoil from it. Once, Sorger dreams that his brain is
"a map of the world. "
Needless to say, with this sort of ambiguity in relating to physi–
cal environs, Sorger's relationship to the other people he encounters
are riddled with
angst.
(And one realizes how rarely one hears this
painfully self-conscious, alienated voice typical of the earlier mod–
ernist writers today.) Mechanistic metaphors pop up persistently as
Sorger fumbles to sort out his reactions to the people he encounters;
even the native Indian woman he sleeps with in Alaska is spoken of
as "a dangerous machine." Sorger wants someone to touch him, to
restore a sense of limits so that he can regain an image of himself.
