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PARTISAN REVIEW
But when he does engage in a physical relationship with a woman,
he loses himself altogether. While this sort of material would make a
classic case study in what clinical psychoanalysis labels "borderline
and narcissistic character disorders," Handke is getting at something
broader here. "This world with its functional forms, labeled in every
detail, yet totally speechless and voiceless, is not in the right," Sorger
says, and he remarks elsewhere, "Everyday life had become evil."
What the world has left out, Handke suggests, is precisely the
individual psyche; "Individual destinies had simply gone out of exis–
tence," Sorger observes. Insofar as Sorger himself reflects this vacuity,
he also shows the flawed object-self relations typical of narcissism.
But his quest is entirely unlike the narcissist's puerile obsession with
the presentation of the self; rather it concerns the more ambiguous
question of defining ontology and moral legitimacy in an age that
has lost its moorings. As T. S. Eliot and Spengler knew, escape into
the rigors and routines of technique is the mass anesthetic in such a
disoriented period. Sorger's despair, of course, is that the anesthetic
doesn't take for him. He cannot stifle the still, silent voice that says
the soul cannot survive in such a sterile climate.
So he travels, from Alaska, to Los Angeles, across America.
Just before he leaves New York, Sorger has a moment of grace,
when he feels "that the history of the world would soon be ended,
harmoniously and without horror," and his eyelids are "anointed by
an eternally wild need for redemption."
Back in Europe, Sorger makes a pilgrimage to Mount Ste. Vic–
toire and engages in meditations on, among other things, Goethe's
color theory and the use of birds in seventeenth-century Dutch paint–
ings to guide the eye to infinite distances. ("And there was not one
bird to save the landscape," he quotes from a Borges story.)
The final section, called "Child Story," is a description of Sorger's
relationship with his daughter. Here Handke is clearly trying to
render a culmination to Sorger's quest by implying its fulfillment in
a state of pure being, represented by the child. Unfortunately, this
does not come through with compelling force. The earlier, driving
tensions flatten out, and one is left with a rather boring realistic nar–
rative. Ultimately, Sorger's redemption seems false. When at the
end of the novel he declares that every story about a child should end
with the words, "Cantilena; perpetuating the plenitude oflove and of
all passionate happiness," one knows one is supposed to be feeling
something reminiscent of, say, the epiphany Thomas Mann evokes
