SOURCE: Varsava, Jerry A. “Auto-Bio-Graphy as Metafiction: Peter Handke's A Sorrow beyond Dreams.” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 14, no. 2 (winter 1985): 119-35.

[In the following essay, Varsava surveys metafictional elements in Peter Handke's A Sorrow beyond Dreams.]

Typically, contemporary metafiction has primarily dealt with a world of fictive events. The author—either directly or through a persona—reflects on the “made” or “constructed” quality of his fictional realm, dispelling notions of narrative omniscience and epistemological apodicticity as his fiction progresses. The reader infers that his own world resists definitive description in much the same way. Peter Handke, the contemporary Austrian poet-novelist-play-wright-essayist, endorses such a view in A Sorrow beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück) and elsewhere.¹ His point of departure in this novella is not, however, a “fictional world” per se but rather personal history. Handke's subject matter would seem to distance him from metafictional considerations. After all, what have biography, autobiography, and history, in general, to do with imaginative literature? The response Handke fashions to these questions will be the subject of the present inquiry.

Long heralded in western Europe, critics in the U.S.—and not just Germanists—are coming to regard Handke as one of the more gifted experimental authors writing today and one who largely concurs with American postmodernist attitudes on history, epistemology, and fictional narrative. Prior to discussing A Sorrow beyond Dreams as exemplary of the Handke opus, I shall place Handke's work within the context of contemporary narrativist historiography and “nonfiction fiction.” In my view, Handke's work takes on new significance when located within a comparative frame of reference. This essay hopes to introduce an important work of Handke to those readers who, though interested in postmodernist philosophy and theory of narrative, may have overlooked Handke by focusing on American authors and a few major foreign ones such as Borges, Robbe-Grillet, and Calvino.

While sharing with other postmodernists a preoccupation with self-reference and generic redefinition, Handke's concern with the ethical implications of language usage is more serious and more urgent. Like many twentieth-century thinkers—his fellow Austrians, Robert Musil and Wittgenstein, for example—Handke sees in the language the operation of “invisible” social codes. In his fictions, plays, and poetry, Handke seeks to unmask the subtle, often insidious powers of language. A Sorrow beyond Dreams is especially resonant today in two respects. Generally speaking, it investigates language as an (strong-) arm of coercive ideology. More specifically, it explores how language assists in society's subjection of women to sexist biases. In making himself and his reader more sensitive to the conceptual oppression language often effects, Handke opens up language usage to the possibility of a constructive revision. Revision, herein, entails a critique of “automatic language,” that battery of axioms and idioms that is all too frequently our first refuge in moments of moral and intellectual lassitude.

Passivity and conformity have always been the enemy for Handke. His writing reveals nothing so much as a private appropriation of the contemporary literary tradition, as an existentializing of literary forms. An influence study would detail at length Handke's debt to Kafka and Camus in Die linkshändige Frau (1976) and Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung (1975); to Camus (L'Etranger) and Robbe-Grillet (Le Voyeur) in Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1970); to the theatre of the absurd in Kaspar (1968) and Der Ritt über den Bodensee (1970); to the Bildungsroman tradition in Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (1972).² Finally, however, the influence study could not fail to remark upon the originality of language, the subtle extension of conventions, the fierce intellectual integrity, that invest these works. These same qualities characterize A Sorrow beyond Dreams, a work in which the author at once defines and exceeds the limits of traditional biography and autobiography.

I. BEYOND FICTION, BEYOND FACT

A Sorrow beyond Dreams is a meditation on the powers and limits of language to construct meaning. The novella-length study records the author's emotional and intellectual reactions to his mother's life and suicide, what he calls her Freitod—her freely-willed death.³ Typically, a biographer assumes a stance vis-à-vis his or her subject somewhere between enthusiastic engagement and dispassionate objectivity, the aim being to garner the reader's interest without sacrificing the illusion of critical inquiry. Handke's, contrary to this kind of unambiguous biographical project, embraces a multifurcated perspective. In A Sorrow beyond Dreams, he acknowledges a complex of motivating factors that take him far beyond the generic confines of the biography form; he lists the following as “justifications” for the work: as an “insider,” he is in the best position to tell the story of his mother's life (and death); the act of writing is, for himself, therapeutic; and he wishes to privilege his mother's story, to represent it as an “exemplary case.”⁴

The first of these motivations would seem to put Handke in league with traditional biographers who, implicitly or otherwise, purport to capture something like the “essence” of their subject in the course of their research. Handke, however, defining auto-bio-graphy as a private reading of event, stands in an ironic relationship to the genres of autobiography and biography. He does not aim at a delineation of objective correspondences in A Sorrow beyond Dreams. Text is neither a slice-of-life nor a crude reflection of onticity; text is merely a faint representation, partial and temporary. In A Sorrow beyond Dreams, the objectivist's confidence in ratiocination and empiricism—typical of biography and, to a lesser extent, of autobiography as well—conflicts directly with an ironic mode that posits relative (or even absolute) uncertainty as the surety of truth. “Truth” has become insubstantial, existing only at the intersection of assertion and counter-assertion, at a level of dialectical debate on the very impossibility of truth. Handke feels a filial and creative need to verbally depict his mother and yet declares openly his incapacity to achieve this goal. Through his self-reflexive mode of representation, his metafictional self-consciousness, Handke admits himself to be a “liar,” a dissimulator, yet, paradoxically achieves something more than dissimulation through his admission.

There has emerged, of late, in the philosophy of history the view that historiography does, like imaginative literature, manipulate rhetorical tropes, that the historian imposes a narrative structure upon event as he writes his history. The manipulation of tropes and the consequent narrativization of history determine a historian's understanding of his subject. In his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, Hayden White details at length the operation of certain tropes in nineteenth-century historiography, e.g., metonomy in Marx, metaphor in Nietzsche, irony in Croce.⁵ Like the novelist, the historian must establish, White asserts, both extra-textual correspondence (i.e., real-world referentiality) as well as intratextual coherence (i.e., narrative consistency)—“… history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation.”⁶ Form and content serve as reciprocal influence in the writing of history—an uncontroversial point in postmodernist criticism but one that continues to inspire hot debate among historians and philosophers of history. The narrativist school of historiography—and we can count Danto, Dray, Gallie, and White among its more prominent members—emphasizes the fictional quality of all history.⁷History only begins when the historian, having sifted through a plethora of “facts,” gives shape to them through the processes of selection and storytelling. And, as White points out, all narrative discourse projects value:

If every fully realized story, however we define that familiar but conceptually elusive entity, is a kind of allegory, points to a moral, or endows events, whether real or imaginary, with a significance that they do not possess as mere sequence, then it seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats.⁸

A Sorrow beyond Dreams is a very self-conscious exercise in narrativist historiography. Handke accepts, indeed celebrates, the view that the creation of narrative discourse brings one into a personal, highly individuated relationship to event. It remains the ethical responsibility of the writer to determine a mode of discourse appropriate to the phenomena under review. In A Sorrow beyond Dreams, he ruminates on the narrative strategies open to him. A Sorrow beyond Dreams, as metahistory, as metafiction, discards the traditional fact-fiction dichotomy. Through its halting, often pointillistic description, through essayistic digressions on language and narrative form, the novella portrays the capacity of verbal constructs to at once defile and define the human condition.

In A Sorrow beyond Dreams, Handke, perhaps the most Gallic of prominent German language writers today, extends the French tradition of the memoir novel. Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit are, stripped bare of certain novelistic conventions, essentially autobiographical. Sartre's sainted Genet, as a function of his radically antinomian ethics, discards the minimal illusionism of Proust and Celine in Journal du voleur. Fact-fiction distinctions are no longer of any import. Declares Genet in a metafictional aside in his Journal:

We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those bygone, foreign states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it were to be the notion of what I was. I shall therefore make clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext-subject is my former life. It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and vice versa. Let the reader therefore understand that the facts were what I say they were, but the interpretation that I give them is what I am—now.⁹

The distinctions formerly apparent between memoir and prose fiction no longer hold sway. Burroughs in Junkie and the more subjective of the “New Journalists”—Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson, for example—similarly ignore traditional generic distinctions that separate fact and fiction, historical narrative and imaginative literature.

In contrast to those metafictionists who boast of their cleverness to the reader—an inclination apparent from time to time, for instance, in the work of Coover, Sukenick, and Federman—Handke remains considerably less self-assured and, in his own view, less conforming. Notes Handke,

I'm sick of those passages in our work that refer however sauvely to how the work is being made or how it should be made although in a broader sense I still deal with the self-referential condominiums. The former seems to be at this point like nothing more than another dull literary convention to be purged. …¹⁰

Through canonization and over-use (the same thing Handke would probably argue), self-reflexivity has, to some degree, lost its intellectual resonance, has become faddish and mannered. As a narrative convention, it threatens to become a cliché. Handke, of course, has been long devoted to the denigration of accepted norms. His famous attack on the Gruppe 47 at Princeton in 1965 served notice that he would not be influenced by the realist aesthetics and engagement that had dominated German literature since the end of the war.¹¹ Handke's Princeton speech established him as an early exponent of neue Subjektivität in German language and letters.¹² Heavily influenced by existentialism, Handke has maintained, with doctrinaire rigidity, the primacy of the individual. Though his alteration of generic conventions, especially in his drama, leaves him open to the charge of formalism, the entirety of Handke's corpus aims at real-world referentiality, at achieving the intersubjectivity necessary for the moral education of the reader. Handke refuses, however, to see his writings as oracular discourse. The plays, the novels, even his essays, reveal the tentative probings of an inquisitive mind struggling to make personal sense of life. Literature provides Handke, first and foremost, an opportunity for self-discovery. Thus, in Der Hausierer (1967), Handke, exploring the limits of the detective novel, takes himself (and the reader) into the hidden recesses of human consciousness where sense perceptions are recorded and appraised. The plays extend the Brechtian program of audience alienation—not, however, in the interests of political agitation but in those of increased self-awareness. In Publikumsbeschimpfung, an early Sprechstück—an undramatized audience dialogue, devoid of “theatricality”—the players openly bait the audience, demanding that every individual viewer take on an active posture, both as theatre-goer and Mensch:

No actions take place here. You feel the discomfort of being watched and addressed, since you came prepared to watch and make yourselves comfortable in the shelter of the dark. Your presence is every moment explicitly acknowledged with every one of our words. Your presence is the topic we deal with from one breath to the next, from one moment to the next, from one word to the next. Your standard idea of the theatre is no longer presupposed as the basis of our actions. You are neither condemned to watch nor free to watch. You are the subject. You are the play-makers.¹³

II. AUTO-BIO-GRAPHY AS METAFICTION

Though advancing a critique of literary form, the ramifications of metafictionality are not confined to the purely formal or the purely literary. Metafictionality, in its more profound forms, questions the grounds we have for claiming to know and to understand. Not unexpectedly, in our highly self-conscious postmodernist age, epistemological inquiry has not remained the concern of a small group of experimental novelists. The roll of contemporary metafictionists continues to grow and includes writers working in such diverse traditions as science fiction—Ursula LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness) and Samuel Delany (Triton)—the socialist novel—Ulrich Plenzdorf (Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.) and Jurek Becker (Jakob der Lügner and Irreführung des Behörder)—and, with Handke, both biography and autobiography.¹⁴

Language has long served as a means to epistemological insight for Handke. In an autobiographical essay, Handke acknowledges that, as a schoolboy writing descriptive essays, he first became aware of the formative role language plays in our construction of a world view:

When I was supposed to describe an experience, I didn't write about the experience as I had experienced it. Rather the experience about which I was writing changed itself or often came into existence for the first time through the writing of sentences about it, and certainly through the sentence models that people had taught me: Even a specific experience seemed to me different when I had written a sentence about it.¹⁵

For Handke, one only understands after one has constructed a narrative, after one has told a story about an event or experience. Narrative construction, when proceeding according to collective views of language usage and storytelling, yields a meaning consonant with that of the collectivity. The effacement of self becomes an unavoidable consequence for those who fail to shape their experiences in personally meaningful ways. Handke accepts a proposition fundamental to existentialist ethics—one must choose oneself for oneself. In A Sorrow beyond Dreams, Handke manipulates the classical narratorial perspectives of mimesis and diegesis. At the level of biography and memoir, the author illustrates or shows his response to his mother's life and death; at the level of metafiction and meta-auto-bio-graphy, he delineates or tells the operation of self-choice that leads to the particular meaning he assigns to his mother's tragic existence.

In Handke's view, the construction of narrative must be a highly self-conscious act if one is to avoid the tyranny of “mass-speak” and “mass-truth.” Since, as Werner Thuswalder points out, language embodies the interests and biases of a culture, the cultural critic must also be a critic of language.¹⁶ The investigation of language and literary form is an investigation of collective attitudes. The formal novelty of Handke's work (the above “influences” duly noted) merely attests to the novelty of life. Old forms remain insensitive to the novelty of quotidian phenomena. Writing in his by now famous essay, “Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeimturms,” Handke describes the significance literature holds for him:

I expect from the literary work some news for myself, something that changes me, if only a little, something that makes me aware of a not yet thought, a not yet conscious possibility of reality, that makes me aware of a new possibility to see, to speak, to think, to exist.¹⁷

Through questioning traditional patterns of storytelling (e.g., Aristotelean illusionism in drama, objective biography, the Bildungsroman), Handke sets an example for the reader who, though probably not an imaginative writer, must, like Handke, involve himself imaginatively in his own personal experiences if they are to have personal significance and personal appeal. All of Handke's literary efforts are autobiographical, are acts of self-exploration:

… I have only one theme: to become clear, clearer about myself, to get to know myself or not get to know myself, to learn what I am doing falsely, what I am thinking falsely, what I say without reflection, what I say automatically, also what others do, think, speak without reflection: to become attentive and to make attentive: to make and to become more sensible, sensitive, and exact so that I and also others can exist more exactly and sensibly, so that I can communicate better with others and interact better with them.¹⁸

Through narrativization, Handke comes to terms with his own existence.

Narration is, for Handke, a way to humanize human being. It is not primarily a literary event but rather a primordial response to being. When language and literary conventions are appropriated self-consciously and critically, they allow one to define and assert one's identity. In A Sorrow beyond Dreams Handke establishes the living relationship that exists between fictional and historical narratives. Notwithstanding the highly personal, even private, subject matter, despite his frequent essayistic digressions on narrative aesthetics, A Sorrow beyond Dreams has broadly relevant social and philosophical implications.¹⁹ The novella exceeds the apparent solipsism of Handke's very personal family portrait; it is more than a purely “literary” enterprise though its dissections of narrative praxis and genre theory are, in themselves, important. His narrative aesthetics concurs with that of Ricoeur which asserts that “The work-world of narratives is always a temporal world. In other words, time becomes human time to the extent that it is articulated in a narrative way, and narratives make sense to the extent that they become conditions of temporal existence.”²⁰

III. A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS: THE STORY OF A LIFE, THE LIFE OF A STORY

As metafiction, A Sorrow beyond Dreams gives two essential issues—one literary, one epistemological—a problematic cast. What are the grounds of human knowledge? How effective is language in conveying such knowledge? Actually, the two issues do not exist separately but together as aspects of man's ceaseless inquiry into the nature of truth. A statement by Handke early in the novella echoes these two concerns: “… I experienced moments of extreme speechlessness and needed to formulate them—the motive that has led men to write from time immemorial.”²¹ For Handke, a verbalizing talent serves as the necessary adjunct of knowledge and understanding. This is hardly new, of course; phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Gadamer have long asserted that language molds our powers of conceptualization and shapes our thoughts—in the words of Edmond Jabes, “You are the one who writes and the one who is written.”²² This awareness of language's partial dominion over man accounts, in part, for Handke's interest in verbal and generic experimentation. An ironic attitude toward language is, then, characteristic of Handke (and of many other postmodernists, one might add) who realizes that language must at once serve as mid-wife to his thoughts as well as the whore of the conformity and intellectual lassitude that he loathes. Writes Kermode: “[Hence] for Handke language is what prevents us from being in the world as it is, a set of debilitating fictions. … Attack language, Handke seems to be saying, and you attack the root of evil.”²³

The capacity of language to enslave has three major reference points in A Sorrow beyond Dreams: first, there is the moral bankruptcy that the instrumentalization of language has occasioned in German and Austrian society; second, there is the role language plays in the reification of Handke's mother; and, lastly, of most interest here, there are the problems of language and generic convention that the author himself wrestles with in the novella. Let us reflect upon each of these in turn to appreciate the full range of Handke's ironic metafictional perspective and to see how the author is capable, finally, of escaping the straightjackets of “mass-speak” and traditional literary form as he fashions a work of originality and compassion.

A Sorrow beyond Dreams is a telling critique of middle-class values; both as practiced by the bourgeoisie and as imitated by the urban and rural poor. Except for brief membership in the Berlin working class, Frau Handke lives out her life among the poor craftsmen and peasantry of provincial Austria. Notwithstanding obvious differences, both social groups share an important feature—an intolerance toward individuality. Despite short periods of individuation, of a personal blooming, Frau Handke returns again and again to the “zero degree” of personality that social integration requires of her. In such a society, religious practice has become pure ritual, the mouthing of catechismal truths and pious phrases. Handke writes that “… little remained of the human individual, and indeed, the word ‘individual’ was known only in pejorative combinations” (p. 267/p. 48). Language is reduced to mere instrumentality. In instrumentality, it gives up its expressive, individuating capacities; it becomes the tool of a culture's social and political self-reinforcement. The media manipulate this dehumanizing potential in language. With the Anschluss, the rape of language becomes programmatic. The “Sieg Heil” becomes mandatory. The press comes to more fully embody Benjamin's characterization of it as “the theatre of the unbridled debasement of the word.”²⁴ The radio, as a major propaganda organ, markets as news the tired phrases of fascist optimism; it inculcates in the populace an acceptance of Nazi horrors, rendering injustice palatable through the artful marriage of circumlocution and euphemism. And the people, never aware of language's ability to critique itself, its power to peel back the layers of rhetoric and moral cant to expose a barren core, fall in line, beguiled by the Sirens' song. And what was “politics”? asks Handke rhetorically.

A meaningless word, because, from your schoolbooks on, everything connected with politics had been dished out in catchwords unrelated to any tangible reality and even such images as were used were devoid of human content: oppression as chains or boot heel, freedom as mountaintop, the economic system as a reassuringly smoking factory chimney or as a pipe enjoyed after the day's work, the social system as a descending ladder: “Emperor-King-Nobleman-Burgher-Peasant-Weaver/Carpenter-Beggar-Gravedigger” …

(pp. 252-53/pp. 23-24)

The reduction of social praxis to schematized relations, to sentimental role playing, leaves a social organism devoid of vitality and inimical to the interests of the individual. These, then, the Austrian Dorf and post-war Berlin are the social ambiences in which Frau Handke moves.

Frau Handke's biography is the history of an individual's submission to the imperatives of the group. Ebullient and curious by nature, she has allowed personal weakness and overpowering circumstance to blunt her nobler instincts. The moral mediocrity of her social setting, its chauvinism, its disdain for idiosyncrasy, slowly stifle her spontaneity. Such a milieu consumes individuality. Frau Handke conforms; she dons the mask of anonymity. In Berlin, she mimics the speech and manners of the hardened locals although she herself is gentle and sensitive. She becomes typical, construing life in typical terms, freeing herself “from her own history” (p. 261/p. 38). In her relationship with men, for example, “… clichés are taken as binding rules and any individual reaction, which takes some account of an actual person, becomes a deviation” (p. 261/p. 39).

Frau Handke emulates the petty proprieties of the bourgeoisie but, as Handke points out, bourgeois values do not insulate her from despair because she, being poor, lacks the material resources that give a hollow succor and some distraction to the middle-class matron. No, the life of the narrator's mother is founded on disjunctions. Her world view does not correspond to the material circumstances of her life. Her verbal address does not match her actual concerns and feeling. She does not live her own life but that of a socially determined mean; the question of happiness becomes for her, as for Auden's “unknown citizen,” beside the point, absurd even. Menial tasks give her life what meaning it has and, in the long run, leave it quite devoid of all real meaning. For Frau Handke, time exists only as a ceaseless repetition of tedious routine:

Today was yesterday, yesterday was always. Another day behind you, another week gone, and Happy New Year. What will we have to eat tomorrow? Has the mailman come? What have you been doing around the house all day?

(p. 275/p. 61)

The search for self-expression within the bounds of the socially permissible becomes Frau Handke's irresolvable dilemma. Ultimately, she becomes a person alienated both from self and society. Misery, mental illness, and suicide all come to characterize what Handke, in an ironic inversion of a common expression (“wunschlos glücklich sein”), calls her A Sorrow beyond Dreams.²⁵

It is Handke's expressed objective in the novella to detail the existential failure of a noble woman, the causes of that failure and its consequences. However, a measure of his honesty and sophistication, the author is very much aware of the pitfalls open to the biographer. There must exist, for example, a delicate balance between the description of particular aspects of his subject's life and generalizing statements that synthesize and render typical and symbolic these particularities. Handke as ironic narrator, as metafictionist, acknowledges in his reflexive commentary that literature invariably points in one of two directions—toward the concrete and descriptive or toward the abstract and symbolic. The former risks losing its reader when a welter of detail detracts from narrative interest as every reader of Beckett knows. The author promises his reader more than purely local verisimilitude when he takes up his pen. Conversely, and a point of special concern for Handke, a largely symbolic rendering of one's subject matter may leave a rather vapid Tendenzroman that may well have little to do with anything other than the author's philosophical speculations. The most serious problem connected with a symbolic-allegorical approach for Handke is that it would replicate, if in a different manner, the reification his mother suffers amongst her family and friends:

The danger of all these abstractions and formulations is of course that they tend to become independent. When that happens, the individual that gave rise to them is forgotten—like images in a dream, phrases and sentences enter into a chain reaction, and the result is literary ritual in which an individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext.

(p. 263/p. 42)

The point of perfect equilibrium between the particular detail and the general truth becomes, in itself, an abstract impossibility, one that Handke himself is aware of. He admits as much to the reader, suggesting to the latter that he carefully scrutinize the author's narrative aesthetic. Handke's discussion of narrative problems dispels the illusion put forth by much non-reflexive fiction—that fiction is not made but simply materializes out of thin air. Reflexivity is, of course, as much a matter of theme as one of form and certainly only one theme among many. It is, however, an important one for the postmodernist who is intent upon instilling in his reader a root suspicion of all that appears inevitable and “objective” in the literary work (and, indeed, in life itself). Handke demands that the reader subject his novella to the kind of critical awareness that he himself applies to the circumstances of his mother's life and to the circumstances surrounding his literary depiction of that life.

IV. THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE AND FORM

Handke admits to no Olympian perspective. He finds himself existentially involved as he writes. His “prejudice” cannot be overcome nor is this desirable. It can, however, be acknowledged. His writing is first and foremost a project of self-discovery and only secondarily a commodity for vicarious appreciation. A Sorrow beyond Dreams is as much his story as his mother's, as much autobiography as biography:

… I am only a writer and can't take the role of the person written about, such detachment is impossible. I can only move myself into the distance; my mother can never become for me, as I can for myself, a winged art object flying serenely through the air. She refuses to be isolated and remains unfathomable; my sentences crash in the darkness and lie scattered on the paper.

(p. 265/p. 44)

Writing is, here, necessarily ironic, a dissimulation of truth—a dissimulation that is not willed but fated. Humanity may be more than a collection of monads but its powers to penetrate into the deepest recesses of one another's souls has perceptual and verbal limits. But Handke, like many other twentieth-century writers, realizes that language is all there is, or, as a pop song has it, that “words are all we have.” So, as with Hofmannsthal in his Lord Chandos letter and Musil in Törless, who both actually extend language in their discussion of its limits and imperfection, or like Hemingway who, seeing “more” in “less,” achieves a new range of expressivity through precision and economy, the narrator of A Sorrow beyond Dreams enjoys a conditional victory over what might otherwise remain genuinely “speechless moments of terror” in his imperfect portrayal of them.

To extend the limits of language, to defer its tyranny over the individual, Handke resorts to various ploys. His dissection of bankrupt concepts has been explored briefly with reference to “politics.” We might also consider the manner in which he ironically manipulates clichés.²⁶ Setting them off in upper case print or inverted commas, he exposes their pretensions and vacuity. At the conclusion of the novella, he cites the trite graveside remark, placing it in quotation marks—“‘She took her secret to the grave’” (p. 297/p. 97). The narrator mocks this pious statement and its reluctance to penetrate into the tragic circumstances of his mother's life, its willingness to dispatch her to the realm of non-identity with the wave of a colloquial wand. Handke himself must stand on guard against such easy sentimentality. Curiously, something strange and vital occurs when the author disfigures the disfigurement language accomplishes through clichés and worn pieties.²⁷ His ironic verbal play liberates language, if only briefly, from the squalor of “mass-speak.” As Karsten Harries points out, a cliché “functions as cliché only as long as it lulls the spectator into taking for granted what is presented. In recognizing a cliché for what it is we are already beyond it.”²⁸

Handke's suspicion of language is mirrored by his distrust of generic convention. A Sorrow beyond Dreams eludes succinct generic definition. The novella, through Handke's self-reflexivity, merges a number of generic strains into a highly original pattern of discourse. Most obviously biography, the text shifts toward meta-biography when the narrator takes up the problems connected with that genre. The novella, as mentioned earlier, is also an essay in autobiography and self-definition; yet, its self-reflexivity points beyond all conventional autobiography to an analysis of the possibilities of the autobiography form. Handke manipulates auto-bio-graphy (not to mention social and political history); he does, however, give little credit to two premises basic to “non-fictional” genres—that, one, objective exegesis is their legitimate goal and, two, that this goal is realizable. Echoing the thoughts of many postmodernists, the narrator wonders, “… isn't all formulation, even of things that have really happened, more or less a fiction?” (p. 253/p. 24). What the narrator says of Marlow in Heart of Darkness, might be applied with equal justification to Handke. Truth has become insubstantial, less the “light” that generates illumination than the faint penumbra that enshrouds it.²⁹ Handke's only recourse is infinite description. The book ends with the promise to write something more on these themes at a later date.³⁰

In the absence of apodictic truths, given the opacity of language, the author can only be an ironic metafictionist, a conscious dissimulator, a teller of incomplete truths at best. Handke's novella is, then, necessarily episodic and incomplete. It scrutinizes, with varying concentration, the circumstances of Frau Handke's life and the author's own concerns. A Sorrow beyond Dreams is sometimes expansive, sometimes curt. Given its lack of measure and formula, its halting progression, the novella resembles a home-movie with Handke, the anxious projectionist, never quite managing to get everything in focus. And yet, notwithstanding this “home-made” quality, the author conveys the horror of his mother's life with sensitivity and conviction and perhaps even accuracy. Handke purports a vague phenomenological awareness that “truth” resides more in an endless dialectical pre-occupation with formal and ontological possibilities than in traditional claims to objective representation. Or, as Heidegger expresses it somewhat more succinctly, “The work's becoming a work is a way in which truth becomes and happens.”³¹

Notes

1. Peter Handke, A Sorrow beyond Dreams, in Three by Peter Handke, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Avon, 1977); Wunschloses Unglück (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1972). (A stage adaptation of A Sorrow beyond Dreams has been produced off-Broadway.) Three by Peter Handke also includes Michael Roloff's translation of Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) and Manheim's translation of Der Kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (Short Letter, Long Farewell.)

2. For Ralph Manheim's translations of Die linkshändige Frau (The Left-Handed Woman) and Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung (A Moment of True Feeling), see Two Novels by Peter Handke (New York: Avon, 1979). For Michael Roloff's translations of Der Ritt über den Bodensee (The Ride Across Lake Constance) and Kaspar (Kaspar), see The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976) and Kaspar and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969). Roloff has also translated Die Innenwelt der Aussenwelt der Innenwelt (1969), Handke's best-selling (plus 75,000 copies) poetry collection: The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld (New York: Continuum, 1974).

3. While her death is volitional, I do not agree with those readers who, uncritically and without qualification, accept as valid the narrator's implication that Frau Handke's suicide is an act of strength. Ursula Love, for example, writes: “The narrator sees it not as an act of desperation but rather as a decision which the mother makes with a clear head upon recognizing that it is her only alternative. Her suicide is, in his view, actually a ‘freely elected death’ [Freitod] and not only an understandable act but an admirable one as well. As represented by the narrator, it is the sensible conclusion to a senseless life and illustrates how the mother, despite everything, comes to acknowledge herself after all even if self-realization is possible for her only in self-destruction” (my translation); see Love's “‘Als sei ich … ihr GESCHUNDENES HERZ’: Identifizierung und negative Kreativität in Peter Handkes Wunschloses Unglück,” Seminar XVII (1979): 141. At the time of her suicide, Handke's mother is quite as subject to the machinations of her physical and psychical maladies as she has been to the oppressively conformist ideals of her culture. Her suicide is a “concession” to her illness(es) and is no more self-individuating than her concessions to petty bourgeois ideals have been. To assert the contrary is to assign to the novella the sentimentality it strives to avoid.

4. Not all readers concede that the writing of the novella is for Handke a therapeutic act. Rainer Nägele and Renate Voris, for example, in their Handke monograph state that “Writing here is not, in the vulgar psychological sense, a liberation from a trauma …” (my translation); Peter Handke (Munich: Beck, 1978), 60. For my part, I rely upon remarks made in an interview with Heinz Ludwig Arnold where Handke asserts that writing has helped him to become unashamed of himself and his background; see Arnold's Als Schriftsteller leben: Gespräche mit Peter Handke, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Gerhard Zwerenz, Walter Jens, Peter Rühmkorf, Günter Grass (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979). In A Sorrow beyond Dreams, Handke, on more than one occasion, claims that writing is a means to overcoming the horrors of “those speechless moments.”

5. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973).

6. Hayden White, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” in The Literature of Fact, ed. Angus Fletcher (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976), 23.

7. In addition to White's Metahistory, see his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978) as well as the following: Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965); Dray's Laws and Explanation in History (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957) and Philosophy of History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964); and Gallie's Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken, 1964).

8. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 17-18.

9. Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1973), 71; Journal du voleur (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 75-76.

10. Quoted by Jerome Klinkowitz, “Aspects of Handke: Fiction,” Partisan Review 45 (1978): 416; Klinkowitz does not cite his source for this quote.

11. Of the Gruppe 47 writes Handke: “One has the impression that these writers … could spare themselves a lot of time and trouble by using a camera and yet achieve much better results” (my translation); “Zur Tagung der Gruppe 47 in USA,” in Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 32.

12. In an article devoted to the subject, Hans-Gerhard Winter lists as prominent features of neue Subjektivität the following: a personal perspective—whether Er- or Ich-Erzähler, conflation of inner and outer world, self-referentiality, identity crisis, the demand for active readerly involvement, and partial resolution. See his “Von der Dokumentarliteratur zur ‘neuen Subjektivität’: Anmerkungen zur westdeutschen Literatur der siebziger Jahre,” Seminar XVII (1981): 109-10.

13. Peter Handke, Offending the Audience, trans. Michael Roloff (London: Methuen, 1971), 19-20; Publikumsbeschimpfung in Stücke 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), 26.

14. For a discussion of metafictionality in Delany's novel, see Teresa L. Ebert's “The Convergence of Postmodern Innovative Fiction and Science Fiction: An Encounter with Samuel R. Delany's Technotopia,” Poetics Today 1 (1980): 91-104; Philip Manger takes up the metafictionality theme in Becker's work in “Jurek Becker, Irreführung des Behörder,” Seminar XVII (1981): 147-63.

15. Peter Handke, “1957,” in Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms, pp. 13-14 (my translation).

16. Werner Thuswalder, Sprach- und Gattungsexperiment bei Peter Handke: Praxis und Theorie (Munich: Alfred Winter, 1976), 79.

17. Peter Handke, “Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms,” in Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms, pp. 19-20 (my translation).

18. “Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms,” p. 26 (my translation).

19. Peter Horn is of the opinion that Handke's self-professed egocentricity effectively preempts any possibility of a meaningful social praxis for his work: “Alienation can never be overcome through alienated literature anymore than it can be overcome through individual actions or passions” (my translation); see his “Die Sprache der Vernünftigen und die Sprache der Unvernünftigen,” in Handke: Ansätze-Analysen-Anmerkung, ed. Manfred Jurgensen (Bern: Franke, 1979), 45-64, especially pp. 61-62. Horn's critique advances the conservative leftist view—what Karl Popper calls “methodological holism”—that social change can only occur through collective gestures (rather than personal or private ones). I maintain that the individual can meaningfully influence events even as I concede that major social change can only be effected through mass response. In the long run, innovative fictions are far more likely to breed in its readers a liberated, more genuinely democratic sensibility than are formulaic fictions.

20. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative and Hermeneutics,” In Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe C. Beardsley, ed. John Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1983), 149.

21. Peter Handke, A Sorrow beyond Dreams, in Three by Peter Handke, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Avon Books, 1977), 245. I shall give page numbers for all succeeding quotes parenthetically within the body of the text. The second page number given will refer to the original German edition, Wunschloses Unglück (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1972), 11.

22. Quoted by Bruce F. Kawin in The Mind of the Novel: Reflexive Fiction and the Ineffable (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 233.

23. Frank Kermode, “The Model of a Modern Modernist,” The New York Review of Books, May 1, 1975, p. 21.

24. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 225.

25. Volker Bohn discusses this Wortspiel in “Später werde ich über das alles genaueres schreiben,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 26 (neue Folge) (1976): 370. “Wunschlos glücklich sein” means, literally, “to be happy beyond one's wishes (dreams).” Frau Handke is, of course, “unhappy” (“unglücklich”) beyond her wishes.

26. Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover also denigrate the use of “automatic” language though, usually, in a more humorous, less somber manner than Handke. See, for example, Barthelme's Snow White (New York: Athenaeum, 1967) and Coover's The Public Burning (New York: Viking, 1977).

27. An unironic use of clichés can also serve the interests of greater understanding. In her discussion of the fiction of the Latin American writers Manuel Puig and Luis Rafael Sanchez, Lois Zamora points out that popular language can “Make us aware of the self-imposed limitations of literary language during this century by implicitly rejecting the cerebral self-consciousness of much advanced contemporary fiction.” It is of course important to note that the two writers in question, Puig and Sanchez, strive for, in the interests of raising political awareness, the broadest possible appeal. Handke's audience, better educated and better politically informed, is less likely to be confused by the relative novelty of auto-bio-graphy as metafiction. See Zamora's “Clichés and Defamiliarization in the Fiction of Manual Puig and Luis Rafael Sanchez,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XLI (1983): 420-36.

28. Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968), 140.

29. To Marlow, “… the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as aglow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine”; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1971), 5.

30. A later work, Die linkshändige Frau, does, in fact, take up the problems attendant on being a mother-housewife though no direct reference is made to Handke's mother or A Sorrow beyond Dreams. In this instance, the heroine forsakes her husband and reduces her commitment to her son in the interest of establishing a personal identity. As for later autobiographical works, Das Gewicht der Welt (1977) is a Tagebuch full of intimate reflections upon life.

31. Martin Heidegger, “The Origins of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 60.