The Telling Detail: Peter Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide. Yes, get to work: 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.

Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Perhaps the initial, striking aspect of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is its brevity, the slimness of the volume as a printed book. It’s best read in a single sitting: it is certainly short enough, seventy pages - including the title page - in the English translation. It was written during the first two months of 1972 and published that same year. Memoirs of loss have been appeared in some profusion in recent years; one could cite Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, from 2005, as an archetype, and one that heralded the current generation of the form’s manifestations (H is for Hawk, The Long Goodbye, Love is a Mixtape, The Glass Eye, The Still Point of the Turning World, and others); Handke’s book in contrast to such recent books appears self-denying in its concision. It is explicitly a work of mourning, or perhaps around, or instead of, in the place of mourning; the notion of work being pertinent: Handke’s act of writing is often foregrounded, on the surface of the text, which gives it a sense of immediacy. Indeed, there is a section, mid-way through the book, entirely in parentheses, in which Handke reflects on his attempt at writing, interrupting his act of writing, to lay bare its necessary failures, while in the middle of his mother’s story.

Born during the second world war - in annexed Austria - and subsequently having to grow up in its shadow, Peter Handke first came to prominence in the sixties with his plays Offending the Audience and Kaspar while still in his mid-twenties. He was part of a generation of German-speaking writers, artists, film-makers, coming of age in the sixties, politicised by what they saw as the West German state’s authoritarianism, hypocrisy and complacency (all part of a political trade-off for the new country’s economic security), a generation that became inward-looking after the political failures of ’68. This cultural phenomenon was dubbed the Neue Innerlichkeit or Neue Subjektivität - the New Inwardness or New Subjectivity (this latter term was an ironic, critical inversion of the New Objectivity of the 1920s, itself a response to the shadow of another war, revolution, the dissolution of empires); as a cultural expression, this appeared to be the only logical response to the failure of the individual to enact change in the political arena, a turn away to where feeling, sensation, replaced meaning.

In his novels composed around the time A Sorrow Beyond Dreams was written (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Short Letter, Long Farewell, A Moment of True Feeling), Handke’s stylistic procedure is to confront the reader with an accumulation of detail, of seemingly indiscriminate, minute observation, often with references to popular culture as much as their narrators’ precise emotional states (one thinks of Roland Barthes’ reality effect, especially in certain passages where Handke explicitly draws the reader’s attention to the detail itself). In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams this same strategy is used, but, in paring down an excess of details, Handke provides a brief but forensic account of his mother’s life, like a series of snapshots - or microscope slides.

The original German title of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is Wunschloses Unglück, which a more literal translation would be ‘wishful misfortune’. This is a play on words. In the introduction to the most recent English edition, Jeffrey Eugenides explains that, by adding the prefix ‘un-‘, a native German speaker would understand Handke’s title refers to “[t]he German idiom wunschloses Glück [which] means roughly ‘more happiness than you could wish for.’ Handke changes it to mean ‘more misfortune than you could wish for.’ This brutal pun suggests the wretchedness not only of his mother’s life but of the period she lived through…”

The book’s beginning is entirely matter-of-fact:

The Sunday edition of the Kärntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under ‘Local News’: ‘In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.’

With the reticence of leaving the precise location unnamed, Handke also refrains from using his mother’s name throughout the book, a deliberate strategy of holding back, an attempt at objectivity to what Handke refers to, at the start of the book, of his mother’s life and death as being “an exemplary case”; he slips from ‘she’ to ‘my mother’ to writing directly: ‘you’:

You took shortcuts up hill and down dale through the rubble, to get there sooner, but even so you found yourself at the end of a long line…

You lost interest in personal matters and stopped inquiring about them.

So it wasn’t really so bad, you could do it with one hand tied behind your back. Except no end was in sight.

(Of course, the English translation uses ‘you’ freely – generally, most often used in the sense of ‘one’, the equivalent of the German man, but translated in this way ‘one’ would perhaps seem forced and formal. Where man slips into du isn’t always clear: possibly at times, ‘you’ includes Handke himself, collectively, in talking about what was expected of one’s life, behaviour, relations, in the village. When Handke describes his mother as being an “exemplary case,” this may well be in a dual sense: both as a typical example of one life in a small Austrian village through the turbulence of the mid-twentieth century; and, at the same time, exceptional, resisting these strictures of circumstance – but both being senses worth detailed examination. The sense of the collective ‘you’ is important to the book’s milieu: Handke’s mother thinking of herself as an individual appears key to her difficulties. The collective asserts itself repeatedly, acting upon Handke’s mother again and again.)

…since 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.

Through the scattered sentences of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, one gets a condensed sense of the rhythm of a life, hemmed in by circumstance. Handke’s mother was born into the period of inflation after the First World War, the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian empire, once the second largest country in Europe, growing up in a small, rural community, practically feudal, religiously conservative - and with no expectations of women other than as wife and mother (“At home she was ‘Mother’; even her husband addressed her as ‘Mother’ more often than by her first name,” that the fortune tellers at the church fairs would not read girls’ palms - as there was nothing in their futures open to interpretation). When her brother wins a scholarship to the Gymnasium in the regional capital, he lasts but a few days: “He walked the thirty miles from the provincial capital at night, arriving home on a Saturday, which was house-cleaning day; without a word he started sweeping the yard: the noise he made with the broom in the early dawn told the whole story.” However, Handke’s mother did not fit her environment without difficulty: she laughed too loud, too readily, for the small village, and left, at the age of sixteen, to work in a hotel, then travelled to Berlin, experiencing the sophistication of the big city, an affair with the man who was to become Handke’s father, marriage to another, an unsuitable man who she thought would be killed in the war - but was not, leaving Berlin without him when the bombing started. (“For my mother the war was not a childhood nightmare that would color her whole emotional development as it did mine; more than anything else, it was a contact with a fabulous world, hitherto known to her only from travel folders.”) The pull of ‘duty’ reunited them after the war, followed by an eventual post-war return to the narrowness of the village in which she had grown up - enduring her husband’s drunkenness, abuse, the pinched, self-denying economy of rural poverty with its appearances of respectability, self-administered abortions, the necessity of returning to her native dialect, “though of course only in fun: she was a woman who had been ABROAD.”

In the early summer of 1948, my mother left the eastern sector of Germany with her husband and two children, carrying the little girl, who was just a year old, in a shopping bag. They had no papers. They crossed two borders illegally, both in the gray of dawn; once a Russian border-guard shouted “Halt,” and my mother’s answer in Slovenian served as a password; those days became fixed in the boy’s mind as a triad of gray dawn, whispers, and danger. Happy excitement on the train ride through Austria, and then she was back in the house where she was born…

In passages like these, Handke writes himself out of the narrative, or more precisely out of his mother’s history, ‘moving himself into the distance’ until later; the boy in this passage must be Handke, writing his own history in the third person, subservient to his mother’s story. There are sections in which he refers to himself as “the child” or even “it” - as if Handke only becomes himself as a voice, when he enters the story as an adult. This is, however, not entirely consistent as a strategy. The ‘I’ seeps in when recreating the texture of these times:

In general, these memories are inhabited more by things than by people: a dancing top in a deserted street amid ruins, oat flakes in a sugar spoon, gray mucus in a tin spittoon with a Russian trademark; of people, only separate parts: hair, cheeks, knotted scars on fingers; from her childhood days my mother had a swollen scar on her index finger; I held on to it when I walked beside her.

The desolation of Germany Year Zero, the cities of rubble, the Soviet occupation, appear in these brief flashes, the telling detail that infers a world of experience. Handke’s father and stepfather appear as bit-part players in his mother’s life, the nostalgic or sentimental place reserved for the former (the detail inserted when Handke recounts meeting his father for the first time is the presence of a jukebox, representative of an imported culture untainted by history), his mother’s resigned disdain for the latter (“We each look in different directions and the loneliness only gets worse”). However, Handke’s mother cannot resist conformity to the social mores of her time and circumstance, the insistence on domesticity as the proper sphere for women. Gradually, circumstances do improve: the rural poverty that she endures begins to be alleviated by the post-war economic recovery, the appearance of modern household goods, the acquisition of ‘labour-saving’ devices, the possibility of small sums of money that she can now spend on herself, with impulsiveness or frivolity as a protest. At the same time, Handke reappears in his mother’s story: she begins to read the books he is studying (the list given is Hans Fallada, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner):

’I’m not like that,’ she sometimes said, as though the author had written about her. To her, every book was an account of her own life, and in reading she came to life; for the first time, she came out of her shell; she learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by little, I learned something about her.

This period is short-lived: in the text, it mirrors her escape as a teenager from the village, leading her to Berlin; now, the escape is internal, and, perhaps, more profound. But chronic illness enters the narrative, a malady manifesting itself through debilitating headaches, followed by tests, the suspicion of a brain tumour, a diagnosis of a “nervous breakdown”. The contemporary reader may have more particular interpretations in mind: however, once the illness appears, a trajectory with an undertone of inevitably is set.

The woods began right outside the graveyard wall […] The people left the grave quickly. Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seemed to me that nature really was merciless. So these were the facts! The forest spoke for itself. Apart from these countless treetops nothing counted; in the foreground, an episodic jumble of shapes, which gradually receded from the picture. I felt mocked and helpless. All at once, in my impotent rage, I felt the need of writing something about my mother.

Towards the end of the book, the writing becomes more fragmentary: pages slip by with separate, isolated paragraphs, often consisting of just a single sentence, observations, memories, quotes. The final sentence admits an awareness of the preceding pages’ immediacy – in both the colloquial sense, but also in the sense of not being mediated, its very rawness – this is Handke’s primary importance, his need as a writer; this is accompanied with the awareness of what this approach lacks:

Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail.

Nicholas Middleton