Sorrow Beyond Dreams Peter Handke\'s

¶ … sorrow Beyond Dreams

Peter Handke's novel a Sorrow Beyond Dreams is a non-fiction book that relates in a series of disrupted fragments the life and suicide of Maria Handke, the author's mother, focusing both on the personal and emotional life of his mother, and on the social context that was partly responsible for her misfortunes.

The book comes only a few moths after the painful event that caused it- the suicide of the author's mother, and thus captures Handke's division between his feeling of loss and sorrow as a son, and his struggle to give an account of this feeling, as a writer. Every human death can seem unreal and puzzling, and this is even more so when the death is the cause of the suicide. Suicide seems to place every certainty we might have about ourselves and the world around us, under doubt. And in Handke's case, the suicide is that of his mother, and this is why the event triggers not only pain the pain of loss and uncertainty, but even a loss of identity. Peter Handke tries to give an account of a misfortune that has recently occurred, and this is why the feeling is all the more strange and puzzling, because the author is still under the initial impact of the event, that is, he is not just distantly recollecting it:

It's been almost seven weeks since mother died and I want to take up the courage to start working, before this strong need I feel to write about her, that was so strong at the funeral, will be lost again in the soul-destroying lack of words that was my reaction to her loss." (Handke, 5)

The need to talk about the suicide that marked him as a confusing event is collides with the wordlessness that he is experiences as a writer in the face of an event that affects him personally. The son and the writer are confronted with the same painful experience of the suicide, and their reactions are in conflict:

the son, or just the man feels the terrible sorrow caused by the suicide of the mother, that leaves him with a sense of meaninglessness, while the writer feels the need to express and transmit this puzzling and soul-rending experience.

As a writer, Handke immediately feels the need to express an impression or an experience, but the suicide of his mother is far too deeply rooted in his own feelings for him to be able to express it freely.

For the writer Peter Handke, talking about his mother's suicide could seem almost dangerously easy: 'I would not be extorting personal sympathy from my listener or reader', he wrote, 'I would merely be telling him a rather fantastic story' (1976:6) (...)

Handke's sense of wanting to keep it to himself in order to maintain a sense of reality left him feeling ambivalent about whether he even wanted attention from other people:

The worst thing right now would be sympathy, expressed in a word or even a glance. I would turn away or cut the sympathizer short because I need the feeling that what I am going through is incomprehensible and incommunicable; only then does the horror seem meaningful and real. If anyone talks to me about it, the boredom comes back and everything is unreal again. Nevertheless, for no reason at all I sometimes tell people about my mother's suicide but if they dare to mention it to me I am furious. '(1976:4) "

Wertheimer, 128)

The first problem that suicide or death poses is the fact that the misfortune seems unreal at first because of the impact that the event has on the feelings of a certain person. This impact becomes even more serious when Handke tries to relate it in a work of art, because the suicide is presented therefore as a confusing event for the writer as well, that is, for the person that is trying to derive meaning from a particular event.

A perusal of the life of Maria Handke will in itself leave off a feeling of the confusion, since it seems to have been one of those lives that lack meaning and coherence. The author refers to the biographical details of his mother's life- the unfortunate love-affair that leaves her with an illegitimate child, followed by an equally unfortunate marriage, with a man she didn't love and who eventually leaves her for someone else. Also there are a number of abortions that are even more traumatizing than the former events.

All these facts of life are even more enhanced when we are given the historical and social context of her life- she lived throughout the two World Wars and moreover, through the economical crisis that took place after the First World War.

The women of Maria's time and social condition did not have the advantage of education or the rights of a free person, in regards to their personal lives: the education of a woman was considered an unnecessary expense, and they were not accepted in society as the single mothers of an illegitimate child:

And so an emotional life that never had a chance of achieving bourgeois composure acquired a superficial stability by clumsily imitating the bourgeois system of emotional relations, prevalent especially among women...." (Handke, 10)

All these contributed to the sense of lack of identity that brought Maria towards her final breakdown and suicide. It was very hard for a woman to be able to understand her own life and surroundings, since she could not depend upon the freedom of her choices even in the personal matters. Her role in life was predetermined, and she could not escape her own condition. This is what Handke tries to bring in the open, by relating his mother's life.

The source of the disaster is thus the lack of identity in a society that did not recognize the importance of a personal awareness. Maria's life story gives the feeling of helplessness and lack of purpose precisely because her path in life lacked personal intention, and had to be founded on compromise instead.

All this is rendered by Handke in a very intense prose, in which most of the meanings are based on the concreteness of the words and on metonymy. So, he relies very much on the aptness of the words to transmit his personal experience and the "sorrow beyond dreams" that his mother's death occasions for him. In this, he is thus obviously the writer that needs to share his experience, as critic Jerome Klinkowitz observed, and who stresses that meaning can sometimes be better conveyed through the formulation of his feelings, rather than through a mere account of the facts or of a mere description of these feelings.

Handke's meditation on his mother's suicide, a Sorrow Beyond Dreams, uses a similar sense of signs to show not only how a character can become caught up within the semiotics of her world but be defined by it as well:

the GOOD OLD ironing board, the cozy hearth, the often-mended cooking pots, the DANGEROUS poker, the STURDY wheelbarrow, the ENTERPRISING weed cutter, the SHINING BRIGHT knives, which over the years had been ground to a vanishing narrowness by BURLEY scissors grinders, the FIENDISH thimble, the STUPID darning egg, the CLUMSY OLD flatiron, which provided variety by having to be put back on the stove every so often, and finally the PRIZE PIECE, the foot and hand-operated Singer sewing machine. (Pp. 41-42)

Handke needs the signs themselves, rather than what they refer to, for "words convey this sort of passive, complacent disgust much better than the sight of the phenomena they refer to" (p.39). As far as a mother's life, "in the midst of these consoling fetishes, you ceased to exist. And because your days were spent in unchanging association with the same things, they became sacred to you" (p.34) These are not "facts" but rather "the already available formulations, the linguistic deposit of man's social experience" (p.29); for the young girls of the village, they become as hopscotch positions: Tired / Exhausted / Sick / Dying / Dead, "the stations in a woman's life" (p. 10). Her death and funeral are simply one more piece of generative grammar, as "only her name had to be inserted in the religious formulas" (p.65).

Thus, the narrative a Sorrow Beyond Dreams is as much a confessional and personal narrative about the feelings of loss and displacement, but also the confession of the writer who in a quest of words able to reveal the inner sorrow. The writer is seeking for the right formulations, and thus the focus of the writing shifts from a mere account of the inner phenomena to an externalization through words and repetitions of the event. It is a refuge and a manner of escape from the feeling itself, as well as a defense against this feeling.

The manner of composition that he employs is one that suggests a type of writing that almost analyzes itself- that is, that focuses on the way its own means that it has at disposal for expression.

This postmodernist writing that finally ends up having a dialogue with itself reveals an idea common to most of the postmodern art: that language and formulations, as means of expression, are also a means of finding the meaning of something, and that most often, meanings do not reside out of language.