Peter Handke - A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

It's been seven weeks since German author Peter Handke's mother has died. He knows that if he doesn't start writing soon the urge to put pen to paper will leave him and his mother's life, or at least his perception and understanding of it, will remain unsaid. It's now or never:

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.

And so he writes, remembering his mother, casting his mind back as far as it will go, and then going further back. He uses letters, the memories of others, and fictional recreations in an effort to capture the essence of the woman she was before she became a mother and wife. Why? Because it all went bad after that. But he doesn't necessarily want sympathy:

The worst thing right now would be sympathy, expressed in word or even a glance. I would turn away or cut the sympathiser 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.

But A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is not all bleak – not at all. The act of writing, even beginnin to write, has the effect of concluding that portion of Handke's life. Watching one of the Bond movies in which the main character makes a joke about a “baddie” dying, Handke laughs, and is relieved to be able to laugh. He feels good, and feels good for feeling good.

Handke's mother is portrayed as an intelligent but unworldly woman who likes to laugh and who wants the universe. But she doesn't get it, instead settling into the role prescribed for her by the state, the town, her community and her husband. She has to act like this and she has to behave like that. Later, in her forties, when she laughs uproariously at something she is viewed askance, as though something's wrong. But there's nothing wrong, she just hasn't yet lost her capacity for joy.

An early description:

My mother was high-spirited; in the photographs she propped her hands on her hips or put her arms over her younger brother's shoulder. She was always laughing and seemed incapable of doing anything else.

Contrast with:

They went out a good deal, an attractive couple. When he was drunk, he got FRESH and she had to be SEVERE with him. Then he would beat her because she had nothing to say to him, when it was he who brought home the bacon.

Without his knowledge, she gave herself an abortion with a knitting-needle.

It's a painful transition, made worse every time Handke circles back to the positive – and exceptionally attractive – aspects of his mother's life. She could have been happy, if – and he leaves it at that. There's always an if, and it's the saddest thing in the world to understand that it's there and it isn't going away. Handke's mother knew it, which was (perhaps) why she ended her life. The if wasn't going to budge, it was increasingly dominant, and the older she became, the older she was. Her girlhood had vanished and nobody wanted a matron, not even to talk with.

Later in the piece Handke's mother emancipates herself (as much as she is able) from her husband and surrounds; she takes to reading, borrowing books from her intellectual son, who has long since fled. They don't teach her how to live or think so much that her life is over, and that any story that might be written will not be written by her, but she enjoys them nonetheless. Sometimes she might buy herself a blouse, and at other times she will go to a pub and toast the youth to their health. She holds her head high, feeling content within herself, but resentment mounts. Nobody in her community wants her to possess self-respect, especially when that feeling revolves around literature and booze and youth and confidence. In short, she has bucked the social norms and must suffer for it. She becomes ill.

For Handke's mother, life seemed to be a brief moment after you were a child and before you were a drudge (mother), and the rest was pain and suffering. It was a few years, tops, and then your life became numbing, servile, valueless and not at all what you had expected. She didn't gain satisfaction from being a wife, she didn't gain pleasure from having a child, she didn't like doing housework and chores, she want to be sensible and down-to-earth – she wanted to live! But everything around and all the crushing weight of social expectations and responsibilities meant that she could not. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is of course an unhappy story – it opens with a suicide no less – but its sadness stems more from the fleeting moments of happiness and vivacity shown by Handke's mother than it does from “just” her misery. There is a constant impression that this woman, were she born elsewhere and in a different time under different circumstances, could have had a happy life. She loved and laughed, but it wasn't enough, not for the milieu in which she lived.

Two important notes. The first is that Handke never mentions her by name. He doesn't need to, of course – she is his mother – but the omission is striking because one can easily assume the reader remains unaware of her name. She thus becomes something of a stand-in for any disappointed mother, a kind of archetype for Handke's grief projected to the world. We can never ignore that this is a published book and not a private diary; the fact of its publication carries with it certain considerations of tact. Refusing to publish her name is a small concession to his mother's privacy, but of course the very act of publication negates it all – anyone who wishes to know who she is can find out, and those who already did, will see themselves reflected poorly. But why should Handke spare the feelings of those still living? His mother killed herself, didn't she? And the catalogue of events reveal a catastrophic life from start to finish, when there was the possibility for so much more. He's angry, and though Handke as a narrator remains calm, the book itself is an astonishing act of aggression, a direct and unambiguous declaration of guilt to everyone involved, himself included. You did not do well enough by her, is the running theme of the piece. We all did this, every one of us.

The second note comes from Handke himself:

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 a literary ritual in which an individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext.

Again – this is his mother he is writing about. He does not wish her to become a pretext for an abstract discussion. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams remains well-grounded throughout the text, and though he does use his mother's suicide as a beginning point for discussing disappointment, loss, grief and death, her suicide remains the end-point, and it's an event and she is a person who is never forgotten. Handke takes great pains to avoidly merely quoting her life in a series of vignettes, instead attempting to construct the essence of his mother as he knew her and perhaps as she knew herself.

The climax of the novel is its saddest part. The narrative breaks down, becoming a series of memories the author recognises have full meaning for him and less for us. He tells us that, “Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail”, but there's no reason to believe him and, nearly forty years later (the book was written in early 1972), there's little reason to think it will happen. But the sadness of these final pages are so deep, so immense and uncommunicable, that Handke is left writing short paragraphs of memories that mean something to him and him alone:

The eggnog bottle in the sideboard!

And the sadness of it comes from that fact that we, too, possess our own banal memories of those who have left us (or will), and we come to understand that these banalities are important aspects in a person's life, just as important as the rest. My mother, during every telephone conversation, would tell me that she had spent the day “pottering about”. The phrase has greater meaning now, and instantly reminds me of her when I hear someone else say it, and indeed I often find myself saying it, first as a homage but now because it's become an aspect of my speech.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is a touching book, written with obvious pain but able to both transcend and embrace that pain. Transcend, in that Handke has written a work that stands as a significant aesthetic achievement, and embrace in that he never loses sight of the primary focus of the work, his mother, in an effort to “make art” of the situation. His book, while artistically pleasing, does not slip into a purely intellectual exercise. There's a strong heart to the book. To wit, I shall leave the final word with Handke, as he seeks to unravel the problem of writing about his mother in a manner both true and artistic:

Ordinarily, I start with myself and my own headaches; in the course of my writing, I detach myself from them more and more, and then in the end I ship myself and my headaches off to market as a commodity – but in this case, 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 serenly through the air. She refuses to be isolated and remains unfathomable; my sentences crash in the darkness and life scattered on the paper.

Author	Peter Handke
Title	A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Original Title: Wunschloses Unglück)
Translator	Ralph Mannheim
Nationality	Austrian
Publisher	Pushkin Press
Published	2001 (English) 1972 (German)
Pages	77
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Amazon (DE) ---Fishpond (AU)