Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke

First published:Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied, 1972 (English translation, 1974)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: The late 1960’s or the early 1970’s

Locale: The United States

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a young Austrian writer
• Judith, his wife
• Claire Madison, an American with whom he has an affair
• Delta Benedictine, Claire’s daughter
• John Ford, the seventy-six-year-old American film director

The Novel

Short Letter, Long Farewell is one of Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke’s typically enigmatic works, a decidedly meditative novel which defies simple summary or definitive explanation. It seems to involve at once too little plot and too much; its events follow one another in bewildering succession and fail to form any clearly meaningful pattern.

The novel is divided into two nearly equal parts, “The Short Letter” and “The Long Farewell,” each preceded by a brief passage from Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785-1790; English translation, 1926). The first passage deals with the need to attend closely to physical facts and the second deals with the way in which travel enables one to “forget what we don’t like to think of as real, as though it were a dream.” Dreams play an important part in Handke’s novel, as do physical facts, and it is between the elusive otherness of the first and the swamping immediacy of the second that both the narrator and the reader must negotiate their way.

The novel begins in April—like Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1380-1390) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922)—on the narrator’s second day in the United States, only a few days before his thirtieth birthday. The reader follows him on his cross-country travels from Providence, Rhode Island, to New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Tucson, and finally California. Where Walt Whitman traveled the land transcendentally, “afoot with [his]vision,” Handke’s narrator is adrift with his nightmare—Whitman’s exuberance and faith having collapsed into the black hole of Handke’s bleak aesthetic. Whether his narrator’s travels comprise a quest or an escape is left in doubt, for they cannot be divorced from those of his wife, Judith, from whom he has recently separated but who has since come to the United States. At first, it is the narrator who seems to be following his wife, but it soon becomes equally likely that she is the tracker and he the prey. He is perhaps not so much tracked as lured to his death, but it is a death that she seems more intent on dreaming about than actually causing.

The novel’s ambiguous action is rendered in an equally ambiguous style that may best be described as absurdist realism. The sentence, “The bus took the Bruchner Expressway through the Bronx, turned off to the right, and crossed the Harlem River to Manhattan,” is typical of this style, one in which the specific details do not contribute to any Jamesian “solidity of specification” but instead suggest that they have been arbitrarily chosen; they are not so much insignificant as nonsignifying. They hint that the narrator’s larger world, and that of the reader as well, may be similarly devoid of meaning. The style is too realistic and serves only to accentuate the gap between language and physical reality on the one hand and language and understanding on the other. The narrator observes and records everything but, along with his reader, understands nothing. Realizing his own ignorance and incapacity, he pursues an art of deflection, hoping that, by describing accurately what is near at hand, he will be able to delude himself into believing it to have the “momentous” importance it clearly does not possess. It is a style marked above all by coordination rather than subordination, an art of catenation rather than comprehension: an ultimate superficial realism surprisingly like the disjunctive dream logic by which one scene leads, as if inevitably, to the next.

The narrator searches for reasons and motives but finds only his own explanations. Since he is also a random event in the world, his actions are themselves similarly absurd. “Then and there I decided to spend the money living as lazily and frivolously as possible” is a statement that is open to the reader’s interpretation but not to any definitive explanation. Like the narrator, it does not mean; it is.

The Characters

The only character who is fully drawn in this novel is the narrator. His Austrian citizenship and his work as a playwright suggest some connection to Handke, and his anonymity implies the elusiveness that will trouble both him and his reader. Turning thirty during the course of his cross-country travels, he appears at once experienced and naive and, therefore, ill-prepared for the strangeness of American reality. He is a careful observer of his immediate surroundings, of others he meets, and of himself, yet he is fearful and suspicious as well. Highly self-critical, he finds that his criticism results only in making him more uncertain about himself; he fears that his identity may be “dissolving.” As a result, he desires to detach himself from others in order to preserve his own tenuous identity, yet he alternately feels completely cut off from life and longs for engagement with others, a longing that travel both satisifies and frustrates. Chiefly, he desires to be other than he is, for his failed marriage serves as the constant reminder of his own helplessness. Fearful of making himself still more vulnerable, he withdraws into the very self he finds “superfluous.”

Whether it is self-loathing or self-awareness that best characterizes him, the depth of the narrator’s isolation and loneliness is evidenced by his overwhelming need to tell his story and, in this way, to authenticate or at least to certify his existence. This need appears all the more desperate as he places the words he speaks or thinks to himself within quotation marks. His narrative trick transforms monologue into dialogue but only at the cost of further alienating the narrator from himself, splitting him in two; he becomes both speaker and listener, writer and audience. A similar detachment marks his every action. His desire not “to be alone anymore” is certainly understandable, but his remedy—to write “a woman in Phoenixville, a small town west of Philadelphia, to say that I might go and see her”—sounds at best indifferent and at worst inhuman.

Claire Madison is the “woman” with whom he hopes to experience something of a phoenixlike rebirth, following the breakup of his marriage to Judith. The narrator remembers, “It was only when I met Judith, and for the first time really experienced something, that I began to see the world with something more than a malignant first glance.” By the end of their marriage, however, husband and wife are only able to see malignantly, and the return to this same malignant point of view, coupled with his cold detachment, suggests that the narrator’s rebirth in Phoenixville will come to nothing more permanent than his relationship with Judith.

It is significant that Judith’s “love of whatever can be used up or exchanged” (including husbands) and her tendency “to make a magical idol out of every trifle” make her seem quite like the narrator, to whom she writes her short letter: “I am in New York. Please don’t look for me. It would not be nice for you to find me.” Nevertheless, she follows his every move or lures him into following her. (Their roles are in a sense interchangeable.)

Claire provides him with an alternative but a rather ambiguous one, for while she represents for him all that America promises (a fresh start, a haven for the homeless, and so on), the fact that she is a few years older and has an odd and oddly named daughter, Delta Benedictine, suggests that Claire may not be a new beginning at all but instead, in her capacity as an instructor of German at a nearby college, a reminder of the past that the narrator hopes to leave behind.

Critical Context

Instead of telling the narrator and his wife a story, Ford asks them for their story, which Judith then supplies. When the director asks if what Judith has said is true, she answers, “[I]t all happened.” “It all happened” are the last three words in Handke’s novel, and the “it” that she refers to did occur but only in Handke’s fiction and perhaps only as fiction; the reality beyond her words and beyond the narrator’s as well remains untellable. Pointing to the pile of manuscripts he has been sent for his consideration, Ford says, “There are some good stories in there.... Simple and clear. The kind of stories we need.”

Handke’s language and syntax are certainly simple, but his story is anything but clear. Yet the story is needed not despite its ambiguity but for it, for it is story which deals with the difficulty of distinguishing the myths on which man would like to depend from the reality that lies beneath, or perhaps beyond, the semiotic surface.

In his earlier works, Handke tended to emphasize the opacity, the arbitrariness, and the self-reflexivity of language, while in later works, he has become more and more concerned with the possibility of a nearly mystical truth lying somewhere beyond this same linguistic surface. The strength of Short Letter, Long Farewell derives largely from Handke’s relentless depiction of the way in which the individual can delude himself in his quest for meaning and self-definition and, just as important, it deals with his pursuit of a truth less bleak—not a myth but a necessary story, an authentic fiction.

Bibliography

Kaufman, Stanley. “It All Happened,” in The New Republic. CLXXI (September 28, 1974), pp. 29-30.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation, 1983.

Lavers, Norman. “With Peter Handke (in Spirit) in Eastern Austria,” in The American Poetry Review. XIII (September/October, 1984), pp. 15-16.

Schlueter, June. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke, 1981.

Wilkie, Brian, and James Hurt. “Peter Handke,” in Literature of the Western World. II (1984), pp. 2241-2243.