A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke

First published:Wunschloses Unglück, 1972 (English translation, 1975)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: The early 1920’s to the early 1970’s

Locale: A small Austrian village, Berlin, and Frankfurt

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a writer who tries to tell his mother’s life story
• His Mother, a housewife who has committed suicide

The Novel

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, the story of the life and death of Peter Handke’s mother, can be considered a novel in the sense that all biography and autobiography verge upon fiction when the writer imposes a pattern of meaning upon the facts. Handke recognizes a conflict when he tells the reader that “in looking for formulations I was moving away from the facts,” and he fears reducing his mother’s story to a mere “literary ritual.” At the same time, he sees that readers other than himself will want to move beyond his mother’s specific case to “generalizations” about the human condition; for them, the formulations are more interesting than the unvarnished facts.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, then, is not only the story of Handke’s mother but also the story of Handke composing the story about his mother. The novel opens with a quotation from a small-town Austrian newspaper: “In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.” The sparse, objective report is followed by the narrator’s subjective reaction to the death, a mixture of horror and apathy, and his rationale for writing about the death: He wants to explain it, to bring himself “back to life,” and “to represent this VOLUNTARY DEATH as an exemplary case.” More important even than these reasons, he senses a need to transcend “moments of extreme speechlessness” and seek control over experience, or at least control over its impact on him.

The writer’s mother (who is never more specifically named—indeed, the narrator never names himself) was born in the early 1920’s of peasant stock in a small Austrian village. Education was barely imaginable for boys, and it was “unthinkable” for girls; “a girl’s future was a joke.” Desiring to study something and, in so doing, create a life for herself, she left home as a girl to learn cooking at a resort hotel. For a short time, she was happy. She embraced Adolf Hitler and the communal pride he promoted, went out on dates, enjoyed herself, and fell in love with a married man—a German party member by whom she conceived her first child, the narrator himself.

Pregnancy brought an end to the incipient struggle for freedom and personhood; instead, it allowed the triumph of duty when the mother married a man she detested, an army sergeant from Berlin, “to give the child a father.” From this point forward, the narrative is a descent into hopelessness, an account of a joyless marriage punctuated by three more births and three secret abortions and a story of a dreary routine, which offered little reward.

When, after the war, the alcoholic husband lost job after job in Berlin, the couple returned to the Austrian village of the wife’s birth. It was a time when the woman “could laugh anyone to silence,” and she seemed to use laughter as a defense against powerlessness. She certainly used it to destroy her husband’s dreams. Laughter was the only thing that was hers. If, in the city, she had allowed herself to become a “type,” in the village no personal life at all remained possible, and “individual” was a dirty word. Her energy went into “scrimping” when there was barely enough income to support existence; it went into “imitating the pattern of middle-class life.” She sensed that there was something more to be had from living but had no one to help her find it.

Eventually, the acquisition of household appliances changed her life. She had time to read books, to form political opinions, and to become a person rather than function merely as a machine. Yet heightened awareness brought heightened misery: headaches, a nervous breakdown, and a feeling of futility. In quest of a reason to go on living, the woman wanted to adopt a child but was denied one because of her husband’s tuberculosis. Methodical, tidy, and compulsively clean to the last, “she wrote letters of farewell to everyone in her family” and lined her underpants with diapers before she lay down to die.

The mother’s death does not conclude the story. Her son leaves his home in Frankfurt to attend the funeral, feels a need to write about his mother, does write about her, and decides, “It is not true that writing has helped me.” He feels “like a decaying animal...attacked by...horror.” In one last desperate effort to make meaning of his mother’s life and of his feelings about it, Handke records a series of brief observations in the last few pages of his narrative, concluding with the line: “Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail.”

The Characters

What the narrator chooses not to say about his mother is almost as revealing as what he does say. He does not record her name because, among family members, she was nearly always called “Mother.” He does describe the “swollen scar on her index finger,” to which he “held on” as a child. It is as if the woman did not exist for herself as an individual; she existed only in the prescribed roles she played: wife, mother, and caretaker. According to the critic Jerry Varsava, the power of language to keep women in their traditional roles is a major theme in the novel. Indeed, Handke’s mother was no different from all the other women in the village, women whose progress through life could be reduced to the formula: “Tired/Exhausted/Sick/ Dying/Dead.” Formulas seemed to exist to describe every occasion, encouraging little deviation into individuality: Husbands “got FRESH” and wives “had to be SEVERE,” and so on.

If Handke’s mother never fully emerged into individuality, it was not for the lack of desire to do so. As a child, she sought knowledge in order to feel “something of herself.” Later, in adulthood, when labor-saving appliances gave her a respite from housework, she read “books with stories she could compare with her own life.” Literature, however, merely showed her “everything she had missed” rather than what she still might do. It is no coincidence that the days in which “she was gradually becoming an individual” were quickly followed by blinding headaches, debilitating guilt about her duty toward family members, and a nervous breakdown.

Woman’s role, as it was conceived in her village, did not permit individuality. (One might add that the men seemed scarcely more fortunate.) Recovery from the breakdown could only bring a return to a meaningless existence. The suicide was an act of individual assertion by a woman who could not imagine any release from her suffering much less a positive course of action that would allow her to create a motive for continuing to live.

In searching for the significance of his mother’s story and in creating that significance, the narrator pursues his own quest for meaning. Just as “telling about it was a need with her,” telling about it is a compulsion with her son. Whether the writing helps him in the sense of soothing him or allowing him to believe he has explained the tragedy is beside the point. He claims it does not help. Nevertheless, writing is his characteristic activity; he worries over it, writes about it, and discusses the composing process with the reader. The narrator fears losing control of the process and finds in it no salvation. He is his mother’s son in thinking that there should be something more, something he has not yet discovered. Yet unlike her, he has not given up the attempt to make meaning out of recalcitrant materials. The promise, or threat, to “write about all this in greater detail” sounds like a joke, following, as it does, the detailed account the reader has just perused. It may also be a recognition that writing—like life—is an unfinished process until death ends it, and the narrator is still engaged in both those processes, busily creating a world of words even if it does not allow him to escape the feeling that he is “rotting away from second to second.” “He not busy being born is busy dying,” reads an epigraph, quoted from a Bob Dylan song, to the novel. Critics Jerome Klinkowitz and James Knowlton would argue that Handke, in creating this “Life Story,” re-creates himself. He is busy being born.

Critical Context

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams may be the most accessible and the most moving of Handke’s works, all of which deal with the (often tenuous) connections between art and life and with the process of making literature. Handke seeks to discredit the old mimetic conception of art; art is not necessarily a mirror of life that allows its audience to see life more clearly. The world created by the work of art is different from the real world; there may be parallels between the two worlds, but the patterns of meaning in the work of art are created by the artist and, as such, may not correspond to anything discoverable in the real world.

What the “real world” consists of is another question, one which the artist may not be able to answer, according to Handke. On the other hand, it may be that the artist knows as much as anyone can, for facts by themselves are empty; only interpretations of the facts are meaningful. One fictionalizes the facts (creates one’s own version of events) before one can deal with them.

Since Handke wishes to challenge traditional assumptions of what art is and can do, his work is, at times, deliberately unsettling, as in the play Publikumsbeschimpfung (1966; Offending the Audience, 1969), which methodically thwarts the audience’s expectations. While such works are clever, the audience or reader is offended. In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, it is the narrator who is thwarted and frustrated by the limitations that artistic conventions necessarily impose, and the reader watches and sympathizes. The novel engages the emotions as well as the intellect. After all, what reader has not sought to make meaning out of a tragedy that has befallen him? A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is not only a provocative piece of metaliterature but also an enduring work of art that speaks to every reader.

Bibliography

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

Mixner, Manfred. Peter Handke, 1977.

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

Varsava, Jerry A. “Auto-Bio-Graphy as Metafiction: Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,” in CLIO. XXIV (1985), pp. 119-135.

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