The Weight of the World by Peter Handke

First published:Das Gewicht der Welt, 1977 (abridged in translation as The Weight of the World, 1984)

Type of work: Diary

Time of work: November, 1975, to January, 1977

Locale: Paris

Principal Personage:

• Peter Handke, an Austrian writer

Form and Content

Peter Handke, a native of Austria, is one of the most prominent, and at times controversial, authors writing in the German language. He has produced a prodigious amount of work, including plays, poetry, and a number of novels and essays. The Weight of the World is his first published diary journal. It is very much a literary text, written as an experiment in aesthetic form. The English translation represents an abridged version of the original German edition. In collaboration with his translator, Handke excised a number of passages—especially those concerning politics and those too difficult to translate—amounting to about ten pages.

The work consists of short entries which have the quality of random notes. Indeed, Handke composed it by writing in a small book which he carried around with him during the period of November, 1975, to January, 1977. At this time he was living with his young daughter in Paris. Some of the entries are noted by both day and month, others by the month only. They are, for the most part, not organized thematically. Interestingly, very few of the entries—with the exception of those pertaining to his daughter—deal with particular individuals or even public events. This is, above all, a journal of the author’s inner world, a kind of phenomenological diary: that is, a record of the phenomena of consciousness.

In the preface to the original German edition—which is not included in the English version—Handke indicates that he initially began the notebook with the thought of jotting down ideas for a novel or play he had in mind. He then realized that many of his notes did not seem to fit the plan or scheme for the particular literary work he planned to write. He decided that he wanted to attempt writing down his experiences with as little mediation as possible, without thoughts of some larger project or systematic organization behind the act of formulation. It would be a kind of experimental stream-of-consciousness note-taking, writing almost as a kind of reflex action. In an interview conducted in 1979, Handke said he considered it a kind of “novel” about everyday life.

With this attempt to transcribe his feelings and impressions in an automatic gesture of note-taking, Handke hopes to narrow the gap between experience and its formulation and to achieve thereby a more authentic level of aesthetic discourse. The truly creative and imaginative fictions of great literature originate in the immediate experience of the writer—in dreams, striking images, and random thoughts—which are then given a formal structure. These fictions generate, in Handke’s view, alternative visions of reality and thereby illustrate other possible modes of existence. Such visions allow the individual to achieve a momentary transcendence with respect to the inevitable estrangement of life, and they introduce the possibility of change.

This attempt to create a poetic discourse that liberates rather than alienates the individual represents the major dimension of the theme of language and fiction in Handke’s writings. The problem he seeks to address in The Weight of the World is a timeless one: that the attempt to formulate an experience often obscures or distorts the feeling that motivated it. The individual’s experience of his feelings then becomes inauthentic by virtue of the act of formulation. Every act of writing, especially personal ones, such as writing in a diary, seeks to overcome the distortions inherent in language.

Critical Context

Handke’s intention in The Weight of the World is best understood in terms of his overall theories concerning language and the role of fiction. For Handke, language, especially concepts and abstraction of experience, can distort the perception of reality. Conceptual signs or forms as well as language that has become automatized can come to generate their own level of “reality” that is distinct from the world as it really is. It is then easy to confuse these semiological “fictions” with the empirical facts of existence. The individual who takes these signs for truth eventually becomes alienated from his experience and becomes, in existential terms, inauthentic.

Handke gives a good example of this idea in what is perhaps his best-known and most compelling work, Wunschloses Ungluck (1972; A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, 1974), a narrative text he wrote as a tribute to his mother, who committed suicide in late 1971. In it, he examines the forms of language that shaped and circumscribed his mother’s life and death. With this intention, he explores the larger theme that concerns much of his early writings, that is, the distortion of experience through language and sign. He looks, for example, at the word “woman,” a sign which has the denotative meaning of a human female. The connotations of this word, however, involve many levels of personal and societal meaning, implicit social-psychological roles and behavioral expectations that are often subtly conveyed by friends, family, and society.

Having grown up in rural, conservative, and Catholic Austria, Handke’s mother came to know the word “woman” as a repressive and confining sign that unconsciously guided her perceptions of herself and others. Since it is a “woman’s destiny” to get married and rear a family, her grandfather forbade her to go on in school even though she was an outstanding student. In her early twenties, she came to define herself in terms of the images of “woman” found in the slick fashion magazines and advertisements of the big city. When she later had an affair with a married German solider and became pregnant, she was told that it was her “woman’s duty” to be married so that her child would have a legitimate father. She wed someone whom she did not love, and this man became an abusive alcoholic. Her existence as a “woman” became a tale of misery, and she finally took her own life at the age of fifty-one. This seemingly simple word came to fashion its own system of meanings, a level of linguistic reality that circumscribed the actual reality of her life.

In The Weight of the World, Handke attempts to use words in a way that is (relatively) free from such restrictive ideological systems, to generate an existentially authentic use of language. At the time Handke was writing the journal, he also began work on a novel, Die linkshandige Frau (1976; The Left-Handed Woman, 1978), and this latter text shows the influence of the diary in both its narrative style and the main character’s search for an authentic identity outside her roles as wife and mother. The critically acclaimed film Engel uber Berlin (1987; Wings of Desire) is a collaboration between German director Wim Wenders and Handke, and its dialogue is greatly influenced by the fragmentary diary style of The Weight of the World. Handke has since published two additional journals— Die Geschichte des Bleistifts (1982; the story of the pencil) and Phantasien der Wiederholung (1983; fantasies)—which continue the thematic and stylistic intent of this earlier work.

Bibliography

Book World. XIV, August 26, 1984, p. 7.

Booklist. LXXX, June 1, 1984, p. 1373.

Choice. XXII, November, 1984, p. 429.

Fothergill, Anthony. Review in The Times Literary Supplement. November 15, 1985, p. 1297.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, May 1, 1984, p. 440.

Library Journal. CIX, July, 1984, p. 1327.

Linville, Susan, and Kent Caspar. “Reclaiming the Self: Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman,” in Literature/Film Quarterly. XII (1984), pp. 13-21.

Locke, Richard. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX (July 12, 1984), p. 10.

The New Republic. CXCI, September 3, 1984, p. 37.

New Statesman. CVIII, September 28, 1984, p. 29.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, May 18, 1984, p. 138.

Schlueter, June. “The Forthcoming Handke,” in The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke, 1981.

Sharp, Francis Michael. “Literature as Self-Reflection: Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke,” in World Literature Today. LV (Autumn, 1981), pp. 603-607.

Sharp, Francis Michael. “Peter Handke,” in Major Figures of Contemporary Austrian Literature, 1987. Edited by Donald G. Daviau.