Modern & Im/material Things

I recently finished Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, a short but incredibly dense and affective work. Handke’s writes about the suicide of his mother, a woman who lived through Nazi Europe and its aftermath. The book is as much about her life, the cultural context in which she lived and was shaped, as it is about her death and its impact on Handke. In short, the book is truly remarkable. It is also heartbreaking; this is not a book to read on the bus. You cannot half-assedly read this book; you must give it your undivided attention. The book demands, even requires it of you. But the tradeoff for reading a book that is a tome in its emotional scope yet brief in its physical form is that Handke’s writing will move you, arresting you with its ability to articulate the erasure of individual identity, namely the erasure of his mother.

Most compelling is the empathic yet clinical tone Handke takes when discussing his mother’s life. He pieces together her story: lost dreams, stolen moments of joy, frustrations and ultimately the nervous breakdown before her suicide. What remains is a portrait of a woman going through the motions of life, occasionally exercising agency when she remembers that she is an actor in her own story. And yet, fleeting moments of joy only seem to steal her away from the memory, the burden of the unyielding sense of oblivion she carries within herself. Beyond feeling alone in a crowd, she goes outside to run from the gradual, yet unending sense of disintegration that waits for her at home. 

In a small way, the book is a kind of feminist analysis of the impact of socio-political culture-in this case, german fascism- and its manifestation in the institution of marriage. Here we provided with an example of how the lack of viable alternatives can result in internalized shame, self-perceived failure and regret. But really, how a life unlived can yield a loss of humanity: 

“I talk to myself, because I can’t say anything to other people anymore. Sometimes I feel like a machine. I’d like to go away somewhere, but when it gets dark I’m afraid of not finding the way home again. In the morning there’s dense fog and then everything is so quiet. Every day I do the same work, and every morning the place is a mess again. There’s never an end to it. I really wish I were dead. When I’m out in the street and I see a car coming, I want to fall in front of it. But how can I be sure it would work? [A letter from Handke’s mother to Handke, p. 64]”

It’s difficult not to be reminded of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the banality of evil in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem. Banality takes on a double meaning when applied to Handke’s mother: there is the (marco and) micro evil of German totalitarianism looming over Europe and trickling into daily life, as well as the even more micro evil of Handke’s mother’s home life. Yet there is the oblivion that Handke’s mother carries inside of her and there is the aftermath that Handke articulates as a witness. There is a passage from Arendt’s chapter on evidence and witnesses in Eichmann in Jerusalem that speaks to this relationship between witnesses and oblivion quite well:

“The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be “practically useless,” at least, not in the long run…Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation [p. 232-233].”

Although Arendt is discussing the erasure of a class of people, the significance of her point about witnessing the erasure of an individual or individuals can be applied outside of a discussion of The Holocaust. To watch the nervous breakdown of another is to, in a way, witness their erasure, even if it’s self-perceived. It is the disintegration of their humanity. Toward the end of the book, Handke writes of narration and memory, penning one of the most compelling and riveting sentences I have ever read:

“Obviously narration is only an act of memory; on the other hand, it holds nothing in reserve for future use; it merely derives a little pleasure from states of dread by trying to formulate them as aptly as possible; from enjoyment of horror it produces enjoyment of memory [p.72]”

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is perhaps a kind of protest against the conditions that gave rise to his mother and ultimately led to her death. Handke articulates oblivion in order to curb the growth of its reach and depth.