by Derek Neal
I read the opening of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and immediately thought of Camus’ The Stranger. Here is how Handke begins:
The Sunday edition of the Kärntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.”
My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks….
In The Stranger, Camus also begins with the notice of a mother’s death by way of print media:
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
One gets the feeling from Handke that after Camus, one can only write of a mother’s death in the shadow of Camus, that one either follows Camus or rebels against him, yet his presence is always there, undeniable. This goes in the opposite direction as well. When I read Handke’s account of his mother’s death, it led me to reconsider the beguiling opening of Camus’ novel. On some readings, Meursault has seemed indifferent to me at the beginning of The Stranger—how could someone not know whether such an important event happened this day or the day before? Yet reading Handke makes me see things differently. In Handke’s account, I see the decision to depersonalize the story as a way of coping with a terrible reality; relaying the information from the newspaper is not heartless, but the only way to dull the horror of an inexplicable event. It takes something boundless and sets limits on it, creating an official account upon which all can agree. Meursault’s decision to tell the reader about the telegram is similar. He begins by recounting his own version of events and is immediately destabilized; his inability to remember if the death occurred one day or another is not indifference but a loss of lucidity as he is overwhelmed. He then takes comfort in the objective, totalizing nature of the telegram, only to question it again after (“That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”) This is the conflict of The Stranger which plays out over the course of the novel—the meaningless, impersonal, social world represented by the telegram versus Meursault’s own subjective experience of reality, which goes beyond the limits of language.
The funeral, which we might characterize as another “mediation of reality,” connects the two books as well. Handke writes:
The burial ritual depersonalized her once and for all, and relieved everyone. It was snowing hard as we followed her mortal remains. Only her name had to be inserted in the religious formulas. “Our beloved sister…” On our coats candle wax, which was later ironed out.
In The Stranger, before Meursault attends the funeral, he says:
For now, it’s almost as if Maman weren’t dead. After the funeral, though, the case will be closed, and everything will have a more official feel to it.
The funeral—the burial ritual—takes on the same function as the newspaper or the telegram; it inscribes an inexplicable event into the legible social world. For Handke, his mother becomes “depersonalized” as her name is “inserted in the religious formulas.” For Camus (or Meursault), “the case will be closed.” It’s a curious turn of phrase reminiscent of a line in The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro; one character mocks another who always carries an important blue folder by saying “this is another common failing. The belief that putting something in a folder will turn it into a fact!” Putting something in a folder does not turn it into a fact, but as Handke and Camus insist on showing us, much of culture and society comes down to the equivalent of putting things in folders as a way of organizing and classifying what is a messy existence: religious formulas, death rituals, ironing one’s clothes to get the candle wax out. These are necessary but unsatisfactory; they don’t capture the totality of human existence, but they smooth one’s passage through the world.
Handke is intent on describing the weather on the day of his mother’s funeral, another echo of Camus:
It was snowing so hard that you couldn’t get used to it; you kept looking at the sky to see if it was letting up…The woods began right outside the graveyard wall. Fir woods on a rather steep hill. The trees were so close together that you could see only the tops of even the second row, and from then on treetops after treetops. The people left the grave quickly. Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seemed to me that nature was really merciless. So these were the facts! The forest spoke for itself. Apart from these countless treetops nothing counted; in the foreground, an episodic jumble of shapes, which gradually receded from the picture. I felt mocked and helpless.
Human life is juxtaposed with the indifference of nature, which is all powerful. The forest “speaks for itself,” yet without language—it communicates via its presence in a deeper, more direct way, expressing something beyond language. This is the Austrian forest, perhaps the forest of Handke’s childhood and youth. One imagines he has a deep connection with it, in the same way that Camus is shaped by the Algerian sun. In The Stranger, Meursault describes the day of his mother’s funeral:
The sky was already filled with light. The sun was beginning to bear down on the earth and it was getting hotter by the minute. I don’t know why we waited so long before getting under way. I was hot in my dark clothes…I was looking at the countryside around me. Seeing the rows of cypress trees leading up to the hills next to the sky, and the houses standing out here and there against that red and green earth, I was able to understand Maman better. Evenings in that part of the country must have been a kind of sad relief. But today, with the sun bearing down, making the whole landscape shimmer with heat, it was inhuman and oppressive.
Once again nature is cast as an all-powerful force, although in Camus it’s the unbearable sun rather than the imposing forest and the unrelenting snow. The mortal human is subsumed and returns to a natural state, the mother’s casket is lowered into the ground. In The Stranger, Meursault continues to describe the oppressive heat as they follow the casket, with nature and human slowly merging:
All around me there was still the same glowing countryside flooded with sunlight. The glare from the sky was unbearable.
I felt a little lost between the blue and white of the sky and the monotony of the colors around me.
I turned around again: Perez seemed to be way back there, fading in the shimmering heat.
Then there was the church and the villagers on the sidewalks, the red geraniums on the graves in the cemetery, Perez fainting (he crumpled like a rag doll), the blood-red earth spilling over Maman’s casket, the white flesh of the roots mixed in with it.
Meursault emphasizes the mixing of human and nature throughout the funeral, with the last lines serving as a sort of communion between the two: the red geraniums (nature) are on the graves (human); Perez faints and one imagines his body splayed out on the ground, maximizing contact with nature; the earth is likened to blood, it covers the casket holding the mother’s body, and the roots of the earth are described as flesh. This union of human and nature is in fact the underlying logic of The Stranger. When Meursault shoots the Arab on the beach because the sun is in his eyes, his actions make sense in the context of the novel, even if they do not when articulated outside the story. At the end of the novel, Meursault says, “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.” Death for Meursault represents a return to a primordial state, a return that he accepts in contrast to the insincere and hypocritical human world.
Handke’s response is different. While he, too, is skeptical of social formulas and conventions (“it simply swallowed you up, so that in the end you as an individual were content to be nothing”), he does not see nature as a reprieve. After describing the fir forest and the snow at his mother’s funeral, he writes, “All at once, in my impotent rage, I felt the need of writing something about my mother.” Meursault accepts; Handke rebels. But knowing, like Camus, that everything human is dissimulation—including language—Handke must go beyond language while using it, he must create something that adds up to more than the sum of its parts, arriving at a truth that is like the silence of the firs in the forest. This is the challenge of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.
Handke relays another piece of writing connected to his mother’s death: the letter she sent to him before committing suicide. In the letter, “she wrote that she was perfectly calm, glad at last to be falling asleep in peace.” Handke comments, “But I’m sure that wasn’t true.” How could it be true? “Perfectly calm” and “falling asleep in peace”—these are clichés, hardly the sort of text that can describe what one feels before ending their life. On the other hand, what could she say? Words are insufficient in such a situation.
When Handke is at a loss for words in his account, he continually refers to “horror.”
I need the feeling that what I am going through is incomprehensible and incommunicable; only then does the horror seem meaningful and real.
Actually, my moments of horror are brief, and what I feel is not so much horror as unreality.
This story, however, is really about the nameless, about speechless moments of terror. It is about moments when the mind boggles with horror.
Even now I sometimes wake up with a start, as though in response to some inward prodding, and, breathless with horror, feel that I am literally rotting away from second to second.
Horror is something perfectly natural: the mind’s horror vacui.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams documents Handke’s struggle to write something true in the wake of his mother’s death—to describe the “horror” that can only be expressed via silence—which is his version of Camus’ absurd, or the realization that life is meaningless. Handke describes his writing process thus:
I first took the facts as my starting point and looked for ways of formulating them. But I soon noticed that in looking for formulations I was moving away from the facts. I then adopted a new approach—starting not with the facts but with the already available formulations, the linguistic deposit of man’s social experience. From my mother’s life, I sifted out the elements that were already foreseen in these formulas, for only with the help of a ready-made public language was it possible to single out from among all the irrelevant facts of this life the few that cried out to be made public.
There is a tension, then, between fact and cliché, yet facts lead into cliché when narrativized, while from cliché one may be able to draw out the essential facts. It is an impossible challenge because the writer is at the mercy of language, which is necessarily limited. Handke’s goal is expressed well in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s famous but often misunderstood statement: “the duty of literature is to fight fiction.” Handke succeeds as well as one can, yet he frequently comments on his failure:
Writing has not, as I first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment.
In the last pages of the text, he writes in fragments that are surprisingly moving—a collection of images of his mother and his past that make a sort of collage while resisting contrived meaning and sentimentality. It reminds me of Meursault’s rejection of the priest at the end of The Stranger—he will not let someone else tell him what this life means, he will get to the truth without dissembling, or he will try, because the attempt is what counts, even if the boulder rolls back down the hill after it’s been pushed to the summit. Handke writes at the end of his text, written in 1972, “Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail.” To my knowledge, he never has, and part of me thinks he knew when he wrote those words he would never return to the story of his mother’s death. Everything had already been said.
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