The Special Sensibilities of an Isolated Reality

Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke, translated by Ralph Manheim (Farrar Straus Giroux: $16.95)

Out of a fractured consciousness that places him in the forefront of the European literary avant-garde, Peter Handke has undertaken a pilgrimage of a most traditional sort.

Medieval jongleurs sought an alternative to knightly butchery in knightly love. Shakespeare’s courtiers, fleeing court intrigue, rehearsed the natural verities in the Forest of Arden. Rousseau fought to hold off the approaching smogs of industrial society by preaching the Natural Man. Voltaire’s Candide turned to gardening.

“Slow Homecoming,” in its complex and often difficult way, is a highly contemporary version of timeless pastoral. Handke’s philosophical fiction centers about a figure who painfully works his way out of current fashions in politics, morals and aesthetics to explore and celebrate a father’s relation to his growing child.

An Ordeal of Sorts

“Slow Homecoming” was written in three parts and is translated by Ralph Manheim with a limpidity that lays bare the author’s alternating limpid and impenetrable qualities. Like any pilgrimage, it is in part an ordeal--with no clear end in sight--for the protagonist; and also for the reader. Then, in the last part, it opens up with a welcome poetic clarity.

The protagonist is a double figure. He is an Austrian writer, more or less identical with Handke. He is also a geologist created by the writer to act as a kind of scientific extension of himself.

These twin sensibilities are in flight from alienation and in search of authenticity. The flight is elusive. Essentially, it is a rejection of a society that lives in its own exhaust and suffers from massive conceptual indigestion. Included in the rejection are such various things as political passion of the right and left, and most kinds of contemporary narcissism, from consumerism to sexual autonomy to the deification of self-fulfillment to jogging. “Joggers,” the protagonists observes, “look as though they were in training for a world war.”

Stripped of Identity

In the first two parts, this protagonist strips himself of concepts and identity. He is working in Alaska, a European symbol for remoteness from society. In his narrative, everything gives way to a monstrously specific recording of natural detail: the angle of a rock or mud shifting in a river. Background becomes foreground and vice-versa. A love affair with an Alaskan Indian is as dimly seen as, in a more usual narration, the dust on the window of a bedroom where a couple is making love.

It is like clearing out an infested larder. The protagonist pulls out every idea and emotion he possesses and lays them indifferently upon the surface of his surroundings. A neighbor’s casual “hello” becomes as significant as the words of Goethe or Shakespeare. Heading back to Europe by slow stages, he tells a friend that what he will miss is the pattern of lines on his shirt.

In this stripping-down, everything is equally tentative and uninflected. The protagonist writes of himself in terms of what he is not, and every assertion, even the most trivial, is put in quotation marks or rendered in the negative form. His stars are black holes. It is as if the old biblical assertion of ultimate identity--”I am that I am”--were replaced by “I am not that I am not.”

The leveling is so extreme that it becomes a problem for the reader. It is the journal of a man, written by a rock. Where nothing is more important than anything else, we lose mental punctuation.

This is true in the second part as well, although here there is more structure. The narrator makes an effort to reassemble his world after leveling it. He takes a few paintings, seeks out the landscapes they depict and treks through them. What remains of the luminous reality of a Cezanne or a Ruysdael in the material reality of a Provence hilltop or a northern forest? Not much.

Only in the last part does the reassembling really take place. The author’s judgment, emotions and values reappear after their graphic winnowing. It is the shortest and by far the most rewarding part of the book, partly, perhaps, because our senses have been so thinned down. It is a moving and powerfully suggestive narration by a man who brings up a little girl alone--a mother comes and goes--from the time she is a baby to her 10th year.

The narrator gives up his more ambitious writing projects and replaces them with smaller efforts. He reduces his political and social contacts. He curtails, in short, his own priorities. It is a painful process, and like the best kind of pain, it begets discovery. Some of the discovery is touchingly and absurdly obvious. It didn’t take Handke to declare, on behalf of millennia of parenthood, that the continual demands of a child displace our own center, produce rage and frustration and--this is his discovery--make the very colors go out of the day.

But that is the point in a way. To the outrage of his political and intellectual friends--”the reality-mongers” he calls them--he has turned his back on the contemporary isolating definitions of reality and rejoined, in his highly individual way, an older human community. The theme is classic and he quotes from the Greek: “Children are the soul of all men. He who has not learned this suffers less, but his well being is of the wrong kind.”

But Handke’s account of the year-by-year changes in a growing child, and of the shifting pain and delight between parent and child, are seen with the freshness that only an extraordinary writer can impart.