Sebald's essay on Handke, Beneath the Surface, is so good trying to slice out a key quote feels like an unforgivable violation. What the essay demands is being re-read and re-read, its brilliance sends you back to re-read the novel. The last sentence will have to do: "The pathography of the protagonist and the biography of the narrator thus converge in what, from the point of view of societal normality, appears as illegitimate nature of both illness and art, which, each in their different way, recall the destruction that is wrought in the lives of children." 151 Can imagine how beautiful the sentence must be in the German.
The beginning of that final paragraph: "The suggestion implicit in the above, that in depicting a pathological world view Handke was ultimately also concerned with a scrupulous examination of his own artistic 'guilty' conscience, and his own distance from 'normal' life, is confirmed by his story in another regard also." "Bloch's story converges with that of the missing schoolboy"
"the development of goalkeeper Bloch's pathological state goes back to pre-existing handicaps of a social nature, and that his own art only goes beyond the pathological inasmuch as it opens up, for both author and readers, [. . . . .readers . . . .] an understanding of the wretched and utter hopelessness of such circumstances." 150-151
now if only Sebald had written such an essay on each of Handke's novels after this one !
next essay on Light and Dark deals with Stifter and Handke and later a big essay on Repetition
much to look forward to probably will not read the final tale in the Stifter volume
heavy gray skies now rain tonight, Saturday
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