SOURCE: Varsava, Jerry A. “Auto-Bio-Graphy as Metafiction: Peter Handke's A Sorrow beyond Dreams.” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 14, no. 2 (winter 1985): 119-35.

In the following essay, Varsava surveys metafictional elements in Peter Handke's A Sorrow beyond Dreams.

Typically, contemporary metafiction has primarily dealt with a world of fictive events. The author—either directly or through a persona—reflects on the “made” or “constructed” quality of his fictional realm, dispelling notions of narrative omniscience and epistemological apodicticity as his fiction progresses. The reader infers that his own world resists definitive description in much the same way. Peter Handke, the contemporary Austrian poet-novelist-play-wright-essayist, endorses such a view in A Sorrow beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück) and elsewhere.¹ His point of departure in this novella is not, however, a “fictional world” per se but rather personal history. Handke's subject matter would seem to distance him from...