'Goethe Dies' by Thomas Bernhard

The four stories in Goethe Dies were first published in German periodicals in the early 1980s, and in them we can see Bernhard exercising the devices and themes he used to greater extent and effect in some of the novels written in his last decade. The title story displays Bernhard’s puckish tendency to appropriate and subvert the biographies of actual people, as he did with Glenn Gould in The Loser. In this story, Goethe, on his deathbed, requests a visit from Wittgenstein, who is living in England (and, in reality, was born nearly 60 years after Goethe’s death). Apart from travelling to England and finding Wittgenstein to have died eight days previously and returning too late to report this to Goethe, the nameless narrator has no role other than to report the words of another character, or, more commonly, what one character reports of the words of another character, or, often, what one character reports of another character’s report of the words of yet another character. This device of narratorial passivity witnessing not so much the subject but what may well be little more than hearsay (about hearsay about hearsay) about the subject is a favourite of Bernhard’s, continually calling into question any certainty a reader may think they draw from the text. The story ‘Reunion’ destabilises the operations of memory and satirises the narrator who claims to have freed himself from the influence of the tyrannical parents who in fact still dominate him through his memories, compared with the old friend who listens to his rant, who, the narrator claims, never escaped the influence of his parents, and yet who seems not to remember any of the obsessive details of the narrator’s oppressive memories and may therefore be less affected by the shared unhappiness of childhood. These and the other stories display Bernhard’s resentment of reactionary and traditional power, whether that be in a nation (his will states that his books may not be published in his native, hated "Catholic, National Socialist" Austria) or in a family (but he also portrays his resentment is a base and ludicrous act). “Parents make a child and strive above all else to destroy it, I said, my parents just like yours and every parent altogether and everywhere.”

May 2016
 

'Concrete' by Thomas Bernhard

In a single brilliant book-length hysterical paragraph, Rudolph, Bernhard’s narrator, a middle-aged invalid both incapacitated and sustained by his neuroses, obsessed with writing his great work on the composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy but of course incapable of even beginning to write, neurasthenically procrastinating and irritated, riven by every possible ambivalence, unable to write whilst his sister is visiting and unable to write unless she is present, hating his sister but dependent upon her, needing his home but stifled by it, rants about everything from making too many notes to the idiocy of keeping dogs. Bernhard’s delineation of an individual whose interiority and isolation has attained the highest degree is flawless, devastating and very funny. No sooner has Rudolph made a categorical assertion than he begins to move towards its opposite: after describing the cruelty of his sister towards him, we become increasingly aware of her concern for him and his mental state; no sooner does he attain the solitude of his grand Austrian country home (soon after the book opens he makes the categorical assertion, “We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task!”, a common fallacious predicate that one commonly inclines towards but which subverts one’s ends (he follows this swiftly with another self-defeating assertion: “I still don’t know how to word the first sentence, and before I know the wording of the first sentence I can’t begin any work.”)) than he is absolutely certain that he must travel to Palma if he is to write his book on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Towards the end of the book, we learn that Rudolph did indeed go to Palma, where he is writing this account (instead of his work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy) after learning of the recent suicide of a young woman he had met there on a previous occasion following the death of her husband (who was discovered fallen onto concrete beneath their hotel balcony). Such was the isolation of Rudolph’s interiority that he was incapable of taking timely action to help the unfortunate young woman, though it was easily within his means to do so, incapable of making authentic human contact, stifled by his own ambivalences and self-obsession (the undeclared ironic tragedy being that he may possibly have returned to Palma in order to help the young woman but that he is of course too late, her suicide triggering the self-excoriation that comprises the book).

February 2016
    

'The Loser' by Thomas Bernhard

Of the three friends who had studied piano together under Horowitz at the Salzburg Mozarteum, the narrator, Wertheimer and a fictionalised Glenn Gould, only Gould continued playing, for the others, though piano prodigies, were unable to continue their careers after having overheard Gould’s interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and been ‘destroyed’ by his genius. Twenty-eight years later, Gould,  having withdrawn from the world into his ‘isolation cage’ in the Canadian wilds, dies of a stroke while playing the Variations, and, soon after, the highly neurotic Wertheimer, who had been labelled ‘The Loser’ by Gould on their first meeting and who had been most deeply devastated by the unapproachability of Gould’s genius, for he, unlike the narrator, had set his heart on being a virtuoso, and who had withdrawn to his ‘isolation cage’ in the Austrian wilds after his sister, who he had obsessively dominated and controlled, had ‘escaped’ and married a Swiss industrialist, commits suicide by hanging himself near his sister’s new home. The book, in one relentless paragraph with the same sublime unpegged looping structures as Bach’s music and the wicked barbs, subversions and reflexive humour of an interpretation of Bach by Glenn Gould, represents the thoughts of the narrator as they loop over and over the relationship between the three characters, who can be seen as three aspects of Bernhard himself, his characters being blanks upon which he projects his own neuroses, invective, frustrated abilities, lung disease, impulses for self-destruction and, above all, stultifying ambivalence. A revulsion by everything, a precise analysis of the inescapable destructive cacophony of human relationships, a delineation of the self-annihilating effects of the ‘isolation cages’ that are the refuge from humanity, no thought is sooner expressed than it begins to appear ludicrous, the further developed it becomes, the more ludicrous, until it is left exploded, empty, food for its opposite, no less ludicrous. It takes well over half the book for the narrator to walk into the inn at which he will stay after visiting Wertheimer’s ‘isolation cage’ in Traich to search for the work Wertheimer had been writing, almost the entire content of the book taking place at at least the second if not the third or fourth remove, in a subjective hole so deep that the characters leach characteristics into each other as the narrator hysterically overdoes every analysis and statement to the extent that we come to believe that any statement is an overstatement and a false statement, or at least a statement within which truth and falsity cannot be disentangled. In this rereading I noticed that Wertheimer is briefly mentioned as having been writing something called The Loser (otherwise the narrator dismisses his writing as aphorisms “destined for the walls of dentists’ waiting rooms”), and I couldn’t get out of my mind that Bernhard identified strongly with his Wertheimer character, who has written this book as if narrated by his unnamed friend who would have found this work after Wertheimer’s suicide (Bernhard’s proxy suicide) had not he arrived at Traich to be told by the gamekeeper that Wertheimer had been seen to burn all his papers before his fatal trip.

October 2015

    

'Gathering Evidence' by Thomas Bernhard

I am currently reading Thomas Bernhard’s memoir of the first two decades years of his life. The extent to which the account is ‘true’ is unimportant, rendering questions such as how-certain-circumstances-could-produce-the-kind-of-person-who-would-write-the-kind-of-novels-that-Bernhard-wrote extraneous. Given the similarities in tone, substance and approach between the novels and the memoir – the supercharged ambivalence, the nihilism shot through with tenderness and humour, the simultaneously monstrous and pathetic characters, the terrible circumstances that give rise to something resembling nostalgia – what is interesting is the relationship between this book and the others: to what extent is this memoir a sort of petri dish in which the novels were seeded, or to what extent has Bernhard rewritten his life as a kind of adjunct to, or reflection of, the concerns developed in his novels?

May 2015
    

'Correction' by Thomas Bernhard

Finding himself the literary executor of his friend Roithamer after Roithamer’s suicide, the narrator returns to Austria, to the room in the garret of the house their mutual school-friend the taxidermist Hoeller built above the Aurach Gorge, the room in which Roithamer sought refuge from the world to think and plan and perfect the cone-shaped house he built for his sister in the exact centre of the Kobernausser Forest, which was so ‘perfect’ and so ‘suited to her particular character’, or so Roithamer intended, that she died, or was relieved of the burden of having to keep herself alive (Austrians’ ‘national folk art’ being “to think constantly about killing themselves without actually killing themselves”), immediately upon entering it, the room in which Roithamer wrote, rewrote and re-rewrote the manuscript ‘About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone’, which the narrator considers Roithamer’s masterwork, despite its differing and conflicting versions, along with ‘hundreds of thousands’ of passages on slips of paper and preparatory drawings for the nihilistic structure of the Cone, which the narrator prepares himself to ‘sift and sort’. In the second of the two relentless paragraphs that comprise the book, the narrator reads Roithamer’s manuscript, the ‘corrected’ and shorter second version and the ‘re-corrected’ and even shorter third version, and the slips of paper, and is progressively and ultimately completely subsumed by Roithamer’s voice, its absolutism, its monstrous ambivalences, tectonic self-contradictions and tiresome petulance, as Roithamer obsesses over his miserable childhood and youth at his immensely wealthy family’s home at Altensam, his attempts to oppose himself to his family, in particular to his step-mother, ‘that Eferding woman’, his sale of the family estate at Altensam after it was perniciously left to him by his father, who surely knew that Roithamer hated Altensam and would bring about its destruction, all building to a maniacal crescendo of invective and self-abnegation. Even within the claustrophobic subjectivity of Roithamer’s mind, each assertion, as soon as it is stated, begins to move towards its negation: “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognise at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point of time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification, and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth, so Roithamer. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying…”. As with the narrator, so ultimately with Roithamer: persons and facts do not endure; the mechanisms of thought and language, when permitted to run their course, are destructive to all equally: entities, identities, personalities, actualities are all mere contingencies to an ineluctable process of devastation.

February 2015
 

'Gargoyles' by Thomas Bernhard

“The catastrophe begins with getting out of bed.” Gargoyles (first published in 1967 as Verstörung (“Disturbance”)) is the book in which Bernhard laid claim both thematically and stylistically to the particular literary territory developed in all his subsequent novels. In the first part of the book, set entirely within one day, the narrator, a somewhat vapid student accompanying his father, a country doctor, on his rounds, tells us of the sufferings of various patients due to their mental and physical isolation: the wealthy industrialist withdrawn to his dungeon-like hunting lodge to write a book he will never achieve (“’Even though I have destroyed everything I have written up to now,’ he said, ‘I have still made enormous progress.’”), and his sister-companion, the passive victim of his obsessions, whom he is obviously and obliviously destroying; the workers systematically strangling the birds in an aviary following the death of their owner; the musical prodigy suffering from a degenerative condition and kept in a cage, tended by his long-suffering sister. The oppressive landscape mirrors the isolation and despair of its inhabitants: we feel isolated, we reach out, we fail to reach others in a meaningful way, our isolation is made more acute. “No human being could continue to exist in such total isolation without doing severe damage to his intellect and psyche.” Bernhard’s nihilistic survey of the inescapable harm suffered and inflicted by continuing to exist is, however, threaded onto the doctor’s round: although the doctor is incapable of ‘saving’ his patients, his compassion as a witness to their anguish mirrors that of the author (whose role is similar). In the second half of the novel, the doctor’s son narrates their arrival at Hochgobernitz, the castle of Prince Saurau, whose breathlessly neurotic rant blots out everything else, delays the doctor’s return home and fills the rest of the book. This desperate monologue is Bernhard suddenly discovering (and swept off his feet by) his full capacities: an obsessively looping railing against existence and all its particulars. At one stage, when the son reports the prince reporting his dream of discovering a manuscript in which his son expresses his intention to destroy the vast Hochgobernitz estate by neglect after his father’s death, the ventriloquism is many layers deep, paranoid and claustrophobic to the point of panic. The prince’s monologue, like so much of Bernhard’s best writing, is riven by ambivalence, undermined (or underscored) by projection and transference, and structured by crazed but irrefutable logic: “‘Among the special abilities I was early able to observe in myself,’ he said, ‘is the ruthlessness to lead anyone through his own brain until he is nauseated by this cerebral mechanism.’” Although the prince’s monologue is stated to be (and clearly is) the position of someone insane, this does not exactly invalidate it: “Inside every human head is the human catastrophe corresponding to this particular head, the prince said. It is not necessary to open up men’s heads in order to know that there is nothing inside them but a human catastrophe. ‘Without this human catastrophe, man does not exist at all,’ the prince said.”

(December 2014)
 

'My Prizes, An accounting' by Thomas Bernhard

When I begin to despair of the rottenness of the world I find it helpful to self-medicate with a dose of Thomas Bernhard. There is no pretension he will not mock, no relation he will not excoriate, no balloon he will not puncture - and it is all done in sentences so beautifully wrought that the reader is left breathless. Some of the targets of his invective are the institutions of his native Austria, which he sees as ossified with Catholic and Nazi values (his will forbade the publication of his work in Austria). My Prizes, a playfully vicious account of his acceptance of nine major literary prizes, is not only a biting-of-the-hand (while demonstrating why the hand deserves to be bitten) but also a kind of self-assassination and an assault on the reverence society holds for literati. Always less than gracious, Bernhard chooses to accept the prizes for the money attached, and delivers scandalous speeches (one of which causes the culture minster to walk out on the ceremony). The only award he approves of is one from the Federal Chamber of Commerce – he accepts that one as a recognition of the great example he sets for shop-keeping apprentices. Bernhard portrays himself as overweening and feckless: he decides to use prize money to buy a farmhouse (even though he despises the countryside) but can’t be bothered looking around and buys the first rotten house he is shown. Why does reading Bernhard make me feel better? Maybe because, although he gives his attention to the unremitting uselessness of everything, his attention (and the quality of his sentences) remains unassimilated by this uselessness. Of the periods in which Bernhard did succumb to hopelessness and despair and found literature pointless, no record was produced.

(September 2014)
 

'Old Masters' by Thomas Bernhard

One voice entirely dominates this novel, not the voice of the narrator Atzbacher, but that of Reger, an aging music critic who has been coming every second day for thirty years to sit in front of Tintoretto’s Portrait of a White-Bearded Man in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. In the first half of the single paragraph that floods this book with intricately structured reports of Reger’s liberally misanthropic invective, Atzbacher arrives early to meet Reger and observes him from another gallery, recalling things Reger has said to him on previous occasions. In the second half, what Reger says to Atzbacher that day is interwoven with what Reger has said during a previous meeting at a hotel, eventually revealing details of the death of Reger’s wife, which underlies much of the near-hysterical nihilism that Reger pours out of himself and through everyone else. During the passages dealing with the death of Reger’s wife the temporal structure of the narrative is more fragmented, reflecting Reger’s distress. Atzbacher, the museum attendant Irrsigler, and, we learn, Reger’s unnamed wife all function as nothing more than mouthpieces for Reger’s rather Bernhardian opinions, Reger who claims that the relationship in which the parties know as little as possible of each other is the ideal relationship, the relationship which does not contradict his projection. Reger’s opinions, though often sharply barbed and frequently desperately funny, are not supported by argument and are repetitively over-inflated and generalised, undermining their authenticity as opinions but strengthening the dominating voice of the incurably isolated Reger. As with all Bernhard’s novels, the primary content of Old Maters is its form. Reger’s inability to find worth in his world is desperately ambivalent: “I am resisting this total despair about everything, Reger said. I am now eighty-two and I am resisting this total despair about everything tooth and nail”. The art of doing this is the art of existing against the facts: “Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously, he said. But we must make ourselves believe that there is high art and the highest art, he said, otherwise we would despair. Even though we know that all art ends in gaucherie and ludicrousness and in the refuse of history, like everything else, we must, with downright self-assurance, believe in high and in the highest art, he said. We realise what it is, a bungled, failed art, but we need not always hold this realisation before us, because in that case we should inevitably perish, he said.” The novel ends with Reger taking Atzbacher to a performance of Kleist’s Broken Pitcher at the Burgtheater (“the most hideous theatre in the world”), and in the very last line Atzbacher gets to express an opinion of his own: “The performance was terrible”.

(July 2014)
 

'Woodcutters' by Thomas Bernhard

The narrator, a writer recently returned to Vienna after two decades overseas, attends an ‘artistic dinner’ given by a bourgeois couple he was once close to, in honour of a distinguished actor. In the first half of the book, the narrator sits mostly silently in a wing chair as the company awaits the actor’s arrival, and experiences a vitriolic fugue of invective against his hosts, their behaviour past and present, their associates and everything they think and do and say and represent. That afternoon, the narrator, the hosts and the majority of the guests had attended the funeral of Joana, with whom the narrator had once had a close affinity, who had failed to make any sort of artistic impact in Vienna and had fallen into years of alcoholism and despair that led eventually to her suicide. The narrator’s stream of invective, which is both razor-sharp and frequently very funny, could be seen as a subconscious strategy of avoiding thinking of Joana’s death, as an outlet for his anger at a milieu that allows one of its members to descend to suicide, and, not least, as an indirect expression of his nauseation at everything to do with himself, his past and, in particular, his unacknowledgeable shortcomings in his relationship with Joana. As always in Bernhard, all loathing is primarily self-loathing and only secondarily loathing of the world as it is distilled in the loather. The strongest statements are the most unstable: in the second half of the book, when the loathed actor arrives and the dinner progresses, the narrator’s extreme opinions run up against their objects outside his head and undergo disconcerting reversals leading to a highly unsettling end. Woodcutters is one of Bernhard’s finest and most incisive books, and a good one to start with if you haven’t read him before.

(February 2014)
 

'Extinction' by Thomas Bernhard

In the first of the two relentless paragraphs which make up this claustrophobic masterpiece, the narrator, having just received a telegram informing him of the deaths of his parents and brother in an accident, stands at his window in Rome and attempts to retain his footing amid a great rush of (negative) memories of his estranged wealthy Austrian family and their property at Wolfsegg, and, more particularly, of the things he has told his pupil Gambetti about his estranged family and their property at Wolfsegg before he learned of the deaths. In the second half of the book he tells of his return to Wolfsegg, the preparations for the funeral, his relationship with his sisters, and the funeral itself, attended, as feared, by several ex-Nazis, and by his mother’s nauseatingly brilliant lover, a papal nuncio, who naturally assumes centre stage (in the narrator’s eyes at least). In the same way that the beautiful Children’s Villa at Wolfsegg was repurposed by his parents as a hideaway for Nazis after the war, symbolically robbing the narrator of his childhood, harm cannot be undone merely by its rejection, and the narrator's unremitting diatribes, devastating in their execution yet subtle in their implications, against absolutely everything represented by his family (sometimes  with  hints of an achingly suppressed ambivalence) and by the indelibly “Catholic and National Socialist” Austrian society, demonstrates that his attempts to free himself from what is despicable have not freed him but maimed him, and that words, whether as thought, speech or literature, are at best a feeble act of avoidance. “When I take Wolfsegg and my family apart, when I dissect, annihilate and extinguish them, I am actually taking myself apart, dissecting, annihilating and extinguishing myself. I have to admit that this idea of self-dissection and self-annihilation appeals to me, I told Gambetti. I’ll spend my life dissecting and extinguishing myself, Gambetti, and if I’m not mistaken I’ll succeed in this self-dissection and self-extinction. I actually do nothing but dissect and extinguish myself.”

(January 2014)
 

'Yes' by Thomas Bernhard

With its pages-long sentences, fugue-like structure, claustrophobic physical and mental space and relentlessly tightening interiority, Yes is the (disconcertingly pleasurable) literary equivalent of a Chinese burn. In the first of the novel's two paragraphs, the narrator, who has moved (twenty years ago) to an unappealing rural district to write a work on antibodies (what else?) that he will never accomplish, is 'saved' from his hopelessness and depression, which have brought him at last to the point of suicide, by meeting a Persian woman, the partner of a Swiss engineer, at the house of a local real estate agent, and taking a walk with her in the forest, during which no actual conversation takes place but in which the narrator develops a feeling of deep affinity with the Persian woman. In the second paragraph, which I increasingly came to read as taking place entirely within the narrator's head, we 'learn' of the entirely upright dealing of the real estate agent in selling the Swiss a piece of long-unsaleable waterlogged meadow for a high price, of the developing relationship between the narrator and the Persian woman, first into obsession and then disgust (a masterfully rendered portrayal of projection (we, and the narrator (if I read correctly) actually know nothing of the Persian woman)), the history of the Swiss/Persian couple which has led the Swiss to build an oppressive house in an oppressive place as an act of spite, and of the eventual suicide of the Persian woman (to which the Yes of the title refers) as a sort of surrogate for the narrator. As the narrator states on page 65: “If such a thought is present, it must be thought through to the end.”

(July 2013)

'The Lime Works' by Thomas Bernhard

The sublimely cantankerous and ostensibly misanthropic novels of Thomas Bernhard are not nearly as well known in English as they deserve to be. With their indirect narratives, looping structure, claustrophobic pacing and delectably excoriating sentences, Bernhard presents his characters’ psychological ruin as evidence of the ultimately ludicrous and harmful nature of all human thought and aspiration. After a while, though, you begin to realise there is even something strangely compassionate in these attempts to exhaust misery in words, and the books can be very funny, too. The Loser is my favourite of Bernhard’s novels; Correction the most devastating. I have just read The Lime Works, in which, by amassing hearsay from various, often conflicting, sources, an insurance salesman recounts the fate of a man who withdraws into isolation (which he also inflicts upon his crippled wife) in order to research and write a book on the sense of hearing. Due to incapacitating perfectionism coupled with a fatal atrophy of his mental and physical resources, he, of course, never even begins to write, and instead both slowly and quickly destroys both his wife and himself.  Better-known in English than Bernhard are writers who have been influenced by him: W.G. Sebald and the Tim Parks of Destiny spring to mind.

(April 2013)