CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

 

The World of Thomas Bernhard's Novels

 

The history of literary bias goes back more than two thousand years, and between the two world wars there arrived a new fashion for "economy" that continues to hold sway in the aphoristic tendencies of those who write introductions to writers. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other American writers who set the style of the interwar era established the literary precept according to which any right-thinking writer should write a scene in the shortest way possible, using the fewest words, without repetition.

Thomas Bernhard is not a writer who wishes to seem right-thinking or economical. Repetition is the brick of his world. It is not only that his lonely and obsessed heroes repeat the same perversions over and over as each wanders back and forth, obsessively venting some furious passion; as he describes their progress with a shocking energy, Bernhard too will repeat the same sentences over and over. So when Bernhard speaks of the hero of Concrete, who gives many years over to writing a treatise on hearing, he does not, as a traditional novelist might, say, "Konrad often thought that society was nothing and the work he was writing was everything"-instead, he conveys this idea through his hero's endless repetitions.

His circular thoughts-these are not thoughts so much as angry shouts, curses, screams, and expletives ending in exclamation points are hard for rationalist readers to absorb. We read that all Austrians are idiots and, later, that the Germans and the Dutch are too; we are told that doctors are uniformly monstrous and most artists idiotic, superficial, and crude; we read that the world of science is inhabited by charlatans and the world of music by fakes; aristocrats and the rich are parasites, while

the poor are opportunistic swindlers; most intellectuals are birdbrains addicted to their affectations, and most young people are imbeciles prepared to laugh at anything; we read that the abiding human passion is to deceive, oppress, and destroy others. Such and such a city is the most disgusting city in the world, such and such a theater is not a theater but a brothel. Such and such a composer is the greatest so far, and so-and-so is the greatest philosopher, but since there are no other composers or philosophers to reckon with, they are all "would-be" composers and philosophers ... and so on.

When we read Tolstoy or Proust, who protect themselves and their heroes with aesthetic armor-thus safeguarding their fictive worlds from this sort of excess-we might see these attacks, in Bernhard's words, as "the affectations of an anguished aristocrat or of a conceited but still sympathetic hero," but in the world of Thomas Bernhard they serve as supporting columns. In the work of "balanced" writers like Proust or Tolstoy, we might view such obsessive repetition as "a leaf in the world of human virtues and frailties," but here it serves the instantiation of an entire world. Most writers concerned with portraying "life in its fullness" consign "obsessions, perversions, and excesses" to the margins, but Bernhard places them in the center, while the rest of the experience we describe as life gets pushed into the margins, evident only in the little details involved to insult it.

If I am drawn to these attacks and curses that draw their power from obsession, it is partly owing to Bernhard's endless verbal energy, but the attraction also derives from the heroes' situation. Anger offers Bernhard’s heroes protection against the evil, idiocy, and misery of the world. Bernhard's heroes spout not such belittling curses as confident, successful, and refined people deploy to look down on those around them; this is anger born of face-to-face familiarity with catastrophe that may strike at any time, of having accepted the painful truth about what people are really made of-and it is their anger that keeps his heroes from collapsing, that keeps them on their feet. We read again and again that this or that person "has not been able to stay on his feet," "was destroyed in the end," "withered away in a comer," "was crushed in the end, too." For Bernhard's heroes, hemmed in as they are by cruelty and idiocy, the destruction of others serves as warning of danger. In their language, this notion might be expressed thus: For those who would endure, carry on, forbear, and remain standing, the first imperative is to curse the world and the second is to turn this passion into a deep, philosophical, meaningful enterprise-or at the very least to give ourselves over to obsession. Once the obsessions come to define the world in which we live, we are reduced to those things we cannot give up.

In Correction, the hero, who resembles Wittgenstein, is preoccupied with an unwritten biography that will take him long years to research, but his hatred of his sister, who thinks he is impeding his own efforts, preoccupies his thoughts. So it is with the hero of Concrete: Concerned as he is with his work on "hearing," he is just as obsessed with the conditions under which he writes it. Similarly, the engaging hero of Woodcutters, having invited to dinner all the intellectuals of Vienna he most detests, directs all his hospitable energy to detesting them even more.

Valery once said that people who rail against vulgarity are really expressing their curiosity and affection for it. Bernhard's heroes return continually to the things they hate most; they devise ways of fanning the hatred; indeed, they could not live without disgust and contempt. They hate Vienna, but they run to be there; they hate the world of music, but they could not live without it; they hate their sisters, but they seek them out; they abhor newspapers but couldn't bear not to read them; they deride intellectual chatter, only to mourn its absence; they detest literary prizes, but they don new suits and rush off to accept them. In their struggle to set themselves above reproach, they recall the hero of Notes from Underground.

Bernhard has something of Dostoyevsky in him. In his heroes' obsessions and passions-their defenses against the hopeless and the absurd there are shades of Kafka as well. But Bernhard's world is closer to Beckett's.

Beckett's heroes do not rail so much against their surroundings; they are less interested in the disasters they suffer than in their mental anguish. No matter how they struggle to escape it, Bernhard's heroes remain open to the outside world; to escape the suffering in their minds, they embrace the anarchy of the outside world. Beckett tries to erase, as much as possible, the chain of cause and effect, while Bernhard fixates on these causes down to the last detail. Bernhard's characters refuse to surrender to illness, defeat, and injustice; they carry with them a mad anger and a blind will to fight on to the bitter end. Even if they are ultimately defeated, it is not their defeat and surrender that we read about but their obsessive quarrels and struggles.

If we were to look for another writer who might serve as an introduction to the world of Thomas Bernhard, Louis-Ferdinand Celine would be the best candidate. Like Celine, Bernhard was raised in a poor family

that had to struggle to survive. He grew up without a father, suffered privation during the war, and contracted tuberculosis. Like Celine's, his novels are largely autobiographical, chronicling a constant battle, full of obstacles, resentments, and defeats. Like Celine, who lambasted authors like Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, and who railed against Gallimard, his publisher, Bernhard fumes at the old friends and institutions that take him in hand and give him prizes. Wholly autobiographical, Woodcutters is about a dinner party Bernhard actually organized in Austria for some friends and acquaintances with the express purpose of insulting them. But while Celine and Bernhard bum with flames from their inner hells, they use words very differently. Where Celine offers up ever shorter sentences ending in three dots, Bernhard's innovation is the sentence whose endless repetition of circular or, more accurately, elliptical insults refuses to submit to the paragraph block.

When the mist clears, what we see is a string of lovely, cruel, amusing little anecdotes. Despite their endless diatribes, Bernhard's books are not dramatic; instead, they pile one story on top of the other; the sense we get of the book comes not from the whole but from the little stories scattered inside it. If we recall that these are mostly made up of gossip, insult, and cruel descriptions of "so-called" artists and intellectuals, we can think that the world of Bernhard 's novels is not only shaped much like our own but that it is-at times-close to its spirit too. Voicing the cruel attacks and obsessive hatreds that we all indulge in when angry, he goes on to fashion them into "good art."

But this is the point at which his hatred of art runs into trouble. For the newspapers on which he rained insults take note of him more and more often, while the prize juries on whom he spat keep giving him more prizes, and the theaters on which he poured scorn are only too eager to stage his plays-and when readers come to see that the story they so desperately wanted to believe is in reality just a story, they cannot help feeling duped. So perhaps this is a good moment to remind the reader that the world in which a novelist lives is a different realm entirely from the world inhabited by his characters. But if you insist that this other world is autobiographical, and that it takes all its power from an anger that is real, you will, after reading each Bernhard novel, need to ask yourself why, when you search for a "moral vision," you feel as if you've been pulled into a game with the novel's caricatures, and even the novel itself.