The Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is one of my all-time favorite writers, so I was glad to come across Three Novellas that had not previously been translated into English. Bernhard’s fiction usually consists of long paragraphs consisting of fragmentary sentences just piled on, one after another; the sentences are usually made of multiple layers of indirect discourse, speakers reporting on other speakers reporting on other speakers. Thus in the third and best of these three novellas, Walking, the narrator recounts to the reader what his friend Oehler recounts to him about what he said to the psychiatrist Scherrer about what Karrer, who has gone insane, said to him (Oehler). These convolutions in the narrative voice are accompanied by convolutions in the events narrated, as the multiply layered narrators circle around what they cannot directly describe, mixing anecdotes, rants, digressions, and obsessive repetitions. The overall effect is at once gruesome and hilarious: the narrators insist that life is unbearable, that suicide is the best and only way out, that Austria in particular is a nasty and unlivable country, filled with Nazis and charlatans and ignorant vulgar bullies with a violent, resentful enmity against true and original thought. But these monologues are comic more than tragic because they are so obsessive and so over-the-top. Reading Bernhard is exhilarating, and makes me laugh out loud, even though at the same time his fiction more than confirms my most negative, doom-ridden, and misanthropic feelings and thoughts. Bernhard’s books work because they implicate their narrators, and their readers, in everything they are ranting against: finally they are about the incapacity of thought – or of writing – to realize itself, to cohere with itself, to coincide with itself. Consciousness is always riddled with otherness: the otherness of the body, and of language, as well as of other people and society and nature. This makes thought a painful process, the more excruciatingly painful the more exacerbatedly turned back upon itself; but it always does turn back upon itself, like an itch that one cannot help scratching, even though this only makes it itch more in the long run. So Bernhard’s fiction, beyond its critique of the falseness and superficiality of Austrian culture, dramatizes the impossibility of mastering thought, of mastering one’s own discourse, of being triumphantly masterful and creative, which is what the myth of art and creativity in modern society comes down to. And yet Bernhard’s fiction is itself wonderfully creative, precisely by expressing, and wallowing in, this abject impossibility. Reading Bernhard means inoculating oneself against the nauseating myths of creativity, genius, mastery, moral uplift, etc. – one has to reject these myths, not because art is worthless and meaningless, but precisely because art matters, and Bernhard gives us an account of how and why it matters. The exhilarating laughter of excruciating pain and disgust.
Bernhard
The Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is one of my all-time favorite writers, so I was glad to come across Three Novellas that had not previously been translated into English. Bernhard’s fiction usually consists of long paragraphs consisting of fragmentary sentences just piled on, one after another; the sentences are usually made of multiple layers of indirect discourse, speakers reporting on other speakers reporting on other speakers. Thus in the third and best of these three novellas, Walking, the narrator recounts to the reader what his friend Oehler recounts to him about what he said to the psychiatrist Scherrer about what Karrer, who has gone insane, said to him (Oehler). These convolutions in the narrative voice are accompanied by convolutions in the events narrated, as the multiply layered narrators circle around what they cannot directly describe, mixing anecdotes, rants, digressions, and obsessive repetitions. The overall effect is at once gruesome and hilarious: the narrators insist that life is unbearable, that suicide is the best and only way out, that Austria in particular is a nasty and unlivable country, filled with Nazis and charlatans and ignorant vulgar bullies with a violent, resentful enmity against true and original thought. But these monologues are comic more than tragic because they are so obsessive and so over-the-top. Reading Bernhard is exhilarating, and makes me laugh out loud, even though at the same time his fiction more than confirms my most negative, doom-ridden, and misanthropic feelings and thoughts. Bernhard’s books work because they implicate their narrators, and their readers, in everything they are ranting against: finally they are about the incapacity of thought – or of writing – to realize itself, to cohere with itself, to coincide with itself. Consciousness is always riddled with otherness: the otherness of the body, and of language, as well as of other people and society and nature. This makes thought a painful process, the more excruciatingly painful the more exacerbatedly turned back upon itself; but it always does turn back upon itself, like an itch that one cannot help scratching, even though this only makes it itch more in the long run. So Bernhard’s fiction, beyond its critique of the falseness and superficiality of Austrian culture, dramatizes the impossibility of mastering thought, of mastering one’s own discourse, of being triumphantly masterful and creative, which is what the myth of art and creativity in modern society comes down to. And yet Bernhard’s fiction is itself wonderfully creative, precisely by expressing, and wallowing in, this abject impossibility. Reading Bernhard means inoculating oneself against the nauseating myths of creativity, genius, mastery, moral uplift, etc. – one has to reject these myths, not because art is worthless and meaningless, but precisely because art matters, and Bernhard gives us an account of how and why it matters. The exhilarating laughter of excruciating pain and disgust.