I’m No Scandalmonger
JEAN-LOUIS DE
RAMBURES: What are you complaining about?
For six months you’ve been the only thing anybody talks about.
THOMAS BERNHARD:
Yes, but only as if I were a fit subject for tabloid sensationalism. Coming from the Austrians it’s a normal
reaction, but coming from the Germans it’s something that really puzzles me,
because of course, as everybody knows, they’re the ones who brought efficiency
and seriousness into the world. I
personally quite enjoy sensational news stories. But when a literary critic sues an author and
drags him into court—that in my opinion is no longer a laughing matter. The interdiction was issued by a judge who
had had only an hour to read the book.
The police went into each and every bookstore to confiscate each and
every copy. In the last two weeks I have
received fourteen summonses. But not
once in the first six weeks did the judge deem it necessary to summon me. What was that all about? They’ve said it’s a private matter. But if you’re wise to the thousand ways in
which a sentence can be interpreted, in my opinion it was the government that
initiated this suit against me.
JEAN-LOUIS DE
RAMBURES: Despite this your novel is on the bestseller list for the first time.
THOMAS BERNHARD:
Yes, but for a totally unwholesome reason.
People have been buying my book because they’ve expected it to contain
scandalous revelations, whereas it’s actually just about a handful of harmless
nobodies that those sorts of readers have probably never even heard of. I can just picture them yawning with boredom
by the third page. And at that point
I’ve lost those readers for ever. I’m no
scandalmonger. My expectations of my
readers are of an entirely different order.
At most three or four thousand people are genuinely interested in my
work; at best seventeen thousand people are capable of following me.
JEAN-LOUIS DE
RAMBURES: Did you think as you were writing the book that the originals of your
characters might recognize themselves?
THOMAS BERNHARD:
The whole point of a book is to make the people in it recognizable to
themselves. I write in order to
provoke. Where else would the joy in
writing come from? Of course, if you’re
trying to avoid all contact with the judicial system and the masses, it’s
better to write poems, which nobody will understand, not even their author
himself, and then you can content yourself with attaining the highest degree of
musicality in your writing. That also
allows you to keep winning literary prizes.
But I have no interest in that; I’m a writer who calls a spade a spade.
JEAN-LOUIS DE
RAMBURES: You have apparently declared war on the entirety of creation.
THOMAS BERNHARD:
Not at all. To the contrary, I never
cease to marvel at the world just as it is.
The other day as I was about to go to sleep, I found on my bed a
butterfly that was half frozen to death from the cold. Throughout the night I tried not to move so I
wouldn’t injure it. Even my childhood
was wonderful. But even the most
beautiful thing in the world becomes hideous as soon as you start reflecting on
it. Compare all the promises that are
hidden in a ten-year-old child with what that child turns into twenty-five
years later. The world consists of and
subsists on nothing but defeats.
JEAN-LOUIS DE
RAMBURES: Do you hope to contribute to changing
the world through your work?
THOMAS
BERNHARD: For God’s sake, if the world changed I’d obviously be condemned to
silence! Rage and despair are the only
things that keep me going, and I’m lucky enough to have found the ideal spot
for both of them in Austria. Are
you aware of many countries in which a cabinet minister can take extra-special
pains to salute the “homecoming” of an SS officer responsible for the deaths of
thousands of people? It all makes sense
if you know that this minister hails from Salzburg and that his entire
family—with whom, by the way, I’m very well acquainted—has been made up of
musicians for generations. On the first
floor somebody’s playing the violin. In
the basement somebody’s turning on the gas-taps. A typically Austrian mélange of music and
Nazism. Yes, indeed: if this country
should ever change, there would be nothing left for me to do but emigrate.
THE END
[1] Editors' note. First published in French
translation: Le Monde, Paris, February 2, 1985. First published in
German in a retranslation by Monika Natter (prefatory note [inexplicably
omitted from my source text (DR)]) and
Isabelle Pignal, in Von einer Katastrophe in die andere [From
One Catastrophe to the Next], edited by Sepp Dressinger, (Weitra, 1992),
pp. 119-123. (The present translation, like
that of the earlier Le Monde
interview, is a re-retranslation from the German. [DR].)
Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2014 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur. Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons. Herausgegeben von Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth. Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles. Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](
No comments:
Post a Comment