An Allegory
of the Great Coldness
A medical student, who is completing his clinical traineeship in a
provincial hospital—in Austria such an internship is known as a Famulatur—is
ordered by the clinic’s assistant physician to observe his brother, the
“painter” Strauch, who lives alone, and evidently in a state of mental decay,
in a godforsaken village in the mountains.
He is expected to make a report of his observations.
This report, to wit, the student’s daily jottings, constitutes the
subject-matter of Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost. I regard this book as one of the strongest
first attempts of a new talent, as one of the most haunting and disturbing
prose works produced by an author of the younger generation since Peter
Weiss. When I think back on my reading
of this book, I hear a remarkable din, like the sound of the crust of snow on
the front of my house shattering and melting away owing to a nocturnal
incursion of Föhn air through the eaves-gutter.
This uncanny, menacing, thrilling, blustering din, which intimates the
disaggregation of all human connections to the point when one last solitary
remnant of the soul will have been laid bare, plays out in the background of a
lucid, disciplined, richly imagistic prose idiom—it is not engendered by the
words themselves; rather, the shocked and horror-stricken reader overhears it
in their interstices. Here something
that we neither know nor are acquainted with is called to mind, something that
can scarcely be compared to anything lived or experienced, or even to any
literary precedents and that opens up new perspectives on that human “abyss” of
which Büchner speaks.[1] For this is no “psychological” novel, even if
the various phases of disaggregation and isolation, or, as one should rather
term it, frostification, of Strauch the painter are linguistically rendered
with the exactitude of a clinical report.
It is much more like a legend or a ghastly fairy tale, like some
terrifying history of a mythological martyrdom, or in the words of the author
and his subject, like a “passage through a millennium not yet inhabitable by
humanity”—like an “expedition into primeval forests of solitude.”[2]
At this point I am again compelled to use a
comparison drawn from acoustics: in this book loneliness drones, it
drones and within it solitude reverberates like the footfalls of a man who, as
the last, forgotten human being, has been confined to some cavernous vault like
St. Peter’s Basilica when it is shut up at night. At the same time the book is not a narrative
about there being “no exit” in the trivial buzz-wordish sense--because in it an
exit is still very much being sought, an exit that inheres in the realm of
human possibilities, and at the same time, despairingly and yet not hopelessly,
the book is searching for an entrance that could lead to a deeper
interiority and thereby to a discernable wellspring. The sequence of events in this book rather
reminds me of the by no means merely recreational or wayward work of the
speleologist, who embarks on his investigations to the end of discovering not
only the courses of subterranean bodies of water but also unfamiliar insights
and new evidences of the origin of humankind.
In the unbridled, idiosyncratic monologues of the
painter Strauch, who has long since stopped painting and “made heating fuel” of
his paintings, who “goads” the young man, the catalyst of his verbal
discharges, “onwards with a stick,” like a mule whom he would like to encumber,
who “spews out his sentences like old people’s spittle” on endless walks—“flights,”
the narrator calls them—through ravines encrusted in frost or macerated by
fresh snow—out of these cascades of words issuing from an ever self-referential
imagination, out of these abstruse (but never “absurd”!) scraps of ideas and
simultaneous visions of a hypersensitive brain that has so to speak been bereft
of its protective cranial integument—out of all this and in all this there
emerges, in a scarcely comprehensible manner, a secret and secretive, but for
all that absolutely pellucid sense (one could speak of the sense of non-sense
or of the clear-sightedness of blindness); it emanates from a certain
terrifyingly compelling, appallingly fascinating quality, from the spellbinding
power of madness, a madness that in a different, unexplored dimension
nevertheless “has method in it”; and in a plastic medium that is constantly
outgrowing its defining contours this painter Strauch, this “poor fool,” this
“idiot,” preserves a peculiar, unmistakable creatureliness, with which he
overawes the young doctor, the implanted spy, the detached observer and—without
this ever being explicitly stated or underscored by means of embarrassing
pointers—makes him into a different human being, or even into a human being
full stop.
Anybody who is acquainted with the landscape of the upper
Salzach--acquainted with the Pongau, with its little industrial towns, railway
yards, that seem to have been thrown together by accident amid the eternal
mistiness of their waterfalls, acquainted with its gloomy, gorge-like, incision-ridden
lateral valleys--knows with what oppressive realism the author has captured its
distinctive hues and climate. In an
overheated light railway train, the Famulant, together with a crew of
snow-shovellers, makes his ascent to the little village of Weng. “It was as warm as the inside of the belly of
a cow.” But the frost clings to the
villagers’ damp clothing. “Weng is the
bleakest place I have ever seen.” One of
those inbred settlements in which you cannot cross the street without running
into a village idiot who gapes at you and drools as he claws at you with his
fingers.
The fictional town of Weng--this is the scenic backdrop of a limbo
that, as in a nightmare, one cannot find one’s way out of, duped as one is by
darkened blind alleys and uncertain lights, menaced as one is on all sides by
lemures lying in wait. “Extremely short
grown men and women whom one may unhesitatingly term cretins...on average no
taller than a meter forty centimeters...everybody here has drunken children’s
voices sharpened up to high C, voices that that they pierce you with as you
pass by them.” Everywhere one hears
yapping, howling dogs, but one never sees them, except sometimes as cadavers
that the landlady chops to bits for use in her unspeakable cookery. “Weng is situated at a very great height, and
yet also entirely at a very great depth, as if inside a gorge.” In Schwarzach-St. Veit the river overlooked
by the student’s window rushed noisily past; here it is “unbearably still and silent.” Here the painter Strauch, whom his brother
the surgeon has not seen in twenty years and scarcely wishes to see, has hidden
himself away in his private labyrinth; here he undertakes his endless, hurried
walks, which give one the feeling that they are always describing the same
circle.
It is a final stop, an oubliette in which a man has incarcerated
himself and thrown away its key through its grilled window: this out of a dread
of what might happen to him in the outside world. Nevertheless, he claws at every ray of light
that slips through the grill, as if he might take hold of it and thereby build
another world, another freedom, a bridge to redemption leading out of an
existence in which he has nothing to look forward to but going under,
perishing, freezing to death.
He resides there in the bare, creaky sitting room of a third-rate inn
(I cannot recall whether in the book it is ever stated that the floor of the
sitting room creaks, but the author’s narrative artistry is so accomplished
that I hear the floorboards creak when the headache-stricken painter sleeplessly
paces up and down in his woolen socks).
So accomplished that everything, even abstraction, even the intertwined
filaments of thought, the intellectual breakdown of a schismatic spirit, takes
on a sensuous quality, an acoustic, or even more often an optical quality (for
it is no accident that this man Strauch is a painter, an “artistic painter”) in
one’s imagination; I see the dead tree stumps on the path to the high forest
and their potpourri of roots, the unfinished waterworks and the—perhaps only
imaginary—tumor on painter’s foot like rudiments of his mental world, of his
“word-transfusions,” made visible; I smell the acidic haze of the tavern and
the landlady’s bedclothes, as if I were capable of converting the painter’s
categories of perception, cellular revulsion, physiological horror, and
spiritual ecstasies of color, into mathematical figures.
This inn is the gathering place of the middle-cum-upper stratum of
this inferior town, which despite its inferiority has already been overrun by
the industrial present. The truck
drivers, the foremen, the engineer, the knacker, the police deputy—who among
many others share the landlady’s bed.
Meanwhile the landlord, a convicted homicide, is expiring in a penal
institution. The inn is the nerve center
of a musty little world of musty sexuality, a world dominated by the brutal
butcher’s mentality of the harlotic landlady, who lashes out with the fireplace
poker at her pregnant daughter. Sexuality
untouched by the magic wand of Eros permeates this hyper-neglected and
therefore unconcealed strain of humanity like an uncouth, compulsive,
lackadaisical instinctual drive: “All of them live a life of sexuality, a
non-life,” the painter at one point says of his “pre-human inhabitable”
environment. “Here you can make pure
observations that do an about-face in the cold, out of resentment of
themselves.”
But the reporter, the narrator, does not get bogged down in the
details of such observations; he does not make a flashy spectacle of the naked
abominableness. When at one point the
landlady and the knacker, having just slept together, are sitting in the empty
barroom and eating sausage-slices and drinking beer, one feels a gagging
sensation in one’s throat, a kind of shame that could never be evoked by the
most naked description of shamelessness.
“I smell human flesh,” says the gluttonous giant in the fairy tale.
Everything that happens in the town acquires such spellbindingly
surreal, fairy tale-like significance.
The death of a woodcutter who shortly before he fell under his sled was asking
the painter what time it was. The
mischievous “showman” who exhibits crippled animals and children for money. The gruesomeness and severity of provincial
life, undiluted by any nature-idylls, becomes an allegory of “the great coldness.” Two victims of a fall in the mountains. The “cattle-rustling riffraff.” The poorhouse. The unheatable stone house of the village
priest. The burning to the ground of a
farmstead, the death of a farmer’s wife, a funeral, conversations about the
construction of the power station. All
these things are woven around the destiny of Strauch the painter; they weave
around him like a spider’s filament constricting a trapped fly: escape to the
outside world is impossible.
He gets all the more wildly tangled up in his own cocoon. He retains no connection to the world, to his
former life. He has been written off. Even his brother, the surgeon who has a
stranger observe him, does so really more in the hope of breaking free of him
than of getting closer to him. The
observer’s plea of “Answer your brother!” dies away unheeded. He no longer “receives any letters. Not a single one.” But he repeatedly makes the same beeline for
the railway station to buy newspapers—one final childlike apparent attempt at
communication.. “Politics is of course
really the only interesting phenomenon in human history.” One senses that he is referring to something
quite different, something on the far side of ideology. He says that communism is on its way—he says
it without offering any pros or cons, the way one would say “Another cold
winter is on its way”; communism is “the provisional future of all mankind
throughout the world.” And yet: “What
could this yapping (of the invisible dogs) still portend, when we already know
everything, when we are already inured to the fact that we are living through the
actual end of the world.”
In his reminiscences he tends to generalize; they are no longer of a
personal nature. He was once a
substitute teacher; he speaks of “the life of a substitute teacher” as if he
were speaking of the life of a hitherto undiscovered species of stink bug. “All childhoods are the same. It is just that one of them appears in a
humdrum, the next in a gentle, and the third in a diabolical light.” There is nothing painterly about his
knowledge of life; it appears to him “in the colors of a dream.” But also in mighty visions. The black, wintry tree-trunks metamorphose
into the figures of judges, “mighty judicial personalities!” “They pass grand sentences! Those colossal sentences!” He descries colossality, grandeur, not only
in the condition of his own potency but also in the precondition of his own
helplessness. He sees the “great ideas”
being charged as petty embezzlers; he sees them being arrested, imprisoned; they
have no one to plead for them, “not even a single lousy public defender! Listen up!
Behold! The mind has basically
always given a wide berth to great ideas!”
He has held on to
only one book—“his Pascal.” It is
unknown whether he still reads it. At
one point the knacker comes upon him in the glacial cold—“crouching on his
tree-stump.” He drags him back to the
village.
He may have been
crouching in such a fashion when he subsequently went missing. “Because of the prevailing snowstorms the
search for the missing man, in which members of the police force also took part,
had to be called off,” reads a notice in the Demokratisches Volksblatt.
Thereafter he does not reappear, and with this announcement the
narrator, too, disappears from our field of vision. We learn nothing of how he finishes his
assignment, of how he subsequently lives.
But the author
gives us a hint in the first pages of the book.
He speaks of the difficulty of “exploring the unexplorable”—namely the
extracorporeal. “And it is quite
possible,” he continues, “that the extracorporeal, by which I do not mean the
soul, that this thing that is apart from the body without being the soul, the
question of whose existence or non-existence I obviously cannot answer,
although I expect that the soul does exist, that this millennially ancient
supposition is a millennially ancient truth; it is entirely possible that the
extracorporeal, namely that which is absent from our cells, exists, that
everything owes its existence to it and not vice-versa, and that this existence
is not merely a debt of one to the other.”
After reading
this book one feels that one has set off along a trail that is as old as
humanity itself and at the same time as new, and as vectored to unexplored regions,
as travel into outer space.
THE END
Translation unauthorized but Copyright
©2015 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Über Thomas
Bernhard. Herausgegeben von Anneliese
Botond [On Thomas Bernhard. Edited
by Anneliese Botond] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 81-89. According to the bibliography in this book,
Zuckmayer’s essay was originally published in Die Zeit on June 21, 1963.