Confessions of an
Obsessive
Whatever story
Thomas Bernhard happens to be telling, it is always the case history of an
illness. He is one of those writers
whose persistent and obdurate attention is principally devoted to those who are
imperiled or already lost, to people who are being sucked by the undertow
towards the abyss. His tableaux are
populated by psychopaths and neurotics, criminals and madmen, murderers,
suicides, and the dying. The personnel
of this epic are gloomy and menacing; the world delineated here is uncanny and
depressing.
But unequivocal
though Bernhard’s predilection for the macabre and the suffocating is, the
motives by which he is actuated are apparently legitimate. He is fascinated by the darkest regions of
our existence precisely because it is there—and only there—that he hopes to
find the answer to the most decisive questions.
Certainly, he wallows in morbidity and also frequently in repulsiveness,
but the pathology is plainly intended to render the human condition visible and
the abnormality to point up the dubiousness of the things we are accustomed to
regard as normal.
So Bernhard
shines his flashlight into the suburbs of existence in order to determine its
focal points, in order to grope his way towards them or at least furnish a hint
as to their location. He knows that in
literature it is often the eccentric detour that leads to the center. In other words: he puts extremity on display not
despite but because of its exemplary significance.
Moreover, his
prose works evince a striking authenticity that we cannot help missing in many
of our younger writers and that is unattainable by mere craftsmanship. Bernhard is a storyteller who has no need to
go looking for his subjects. We are
dealing here rather with a subject that has found someone to tell a story about
it. His works are diaries of a man
bereaved, confessions of an obsessive—which, however, is by no means to say
that they contain anything in the way of autobiographical elements.
At the same time
each of these prose texts owes its persuasiveness to its description of
background detail, which enfolds the text’s characters and objects just as
comprehensively as the localities and landscapes implicated in its storyline. Whether he wants to
be one or not, Bernhard is an Austrian national bard, one who is admittedly
impelled to write not so much by love or introspective musings over life in the
Tyrol or the Styrian valleys as by rage and disgust, if not outright loathing. Bernhard’s aggressive relationship with his native
environment is the sole and blatantly visible incubator of the extraordinary
one-sidedness that determines his subject-matter and perspective as well as his
choice of motifs and characters, of colors and tones, of literary devices. But in literature as a rule one-sidedness is
ascribable to one of two things: it can be rooted in a laudable impetus or it
may have its origin in a kind of narrow-mindedness. I believe that both ascriptions hold true for
Thomas Bernhard: his one-sidedness strikes one as audacious one moment and
simplistic the next. It facilitates the severity and the idiosyncrasy of
this epic, but unfortunately also sets narrow limits to it and often occasions
monotony. Thus, the very thing that
makes his prose so valuable threatens to vitiate it at the same time. His new book, the novel, Verstörung [Gargoyles], evinces this
with almost appalling clarity.
The
first-person narrator, a student who has come home for a brief stay, is taken
along by his father, a country doctor in Styria, on a daylong series of house
calls, because, he says, the young man “must become acquainted with human
beings.” His notes on the individual
patients and the people connected with them, on their histories and destinies,
fill the first part of the book. Bernhard
inaugurates the round-dance with a dying innkeeper’s wife who has been mortally
wounded by a dipsomaniac for no conceivable reason; this episode is followed by
portraits of various invalids who are almost all afflicted with horrifying
physical or mental infirmities and are for the most part slowly wasting away;
at the end we are presented with a depiction of an insane cripple which hardly
scrimps with the unsettling details.
This
is all recounted in an impassive style that deftly and coherently employs
indirect discourse, a style from which Bernhard manages to wrest a considerable
amount of power: for from this pointedly referential, often depositionally formal mode of writing it is easy to gather that although the young commentator
would like to contemplate the sufferers dispassionately, for all his cool
objectivity he feels touched by their misfortune. Many
passages are signalized by a peculiarity that is a hallmark of good prose: in
them distance and proximity are discernable at one and the same time.
So Bernhard’s
epic art stands the test once again in several of the juxtaposed miniatures of
the first part of the book, but only in those in which he contents himself with
the depiction of the sensuously perceptible world and also places his trust in
sober, reportorial observation. When he
tries to seek out the mental causes of the crimes and illnesses he describes,
he comes up with motives that seem superficial and formulaic and make it evident
that while psychology is undoubtedly his passion it is not necessarily his
forte.
When on the
other hand he lets the facts and concrete situations speak for themselves, the
characters and moods are immediately present, and local color and a sense of
setting emerge almost spontaneously. It
then becomes apparent that he is capable of transforming inconspicuous details
and trivial objects into discrete but telling indicators of a situation, and in
particular of the hopelessness of that situation. The succinct description of the bedroom of an
irremediably doomed widow betrays more insight into her life than do all the exegetic
remarks that are likewise served up to us.
Nevertheless,
this first part of Verstörung leaves behind a decidedly ambivalent impression. At first blush it seems to me that such a colossal
accumulation of dismal, perverse, and gruesome elements quite simply undermines
the novel’s economy: anything displayed in such abundance fails to achieve its
intended effect and occasions fatigue rather than shock.
In addition, Bernhard proceeds from a programmatic thesis that condemns
his book to failure from the outset. The
country doctor who elucidates the world for our narrator states, “In point of
fact there are more brutes and criminals in the country than in the city. In the country brutality, like violence, is
the foundation […] The crimes committed in the city, the urban crimes, are nothing compared with the crimes committed in the
country […].”
To this opinion, which is stated in the novel’s first few pages, Bernhard
has subordinated the whole of Verstörung,
with a characteristic—and in this case disastrous—result: the individual
tableaux, sketches, and genre paintings are always intended
to reinforce and exemplify these theses [(sic) on the plural number (DR)]. Thus Bernhard degrades his narrative art: he
consigns it to a merely illustrative function.
Consequently, in certain stretches the book reads like a blood-and-soil
novel turned on its head. The genre
whereby the praises of rootedness in the soil were formerly sung must now be
made to promulgate examples of rootlessness.
Naturally I
wouldn’t dream of getting into an argument about the inhabitants of rural
Styria with the author of Verstörung. He knows his way around there; I don’t. Moreover,
he never gives one cause to doubt that his survey is sufficiently broad or
deep. But as a rule radical anti-idylls
bear an embarrassingly close resemblance to idylls–namely in being at an
equally far remove from reality. And a
social critic’s thesis-driven novel of ideas, even one that tries to elevate
the world it depicts to the level of an allegory of our epoch, strikes me as an
extremely dated literary anachronism.
But Verstörung has also got a second
part. The doctor and his son pay a visit
to a certain Prince Saurau, who at the moment of their arrival is immersed in a
conversation with himself, which he continues carrying on despite their
presence. His monologue, which is well
over a hundred pages long, is registered by the narrator without commentary or
anything else but occasional stage direction-like remarks.
This prince, who possesses enormous amounts
of land, has plays staged in his “summer house,” is suffering from a mental
illness, and is in the habit of carrying on “masochistic discussions” with
himself for hours on end in a locked and bolted room; he can hardly avoid being
stigmatized as conventional: such figures have been awfully popular since at
least the days of Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Bernhard’s prince tells anecdotes about his
mysterious and unabashedly sadistic son and about three men who have applied to
him for a job; he reports on catastrophes that have already happened and on
others that he expects to happen; he meditates on the State and on suicide. Everything is sited—so he proclaims—“in a
homogeneous, dim-witted agony.” He says
that in his entire life he has only ever “beheld invalids and crazy people,” in
incidental connection with which it is striking that he expresses views that
are quite similar to those of the by no means-insane doctor in the first part
of the book. From the very beginning,
the prince declares, he has dreaded “being compelled to be suffocated by the
stench of the world.” He says that the
“mass-political madness of the masses” (?) is not so ridiculous “that in the
future it would still not be able to destroy everything.” Or: “The common people are stupid and smell
bad; this has always been true.” From
the doctor we heard: “The poor are doubly brutal, vulgar, and criminal.”
To be sure, the author of Verstörung has sound reasons for
giving plenty of space to the prince’s pathological hatred and to his contempt
of humankind. The only problem is that
he lacks the eloquence required for fulfilling such a function. The almost fanatical authorial obsessiveness
that is so often in evidence in Bernhard’s prose is completely ineffectual
here, where the object is to substantiate the confessions of an obsessive. The few illuminating formulations and
intriguing insights contained in this endless monologue are regrettably drowned
in an ocean of platitudes and in a welter of chit-chat that makes extraordinary
and unconscionable demands on the reader’s patience.
At least Bernhard has been ambitiously keen
to elucidate the mental condition of a madman with the help of his own expressions. But even this attempt proves unproductive, to
put it mildly. “The interior of my head
is literally an unimaginable wasteland”; “the noise of my head prevents me from
doing anything”; “In my head there is a snarl of lines”; “Repose is spreading
in my head and is going to smash it to pieces”—these assertions are simply not
up to snuff. Persistently iterated
messages like these reveal nothing but that the realization of the intended
effect exceeds Bernhard’s present powers.
It would be unfair to suspect the author to
whom we owe the novel Frost and a few extremely remarkable novellas of
wishing to relieve himself of aesthetic and intellectual responsibility with
this monologue. But this foray into the
domain of the uncontrollable has caused the man who time and again has depicted
people on the edge of the abyss to stumble into the proximity of a perilous
abyss in his own right.
Art must “go too far in order to learn how
far it is allowed to go.” Although these
memorable words, first spoken by Heinrich Böll in his Wuppertal speech, originally
referred only to artistic freedom, they hold good for the validity of art in a
much more general sense. In his Verstörung Thomas Bernhard has gone too
far. Probably he had to. Will he be capable of drawing the right
conclusions from having done so?
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. 93-99. According to the bibliography in this book, Reich-Ranicki’s review was originally published in Die Zeit on April 28, 1967.