A Translation of "Konfessionen eines Besessenen," a Review of Thomas Bernhard's Verstörung by Marcel Reich-Ranicki

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. 

A Translation of Anneliese Botond's "Schlußbemerkung" to Über Thomas Bernhard

A Final Observation

In 1963 Thomas Bernhard published his first book of prose.  In this novel, Frost, he drafted the blueprint of a system (of a self-contained world) that remained in place in his succeeding books.  With a minimum of exponentials—a spoken discourse [Rede] and an ear (witness) that assimilates it—a maximum field of play (field of tension) is opened up for an unlimitedly monotonous, magnificent, ludicrous, terrifying, fascinating drama, a drama that is always the same and that is of such a universal nature that not merely a single situation, a single place, but even a single sentence (every sentence) a single word (every word) should be capable of expressing it.  Every premiere performance of this drama is a repeat performance; every repeat performance a premiere performance.  This drama is always, perhaps even in its very history of repeat performances, a trial of destruction.  A trial whose origin is conceivably nature.  Nature or the incestuous coupling of antitheses.  Literary criticism, that court of first instance in the reception of contemporary literature, has been confronted with the output of this author for seven years.  Very early on it was torn between two mutually contradictory positions, attraction and irritation.  Approval and disapproval were not without pathos.  Criticism was working with literary criteria and existential categories.  It applied the usual catchphrases touching on thematic concerns and characterizing the author’s temperament. It recognized and accepted that his development consisted in repetition.  The critics all agreed, in various shades of approval, that whether this person was truly modern or not, he certainly could write.

The parallels that were allusively drawn between Bernhard and other writers of the past or present afforded some degree of illumination.  The sole attempt I know of to place his books under a conceptual umbrella—that of the anti-Great Austrian Novel—has misfired.  At a relatively late point, considering that literary criticism has had sociological, psychoanalytical, and linguistic methods and perspectives at its disposal for quite some time, people began to ask whether these books could be come to terms with at all by means of purely literary criteria. 

Thomas Bernhard does not make public pronouncements about his books.  He does not engage in any literary debates.  If the soundless interchange between the author writing his books and the critics writing about his books counts as a dialogue, the dialogue in this case has pursued a course not unlike that pursued by the conversation about the flood and the theatrical performance in Gargoyles.  Doubtlessly literary criticism has a share in this complex process—an enigmatic one even on the level of clear-cut facts—that is termed an author’s “effect.”  Thomas Bernhard was a well-known author before he had a sizable readership and before the attraction or irritation emanating from his books could be substantiated.

It is evident that the younger generation has recently begun to take a more attentive interest in this author, to auscultate his books.  At any rate, thanks partly to the university seminar room, the past year has seen the almost simultaneous and mutually independent emergence of a series of critical works that have provided new starting points and outcomes.  Books like those of Thomas Bernhard, books whose austere architecture is hidden under a semblance of anarchy, are highly susceptible to being misunderstood.  With the utmost lucidity, the individual investigations highlight the systematic character and almost vertiginous consistency of a mode of thought that proceeds integratively rather than discursively [diskursiv].  When read out of context, words like “theater,” “forest,” “dispersal” suddenly become relevant to the whole.  In Bernhard the detail may in fact afford the shortest path to the center.

Thomas Bernhard’s body of work is not yet complete; equally incomplete is the controversy in which he is involved.  The texts collected in this volume delineate a study of this incomplete corpus.  The trial is not yet over.  

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. 139-141. 

A Translation of "Als ich »Verstörung« von Thomas Bernhard las" by Peter Handke

When I Read Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

Upon my arrival at the central railway station in Hanover, I rang up the acquaintance whom I intended to go see.  There was no answer.  But because I intended to stay overnight in Hanover no matter what, I decided to wait and ring the same number again later.  Then I bought a newspaper and went upstairs with my light cargo of luggage into the Hanover station’s café.  I was very tired, but the book refused to let me rest.

The doctor’s round of house calls, on which he had been accompanied by his son, was already behind me; only the visit to the Prince of Saurau at the Hochgobernitz castle still lay ahead.  Father and son were now making the perilous ascent to the fortress from the gorge down below, where they had just visited the mill.  It was not advisable to look around.  What they had seen before had been foretokens: a killer, still unapprehended, was roaming around the countryside; in all the houses the two of them had visited so far, the wretchedly moribund were lying or running rampant; in a building next door to the mill dead birds were strung up in rows; the miller’s dog, hazardous in its derangement [Verstörung], dashed to and fro amongst the putrescent mill-workers; every living creature seemed abjectly subject to its own nervous system.  In the eyes of the narrator, a young man studying mining in Leoben, Leoben was gradually coming to seem like a world apart as he accompanied his father; everything was growing further and further apart from everything else; an invalid, shortly before expiring, drew a sketch entitled “Death by Asphyxiation while Walking.”  All the characters were confessing something: the father as good as admitted it.

Shortly before the two of them reached the prince’s castle, they paid one more house call, to a one-story house[1] that was the dwelling of the insane young Krainer, who had been born with a head that was too narrow and who owing to the subsequent physical changes had completely lost the ability to speak.  In earlier life he composed harmonious music; now, according to his sister, his music was excruciating.

When the two of them arrived at the castle, they were afforded a view extending for literally hundreds of kilometers.

They sighted the prince on the outer wall of the castle; they caught up with him on the inner one.  He greeted them without halting.  They tagged along with him.  In their company he immediately resumed the monologue that he had been delivering all day long.  At every instant the prince found it natural to believe that the world was falling apart.  He always talked about himself as if he was talking about the entire world and about the entire world as if he was talking about himself.  The father had already told the student that the prince was totally mad; even the miller’s apprentices down below said that the prince said the most incredible things.

The prince talked as if his life depended on it.  He repeated many of the same phrases over and over again, varying nothing but their word-order.  To his interminable generalizations he suddenly appended the phrase: these colossal walls!  The prince did not say that he was in despair; he said: these colossal walls!  For the prince, all names, even place names, were names of despair.  By midday he had received visits from three applicants for the steward’s position; he had managed to torture one of the applicants repeatedly with words.  In conversing with the applicant he ascertained which words the man could not bear to hear and repeatedly used these words; for instance, mole, linen, miner, reformatory.  The applicant reacted to these words as if he were being tortured.

No matter which words the prince addressed to his listeners, they were words of sensitivity, words of torture.  I read on as the prince talked for hours to his visitors about the applicants, in the course of doing which he was incessantly vaulting from the picturesque, concrete particulars of these people—one of them lived in a landscape that was so gloomy that it actually precluded suicide, and his clothes were so neat that they must have hung on a nail and not in a closet—to certain incessantly iterated unpicturable abstractions that complementarily imparted picturesqueness to the prince.   The prince was possessed by speech; he spoke, he said, out of a fear of suffocation.

He often spoke in commonplaces, but this very accumulation of commonplaces highlighted his sharp-eared faculty of occultation.  He did not trouble himself about any sort of logic of grammatical structures; he could say that monologues were just as pointless as conversations, albeit far less pointless; he could say: he is completely rational but bereft of the slightest trace of rationality; he could utter a sentence like “Moser said, but he did not dare to say…”—I read on as the prince incessantly inverted his own sentence structures, as while speaking he made possible the dissolution of all concepts. 

Whatever he referred to in the external world was merely a sign of his inner world.  The prince spoke in signs rather than in metaphors.  He did not liken the flood of which he spoke to his inner self; rather the flood, which had actually taken place several weeks earlier, was his inner self, and the summer house in which his dead father had once been laid out and that used to be used for theatrical performances was what was happening inside his head, and even when the prince spoke of the catastrophic postal service in the Bundau countryside, he really meant that his own inner life was catastrophic.   The names of things and processes, I recognized, were merely signs for his conditions.  The place names Köflach and Stiwoll stood for derangedness and despair.  Agriculture, the prince said for example, is an error: he spoke as if agriculture were a way of life.

Every human being has his Ache, said the prince with all the banality of the deranged, the insane, and by now the Ache, which actually flows through the gorge, has simply become another word for lunacy.  As I continued reading I recalled that earlier on another invalid had told the doctor that only his visit had hindered him from drawing the “Hauenstein consequences”: the invalid resided in the village of Hauenstein; he used the word Hauenstein in place of the word suicide.  The prince spoke with a grammatical lunacy; he coined new words as schizophrenics are wont to do, and he interpolated mannered foreign words into his discourse: his use of these words, like his use of constantly shifting phrases referring to human beings, was a sign of his derangement.  The prince thought in in terms of opportunities for suicide.  He was not interested in who would be the first person on the moon but in who would be the first to travel through the earth.  At the castle the natural laws of Saurauean thought reigned supreme.

It is always your own story that is being told to you, said the prince.  He found nothing in the world bearable.  If he happened to find something nearly bearable, he said it was the least unbearable thing, or he said, reading is still the most bearable of all horrors.  Whenever he reported on a normal condition, he had to presuppose worseness, which was the normal condition for him.  When his mind was at peace for a change, the prince said he had not a trace of debility.  His discourse was a hospital report.

Having begun by walking on the inner wall of the castle, the three of them continued their circular stroll on the outer wall.  They walked ever faster, and it grew darker.  The prince continued talking in order to drown out the noises in his head.  He underlined, as it were, every word; he employed every word, not only adjectives, in the superlative degree: his son, who was slated to acquire the castle after his death, was going to let EVERYTHING ROT AWAY COMPLETELY.  Like many madmen the prince often likened events to the events in a stage play.  He veered from one idiom to another, from a philosophical idiom to, for example, a legalistic one: all deeds are prosecutable deeds, he said.  Then this man who now read nothing but newspapers, admittedly only old ones, suddenly began employing journalistic expressions: he said that his dead father had been an “unfortunate man” who had been found with a bullet in his head.  The prince spoke in foreign idioms that at the same time, when taken as a whole, were his own idiom: even foreign speaking conditions were signs of derangement.

On the walls of the castle he was still best able to bear his solitude.

Now and then he would very hurriedly and absently ask the doctor: have you brought my pills with you?  Is it very taxing for you to come up here?  What does your son do?  And then, without waiting for an answer, he would launch back into his conversation with himself.

The son listened.

The prince wanted to lead everybody through his brain until “it makes him ill.”

Afterwards he talked about a conversation that he had had with the doctor not long before: the prince had wanted to talk about the flood, but the doctor had wanted to talk about the recently performed play: “‘The more intensively I talked about the flood the further your father was distracted.  Namely,’ said Prince Saurau, ‘by the play […] the moment I began to talk about the flood, your father began to talk about the play.  Your father was more and more preoccupied with the play the more I was preoccupied with the flood.  I talked about the flood and he talked about the play.’  My father said, ‘the whole time I thought you had to talk about the flood, but I talked about the play.’  The prince said: ‘I talked about the flood and not about the play, because what else was I supposed to talk about if not the flood! […] And your father had thought about nothing other than the play.  Just as I was more and more preoccupied with the flood, your father was more and more preoccupied with the play, and the degree to which I, as I spoke of the flood, was irritated by your father, who was speaking about the play, was the same degree to which your father was irritated by me, who was speaking only about the flood. […] Over and over again I heard your father breaking into my endless floody ramblings with his commentary on the play.  That was what was so incredibly conspicuous about it,’ said the prince, ‘namely, the fact that as time passed I talked about nothing other than the flood, and your father about nothing other than the play.  And your father spoke ever more loudly about the play and I spoke ever more loudly about the flood.  Loudly, equally loudly, simultaneously loudly, did the two of us speak; your father about a monstrous play, I about a monstrous flood.  And then,’ said the prince, ‘there ensued a period when we both talked exclusively about the flood, and thereafter one in which the play was the exclusive topic.  But all the while we were talking about the play, I thought about nothing but the flood, and all the while we were talking about the flood, your father thought about nothing but the play […] When we were talking about the flood, I thought that your father wanted to talk about the play; when we were talking about the play, I wanted to talk about nothing but the flood […] When we were talking about the play, said my father, you were constantly exclaiming high costs!; whereas I, while we were talking about the flood, incessantly said words like the word gridiron, mimicry, exaltation, marionettism.  But basically,’ said the prince, ‘on that day no matter what we spoke about we were speaking about the flood.’

Meanwhile I had left the café and rung the number once again.  Again there was no answer.  When he spoke, said the prince, he could at least be misunderstood.  It had gotten completely dark.  I went to a park near the Hanover Opera and continued reading by the light of the street lamps.  The prince could not take them into the house because everything was in disarray.  By then I had gotten up and had continued reading in a pub, to the strains of a strolling violinist.  I had rung the number in vain a few more times.  I had had something to drink and had continued reading.   The prince had been constructed in complete defiance of reality.  He was freezing to death from within.  I read and read and read...

THE END

[1]  Although I have carried over a few words and phrases (like this "one-story house") from Richard and Clara Winston's English version, most of the translations of Handke's quotations from the novel, including the lengthy one in the penultimate paragraph, are my own.  I am afraid I have yet to work out anything like a consistent policy regarding passages from texts with well-established translations. 

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. 100-106.  According to the bibliography in this book, Handke’s essay was originally published in Zürcher Woche  on December 7, 1967.