To judge by all the
established empirical indicators—none of which I shall or will name—the
translations of Thomas Bernhard’s plays posted at this site have not attracted
a major fraction of the interest that has accrued to their sympatric brethren
in the genres of novella and short story.
The explanation for such comparative neglect that immediately springs to
mind—namely, that Bernhard is much better known as a novelist than as a
playwright in the English-speaking world—is no less question-begging than it is
obvious. Granted: by now, most of
Bernhard’s novels have appeared on paper in English under the imprint of a
famous British or American bookseller; whereas only four or five authorized English translations of his more
than twenty plays have been published, and these only by minor indie presses or
in small-circulation journals. But why
did translators and big-name publishers give such a high hat-cum-wide berth to
the plays in the first place? They did
so, it seems to me, on account of two characteristics of the Bernhardian
quasi-narrative prose text that are perforce absent from the Bernhardian
dramatic text and two further (and complementary) characteristics of the
Bernhardian dramatic text that are perforce absent from the Bernhardian quasi-narrative prose text. So, to dispatch the first two at one go: from
the very startup days of the Anglophone Bernhard industry—i.e., 1970, with the
appearance of Gargoyles, when there were as yet no Bernhard
plays, even in German—the most beloved of Bernhard’s stylistic traits among
English-speaking readers has without a doubt been the exceptional length of his
sentences. Indeed, it has become
something of a ritualistic gesture when writing on Bernhard in English to
include the word-count of a specific sentence (usually the opening one of one
of the novels); the Anglo-Saxon Bernhardian flourishes his word-count like a
fisherman proudly displaying his latest catch alongside a yardstick. And what spectacle greets such a lover of the
bi- or tri- sesquipedalian period when he eagerly and willy-nilly turns for the
first time to a page of one of Bernhard’s plays? –why, the supremely
disheartening spectacle of a succession of glorified haikus; in other
words, short blocks of free-ish looking verse separated from each other by the
capitalized names of speaker-characters, and subdivided into unpunctuated lines
consisting of no more (and usually far less) than a dozen words apiece. So even at the purely ocular level—a level
that must on no account be made light of (consider the effect of certain visual
patterns on epileptics)—a Bernhard play is a very different affair or beast or
skin condition or what have you from a Bernhard novel or novella or short
story. In the plays, there are no
sentences at all, let alone any long ones.
As for the second of the aforementioned pair of characteristics: among
his English-speaking fans the most beloved of Benhard’s
epistemological-cum-metaphysical traits is unquestionably what W. G. Sebald
described as his (Bernhard’s, not WGS’s) “periscopic” attitude to narration, evinced
in the fact that (in the novels) nothing is ever reported as simply having
occurred, but rather is constantly being bracketed as the testimony of some
specific person, which may in turn be bracketed by its debt to the testimony of
some third person, and so on, right on up (or perhaps down) to the root-level
voice of the master-narrator (e.g., Atzbacher in Old Masters, or the
unnamed insurance salesman in The Lime Works), who is never
presented as omniscient. The cumulative
effect of all these bracketings is a Wirklichkeitsvorstellung that is less
“cinematic” or purportedly “objective” than any other in world literature—it is
the effect of being trapped not so much “in somebody’s head” as in a
phantasmagorical hall of heads (I did not invent the phrase, but I blush
to name its inventors) whose lack of engagement with the so-called outside
world is curiously invigorating. In the
plays, no such Vervremdungseffekt is even attempted. The reader is presented with a dramatis
personae, and the characters listed in it proceed to enter and exit and speak
their lines before an implied audience as Godlike, as epistemologically
privileged, as any addressed by traditional drama. Try as hard as one might, one cannot escape
the impression that one is reading about something that is supposed to be occurring
not hypothetically or conjecturally or counterfactually in some Russian doll’s
nest of disembodied heads, but “for real” among “real” corporeal people in some
“real” material place. No amount of
literary-historical genealogical puffery linking up the Bernhardian dramatic
corpus with the most illustriously subversive names and schools in the
twentieth-century theatrical avant garde (Beckett, Artaud, theater of the
absurd, actionism, &c.) will suffice to staunch the disappointment of the
Anglo-Saxon Bernhardian in face of these two differences, for he quite simply doesn’t
give a tosslet about the stinkin’ twentieth-century theatrical avant
garde; he just wants his long sentences and periscoping narrators back.
All this
notwithstanding—and this is a very big “all this notwithstanding” (but then so
are all “ATN”s by comparison with “nonetheless” and “in any case”)—I think that
the average Anglo-Saxon Bernhard fan—call him or her Joe Grüner Veltliner or Jill
Linzertorte–will or at least should find much to love in the plays. He or she will or should do so first of all
because many—if perhaps not quite most—of the episodes in the Bernhardian
novelistic corpus (or “BNC” for short) that he prizes most highly owe much of
their Punchkraft to devices that are used to similar punchpackendenes
effect in the plays; devices that are often theatrical in quite a technical
sense and always at least eminently amenable to being adapted for the stage. Consider, for example, two of the most
impressive stretches of single perspective-delimited prose in the entire
BNC–Reger’s in Old Masters and Murau’s in Extinction. What would either of them be without its
recurrent indications of the presence of a largely silent listener—Atzbacher in
Reger’s case, Gambetti in Murau’s? The
plays are full of similar pairings of garrulity and taciturnity—from He and
Katharina in Simply Complicated to Herrenstein and Richard in Elizabeth
II to the Millionairess and Mrs Kant in Immanuel Kant to Claus
Peymann and Hermann Beil in Claus Peymann Buys Himself a Pair of Trousers. Any Bernhardian who relishes the comic
tension generated in the novels by a monologist who carries on for thousands of
words at a time on his own in defiance of the availability of an interlocutor
cannot fail to be charmed by the recurrent generation of such tension in the
plays. As for theatricality in a freer
sense, the sense one invokes when speaking of “dramatic pacing” in any
context—it seems to me that the prominence of this sort of theatricality in Bernhard’s
novels has always been unfairly downplayed, probably because it enjoys an
unhappy association with the regressive fetishization of “good storytelling,”
and hence with the likes of such lowbrow comic book-gourmandizing riffraff as
post and heed spoiler warnings.
Now Bernhard’s novels seldom if ever “tell a story” in the sense prized
by such riffraff; indeed they seldom if ever have a plot in any sense
(alternatively one might say that they almost all have the same plot,
reducible to the following unspoilable sentence: “I (Mr. A reports) arrived
at Place X, and then I left it.”).
Still, it cannot be denied that the ending of a Bernhard novel seldom
even superficially gives the effect of having been occasioned solely by the
exhaustion of its author’s paper supply or typewriter ribbon; that indeed the typical
ending of a Bernhard novel manages to clinch the work’s various strands of
interest with a tidiness and jaw drop-inducingness worthy of the most
architectonically wartertight thriller or whodunit. Sometimes the ending really is properly
dramatic in the sense of involving a large number of personages like the finale
of an opera or a classical tragedy (or, indeed, a Thin Man/Agatha
Christie-era whodunit), as in Extinction; at other times it is as simple
and understated as a punch line, as in Yes—but it always appears as the
surprising yet logical culmination of everything that has preceded it. The plays conform to this same familiar
Benhardian architecture in that while nothing much seems to happen in them,
they end with a bang or a whimper that it would seem could only have come just
then as a consequence of all that has “happened” before. The collapse of Herrenstein’s balcony in Elizabeth
II, the packing off of Kant to the mental hospital in Immanuel Kant,
He’s audition (via audiotape) of the lines he spoke at the play’s beginning in Simply
Complicated, and the italicized commentary (masquerading as stage
directions) at the conclusion of Claus Peymann Buys Himself a Pair of
Trousers are all codas that echo specific contrapartal conclusions in the
novels—not just qua isolated moments, but qua summings-up; such that fruitful
pairings of specific plays with specific novels may also be made. In the crowd in Herrenstein’s drawing room we
are reminded of a similar (albeit not demographically coextensive) gathering of
the remnants of pre-republican Austrian high society at the conclusion of Extinction,
and accordingly are left to ponder the affinities and discrepancies between
Murau and Herrenstein, qua representatives, respectively, of the older (and
plainly post-moribund) agricultural aristocracy and its evidently still vital
bourgeois-industrial successor. In He’s
auto-audition we are reminded of the narrator of The Loser’s playing of
Glenn Gould’s LP of the Goldberg Variations, and immediately reflect that for
all He’s apparent narcissism, it actually behooves him to listen to tapes of
his own performances, given that, for better or worse, he is as it were his own
Glenn Gould, having carried on his métier as an actor in the absence of mentors
and rivals (“I am myself alone,” he declares, apparently quoting Henry VI’s
future Richard III). And in the stage
directions at the end of Claus Peymann, summing up the ensuing
sameoldsameold-ish night’s itinerary at the Burgtheater, we are at once
reminded of Atzbacher’s panning of the Burg’s “terrible” performance of The Broken
Pitcher, an appraisal that is both reaffirmed and undercut by what we have
learned of Peymann’s attitude to Austria and its official theater in the
preceding three scenes. (Basically we
are left wondering why a country with such a flair for the dramatic mode in
everyday life does such a piss-poor job of embodying it “within the wooden O” itself.)
But before I go, and while
the above sentence about “nothing[‘s] happening” in the plays remains (hoffentlich)
fresh in the reader’s mind, I wish to draw to his or her attention a certain
epiphenomenon of this non-happening that just might serve as the Grundrisse
of a dossier for a plausible case that the plays are in both a literary-technical
and (even more siginificantly) a metaphysico-technical sense far more
subversive than the novels. According to
the traditional specifications of all the traditionally temporally-structured
literary genres (e.g. [in principle (but i.e. in practice)], the novel, the
epic, the short story, the comedy, and the tragedy, [together, of course, with
their filmic analogues]), events must prepare and succeed each other in
conformity with three equally ineluctable sets of laws—those of nature, those
of man, and those of human psychology.
Oedipus manages to kill his own father without knowing it because the
laws of nature decree both that babies are helpless and clueless, and that
young full-grown men are physically stronger than old full-grown men. He manages to marry his own mother, who
happens to be the queen of Thebes
And yet in face of all
these revolutions in (or perhaps rather “unravelings of”) the Weltgeist,
the prevailing mode of narrative and dramaturgical organization remains, as I
said earlier, centered on the facing-off of the forces of the law of man
against the law of human psychology—on the assumption that some legal or
“cultural” prohibition can be both binding and constrictive enough to keep its
enforcers and resisters busy for a lifetime (or two hours or two hundred pages
standing in for a lifetime). (Typical specimen
of such pandemic dramaturgical anachronism: COLONEL. With almighty God as my witness, major, I
swear that braided scrotal hair will be permitted in the U. S. Army only over
my dead, naked, shaved and rather imposing mons pubis. MAJOR. Oh really, Colonel-sir? Perhaps, sir,
you’d care to vet [sic] your reservations, sir, to my boss, sir. COLONEL: Your boss? COLONEL: Yeah [not “yes”], sir. He resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
And it is for relief from
such fatuity that the reader gratefully turns to Bernhard. For his is the only contemporary poetics that
acknowledges the full force of all three of the above-explicated facts of the Weltgeist,
and most centrally, the conjoined facts of the individual human psyche’s
undiminished energy and its loss of muscular tone. Essentially all his texts insistently pose
the old Russian revolutionist’s question “Что делать?”—“What is
to be done?”—only this time round the entity about which one knows not what to
do is not the impoverished peasant or industrial worker but the Kantian subject,
the self-conscious ‘I” uncompromisingly committed to the notion (i.e., not
merely the “sense” [i.e., illusion]) of Zweckmassigkeit or purposiveness
(sometimes also known in English as purposefulness). It is in its explicit and unabashed posing of
the historically informed Kantian subject as its subject that Bernhard’s work
may be distinguished from that of certain of his illustrious senior
contemporaries, notably the Francophone existentialists—Sartre, Camus, and
Beckett. The existentialists’
preoccupation with the “absurdity” and “meaninglessness” of the world tout
court may seem identical to Bernhard’s preoccupation with the apparent purposelessness
of the post-nineteenth century Kantian subject.
But their preoccupation in fact differs signally from Bernhard’s in its
presupposition that the subject’s formidable suitcase-load of hundred to
thousand year-old outmoded purposes can be summarily jettisoned, that every
resident of the modern world by default enjoys the luxury of behaving like his
own Adam. In conformity with this
presupposition, they treat the reader either to old-school realist narratives
in which the hero “finds himself” by arbitrarily committing himself to a cause
(Sartre, Camus), or to science-fictionesque scenarios centered on non-people in
non-places at non-historical periods (Beckett).
Bernhard does not believe in the possibility of such luxury; accordingly
all his heroes—and why bother blushing about calling them that?—are native
residents of a specific country (Austria
At
this point, I am finally ready to close up my mammoth quasi-digression and get
back to the plays. For it is one thing
to present, as Bernhard is licensed to do in his novels, a mind lashing out at
a succession of antagonists that it may summon or dismiss at will, and quite
another to present, as Bernhard is constrained to do in his plays, a no-less
froward mind obliged to contend with creatures that are free in their own right
to come and go as they please. A less
dexterous champion of the Kantian subject than Bernhard would deal with the dramaturgical
constraint by allowing the antagonistic forces to scheme effectively against
the subject and finally to triumph over him—this by way of conferring a kind of
tragic dignity on the KS’s struggle against them. But Bernhard knows full well that such
dignity is no longer so cheaply to be bought, that one cannot blame the defeat
of the subject on his sub-subjective antagonists without ascribing to them a
factitious power of agency, and thereby conferring on them a factitious dignity
that cancels out the dignity one would bestow on the subject; he knows that
what has turned out to be bad for the civilized gander has likewise turned out
to be bad for the philistine goose. And
so he gives his dramaturgical Geistesmenschen, his stage ranters, a
tether that is superficially no less slack or lengthy than the one enjoyed by
their novelistic counterparts, he lets them “have their talk out” unmolested by
the obligation to engage with their fellow characters. At the same time, he allows these other
characters, these intrigants, to get their fill of the sorts of activities at
which they would have excelled in a traditional bourgeois drama of the Figaro
era—pushing about stage props, tittering, gossiping amongst themselves, and
generally giving the impression that they are collectively “thinking up
something special,” to quote the Bass/Baron in The Celebrities. The denouement, when it finally comes, may be
favorable either to the Geistesmensch or to the intrigants; sometimes
the one side appears to finish up on top, at other times the other does. But in neither case will the final event of
the play be explicable in terms of a happy concatenation of the three laws of
traditional drama, and least explicable of all in terms of the Figaro-era
ascendancy of the law of human psychology.
‘Our hero’ will not have won by outwitting his fellow characters; nor
will he have lost by being outwitted by them.
The denouement will be explicable, rather, only in terms of the
characters’ respective significances in the constellation of preoccupations
delineated by their respective dramaturgical essences. “Oh, I see: you mean that it will be
explicable in terms of what the characters symbolize.” Indeed I do not. That would be giving the characters—apart
from the Geistesmenschen, who indeed constitute a special category—too
much credit. Taken on his or her own,
the typical Bernhard character is at best the one-dimensional, pointillistic
peformer of a simple, mindless, endlessly iterable, non-signifying routine—like
one of the ghosts in Pac Man (the original arcade video game, not the TV
cartoon spin-off). And it is only in
coalition with his fellow pointillistic points that this character acquires
significance of any kind, a significance that I would still demur at terming
symbolic in favor of some more concrete and visually oriented term—hence my
reference to a constellation of preoccupations. Take Count Neutz in Elizabeth II. Assessed in isolation, he consists of a
single character trait—exhibitionism; he loves nothing more or other than to
“bask in the limelight” awarded him in appreciation of his dialect-slathered
impressions of long-deceased members of the Hapsburg nobility. But when we consider him in juxtaposition
with the Lady with the Red Hat (a.k.a. Countess Winterhalter), who has just sold
off some apparently montane property known as “the Aschenhöhe” in parallel to
his own off-selling of “Kurring” and “the Trautensee,” we conclude that he is
part of some more general trend among the old aristocracy to abdicate their traditional
responsibilities as landowners. Then
consider E2’s Countess Gudenus.
At first blush—namely, before her entrance, in Herrenstein’s comments on
her; and in the first few lines she speaks after her entrance—she seems simply
to represent a one-woman, intellectual or philosophical pro-Herrenstein fifth-column
amid the “bone-headed riffraff” comprised by the remainder of Herrenstein’s
high-society guests. But no sooner has
she begun to address the philosopher Guggenheim at length than we see that her
passion for philosophy is no more substantial than the boy-band groupie’s
passion for music: the highest praise she manages to bestow on Guggenheim’s book
is that “in [its] every sentence I can tell that you were a professor at
Oxford”—as though Oxford were some sort of brand name certifying the brilliance
of everything produced under its auspices—such that in the end she actually
reinforces rather than undermines one’s sense of the aristocracy’s
unphilosophical bone-headedness.
Finally, consider the Doublemint pair of the One Lady and the Other
Lady. They appear at front and center
stage just long enough to compliment Herrenstein on “how fantastically well” he
looks and then dutifully mosey upstage to the buffet. But this single, split-second LED flash of a
remark links up with other remarks made by other aristos—with the Lady in the
Red Hat’s that Herrenstein “is a poster boy for healthy living” and Neutz’s
that “the Trautensee is still in the [i.e., “my”] family”; remarks that
likewise highlight the aristocracy’s propensity for lying. So: between the half-dozen or so of them
these characters delineate an “aristocratic” or “high-society” constellation
consisting of a combination of brazen dishonesty, exhibitionism,
unphilosophical bone-headedness, wanton disregard of the traditional
obligations of one’s class, and flagrant fetishization of that class’s history. Now, such constellationizing is by no means a
dramaturgical innovation of Bernhard’s, and indeed its rudiments were already
present in the ancient Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terance’s employment
of stock figures—suitor, beloved, pimp, servant, etc. But in earlier dramatists the
constellationizing is but so much propaedeutic scaffolding for the action
(i.e., a collection of productive intrigues), an analogue to the setup in jokes
that begin “A Texan, a Scot, and a Belgian were all on this plane…” In Bernhard the assembling of constellations is
the action, and once this assembling is complete, “it’s a wrap,” as they say in
the rival world of the cinema. Hence, in
Elizabeth II, once the high-society types have shown the full peacock’s spectrum
of their true (or, rather, false) colors, there is nothing to do but to pack
them all off to Herrenstein’s balcony, which collapses literally under the
weight of their collective fatuity.
Meanwhile, there has of course been no shortage of traditional
intriguing: Richard, Herrenstein’s manservant-cum-lover, while constantly
staying “in cahoots” with Fräulein Zallinger, the housekeeper, for some unspecified
purpose, has attempted to secure a place as Herrenstein’s principal heir by
threatening to emigrate to America with his new love-interest, Dr. Schuppich
(who has lately published a book in which Herrenstein is libelously
represented); an employee of Herrenstein’s named Kreiseleder has been up to
mischief apparently harmful enough to require his summons before the firm’s
board of directors; a pair of Herrenstein’s guests, the Bartenstein brothers
(business rivals or distant relatives?), are exploiting the queenwatch as an
opportunity to “case his house”; and Herrenstein himself has been working on
sending sixty thousand gun-barrels to the Philippines. As we learn of all of these episodes only by
report, we are well advised not to take their actuality for granted; and specifically
with regard to those reported on by Herrenstein, as they all center on some
person or object in which he has a selfish investment, we are well within our
rights to wonder whether they are not mere figments of his paranoiac imagination. Nevertheless , vis-à-vis Herrenstein we must
at all costs avoid committing the AP English teacher-esque errors of assuming
that because a character’s testimony is unreliable it is mistaken and then regarding
this mistakenness as the metaphysical and moral crux of the entire text that he
inhabits. For Elizabeth II is no “My Last Duchess” and Thomas Bernhard is no
Robert Browning. He takes no interest
whatsoever in debunking the pretensions to “objectivity” of the high and
mighty: for him all human testimony is on a level epistemological plane
of “unreliability” (which complementarily is also a plane of “entertainability,”
whereon anything is conceivably true. “Might
not the atmosphere of the earth be composed of metaphysical air?” queries
Prince Saurau in Gargoyles. “Why
yes,” answers Bernhard; “but then again, the earth itself might end up as cat’s
piss on Mars. In the end that’s a
possibility.”). Dramaturgically,
morally, and metaphysically speaking, the reported intrigues in Elizabeth II
have but one function—to point up the ineffectuality of the law of human
psychology by contributing absolutely nothing to the denouement, to serve as a
mighty heap of feathers weighed in the balance against the moral-cum-corporeal pair
of twenty-ton cast-iron dumbbells that bring the balcony crashing down. No matter how clever or how stupid they may
be, and no matter how much or how little they may have schemed against
Herrenstein, the “eighty or ninety” people who plunge to their deaths in the
final minute of Elizabeth II perish not because of what they have done
and tried to do but because of what they are—interchangeable mass-units
of the quintessentially Viennese “inquisitiveness” and the more broadly
Austrian mania for noble titles (both of which qualities, we may infer, are
especially pronounced in the Vienna-resident Austrian nobility). Poetic justice? In part, yes; but also prosaic injustice;
for the vicious aristos are joined in death with at least one figure who one
supposes deserved to be spared such a fate—Guggenheim, the sporting ex-expat
Jewish philosopher, whose gratitude to England for saving his life during the Nazi
period even the curmudgeonly Herrenstein acknowledges as a worthy motive for
spectating on Queen Elizabeth’s passage.
The law of nature—which here gloatingly triumphs at the expense of the
laws of man and of human psychology—is indifferent to the distinction between
the deserving and the undeserving.
Before moving on to Immanuel Kant, and returning to the
topic of the specifically dramaturgical aspects of Bernhard’s plays, I must
make one observation about a salient quality of Elizabeth II that is
related at best tangentially to this topic—namely, that apart perhaps from Wittgenstein’s
Nephew and In the Cold, no other Bernhard text addresses more
eloquently or extensively the miseries of old age and physical infirmity. Herrenstein is by no means a young old man: at
eighty-six has he has reached an age at which no matter how healthy one is, one
must take life extremely slowly and carefully on pain of sustaining devastating
injuries. And from his lugubrious
remarks about his physicians’ prognoses and the episode wherein he orders
Richard to touch his chest, we know that he does not regard himself as healthy
even for his age—indeed, that he believes that he may drop dead at any moment; moreover,
from his breathlessness, tenebrous eyesight, and lengthy and complicated
schedule of medications, we suspect that he is not much exaggerating the
precariousness of his condition. On top
of all this, of course, he has to deal with the absence of both his legs, which
he was deprived of as a very young man; such that he has presumably been
dependent for more than half a century on close personal attendance of the sort
provided by Richard. If these hardships
were counterbalanced by any forces sustaining Herrenstein’s engagement with the
world, we might be able to discount octogenareity, paraplegia, and cardiopathy
as the ultimae rationes of his existence. He does of course have his business, the firm
of Herrenstein and Herrenstein—an apparently multimillion-schilling concern
with a transatlantic reputation and transpacific interests. But the business seems to get on well enough
with minimal supervisory input from him, input that would appear to require at
most a few minutes of his time a day.
The remaining fourteen hundred-plus minutes (or, at any rate, the
non-monologic balance thereof) he typically whiles away by having Richard read
to him from his favorite authors—Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Turgeneev. But many if not most of these texts he is so
familiar with that he need never hear them again, and all of them are dispiriting
reminders of how he has “made the world into a much darker place for [him]self
through literature” (cf. the bile-mouthed final line of Philip Larkin’s “Study
of Reading Habits”: “Books are a load of
crap.”). He also tries from time to time
to satisfy his intellectual-cum-cultural jones by traveling abroad within continental
Europe —to Portugal ,
Italy , and Poland . But apart from the extremes of beauty and
hideousness to be encountered in the faces of the inhabitants of Lisbon ,
he makes no mention of any peculiar qualities of any of these destinations,
such that one suspects that he finds them effectively interchangeable. Socially, he is almost completely isolated, being
surrounded morning, afternoon, and evening by people (Richard, Fräulein
Zallinger, Holzinger, and Viktor) who are financially dependent on him and who
all lack either the courage or the desire to say anything to him that could be
construed other than as a manifestation of unqualified submission to his will. The only person he habitually deals with on
something approaching an equal footing is Guggenheim, with whom he does indeed enjoy
a proper friendship extending all the way back to their childhood years—a
friendship that, in listening to Herrenstein’s up-building description of it
before Guggenheim’s arrival, one expects to center on the swapping of philosophical
aphorisms and tender reminiscences about their playground days in the
Ringstrasse. Instead, it proves to be a
forum for yet more Herrensteinian monologizing, but not on account of any
deficiency of attention to the friendship on Herrenstein’s part. Indeed, Herrenstein cannot seem to get his
fill of panegyrizing Guggenheim and all that he signifies and embodies for him,
to the eventual and embarrassingly fulsome extent of proclaiming, “There is so
much talk about helping out one’s neighbor /the two of us put it into
practice.” The problem is that
Guggenheim himself has no interest in playing along; he is there to see not
Herrenstein but the queen, and he accepts his old friend’s invitation to join
him on a jaunt into the mountains with an ill-concealed reluctance bordering on
bad grace: “Yes if that is what you want” and “yes if it has to be,” he groans,
in virtual echo of another Bernhard listener’s (Atzbacher’s) acceptance of an
invitation from another lonely octogenarian Geistesmensch (Reger, at the
conclusion of Old Masters [“Very well, I said to Reger, Atzbacher,
records, if that is your express wish”]). We need not, it seems to me, seek the
explanation for Guggenheim’s tepidity in any place of great moral or
psychological charge; we need not, for example, infer that Guggenheim harbors a
grudge against Herrenstein for any injury real or imagined, or even that he does
not regard Herrenstein as his own closest and dearest friend. More than likely, we may infer, Guggenheim would
rather not go with Herrenstein to the mountains simply because he is a much
more nearly typical octogenarian than Herrenstein—because his “blood is caked
and cold and seldom flows,” and “’tis lack of kindly warmth that he is not kind”;
because unlike Herrenstein he sincerely “no longer desires anything of
the world” and finds it irredeemably taxing to deal for very long with someone
who still “desires so many things so strongly of it.” Hence, to the extent that we are to regard
Guggenheim as a norm—in other words, as an embodiment of how an octogenarian ought
to behave in pointed contrast to Herrenstein’s embodiment of age-inappropriate
paranoia, cupidity, volubility, etc.—we are correspondingly obliged to concede
that in one’s eighties one always might as well already be dead as still alive.
Now, as for Immanuel Kant: the first thing about it
about which one must be immaculately clear, in brazen defiance of one’s inner
AP English teacher, is that its eponymous IK is not just some schlub of a late
twentieth-century schizophrenic who happens to believe that he is Kant rather
than Napoleon or Ethel Merman. Despite
his association with scads of deviations from the real Kant’s biography, the
Kant of this play is indisputably the real Kant (just as the Glenn Gould of The
Loser is indisputably the real Glenn Gould, and the Goethe and Wittgenstein
of Goethe Dighs are indisputably the real Goethe and Wittgenstein
despite their associations with scads of equally wild deviations of the same
sort [Incidentally, a stop really needs to be put to the practice—rendered
pandemic since ca. 1990 by a rash of sitcoms starring actors playing
themselves—of referring to real-world person Mr. Jones as “a character
called Mr. Jones” whenever he happens to
be represented as doing, saying, or possessing something that he is supposed
never actually to have done, said, or possessed. As Mr. Saul Kripke proved more than four
decades ago, it is metaphysically impossible for a name to refer to any entity
other than that to which it was originally assigned). We can be sure of this because none of the
other characters ever refers to Kant by any other name than Kant or (in
Mrs. Kant’s case) Immanuel—not even when he is absent from the stage and
therefore indisputably out of earshot. In
what light, then, is one to interpret Kant’s apprehension by personnel from “a New
York mental hospital” (Bellevue ?)
at the end of the play? What’s that you
said in reply, dear gentle reader?: “Kant is history’s champion champion of reason,
and yet here he is being nabbed as a victim of reason’s nominal antithesis, madness,
also sometimes known as unreason.
Oh, the irony: one certainly
could not cut it with a spork.”? Indeed,
one certainly couldn’t, but why is this champion champion of reason nabbed as a
madman specifically in late twentieth-century New York at the end of a
sea voyage with his wife, his pet parrot, a lady millionaire, et al., and after
having spoken several hundred lines of dialogue dominated by quotations from one
of his earliest, most obscure, and most marginal works and culminating in a
rant that has no parallel in tone, wording, or substance with anything in the
actual Kantian corpus? Bernhard is
clearly up to something more purposive and historically mediated than an
iteration of the timeless ancient Erasman paradox “Wisdom is folly, and folly
wisdom.” So, to address penultimate
things first: nowadays (i.e., since ca. 1830) we (i.e., almost everybody who
has heard of Kant since ca. 1830) tend to think of Kant exclusively as a
philosopher in the modern (i.e., post-ca. 1830) sense—someone who ponders such imponderable
questions as “How can God’s existence be proved?” and “In what does the good
life consist?” and “Does the pope s**t in the woods?,” questions that we think
of as having nothing in common with the sorts of questions asked by scientists
(e.g., “How does the world work?” and “How can we build a better mousetrap?”
and “How can we get a mouse to grow testicles the size of a bull’s?”) Even more specifically, we think of Kant as
the principal founding father of a philosophical tradition known as German
idealism, a tradition that fairly smugnesses itself on its uselessness and flaky
at-loggerheadedness with the down-to-earth, matter-of-fact, positivistic
worldview of modern science, a worldview it assumes to be headquartered somewhere
in Britain or the United States. But in
Kant’s own (i.e., pre-1830) day, science and philosophy were not yet regarded
as mutually distinct fields of inquiry. Kant
himself contributed no less copiously to the literature of “science” than to
the literature of “philosophy,” and he regarded both contributions as parts of
a single, unified intellectual project.
It is against the background of this eighteenth-century sense of a
single grand philosophical tradition that we must interpret both such tactical
Bernhardian feints as having Kant designate Newton as his and Leibniz’s
“employer” (Newton quite literally gave work to Leibniz and Kant—to Leibniz by
vying with him for the discovery of the differential and integral calculi, and to
Kant by inspiring him to attempt a synthesis of Newtonian physics with the
metaphysicses of Descartes and Leibniz) and the grand Bernhardian strategy of
largely confining Kant’s self-quotation to the Universal Natural History and
Theory of Heaven, a hodgepodge of “pure science” and metaphysics that tenders
such preposterous propositions—but what other than “our” abject deference to
the testimony of scientific so-called experts has predisposed “us” to regard
them as preposterous?—as that the denser a planet is, the denser (as in
“stupider”) its inhabitants will be. “One
must remember,” Bernhard reminds us by means of these tactics and this strategy,
“that the two principal intellectual factions of our time, the so-called
‘culture of science’ and the so-called ‘culture of the humanities’ share a
single origin in the weltanschauung of the Enlightenment and ultimately must stand
or fall on the foundation of its leading lights’ most dubious productions.”
At the same time in this connection it should be noted that
the overwhelming majority, if not the entirety, of Bernhard-Kant’s quotations
from the Universal History are confined in turn to a single chapter thereof,
“The Eccentricity of the Planetary Orbits” (Part II, Section IV) and that this
chapter considered in isolation is a work of “pure” or “straight” science—that
is to say, it deals exclusively with natural forces and phenomena and is free
of metaphysical speculations about the relation of physical to intellectual
density and the like. It should further
be noted that this chapter is the only one of Kant’s works mentioned by title
by anybody other than Kant—specifically, by Mrs Kant when she informs her
husband that the captain has read it. Next,
it should be noted that the captain, in common with all the other non-eponymous
characters, is unimplicated in Kant’s mental pathology (recall that the doctors
and nurses in the final scene show no interest in anybody but Kant). Finally, it should be noted that the
quotations from the “Eccentricity” chapter gravitate, as it were, towards the
first half of the play, where they form the bulk of Kant’s non-situational
utterances, and throughout which Kant is uniformly calm and equable vis-à-vis
all non-situational matters (even if vis-à-vis most situational matters—e.g.,
the ingredients of his soup and the composition of Friedrich’s birdseed—he
tends to be quite irascible). In the
aggregate, these notable facts appear to delineate a Kant who according to the
play’s scale of efficient causes—strong, heavy, concrete, down-to-earth “scientific”
America vs. weak, light, abstract, head-in-the-clouds “philosophical” Europe—need
harbor no fear of being institutionalized; such that all admissible evidence of
Kant’s insanity must be sought in the second half of the play. During the first half of this second half we
witness Kant venturing into discursive territory that hints at, without necessarily
quoting verbatim from, certain properly (in the modern sense) philosophical
texts that we think of as core texts of the Kantian corpus—the second Critique,
“What is Enlightenment?”, “Perpetual Peace,” &c. “Every single life,” he asserts, “is of the
greatest importance,” in reaffirmation of the most beloved formulation of his
Categorical Imperative: Treat other people only as ends in themselves and
never as mere means to an end. And
he proclaims: “I am a socialist / the only true the only real socialist” as if
by way of tetchily reminding us of his timely advocacy of the French Revolution
in the Metaphysics of Morals. And
all the while that he is alluding to texts that provided the philosophical
basis for the liberation of the subject, he intermittently enacts this very
liberation (albeit in not quite a manner guaranteed to satisfy a
dedicated Kantian). For here, in marked
contrast to his essentially autistic social habitus in the first half of the
play (wherein he addressed his occasional situational utterances mostly to the
inner Kantian circle of Mrs Kant, Ernst Ludwig, and Friedrich), he is fairly comfortable
and clubbable, letting his hair down far enough to report on his wife’s
adulterous liaison with Friedrich to a near stranger, the steward; and to
kvetch in sitcom-husband-worthy fashion about women’s incapacity to travel without
“huge piles of luggage.” The moral of
this middle section would thus appear to be: Left to its own devices, and unthreatened
by a more forceful antagonist, the subject will merely indulge itself in banal
and fruitless Geschwätz—gossip and chit-chat. But in the penultimate scene of the play, the
scene of the Chinese lantern festival on the rear deck, Kant undergoes a second
transformation: to begin with, he
reverts to his autistic disposition of the first half, a disposition more conspicuously
anti-social in the setting of a dinner party at which the remaining guests converse
in a manner not radically dissimilar to that of characters in an Agatha
Christie novel or BBC costume drama; and when, towards the end of the scene, he
resumes ‘philosophizing,’ in place of quoting from his own works he improvises
a rant that would not be out of place in the mouth of any other Bernhard
protagonist in rabid meltdown mode (a mode, incidentally, that tends, as here,
to supervene a few pages before the end of the text): “When I compose a lecture
it is always a lecture on death / on illness progressing to death don’t you
know /on this process / that from here to infinity will remain unexplained
Health is a usurpation gentlemen/ Health is an act of rape
/
The integral is hell.” I would argue that it is solely in virtue of
his behavior in this penultimate scene, and most especially in virtue of his
delivery of its just-quoted rant, that Kant is institutionalized in the final
one. Mind you, I am not arguing that
there is any demonstrable causal connection between the one event and
the other—that, for example, in slipping the steward a “banknote of large
denomination” Mrs Kant asks him to wire news of Kant’s breakdown to New York;
for intriguing in Bernhard—and I cannot iterate this point emphatically
enough—is never diagetically effectual; and indeed one would perhaps best be
served by thinking of it as a purely gestural and ritualistic element, like the
actions of the figures in Japanese Noh drama.
In the earlier scenes, Mrs Kant’s whispered confidences to the steward
constitute the sole gesture of intrigue (save for one prolepsis of the
penultimate scene’s big bribe, when she slips him a banknote of unspecified—and
therefore presumably small—denomination), and they serve merely to highlight in
a low-key fashion Kant’s detachment from the daily grind in his capacity as a
generic intellectual; in the penultimate scene the whispering spreads to other
characters—the cardinal and the art collector—and is augmented by bribery, and
thereby serves to point up Kant’s total estrangement from all of late
twentieth-century Gesellschaft in his new capacity as a certifiable
loony. Not that we should attach too
much importance to this certifiability, for Bernhard hardly maintained a very
high opinion of the psychiatric profession: “Of all medical practitioners,” he
wrote in Wittgenstein’s Nephew, “psychiatrists are the most incompetent,
having a closer affinity to the sex killer than to their science.”
In any case, the certification is
robbed of all conceivable normative weight by the verbatim debt of loony Kant’s
rant to one of Bernhard’s most notorious apercus, delivered not via a Geistesmensch,
but in his own voice, during a prize-acceptance speech: Everything is
laughable when one thinks about death.
Indeed, why mince words, here? Why not frankly acknowledge that in the
two final scenes of IK Bernhard is effectively proclaiming, “Immanuel
Kant, c’est moi”—or, rather, “Immanuel Kant serait devenu moi had he
lived an extra hundred seventy years”?
It is rather like the reply the composer Charles Ives made to someone
who asked him what his rambunctious, cacophonous compositions could possibly owe
to the nobly retenu works of Beethoven: “They’re a continuation of the
same spirit.” Bernhard-Kant’s
impassionedly demented raving may at first blush seem to constitute a total
non-sequitur in relation to the body of smugly pedantic remonstrations we have
inherited from the Kant who died in 1804, but in all plausibility, if not
incontrovertible fact, they may actually constitute the residue that would have
been left behind by those remonstrations had they ever been honestly and
thoroughly put through the paces of nineteenth and twentieth-century world
history in all its significant registers—political, intellectual, and social. I mean seriously, Volker (sic), can
any mind of a truly philosophical bent give half a monkey’s about the movements
of the planets of our solar system once it knows within spitting distance of a
reasonable certainty that the larger, lighter planets of this system are not
inhabited by sentient beings of any sort at all, let alone beings of a higher
and nobler order than our own vulgar earthy selves? And how can such a mind maintain that one
must regard human beings as ends and not means once the instrumental nature of
all human relations has been promoted from a universally unacknowledged open
secret to a universally cossetted article of faith? To a truly philosophical mind fully
cognizant of such historical transformations, every utterance is indeed an
utterance about “death, on illness progressing to death,” because deprived of
the promise of a more nearly pure form of life elsewhere, one is compelled to
regard the termination of biological existence as the sole telos of life
ici-bas; and such a mind likewise must regard “health” as a “usurpation”
because the noble ends that he has in view for life could be realized only in a
world devoid of life as we have hitherto known it, life as an affair of nothing
but [in Theodor Adorno’s words via Anatole France] “eating and being eaten.” (One may succinctly sum up the process I have
been describing in the present paragraph as a subjection of the Kantian moral
law to the rigors of the Hegelian dialectic, whereby over time, through the
movement of the Weltgeist, phenomena come into their own only by being
transformed into their opposites [or antitheses.])
A word or two of course must be said about the millionairess, if
only in the light of the sheer abundance of dialogue with which she is
graced. No other character in the play
but Kant has more lines, and not even Kant has a single speech longer than her
longest one—a mammoth 130-liner that overspills a two-page spread at both ends,
such that upon turning at hazard to its central portion (pp. 296-297), one is
at a loss as to both who is speaking it and to whom it is addressed. Clearly if portrayed by an actor of
above-average skill and looks (like Sunnyi Melles in the 2009 Burgtheater
production) the millionairess will steal the show. But is she meant to? Is Immanuel Kant one of those dramatic
texts like Julius Caesar and Der Rosenkavalier that are
effectively misnamed, and is the millionairess its Brutus and Ochs? The answer to this question it, seems to me—and
delighted though I would be to maintain so grain-defying a thesis as that
entailed by its contrary–is a firm “No,” inasmuch as one cannot affix the millionairess
to a Weltanschauung or ethos sufficiently well-defined and anti-“Kantian”
to serve as an alternate, and ultimately more powerful, center of dramaturgical
gravity, an affixation that would establish her as the true hero or “anti-hero”
of the play. To be sure, we gather that
Kant—at least the middle-period Kant of the “middle-deck” scene—does not hold
her intellect in especially high regard, for why else would he ask her for
permission to call her “the millionairhead”? But this one-off remark hardly suffices to
establish her as the play’s resident standard-bearer of stupidity, while any
one of a number of certain other bits of her own dialogue would heartily
suffice to establish her as the play’s vice-resident exponent of intelligent
Vernunft. Like a true exponent of
Enlightenment—and unlike any of the other characters save Kant himself—she is
endlessly curious, forever asking questions, and occasionally even indulging in
speculative thought experiments. “Say
somebody stuffs a fortune / into a certain head / for instance Kant’s head
right / then at the very least that somebody is going to learn / what the point
of the intellectual world is,” she conjectures in a striking parallel to Kant’s
own speculative designs on the cranium of Friedrich (“An operation /would prove
everything naturally / an operation that enabled me to see / the inside of
Friedrich’s head”). To be surer, these
questions and thought-experiments add up to but a small fraction of her
dialogue, the overwhelming bulk of which consists of personal anecdotage of no
obvious interest to anybody but herself—but then again, as I mentioned earlier,
so does that of the middle-period, middle-deck Kant; moreover, it is pretty
much exclusively through the window or prism of this millionairessian corpus of
anecdotage that we get anything approaching a glimpse of the world writ large,
a world independent of the play’s characters, a world populated by such
tantalizingly eccentric specimens of humanity as a terminally diarrheic
proletarian husband, a street thug with an animus against knees, a sea-faring,
pianizing, jewel-toting grandmother, a filially pious ex-medical student turned
masseur, and so on—in short, types whom one would expect to be most at home in
a first-rate page-turner of a novel dating from the high season of bourgeois realism (ca.
1840-1910). We may not approve of the
motives guiding the emanation of this anecdotage, but to the extent that our
attention is captivated by it, we cannot stigmatize it in good faith. “Narcissistic rambling may be the best that
the noblest, the most would-be altruistic liberated subject can come up with on
his own a la Kant,” Bernhard here implies, “but complementarily even the most
despicable, the most unabashedly self-centered liberated subject may, a la the
millionairess, bequeath gifts that gratify her fellow-subjects’ least
narcissistic impulses.” To be surest,
the millionairess does suffer from one utterly irredeemable flaw—her almost
complete lack of knowledge of matters intellectual and cultural: she is indeed
an ignoramus’s ignoramus and a philistine’s philistine. But even pace “late,” “rear-deck”
Kant’s baleful imprecations against “Americanism” qua cause of “the end of the
world,” in order to regard the millionairess as a stand-in for the barbaric
Ameriphilic tenor of the times—and thereby to read the play as a whole as a
satire on this tenor—one would have to point to some native twentieth-century
figure in the dramatis personae who embodied or expounded a full and authentic
relationship to the life and produce of the mind; and one will look in vain
therein for such a figure. Oh, to be
sure1, a number of them talk about their reverence of art or
philosophy in the abstract, but not one of them ever evinces so much as a ghost
of a sign of any interest in or understanding of a particular work of art or
philosophical text (any text by Kant very much included). The fatuous triumphalism of the captain’s
post-toast remarks—“This Chinese lantern party will /go down in history / not
only in nautical history / but also in the history of philosophy”—points up the
purely fetishistic character of the non-Kants’ culture-fandom. All of them to a man and a woman value
culture only insofar as it emits an aura of grandeur and importance, and
beneath this aura they apparently have no desire to penetrate. And it is surely no accident that the most
voluble of these European culture-vultures is Sunshine the art-collector, a man
whose very vocation encourages him to regard works of art as fully fungible
speculative investments. (The
millionairess, by contrast, is according to Mrs Kant, a practicing artist—a
linocutter—and at least cares enough about the formal qualities of visual art
to enthuse about “how Rembrandt distributes his colors.” [One of course mustn’t
make too much of either of these facts, but one also mustn’t make absolutely
nothing of them.]) So: for all its
undeniable Ameriphobia, Immanuel Kant hardly reposes any hope in Europe
qua bastion of cultural vitality, and in according so much floor-time to an
uncultivated Europhobic European “child of capitalism” like the millionairess,
the play seems to want to suggest that whatever life may be left in the
moribund Kantian subject is perforce life of a decidedly barbaric,
post-European, post-cultural nature.
Finally, a bit of dot-connecting in connection with three minor
yet conspicuous figures—Friedrich, Ernst Ludwig, and Mrs Kant. The most obvious implication of the fact that
Kant’s best friend is a parrot—namely that the great philosopher desires to be
surrounded not by colleagues but by yes-men—has already been remarked by at
least one critic. But given that this
parrot’s name is Friedrich and that Friedrich happens to be the forename
of an extremely famous German philosopher who postdated Kant, it seems to me
that one must countenance the possibility that he, the parrot, stands in for
some other quality than abject discipleship tout court—especially if one
happens to be familiar with a particular pair of passages from the Bernhardian
corpus, one antedating IK by over a decade, the other postdating it by
just three years. The first, and earlier, passage is from Gargoyles, and consists of the mad Prince Saurau’s assertion
that “no philosopher since Kant” has produced anything worthwhile. The second hails from a point in the Monologues
at Mallorca when Bernhard is explaining to Krista Fleischmann the
necessity, in setting oneself a philosophical syllabus, of separating the
first-rank philosophers from the second-rank ones. Among philosophers of the first rank, he explicitly
names only three—Kant, Schopenhauer, and Pascal—and maintains that the
greatness of all such FRPs consists in their ingenious proclivity for jesting;
jesting not as in cracking jokes but as in behaving in a manner that (intentionally
or otherwise) arouses mirth. (Whatever
reservations one may have about Bernhard’s Kant, one cannot deny that he is a
mirth-arousing figure.) “And the lesser
ones,” he continues, “the second category, they’re all basically boring,
because they just chew the cud that these philosophical jesters have written out for them beforehand.” From a biophysical point of view chewing a
cud is of course a very different operation from mimicking a sound; indeed, the
two operations occur in two entirely different systems of the organism (to say
nothing of the biophysically incommensurable differences between the avian and
bovine nervous and digestive systems).
But as far as the history of metaphor is concerned, they are essentially
identical acts, the vehicular lynchpin of the whole diptych consisting in the unoriginality
of the worked-upon medium: just as the utterances of a parrot are not being
spoken for the first time, having originated in the mouth of a human being; so
is the cud in the mouth of a cow, bull, heifer, steer, or ox not being chewed
for the first time, having originated as a mouthful of fresh grass that was
subsequently swallowed and regurgitated.
Such that provided the Monologues are regarded as admissible
evidence towards the outferreting of the Bernhardian Intentionschaft
(and I consider Bernhard one of those rare authors whose off-typewriter remarks
carry virtually equal intentional weight with their writings), and after
triangulating the above-quoted passage from them with the less intentionally
problematic passage from Gargoyles, one must be forgiven for
conjecturing that in naming Kant’s pet parrot Friedrich Bernhard meant to say
that Nietzsche’s writings were effectively a gratuitous echo of Kant’s—a
provocative thesis, to be sure2, but by no means an insane one, from
the point of view1 either of the history of ideas or the Gedankschaft
of IK. Certainly the actual Kant,
although professedly a theist and a Christian, came remarkably close to saying
“God is dead” in refusing to accord any epistemological or legislative
authority to Scripture; the Christian gospels, he averred, may have come closer
than any other as-yet existing text to articulating the moral law and the
nature of God, but they were still a mere contingent manifestation of man’s groping
intuition of these things, not the sole, necessary, infungible, efficient cause
of his unbudgeable certainty of them. (Here Kant was perhaps even more subversive
than such notorious “infidels” as David Hume, who in banishing religious faith
to the realm of the irrational at least left open a loophole for such ancient
and still-respectable theological watchwords as Tertullian’s “It is certain because
it is impossible.” ) Such that1 one may not implausibly
argue that at least in a theological register the difference between Kant’s
sprawlingly involuted meta-metaphysical ethics and Nietzsche’s snappy post-metaphysical
anti-credo is more stylistic than substantial; an argument that we may infer
Bernhard’s Kant would ringingly endorse, if we take his extrapolative genealogy
of the history of political philosophy as a pattern—a single spoke in the
wheel, as it were—of his view of the debt of subsequent philosophers to him in
other domains. If Bernhard-Kant has no
trouble viewing himself as “a socialist / the only true the only real socialist,”
who was “completely misunderstood by that poor feebleminded sap Lenin” despite
having died nearly a half-century before the foundation of the socialist
movement and more than a full century before the Russian revolution, he is
likely to find it easy enough to entertain the conceit of himself as “an
atheist / the only true the only real atheist,” who was equally “completely
misunderstood by that poor feebleminded sap Nietzsche.” As for Bernhard’s flagrant desecration of the
icon of St. Kant the Eternal Bachelor by way of the figure of Mrs Kant, it can
be accounted for via a passage from a 1986 interview Bernhard gave to Werner Wögerbauer:
[Thomas Mann] was totally uptight and a
typical German petty-bourgeois. With a greedy wife. For
me, that's the typical German writer combination. Always a woman in the
background, be it Mann or Zuckmayer, always making sure these characters get to sit next
to the head of state, at every idiotic opening of a sculpture exhibition or a
bridge. Is that where writers belong? These are the people who always make deals with the state and those in power, who
end up sitting at their elbows. The typical German-language writer.
So far I have had occasion to mention only one side of the
actual Kant’s political ethos—the revolutionary, progressive, “socialistic”
side. But there was another, and
plausibly more essential, side to this ethos: the side of Kant the
institutional brown-noser, who never missed an opportunity of advertising his
university appointment at Königsberg, who went out of his way almost every day
to rub elbows with the town’s worthies, and who never publicly dreamed of
raising a finger in defiance of the arbitrarily wielded prerogatives of the
monarchical Prussian state. This is a
Kant who would indeed probably crave “get[ting] to sit next to the head of
state at every idiotic opening of a sculpture exhibition or a bridge” a la Mann
or Zuckmayer, and in Bernhard’s Mrs Kant he is indeed blessed with a consort
whose sole care and function seems to be to engage in “background” maneuvering
(over the production and placement of blankets, menu items, pillows, knitted
caps, &c.) to ensure that her husband arrives alive and in one piece at such
a privileged ceremonial spot—viz. the conferee’s chair of an honorary doctorate
awarded by the chief university of the chief city of the chief world power. Of course, Bernhard’s Kant affects to be
incapable of caring less whether he receives the doctorate or not, to maintain that
all excitement on this score emanates entirely from his wife, and that he
himself has consented to undertake the present voyage solely in the hope of
curing his eye condition. But from the
fact that we first learn of the prospective award of the degree from Kant
himself, and a mere six pages into Scene I, we may safely conclude that he
attaches a great deal of importance to it.
Such that2 in hitching up the Eternal Bachelor to such a
prosaic, pomp-hungry consort as his Mrs Kant, Bernhard seems to be saying,
“Kant may not have got around to getting married, but he clearly deserved a
wife—albeit a wife no better than this—for the twin sakes of his private power-humping
ethos and his public role as the first German ‘intellectual’.” (A salutary comparison may here be drawn to
Bernhard’s representation of the second great German “intellectual,” Goethe,
who, according to the unnamed narrator of “Goethe Dighs,” “throughout his life
has been unable to abide the passage of a single day without the presence of
women.”) Unlike Mrs Kant, Ernst Ludwig
does correspond at least in function to a figure in the life of the real Kant,
who really did have a manservant who waited on him hand and foot twenty-four
hours a day. But the real Kant’s
manservant’s name was not Ernst Ludwig; it was Martin Lampe. The fact that Bernhard elected not to call his
Kant’s servant Martin Lampe and yet christened him with a proper name (as
opposed to the functional titles borne by all the other figures in the dramatis
personae save Friedrich and Kant himself [The art collector counts as a
half-exception, as we do eventually learn his surname]) suggests that Ernst
Ludwig is to be regarded as a stand-in not for Lampe but for some other
historically actual person, a person who in real life was named Ernst Ludwig
and was no more a servant than Friedrich Nietzsche was a parrot. The only plausible contender for this role in
the real Kant’s life—an obvious starting point for our search, if hardly an
inevitable ending point for it—is one Ludwig Ernst Borowski, his first
biographer. I personally am mighty loath
to settle for an unequivocal identification of EL with LEB, not so much because
ELB is surnamed Borowski rather than Ludwig (for if the “Ludwig” in “EL” were a
surname and not a middle name, Kant and his wife presumably would address EL
not as “EL,” as they do, but merely as “Ernst”) or even because “EL” is no more
“LE” than “James Henry” is “Henry James” (for Bernhard may have deliberately or
inadvertently transposed the two name-components) as because ELB seems both to
have been a rather marginal figure in the real Kant’s Lebenswelt and to
have subsequently become an equally marginal figure in the Lebenswelt of
Kantians; to have been and become more of a John Hawkins than a James Boswell—the
guy who merely wrote about the Great Man first rather than most perceptively or
illustriously. And who was Kant’s
Boswell in this second sense? Why, a
bloke by the name of Ernst Cassirer, author of Kant’s Life and
Thought, the classic secondary source on all things Kantian. I trust the reader is beginning to get the picture:
by transposing the forename and middle name of Kant’s first biographer,
Bernhard bestows on Ernst Ludwig the forename of Kant’s most famous biographer
and thereby makes his stage character a composite figure standing in for the
entire Kantian biographical tradition.
And what is he thereby saying about this tradition? Why, the obvious thing that one would expect
to be said by the equation of a writer’s biographer with a semi-mute and
apparently illiterate muscleman: that literary biographers do all the heavy
lifting for their subjects, performing work that is undoubtedly
indispensable in that (in Joseph Addison’s famous words) “a Reader seldom
peruses a Book with Pleasure, ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a
black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a
Batchelor, with other Particulars of a like nature,” and where is the reader
going to get these particulars if not from a biography?; and at the same
irredeemably ignoble in that it requires precious little genius or invention
and therefore could be performed by almost anybody. And in Ernst Ludwig’s unenviable charge as
guardian of Friedrich, one cannot quite resist the temptation to descry a
mini-allegory of the less than swimmingly harmonious relations that obtain between
the biographers and the disciples of philosophers (although I balk at
attributing to Bernhard the conjecture that in boosting Kant’s reputation
Cassirer was also attempting to “poison” Nietzsche’s).
On the Translations
It perhaps beho(o)ves me to preface these remarks by remarking
(or these notes by noting) that many of them would probably be most usefully
housed in footnotes to specific plays, and that I am placing these many here
only because the B****er text-editing window, while finding plenty of room for
such un-writerly genres of insertion as animated characters and video clips,
does not allow automatic footnoting.
“Seriously, schlöndorfs,” I would be tempted to query on this head, “we
can crash a robət into Mars and fantasize about crashing a man into an
asteroid—can we not then bring the functionality of our state-of-the-art
bl***ing software in line with that of the word-processors by whose aid our
grandsires penned their first grammar-school composition exercises?”—I would,
I say, be tempted to query thus, did I not know full well that B****er, like
all other mainstream software applications of the post-Mac era, is pitched not
only primarily but also ultimately and solely to the illiterate, and that any
benefits that may accrue from it to the literate and semiliterate are merely
vestigial holdovers from the golden age of pre-WISYWIG word processing. To grouse about the lack of automatic
footnoting in B****er is as pointless and therefore basically churlish as to
grouse about the absence of a mounting rail in a modern motor-car: one should
simply be grateful that the thing still has down-rollable windows.
Having remarked all that, I shall begin the remarks proper (as
it perhaps beh(o)oves me to do) with those few remarks that are not ideal footnote-fodder
inasmuch as they apply more or less equally to all or at least most of the
versions of the plays available here at the PWA. Ad hunc finem imprimis: in the first
part of this essay, I observed that the Bernhard plays give the typographical impression
of being in free verse. Whether they
actually are or are supposed to be (in) free verse or indeed verse of any other
kind is beyond my ken, for amazingly enough at no point in the several thousand
words of commentary on the Bernhardian dramatic corpus that I have so far
encountered has anybody—either Bernhard himself or his commentators—made
mention of this corpus’s typographical or prosodic qualities. And so as a translator I am left to sift out
and catalogue as many such qualities of this sort as I manage to observe, and to
deal with them in their order of apparent objective priority. So, ad hunc finem () imprimis: it seems
to me both that the plays are not in free verse or verse of any other kind, and
that they are at the same time not entirely—or, to be more precise, not consistently—unmetrical. Now, I admit that this pair of “that” clauses
at first blush seems to constitute a paradox, a paradox along the lines of that
contained in the following sentence: “I know full well that that there heap of
brown matter is a just a pile of excrement deposited by a cow ten minutes ago,
and yet at the same time I maintain that that same heap is not only a work of
architecture, but of specifically Palladian architecture.” Meter (=Palladianism) is a property of a
certain kind of verse (=architecture), a more restrictively organized kind of
verse than free verse, which is in turn at least traditionally more
restrictively organized than mere prose (=mere excrement); such that to assert
that a given collection of words is mere prose would seem perforce to preempt
or short-circuit the possibility of its being even sporadically metrical. But it is just this prima-vista paradoxical
state of prosodic affairs that Bernhard’s dialogue embodies; inasmuch as for
the most part, for all its division into verse-line like segments, it does not
benefit from any sort of analysis in terms of a pattern of stressed and
unstressed syllables (a la metered verse), or even from syntactic division into
discrete lines (a la free verse); and yet it does occasionally lapse into
passages that reward metrical analysis of such rigor as are exacted by the most
restrictive traditional metrical verse forms.
So, why not simply say that it is mostly in prose but partly in
verse? Why, because that would be to
imply that the metered passages were formally set off from the unmetered
passages as mini-poems, whereas in fact they seamlessly follow and precede
them. A good—albeit probably not exactly
the best—example of this contrast occurs in the following pair of dialogue
segments from Die Berühmten (entitled The Celebrities in my
translation):
BASSIST zum Tenor:
Herr Kollege
Kennen Sie das denn auch
daß die Stimme plötzlich weg ist
und plötzlich wieder da ist
TENOR stimmlos auf seinen Kehlkopf
deutend, heiser
Ich habe heute keine Stimme
verkühlt
velleicht verkühlt
velleicht
ich weiß es nicht
Considered on its own, the bass’s passage is metrically
irregular from start to finish. To be
sure, each of its lines is scannable as a variation on a genre of prosodically
established line—trochaic dimeter in the first line, iambic trimeter (or
trochaic tetrameter) in the second, iambic tetrameter (or iambic trimeter) in
the third line, and iambic trimeter in the fourth. But the presence of disruptive pyrrhic (i.e.,
unstressed disyllabic) feet in each line, together with the absence of even two
lines exhibiting the same metrical pattern, insure that none of these
line-genres manages to overcome the effect of merely accidental metricality,
let alone establish itself as a governing meter of what could be called a
stanza only in the event of such an establishment. Accordingly, in translating this segment,
although I have tried (and managed) to preserve each line’s semantic integrity,
I have made no attempt to reproduce its pattern of stresses:
My
esteemed colleague
are
you at all familiar with this
with
the voice suddenly disappearing
and
suddenly coming right back
The tenor’s segment, in contrast, is metrically rigid at the
resolution of each line and metrically cogent at the resolution of what may in
this case indeed legitimately be called a stanza. The first line is in perfect iambic
tetrameter (final unstressed syllables do not count as irregularities), the
second in perfect iambic monometer, the third in perfect iambic dimeter, the
fourth (like the second) in perfect iambic monometer, and the fifth (like the
third) in perfect iambic dimeter—such that we have a metrical scheme of ABCBCB;
moreover, apart from the single unstressed syllable at the end of the first
line, the segment consists of iambs from start to finish, such that it could
easily be rearranged into two lines of near metrically perfect iambic
pentameter. Accordingly, in translating
this segment, I have tried (and managed) to reproduce its pattern of
stresses:
Today
I’ve got no voice at all
a
cold
perhaps
a cold
perhaps
I’m
not quite sure
Admittedly, this prosodic exactitude comes at the cost of a slight
loss of semantic integrity: verkühlt is the past participle of verkühlen,
“to catch a cold,” such that a perfectly literal translation of line two
would be not “a cold” but “caught a cold,” which for clarity’s sake would best
be amplified into “I’ve caught a cold”; and “I’m not quite sure” is a shade
more colorful and equivocal than “ich weiß es nicht,” which literally means simply
“I don’t know (it).” But both losses
seem to be amply overbalanced by the gain.
And of course even in reproducing the meter, I have hardly conveyed the
full cargo of the original’s extra-semantic content: for example, ideally the
collective lexicon of lines two through four should consist of two words, not
three; and ideally these two words should both start with the same letter (or,
to be more precise, the same consonantal phoneme followed by some vowel phoneme). But any nearer approach to such conveyance
could doubtless be purchased only with further erosion of sense. Or perhaps not: certainly the only example
that I have so far come up with (“Ménière’s / mayhap Ménière’s / mayhap”) suggests as much, but one never
knows what will occur to one tomorrow.
In the meantime, today, one presses on to the next chunk of dialogue,
which in all probability will be, like the above Bassic chunk, a metrically
chaotic segment that one can set about translating exactly as one would any
block of ordinary, full-stopped, margin-to-margin stretching prose; the only
departure from such a procedure consisting not in the translation proper but in
the post-translational work of dividing the segment into sub-segments of such
mutually proportional lengths as allow (provided the insuperable differences
between German and English syntax do not already forbid it) such quasi-poetic
events as the replication of “suddenly” in the above Bassic chunk to occur at
some place within spitting distance of their corresponding place in the
original text. And should it not be
such a chunk, should it in prosodic terms more nearly resemble the above
Tenoric chunk, one will very probably have to resign oneself for semantic
fidelity’s sake to rendering its prosodic properties less nearly exactly than
one did those of that chunk, to falling back on the old Anglo-Saxon accentual
tradition, wherein the number of stressed syllables alone counts, and the
number of unstressed syllables is permitted to vary from zero to infinity. Hence, for example, in Englishing one of the
lines that accompanies Die Berühmten’s Soprano’s assault on her mentor Lotte Lehmann,
a line consisting of the single monosyllabic lexeme so, I have not
scrupled to expand the monosyllable into an iambic disyllable consisting of the
two lexemes like this— first because the only semantically
plausible monosyllabic alternative—namely, thus—has probably not been
used in the past two centuries by an empirical English speaker to the end to
which the Soprano avails herself of her German so—namely, the end of illustrating
how to do something; and secondly because the like, being unaccented and
coming before the accented this—a this, that incidentally and
presumably, like the so, will coincide exactly with the soprano’s
delivery of her blow with the champagne bottle—will be as it were only
half-heard (either by an actual audience or by the so-called inner ear of a
reader). And yet even here, Greco-Latin
pedal-syllabic prosody is not irrelevant, for I certainly would have scrupled
to render the so by way of the perfectly semantically plausible trochaic
pair of lexemes this way, on the grounds that the way, in being
unaccented and presumably posterior to the blow, would constitute a vestigial
anticlimax thereunto.
“Something too much of this,” and at the expense of what is
probably a more important and certainly a more nettlesome one for the
translator—namely, capitalization.
In any English-language text devoid of punctuation, capital letters function
as the sole unequivocal indicators of those perhaps-factitious but undeniably
handy syntactical-cum-grammatical units known as sentences; marking off
as they do those places that in a solicitously pointed text (SPT) would have
been immediately preceded by an inhalation-mandating period (a.k.a full
stop). What is more, in such a text,
capital letters supply the only indicators—unequivocal or otherwise—of such
sub-sentential syntactic and pneumatic partitions as would normally be marked
by commas, semicolons, and dashes, inasmuch as the placement of these
partitions must all be deduced, as it were, from the lie of the sentence and
from within its territory. “But what
about line breaks,” you ask? Why, they
are of no reliable syntacticocartographic use whatsoever. True, the author may deliberately have begun
a certain line at a certain point in order to set off a clause that in a(n) SPT
would have been preceded by a caesura-marking semicolon; but alternatively he
may have started the line there simply in order to emphasize (as Bernhard seems
to like to do) some syntactically and pneumatically irrelevant correspondence
between its contents and those of its predecessor. “Fine,” you concede: “I’ll retract in full my
plea for line-breaks as syntactic markers provided you qualify that
‘unequivocal’ up there with a prefatory ‘nearly’.” And why the d***l would I ever dream of doing
that? “Because there are two cases in
English in which a capital letter does not unequivocally signal the
start of a sentence–viz. when it begins a proper name and when it is
coextensive with the pronoun I.”
You’re quite right to point those two cases out, and in particular to
point out that second one, inasmuch as it is an ambiguity that one never
encounters in German, wherein the I equivalent ich is (as you
just saw) uncapitalized—such that it occurs to me now that I really ought to collate
all my I-starting lines with their counterparts in my source-texts, and,
when I discover one of these Is corresponding to a lower-case ich,
see if I can’t get away with bumping it up or down a syllable or two by way of
insuring that I do not introduce into my translation an instance of ambiguity
that is perforce absent from the original.
As to instances of your first case, instances of lines starting with Bob
or Suzy or Dave or Sophronia, I need worry about them far
less, inasmuch as German capitalizes its own proper names, such that provided my
placement of a Bob, a Suzy, autc. at the beginning of a line has not
been occasioned by some freak of interlingual syntactic divergence, any
ambiguity emanating from that placement will be but a carryover from the
original German text. But all this
(beginning, that is, from “Something too much of this” above) has essentially
been a mere propaedeutic to my commentary on the main nub of the nettle
presented to the translator of these plays by capitalization; namely, that in
German all nouns, whether common or proper, are capitalized—such that
the relative respective values of the capital letter qua sentence delimiter in English
and German are roughly comparable to the relative respective monetary values of
a present-day English pound and a present-day Euro (inasmuch as common nouns
account for at least a quarter of the total lexicon of both languages, and the
pound reliably outstrips the Euro to the tune of 25% in the currency market);
such in turn that while the translator of a Bernhard play may simply wave
through each occurrence of a capitalized line-beginning preposition, pronoun,
verb autc. with the blaséness of a Washington Union Station ticket inspector at
rush hour, he is obliged to scrutinize every occurrence of a line-beginning
capitalized common noun with the impassible suspiciousness of a south Philadelphia
pawnbroker overdue for a lunch (i.e., cheesesteak) break. In schoolmarmishly punctilious theory, the
criterion of the appraisal is quite simple and clear-cut, albeit tryingly
tedious to apply: if the line-beginning capitalized noun 1) does not occur at
the beginning of a dialogue segment (Bernhard capitalizes every word in this
position, regardless of which part of speech it instances) 2) functions as the subject
of a verb that follows it, and 3) is not preceded by a relative pronoun, then
its counterpart in the translation deserves to be capitalized; otherwise, it
does not. “But surely,” you demur in
your best impression of a schoolchild in desperate, physiologically genuine
need of a bathroom-pass, “not all—nay, not even most!—non-relative clause
preceded subject-plus-verb combinations are the beginnings of sentences; surely
most of them are (like the present clause), mere subdivisions of
sentences. And then there are other
cases in which a noun clearly does deserve to be capitalized, despite not being
followed by a verb. Sentence fragments
(like the present one), for example.
Surely Mr Bernhard intended some more than negligible proportion of his
capitalized, line-beginning nouns to be considered in one of these two lights.” “Well then,” the schoolmarm counter-demurs as
sternly as if she were turning down your request for a bathroom pass on the
grounds that you (or Mr Bernhard) had fiddled your last ten bathroom breaks
into afternoon-long hooky sessions at the nearest Cineplex, “Mr Bernhard should
have thought of some way of signaling this intention before he set about
writing punctuation-free plays. He could
easily, for example—and a la Stefan George—have adopted a non-Teutonic
capitalization style; i.e., left his common nouns lowercase by default. But I suppose the fear of coming across as jugendstilisch
altmodisch preempted such an adoption.
When ever will you children learn that looking ‘uncool’ is not the worst
thing that can happen to you?” On the
whole, I have to say, I find the schoolmarm’s arguments quite convincing; and
on the whole my capitalization policy corresponds to the one that she would
enjoin—such that, for example, while Immanuel Kant’s original German
millionairess refers within the span of two lines to “…eine Menge erzherzöhglicher
Ringe / Brillanten [note the uppercase B], Diamenten, aus allen
Kaiserhäusern [note the absence of any verbs since “Brillanten”], and thereby
certainly leaves open the possibility of an implicitly full-stopped sentence
ending with “Ringe” and followed by a sentence-fragment beginning with a
capitalized “Brillanten,” my Anglophone millionairess refers within that same
two-line span to “…a heap of archducal rings / brilliants [note the lowercase B]
diamonds from all the imperial residences,” thereby implying that the two lines
comprise a single sentence that is terminated only immediately before the
following line’s inaugural “Finden,” whose capitalization, being that of a
verb, cannot have been accidental, and which I have accordingly transferred to
its Anglophone syntactic (albeit not semantic) counterpart “Don’t.” Nonetheless, I must confess to having
knowingly strayed from this policy more than occasionally for reasons that I
have always deemed just and yet not always found transparently clear. In the last segment of proper dialogue in Die
Berühmten, for example, the bass utters the following three lines:
“Champagner / Champagner / Champagner,” and while the schoolmarm would have had
me render them thus: “Champagne / champagne /champagne,” I have instead
rendered them thus: “Champagne / Champagne / Champagne,” thereby ending each
line with an invisible exclamation point when from a strictly syntactic point
of view an invisible comma or semicolon at the end of the first and second
lines (as implied by the schoolmarmish version) would have been perfectly
plausible. Plausible, yes, but somehow
wrong, possibly because the fist-pounding with which the stage directions tell
us the bass accompanies these last words suggests that they must at least end
as an exclamation, and it is hard to imagine a string of uncapitalized words
building up to anything more emphatic than a period (but why is it so
hard to do this?); and possibly also because in the absence of punctuation some
other typographical device must be employed to signal that a play as a
specifically spoken dramatic entity, as a succession of intelligible
verbal utterances, is here coming to an end. (The final scene, in consisting entirely of stage
directions, effectively marks Die Berühmten’s permanent desertion of the
dramatic mode in favor of quasi-novelistic narration-cum-description.)
But all this, from the first “something too much
of this” above to the preceding sentence, has essentially been a mere
propaedeutic to the following caveat-cum-prescription: as I have on the whole
been quite sparing, quite n*****dly, in my apportionment of capital letters in
my translations of the plays, the user of them, be he a solitary reader, a
stage director, or an actor, must work out their pneumatic rhythm—the placement
in them of accents and pauses—largely on his own. He must expect as a near-given that between
any two capitalized letters there will be stations at which he will have to
pause without cue, and he must determine where these stations are by simply
(but often far from expeditiously) reading the stretch aloud (or, what comes
nearly to the same thing, imagining it being read aloud by someone else), and
stopping whenever it seems to him that he would be making so much as a jot less
sense to the listener by pressing ahead.
On one level, as they say, I feel really bad about, as they say,
imposing such a tedious chore on the user, especially as I suspect that
ninety-nine times out of a hundred we, the user and I, would agree on where
these pausing-stations should occur, and that nine times out of ten we would
even agree on which punctuation signs should mark them. But what can I say? My hands are, as they say, tied. “‘My hands are tied,’ you say,” you say, “and
yet you have certainly been nimble- fingered enough to insert into your translations words, phrases—nay, whole
sentences—whose siblings—nay, eighteenth cousins nineteen times removed—the
reader will search for in vain in the original text—e.g., ‘sweeping judgment’
for Pauschalurteil (literally pocket judgment), ‘HERR HOLZINGER, a
manager at Herrenstein’s firm,’ for ‘DIREKTOR HOLZINGER, ein
Angestellter’ (literally, DIRECTOR HOLZINGER, an employee), ‘burning
your blowtorch at both ends’ for hängt man an einem Kälberstrick
(literally, hangs everything on a calving rope), even ‘do you really think you can say anything without
picking up a broom?’ for ‘Können S’alles ausweitern, nicht” (literally, Can
y’expand everything, not.). “Why,
your confounded cheek fairly buggers description!” Oh yeah?
Well your confounded description buggers my cheek! But seriously, Rudiger, you have in fact hit
on a genuine ethical paradox confronted by the translator—a paradox not
unlike the sileni of Alcibiades, as my maternal grandfather’s partial
namesake Salvatore Camporeale seldom missed an opportunity to say—the paradox
that the translator’s tender regard for his source text’s reputation for virtue
obliges him in certain settings to take certain liberties with her that the
most abandoned seventeenth-century rake would blush to inflict on a half-shilling
St. James’s whore, even as it more predictably obliges him in certain other
settings to refrain from begging certain favors of her that the most morally
precise seventeenth-century Puritan parson would not blush to request of the
most respectable married woman in his congregation. Now, as for the raisin debtor for such an
apparently schizoid disposition: the first setting (the whoremasterly one) is
one in which a given infelicity or difficulty appears to issue from differences
of linguistic decorum between the source language and the target language,
whereas the second (or parsonic) setting is one in which the I or D in Q seems
to issue from some private whim of the author; and when dealing with a source
text hailing from a literary tradition as abundantly represented by middle-of-the-road
English translations as is the German-language tradition, one owes it to that
text to play down such linguistic quirks as are common to all German-language
writers, lest one’s reader suppose that one’s author is addicted to
impersonating, say, Martians or the Amish (“What’s up with all these as saids
thees and thous? I didn’t
notice anything like them in the translation of Doktor Faustus I just
finished reading.”) [The treatment of dialect—such linguistic quirks as are
common to only a minority of the source text’s speakers and writers—is a
trickier matter {see Note 2 on Elizabeth
II below}], whereas when the quirks are genuine idiosyncrasies (i.e.,
components of an idiom) one owes it the source text to include them—or
at least some equally off-putting Anglophone approximation—lest one’s reader
suppose that one’s author is just ein gewöhnlicher Kerl, a veritable Hans
Zweiliterhumpen. Now the vagaries
of Bernhard’s capitalization and punctuation style seem apodictically enough to
present be quirks of the idiomatic sort and to demand the most gingerly
parsonic treatment—in other words, I am pretty sure that most German-language
writers, or even more specifically German-language playwrights, do not
capitalize and punctuate their plays in the Bernhardian manner, and so I have gone
out of my way not to tinker with this style; to convey it as best I can with Lelyesque
fidelity, however annoyingly counterproductive I may find it (and I do
find it awfully annoyingly counterproductive). The likes of Direktor Holzinger, hängt
man an einem Kälberstrick, and so on, on the other hand, seem to me to
belong to the general Germanic sort of linguistic peculiarity, and to demand
whoremasterly treatment. “But surely,”
you demur, “there are whoremasters and whoremasters, or rather—to refer to
another term in your conceit, by way of getting away from this unsavory rapscallion
the WM—there are liberties and liberties.
Clearly one can’t just plunk down any old string of words—e.g., “Furiously sleep ideas green
colorless”—in place of Direktor Holzinger or hängt man an
einem Kälberstrick. Surely there
must be some rationale for the libertine’s vector—for how far and in which
direction he roams.” Indeed there is, but the distance and direction must be
calibrated for each specific case (or at most, as small set of cases), such
that one can never explain why one took a certain liberty except in specific
terms (or at most, in terms of highly straitened generality). “And how does one get around this problem of
ungeneralizability?” Why, by setting
down one’s specific, discrete rationales in a series of targeted notes—i.e.,
notes of the footerly sort that I long ago promised this second section of
these Notes would prevailingly consist, a promise that I am sure I can dream of
fulfilling only if I immediately leave off this discursive vein and proceed as
follows:
Footnote-like Notes to Specific Plays
I. Elizabeth II
1. So then—as I may as
well start with a passage that is fresh in the reader’s mind—why did I elect to
change “DIREKTOR HOLZINGER, ein Angestellter” to “HERR HOLZINGER, a
manager at Herrenstein’s firm”? First(ly) and most exigently, because while in
the Germanosphere it is considered normal and not at all pedantic to refer to
or formally address a person by prefixing to his surname his functional job
title, here in the Anglosophere, our prefatory titles derive for the most part
from generic academic qualifications (Dr Spock, Professor Kelp) or in
default of these, generic respectable personhood (Mr Spock, Miss
Piggy). So at minimum, Direktor
Holzinger must be transformed into Mr Holzinger, or, in a sop to
Germanophone plausibility that I have provisionally renounced in subsequent
translations, Herr Holzinger. But
in jettisoning Direktor (meaning “manager”) and leaving in Angestellter
(meaning “employee), I deprive the reader of certain information about the nature
and status of Herr Holzinger’s job—I leave open the possibility (and indeed
incline the reader to infer the probability) that Herr Holzinger is a mere
janitor or mailroom clerk—hence the necessity of substituting “manager” for
“employee.” (“Executive” would probably have been more in line with present-day
Anglophone business-speak, but I find it a shade too pompous, at least for
application to such a colorless nonentity as Holzinger shows himself to be.) As for the postfix of “at Herrenstein’s
firm,” I have added it by way of forestalling the question I should immediately
ask upon reading that a certain person was a “manager” plain and simple, viz.,
“What is he a manager of—conflicts? mutual
funds? a 7-11?” I confess that the above substitution-cum-addition,
while despoiling the reader’s nose of no skin, does not amount to an unalloyed
gain for the pure spectator of the play, who, in perforce knowing Holzinger
from start until his first appearance as “a mere mister,” will be denied the
undeniable albeit negligible thrill of anticipating the arrival on the scene of
a person of at least marginal authority somewhere, a full-fledged director
or manager. Directors (of plays,
not businesses) who are skittish about this shortfall certainly have my
blessing to append a “from the office” or “your lackey at the company” to the
first mention of the character (by Richard, on p. 15 of the PDF version).
2. “If yah wanna piece
o’ me / help y’self,” attributed by Count Neutz to the Kaiser on p. 64 of the
PDF version, reads in the original “geh’ hörn S’ auf / ham S’ mi gern,”
evidently a broad Viennese -dialectal approximation of “geh(e) hören Sie auf /
haben Sie mich gern.” The first of these
two strings of text may be translated almost word for word as “Now stop it”;
the second literally means “Have me gladly,” but according to the dictionaries
it is also an idiom meaning “I’ll see you further first”—an oddly clunky and
recherché alternative to such tried-and-true Anglophone expressions of defiance
as “I’d like to see you try” and “over my dead body.” So semantically speaking in the second line
Neutz’s Kaiser is essentially iterating the first line with a bit more
peremptory oomph: “Now stop it, or else…” And between the two of them these
lines amount to the couplet “Now stop it / now stop it, or else…,” hardly the
sort of remark one expects to elicit “a peal of uproarious laughter
that is slow to subside,” as it is said to do. Why then does Neutz’s audience find it so
funny? No doubt partly because of the Kaiser’s
accent, which, whatever else it may be—including an accurate impression of his
actual one—is decidedly sub-posh and therefore intrinsically comical coming
from the mouth of an emperor. So at
minimum the translation must suggest a plebian accent. But is the funniness really all in the
accent? I would wager not, on the
assumption that in German as in English have is one of those verbs that
is always amenable to being taken in a naughty sense—that in other words in
saying “Have me gladly” Neutz’s Kaiser may be construed not only as defying the
other fellow to take a swing at him but also as inviting him to have sex with
him. So the translation must likewise
invite both pugilistic and sexual interpretations, as I believe “[Do] you want
a piece of me?” patently does in the light of piece of’s
ineluctable Lockean tendency to bring in tow the word ass and thereby
put the reader in mind of one of our language’s most beloved metonyms for the
sexual act. But because “Do you want a
piece of me?” on its own sounds a bit too coldly rhetorical to my ears, because
“haben Sie mich gern” has overtones of outright gemütlich hospitality that
are decidedly wanting in “[D]YWaPoM?”—“I would be glad, nay delighted,
if you had me,” “hSmg” fairly squeals—I have felt compelled to absorb “[D]YWaPoM?”
into a full-fledged “if…then” construction terminating in the sole
indispensable expression of every good Anglophone host—viz. “help yourself.” Now, as for the dialect or accent, it is the
generic petit-bourgeois judeo-italick, four boroughs-’n’-four counties New York
City-area accent that everybody knows from the works of Messrs Scorcese, Allen,
Coppola, “Dice” Clay et al.; as near as I can render it without resorting to
the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association. Whether this dialect is really the best
quasi-equivalent of the Viennese dialect is a question that is certainly open
to debate and that will doubtless remain so until some serviceable consensus
arises out of the ten thousand per annum and counting-strong tally of that
classic parlor game played in Anglophone drawing rooms from Juneau to
Jodhpur—viz. “Is Vienna the New York, the New Orleans, or the Norwich (England)
of the Germanosphere?” All I know is
that ever since I heard New York native Jerry Stiller inaugurate a session of
fisticuffs with Julia-Louis Dreyfus by way of “You want a piece of me” spoken
in this dialect, I have been unable to imagine “YWaPoM?” uttered in any other,
and to the extent that millions of my fellow Anglophones cannot but share my
incapacity, I am being faithful to the heritage of “YWaPoM?” (if to nothing
else) in forcing the Kaiser to pronounce it in cod New-Yorkese.
Immanuel Kant
1. Millionairhead
(p. 54 in the PDF version) corresponds to Bernhard’s Millionärrin, a
portmanteau word composed of Millionär (i.e., “millionaire”) and Närrin,
the feminine form of Narr, meaning “fool.” In asking the millionairess’s permission to
call her Millionärrin, then, Kant is asking her for permission to call
her simultaneously a millionaire and a female fool. In millionairhead I am quite certain
that I have captured Millionärrin’s foolishness, as my 1990 Concise
Oxford Dictionary defines airhead in its second, non-military, “esp.
US sl[ang].” sense as “a silly or foolish person”; and I am pretty well
sure that I have captured its femininity, in that airhead is one of
those terms of opprobrium that while not being pegged by the private parts to a
specific sex tends almost unfailingly to be applied to one and not to the
other. (Just as James Boswell averred
that he had “never heard blockhead applied to a woman,” I can aver that
I have never heard airhead applied to a man.) What I am certain I have not captured
in millionairhead is the virtual phonological identity of the original
term with its substitute, an identity that renders it not only possible but
almost inevitable for the millionairess to be “flatter[ed]” (as she says she is)
rather than offended by Kant’s request. Millionärrin,
you see, is only an extra r away from Millionärin or “millionairess,”
an r that does not affect the pronunciation of the ä that
precedes it; such that Bernhard’s German-speaking Kant can privately savor his
little jibe in the secure assumption that the millionairess will fail to realize
that he is taking the mickey out of her.
This is obviously not a luxury so quiescently enjoyable by my
English-speaking Kant, for while the h in “airhead” is plausibly (if
only just plausibly) elidable (i.e., on the pattern of the old-school
pronunciation of “forehead” as forrid) there is no way in heck that one
can pronounce that final d so as to make it mistakable for an s. Still, I do think it fairly plausible that
the Millionairess should hear the “air” in “airhead” not as the first syllable
of that word but rather as the last syllable of the word “millionaire”; that
she should, in other words, hear the entire coinage not as “millionairhead” but
rather as “millionaire-head”—a bemusing construction, to be sure, but hardly an
“unflattering” one. “But isn’t this
plausible mishearability very much a two-edged sward, in that the audience no
less than the millionairess is likely not to pick up on Kant’s joke?” Yes, but given that the sward is even sharper
on both ends in the original German, it is clearly Bernhard and not me who
ought to be taken to task for this hole in IK’s epistemological economy. I personally—that is to say, in just shooting
from the hip of my gut feeling—think that this epistemological hole is no
oversight but a deliberate act of self-vandalization on Bernhard’s part, that
Bernhard is just being a dick, as we say in the American sector of the
Anglosphere, in keeping the pure spectator out of the loop of the Millionär(r)in
joke; that this hole is just one of the thousands of gestures—e.g., the
afore-beatentodeath absence of punctuation, the ever-sketchy indications of
décor, and the generally nonexistent indications of costume—whereby Bernhard
gives vent to his oft-expressed contempt for the exigencies of the people who
produce and consume live, in-the-flesh drama.
2. Speaking of TB’s fudging up or being a dick, the continuity
error occasioned by Mrs Kant’s declaration that Ernst Ludwig is mute after he
has spoken eight times is all Bernhard’s.
Of course, one might argue that Mrs Kant is meant to be mistaken and
that this lapse (as it would then have to be regarded) points up her bourgeois
hauteur in showing how flagrantly oblivious she is of even the most glaringly conspicuous
traits of the hired help. But this would
tend to make her seem in certain respects even more out of touch with the hic
et nunc than Kant (who treats Ernst Ludwig’s capacity to speak as a matter
of course), and to what end? I am not
suggesting here that it is impossible that Bernhard deliberately put inaccurate
words into Mrs Kant’s mouth, but merely that if he did, he neglected to work
out why they needed to be put there.
3. The Millionairess’s
characteristic ejaculation “Oh yeah” corresponds to the German achja,
which in most cases may legitimately be translated as “Ah yes,” or “Oh yes” or
“Oh yeah,” or even (if one wants to get kinky or affect to seem streetwise) “Ah
yeah”; but in some cases must be translated as something entirely different. So regrettably a few of those achjas had
to become “Oh well”s, and my millionairess to become a trifle less irritating
than Bernhard’s. As to why I opted for
“oh yeah” rather than “ah yes,” autc.—well, it just seems both more American
and more “airheaded” than the alternatives.
To be sure, plenty of clever Brits say “Oh yeah,” but from “Oh yes” or
“Ah yes” (and unlike from “Oh yeah”) it is an easy transition to “I say,” and
thence an even easier transition to “I rather would fancy marmite sarnis for
tea today.”
III. The Celebrities
1. The difficulty of
producing an adequate English title for this play shows how even so basic and
apparently straightforward a distinction as the one between literal and
idiomatic meaning can be annulled by the vagaries and vaguenesses [No, these
two are not essentially the same word: check your COD if you do not
believe me.] of history and “culture”—or, to be more precise and honest, by the
limits of the translator’s knowledge of these vees and vees. Its original German title, Die Berühmten,
consists of the nominative plural form of the definite article followed by the
plural of the adjective berühmt, recognizable as a de facto noun from
the facts that it is capitalized and not followed by another word. Lower-case berühmt may be translated
variously as “famous,” “celebrated,” or “renowned,” but it derives from a verb berühmen,
meaning “to praise,” “to extol,” or “to glorify,” after the fashion our own
adjectives “bespoke(n)” from “to speak,” “bedaubed” from “daub,” etc. Now, when we call somebody “famous,” we
usually mean that he is both widely known and celebrated, but we may mean that
he is merely widely known, widely-known full stop; that while scads of
people certainly have heard of him, it is possible that not a single scademe
among them has so much as praised the color of his sneaker-laces. Case in point: the recumbent anthropomorphic
glyph on the yellow CUIDADO: PISO MOJADO signs that bestrew the lobbies of our
hotels and office buildings—more famous than, say, Michael Phelps, but hardly
as celebrated. (To be sure, if we want
to convey that the person is both widely known and detested, we use a different
adjective—“notorious.”) This conventional
ambiguity attending “famous”—an ambiguity that to the extent that an obvious
etymology can be trusted, apparently does not attend berühmt—inclines
the translator away from kinsmen of “famous”; and this disinclination is
strengthened by the reflection that our lexicon does not contain a countable
noun derived from “fame,” such that in sticking to a “fame” derivative, he
would have to call the play something like The Famous People, which of
course sounds awful. But suppose he goes for a “celebrated”
derivative. Is he then obliged to call
the play The Celebrated People?
Of course not, for our language lexicon does contain a countable noun
derived from celebrate—viz., “celebrity.”
And as The Celebrities is what I have in fact chosen to call my
translation, the present pseudo-footnote would seem to have exhausted its raison
de continuer in the preceding sentence.
And yet it continues. Why? Because a celebrity in all varieties of
present-day English (save, conceivably albeit none-too-plausibly, the
Indo-Pakistani one) does not denote a person who is celebrated tout court but
rather a person who is celebrated in a certain way in certain places, or by
certain types of celebrators.
Celebrities are written about (and photographically depicted) in mega-mass
circulation magazines like People and Us (if it is still around),
which celebrate them mainly by recording how much weight they have gained or
lost recently and speculating on the exclusivity and solidity of their latest
sexual liaisons. Of Die Berühmten’s
eighteen characters (not counting the two servants but very much counting the
nine dummies) there is only one whom I would unreservedly call a celebrity in
this sense—viz., Arturo Toscanini, who was indeed gossiped about and
photographed ad nauseam in mega-mass circulation magazines throughout the 1930s
and 1940s, albeit—if only in the light of his advanced age—probably not in
quite so prurient a spirit as Brad and Angelina and Kate and Wills are now. Of the other seventeen, the most I would say
with confidence is that they are universally celebrated among other people of
the same job title within the Germanosphere–the Bass and by Richard Mayr by
other German-singing basses, the Tenor and Richard Tauber by other German-singing
tenors, and so on. “Do you actually have
the temerity, sir, to call the göttliche Lotte Lehmann, she who received
[,say,] a four-hour standing ovation at the Met, a mere German soprano’s
German soprano?” No, but I do actually
have the timidity not to call her a full-fledged celebrity in deference to the
fact that I had never heard of her until years after hearing of hundreds of
female vocalists (e.g., Ely Ameling, Lucia Popp, and Judith Raskin) whom I unhesitatingly
would debar from the pantheon of celebrityhood. You are now beginning to appreciate, I trust,
the practical benefits of the notion of famousness as against the notion of
celebrity-hood: to call someone famous allows him and his fans the full measure
of glory to which he is supposedly entitled without encroaching on the claims
to fame of rivals (e.g., to the title of greatest German-singing tenor or bass)
and super-rivals (e.g., to the title of the greatest tenor or bass tout
court); for fame, as Laurence Sterne recognized way back in the 1760s (albeit
that he used the word “reputation”), is a medium whose limits of propagation may
always be seen as coextensive with those of the entire world, even if that
world turns out to be “no more of” the actual entire world than “four English
miles diameter” around the “cottage” where the famous person dwells; such there
is no person too obscure to be regarded as famous by someone; whereas to dub
somebody a celebrity is automatically to assert that he is or ought to be known
by literally everybody the world over.
Bernhard himself (i.e., in his own character) evinced an irritation at
this very sort of bumptiousness on the part of another German analogue to
countable “celebrity” when he bristled at Krista Fleischmann’s designation of
the real-world counterparts of the characters in Woodcutters as Persönlichkeiten:
“Whether they are celebrities [Persönlichkeiten]
or not is debatable; there are, I believe, 40,000 writers in Austria; I very much doubt (laughs) that we have 40,000 celebrities.” (Yes, here I have once again had to avail
myself of the accursed C-word; this time because “personality” is current as a
countable noun only in compound forms [e.g., “television personality” and
“radio personality”].) In other words,
no matter how well-known an Austrian writer is to other Austrian writers, the
odds of his being a proper celebrity are remote in the light of the huge number
of writers in Austria (40,000) as against the tiny total number of Austrian
celebrities (100? 10? one [If only one, then that one is course Arnold
Schwarzenegger]?) across the board. If
only Fleischmann had called Woodcutters’s writers Berühmten,
and Bernhard had demurred at that word as forcefully as he actually did at Persönlichkeiten! For then the
translator could be sure that he was not artificially amplifying, for example,
the Bass’s megalomania in making him proclaim “I am a celebrity [Berühmtheit]” or the publisher’s sycophancy in making him
conjecture that his fellow dinner-guests are “at the pinnacle of the
internationality of [their] celebrity [Ruhmes].”
2. The Bass, as
Bernhard indicates in his dramatis personae, is a baron; and in the original
German text he is addressed as Herr Baron on numerous occasions. I have rendered each of these Herr Barons
as “my lord.” And why did I not rather
render them by some formula that did (or does) not reduce his barony to mere
generic nobility? Why, because “my lord”
is one of only two forms (the other being the equally generic “your lordship”)
by which a sub-ducal noble may properly be addressed in our tongue. “Baron” on its own would have debased the
title to a buddy-buddy nickname on the level of “Doc” or “Coach,” and Herr
Baron untranslated would have thrown up a screen of Germanophone
inscrutability that, as I hinted earlier, I have of late been sedulously keen
to avoid erecting. No, Sir: “my lord”
is just the mot juste (pr. “Moe Juiced”). In an Anglosphere wherein though barons,
earls, marquesses, and viscounts teem in greater numbers than at any earlier
point since the Norman Conquest, these selfsame peers suffer themselves to be
addressed a la Joe Bloggs by such handles as Patrick, Seb, and Melvyn; in such
an Anglosphere, I say, “my lord” conveys a note of anachronistic servility that
is equally appropriate to an Austria that had been without a legally recognized
nobility for nearly sixty years as of 1976, the year of Die Berühmten’s
premiere. (It will be seen that the “my
lord”-ing of the Bass will leave the pure spectator in much the same sort of
semi-dark that he is left in by the “Herr”-ing of Direktor Holzinger, but in
this case if he sticks around long enough—viz. until a few minutes into Scene
I—he will be enlightened—viz., by the Conductor’s explicit reference to the
Bass’s barony.)
3.
Verkrüppelung, the thing
and quality to which Adorno is said by the publisher to attribute all artistic
greatness, presented me with pretty much the same difficulty as did Berühmten,
namely its grammatical incompatibility with a semantically perfect English
twin. The krüppel in Verkrüppelung
is as vrai an ami allemand as an English word could desire: it looks
almost exactly like what it actually means—“cripple.” And that “ung” at the end of Verkrüppelung is indeed a cognate of the particle
“ing.” As for the “Ver” prefix:
it is a cognate and synonym of the Latin “per,” meaning “thoroughly” or
“through and through” or “completely.”
But let us not worry about that prefix for now; let us assume that it
can pretty much be omitted from the translation (as it can from the translation
of plenty of other German words—both “hindern” and “verhindern,” for example,
may be rendered as “to hinder,” “to prevent,” “to impede,” etc. [such that in
dealing with a conspicuous juxtaposition of the two verbs (i.e., as uttered by
the Director in the second prologue) in order to avoid flagrant repetition
while acknowledging the lexical overlap, I have been obliged to do some
violence to the sense in translating hindern as “prevent” and verhindern as “preempt”]); let us take the negligible liberty of Englishing Verkrüppelung
as “crippling.” We must then still
acknowledge that “crippling,” unlike scads of other English “–ing” terminating
words (e.g., “acting,” “hunting,” and “lying”) has yet to enjoy much success as
a gerund—that is to say, a kind of honorary noun denoting the activity
accomplished by the verb. By default we
take “It is as easy as lying” to mean “It is as easy as to tell a lie,” whereas
“It is as harmful as crippling” we are more likely to take to mean “It is no
less harmful than it is causative of a crippled condition” than “It is as
harmful as to cripple.” In other words,
we are less likely to regard “crippling” as a gerund than as a participle—i.e.,
an honorary adjective. Even less likely
are we to regard “crippling” as one of those -ing-terminating words that has
graduated (a la “misunderstanding”) to the status of a full-fledged proper
countable noun, the sort of word that any translation of Bernhard’s Verkrüppelung
perforce must be, in the light of the dozen or so occasions on which the
playwright sees fit to prefix the big V-word with some German equivalent of
“a(n),” “the,” “his,” “her,” or “their.”
So I was regrettably obliged to search for a more decorous synonym for
this gawky, ungainly “crippling” noun, to seek out a word that meant “the thing
in virtue of possessing which a cripple is a cripple,” which search immediately
yielded the pair “handicap” and “disability” and then stalled for good. I trust that I do not need to specify at
length the shortcomings of these two words qua Verkrüppelung-alternative,
as to do so would be merely to iterate a certain boilerplate so-called anti-PC curmudgeon’s
tirade that I trust the reader knows much better than the Gettysburg Address or
“To Be or Not to Be,” a tirade to the effect of “When I was a nipper, we called
them there gimps cripples; but that wasn’t nice enough; so we had to start
calling ’em ‘handicapped’; but that wasn’t nice enough, so we had to start
calling ‘’em ‘disabled’; but that wasn’t nice enough, so we had to start
calling ‘em ‘differently abled.’ What’s
next—calling ’em ‘hung like a blue whale on performance-enhancing drugs?’ Doh!/What
a kantree!” “So much for not iterating
the tirade, YFC.” I beg your pardon:
that was a radically condensed paraphrase, not an iteration. In any event/in short, the shared historical
burden of handicap and disability obliged me to venture into the
second tier of Verkrupplung’s dictionary-certified Anglophone analogues,
within which tier I discovered and eventually resigned myself to deformity. In point of fact, while undoubtedly semantically
inferior to any c-word derivative, “deformity” has a decided edge over “handicap”
and “disability” in more than one salient albeit not-quite overriding
respect. First because not necessarily
lesser, it is a perfect prosodic match for Verkrüppelung, consisting as
it does of four syllables tapping out an iamb followed by a pyrrhic, and thus
facilitating the transmission of the intermittent metricality that I wrote the
reader’s eyes off about earlier. Second,
“deformity” happens to be one of the classic antitheses of “beauty”—“ugliness”’s
older upmarket sibling, as it were (case in point, The Deformities of
Johnson, a satirical anthology of Samuel Johnson’s writings published in
response to an earlier collection called The Beauties of Johnson); such
that were the Publisher’s assertion that “Absolute beauty does not fascinate,” preceded
by an assertion that “People with disabilities always exert a fascination” it
would seem a virtual non sequitur by comparison with the assertion that it
actually follows in my translation, viz. “People with deformities always”
&c. Indeed, out of this particular counterfactual
mismatching one may fashion a kind of creation myth for the replacement in
English of “cripple” and its derivatives by euphemisms derived from “disable.” It would seem that the condition by which a
cripple is afflicted—whether a withered leg, an extra thumb, or a missing eye—must
always be something that not only makes the performance of certain acts harder
for him than for normal people, but also makes him less cosmetically attractive,
less shapely, than normal people.
“Disabled”et al., in purging “crippled” et al. of this cosmetic stratum,
allowed everyone to pretend that the whole kerfuffel was really only about the impairment
of capacity, whereas what the crippled actually resented most of all was being
thought less pretty than their uncrippled contemporaries. Well, as I said, this is only a creation
myth. And in any case, as long as our
species continues to be blessed by deformities—from strawberry birthmarks to extra nipples (among men at least) to missing
wisdom teeth—that are not also disabilities, “deformity” will never afford an
altogether satisfactory translation of Verkrüppelung, whence the present
pseudo-footnote.
4.
The publisher’s quotations of Novalis are all genuine and accurate, with
the exception of one that I have translated as “Seriousness must be merry /
pain must shimmer with seriousness,” wherein the word “pain” corresponds to the
word Schmerz, which in Bernhard’s text stands in the place occupied by Scherz—meaning
“joke” or “merriment”--in Novalis’s original aphorism. So the quotation ought actually to read
“Seriousness must be merry / A joke [or “jokiness,” “merriment,” etc.] must shimmer with seriousness.” Naturally one’s inner AP English teacher
assumes that the insertion of the extra “m,” while inadvertent on the
publisher’s part is quite deliberate on his so-called creator’s, that it is a deftly
thrifty means of pointing up the publisher’s fatuity (or inanity). And so it probably is, but I believe there is
a real albeit slim chance that it is just a typo. (Bernhard complained that editions of his
works were full of them.) Note that I
did not say that I believed there was a chance that the mistake was Bernhard’s,
that it was his rather than the publisher’s eyes or memory that was at fault,
because for that to be plausible the quote as printed in the play, however
asinine its upshot, would still have to make some sort of sense–the way that,
for example, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds” makes sense although
it is merely a truncated and misleadingly banal version of Emerson’s original trenchant
apothegm, viz. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” (See Next Stop Wonderland starring
Hope Davis for an entire movie built around this particular misquotation of
this particular apothegm.) Bernhard’s
publisher’s misquotation, though, is logically incoherent. The original aphorism is essentially a chiastically
framed paradox—it states twice that a certain thing (seriousness) is one of
its classical antitheses (merriment or jokiness), the only effective difference
between the two statements being the order of the two things, which are swapped
for each other the second time round: “1) Seriousness is jokiness. 2) Jokiness is (or “must shimmer with”)
seriousness.” AB
BA
the
statement in general terms of a received wisdom-confuting paradox followed by
an exemplification of that paradox: “Seriousness [--contrary to what you
believe--] must be merry (Statement) / A joke [i.e., a particular instance of
merriment] must shimmer with seriousness.” (Exemplification) The publisher’s quotation is a statement of
the same general paradox followed by an equally general statement that
reasserts the very bit of received wisdom that the paradox was intended to
undermine. “Seriousness[—contrary to
what you believe--]must be merry / Pain [--in exact conformity with what you
believe--] must shimmer with seriousness.”
At bottom it is logically coextensive with the sentence “Black is white,
and white is white,” which prompts one to conclude that everything is white and
that therefore whiteness is an otiose and meaningless concept. Clearly on the whole Bernhard regards his
celebrities as men and women of low genius, but I am not at all sure that he
regards them as so stupid as to be incapable of recognizing such flagrant
nonsensicality as this. And I think we
should be especially wary of assigning preeminence in stupidity to the
publisher given that 1) Bernhard himself never spoke of Novalis but with
unqualified veneration (that is to say, absent the sort of caricaturistic
lampooning with which he always leavened his acknowledgments of debt to, say,
Schopenhauer and Kant), b) the animal head assigned to the publisher in the
last two scenes is that of a fox, the proverbially least stupid of all furry
beasts, and, most materially, 3) the publisher gets the last word (not counting
the bass’s chants of “Champagne”) in the play, and through it enunciates a
sentiment that resonantly echoes dozens of Bernhard’s depreciations of
performing artists both in his own voice and in the voices of characters who,
say what one will about them, are certainly not morons.
5. “Burn your blowtorch at both ends” for
“hang everything on a calving-rope.”
For an explanation—or, at any rate, rationalization—of this improbable
metaphoric vehicular transformation, one must consult the metaphor on which the
calving-rope metaphor riffs, the metaphor to which the bass pointedly contrasts
“HEoaC-R”--viz. “hängen alle an einem Faden,” which literally means “to
hang all things on one thread.” In its inclusion
of an exclusive burden-bearing medium (a basket in place of a thread) this
would appear to be a kid glove-tight translational fit into our English “put
all one’s eggs in one basket,” and I concede that in certain settings “PAOEiOB”
probably does fit “HAaeF” like a potholder’s mitten. Why only like a potholder’s mitten
even in these settings? Because in
“PAOEiOB” the emphasis is on the fragility of the burden rather than of the
medium: one is meant to worry not that the bottom of the basket will give way
but that the eggs, being a byword for frangibility, will break thanks to any
number of plausible mishaps, none of which need cause any damage to the
basket. But in “HAaeF” the emphasis is
on the fragility of the medium rather than of the burden: the “all” in question
could for all we know consist of a gross of indestructible twenty-pound
titanium bowling balls, whereas we know that the thread, being a byword for
snappability, cannot support any ponderable weight for long even if it is
itself spun from titanium. And in our
play this second emphasis is very much to the foreground, for “HAaeF” is adduced
in it immediately after the bass’s generalization that “Young people think
they can
indulge themselves in everything,” which in turn immediately follows his
upbraiding of the tenor for dreaming of eating ice cream only hours before he
is to sing and leads into the director’s woeful tale of actors who drink and
whore themselves into a state of permanent professional incapacity. In these cases, the alle or “all
things” is clearly the performing artist’s collection of bad habits, and the
thread is clearly his talent or livelihood as an artist. Hence it is advisable to substitute for “HAaeF”
some idiomatic English metaphor wherein the term corresponding to “all things” is
manifestly destructive, lest the reader or spectator wonder why these
pernicious habits are being implicitly likened to something as wholesome as a
bunch of talent-eggs; hence “they burn their candle at both ends.” Now, as for the necessity of replacing
“calving-rope” with “blowtorch”: first of all, a calving-rope is a looped
length of rope or twine used in the extraction from the bovine womb of an incipient
newborn cow or bull child, a load of considerable weight and limited
tractability. Such that in saying that
after the age of forty one starts hanging everything on one of these here calving-ropes
instead of on a thread, the bass may mean either that one then continues
indulging in one’s established vices but on a securer financial or reputational
foundation; or (as seems more likely, in the light of the tetchy rejoinder the
metaphor provokes from the soprano) that one then exploits this securer
foundation by indulging these vices with more intensity or augmenting them with
new vices. In either case, the analogue
to the calving-rope in the translation ought to bear the same relation to a
candle as a calving-rope does to a thread: it ought to be both substantially
bigger (i.e., both longer and thicker) than its predecessor and capable of withstanding
much more vigorous and protracted assaults on the thing to which it owes its
integrity (tensile strength in the case of the thread, combustible fuel in the
case of the candle). At the same time,
though, the calving-rope analogue ought not to be geometrically bigger
and stronger than the thread analogue; for after all, a calving-rope is not a drawbridge-chain
or a suspension-bridge cable: like a thread, it is something that a single
human being can directly put to use with his own two hands. And finally, the CRA ought to be a more
specialized and complicated tool than a candle just as a calving-rope is a more
specialized and complicated tool than a thread.
Whence “to burn your blowtorch at both ends.” I concede that the analogy is not perfect;
that it would be better if the CRA retained the candle’s non-distinction
between container and fuel; such that the application of heat to its base would
result in the immediate if gradual (and silent) consumption of both, rather
than the gradual consumption of container followed by the sudden (and
explosive) consumption of fuel. In
return, though, I demand the concession that the application of heat to the
base of an ordinary candle will cause it not properly to burn but merely to melt,
such that to make such a candle properly burnable at both ends would require an
extension of its basal wick a good inch or two beyond its normal limits; and
from imagining such an operation it is surely an easy transition to imagining a
blowtorch with a second ignitable jet at its base, as which chimerical entity I
accordingly beg the reader to picture the blowtorch in my translation.
2 comments:
Dear Sir, first of all we would like to congratulate you for your amazing translation of Thomas Bernhard's "Immanuel Kant", your interesting analysis on that play and your blog in general. We translated into Greek this wonderful play (directly from German, but your translation too was very interesting and helpful for us) and we are ready to perform it in Athens (in Greek Art Theatre Karolos Koun), on February the 1st. In addition, we are about to publish our translation and we are interested in including some passages of your analysis (translated into Greek) in the introduction of the book, after mentioning your name and your blog, with your permission, of course. If you are interested in our suggestion, we would be glad if you could contact us by e-mail (ernstludwig.th@gmail.com ). Yours sincerely, Giannos Perlegas and Ismini Theodoropoulou
As a monoglot Brit, I am deeply beholden to you for this wonderful translation and exegesis of certain plays by Thomas Bernhard. Your exegesis is particularly relished for its deep perception of why the plays are written in the way they are - with their (what I guess to be) original subtlety, shining-through. I came to discover your work through asking Google if a translation of a lecture by Ingeborg Bachmann existed ... and found your blog.
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