Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard is often lauded for his Beckettian absurdity and dense prose. His first-person narrators are disillusioned and bitter, and I find them particularly useful lenses through which to glare at post-modern hypocrisy.
I’ve read just a few of the prolific Bernhard’s works. I began with the philosophically compact “Woodcutters,” which follows the musing and denigrations of the narrator at a single dinner party. I then read “The Loser,” which follows a failed pianist obsessed with Glenn Gould. Most recently, I read “Yes,” about a mentally distressed scientist who finds salvation in the company of a Persian woman and her Swiss husband.
What I find most striking about Bernhard’s wielding of language is the utter containment of his grand and interrogative theorizations on the human condition in page counts that typically number no more than 200. He is a voice of the century that is defined by limits.
Often, critics write Bernhard off as death-obsessed and drearier than Kafka, but his writing isn’t wasted on those who aren’t too critical to bear him.
Bernhard’s works are polemical and placed in the socio-cultural climate of Austria, but can be extrapolated by all contemporary artistic institutions and pursuits. Submerged in the hysteria of his narrators, they reflect the lesioned mind of modernity.
Bernhard is a moralist in the tradition of Karl Kraus. What raises this denunciation of his critique of cultural parochialism, far surpassing the level of mere satire, however, is Bernhard’s ironic tone of voice and musical sensibility. His narrators’ own credibility is constantly undermined by the anxious excessiveness of his attacks, which the reader gradually comes to see as being aimed as much at himself and his own fear of death.
His language loops ceaselessly, exhausting itself through repetition. Cutting critique eventually settles into self-implication. In “Woodcutters,” the narrator’s declaration “[i]ndeed, I hated all of them, because they were in every way the exact opposite of myself,” captures Bernhard’s central rhythm into annihilation. The dinner party, the failed pianist and the obsessed scientist all discover the same impasse where sharp critique turns inwards.
Bernhard’s tact lies in this enclosure. His novels end not with resolution but with saturation, as if the mind can only survive by saying the thing one final time. What remains is not despair but exposure, which stages modern consciousness trapped in its own intelligence.
