Thomas Bernhard's Minetti: what is comedy, what is tragedy?

 

Thomas Bernhard's Minetti (in German, above) is set in the lobby of a hotel in Ostend on New Year’s Eve, where the eponymous legendary actor has a rendezvous with a famous theatre director to discuss his comeback 30 years after having ignominiously turned his back on the stage. As he waits for the director to arrive to thrash out the plan for him to play King Lear – ‘the most important dramatic work in all of world literature’ – Minetti harangues anyone he comes across – the hotel receptionist, the hotel porter, the other guests – on his fatal decision to become an actor, the artist’s life of anguish and failure, madness, illness and death. 

At one point, Minetti says: 

‘if you really think about tragedy 

with a clear head 

you can see at heart it's really comedy 

and vice versa’ 

This absurdist paradox – tragedy is comedy and comedy is tragedy – recurs throughout Bernhard’s novels and plays and ultimately comes from Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the intellectual and artistic shadows – like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Wittgenstein and Glenn Gould – always cropping up in Bernhard’s work. In The World as Will and Representation, the German philosopher writes: 

‘The life of every individual, if we survey it as a whole and in general, and only lay stress upon its most significant features, is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy. For the deeds and vexations of the day, the restless irritation of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all through chance, which is ever bent upon some jest, scenes of a comedy. But the never-satisfied wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes unmercifully crushed by fate, the unfortunate errors of the whole life, with increasing suffering and death at the end, are always a tragedy. Thus, as if fate would add derision to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but in the broad detail of life must inevitably be the foolish characters of a comedy.’