‘That was Thomas Bernhard’

This is a very useful documentary from Austrian state television (ORF) made shortly after the death of Thomas Bernhard in 1989, which reviews the trajectory of his work – from young poet, to debut novelist, playwright, autobiographer and novelist-playwright – through various television interviews he gave.

Thus, the film starts with Bernhard discussing his rather gloomy and earnest poetry – collected in In Hora Moris and Under the Iron of the Moon and On Earth and in Hell –

I cannot sleep,
for the circus has started up outside my window
and people are cheering!
As if through the grass of hell
I see their faces,
which bring this city
its destruction

– before Bernhard talks about his early novel Frost, then The Lime Works, in which Bernhard makes an aesthetic breakthrough, injecting a diabolical humour into the madness and rantings of his protagonists.

We then see Bernhard being interviewed about his first theatre works – A Party for Boris, The Famous, Minetti – before moving on to his multi-volume autobiographical work, published in English as Gathering Evidence, which describes his childhood and upbringing in what he calls Catholic National Socialist Austria, redeemed only by the influence of his grandfather, an intellectual, a failed writer but above all an iconoclast and nonconformist; and his near-fatal lung illness and hospitalisation as a young man.

The film charts Bernhard’s increasingly antagonistic relationship with Austria as through his novels and plays he spares no invective to castigate the country’s politics and culture and engages in thinly-disguised attacks on leading intellectual figures he has encountered over the years.

Bernhard’s loathing is partly contrived – ‘to explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear’. In many of the later interviews, Bernhard goes about trying to explain himself with a smirk on his face, apparently in full knowledge of how provocative he’s being and laughing about how offended his audience is.

Thus Bernhard’s taunting of his audience is part of a performance, with Austria as the stage, the entire Austrian population as his audience and he as a stand-up or a clown berating them and making them squirm.

The relationship between Bernhard and his Austrian audience grew so strained, the film shows, that his novel Cutting Timber: An Irritation, a coruscating and hilarious denunciation of former friends and bourgeois intellectual Vienna was, by court order, banned for libel, while his final play Heldenplatz, about continued antisemitism in Austria, written at a time when ex-Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim had been elected Austria’s president, was intended to libel a whole country – Waldheim called the play ‘an insult to the Austrian people’ – and was met with protests, resignations, calls for a boycott, threats of violence, real violence, performances marred by hecklers, all while Bernhard’s health was rapidly deteriorating and signifying his early death.

Thomas Bernhard’s politics

Good luck trying to pin down Thomas Bernhard’s politics. Reading his plays, poems and novels won’t help you determine what the Austrian writer truly held to be politically true or what his politics were. Perhaps the only conclusion we can draw is that he was disgusted by all political interventions, found them all equally repugnant, preposterous and irrelevant.

Here he berates socialism or social democracy, which he declares ‘a sham’:

the socialists are today's exploiters
the socialists are the grave-diggers of this country
the socialists are today's capitalists
the socialists who are no longer socialists
are the real criminals in this country
compared with them the Catholic riff-raff is downright irrelevant

And as the above quote from Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz indicates, the Roman Catholic church, the bulwark of Austrian conservatism, is another consistent target for loathing, especially when Bernhard associates it with Austria’s Nazi past, and it becomes, in Bernhard’s phrase, Catholic National Socialism, which Bernhard was fond of saying is the national ideology of Austria – ‘wherever we look, we see only Catholicism or National Socialism’ – prevailing to this day:

What’s happening right now
is that a majority of Austrians want
National Socialism to rule
under the surface National Socialism
has been back in power for a long time

Of course, just because Bernhard’s characters articulate hatred for socialism or believe that Austria remains in the grip of Roman Catholic Nazism doesn’t mean this is what Bernhard himself believed – though he probably did. Nor should we forget that Bernhard was a provocateur, who relished in taunting, shocking and disorientating his audience and readers, who believed in exaggeration as a useful aesthetic tool– ‘to explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear.’

Ultimately, Bernhard’s interests go beyond politics, which is just another distraction from the things that really matter in his world – madness, despair, failure, illness and death, the specifics of the human condition, although, since politics and society are human creations, they come to characterise these fields too.

what do you say will the Reds win the next election
but they have no character
and the Conservatives are all morons
swinishness is the driving force in all parties
if you elect a politician today
you’re electing a corrupt bastard
that’s how it is

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.’

Old Masters: a comedy from the edge of the abyss

Above is a podcast from Book of Some Substance press discussing Thomas Bernhard’s novel, Old Masters: A Comedy (1985). The guest is João Reis, the Portuguese novelist and translator. He discusses the appeal of the Austrian writer, his peculiar style – most of his novels consist of one long tortuous, meandering paragraph that has the quality of a rant or a spouting stand-up – and its influence on his own writing, before talking about the specific novel.

Because Bernhard’s characters dwell on madness, suicide, despair, death, disease, the decay of society, it might be tempting to see him as misanthropic or depressing, but as Reis rightly points out, once you manage to get into the rhythm of the writing and realise Bernhard is reaching for the absurd, then his writing becomes exhilaratingly funny.

However, it wouldn’t be right to describe Bernhard as a writer who finds the comic in every situation. There are times in his novels where Bernhard is genuinely moved by the tragedy of his characters. This is the case with the Persian woman in Yes, Joana in Woodcutters and Anna in Concrete – notably all women who take their own lives after being betrayed by life.

Back to the humour in Bernhard, and particularly in Old Masters. It’s humour from the edge of the abyss, which is where Bernhard’s characters are always found.

Caught between sanity and insanity; life and death; suicide and ploughing on; genius and idiocy, Bernhard’s protagonists are invariably artists or intellectuals – actors, writers, scientists, architects – driven towards chaos by their need to fulfil some great work they've conceived, which they can't start or can't finish. For them, art and the intellectual life is not salvation but self-destruction. 

Being an artist or intellectual demands isolation and solitude but at the same time men and women always live in society and in communion with others. And what happens when your intellectual or artistic endeavours founder – as they invariably do – is that you obsess and fulminate against those you perceive have intruded on your genius and scurrilously imposed their will or desires on you and are responsible for your failure – your parents, siblings, friends, teachers, the critics who judge your work, actors and readers who interpret it, politicians, the church, the state, and ultimately nature, the entire array of your tormentors and oppressors who have prevented you from being who you think you were meant to be.

Thomas Bernhard: Charity

 

Charity
An old lady who lived near us had gone too far in her charity. She had, as she thought, taken in a poor Turk, who at the outset was grateful that he no longer had to live in a hovel scheduled to be torn down but was now — through the charity of the old lady — allowed to live in her town house surrounded by a large garden. He had made himself useful to the old lady as a gardener and, as time went by, was not only completely re-outfitted with clothes by her but was actually pampered by her. One day the Turk appeared at the police station and reported that he had murdered the old lady who had, out of charity, taken him into her house. Strangled, as the officers of the court determined on the visit they immediately made to the scene of the crime. When the Turk was asked by the officers of the court why he had murdered the old lady, by strangling her, he replied, out of charity. (Thomas Bernhard: The Voice Imitator)