There are other reasons why the word ‘love’ is not such a misplaced characterization of the relationship between Bernhard and his readership. One is the constant reminder of physical vulnerability which his work conveys, and a sense of the oddity of the juncture of thinking head and decaying body.
Bernhard wrote against death — outran death — With such an unparalleled gusto and combativeness that it is sometimes possible to forget or miss the presence of compassion and sorrow. Perhaps the most important element of that sorrow is a note of mourning for what children lose in becoming adult.
In Concrete Anna Härdtl is a young woman from Munich whom the narrator, Rudolf, remembers meeting. She related the circumstances of her husband’s suicide while on holiday in Palma. Her life appears to be ruined because of a child-like confidence that adulthood will turn out as it is supposed to be. In an earlier novel, Gargoyles, the narrator who is accompanying his father, a country doctor, on his rounds notices a group of schoolchildren in a restaurant. ‘They were given hot soup and admonishments not to make noise. What gruesome people these innocent creatures will inevitably become, I thought as we left the restaurant.’ The tragedy is both that children grow into gruesome adults and that those who are unable to do so are destroyed.
In Bernhard’s novels childhood is usually only present as a need, as something missing rather than fulfilled. A need which is thwarted by the indifference, if not positive antagonism of adults. (The absence can also be described as a need to belong somewhere, a need for home-ness.) However, in his autobiographical writing Bernhard was not afraid to use such words as ‘paradise’ and ‘idyll’ of his early life in the countryside and in the town of Traunstein — before school, a Nazi-Catholic education system, war and illness. And in an interview he admitted, ‘Nevertheless, it was a happy childhood, probably, certainly even.’ This respect for childhood and its investment with a degree of Utopian light brings Bernhard, in this respect at least, close to the grand old Marxist Utopian Ernst Bloch. (In the novel Corrections, the central figure, Roithamer, is described as constantly having his most important books — which always remained the same — ready to hand: ‘Montaigne, Novalis, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Ernst Bloch…‘)
Thomas Bernhard’s aesthetic subjectivity and its capacity for defiance, disruption and contradiction can clearly not be reduced to an individual biographical identity. The disturbance his writing produces cannot be translated into moral or social terms. Nevertheless, his work owes its power — an ability to disarm, as well as a capacity for disruption — not only to the way his prose overwhelms the reader and to his Swiftian revulsion at human motives; it draws too on his sense of the comic and an underlying intimation of a loss, a waste, of the potential for humanness.
Martin Chalmers
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From March to December, writes Rudolf, while I was having to take large quantities of prednisolone, a fact which I am bound to record here, against the third acute onset of my sarcoidosis, I assembled every possible book and article written by or about Mendelssohn Bartholdy and visited every possible and impossible library in order to acquaint myself thoroughly with my favourite composer and his work, preparing myself with the most passionate seriousness for the task, which I had been dreading throughout the preceding winter, of writing — such was my pretension — a major work of impeccable scholarship. It had been my intention to devote the most careful study to all these books and articles and only then, having studied them with all the thoroughness the subject deserved, to begin writing my work, which I believed would leave far behind it and far beneath it everything else, both published and unpublished, which I had previously written in the field of what is called musicology. I had been planning it for ten years and had repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition, but now I had resolved to begin writing on the twenty-seventh of January at precisely four o’clock in the morning, after the departure of my sister, who was due to leave on the twenty-sixth, and whose presence in Peiskam had for weeks put paid to any thought of my starting work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. On the evening of the twenty-sixth my sister had finally gone, with all her dreadful faults, which are the result of her unhealthy craving to dominate and her distrust of everything, but especially of me, a distrust by which she was consumed to a higher degree than anyone else, but from which she daily drew fresh vitality. I went round the house, breathing deeply, and aired it thoroughly. Finally, since tomorrow was the twenty-seventh, I set about arranging everything I needed to carry out my plan, arranging the books and articles, the papers and the piles of notes on my desk in precise accordance with those rules which I had always observed as a precondition for starting work. We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task! These preparations occupied me for more than five hours, from half past eight in the evening until half past two in the morning, and, as was only to be expected, I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, being continually tormented above all by the thought that my sister might return for some reason and frustrate my plans. In her condition she was capable of anything: the smallest incident, the slightest upset, I told myself, would be enough to make her break her journey home and return here. It would not be the first time I had seen her to the Vienna train and parted from her, as I thought, for months, only to have her back in my house two or three hours later to stay for as long as she chose. I lay awake, constantly listening for her at the door, alternating between listening for my sister at the door and thinking about my work, and especially about bow to begin it, how the first sentence should run, for I still didn’t know how to word the first sentence, and before I know the wording of the first sentence I can’t begin any work. So all the time I was tormented by listening for my sister’s return and by thinking of how I should word my first sentence on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Again and again I listened despairingly, and again and again I thought, just as despairingly, about the first sentence of my work on Mendelssohn. I spent about two hours thinking about the first sentence of my Mendelssohn study and at the same time listening for my sister’s return, which would put an end to my study before it was even started. However, since I listened for her return with ever increasing intent-ness, reflecting that, if she did return, she would inevitably ruin my work, while at the same time thinking about the wording of my first sentence, I must finally have nodded off. When I awoke with a start it was five o’clock. I had meant to begin working at four o’clock and now it was five. I was alarmed by this negligence of mine, or rather this lack of discipline. I got up and wrapped myself in a blanket, the horse blanket I had inherited from my maternal grandfather, and tied it round me as tightly as I could with the leather belt which was also inherited from my grandfather, so tightly that I could scarcely breathe. Then I sat down at my desk.
Of course it was completely dark. I made sure that I was alone in the house. I could hear nothing except my own pulse beat. I took the four prednisolone tablets, which had been prescribed by the specialist, with a glass of water and smoothed out the sheet of paper I had put in front of me. I’ll calm down and begin work, I told myself. Again and again I said to myself, I’ll calm down and begin work. But after I had said this about a hundred times and could no longer stop saying it I gave up. My attempt had failed. It was impossible for me to begin work in the early morning light. The dawn had completely dashed my hopes. I got up and fled from my desk. I went downstairs into the hall, believing that I should be able to calm myself there, where it was cold, for by sitting for more than one whole hour at my desk I had worked myself into a state of agitation which made me almost demented, brought on not only by mental concentration, but also, as I had feared, by the prednisolone tablets. I pressed both palms against the cold wall of the hall, a well-tried method for overcoming this kind of agitation, and I actually did calm down. I was conscious of having surrendered myself to a subject which might possibly destroy me, but all the same I had believed that I could at least make a start on my work this morning. I had deluded myself. Although she had gone, I still felt the presence of my sister in every part of the house. It would be impossible to imagine a person more hostile to anything intellectual than my sister. The very thought of her robs me of my capacity for any intellectual activity, and she has always stifled at birth any intellectual projects I have had. She’s been gone a long time now, and yet she is still controlling me, I thought as I pressed my hands against the cold wall of the hall. At last I had enough strength to remove them and take a few steps. I also failed in my plan to write something on