Marek Kędzierski

DEATH INTO FORM : BECKETT BERNHARD RÓŻEWICZ
an excerpt

... How different from the quiet and controlled visions of late Beckett seem the inflated, loquatious monologues of personnages of Thomas Bernhard. Upon closer examination of his works, however, we may find many features characteristic of Beckett, especially of Beckett's prose and drama written be­tween 1945 and 1960. The affinities are so numerous, in fact, that we wonder why Beckett's name has never (to my knowledge) appeared in the texts of Bernhard, an author otherwise notorious for his inclination to lavishly inlay his books with names of people who have enchanted or repulsed him. There is a distinctly Beckettian flavour in the unmitigated despair of Bernhard's early heroes' hectic monologues. Reminiscent of the Beckett Trilogy is the sultry atmosphere, distorted verbal structures, and the perilous proximity of the banal and the poetical. Unlike in The Trilogy, however, the tension in Bern- hard is never relieved by humour, something strikingly absent in his fiction. In later works of the Austrian writer, a theme of ambiguous relationship between the artist and his creatures occasionally surfaces. Language manipulation fre­ quently comes close to the techniques employed by Beckett, especially in Watt. Mechanically monotonous discourse is conveyed by speech, which unfolds in a staccato-like manner, and which equals speaking, walking, and thinking. In Bernhard's drama, silence is sometimes as pregnant as in Beckett, and like in Beckett, small stage gestures unexpectedly assume essential meaning.

Bernhard's vision, shaped in the process of trying to reconcile his life experiences with his aesthetic inclination, is embodied in numerous poems, prose texts, and theatre plays. Lyrical poetry, especially in his early years, was an important part of his creative output. For almost two decades Bernhard has been writing for the theatre. His plays, some of which are examples of social and political satire, seem to be more accessible to the audiences; understand­ ably, they have made greater social impact than his fiction. His stage intuition combined with critical assessment of contemporary theatre, the precision of his dramatic vision, and the musical qualities of this stage speech (love for which, however, turned his plays into a theatre of long tirades) - all this won for his cause outstanding actors and directors, like Bernhard Minetti and Claus Peymann. It is in Bernhard's novels, however, that he most fully and uncompromisingly confronts his chief preoccupations, death and disease, with his concern for form. The evolution of Bernhard's prose reveals the search to find a form which agrees - or disagrees - with the metaphysical search.

Bernhard's fiction can be divided into two phases. In the first phase, he presents in sometimes parabolic forms the world as it is, subject to decay and mortality, and shows a figure of a lonely hero who cannot be understood by the others. Preaching the truth of misery, the protagonist only encounters indifference or hostility on the part of his environment, with which he even­ tually comes into conflict. Having withdrawn from the big world as much as he can, he often attempts to redeem its madness with the self-imposed task of summing up his reflections on the universe in an intellectual work - usually a puny exploit - which can never be brought to a conclusion. Milestones in Bernhard's evolution are his four novels: Frost, Consternation, The Lime Works, and Correction 5 . In a way, all the titles reveal something about the human condition. The truth of it, says Bernhard in the first one, is frost (in the same book we read: "another word for the truth is blood; it should replace the more traditional nectar"). "Consternation" is the primary sensation of a man facing life. "Lime works" may refer to the futility of human aspiration to the spiritual. The "Correction" refers to correcting life by the decision to renounce it.

All four novels are descriptions of a place, a region similar to Bernhard's Upper Austria , turned into a mythical Everywhere. Like in Frost, dreary, morose landscapes have their equivalents in the inner landscapes of the por­ trayed protagonists. And to portray both landscapes, to produce a picture of their distortion, the author misuses the language. Words in Frost are used so as to magnify the brutality of people and to create a vague feeling of menace. Exhaustive enumeration, accumulative repetitions, syntactical arabesques, strange newly-coined hybrid words - all these devices, in which the protago­ nists of Bernhard's novels indulge perhaps too easily, contribute to the effect of creating a feeling of getting lost in language - a substance equally alien to us as nature. There is always a persistently incredulous "formal" narrator, a part of the outer landscape, who manages to quote, in full, seedily unbridled monologues of the main protagonist, the one whose being is at stake in the novel.

Pathetic elevation (and inflation) of inwardness and spirituality - Innerlichkeit - characteristic of the major protagonists, stands oftentimes in blatant dis­sonance with the form of the narrative. The tale of Konrad in The Lime Works is conveyed to the reader in a report written by an insensitive bureaucrat who tries to reconstruct the events which led to a murder committed by the alien­ ated hero. Incredibly long passages of overheard conversations are framed with pedantically repetitive phrases of quotation. It adds to the gap between the metaphysical depth of the hero's undertakings and the gossipy, grotesque form of the narrative. The message of the novel is neither the relativity of human deeds nor the impossibility of judgement, but the total estrangement of an individual from nature, the others, and himself.

Correction is perhaps Bernhard's best single work, or at least one that most flawlessly mirrors his vision. It is another report of a reconstruction. The narra­ tor edits notes left by his friend, who has commited suicide. He had been a builder of an unusual edifice referred to as the Cone. The Cone is the symbol here; it vaguely stands for the metaphysical in general. More specifically, it is a symbol suggesting the unity of the centre, the peak, and the end. The man, named Roithamer, constructs it by himself. He is reported to have said: "For the greatest bliss can be found only in death". 6 If death is the centre and the peak, then Roithamer, who built the Cone, and took his own life, is right to claim to have reached his goal, which was to "turn the thought, the calculated [...] centre, into the real centre."

The beginning of the seventies marks a ceasure in the development of Bernhard as a novelist. His fiction becomes less pathetic. The author aban­ dons his efforts to present le gouffie directly, be it even in an incredulous quo­ tation. All is now more focused on the formal narrator, who is most often a writer, and is more than once referred to as Bernhard. The narrative becomes simpler, less hectic, unfolds almost serenely. There is a clear, albeit capricious, story line which proceeds with no hurry, the narrator indulging in shaping his sentences so as to emphasize their musical qualities. Repetitiveness and incre­ dulous narrative memory cease to be disturbing; they even become soothing and pacifying. The old conflict between the environment and the compulsive misanthropic hero is no longer there. Instead of being menacingly con­ demned by the world, the hero and narrator himself, now almost like the author, condemns the world, sneers at immodest artists, shallow intellectuals, hypocritical politicians, the Austrian people and the Austrian state. Beckett's sardonic remarks about Ireland seem harmless compared to Bernhard's biting insults.

The scenery and personnages of Bernhard's works quite often bear authentic names. In Wittgenstein's Nephew the author evokes the real person of the philosopher's relative, speaks of real members of the well-known family, mentions real locations in Vienna and elsewhere, restaurants, hospi­ tals, and so on. In The Loser 9 one of the three main personnages is Glenn Gould, the famous pianist. However, it is a variant of Gould, a literary figure whose person serves the narrative. The "real world" presented in this novel comes to existence in an act of Bernhardian creation, in projecting psychical mechanisms onto paradigmatic situations, by filling up mental patterns along which the discourse proceeds, with variables taken often directly, and liter- arily, from the author's biography and his real surroundings. The personnages of The Loser represent three variants of the Bernhard persona: firstly, the domain of the feasible, which is the domain of both achievement and death; secondly, the domain of unaccepted mediocrity, of failure and insanity; thirdly, the domain of accepted mediocrity with renouncing the highest (the Roithamer Peak ) as the only way to remain sane. Naturalistic decorum, al­ legedly so "authentic", wears thin. The novel should be seen as one of Bern­ hard's many literary overtures on the familiar motives: art versus life and death, genius and mediocrity, failure and renouncement, and the absolute revealed in music.

Music is the highest testimony of Innerlichkeit, a spiritual depth to which the sensitive heroes of Bernhard aspire, compulsively driven to sum up their existence in the labour of mind. Interestingly, Bernhard seems to tend toward the view that literature, at least his literature, cannot aspire to the heights of music and philosophy. The garrulous narrative about garrulous people the narrator detests but is reconciled to in one of Bernhard's most recent novels, Woodcutting 10 , seems to directly express the idea of the banality and pettiness of life. We could, a propos of this book, paraphrase: 'when the sense is banal­ ity, the words are only banal; when the sense is shallowness and emptiness, the words are shallow and empty'. Only the artifice masked by virtuoso bril­ liance - Bernhard seems to be giving us his peculiar message - only the arti­ fice revealed in the virtuoso brilliance of diluted language can hint at the depth which it so ostentatiously falsifies. The text of the novel is full of adverbs and adjectives in the superlative and inflated sentences in which the narrator, carried away by the language, repeatedly refers to mythical depth, to the absolute, to the spiritual quest and achievement. On the other hand, the evidence for it is never presented in the work; we are confronted only with the banal, idiosyncratic, petty, and ridiculous. We may yearn for depth and spirit, but all we can manage is to attach some adjective in front of some name; this is the only thing we are capable of communicating in order to prove our judge­ ments, and this is superficial enough to undermine our overstatements. This is Bernhard's expressive form: to show the mediocrity of his contemporaries, to mock snobbish society, even if it means to mock oneself. A social satire, then? Yes, although in the last instance even late Bernhard faces death as a metaphysical concern. For, as he once said to an Austrian minister, who felt deeply insulted by it, "everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death." 11

Beckett und die Literatur der Gegenwart
Herausgegeben von Martin Brunkhorst, Gerd Rohmann, Konrad Schoell
Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg 1987