Prose /

For the sympathetic Anglophone charged with reviewing newly translated texts by the Austrian playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard, the task is a paradoxically onerous one. Put aside the near certainty that Bernhard would have disparaged anything you might say about his work - not just disparaged it, but attacked it with an acid-tongued rant that eviscerated your words, your intellect and your pathetic petit-bourgeois existence. You still have to deal with the almost overwhelming ambition, common to Bernhard fans, to correct his woeful stature in the English-speaking world, as well as the equally oppressive realization that opportunities for doing so are fast running out. The 21 years since Bernhard died after a lifelong battle with tuberculosis have witnessed a slow but steady trickle of translations, including "Old Masters," "The Loser" and "Extinction," which, with "Woodcutters," form a loose tetralogy (or, in the formulation of the Bernhard scholar Gitta Honegger, a classical trilogy to which "Old Masters " which Bernhard didn't expect to live to write, is appended as satyr play). These four books, along with "Concrete," "Yes," "Wittgenstein's Nephew" and the five-volume memoir "Gathering Evidence" - oh, and the plays, the plays! - together constitute what some people, this writer included, regard as the most significant literary achievement since World War II. Despite this, Bernhard's international reputation has never solidified in the manner of a W.G. Sebald, Christa Wolf or Peter Handke, let alone the three most recent German-language writers to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller - all of whom, one wants to say with a dash of Bernhardian bile, are vastly inferior talents when compared with the master. All the more urgent, then, for one of those reputation-making panegyrics akin to that with which D.H. Lawrence resuscitated Herman Melville. But how to write it, when most of what's left of Bernhard's oeuvre would appear to be ephemera and juvenilia? Certainly it's doubtful the two works on offer here, "My Prizes," a slight if biting "accounting" of Bernhard's literary awards, and "Prose," a collection of short stories from 1967, will garner many converts. "My Prizes" (with the exception of a dozen or so pages to which I'll return later) is essentially for the fans; the moral outrage it musters against the idea of state-sanctioned art is tepid compared with similar diatribes in the novels. And "Prose," though published when the author was in his mid-30s, feels amateurish, perhaps because Bernhard came relatively late to literature, after a recurrence of his lung disease ended his dream of performing onstage. Like the early novels "Frost," "Gargoyles" and "The Lime Works," "Prose" (translated by Martin Chalmers) is most interesting, at least in hindsight, as a marker of the evolution of Bernhard's style and sensibility. In "The Carpenter," we encounter the line "The fault lies with the state," which would practically become Bernhard's mantra; in "The Cap," there is the equally familiar narrator who feels "always close to going completely mad, but not completely mad" (which, curiously, is translated "crazy 'but yet not completely crazy'" in the jacket copy). But both these and the five other pieces in "Prose" seem more like efforts at resistance to traditional narrative forms than fully realized stories. In "My Prizes" (translated by Carol Brown Janeway), there are more consistent, and consistently Bernhardian, moments: "Like me, they were all longing for death and they all, as I have already said, got their wish, . . . among them the former policeman Immervoll who was in the room next to mine and who, for as long as he was in a state to do so, came to my room every single day to play pontoon with me, he won and I lost, for weeks he won and I lost until he died and I didn't. Both of us passionate pontoon players, we played pontoon together to kill time until it wasn't time that was killed, it was he." There is George Saiko, whose "incessant articulation of his theories" about the novel "was already giving me a headache," and Herr Piffl-Percevic (?!), the Austrian minister of art, culture and education, who "understood absolutely nothing about art and culture," and probably nothing about education either, though it "may be" that he knew something about "calves and cows and . . . pigs," but above all there is Bernhard himself, who says, perhaps a little too predictably, "It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all." In almost every instance he promptly wastes his winnings - on one occasion he buys a car, on another a house - as if profligacy were the only acceptable way to dispose of such tainted funds: "If, I thought, I want new storm windows to replace the old ones on my house which are almost totally rotted, I have to accept the prize, and so I had decided to take the Wildgans Prize and take myself off to the Löwenhöle Salon on the Schwarzenbergplatz. I mostly thought that one should take money when it's offered and no one should waste time fussing around over the how and the where, all these reflections are nothing but total hypocrisy and so I ordered the storm windows from my local carpenter. . . . No sensible person says no to 25,000 schillings out of a clearblue sky, whoever offers money has money and it should be taken from him, I thought. And the Industrial Association should be ashamed of funding a prize for literature with a mere 25,000 schilling award, when they could fund it with five million schillings right there without even noticing it." No doubt Bernhard devotees will chuckle when they read such lines, just as people unfamiliar with his work will prqbably think him as much a "bastard" as the people he disses, and find the moral argument he makes for rejecting any future awards less compelling than the fact that, by the time he chose to do so, he didn't need the money. None of this, however, is likely to impress his significance upon English-language readers, and so, at the risk of incurring Bernhard's wrath and ridicule from beyond the grave, I'm going to give it a shot. Deep breath, please (or eye roll, as you prefer): Broadly speaking, Western literature - the poems, plays and stories told from Moscow to Buenos Aires, from the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" to "The Corrections" and "Freedom," with postcolonial contributions from India and South Africa and even more far-flung parts of the conquered globe - can be divided into two traditions. The first, what we might call the canonical or public or, more generously, the democratic tradition, finds its roots in ancient Greece, and traces a fairly straightforward line through Rome and the Renaissance and the European colonization of the Americas and other parts of the world. This is a literature that measures itself in successive aesthetic innovations, in language that, however manipulated, finds its idiom in the vernacular rather than the orthodox, and in an increasingly representative cast of characters and behaviors, from early ecumenical existentialism (the acts of the gods and their consequences for kings and heroes) to the domestic dramas of Tolstoy and García Márquez and Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. In other words, it encompasses about 99 percent of all books. IN contrast to this is a tradition that begins more or less with the novel itself, i.e., "Don Quixote" (although the case can be made that it also starts with Homer, albeit with the brooding Achilles, whose actions are motivated by nothing beyond the immediate satisfaction or alleviation of some need, rather than the equally selfish Odysseus, whose every deed is calculated to secure fame after death), and wends its way through various misfits, misanthropes and criminals constitutionally incapable of resigning themselves to the social contract: Cervantes's Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Dostoyevsky's underground man, Knut Hamsun's self-starving doppelgänger in "Hunger." In lieu of offering a rational critique of the world they inhabit, the antiheroes of the second tradition simply hate or reject it, just as their creators, far from seeing literature as a tool for cultural or even individual salvation, write only to give voice to a sense of alienation from oneself, one's peers and one's place in histocy. On the one hand, the writers of the alienating tradition can be said to keep the writers of the democratic tradition honest, deflating the hyperbolic claims to which writers and critics have grown increasingly prone in the absence of a teleological basis for literature; but, more concretely, these writers are also responsible for articulating the ennui/anxiety/weltschmerz that we now regard as the core of postmodern existential identity. From Hamsun we get Kafka, from Kafka we get Beckett, from Beckett we get Bernhard; as yet there is no worthy successor to the line - Roberto Bolaño maybe, or maybe Dennis Cooper, although Bolaño might have died too soon and Cooper lived too long to secure that place. It was Cooper, in his introduction to Brad Gooch's fine 1984 collection, "Jailbait," who talked about a "widespread disbelief in a future and refusal to learn from the past," a sensibility that he called Punk and that produced "luminous texts" filled with "inordinately real (as opposed to literary) experience." This, as neatly as anything else, sums up the difference between the traditions I've just outlined, and the need for both. If the democratic tradition continually updates the individual's relationship to society, enabling the peaceful coexistence of private psyches with public consciousness, the alienating tradition reminds us that such constructs and relationships are necessary conveniences, and that no amount of clothing or culture can enable us to escape man's nature - and man's fate - as just another animal subject to the gross processes of lust and hunger, micturition and egestion, the permanent nothing of death. If the first tradition is ego and superego, the second is pure id; or, to borrow another Freudian metaphor, if the first is civilization, the second is its discontents. Freud taught us that the consequence of ignoring our "cultural uneasiness" is, on the individual level, neurosis, and, on the social, world war. Freud's world war was the first, but Bernhard's was the second, which is to say, Freud was writing to explain what had happened in the hopes of forestalling another such conflagration, whereas Bernhard, having seen the unthinkable happen again, could only lament. And so we come to the dozen pages I mentioned earlier. These are the texts of four short speeches that Bernhard alludes to throughout "My Prizes," and that stand as the most revelatory confession I've ever encountered about a novelist's process, a novelist's motives, a novelist's nightmares. They are the absolute negation of all the poems, plays and books he ever wrote, and at the same time their only justification. "We are standing on the most frightening territory in all of history," Bernhard tells his mute audience in one of them. "Everything is explained to us and we understand nothing," he says in another. "The words to which we cling because our impotence makes us insane and our insanity makes us despair, these words merely infect and ignore, blur and aggravate, shame and falsify and cloud and darken everything." As I look at these lines on my computer screen, they seem to lack the power they have on his page, in his voice. Every sentence is so wedded to its predecessor and successor that to pull one from its place feels like ripping a thread from a sheet of fabric: the individual string has no substance, and the sheet will soon tear in half at the seam. Whatever use they provide, whether it be consolation or just cover, can only be experienced whole. Almost a century before Bernhard delivered these tiny eulogies - for art, for civilization, for us - Knut Hamsun wrote about a man locked in complete darkness for a single night. The darkness was so intense that the man's mind began to play tricks on him. First he obsessed over an invented word - "Kuboaa" - that lacked any definition; later he sought "a word black enough to suit that darkness" in which he was trapped. He himself never linked his undefined word with the indefinable darkness; it was left to the reader to make the connection, or miss it. If "Kuboaa" is the word that "blurs" and "clouds" and "darkens," the act of securing its true meaning, its "real (as opposed to literary)" significance, is a demonstration of how art can achieve the "luminous" quality Cooper refers to. This kind of reading is necessarily singular and labor-intensive rather than dialectical or progenitive. What I mean is, perhaps it's a good thing Bernhard isn't more popular in the wide world. Perhaps acclaim of the kind he describes in "My Prizes" would smother the idiosyncrasies of his texts with bland, universalizing exegeses. No doubt I'm contributing to that process with these words, in which case probably the best thing you can do is forget everything I've just told you and go read one of Bernhard's books instead. Or, better yet, don't. From Hamsun we get Kafka, from Kafka we get Beckett, and from Beckett we get Thomas Bernhard. 'Words merely infect and ignore, blur and aggravate, shame and falsify and cloud and darken everything.' Dale Peck, a novelist and critic, is a cofounder of Mischief & Mayhem Books.