Note: Barrelhouse first published this essay (in somewhat different form) in 2014, in their Issue 13, a few months after publishing Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters from Eyeshot Outbox, about two years before New Directions published my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador.
It surprised me how many happy vocalizations I emitted the first time I read Thomas Bernhard. The blurbs on my University of Chicago Press paperback had mentioned nary a chortle!
- “In its obsessive, elegant rhythms and narrative eloquence, it resembles a tragic aria by Richard Strauss.”
- “The great pessimist–rhapsodist of German literature . . . never compromises, never makes peace with life . . . Only in the pure, fierce isolation of his art can he get justice.”
- “In his work, the nihilism of this century found its most uncompromising expression.”
I loved the repetitive ranting. I laughed at controlled theme/variation ranting about suicide in Woodcutters and The Loser more than when I read writers or watched television considered funny. The vocab also made me laugh, repetition of words like ruthless, relentless, obliterated, annihilated.
It’s difficult to scan Woodcutters for a representative passage that isn’t many lines long and comes off as funny out of context. It’s not like Bernhard delivers one-liners and zingers—there’s an accretive quality to the “humor”—but here’s a quotation that comes close:
“Vienna is a terrible machine for the destruction of genius, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, an appalling recycling plant for the demolition of talent.”
Compared to what I’d been reading circa 2001–2004 (George Saunders, T.C. Boyle, et al.) lines like these, slightly repeated and varied, seemed liberating, if not exactly hilarious. At the time, like fighting fire with fire, such negativity may have served as an antidote to airborne toxins expelled during George W. Bush’s first term. All of which somehow made me laugh.
Knockdown
He doesn’t resemble conventional comic writers on the surface but Bernhard sets ‘em up and knocks ‘em down just the same. The setup creates an expectation the knockdown undermines. The setup enters the recipient as an airy expectation that a sudden energy shift expels as a laugh. The setup Bernhard wallops involves the formal contrivances and expectations of conventional contemporary American literary fiction, the scenes involving familiar characters walking around indirectly talking about longing and loss, with their speech ensnared by quotation marks, with paragraph breaks, space breaks, chapter breaks, section breaks, the whole rise and fall (“arc”). Such an all-encompassing thematic/stylistic punch line is essentially set up by everything little baby Stewie satirizes on “The Family Guy” when discussing the dog Brian’s novel. Now imagine an entire 150-page, single-spaced novel of Stewie in the form of a smarter Austrian depressive berating a Brian who represents everything crappy about life on Earth.
Frustrated Idealism
Giddiness rose in me when I first read Bernhard in part because, despite rage and bile and darkness, his narrators never lose their shit. Their impeccably ordered prose feels organic and individuated and never rigid. It’s natural and flowing yet structured, an improvised fugue, a style with antecedents (some say Beckett, others say Walser) but never so exaggerated as in Bernhard. The style accounts in part for the humor but LOLs and other vocalizations are also compelled of course by the content.
A Bernhard narrator is a frustrated idealist releasing acerbic thoughts in something like a long, detoxifying therapy session with himself, not seeming to worry about how his thoughts are received. I had expected these novels to blacken bright days, but the meticulous, flowing language mainlining an obsessive’s agitated consciousness suggested a fantasy rant in which I let loose on everyone/everything that came within the crosshairs of my own frustrated idealism. Particularly in later books like Extinction, the narrator (mostly) spews dark ideation but never froths at the mouth or lapses into absurd divergence — a model for the psychological and emotional extirpation of bullshit. If you’ve ever giggled evilly after blurting something you shouldn’t have said aloud, you can relate.
In a controlled mode of attack, Bernhard takes off the gloves of civility to reveal the claws of what he really thinks. He goes for the eyes of the world, and does so not because of some typically Austrian version of Generalized Rage Disorder or simple sour grapes or an attempt to avenge a perceived insult. He does it because, when it comes to art and life and self, his narrators are Total Raging Idealists.
Key lines in the last pages of Wittgenstein’s Nephew:
“He both loved and hated nature, just as he loved and hated art, and loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.”
The Bernhard narrator fills the space between conceived Ideal and perceived Real, between love and hate, passion and ruthlessness with 150-page paragraph-less sheets of organically ordered sentences that flow across and down the page, that seem at best like buzzsaws downing towering conceptions of society and text.
Infectious Phrases
All of which sounds very nice but those who spend too much time with Bernhard are often in some trouble if they value their so-called happiness. Prolonged exposure to Bernhard leads to silent composition of gracefully modulated rants, statements phrased and rephrased, with certain key phrases italicized for emphasis. In fact, all those exposed to Bernhard’s prose are in danger of contracting a virulent language virus that presents in the reader as silent composition of organically ordered statements phrased and rephrased, with certain key phrases emphasized as motifs. The Bernhardian rant is a fugue that seems improvised and may have been improvised upon composition but has been worked until its final presentation in print seems organized and controlled. Certain key phrases, oft repeated, are like buoys in the whitewater of his sentences. In the agitated surf of his repetitions, certain key phrases provide a moment of respite, a safe base for a second until the sentence proceeds. Certain key phrases, in short, behave as rests, as silences in effect, and this approach is virulent because it mimics patterns of thought in the heads of obsessives ranting about everything they consider contemptuous, obsessives whose thoughts churn around the axle of certain key phrases that undermine a conceived ideal of what the world should be. To turn again to the common ground of relatively contemporary televised animated entertainment, relentless/repetitive emphasis of certain key phrases I find funny the way I find it funny when Sideshow Bob in the “Cape Fear” episode of the Simpsons, in a gag that works the longer it goes on, repeatedly steps on the teeth of rakes, causing the handles to fly up and smash him in the face over and over again (~10×).
Over time I’ve also found it funny whenever I discover that Bernhard has infected another great writer. In an interview on Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm,” W.G. Sebald, a towering literary artist if ever there was one, a German who lived and taught along the eastern coast of England in East Anglia, revealed himself as “yet another follower of Bernhard,” which is most evident in Austerlitz, wherein two characters discuss an absent third who has committed suicide. William Gaddis, author of two twentieth-century American doorstops read by ambitious/precocious male writers in their twenties, The Recognitions and JR, struggled for twenty-something years on a third massive novel about the player piano until he read some Bernhard and wrote a Bernhardian rant about trying to write a massive novel about the player piano, Agapē Agape. And Geoff Dyer, expert amateur par excellence, has cited Bernhard as an influence for Out of Sheer Rage, a memoir of sorts about trying to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, a tactic derived from Bernhard’s Concrete, a book about trying to write a book on Mendelssohn.
World-Historical Heft
None of this sounds particularly funny, I realize. Correction involves building a giant cone in the middle of the forest for one’s sister, which seems like a funny premise in theory but in practice the cone in the forest is surrounded by three-hundred pages of Bernhardian madness, which is rational and exacting as it deploys successive layers of civilization to suppress asocial urges raging in the blood.
For the most part, the controlled madness of Bernhard’s narrators can be read as a critique of the author’s spatiotemporal origin (WWII-era Austria):
“A basic trait of this country’s population is the constant thought of suicide, they might be said to take pleasure in thinking constantly, steadily, without allowing anything to distract them, about how to do away with themselves at any time. It is their way of keeping their balance, I said, to think constantly about killing themselves without actually killing themselves.”
This controlled madness perceived in fellow Austrians he also sees in himself:
“Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness; one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. Paul never controlled his madness, but I have always controlled mine—which possibly means that my madness is much madder than Paul’s.”
Controlled madness is an apt oxymoronic description for Bernhard’s approach. And such juxtapositions have also always been a comedic standby. YouTube vids abound of a scene in a film in which Hitler receives bad news and rants in apoplectic German as subtitles reveal that he’s super-pissed about a late-arriving pizza, farts, the iPad, DeSean Jackson’s glorious walk-off punt return against the Giants, and everything else inconsequential compared to failed plans for establishing that supreme example of controlled madness known as the Thousand-Year Reich.
The Holocaust was the most meticulous genocide ever — and a critique of the precise quantification of genocidal madness is suggested in the controlled madness of Bernhard’s prose. Thematic and stylistic audacity but also suggestion of serious world-historical heft (i.e., the relatively recent attempt to take over the world and exterminate/enslave all non-Aryans) release pressure caused by internalization of the enormity of what’s off-screen in his novels.
It’d be erroneous indeed to compare Bernhard with “Wedding Crashers.” But reading Bernhard somehow produces — for me at least — the sort of suddenly emitted vocalizations normally associated with the consumption of conventional American comedic entertainment. Which is amazing?
The (Likeable) Art of Exaggeration
At first after reading Bernhard I thought I’d discovered a model for exaggerated/intelligent invective, an improvement upon Céline’s comparatively tame Journey to the End of the Night. I found Bernhard useful as I became more immersed in the so-called Literary World, especially as I started and finished an MFA and subsequently failed to attract literary-agent or small-press interest in a few novels and a story collection completed over the course of a decade.
With expectations dangerously raised, as I was repeatedly bashed in the face by the rakes of kind declines, Bernhard’s exaggerated monologues served as a palliative. If one exaggerates expectations, one can’t help but be let down, and since Bernhard’s narrators are extreme idealists and master exaggerators, they’re pretty much screwed, and therefore serve as therapeutic models for those with dashed expectations. Consider this longish passage from the end of Extinction:
I’ve cultivated the art of exaggeration to such a pitch that I can call myself the greatest exponent of the art that I know of . . . I was the greatest artist I knew in the field of exaggeration . . . But of course this too is an exaggeration, I realize as I come to write it down—a typical instance of my art of exaggeration. The art of exaggeration is the art of tiding oneself over existence, of making one’s existence endurable, even possible . . . Those who are most successful at tiding themselves over existence have always been the great exaggerators. Whatever they were, whatever they achieved, they owed solely to the art of exaggeration. The painter who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor painter, the musician who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor musician . . . With some, of course, the art of exaggeration consists in understating everything, in which case we have to say that they exaggerate understatement, that exaggerated understatement is their particular version of the art of exaggeration. Exaggeration is the secret of great art . . . and of great philosophy. The art of exaggeration is in fact the secret of all mental endeavor.
All life will be suffering if, as in Extinction, all writing fails to attain the level of Kafka (“even Thomas Mann and Musil in every line they wrote let themselves be dominated by three-ring binders”), just as all cities will underwhelm if compared to Rome, just as all music will fail to match Glenn Gould’s “piano radicalism,” just as all people will pretty much suck if compared to Extinction’s Uncle Georg, who introduced the narrator to “literature and opened it up as an infinite paradise.”
It’s this extreme, unrelenting, exaggerated demand for not just simple excellence but the finest achievements of humanity (the infinite paradise of lit) that makes Bernhard’s narrators likeable: “. . . as I see it only the highest can bring real satisfaction.”
Bernhard’s narrators could easily seem like elitist shits but instead are likeable because 1) they have exaggerated ideals when it comes to life and art, and 2) these exaggerated ideals produce exaggerated textual manifestations of suffering, which may come off as funny since the narrators aren’t dying of terminal illness but instead suffer from self-inflicted spiritual wounds caused by intolerance when it comes to others’ so-called taste.
Accounting for Taste
Taste is expertise developed through the cultivation of native and acquired sensibilities. But it seems like whenever someone suggests something like this, they’re shat upon from a great height by everyone with internet access.
Novelist J. Robert Lennon, for example, stated in an early 2013 post on Salon that “most contemporary literature is terrible: mannered, conservative, and obvious.” He concluded “let’s face it: literary fiction is fucking boring,” after suggesting that writing students would be better off paying attention to the world (“read instruction manuals, legal documents, restaurant reviews, and corporate newsletters” and “have lots of intense and ridiculous conversations with drunk people”) instead of immersing themselves in such crap.
Lennon’s statements triggered Twitter rebuttal I mostly ignored since it seemed like another opportunity for instantaneous commentary from omnipresent submediocrities online, humorless types whose literary careers have progressed largely because they’ve used social media to establish a network of friends/followers who “like” their posts and retweet their tweetage. But after Lennon tossed a little stone into the pond, the subsequent rippling of outrage and triage made me wonder what Thomas Bernhard might have made of the Lit World as it’s currently expressed on Twitter.
The Litter
Writing is one thing, reading is another, but the Literary Twitter is something else. At best it’s an improvised, collective, ever-updating fount of news, knowledge, and wit. At worst, it’s a column of ice chipped at by the axes of cutely compressed links to the world’s ever-expanding online literary content; endless self-promotion and sycophantic promotion of others; quipped opinion regarding live televised events (cable TV dramas, disasters du jour); public conversations better served by texts unread by thousands of strangers; declamations upon the craft of writing and everything else (as though there were anything else, ha ha ha); lesser-known writers retweeting better-known writers hoping to gain better-known writers’ favor; middling writers retweeting publicity staff hyping middling reviews in middling publications of middling novels; writers offering mash-up puns of canonical novel titles; writers tweeting daily pics of their word count function on their latest novel manuscripts; the whole damn #amwriting thing; pretentious young writers pitching surreal/absurdist novels or films or products or outerspace expeditions; famous novelists tweeting insights ripped from novels published long ago that no one reads anymore; writers with their Goodreads accounts synched with their Twitter so everyone can see they’ve given five stars to some non-fiction anthology published by their friends; writers who’ve tweeted nearly 50K times proclaiming their gratitude for writing and reading on the day of a domestic terrorist event; writers playing nice in the character-restricted sandbox but rarely letting loose and saying exactly what they think, that is unless their handle is @breteastonellis.
No Compassion
Thomas Bernhard as I imagine him on Twitter would defend against idiocy in all its forms, an avenging/guardian angel of invective, presenting unabashedly uncivilized commentary in sophisticatedly phrased tweets and comments that seem shamelessly thick-skinned when of course his skin is thin or else he wouldn’t register an army of Lit Shit encroaching upon the garrison of his ideals, a glittering city on a hill surrounded by heathens loading catapults with soul-sucking tweets, the character-restricted excrescence of a literary culture consisting of promotion and cronyism and tired bougie considerateness and/or mild condescension at most, all of which combines to smell like the sweat of something essentially human degraded thanks to overexposure to the scent of its own stink.
@ThomasBernhard—a demigod always at arms online, ready to attack idiotic tweets and tweet totalizing statements that identify an ideal by outlining its negative image—is wish fulfillment. For those suffering from the possession of highfalutin ideals, their protection from assaultive forces (be it mass-produced mediocrity or whatever else that grinds one’s gears) is essential.
Maybe what we need now is a model for scorn, disdain and contempt to overcome the civility and competence of the online hordes, whose catchphrase so often these days seems to be compassion. In her essay “On the Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor states: “So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.” Folks now treat her as a saint, but omnipresent sub-mediocrities freak when J. Robert Lennon states that “MFA programs . . . have had the effect of rendering a lot of lousy writers borderline-competent, and many of these competent writers get stories and books published.”
Compassion, as it’s currently used in a literary context, has become a tepid if not yet noxious trend that Flannery O’Connor also identified in her day:
“It’s considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth and which no book jacket can do without. It is a quality which no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so it is safe for anybody to use. Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything.
From “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” [1960]
As an artistic practice it’s possible that compassion produces weaker work than does contempt? Compassion and contempt both derive from the same perception of something or someone seeming off. Etymologically, compassion approaches someone/something “with suffering” whereas contempt does so “with scorn,” although I’d also emphasize the tempest I sense in the word (“with storm”).
A Storm of Shit
Maybe I’ll load tweetable sentences from the end of Bernhard’s last novel, Extinction, into an automated tweeter thingy configured to expel a shitstorm of Bernhard pronouncements on such a regular basis that I inundate the handful who follow my recently reborn electronic evangelical outreach and interaction activities (@leeklein0) with refreshing, revitalizing literary ideation like:
- “I detest the majority of writers.”
- “I can’t imagine anything worse than meeting a writer and sharing a table with him.”
- “Writers are on the whole the most repulsive people.”
- “Low, vulgar, stupid individuals who have attained a degree of literary fame but whose company I can do without because they have nothing to offer me but their mediocrity.”
- “[Writers] are all basically simple-minded, like the books they write and put on the market.”
- “We pretend we’re capable of the very highest achievement, but can’t even write down a word of the unique and tremendous work that we’ve just announced.”
I include that last one since it’s surely easier to wield a great hate, pretend to revel in an evil alternate world dominated by antisocial media, and ruthlessly and relentlessly obliterate and annihilate everyone and everything than it is to create something that meets and exceeds one’s ideals. Creating something worthwhile instead of destroying everything worthless is 1) no laughing matter and 2) so challenging that all one can really do is laugh, which maybe is why I — irrelevant submediocrity that I am — have found Bernhard so funny? What seems at first like destruction is really creation of the highest order?
So the moral of the story is something like this: if ever so worked up that you feel the need to harm someone or something physically or emotionally, you’re better off settling down with some Bernhard. Let him leech the seething out of you before you start researching literal and figurative pressure cookers.
For what it’s worth, the Boston Marathon Bombing occurred during the writing of this essay. Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon wish list included books about ID forging, fraud, organized crime, and voice lessons, but not a single volume of Bernhard. It’s possible of course that no Bernhard titles appeared on his Amazon wish list because Tamerlan had already read them all, but for the purposes of the conclusion of this essay the suggestion is clear: if Tamerlan and Dzhokhar had read Bernhard, the Boston Marathon Bombing would not have happened.
Similarly, if you read Bernhard, it’s possible that imagining @ThomasBernhard may help you from freaking out when exposed to online and offline obscenities not as easily ignored.
It’s a basic algebraic principle: when you multiply a negative by a negative, the product is positive.
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).