It has been suggested, therefore, that Bernhard’s “antiliterature” is obsessed less with the theme of death qua death than it is with the death of meaning.

Frost

When it appeared in 1963, Bernhard’s first novel, Frost, caused a sensation. Although some critics pronounced the book “disgusting” and the author “only of regional Austrian interest,” Carl Zuckmayer wrote in Die Zeit on June 21, 1963, that the novel was “one of the most stirring and urgent prose works” he had encountered in years. Focusing fixedly on the themes of sickness and death in its long, involved, and almost breathless sentences, Frost set the tone for what was to follow in Bernhard’s compulsive fiction.

In effect, Frost functions as a bildungsroman in reverse. The protagonist, a medical student completing his Famulatur, or clinical internship, is charged with the task of observing and reporting on a painter named Strauch, a man who has retreated to the remote mountain village of Weng, has burned all of his paintings, and is in the process of a complete mental collapse. The assignment, therefore, is quite literally part of the student’s education, and he fully intends to carry out his study with an objective and critical attitude. The young intern quickly discovers, however, that he will have to report on ontological more than on medical problems, and he slowly but surely begins to abandon his detached viewpoint for a more subjective one. What the medical student, the narrator of the novel, experiences can be described as a nightmarish sequence of intimate glimpses into the personality of the painter Strauch, as a terrifying fairy tale minus the traditional happy ending. The painter drags him about in the snow while explicating his philosophy of decay, confronting the young student with memories of ghostly accidents, putrescent funerals, and rotting war dead dotting wasted landscapes.

Feeling himself becoming “sucked in” by all of this, the narrator attempts at first to resist the perverse attraction of Strauch’s monologues (which constitute a large portion of the text of Frost) because he knows that they are the product of a diseased mind. The painter talks incessantly of himself, of his hallucinations, his paranoia, his severing of contact with the outside world, his complete lack of interest in anything but his own psyche. He is “a person living a precarious existence in the world of the imagination,” an individual in a state of complete and admittedly unproductive detachment. Isolation, the goal of total encapsulation within himself, is the painter’s obsession, and he constantly returns to the image of the absolute and final cold, the coming frost that will deprive everything of life. It will be a time when “the stars will flash like nails closing the lids of heaven,” when the apocalyptic cold will be inside and outside all landscapes and all animals and people populating them.

By the end of the novel, the medical student has lost his power to stand firm in his own identity and can only conduct his “scientific” reporting in the language and idiom of his case history: “He simply slips his vulnerability into me in the form of sentences, like slides into a projector, which then casts these terrors on the ever present walls of my (and his) self.” Unlike the typical protagonist of the bildungsroman, therefore, the medical student in Frost has not gained in self-realization and has not become more well balanced; on the contrary, his progression is a regression, because he has fallen prey to a mentor from whom he is ultimately indistinguishable.

This development has implications for thenarrative perspective of Frost, implications that Bernhard develops in his later novels. Because the medical-student narrator of Frost surrenders his objectivity in describing the fate of the painter Strauch, the reader is also left somewhat at a loss to assess and interpret the narrative. All seems dispassionately presented and objectively recorded, but can one trust a narrator who becomes subsumed in the personality of a deranged monomaniac? The question grows even more acute in Bernhard’s subsequent work.

Gargoyles

Bernhard’s second novel, Gargoyles (the German title, Verstörung, which the distinguished translators Richard Winston and Clara Winston chose to ignore, suggests “bewilderment” or “derangement”), is in several respects an extension or continuation of Frost. The motto for the work is a dictum from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1670; Monsieur Pascal’s Thoughts, Meditations, and Prayers, 1688; best known as Pensées), “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” and the theme of isolation and the inability to communicate is introduced at every turn. The novel is sustained (or, in the opinion of some critics, fails to be sustained) by an extremely pared-down plot in which action is reduced to a minimum. A doctor’s son has returned home from university studies, and in an attempt to bridge their mutual estrangement, the doctor takes the son with him on his rounds. Together, they visit patients, all of whom are in various stages of physical decay or mental torment, such as the industrialist who has shut himself up in his house, where he perpetually writes and summarily destroys what he has written, and the young boy, crippled and insane, who is kept in a cage in a bedroom, where his atrophied body gives off a foul odor.

The bulk of the novel, however, is devoted to the final patient, a prince by the name of Saurau who lives in a castle high on a mountain. The meandering outpourings of this aristocrat are reminiscent of Arthur Schopenhauer—all that Saurau touches upon is tainted with negativity. Saurau’s remarks cover everything from technology to psychology and are constantly shifting and a bit out of focus, but his long monologue is galvanized by three central themes: decay and corruption (in the state, Europe, and the world); the violence of nature; and the self-destructive essence of all human relationships, particularly familial ones (Saurau’s father has committed suicide, and Saurau anticipates that his own son will do the same). Saurau summarizes, in a sense, his philosophical outlook when he states that “mankind is nothing more than a collective community of dying which is now in the billions and spread out over five continents.” Much like Strauch in Frost, he has limited his contact with the outside world to reading newspapers and resolutely awaits “the final end.” Appropriately enough, the novel “concludes” in midsentence.

Saurau’s long monologue constitutes approximately the final third of the novel. Once again, as in Frost, the narrative perspective becomes dominated not by a “trustworthy” chronicler (the doctor’s son) but by a transmitter who shatters the foundation of traditional realistic narration: the ability to distinguish competently between inner and outer reality and to comment on both. The reader is left immersed in a psyche that cannot maintain borders between inner and outer worlds and thus gains no insight into “universal connections,” only into the phantasies and derangements of a sick, self-ensconced mind.

It is small wonder, therefore, that Bernhard’s second novel brought him little critical acclaim. Although some critics acknowledged a “persuasive stylistic powerthat embraces characters and objects as well as locales and landscapes involved,” many others could comment only on Bernhard’s “extraordinary one-sidedness,” on his extremely negative themes and characters, or on his “unstructured, plotless outpourings,” which “quickly pall upon a reader through their repetitiousness.” For these reasons, perhaps, Bernhard made some rather significant formal changes in his next novel, The Lime Works.

The Lime Works

With the publication of The Lime Works in 1970, Bernhard achieved a literary tour de force that must have been surprising even to him: The novel brought him instant and almost unanimous recognition as a major figure in contemporary German literature, reversing to a large extent the negative critical reception of Gargoyles and bringing him, in the same year, the ultimate German literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize.

This stunning reversal can be attributed, in part, to two felicitous formal changes. First, The Lime Works employs a narrative perspective that is notably different from that in the earlier novels. Unlike Frost and Gargoyles, in which the student narrators gradually lose control of the narratives, The Lime Works is distinguished by a marked distancing of narration that is present from the outset, a remoteness that is reinforced by an almost constant use of the subjunctive mood; the narrator here does nothing but quote other observers (thus making his reporting second- or even thirdhand). The result is an intentional and extreme indirectness, combined with an obsessive exactitude of narrative detail. This formal technique, in turn, is meant to amplify one of the novel’s central themes (and one of Bernhard’s personal tenets): the complexity, intractability, and inherent duplicity of language. This “language problem,” already alluded to in Frost, becomes in The Lime Works the ultimate undoing of Konrad, the novel’s central character. A second formal change to be noted is less complex in nature but is certainly significant to the reader: The Lime Works is structurally taut and possesses, unlike Bernhard’s first two novels, a true “ending.” This work is free of much of the somewhat gratuitous prose of Frost and Gargoyles, and the conclusion, although known from the beginning, is artistically and psychologically satisfying.

In terms of its themes and its minimal action, The Lime Works is vintage Bernhard. Konrad has led a life of isolation in “a state of almost complete estrangement from his brothers and sisters, parents, relations, and finally from his fellow human beings.” Although he is married, this relationship, too, is one of lonely distance and separation, because the marriage has degenerated into a series of ritualized obsessions and mutual irritations. The reports with which the reader is presented attempt to trace, at times in a fragmented or even contradictory manner, the harried existence of the Konrads, who have moved about from place to place in search of seclusion. They finally retire to a lime works that Konrad has known since childhood, a place where he can devote himself to writing down his great “study” of human hearing.

At once, he sets about isolating himself by planting shrubs all around the works and by discouraging contact with the outside world, since his work demands that he be “completely isolated and free of people.” Intrusions from the consumer society, from other people, and even from his wife are, however, continual and unavoidable. He nevertheless tries to maintain, in the face of these disturbances, “the highest degree of uninterrupted intellectual and physical self-control,” but he is confronted by an inner problem that is even more insuperable than these constant outside irritations: his inability to set thoughts down on paper. Although he feels he has good ideas, he is trapped in “the powerlessness of his own being”; he cannot shed the conviction that “words ruin everything you think.” Increasingly driven to distraction and a sense of futility, Konrad eventually loses what is left of his mental equilibrium and kills his wife.

Bernhard parallels the violence of his story with a prose style that is similarly aggressive. The reader is virtually assaulted by a language that is whipped up to greater and greater extremes of expression, and by repetitions of emphatic words. This violent style gives the uncanny impression that language itself is attempting to work out its own obsessions. Convinced as he is that the perception of mental or physical reality cannot be captured in words, Bernhard paradoxically thematizes the impossibility of adequate linguistic representation, and this in a prose that is extremely successful as literary art. Implicit here as well is a continuation of the antagonism between author and reading public that has found expression since the advent of Romanticism: Because the author believes that his readership will not be able to accept the consequences of his attack on a normative and socially functional language that this same readership employs, he resorts to a radical preoccupation with his own linguistic development, to a solipsistic forging of deeper inroads into his self. This nexus of concerns found full-blown and direct expression in Bernhard’s subsequent novel, Correction.

Correction

Formally and thematically, Correction is once again a logical extension of Bernhard’s previous work. Narrative“structure” is here rarefied almost to the point of obliteration, however, because the first-person narrator of this novel without chapters and paragraphs does not even make the pretense of telling a story; he is present merely to “sift and sort” the posthumous notes and jottings of the work’s protagonist, Roithamer, a brilliant Austrian scientist who has committed suicide immediately before the narrative begins. The narrator, Roithamer’s friend, has been named the executor of Roithamer’s papers, and in the first section of this novel in two parts (the only formal division of any kind in the work), he recalls in a personal manner his friendship with Roithamer, which began when they were boys. These recollections are supplemented with entries from the scientist’s journals and notebooks, however, and in the second section of the novel, the narrator’s voice gradually gives way almost entirely to the voice of Roithamer speaking through his papers, a device familiar to readers of Bernhard. Once again, therefore, a narrative shift or fusion makes it possible for three voices to speak in an intertwined and almost indistinguishable manner: Bernhard himself, the original narrator, and the work’s central character, Roithamer, into whose mind the reader is perforce propelled. By the end of the novel, this last voice dominates, so that Roithamer’s pain and obsessions become the reader’s as well.

These obsessions are an admixture of Thomas Bernhard and Ludwig Wittgenstein. “Bernhardesque” is the loathing for Austria (here more scathingly expressed than in any of Bernhard’s previous novels), “a permanent condition of perversity and prostitution in the form of a state, a rummage sale of intellectual and cultural history.” At a deeper level, attributable to Bernhard is the conviction that a dedicated life of thought or mental activity is at once the only posture of existence worth adopting and a self-destructive modus vivendi. Shared by Bernhard and Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is a belief that could be described as the novel’s cardinal theme: the fact that every individual is at birth cast into a world that person has not created; there is a great gulf between what an individual is and what he or she is forced to be, and language, the only means of overcoming this chasm, is a hopelessly inadequate tool for the task.

Finally, the links between Roithamer and Wittgenstein will be clear to anyone familiar with the philosopher’s life and works. The fundamental similarity between the two is their tortured, obsessive probing of language and the limits of thought, but there are many other links as well. Roithamer, like Wittgenstein, has studied and taught in England, and he also inherits a large fortune that he summarily gives away. His family, too, has a history of suicide, and, like Wittgenstein, Roithamer spends a great deal of time and energy designing a novel and somewhat bizarre house for his sister, in this case a conical construction that becomes the novel’s central metaphor. The neurasthenic protagonist decides to do this because such a structure would be tantamount to the physical reification of an idea wholly his own, the product and symbol, as it were, of his autonomous thinking. The realization of this idea becomes, in fact, a unique edifice, but one that his sister cannot comprehend. Despite the fact that her brother has attempted to “think” her reality and embody it in a house ideally suited to her, the experiment is doomed to fail simply because the gap between people is unbridgeable. The sister dies as soon as the house is completed, and Roithamer is forced to reassess his attempt, the failure of which signifies and affirms his own isolation and estrangement. He determines that it is language itself that is responsible for the impossibility of mutual understanding—or of doing anything right, for that matter: “Everything is always different from the way it has been described, the actual is always different from the description.” Hence, any utterance or communication is in constant need of correction—“and then I will correct the correction and correct again the resulting corrections and so forth”—an obvious no-win situation that ultimately drives one to the ultimate correction, suicide. Roithamer takes his life by hanging himself in a forest that he has known since boyhood, a step not unlike the self-enclosure of Konrad in the lime works he had known as a child.

Concrete

While Correction brought to a culmination of sorts the formal and thematic development begun in Frost, it by no means exhausted Bernhard’s invention. The short novel Concrete belies the charge, frequently heard after publication of Correction, that Bernhard was merely repeating himself. Although it employs the narrative strategies and obsessive motifs that came to be the staples of the Bernhardian world, Concrete is significantly different from its predecessors in both tone and content.

“From March to December, writes Rudolph . . .”: Thus begins the long first sentence of Concrete, providing the narrative with the barest of frames; the last sentence in the book begins: “I drew the curtains in my room, writes Rudoph.” Everything in between is the first-person narration of Rudolph; the entire novella consists of a single, unbroken paragraph.

In many ways, Rudolph is a typical Bernhardian protagonist. For years, he has been making notes for a study of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, but he has yet to begin the actual writing, let alone complete the project. Rudolph rails against his sister, whose business acumen (she is a real estate agent who deals only in high-priced properties) and Viennese social connections he despises; he also directs his invective against many other targets, including dog lovers, pretenders to culture, and the state of Austria.

All of this will be familiar to Bernhard’s readers, but such a summary can be misleading. Rudolph is a more human figure than his counterparts in The Lime Works and Correction, and his diatribes are accordingly more entertaining. While his narrative is considerably shorter than those of his predecessors, it embraces a much wider range of experience. In contrast to the relentless prose and claustrophobic atmosphere of Correction, Concrete is highly readable and often blackly comic. Nowhere is this opening out of the narrative more apparent than in the story-within-the-story that gives Concrete its title. Late in the book, Rudolph, who suffers from sarcoidosis, takes a trip to Palma, Majorca. There he recalls a young woman, Anna Härdtl, whom he met in Palma on his previous visit, some eighteen months before. Her husband fell or jumped to his death from the balcony of their hotel; he is buried in Palma with a woman, a complete stranger, in “one of the above-ground seven-tier concrete tombs which are common in Mediterranean countries owing to a shortage of space.”

There is a marked contrast between Anna Härdtl’s tragic story, presented in indirect discourse as Rudolph remembers their encounter, and the litany of Rudolph’s complaints and vituperations that has preceded it—a contrast that Rudolph himself seems to recognize. He is free, as ordinary people such as Anna Härdtl are not, to maintain a proud and contemptuous isolation, untroubled by the exigencies of making a living. In the degree of self-awareness and genuine growth achieved by its protagonist, in its strangely engaging tone, and in its accomplished metamorphosis of the classical form of the short novel, Concrete testifies to the vitality of Thomas Bernhard’s art.