SOURCE: “Mental Life in Thomas Bernhard’s Comic Types,” in Missing Persons: Character and Characterization in Modern Drama, The University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 108–54.

[In the following essay, Gruber provides a psychological analysis of Bernhard’s characters and surveys his literary techniques.]

Answer M D’s and Mrs. Dingley’s letter, Pdfr, d’ye hear? No, says Pdfr, I won’t yet, I’m busy: you’re a saucy rogue. Who talks?

Journal to Stella

What time is it No don’t tell me what time it is. …

It is good that you are there and that you are listening to me We are a conspiracy.

Ein Fest für Boris

Of character in the works of Thomas Bernhard one might say what Claude Rawson said once of character in Swift’s satires, that discussing it led only to “deserts of circularity.”¹ Certainly the figures in Bernhard’s plays are as stupidly and savagely hostile as any of Swift’s cannibals, clergy, or politicians, and, like Swift’s characters, they profess with heartfelt conviction the most appalling opinions. Sadists, megalomaniacs, pedophiles, Nazis-in-exile—no mask, no manner of hatred, no gross violation of culture or common decency is too outré for Bernhard to dramatize; as a matter of fact, his characters’ irrational viciousness seems to be the main source of their popular appeal. No human nor any human institution escapes Bernhard’s scorn; his plays, like Swift’s works, are wildly implausible satires of folly and madness.

Nothing in Bernhard’s work or life, so far as I am aware, links his art directly to Swift’s; in fact, Bernhard’s explicit denials that his art means anything or has any practical consequences differ radically from Swift’s express interest in righting social wrongs. But there is much room for instructive comparisons between the two writers, whether in their running and bitterly polemical feuds with their respective countries and compatriots or in their wholesale misanthropy or, finally, in their preference for literature that is both funny and mad. And there are legitimate correspondences of literary form: for example, the apparent instability of Swift’s “I” has long been a question central to Swift studies, and in analogous fashion the plays of Bernhard highlight problems with character similar to those that I have been pursuing in this study. Chief among these is the question of the speaker’s responsibility for apparently personal or self-expressive statements. Who talks? Is it the speaker or the discourse? That is to say, are characters’ words supposed to express the original thoughts of discrete individuals or are they more on the nature of borrowings (quotations, echoes, repetitions, imitations) whose use defines character ironically, as it were, from without?

Bernhard’s stance toward his own work is instructive here. Even though Bernhard’s personal investments in his characters’ utterances are everywhere apparent—many plays, for example, include characters whose diatribes against Austria and Austrians resemble Bernhard’s own—more often than not those authorial commitments are impossible to specify very precisely. In an early novel, for example (Der Italiener), we encounter a narrator who says, “In my work, if I see the signs of a story developing anywhere, or if somewhere in the distance between the mountains of prose I spot even the hint of a story beginning to appear, I shoot it. It is the same with sentences: I have the urge to take entire sentences and annihilate them before they can possibly take shape.”² Which is (as Bernhard surely knew) almost precisely what Nazis liked to say of “culture”: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my Browning.”³ A character speaking an author speaking a Nazi propagandist: how does one come to terms with such intimidating abysses of personation? How does one distinguish the voice of the author from those of his represented personae?

Most of the problems one encounters reading Bernhard’s plays have to do in some way with interpreting the stance of the speaker toward his or her words, problems therefore in some sense with character, for the actors in Bernhard’s plays (unlike Beckett’s actors) are not discouraged from inventing psychological subtexts for their various speeches. On the one hand, Bernhard has insisted repeatedly that he writes nonnaturalistic theater; on the other hand, as we have seen in the work of Beckett, to abandon naturalistic or novelistic portraiture as a means of representing character under no circumstances means abandoning character. Even in Beckett’s most expressly formal works, where actors cannot imitate specific personalities, character indelibly stains the work. Quad, for example, has apparently been stripped of agency, and yet agency clearly remains as the central problem. To reiterate for the sake of emphasis, ruling out psychological modes of portraiture does not automatically erase an audience’s sense of individual psychology, let alone their sense of character; as Gordon Craig long ago discovered, simply to place a living actor on stage is to create a powerful illusion of character. “We need to confront the fact,” says Charles Lyons, “that the image of character in space and time constitutes an irreducible aesthetic unit.”⁴

Because his plays demand what Stephen Dowden calls “a special declamatory performance,” Bernhard has frequently been described as a philosophical playwright.⁵ His plays often have been compared to music or to geometry, but hardly ever to nature. In America especially it has become customary to see Bernhard’s characters as puppets or abstractions or, more recently, as “pithed” souls for whom language is the sole source of being. Gitta Honegger (among others) finds in Bernhard compelling evidence for lost subjectivity:

The idea of language as a mechanism that sets us in motion and keeps us alive, that provides the cues and patterns for our actions, the notion of the loss of the subject, although accepted in theoretical discourse is very hard to introduce to the American theater with its deeply engrained belief in psychological motivation as the basis for a character throughline which must be unbroken and free of contradictions.⁶

It has been clear from the beginning of this study that the study of character in drama cannot be separated from modern discourse such as Honegger alludes to about the nature of the self and personal identity. Much modern criticism of literature has documented the dwindling emphasis (if not the vanishing) of the individual, the authentic subject, the coherent character. In the case of Bernhard, for example, Dowden writes that “the weight of the self always turns out to be inconsequential.”⁷ I would argue, in contrast, that Bernhard’s plays are a good deal more hospitable to character than is normally supposed. This is a proposition that will have to be tested over the course of the chapter; in the main, I will follow two related lines of thought. I want to discuss Bernhard’s characters in ways that describe as fully as possible their mental landscapes, and I want also to see what remains to be said of character when the usual stage criteria for identifying ethos, namely, the illusions of autonomy and authenticity, have been discarded.

Until recently nearly every person to write on Bernhard’s dramas has stressed a direct relationship between his austere style and his flat characters. For most readers, Bernhard’s extreme formalism all but eliminates individual personalities and egos. Thus Martin Esslin:

[There] is no genuine dialogue in Bernhard because his chief characters are entirely enclosed in separate inner worlds. There are no love scenes or love interests in any of Bernhard’s works—narrative or dramatic—because monologue does not allow genuine interaction between human beings. Any interaction that takes place is thus purely mechanical, as that between puppets. Bernhard’s earliest dramatic efforts were written for marionettes. He regards and deliberately designs his characters as basically no different from puppets—simply because he is convinced that people in real life are, with very few exceptions, barely conscious, let alone able to act otherwise than as merely propelled by mechanical instincts and reflexes; that, in fact, living human beings, in the mass, are no better than marionettes.”⁸

Or Nicholas Eisner:

The main point to note about the nihilism of Bernhard’s plays—as of his prose—is that it is derived essentially from a highly repetitive style of language, which does not allow the development of plot, character, and genuine dialogue. … Bernhard’s figures are merely “verkörperte Funktionen,” (personified functions) used to illustrate the concept which generates them.⁹

Or Denis Calandra, who writes that Bernhard and his “chief exponent,” Claus Peymann, “share a concern with the purely linguistic features of their dramas, to the neglect of conventional plot and rounded character.”¹⁰ Even Stephen Dowden, who cites individuality as one of Bernhard’s principal themes, rules out any concern on Bernhard’s part with his characters’ affective psychologies: “[P]sychology is beside the point in Bernhard’s hyperconscious world because what he aims to capture in his fiction—for the imagination alone can capture it—is the spirit of the conscious intellect as it vies with death for supremacy.”¹¹ Bernhard’s figures, says Dowden, are not psychological but allegorical. Not only do they “lack psychological depth,” but “[t]hey exist more as personified ideas than as plausibly imagined people.”¹² “Bernhard operates,” he continues, “under the assumption that we cannot fathom the true interior of a human being. … The self is unique and so cannot be described in conventional language. It is a hidden process, ephemeral and unfathomable as a whole.”¹³ Such assumptions about “flat” and “round” characters, in particular the notion that subjectivity belongs to the latter but not to the former, are hypotheses about character that I want to question by examining some of Bernhard’s plays.

A TRAGEDY OF HUMORS

Bernhard seems to have needed no apprenticeship in playwriting; his first play (A Party for Boris, Ein Fest für Boris, 1968) provides the model for nearly all that follow. In this and other works, characters seem to lack internal structuring; rather than existing as discrete individuals, they seem bound together into relational units in which emotional intimacy is assumed but rarely dramatized. To an audience these relationships give the appearance of being mechanical or possibly theatrical because the people involved so clearly do and say things they have said and done before. In such an atmosphere even the most intensely personal statements can sound like humorous caricatures of selfhood; “A person,” says the protagonist in A Party for Boris (named, ironically, Der Gute, “the good one”), “is a person who is in hate with another person.”

Bons mots like these are typical of Bernhard’s mad satires; one can hear the burst of laughter as the sentence is spoken. At the same time the remark is not only a farcical inversion; there is a real sense in which The Good Woman here exposes the truth of her own situation. The relationship she has with Johanna, her servant, consists of verbal abuse—it is an almost ritualistic tirade—directed by the employer at her employee. Both women hate each other, and yet both in some fundamental way also seemingly need each other. Why otherwise continue this painful relationship? One feels, in other words, that circumstances have conspired to draw together with diabolically humorous symmetry two people who cannot stand one another.

The President’s Wife and Mrs. Frolick (The President), Vera and Clara (Eve of Retirement), or Bruscon and The Innkeeper (Histrionics) provide variations on this infernal comedy of odd couples. The relationship is invariably politicized, normally by class or status, creating a situation in which one member is empowered to speak and another expected more or less submissively to listen. Typically the scene takes the form of a rambling disquisition on the current sorry state of the world, Austria in particular; also typically the speaker maliciously degrades the listener, criticizing him or her for lacking education, sense, taste, imagination, social background, even for choosing the wrong village to be born in. Against these charges the listener is compelled because of his or her station to keep silent.

Yet silence on Bernhard’s stage functions as powerfully as speech, and in many cases the longer the monologist talks, the more his or her words become ironically self-expressive—expressing, by indirection, the psychic reality they intended to avoid in the first place. Against the background of the listener’s continuing silence, the speaker’s words become a desperate attempt to fill a bottomless existential void. It is a dramaturgy of surprising power. Bernhard’s characters have little new to say to each other; on the contrary, we get the clear impression that what is being said and done has been said and done many times before. Yet the repetitiousness is not banal or uniformly comedic; indeed, at times it can be unexpectedly moving to watch Bernhard’s eccentric pairs circle repeatedly round one another, locked forever in a mutually destructive and mutually supportive pas de deux. Ultimately, rather than seeing individual characters progress toward intellectual or emotional insight, we become aware of their profoundly empty spiritual state—in Kundera’s marvelous phrase, of their “unbearable lightness of being.”

The inner landscape of such terrible lunacy has never been more acutely explored than on Bernhard’s stage. Bernhard depicts character, in part, by means of a play of mutual echoes and deep-seated if mysterious psychological collusions. The significant psychological unit for Bernhard is less an individual than a dyad. Here is a small portion of The Good Woman’s harangue to Johanna; throughout much of the scene, while talking, she has been aimlessly trying on hats and gloves:

tries on a green glove
But if you travel to England
and do not understand the English language
or to Russia and understand no Russian
It is good
that I put a stop to it
put a stop to it
wholly soft
put a stop to it
admiring the green glove
It wasn’t as if I had been surprised by the accident.
it wasn’t so.
takes the green glove off again
To be dead
to plunge down a light shaft
to be dead like my husband
In truth I have not dreamed about him for weeks
not for years
When you clean your shoes
do you not then think about me[.](14)

How can it possibly be said that the speaker of such discourse lacks psychological depth? The mention of dreams alone, quite apart from any psychological portraiture an actor may wish to give to the part, produces clear evidence of this character’s narrative extensiveness. One senses not only that The Good Woman has a mind, one also imagines her mind following its own inner pathways. Various cues or signs, for example the sudden recurrence of dreams about the dead husband, allow us to imagine several different possibilities. Certainly The Good Woman’s words have none of the self-conscious analysis typical of earlier forms of stage realism. Taken at a different level, however, the speech makes perfect sense as an instance in which verbal repetition signifies the mind’s—a mind’s—unwillingness or inability to let go of a particular subject.

Or consider the moment briefly from an actor’s point of view: why does The Good Woman not dream of her dead husband? It is a provocative remark, to say the least brutally frank. How is it to be spoken? With regret? relief? Or perhaps she is lying and if so, to whom? It should be evident that no one of these possible representations, whether denial or regret or some other mental strategy, by itself accounts for the inner workings of her mind. But it should be evident also that Bernhard’s actor, in sharp contrast to Beckett’s, cannot in such circumstances rely on sculptural portraiture or stylized speech. The moment insists that the actor construe behavior (speech) in firm relation to some mental strategy and so allows for a model of mind to be staged.

That Bernhard intends any single specific psychological profile to be staged in this or most other instances is unlikely; the psychological depth here apparent is more illusory than clinically certifiable. But the illusion of depth is present nevertheless, and crucial; it identifies the deepest motive power of the play, the instinctive conjunction of one person to another. To be joined is, for better or worse in Bernhard’s world, the primary condition of character.

Over the course of the play Bernhard provides considerable evidence that The Good Woman’s acts are symptomatic of a buried mental life. First, like many of Bernhard’s protagonists, her psyche has been scarred by the intrusion of terror into everyday life.¹⁵ Next, The Good Woman mentions the dead man only three times, each time briefly. Upon scrutiny, none of the references is random. As in the above instance, her narrative accounts of the dead husband are triggered involuntarily by an accidental association—a double-edged phrase, the color black, the circumstances of remembering her first year with Johanna. We know too that part of Johanna’s obligation to her employer is never to speak of the husband—though if we believe The Good Woman, she has a morbid obsession about the subject. Both women are therefore bound together in part by means of the single obscure trauma; barely manifest, the accident is nevertheless crucially important. One might say that it becomes a subtext that secretly directs their daily lives:

You always wanted to hear something in connection with the accident
in connection with that evening
whenever you asked me something
whenever you ask me about my nightdress
about my necklace
whenever you ask me if I want to go out or downstairs
you only ask
how the accident was[.]

(P. 25)

Bernhard’s play interweaves trauma, memory, and speech: yet of the key event, the accident, we know relatively little except that it occurs before the play begins in so-called diegetic space, that is, within a narrated or “virtual” past. To plunge down a light shaft! It is an outrageous way to die. Among the multitude of shocks literary flesh is heir to, it is one of the more novel. Apart from Stephen Dowling Bots, whose death by falling down a well was immortalized hilariously by Mark Twain, I cannot think of a similar literary misfortune. It is not that such things do not happen naturally in real life, but rather that this is assuredly not a “natural” way for characters in imaginative literature to die. Stabbings, poisonings, shootings, illnesses, suicides of one sort of another—these are the kinds of dyings one expects on stage. But characters in literature do not fall down light shafts, and the lack of conventional literary support makes almost impossible interpretive demands. Are we to laugh? are we to sympathize? (It is worth mentioning in passing that students almost always misread this passage. They assume that the accident involves motor vehicles, and that “to plunge down a light shaft” represents a near-death experience. Presumably their awareness of literary convention is insufficiently broad to help them guess that convention itself is here being exposed.)

Our response to the event is made even more difficult by the attitude of The Good Woman. She is not melancholy, but neither is she bitter or reflective. Indeed, she seems suspiciously unaffected by it at all. She seems deficient in the marks—the affects, the insights—by which we customarily recognize individual literary mentality.

But if we look more carefully at the implicit relation between trauma and its remembered recurrence, we may discover that many of The Good Woman’s acts point to a bizarre individuation. She writes letters but never mails them, tries on costumes with no intention ever of buying one; legless herself, she sends her servant on daily excursions to purchase stockings and shoes, dreams of travel and “walking the pavement” (p. 37), and marries (there is some evidence she views it as an act of expiation) a legless cripple from a nearby asylum. This bundle of acts does not define a “self,” perhaps, but if we cannot derive from them a clinically coherent psychology we cannot also imagine them without simultaneously imagining behind them a center of human energy or will.

It would be incorrect to say that Bernhard is interested primarily in detailing the inner life of The Good Woman; in a way, her obsessive behavior forestalls full insight into her unconscious. In a very real sense, she has within her that which “passes show.” In another sense, however, it is precisely such an unconsciousness, and how the landscape of that unconsciousness haunts the play and its action, that determines character in this play. Consider, for example, how we are introduced to the new husband, Boris, of the play’s title:

A cripple I said
a cripple who like me
has no legs any more
in the house
marry
Boris[.]

(P. 25)

Bernhard plays upon what he knows will be viewers’ predilections to seek psychologically plausible motives for characters’ words and acts. Only the slightest hint is necessary to establish for modern audiences the illusion of a hidden psychological agenda. We intuit this directly by way of numerous hints or allusions. At times, for instance, it seems almost as if Boris, the new husband, is indistinguishable rhetorically from the anonymous first husband. Having got used to hearing The Good Woman refer to the dead man as “my husband,” it comes as a mild shock to discover in the following passage that the referent has shifted:

is my husband sleeping
I said, is my husband sleeping
is Boris sleeping[.]

(P. 48)

To the degree that we allow for such overlapping, one might suspect that The Good Woman has chosen a husband who mimes in life the condition of her first husband, dead ten years. A number of physical congruencies suggest several levels on which the two men symbolically might be linked. Boris is crippled, immobile, and sleeps incessantly. Much, too, is made of the fact that he sleeps in her first husband’s bed; The Good Woman says that

Boris has a long bed
in which he can stretch out
that is the least he can ask of me
that I give him a bed in which he can stretch out
to BORIS
right
you can stretch out in your bed
BORIS nods
Tell your friends
that you can stretch out
when you like
Only he never stretches himself out
Never
I know that he never stretches out
but if he wants to stretch out
he can stretch out
He has the bed of my first husband
He was one ninety
to BORIS
Say that you can stretch out in your bed
when you like
BORIS nods[.]

(Pp. 81–82)

Moreover, the action takes place on Boris’s birthday, an anniversary that is specially significant to The Good Woman. “How I look forward to this party,” says The Good Woman; “the whole year I look forward to the party on Boris’s birthday” (p. 94). Boris receives a great variety of presents from his friends at the asylum, including a drum, a rattle, a hat, telescope, a stuffed raven, a bottle of mead, and—from The Good Woman—officer’s boots and long underwear. Of course these latter presents are superbly useless.

The relationship with Boris, is short, despite its contradictory nature and in contrast to that with the first husband, is amply documented, richly suggestive, emotionally turbulent. That it is satire adds complexity to the representation but hardly renders it psychologically empty. At one point The Good Woman reminds Johanna of how she chose her husband:

What is the point
of talking to him
when he has no understanding
when he has that foul smell
But I have him
I have sought him out myself
to JOHANNA
We went to the asylum and sought him out ourselves
And I married him
him
him
Say that we sought him out ourselves
you forced me
He feels nothing
he is nothing and he feels nothing
He knows nothing[.]

(P. 50)

The apparent contradictions themselves are significant. By assuming and then denying responsibility for choosing Boris, The Good Woman can in effect act independently to produce events while yet maintaining an illusion of her own passivity. In a sense, The Good Woman marries Boris to kill the memory of her husband and so gain power over it. By electing a stand-in or double for the dead husband she can both have the husband (that is, cause him to return) and at the same time will him to die by dominating his replacement. Only by selecting a hopeless cripple could she exercise so completely her desire for revenge; like the little boy Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Good Woman plays with Boris as if he were an inanimate object. Acting on whim, she orders his hair parted and forbids him to finish an apple he has been eating:

THE GOOD WOMAN
          Why has he no part
          I told you to give him a part
          Why has he no part
BORIS
          I don’t want a part
THE GOOD WOMAN to BORIS
          I want you to have a part
          to JOHANNA
          Give him a part in the middle
BORIS
          I don’t want a part
THE GOOD WOMAN
          a part in the middle
BORIS makes a point of taking an apple from
his pocket and biting into it
THE GOOD WOMAN shocked
          He has an apple an apple
JOHANNA takes the apple away and hides it
THE GOOD WOMAN
          Make certain
          that he gets no apples
          I can’t stand to hear it when he bites into
an apple
          to BORIS
          Does your food taste good Boris
          BORIS nods[.]

(Pp. 59–60)

It is probably a mistake to try to make too clinical a descriptive frame for The Good Woman’s acts. As a matter of fact, the drama achieves much of its force by satirizing concepts such as emotional unity and voluntary agency. But in calling attention to Bernhard’s characters’ “mental life” I mean to suggest the survival of something like the psychology of character within a dramaturgy apparently inhospitable to it. In what follows I want to try specifically to reestablish psychology and psychic experience as relevant components of Bernhard’s dramatis personae.

LAYERED CHARACTERS

At the time of his death Bernhard had become one of Europe’s most controversial and widely admired playwrights, yet his works remain largely unknown to English-speaking audiences, especially Americans. Few of his plays have been translated, and productions are almost nonexistent, even though in academic journals his works receive considerable attention. Much of his commercial unpopularity seems a case of mistaken genres. Bernhard is an expressly comic writer, but the laughter that sounds throughout his plays is derisory, cruel, grisly. That does not make the plays any less funny—comedy is not often fair—but it disturbs audiences who think that the comic spirit is civilized and genial. Exposure to bourgeois comedy (and overexposure to Shakespeare’s festive comedy) predisposes English and American audiences to interpret satire as misanthropy or outright nihilism. In addition, topical satire such as the following harangue, spoken by the protagonist, Bruscon, in Histrionics (Der Theatermacher, 1985), proves extremely difficult to transfer outside Austria:

A thoroughly stupid country
populated
by people who are thoroughly stupid
It doesn’t matter who we talk to
it turns out
that it’s a fool
it doesn’t matter who we listen to
it turns out that
it’s an illiterate
they’re socialists
they claim
and are only national socialists
they’re Catholic
they claim
and are only national socialists
they say they’re human
and are only idiots
looking round
Austria
Osterreich
L’Autriche
It seems to me
as if we’re touring
in a cesspool
in the pus-filled boil of Europe
beckoning to the LANDLORD
whispering in his ear
Why does everything stink round here
What a horrible return
my dear sir
in a normal tone again
At every street corner
there’s something to turn your stomach
Where there was once a wood
now there’s gravel pit
where there was once a meadow
there’s a cement works
where there was once a human being
there’s a nazi
And always on top of everything else
this electrically charged atmosphere of the Lower Alps
in which a sensitive person
is in constant fear
of an apoplectic fit
This tour is proof positive
This country
is not worth the paper
its travel brochures are printed on[.](16)

The self-characterization in this tirade has as much to do with Bernhard as with Bruscon, nominally the speaker. Indeed, part of learning to appreciate Bernhard seems to involve learning to read speeches and personae such as these in terms of the “family relations” between them and characters and speeches in other plays, as well as between them and Bernhard himself. (As is sometimes said of literary villains, such are the characters we love to hate. At the premiere of Der Theatermacher, it is said that “the audience broke into gleeful laughter as the protagonist went into the anticipated tirade about the present-day Nazification of Austria.”¹⁷)

Doubtless “character” in the conventional sense is inadequate to describe Bruscon. For one thing, he cannot stably be described as round or flat, individual or type. Like most of Bernhard’s protagonists, Bruscon is in some ways a figure out of humors comedy. But his humor is subtly modern. He is a megalomaniac—he says so himself—and in fact he displays the requisite symptoms of megalomania, clinically described as a delusional disorder marked by infantile feelings of personal grandeur and omnipotence. Despite their repetitiousness, his speeches clearly depict a mind fixed upon some goal and proceeding logically toward that goal by means of numerous contradictions and conflicting emotions. As was true of the speeches of The Good Woman, Bruscon’s monologues constitute an open invitation to actors to invent for themselves plausible narrative subtexts for representing character.¹⁸

But Bernhard freely compromises even predictably humorous moments of character representation. Consider the play’s ending, a comedic explosion of cries and confusion caused by the offstage burning of the local parsonage:

BRUSCON staring at the ceiling through which it has already begun to rain while loud cries are heard in the hall

The parsonage is on fire
the parsonage is on fire
on fire

the parsonage is on fire

the whole audience rushes out

BRUSCON and SARAH peer through the curtain until the hall is empty

BRUSCON after a pause

The hall is empty
an empty hall
perfectly empty

rain drips on them all

SARAH embracing her father, kissing him on the forehead, very tenderly

My dear father

brings him an armchair into which he collapses

BRUSCON after a pause in which the thunder and rain have reached the highest pitch of ferocity

I might have known that it would come to this[.]¹⁹

The way one responds to this scene will doubtless depend on the way the actor plays Sarah’s overall relationship with her father, but surely Bernhard’s rare affective specification, “very tenderly,” indicates the moment is one of exquisite personal sorrow. As he paints this scene, however, Bernhard cannot help but mock his own efforts. The catastrophe seems to echo an older theatrical moment, specifically the burning of the orphanage and the grim pietà of Ibsen’s Ghosts.²⁰ It is a little like the realizations so popular on the Victorian stage, those climactic moments when the stage picture suddenly composed itself according to a familiar work of pictorial art. As for its effect on the apparent representation of heartfelt emotion, Bernhard implies that even grief might reveal nothing more of character than any other artificially constructed response.

If the foregoing comparison with Ibsen can suggest some of the power of Bernhard’s modes of figuration, it can suggest as well one of the misconceptions involving his work, namely, its seeming derivativeness. As Amity Shlaes writes in a review of Bernhard and contemporary German literature, “The problem with all these plays is that they feel derivative. Bernhard studied Artaud and Beckett, and his plays are often “German” reworkings of postwar existentialist theater. … [F]or those not born on the Danube or Rhine, Bernhard too often remains too much the German student of the great originals. Why see Force of Habit when one can see Endgame?”²¹

Parallels with the works of Samuel Beckett are indeed numerous. Bernhard’s characters, like Beckett’s, must cope with an uncooperative and imperfect world. Trains are always late, hats always fall off, and appointments are never kept. Bernhard shares also with Beckett an apparent fascination with wounds, disease, or physical impairment, for the majority of both men’s plays feature characters who are crippled or partly immobilized. And Bernhard, like Beckett, values aesthetic technique often at the expense of subject matter. Beckett more than once asserted the primacy of form over content, and Bernhard’s notorious criticisms of art and artists paradoxically confer on aesthetics a kind of legitimacy. (Of theater, he once wrote: “The curtain goes up, and a pile of shit is lying there, and more and more flies come in, and then the curtain falls again.”²²) Nobody could protest so much and mean it. The list of comparisons with Beckett is so long, in fact, that it is easy to see in Bernhard an Alpine Beckett.²³

But there are difficulties with this view. One of the most striking involves the different use each playwright makes of stage objects. For Beckett, a prop—and there are not many in his works for theater—often involves several levels of significance. It can be a symbol, an extension of the human figure, an opportunity for stage business, even an aesthetic luxury. One thinks of the tree in Godot, of Winnie’s umbrella or Krapp’s tape recorder, of the dazzling sequins on W’s black dress in Rockaby. In contrast, the props in Bernhard’s works are shallow, and they seem somehow drained of the heightened semiotic capacity we expect of stage objects. Yet paradoxically they are at the same time more aggressive. One example: during the first act of The President, The First Lady talks to her dead dog’s empty basket. The basket is a natural object, and her grief for her pet seems real. Yet Bernhard’s unrelenting scrutiny of the object—some twenty times during the course of the scene The First Lady stares at the basket or refers to it directly—makes it hard to say whether the object is being parodied or honored. In such a context the basket is reduced phenomenologically to a neutral “basketness”: like a word endlessly repeated, it becomes sheer presence, drained of any referential capacity whatsoever.

Another crucial difference concerns the respective attitudes Beckett and Bernhard take toward another aspect of the dramatic script, stage directions. Beckett’s stage directions are perhaps the most explicit in theater history; most of his later plays and especially the plays he wrote for television are created with an extraordinary sense of their detailed pictorial realization. But Bernhard’s texts include almost no information about production mechanics—lighting, blocking, pacing, and so on. It is not as if Bernhard were uninterested in figural aspects of character; his texts contain numerous objective instructions to actors to perform specific acts—actors are told to look in the mirror or to stare at a dog basket, to puff on a cigar or to shoot a pistol—but they rarely give information regarding individual affects. (The notation “very tenderly” in Histrionics is a remarkable exception.) His plays are a reaction not only against what commonly passes for character determinants in playtexts—the elaborate narrative specification of states of consciousness or affect such as is widespread in much modernist drama, for example, in Ibsen or Kaiser or O’Neill—but also against the modernist fondness for figural abstraction.

It is all the more surprising, then, that in performance Bernhard’s plays are not formal abstractions but remarkably naturalistic; Bernhard Minetti (who is Bernhard’s favorite actor) has said that Bernhard’s monologues are especially challenging for actors who must themselves determine the numerous movements of characters’ minds. Actors must choose “which spoken words are merely private reflection, which are less controlled emotional outbursts, and finally, which are uttered for the sole purpose of evoking responses from others on stage.”²⁴ This variation creates the impression of a ceaseless self-awareness; in contrast to Beckett’s actors, who are normally enjoined to speak neutrally and with “no color,” Bernhard’s actors are free (even encouraged) to color their representations with “character.”

Perhaps the best example of inappropriately drawn parallels between Bernhard and Beckett concerns the formal doubling or patterning so typical of their stages. It is here, of course, that Beckett’s theater seems definitionally antinarrative; nearly all of the late works replace plot (mythos) with verbal or visual design. In Bernhard’s drama also repetition forms an important aesthetic element. In all of the plays, for example, banal catch-phrases are distributed among several characters and repeated insistently (and often unconsciously). Such repetitions give rise to the peculiar impression that certain thoughts are “in the air,” part of a Zeitgeist, possibly, or at the least an identifying structural feature, like a rhyme in poetry or a song’s refrain. In Force of Habit, for example, the phrase “tomorrow Augsburg” (Morgen Augsburg) and its variants (“tomorrow in Augsburg,” “tomorrow we will be in Augsburg”) occurs (so it seems) on every other page. Spoken repeatedly by four of the five characters, it surely carries, as Martin Esslin writes, “a multitude of associations and overtones in a number of different contexts.”²⁵ Esslin calls such visible recurrence a structural element analogous to music more than to drama.

This being the case, however, it is ironic that one might equally plausibly call such echolalia a sign of genuine subjectivity. The formal (almost ritual) display of mirrorings and echoes in Beckett seems at times to approach an autonomous aesthetic system, independent of the individual. Because of the naturalistic subtext from which they originate, however, Bernhard’s figures’ repetitions suggest a palpable attempt to show the eerie theatricality on which human character ultimately rests. When words spread so infectiously from one individual to others, the separate characters from which they normally issue become alarmingly similar; a new identity is created, what one might call the mimetic subject.

The mimetic existence binds one character to another in various ways in various plays; at its most innocent it takes the form of a congenial assent of one person to another, as when The Niece repeats “in Nuremberg” in response to her grandfather’s promise to tour “in Nuremberg” in the fall. We all perform such repetitions dozens of times daily, and here mimesis simply indicates an empathic attentiveness to what the other person is saying. In other circumstances, however, such automatic repetition of another’s words seems to break down the apparent integrity of character. When, in The President, The First Lady defers repeatedly in her opinions to her friend The Chaplain (“the chaplain says …”) and The Chaplain, in turn, obtains his opinions on manners and morals from the great European authors (Goethe, Voltaire, Proust, among others), individuality in the conventional sense of self against world becomes gravely threatened.

Does this mean that character has been forfeited in favor of formal or philosophical objectives? Not at all. Suppose character is not something essential, unchanging, or intrinsic, but a state of existence more like that imagined by social psychologists or like the social or dialogic self described by Mikhail Bakhtin or the dramatistic self Kenneth Burke invents to account for our verbal exchanges with others.²⁶ Selfhood is not to be understood exclusively as the expression of an original or private voice; rather it is something one acquires naturally by way of affiliation with others. Character, then, is acquired almost as a form of contagion, and subjectivity spreads as a system of ethics and values from person to person and from generation to generation. It is a curiously Platonic insight: one “catches” character by way of mimesis, by falling, that is, into imitative modes of being. Originality and individuality, of course, have significantly less value in this world, for everybody, it turns out, is a clone of everyone else.

A world peopled by characters cut from the same pattern is by definition humorous, yet in Bernhard’s hands the follies of typically humorous characters are transmuted into an appalling bizarreness. It is one thing to parrot a chaplain who parrots Voltaire; it is quite another, however, to push psychological collectivity to its logical and (inevitably) political limits. One example: In Eve of Retirement (Vor dem Ruhestand, 1979) two contemporary Nazis, a sister and brother, secretly celebrate Himmler’s birthday. The celebration is an annual ritual and involves, among other things, wearing clothes from the Nazi era and committing incest. At one point during the party the pair turn to a photo album and begin to reminisce about their life during the National Socialist regime. It is a scene of unparalleled sardonicism: idyllic country views and family snapshots from their childhood are nestled alongside photographs of corpses and concentration camps. At one point Vera, the sister, turns to her brother, Rudolph, and says, after a nostalgic pause, “Oh Rudolf that we have to hide / and look at this so secretly.”²⁷

Theater history has never known such a brother and sister, and yet Bernhard seems not to have considered his characters fantastic or even extraordinary. (Indeed the play was written during a time when the problem of ex-Nazis establishing themselves in high government positions was real.) But the most striking feature of the play is its comic underlayment. Despite its credible horror the foregoing scene is uncomfortably risible. Vera and Rudolph seem less individuals than one-dimensional caricatures, mindless generic Germans of the sort one sees in propagandistic cartoons from the Second World War or in more recent films such as Zero Mostel’s and Gene Wilder’s The Producers. And the play’s conclusion is downright farcical. Rudolph, impossibly drunk, waves his pistol wildly about the room, then collapses of a heart attack. As he lies groaning, Vera tries desperately to revive him with kisses and at the same time starts to remove his SS uniform. Meanwhile Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony plays loudly in the background. The play ends with the summoning of a physician, apparently (and of course ironically) Jewish: as the curtain falls we hear Vera speaking on the phone, “Doctor Fromm, please.”

The behavior of these characters is as mechanically predictable as that of any of the protagonists of Jonson or Molière. But to call Vera and Rudolph humorous parodies of past or present Nazis seems dangerously inept. Nothing in the play proves that unrepentant and vicious anti-Semitism is any less a reality now than in 1940. Also wide of the mark, however, is the description of Eve of Retirement as “a humorless mix of Strindberg and Beckett … as repulsive as Fassbinder’s, though more upscale.”²⁸ The objections of Robert Skloot (who wrote the preceding comment) to Bernhard’s Holocaust drama cannot be waived arbitrarily. He regards the lack of a humane voice in the play as a damning ethical mistake on Bernhard’s part, and I have taught the play unsuccessfully often enough to half-believe him. Told to read Eve of Retirement as comedy, students are aghast; told to read it as politics, they miss the humor and so (in my opinion) miss the point. In this humors comedy, buffoons have the power to play out exaggerated, violent fantasies. Of the characters who endow Eve of Retirement with the horrors of the National Socialist era, Bernhard has written that such people “are in me, just as they are in everyone else.”²⁹ If his plays are any guide, these remarks must be interpreted as more than a metaphoric expression of innate human depravity. Bernhard suggests here for drama a heterogeneous model for selfhood, one whose component parts are by no means complete and exclusive. Other people are part of us as we, in turn, are part of them. It is a model for character that is multiple, relativistic, open, and, as Bernhard dramatizes it, psychologically plausible.

The issue of character arises also in a work like Der Präsident (The President, 1975). LikeHistrionics, The President presents characters who seem at first almost featureless. No assembly of traits can describe them, and indeed there seems little to describe: they lack determinate pasts, consistent opinions, coherent affects. The play begins just after a group of anarchists have bungled an attempt to assassinate the president of an unspecified European country. Instead of shooting The President, the assassins kill a nearby colonel and The First Lady’s beloved pet dog, who apparently dies of fright. The play ends several days later with the anarchists’ second, and successful, strike. In the meantime, with crushing finality, The President waits for death.

The President can be read as a pièce à thèse, a cheerless lecture on mortality and the relative irrelevance of literary form. Since all plots end in death, Bernhard seems to be saying, why pretend that one is different from any other? By conventional standards the play seems monochromatic: its plot is emphatically static, and its characters are powerless to act in their own interests. The President’s situation is of dramatic interest only as an exemplar of “the blight man was born for.” Like the child in Hopkins’s poem, The President is psychically oriented toward death, even though he cannot bear to acknowledge it. Thus he spends his remaining time in a frantic effort to deny what he knows to be true.

Even though the play dramatizes a moral as succinct as that of any medieval allegory, it cannot be said that Bernhard creates characters mainly to illustrate philosophical principles or to conform to abstract formal patterns. (One might for a start point to its mordant political realism. No one aware of the ghastly ironies of contemporary international events can think Bernhard dwells entirely in fancy.) Next, the play draws odd emotive power from its haunting images of individuals. Even though their words do not directly express the inwardness that in conventional drama passes for psychological realism, one responds empathically to the bleakness of their situation and the extremity of their suffering. These people are mutilated so far beyond recognition that, like the grisaille figures in Picasso’s Guernica, their pathos is convincingly real.

It is the latter dimension of Bernhard’s characters that has thus far gone unrecognized. If they do not fit familiar norms for the depiction of mentality, neither do they conform to our notions for “flat” characters in literature. Consider the following speech in which the representation of character seems largely subordinated to formal matters; The President speaks to his lover, an actress:

And what does the director plan for you
a leading role or a supporting role
You can renounce the lead role my child
you play it with me
you play your supporting roles in the theater
kisses her on the cheek
with me you play the lead role
suddenly pathetic, raises the glass
You are the greatest actress
that I know
and so you play the lead role with me
you play the greatest role that any actress
in any of our theaters has played
Duse
You Duse
Duse
throws his glass in her face
You Duse
The actress raises her glass even higher and
throws it in his face
My Duse
my Duse you[.]
Curtain(30)

Like so much of Bernhard’s theater, the scene defies easy classification or explanation. It takes place in a “flat” or neutral space, and on the page seems largely empty of subjective interiority. On the one hand, it is a satiric portrait of a comic type (again, a megalomaniac); on the other hand, even though the scene takes place on the edge of slapstick—the head of state is revealed to be nothing but a drunken lecher—the speech cannot be played for laughs. The President’s monologue differs qualitatively from a speech by, say, Volpone or Harpagon, mainly because its mode of expression and its peculiar mechanisms suggest a state of mind that is paralytic rather than intent upon action. Its attraction for an audience is therefore more mesmeric than comedic. The speech manifests fear, a sinister hysteria that means nothing in itself because it is only an unreasonable deferral or displacement of emotion. The “I” expressed by the monologue is again infantile, and, incidentally, pathologically accurate. At the same time the repetitive, patterned style adds a pathetic counterpoint to the childish outbursts:

You can renounce the lead role my child
you play it with me …
with me you play the lead role …
and so you play the lead role with me[.]

From the point of view of an actor the speech is as complex psychologically as any of Ibsen’s characters’ revelatory declamations. The President represents his needs symbolically; his words suggest, for example, the protective devices that schizoid individuals use to avoid the dangers of emotional involvement. Early in the scene he speaks of his wife’s infidelity with a bizarre objectivity:

she lies in her bed
she thinks about her butcher
about the butcher on the one hand
about the chaplain on the other
in the night they both run through her head
and they won’t reconcile themselves in her head
but neither can she go mad
in this stage
And if she is ever with me
she is still with the butcher
or with the chaplain
This explains her increasing nervousness
This also causes her to torture
the servants[.]

(P. 130)

The speech first of all structures individual identity as a schizophrenic attempt to reconcile disparate (or other) components of the self: The President’s wife’s nervousness and cruelty can both be attributed to her awareness of the sway competing authorities hold over her. And The President’s monologue carries out his own unapprehended willing. The President claims to be indifferent to his wife’s behavior, but the peculiar references to her in his monologue suggest otherwise. There seems to be a causal relationship between his rambling, bitter narrative and an unexpressed wish to deny that his wife means anything to him. His ramblings make perfect sense, for example, if they are understood as coming from the mind of a man who dreads meaningful emotional connections. In one instance during The President’s monologue, for example, he begins to link himself with his wife in a sympathetic, caring way; his language, however, almost immediately becomes abusive and repetitious:

a hair’s difference my child
and I would not now be in Estoril
The assassination is the reason
that I am here
You have suffered a shock
said my wife
go to Estoril
she said
And she said it only
so that I would go away
so that she could go to the mountains herself
with her butcher
or she might go with the chaplain to the mountains
With the butcher
or with the chaplain
it is all the same to me with whom she goes to the mountains
the main thing is that I am with you in Estoril my child
drinks
two thousand police all to look after
my person
And you my child
my little actress
with the diplomatic passport
and with the official protection of the president
the day after tomorrow we’ll travel to Sintra
on official business
and enjoy ourselves
like that waiter in Sintra last year
didn’t I read him a lecture
a lecture
first in French
which he didn’t understand
then in English
which he didn’t understand either
finally in Portuguese
In the night we never sleep together
my wife and I
not for twenty years
when she lies in her bed
she thinks about her butcher
about the butcher on the one hand
about the chaplain on the other[.]

(Pp. 128–30)

The foregoing speech hints at a psychic reality that determines the course of the fragmented, repetitive, hostile verbal surface. The memory of Sintra, for instance, although introduced apparently at random, masks a subtle attempt on the part of The President to recover through memory a situation in which he could dominate events and persons absolutely. His pleasure in remembering the incident at table seems therefore the product of a blunted psychic need. By repeating the story he reconstitutes the power he held over a waiter who knew neither French nor English and could not respond therefore to verbal abuse. Of course this part of The President’s speech can be interpreted conventionally—evidence, perhaps, of a sadistic streak that can never be understood—but given his imperiled situation his words suggest an instinctive psychological strategy. This portion of his monologue is clearly motivated and, from one perspective, perfectly coherent. In context—a nostalgic recollection that contrasts markedly with the bitter commentary on his wife’s sexual infidelity—the story of the waiter at Sintra seems to be a delaying tactic, an attempt to kill the memory of his wife.

Bernhard here opens a void beneath The President’s humor, thereby giving the effect of genuine interiority. When The President strikes his various poses or discards one personality in favor of another, he defines character as a problem in itself. Indeed, much of the melancholy power of this scene derives from our sense of a character struggling to win a stable sense of self. The President is not talking gibberish; his speech is a performance, a complex tangle of contradictions, assertions, and denials the sum of which testifies to a severely damaged and tormented psyche struggling to articulate itself. His consciousness, to the extent that it can be inferred from his discourse, attracts psychological interpretation. The repetitions, the sudden outbursts, the bitterness, the nostalgic lapses—these are not merely formal elements of a “musical” drama, they are distinctive marks of character. In The President, Bernhard dramatizes character effects appropriate for our own age—“the age of the schizoid,” as it has been called.³¹ For example, the apparent digressions contained in his speech can be interpreted as attacks on “linking,” the purpose of which is to deny meaningful relationships.³² Significantly, the apparent digression via the waiter at Sintra ironically leads The President back to his subject:

In the night we never sleep together
my wife and I
not for twenty years[.]

Digressive topics in The President’s speech almost always mark the return of the repressed. The more we observe the peculiar repetitions of The President’s monologue, the clearer it becomes that they are closely tied to his obsession with his wife’s infidelity. He may not understand fully what moves him to speak, and, indeed, at times his words take on a life weirdly remote from their speaker. To the extent that he is in the grip of his repetition compulsion, he is constituted exclusively by it. But if his own interiority is not always available for The President himself to explain consciously, his repetitions are for us the signs of a pathetic subjectivity. The mental journey the President takes during the course of his monologue has about it the same sinister quality of the Italian walk Freud describes in his essay on “The Uncanny” in which time after time he arrived at the same red-light district from which he was trying to escape. Freud likens his experience of apparently unintended repetition to the helplessness one sometimes feels in dreams, and a similar anxiety pervades The President’s speech as, like Freud, he returns by devious paths to the very place he intends to leave. The recognizable landmark in The President’s speech is his obsession with the butcher and the chaplain. It is the sign of a repetition compulsion that appears so often and so clearly out of context that it marks his real concern.

The President’s speech is as unintentionally revealing of character, therefore, as any of Browning’s dramatic monologues, and it is possible to read it for similar kinds of insights into the speaker’s mental life. There is a single crucial exception, however. Browning’s characters’ monologues are invariably gratuitous; their utterances, as Robert Langbaum once observed, remain largely unmotivated.³³ Hence the peculiar formal expressiveness of the dramatic monologue: lacking exterior motive for speech, characters’ speech then approaches the condition of lyric poetry. The poem becomes (in Langbaum’s description) “the occasion for a total outpouring of soul, the expression of the speaker’s whole life until that moment.”³⁴ Bernhard’s characters too feel compelled to burst into speech, but for entirely different reasons. The President cannot help but produce himself by speaking, but in another sense (a sense that distinguishes his monologue from, say, that of Browning’s Bishop), he loses his command over words to such an extent that he is possessed by them.

The President, therefore, is in some sense an effect or product of discourse. But to say this does not foreclose discussion of The President as a character. Human presence dominates this scene, though it is no longer centralized as it was, say, in Renaissance or nineteenth-century realist drama. Certainly it would be wrong to invest The President with the kind of autonomous expressive power one finds in Shakespeare’s or Ibsen’s protagonists. But this may well be for Bernhard the crucial issue, to define figures for the self in terms of a revolutionary and expressly negative dramatic language. Characters on stage are not ipso facto deprived of mentality—Forster’s illusion of “roundness”—because they lack existence apart from the discourse that animates them. In the foregoing speech, for example, the mental life of The President is individuated, coherent, and to a great extent knowable. Bernhard’s figuration of character is archaeological; like Freud’s model of Rome as a psychical entity, The President is a site for cumulative layerings or doublings.

To read The President’s speech in this way permits the speaker a measure of psychological credibility or wholeness without at the same time reducing him to conventional grammars for character. The President’s repetitions are consistent with an internalized struggle, for his monologue reproduces the familiar double structure of a compulsion. Like anyone driven by compulsion, he both controls it and is controlled by it. On the one hand, this makes him a puppet whose repetitions are entirely out of his hands; on the other hand, however, there are moments when, during his infantile outbursts, one senses a self struggling through repetition to assert control. For The President, in other words, repetitive language dramatizes a complex psychological duality involving surrender and control.

Seen in this way, character is a critical issue for Bernhard, and his stage functions as a forum for contemporary definitions of identity that stress the self’s multiplicity. Beneath their torrent of posturings, accusations, repetitions, evasions, and silences, Bernhard’s characters struggle to articulate their tortured experience. To substantiate this claim fully will require the rest of the chapter, and perhaps the best way to begin will be to discuss in greater detail the kinds of mimetic involvement with others—repeating, imitating, mirroring, echoing, quoting—that distinguish Bernhard’s characters.

REPETITION, SELF-FASHIONING, AND THE FORCE OF HABIT

One of the most remarkable features of all Bernhard’s dramas is the extent to which they are infused with linguistic repetitions: all characters repeat the same stories, situations, catchphrases, and allusions. In The President, for example, the phrase “ambition, hate, nothing else” is spoken eleven times. Such repetitions at first seem common literary devices. Like the refrain of a ballad or the phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata in Swann’s Way, their significance depends on their being repeated so often as to become a motif or signpost rather than an expression that distinguishes one individual from another. As this bitter phrase echoes throughout Bernhard’s play, its significance becomes increasingly ironic until it finally indicates little about its speaker. Like the women’s “talking of Michelangelo” in Eliot’s poem, the repetition eventually highlights the discrepancy between an original and its subsequent abuse through thoughtless duplication. By the time we hear for the eleventh time, “ambition, hate, nothing else,” it has become a prefabricated linguistic response, in effect a kind of comic malapropism. Bernhard coldly mocks the characters whose failures he exposes. Entrapment within language depicts character, but negatively; as in conventional humors comedy, it signifies the absence of thought, the loss of individuality.

Repetition of this kind can also serve formal ends. It can become a unifying structural element as in music, adding intensity or significance, synthesizing or centering the work. Of a similarly repeated phrase in Die Macht der Gewohnheit (Force of Habit), for example, Martin Esslin remarks that “the sentence ‘tomorrow in Augsburg’ (referring to the circus’s next stop on its tour) occurs on almost every page. Simple as it is, it carries a multitude of associations and overtones in a number of different contexts.”³⁵ Esslin classifies repetitions of this sort as autonomous, technical features of the work of art, unlike the repetitive conversations of other contemporary dramatists (notably Harold Pinter) “who are mainly concerned to show that real speech in real situations is largely repetitious.” Esslin writes that, “In Bernhard’s case, there is no pretence to naturalism. His dramatic language … is strictly rhythmical.”³⁶

Bernhard is a trained musician, and he often borrows from music structural elements for his plays. But the musical or rhythmical analogy, while accurate, does not fully account for the wide-ranging effects of Bernhard’s imitative patterns. As we saw in the foregoing analysis of a portion of The President’s monologue, repetitions tend in spite of their definitional formalism to cluster around character and to stamp language with individual desire. Whatever their logic as formal elements of a composition, in other words, the repetitions tell an enigmatic story. The President’s repetitious language can be read narratively as the symptom of a drive mechanism that holds constant sway over his life and through which he tries to articulate himself. One can track, for example, traces of The President by means of the texts he articulates. Or one can (using late Freudian theory) describe a psychic economy that governs The President’s various defensive strategies. When The President returns again and again to “the butcher or the chaplain” he deals with highly negative feelings. He can be said to discover repetition (as Freud theorized in discussing the now-famous fort/da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) as a tactic that transforms passive suffering into a game of control. His compulsion to repeat combines infantile pleasure with a perverse, sterile, and cruel mode of mimesis.

The President cannot see into his repetition, of course, but his monologue clearly tells his story—the story of one who cannot see. Obsessed with his wife’s sexuality, he complains incessantly about her lovers, her dead dog, her charities and intellectual pursuits, and even her manner of chewing. And the scene culminates in a pathetic moment of insight and denial:

The wife of the president of the Republic
is a whore
a whore
after a pause
A whore who now only
stares into an empty dog basket
stares into it you understand
stares
stares into it
into the empty dog basket
both empty their glasses
It is a play my child
in which alternately
the most impossible people and arrangements occur
and possibly
it is already the revolution[.]

(Pp. 137–38)

The world is a drama staged by actors who inevitably betray the roles they find themselves obliged to play. Bernhard identifies the self’s inherent theatricality and pursues that concept to its macabre extreme. His experimental dramaturgy represents inner experience by linking it with external caricatures—a definition of the ego in terms of a set of mechanistic and mimetic responses. Character can be identified as a primary subject of Bernhard’s concern, in other words, even though his characters rarely use words or acts to explain what they are doing and why. Consider evidence from another play, the introductory scene of Force of Habit:

A piano left
Four music stands in front
Chest, table with radio, armchair, mirror, pictures
The “Trout Quintet” on the floor
CARIBALDI looking for something under
the chest
JUGGLER enters
What are you doing there
The Quintet is lying on the floor
Mr Caribaldi
Tomorrow Augsburg
right
CARIBALDI
Tomorrow Augsburg
JUGGLER
The lovely Quintet
lifts the Quintet up
By the way I have
received the letter from France
puts the Quintet on one of the music stands
Imagine
a guaranteed sum
Experience proves however
that an offer
should not
be accepted immediately
That is what experience proves
straightens the Quintet on the music stand
In Bordeaux above all
the white wine
What are you looking for then
Mr Caribaldi
takes the cello leaning against the music stands
wipes it with his right sleeve and leans it
back
against the music stands
Covered with dust
everything covered with dust
Because we play in such a dusty place
It’s windy here
and dusty
CARIBALDI
Tomorrow Augsburg
JUGGLER
Tomorrow Augsburg
Why are we playing here
I ask myself
Why should I ask
That is your business
Mr Caribaldi
CARIBALDI
Tomorrow Augsburg
JUGGLER
Tomorrow Augsburg
naturally
The cello
let stand open
for only a few moments
blows dust from the cello
Carelessness
Mr Caribaldi
takes the cello
The Maggini
right
No
the Salo
the so called
Ferrara cello
leans the cello against the music stands again
and
takes a step back, contemplating it
an instrumental
expenditure
But naturally it should
not only
be played
in concrete arenas
North of the Alps
the Salo
south of the Alps
the Maggini
or
afternoons before five o’clock
the Maggini
and after five o’clock in the afternoon
the Ferrara cello
the Salo
blows dust off the cello
A dying occupation
suddenly to CARIBALDI
What are you looking for then[.](37)

The scene (like so much of Bernhard’s theater) at first glance seems barren of motive and strictly formal, as if we are being told nothing essential about The Juggler and Caribaldi. But in fact the text generates a character-centered aesthetic. The Juggler’s incessant speech seems almost surreal in contrast to Caribaldi’s relative wordlessness. Why does Caribaldi not respond when The Juggler asks what he is doing on the floor? Why does The Juggler not repeat his question but instead change the subject, not once but twice? Why does he perform a sequence of highly specific acts during his speech—straightening sheets of paper, perfunctory dusting? Why does he devote so much attention to the two cellos? And what motivates him to visit Caribaldi in the first place?

Such practical questions cannot be brushed aside as irrelevant speculations; they are the salient grounds of the dramatic encounter. Actors performing the scene need to know the answers to such questions, and audiences or readers too may profitably institute similar inquiries. It is not true, in other words, that everything we need to know to read this play is contained within it. The need to read The Juggler’s monologue for its implicit narrativity is proved first by Caribaldi’s relative silence and next by the sequence of linguistic repetitions. Despite its stylization the scene remains rooted in personal neuroses and family relationships. Motives that we would call psychological give this encounter (and most of Force of Habit) its extraordinary blending of abstraction and verisimilitude.

The Juggler several times begins to speak by repeating Caribaldi’s phrase, “Tomorrow Augsburg”; this suggests, by extension, that his speech is both mimetic and inauthentic, that it is conditioned by response to exterior authority. By establishing echolalia as a point of reference, Bernhard mocks the convention that words are the distinct property of the person who speaks them. The Juggler’s speeches and actions are usually triggered by an interpenetration of his discourse by Caribaldi’s, or—more important—by his perception of Caribaldi’s mood or needs. As the scene develops, The Juggler’s individuality is gradually revealed to be a function of Caribaldi’s. (And vice versa: as I show later, Caribaldi cannot act in character, as he is here in character, unless there is someone present whom he can dominate; his behavior, too, is the product of emotional need.)

Under these circumstances, it is impossible to displace character as a legitimate object of inquiry. Awareness of individual psychologies or distinct movements of mind beyond (or beneath) language is certainly central to our experience of the play. Those inner realities are necessarily experienced imperfectly, fleetingly. Likewise their relation to language is problematic; no character’s rhetoric is conventionally self-dramatizing or self-expressive. Still, the scene seems to depend on our awareness of language as somehow expressive of character. It is character’s shadow, or its sign, and it presupposes the existence of a subject in much the same way that symptoms of a disease presuppose the existence of a host. When, for example, Caribaldi and The Juggler repeatedly speak the phrase, “Tomorrow Augsburg,” their words are rhetorical and expressly ethical. At the very least the scene presents individuals who receive language and respond to it with a waxlike impressionability. Even from the very first moments of the play, when The Juggler says “Tomorrow Augsburg” in hope of setting his own rhetoric in accord with that of his employer, one senses the formal linguistic ties that convey to us the play of mimetic correspondences on which character depends for its production.

The continuity of language from speaker to speaker indicates how easily and naturally men and women fall into familiar, repetitive configurations. Force of Habit shows a reality that has lately become a sociological commonplace, that human relationships at any level are weirdly choreographed. The play contains sequences of mechanistic actions that are both predictable and comedic, and, as is true of many of Bernhard’s plays, its structure resembles conventional humors comedy. The story develops as follows: Caribaldi, a ringmaster of a small troupe of traveling circus performers, is also an amateur cellist. Each day for more than twenty years he and the other four members of his circus have tried to play Schubert’s “Trout Quintet.” Yet not once have they been able to complete the piece without error; always someone makes a mistake. Bernhard’s thesis is ingenious if not exactly novel: perfection, as everyone knows, belongs to another world. (One might note in passing that earlier generations might simply have praised Bernhard for being “true to life”; it is hard to imagine anyone who could not supply his or her own examples of the kind of aspirations and frustrations that Bernhard’s formalist art represents.)

In any case, Caribaldi’s desire to perform the quintet successfully eventually becomes an obsession, and, when the play begins, he tries to assemble his musicians for yet another rehearsal. Among the players, in addition to Caribaldi and The Juggler, are a Clown, a Lion Tamer (Caribaldi’s nephew), and a tightrope dancer (Caribaldi’s Granddaughter). Almost as soon as the performance begins, things go wrong. Caribaldi loses the resin for his bow, and The Juggler whines constantly that his artistic talents are unappreciated. The Clown keeps losing his hat, and each time the hat falls he loses his place in the score; and each time the hat falls the dancer giggles and loses her place too. Worst of all is The Lion Tamer. He is drunk, and his left arm is bandaged like a club because one of his big cats recently bit it. All he can do with his wounded hand is to pound the piano. Predictably, this rehearsal, like every other rehearsal for the past two decades, never proceeds beyond the first few notes. Screaming in frustration and fury, Caribaldi finally banishes his sorry collection of “art destroyers.” Alone on stage, near despair, he putters about the wagon, slowly restoring to order a mess of instruments, music stands, and scattered sheets of music. He turns on the radio, and suddenly the stage is filled with the “Trout Quintet”: five measures of music, then silence. These last seconds of the play are moving almost beyond belief: Schubert’s music never seems so incomparably beautiful.

Caribaldi is a perfectionist in a fallen world. Driven by his humor, he is surrounded by other humorous types. He and the rest of the characters in Force of Habit are puppets, and each of them is basically an archetypal clown whose contours are easily recognizable from several comic traditions—commedia, medieval farce, Renaissance humors comedy, Plautine theater. But these formal referents establish the frame for an elaborate subtext. The introductory scene between Caribaldi and The Juggler, for example, is a comic routine involving the relationship between a worker and his boss. The Juggler enters the stage intending to ask Caribaldi to raise his salary, and he brings with him for bargaining power a letter containing a contract offer from a carnival in Bordeaux. In outline the scene has the features of a cartoon, and, in fact, one could easily supply an appropriate caption: The Employee Asks for a Raise.

The key to the encounter, however, is that it is not an original confrontation between The Juggler and Caribaldi but an imitation or duplication of a scene that has been played out numerous times before. Created first and foremost as a fall guy, The Juggler is likeable but dimwitted. He knows when he enters that “the letter from France” is a fiction, and, what is more remarkable, he knows that all his past attempts to fool his employer with contract offers from France have failed. Caribaldi says as much toward the end of the scene when he accuses The Juggler of trying to dupe him with an old trick. So Caribaldi too knows that the letter from France is an illusion. This foreknowledge is not literally part of the text, but it constitutes nevertheless a vital element of the working relationship established between the two men; competent actors would surely have to consider it as part of their representation. Because spectators understand this relationship implicitly, its repetitive quality is the essence of the joke; it is funny because we discern it has all happened before. The Juggler must know, therefore, that Caribaldi will recognize his strategy. How then does he request a raise? Incredibly, like an animal that has been taught only a single trick, he produces the fictitious contract offer from France. This is force of habit with a vengeance.

One can see clearly underlying the scene Bernhard’s humors approach to theater. Dramatic action results not from antagonism between two discrete individuals but from the programmatic harmony of interdependent subjects who carry out a prefigured behavioral pattern. J. Henri Fabré once described the “abysmal stupidity” of a group of moth caterpillars who took seven days to discover that their food supply had been shifted nine inches. In the meantime the insects circled wearyingly round and round the empty track that had once contained their supply of nourishment. Like Fabré’s caterpillars, Bernhard’s Juggler clings to familiar behavior because he lacks the rudimentary sense of opportunism that would enable him to abandon or alter it. He enters Caribaldi’s room, one imagines, after having rehearsed a scenario such as the following: greet Caribaldi, confirm tomorrow’s booking, introduce the letter into the conversation, and so on. But habit betrays him. He is surprised to discover Caribaldi on the floor—bosses do not normally crawl on their bellies—and that novelty renders his prearranged script useless. Before he can begin to play his part, The Juggler must first acknowledge Caribaldi’s location, and he never recovers from that reversal of expectations. He pins his hopes on a direct encounter with his employer, but how can he ask for a raise when his boss is lying on the floor? Withdrawing immediately to a defensive position—“What are you doing there?”—he cannot at the same time break free of habit. So he clings desperately to a repetitive text that subjects him to increasing confusion and humiliation. In the artificial way he introduces the subject of his raise we see his lack of imagination: “By the way [übrigens] I have received the letter from France.” But Caribaldi’s silence compels The Juggler to abandon the subject, and the lame repetition (“That is what experience proves”) signifies that the question of the raise is dead. Only at the end of the long first scene is the matter reintroduced, this time by Caribaldi as a way of cruelly humiliating The Juggler:

And your letter from the manager of Sarrasani
is one of hundreds of forged letters
that in the whole ten or twelve years
you have been with me
you have held under my nose
Show me the offer
Show me the offer
plucks the strings briefly a few times and holds
the bow steady, as if to
play. THE JUGGLER takes one, then another step back[.]

(P. 54)

Bernhard’s text suggests that humans cannot achieve spontaneous behavior or original thought. But this is not to say that he displaces or down-grades character as an element of the dramatic text. The director of an American production of Force of Habit told me that Caribaldi as a character is more difficult to perform than Shakespeare’s Lear, mainly because he requires an actor to display a range of subjecthood that stretches mimesis to its limits. Not only must the actor speak with his body and by way of Bernhard’s text, he must over the course of rehearsals become skilled enough with the cello to be able to “speak” as well through the instrument.

To permit actors so great a range of expressive power surely militates against the nihilism that is often attributed to Bernhard’s artifice and abstract patternings. In fact, one may well describe art such as this as “postmodernist humanism.” If, for example, The Juggler’s unthinking repetitions make him into a humorous type, they also constitute part of his unique “character-armor”³⁸—a personality borne of suffering, pathetically manifest as a mechanism of displacement, deferral, and denial.

Let me sketch this more elaborately: in repeating the fiction of his “contract offer from France,” The Juggler stands no chance of fooling Caribaldi, but that repetition—even though it does not win what he requests—enables him to avoid facing his own extinction. It is as if he repeats the very strategy he knows will fail precisely because he can predict its failure. The abundance of references to France suggests that The Juggler to some extent believes in his own fiction, and that he, not Caribaldi, is the person for whom the story is told. As The Juggler develops his rambling monologue, he returns again and again, obliquely or directly, to the subject of France. “France” thus appears at the center of his particular narrative fantasy of self-definition. In truth, hardly anything The Juggler says or does lacks a French connection; images of France weave in and out of his speech as though his life there were a living presence to him:

In Bordeaux above all
the white wine

(P. 10)

They are expecting me
in Bordeaux
a five year contract
Mr Caribaldi
My plate number by the way
is decidedly a French number

(P. 13)

and the possibility
to work together with my sister
CARIBALDI lets the resin fall
THE JUGGLER picks it up
Above all else
in France
Mr Caribaldi
the greatest impossibility
a blessing

(Pp. 23–24)

extra clothing allowance
and the French fresh air[.]

(P. 24)

Interspersed among The Juggler’s repetitious conversation with Caribaldi are repetitions of a particular sort—memories, anecdotes, confessions that seem to indicate that in an indirect (and perhaps unconscious or automatic) way The Juggler is once again telling his own story. As with The President’s speech to The Actress, character here develops as a weird and yet deeply moving narrative of loss. The Juggler cannot speak directly for himself, but his repetitious and disintegrating discourse conveys eloquently his interior solitude and his emotional distress. The speech is a broken-down autobiography: The Juggler recollects a memory from his childhood when he played the violin, storing extra pieces of resin in “emerald green boxes.” He describes his mother with pride: “French was the mother tongue / of my mother” (p. 15); “That exceptional woman / my mother / by the way in Nantes / left the Church” (p. 15). He alludes briefly to his father—“As you know / my father was from Gelsenkirchen / an unlucky man” (p. 26)—and to his sister, from whom he has long been separated. He often mentions cellist Pablo Casals, who apparently has inspired him since childhood. And he repeatedly speaks of himself as an “artist,” even though he makes his living juggling plates and training poodles. In his opinion such juggling is “art” and he himself is “admittedly a genius” (p. 34). Even when he performs in the most humiliating conditions, playing out his act as the tent is pulled down, The Juggler imagines that “the concentration of the audience / is centered on me” (p. 26).

That this last sequence of self-references exposes his unthinking folly cannot completely subvert our sense that there is a “being” under this text. Knowing so much about his background, we have difficulty dismissing The Juggler as a comic effect of discourse. He is as vain as any Restoration fop. But is this simply a satiric exposure of folly? In my view the repetitions that run throughout The Juggler’s monologue—while they are not, properly speaking, a coherent narrative—reveal an impulse toward a narrativity that could, ideally, organize the disorder of his life. Repetition in this respect is not a sign of the Juggler’s lack of ideal sociability but the symptom of a subject desperately struggling to consolidate itself. The problem is that The Juggler cannot find a way to act that does not lead him to repeat himself, and so repetition both affirms and denies his authenticity. If he attempts to create a life apart from habit, he cannot act except according to a pattern that guarantees his failure. If, on the other hand, The Juggler attempts to use the principle of repetition to sustain or to define himself, he is similarly humiliated to discover that exact repetition is impossible. Even his habits of dress betray him. The Juggler prides himself on maintaining an impeccable appearance. He always carries a handkerchief and a shoecloth, but toward the end of scene 2 he is discovered to have placed these items in the wrong pockets:

[CARIBALDI] A polished, gleaming mirror
you love that
your shoes glistening
THE JUGGLER and CARIBALDI and the GRANDDAUGHTER look
at THE JUGGLER’s highly polished shoes
You have
as I know
a shoecloth always
in your pants pocket
in your right pants pocket
in the right a shoe cloth
in the left a handkerchief
shoe cloth
handkerchief
shoe cloth
handkerchief
ordering THE JUGGLER
Yes show
show
orders THE JUGGLER with motions of the cello bow to turn his
pockets inside out
Turn
your pants pockets out
Turn them out
THE JUGGLER turns his pants pockets inside out,
but the shoe cloth
comes into view out of the left and out of the
right the handkerchief,
not the other way round
You see
you have the handkerchief
not in the left pants pocket
but in the right
in the left you have the shoe cloth
Even you err
Mr. Juggler
Put it all back again[.]

(Pp. 93–94)

Of course this is the theme of Force of Habit, that the world leaves little room for perfection or original creativity. But my point is that Bernhard’s Juggler, despite his manifest humor, ought not to be seen as an experiment in dramatic formalism but as an attempt to characterize the deserts of selfhood.

Caribaldi too is a “flat” character, and in some ways his mechanistic behavior is a metaphor for broad social or aesthetic matters. It is possible, for example, to see Bernhard’s protagonist at the center of a treatise on power and subjection, perfection and human fallibility, art and the artist, and discipline and freedom. But the ringmaster, like The Juggler, possesses a haunting inner landscape. In his interactions with others he is often brutal and insensitive, as, for example, when he compels his granddaughter to perform an exhausting series of calisthenics:

CARIBALDI keeping time with the cello
bow
Onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
onetwo
Now stop
GRANDDAUGHTER stops, exhausted; CARIBALDI orders:
Peel the apples
Polish the shoes
Boil the milk
Brush the clothes
And get to rehearsal on time
do you understand
You can go[.]

(Pp. 50–51)

Caribaldi’s behavior is not particularly funny, although clearly the scene resurrects older forms of comic theater—the master-slave relationship of New Comedy is one parallel, commedia violence another. But there is an important distinction between Caribaldi’s compulsive behavior and that of his theatrical antecedents. The blur of commands—onetwoonetwoonetwo—is sadistic but also compulsive, almost as if it were an incantation or a conjuring ritual. The outburst—it is not really speech—cannot easily be played without conferring on Caribaldi a distinct interiority that drives him to act as he does. Like The Juggler in the first scene, Caribaldi here is “not his own.” The effect is to remind us of the extent to which the self can be corroded by orders of mimesis, namely, drive mechanisms or transferences. We know, for example, that Caribaldi imagines resemblances between his granddaughter and his own daughter, her mother. Repeatedly he refers to the young dancer as “my child,” and it seems as if he uses that patronizing idiom more than idiomatically. On one occasion at least he seems unconsciously to be superimposing the image of the mother on the girl, as in dream:

Tomorrow Augsburg
do you sleep well
in the night
I don’t sleep
I don’t dream
Show your legs
GRANDDAUGHTER shows her legs
Your capital
Your mother
had the most beautiful legs
You must practice
in the strictest way
Practice
Wake up
Get up
Practice
Practice
Practice[.]

(Pp. 74–75)

The Granddaughter seems to provoke two kinds of responses from Caribaldi, both of which involve repetition as the basis for the production of character. First of all, his language creates a humorous monomaniac. But Caribaldi’s brutal treatment of the girl often manifests itself as part of a network of habitual associations. In the foregoing scene, for example, it is the memory of the mother’s beauty that provokes him to demand incessant practice on the part of The Granddaughter. Breaking off from his memory, he becomes a machine suddenly animated by hidden springs. His sudden reversion to habit (one order of repetition) is motivated, in other words, by another kind of repetition, the likeness of daughter to granddaughter. Caribaldi cannot deal consistently (or lovingly) with his granddaughter because he is unable to separate her from her mother. But that woman died some years ago, the result of a grisly accident on the high wire. Built into Bernhard’s drama once again is the pathos of family tragedy, and even though the behavior demonstrated here is essentially humorous, its source is once again a particular mental life. Forces that are clearly psychological operate to produce an image of the subject that seems devoid of the marks of individual character precisely because it is compulsively characteristic.

In Force of Habit Bernhard poses some challenging questions about the interior structure of subjecthood. Working within the familiar conventions of humors characters, Bernhard isolates psychological realities on which mechanistic (hence characterless, in the sense of lacking individuating control) behavior can be founded. Some of the examples are innovative and ultimately mysterious, as in the case of The Juggler; others are almost textbook case histories. For example, a likely explanation for Caribaldi’s tendency to confuse his daughter and granddaughter is given earlier in the scene by The Lion Tamer. He tells The Clown about the way Caribaldi’s daughter died:

His daughter
you should have seen her
a beauty
she was completely mangled
Before that her father
made her practice
the drill How does one bow
fourteen times
just as he makes
his granddaughter
perform the same drill
fourteen times
She made a mistake
do you understand
The collarbone
driven into the temple
indicates this
THE CLOWN imitates him
Into the temple
JUGGLER
A third class funeral
the father so loved the daughter
she was buried in such haste(39)
that a year later
not a single person knew
where
he looked for her in vain
in the cemetery
Since then he never returns
to Osnabrück
Osnabrück no more
CLOWN
No more Osnabrück
LION TAMER
Like a dog
his own daughter
the dirt just thrown over her
do you understand[.]

(Pp. 62–63)

The Lion Tamer despises Caribaldi because he fails to show expected remorse. He cannot understand why the father seems so little affected by the daughter’s death, and so he condemns Caribaldi as an unfeeling brute. But could Caribaldi’s apparent indifference and his hostility toward his grand-daughter indicate paradoxically an unmanageable excess of grief? There is some reason to think so. For example, there is considerable overlap between Bernhard’s character’s behavior and the descriptions of pathological mourning to be found in psychoanalytic literature. I am not trying to prove that psychoanalysis uncovers the secret of Bernhard’s art. But it is striking to see how closely the behavior described in actual clinical studies corresponds with Bernhard’s bizarre stage fictions, and while that correspondence is probably neither Bernhard’s ambition nor his greatest success, it is surely not irrelevant. This does not make Force of Habit a work of naturalistic psychology, but it does suggest how “painting the hero’s mind” might be an important part of Bernhard’s drama.

To see more clearly how Bernhard’s drama might illustrate how individuality or society unfold themselves in literary forms, we might turn for a moment toward recent psychoanalytic literature. In that literature, as on Bernhard’s stage, we can see a concern with a variety of affective disorders of the self that defy those represented by classic neuroses or conventional dramaturgies. For example, Julien Bigras, in an essay entitled “French Psychoanalysis,” tells of a former patient, a young girl “who had been sent to me on the advice of her school-teacher because she had shown absolutely no reaction after her mother had been killed in a car accident.” Bigras writes that

[t]he girl had also been involved in the crash but has suffered only a very slight brain concussion.

Her teacher could not understand why the girl’s conduct at school had not changed in any way whatsoever; she behaved as though absolutely nothing unusual had occurred. I too was at a loss to understand the phenomenon. I therefore accepted her as a patient. I had already dealt with several cases of traumatic neuroses and thus knew that spontaneous sketches, dreams, and fantasies of the patient should reveal violent scenes linked to the accident in which her mother had been killed. This was not the case; the girl would say, “I don’t have dreams. No, I’m not afraid. Everything is fine, I assure you.”

There was nothing left but to hope that, as a last resort, the spontaneous sketches done by the girl would clear up the mystery. But here also I drew a blank: a cozy little house, a road, a tree; in short, the ingredients of the typical child’s drawing. True, a little star or two were in the first drawing, but who would have paid any attention to them? And since it was around Christmas, who would see anything unusual in stars at the tips of the branches of a Christmas tree? Yet in subsequent drawings the stars reappeared again and again scattered among blue flowers or atop a mountain and even at times next to a dazzling yellow sun. Six months went by and still I saw nothing significant in this fact.

Then one day I had a kind of illumination. “Tell me,” I said, “when the accident happened I’ll bet you saw stars.”

She had indeed seen stars at the moment of impact. She immediately burst into tears and told me that she saw stars every night. She was afraid to fall asleep and see them appear again. In addition, from that day forward, she became sad both in my presence and at school. Only at that point was she able to comprehend that before it was neither possible nor permissible for her to mourn her mother’s death.

As I listened to “On Death-Work” [a lecture which prompted Bigras to remember his experience with this patient] it was my turn to become aware of something: the subtle and cunning ways in which the death drive works. Suddenly this notion became tangible and vital. It was the “work of death” which, without my young patient or myself being aware of it, had held constant and silent sway over the life of a child and continued to exert its influence upon the cure process she was going through with me. Surely it is striking to see how awesomely the death drive worked its way into the very cure, even concealing itself beneath the things children are so fond of, like wonderful scenes depicting nature or Christmas.⁴⁰

Caribaldi’s repetitious behavior, like that of the little girl who added stars to all her drawings, accords with the existence of an unseen drive or instinct. From this perspective, it looks less like “humorous” cruelty or artistic formalism and more like the frenzied activity often associated with actual narcissistic personality disorders. Certainly Caribaldi’s behavior with respect to his daughter is more complex and more pathetic than The Lion Tamer imagines. The acts immediately following her death—the swift burial, the period of denial, and then the desperate search for the grave and the subsequent taboo that he attaches to Osnabrück—are consonant with the compulsive actions one finds in case studies of pathological mourning or in accounts of so-called narcissistic disorders or schizoid fractures of the self. The central experience in the lives of such people, writes Ernest Wolf, is “the experience of unbearable emptiness that comes with loneliness … a loneliness that almost immediately elicits some relieving action to restitute the crumbling self.” This activity commonly is frenzied, according to Wolf; it is “often tinged with the excitements of sexuality or of aggression, is used to create a sense of aliveness, to banish the dreaded nothingness that comes with the loss of self.”⁴¹

Bernhard’s work extends character, then, in two directions simultaneously. In the texts I have chosen to discuss, individuality tends to be represented as dependent both on interior as well as on exterior repetitions. In the latter case Bernhard’s characters are almost neoclassical—the image not of an individual but a species or type. They show us what people habitually do (or are), and as characters they can be imaged theatrically as masks or humors. The force of habit requires that we behave like automata. At the same time, however, Bernhard’s characters own a discrete core of individuality, and this in turn makes it hard to efface Romantic (or individualist) impressions of subjectivity from the text. Caribaldi’s humorous mask does not rule out his possessing a hidden self. On the contrary, his mask is clearly the sign of his inner distress. His behavior is like the tip of an iceberg—a misleading distortion, a clinical symptom with limited reference to the actual malaise. There is more than enough material in the text to prove that Caribaldi attempts to control the mother, whom he cannot reach, by controlling her daughter. His desire to turn his granddaughter into a marionette indicates that he has a control instinct and is using her as a child might use a toy. The comic humor in this case represents the individual’s response to pain. Caribaldi invents a game whose express purpose is to effect the illusion of control. Thus Caribaldi’s humor is not imposed on him from without, nor does it indicate a complete lack of subjectivity. Insofar as it results in predictable or characteristic behavior, it is an aggressive mode of self-production. The passive and annihilating situation imposed on him by death can be transformed into an aggressive reaction. Not only can Caribaldi control the trauma of losing the mother by dominating the granddaughter, he can even enact on the missing mother a kind of revenge: onetwoonetwoonetwo, daughter away, daughter dead.

To be sure, Caribaldi’s humorous behavior in this scene is a defensive strategy only. Of the trigger mechanism we know almost nothing except that it is an event that is neither possible nor permissible for him to accept. From The Lion Tamer’s point of view, Caribaldi is inhuman, a megalomaniac. From another perspective, one can see that his life is a profoundly moving horror. His aberrant behavior hints at disordering forces that exist at the foundation of character and yet conceal themselves beneath the masks of egoism, motion, and tyranny—ironically, those very forms of behavior that most suggest the power of individual will.

“The most remarkable peculiarity of melancholia,” writes Freud, “and one most in need of explanation, is the tendency it displays to turn into mania accompanied by a completely opposite symptomology.”⁴² Caribaldi is a textbook melancholic; common sense tells us that his humor imitates something real. Caribaldi’s megalomania, his insane quest for perfection, his absurdly repetitive schedule, all are instinctive strategies that have no other aim than their own ceaseless accomplishment. The aim of such repetition (as Freud postulated) is not to obtain pleasure but to ward off death. Ironically, only the force of habit sustains the illusion of life. The perception is both fearful and funny: funny, like the coyote in the children’s cartoon, who falls only when he looks down and his legs stop churning; fearful, as when Caribaldi responds to The Clown’s monotonous bowing of his instrument by saying that

if he stops
he’s dead
with his bow
in death
laid out[.]

(P. 103)

The final irony is that all the characters in Force of Habit owe their identities to habit itself. On Bernhard’s stage, however, habit does not constitute a mask that must be dropped if the wearer is to recover his or her “self.” Against textual or centerless grammars for character Bernhard sets distinct signs of innerness, and the resulting gaps or inconsistencies give his characters their unsettling reality. Caribaldi, like the majority of Bernhard’s characters, exists because of a grammar of identity sufficiently sophisticated to redefine literary flatness with both psychology and sociology. Likewise, Bernhard’s experimental stylistics and conscious deformation of genre create a new topography on stage for self-experience and self-definition. He writes humors comedy as if authorized in turn by Plato and Freud—a theater in which character is a function of mimesis and where images of the self and its representations create a remarkably chilling hilarity.

Notes

1. Claude Rawson, “Order and Cruelty,” in Essays in Criticism 20 (1970): 24–56. Stephen Dowden, in Understanding Thomas Bernhard (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), reads Bernhard’s work as “similar in nature” to that of Swift and other great satirists. Dowden’s book in my opinion is the best work by far to appear on Bernhard in English, and while I disagree in many cases with his readings of individual works, I acknowledge his influence in this and the following several paragraphs.

2. Thomas Bernhard, Der Italiener (Salzburg: Residenz, 1971), p. 83; my translation.

3. Attributed often to Hermann Göring, but originally said by Hanns Johst, Schlageter (1933), cited in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 16th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), p. 679.

4. Lyons, “Character and Theatrical Space,” p. 30.

5. Dowden, Understanding Thomas Bernhard, p. 72.

6. Gitta Honegger, “Acoustic Masks: Strategies of Language in the Theater of Canetti, Bernhard, and Handke,” Modern Austrian Literature 18 (1985): 64.

7. Dowden, Understanding Thomas Bernhard, p. 5.

8. Martin Esslin, “A Drama of Disease and Derision: The Plays of Thomas Bernhard,” Modern Drama 23 (1981): 377.

9. Nicholas Eisner, “Theatertheater/Theaterspiele: The Plays of Thomas Bernhard,” Modern Drama 30 (1987): 105.

10. Denis Calandra, New German Dramatists: A Study of Peter Handke, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Heiner Müller, Thomas Brasch, Thomas Bernhard and Botho Strauss (New York: Grove Press, 1983), p. 27.

11. Dowden, Understanding Thomas Bernhard, p. 7.

12. Ibid, p. 24.

13. Ibid., p. 32.

14. Thomas Bernhard, Ein Fest für Boris (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 34; translations of Bernhard’s works unless otherwise noted are mine.

15. See Hans Wolfschütz, “Thomas Bernhard: The Mask of Death,” in Modern Austrian Writing: Literature and Society after 1945, ed. Alan Best and Hans Wolfschütz (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1980), pp. 214–35. Wolfschütz writes that “all Bernhard’s characters are marked by such an ‘event,’ whether this takes the form of some personal misfortune or shock, or has been experienced as part of a general or historical ‘catastrophe’” (p. 214).

16. Thomas Bernhard, Histrionics, trans. Peter Jansen and Kenneth Northcott (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 218–19.

17. Nicholas J. Meyerhofer, “The Laughing Sisyphus: Reflections on Bernhard as (Self-) Dramatist in Light of His Der Theatermacher,” Modern Austrian Literature 21 (1988): 108.

18. Calandra, New German Dramatists, p. 144.

19. Bernhard, Histrionics, p. 282.

20. In Ibsen’s play, of course, the child is comforted by the parent. But Sarah’s role in Histrionics is to minister to Bruscon’s emotional needs, in effect a kind of mothering.

21. Amity Shlaes, “Thomas Bernhard and the German Literary Scene,” The New Criterion 5 (January 1987): 30.

22. Quoted in Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard (Vienna: Löcker, 1988), p. 79.

23. Martin Esslin says Bernhard is “a kind of Austrian Beckett,” in “Beckett and Bernhard: A Comparison,” Modern Austrian Literature 18 (1985): 67. Esslin also discounts any direct influence of one writer on the other.

24. Cited in Calandra, New German Dramatists, p. 145.

25. Esslin, “Drama of Disease and Derision,” p. 374.

26. Bakhtin’s “dialogic” (or “heteroglossic”) self and Burke’s “dramatistic” readings of behavior are well known; it should not be necessary to develop an extended comparison between their respective theories and Bernhard’s models for character. Such an extended comparison would prove little, though of course the points of comparison are many. See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), and Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

27. Thomas Bernhard, Eve of Retirement, trans. Gitta Honegger (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), p. 204.

28. Robert Skloot, The Darkness We Carry: The Drama of the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 110.

29. Thomas Bernhard, Der Spiegel, 23 June 1980, quoted in Calandra, New German Dramatists, p. 149.

30. Text is Der Präsident (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, n.d.), p. 140. My translation.

31. Bennett Simon, Tragic Drama and the Family, p. 237.

32. See W.R. Bion, “Attacks on Linking,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 40 (1959): 308–15.

33. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 182.

34. Ibid., p. 183.

35. Esslin, “Drama of Disease and Derision,” p. 374.

36. Ibid.

37. Thomas Bernhard, Force of Habit (Die Macht der Gewohnheit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 9–12. All references to Force of Habit are to this text; translations are mine.

38. “Character-armor” is Wilhelm Reich’s term for describing repeated defensive acts. For an application of the concept to stage characters, see Edward Burns, Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 228.

39. Verscharren, “to cover with earth secretly or hurriedly,” implies shame.

40. Julien Bigras, “French Psychoanalysis,” in Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature: A French-American Inquiry, ed. Alan Roland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 15–16.

41. Ernest S. Wolf, “The Disconnected Self,” in Roland, Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature, pp. 104–6.

42. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 173.