SOURCE: “‘The Greatest Uncertainty’: The Perils of Performance in Thomas Bernhard’s Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige,” in Modern Drama, Vol. 23, No. 4, January, 1981, pp. 385–92.

[In the following essay, Gross discusses Bernhard’s treatment of death in Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige.]

Thomas Bernhard’s recognition of the omnipresence of death has provided the background for all of his dramatic works to appear thus far. For Bernhard, death is not a single, unique event that occurs at the conclusion of each life, but a current of negation that runs throughout the whole of human existence, manifesting itself in sickness, exhaustion and decay. The Writer in Die Jagdgesellschaft presents the Bernhardian vision of death in its most unadorned form:

Wir sind allein
oder nicht allein
wir hören Musik
oder wir hören nicht Musik
Jeder Gegenstand gnädige Frau
ist der Tod(1)
(We are alone
or not alone
we hear music
or we do not hear music
Every circumstance dear lady
is death).

This is not simply another occurrence of the memento mori trope; death is not personified as a character who hovers around unsuspecting mortals, waiting to carry them off at any moment. For Bernhard, all persons carry their mortality within them every moment of their lives. This belief in the imminence of death within the living places Bernhard closer to Martin Heidegger and his analysis of death in Sein und Zeit than to the conventional view of death in the Western tradition.²

In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger explains that death does not stand in opposition to Dasein, but exists as a fundamental ontological moment of it.³Dasein exists in incompleteness; so long as human beings exist, they are constantly changing and are subject to further becoming. Only death can complete Being-in-the-world; Dasein, by virtue of its finitude, is oriented toward death as the utmost possibility of its being. The fundamental orientation of Dasein leads to the experience of anxiety. For both Bernhard and Heidegger, the experience of anxiety is a special locus in which Dasein’s Being-unto-death is revealed. But Bernhard’s characters never learn to confront the fact of their mortality with the “gerüstete Freude”⁴ (“fortified joy”) that Heidegger finds in the authentic orientation toward death. Instead, they exist in a perpetual flight from death that verges on the hysterical.

Bernhard’s dramatic presentation of the flight from death is first emphasized in his second play, Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige (The Ignoramus and the Madman). The death of the title character in his first play, Ein Fest für Boris (A Party for Boris), virtually fails to make any impression on its audience whatsoever, since it has been so numbed and desensitized by a series of far more ingenious grotesqueries in the course of the play. In retrospect, it is clear that the cruel rituals of Ein Fest für Boris are a response to the omnipresence of death in its manifestation as physical mutilation, but the theme is not presented with the precision and subtlety that distinguishes Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige.

The play’s title describes the two forms the flight from death can take: willed ignorance or madness. The Father, an alcoholic approaching total blindness, has chosen ignorance. Although his blindness is not yet total, he has given up the use of his sight, relies on sound for all of his information, and walks with a blind man’s cane. His chosen blindness becomes associated with the ignorance and vulgarity of the operatic world:

Wenn wir den Schwachsinn
der in dieser Kunstgattung herrscht
geehrter Herr
mit der Gemeinheit
der Zuschauer verrechnen
kommen wir in den Wahnsinn(5)
(If we consider the feeble-mindedness
that reigns in this art form
dear sir
along with the vulgarity
of the audience
we go insane).

The Father, who is the most faithful and attentive auditor of his daughter, a world-renowned coloratura soprano, is an image of the theatrical spectator, sitting safely in the dark while the performers attempt dangerous acts under the intense lighting of the stage:

In solcher Intensität
existieren nicht viele
Das Licht
ist ein Unglück …
Wie auf offener Bühne
geehrter Herr
wodurch alles die grösste
Unsicherheit ist (p. 98)
(Not many exist
in such intensity
The light
is a misfortune …
As on the open stage
dear sir
where the greatest uncertainty
is found throughout it).

The Father, like the public, prefers not to recognize how difficult and destructive the artist’s life is.

The world of the operatic stage exemplifies the second form the flight from death can take, insanity. Fleeing from the decay and deterioration that proclaim the omnipotence and omnipresence of death, people look for a structure that appears impervious to death. They accept the rigorous and inhuman demands of the structure, laboring under the illusion that it will free them from the constant threat of annihilation. There are two madpersons in Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige, the Doctor and the Queen of the Night. The Doctor is the madman referred to in the title. He passes his time backstage at the opera house by explaining to the Father how to dissect a cadaver. He presents the process in detail as a rigorous and inflexible sequence of precise actions. It even demands special virtues from its practitioner:

die Aufmerksamkeit
wie die Entschiedenheit
wie die Rücksichtslosigkeit
diese drei fortwährend unerlässlich (p. II)
(Attentiveness
as well as determination
as well as ruthlessness
these three continually indispensable).

The ritualized action of dissection attempts to defy death in its impersonal and inviolable structure, but cannot help to flee from the awareness of death. If anything, it heightens one’s awareness of death by confronting one with a naked image of it. It is in the impossibility of a successful flight from death through structure that madness lies.

In Bernhard’s world, the artist is no more removed from death than the anatomist. The Father’s daughter, known only as the Queen of the Night (after the role she sings in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte), is the second character involved in insane flight from death. Subjecting herself to the rigorous discipline of operatic singing, she has tried to escape mortality by transforming herself into a “Koloraturmaschine” (p. 7; “coloratura-machine”). Since the world of artifice superficially appears to be opposed to the world of nature and death, she has striven to become completely artificial, like the golden bird in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” but Bernhard refuses to let his artists escape into any artifice of eternity. The Queen of the Night instructs her dresser, Mrs. Vargo, to cover her entire face with white make-up for her performance that evening:

Tragen Sie Weiss auf
viel Weiss
das Gesicht
muss ein vollkommen künstliches Gesicht sein
mein Körper
ein künstlicher
alles künstlich (p. 55)
(Lay the white on
lots of white
the face
must be a completely artificial face
my body
an artificial one
everything artificial).

This white make-up will cover her natural visage, giving her the appearance of an artificial being. Similarly, all of her hair will be hidden beneath her crown (p. 50). Her success as a coloratura-machine resides in her ability to submit herself completely to the impersonal stricture of her art. For Bernhard, the performing arts are not forms of expression, but forms of depersonalization. Musicians are allowed no more self-expression or eccentricity in the performance of their tasks than anatomists.

The pursuit of an operatic career has not only failed to provide the Queen with a means of self-expression; it has also crippled her. Just as her father has lost his eyesight and become little more than a highly sensitive ear for his daughter, the Queen is dwindling away into the disembodied voice that has made her famous. The Doctor observes that her continual state of anxiety is bad for her singing, not considering the mental strain caused by such continual tension (p. 54). The first act ends with her vanishing as a physical presence, as we see the Father and the Doctor listening to her singing the Queen of the Night’s first-act recitative and aria over the intercom in the dressing room. In the second act, the Queen’s repeated coughs, signalling the breakdown of the coloratura-machine, are more significant than anything else she says or does in the act. By a strange synecdochical operation, the voice becomes the entire character.

This grotesque reduction of a person to a musical instrument might have given the Queen some consolation if it had succeeded in alleviating her anxiety in the face of death, but art has granted her neither safety nor ignorance. Like the Doctor’s dissection, the performing arts only heighten one’s awareness of death. The Queen dreams that the fire curtain will fall during a performance and kill her (p. 66). She is repeatedly made aware of the fragility of the vocal mechanism on which her art depends (pp. 54, 74). Each night before she goes onstage, the sleeve of her costume tears and must be repaired at the last moment, leaving barely enough time for her to reach the stage in time for her first entrance. She always worries that her costume will tear while she is onstage:

das ist entsetzlich
plötzlich
zerreisst das Kostüm unter dem Arm
und das Publikum
bricht in Gelächter aus (p. 56)
(That is awful
suddenly
the costume tears under the arm
and the public
breaks out in laughter).

Any accident is capable of destroying the illusion created by a work of art, which, by its very nature, seeks to control all of its elements completely. The rip in the costume spells the death of the illusion, the triumph of chance over order. The tear is a farcical reduction of the abyss, a void that reveals the ultimate impotence and ridiculousness of art. Thus, the work of art is continually threatened by its own disintegration. Death appears in the opera house in every chance event that threatens to upset its precarious aesthetic order. The Queen’s madness is founded on her realization that art is always vulnerable to chance occurrences, whether in the form of a torn costume or a falling fire curtain:

Die Künstler existieren
glaube ich
in ständiger Angst
vor dem augenblicklichen Verlust (pp. 73–74)
(The artists exist
I believe
in constant dread
of sudden destruction).

The Doctor compares the life of an opera singer to that of a tightrope walker (pp. 52–53). Like a tightrope walker, the Queen performs an action that is not expressive, but rigorously self-effacing. Despite that self-effacement, however, she is put in mortal danger by her art, which demands that she tread an exceedingly narrow path bounded by the possibility of disaster on either side. She is afforded no opportunity for relaxation, that is, ignorance, since she is aware that her performance could be destroyed at any instant, either by her own carelessness or by forces outside of her control.

The first act of Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige places in the foreground the anxiety that underlies every artistic performance and the constant threats posed to the artist. The characters are concerned that the Queen might not be ready to go onstage in time for her aria. This tension is heightened by the sound of the opera being performed as it is transmitted into the dressing room by the intercom system. Since the conflicts among the characters fail to influence the action in the scene to any appreciable extent, the dramatic tension is almost entirely the result of this race against the clock. At the end of the act, as we hear the Queen singing, we are relieved to see that order has once again triumphed, however narrowly, over the forces of death and chaos.

Bernhard suggests that those darker forces will inevitably intervene and triumph, since no one can defeat them for once and for all. The Father must continually drink more liquor to keep himself intoxicated, the Doctor must continue with his recitation of his multi-volumed treatise on anatomy, and the Queen of the Night must relive her anxiety at every performance. In the second act, the Queen capitulates to the forces of death. This act is more difficult to perform than the first, since it lacks the energy generated by the impending performance of Die Zauberflöte and the problems encountered in preparing for it. Instead, we see a gradual deterioration of the artistic realm induced by anxiety and exhaustion. Whereas the first act ends with the organization of sound in the form of the Mozartian aria, the second act ends with the triumph of chaos in coughing and the sound of objects falling off a table. We see the triumph of exhaustion, as the Queen begins to cough and cancels all of her professional engagements. Her final speech, which is also the final speech in the play, reads, “Erschöpfung / nichts als Erschöpfung” (p. 99; “Exhaustion / nothing but exhaustion”). This speech not only refers to the major, entropic force in the play and indicates its omnipotence, but also implies that life itself is nothing but exhaustion.

In Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige, the flight from death leads the characters into patterns of obsessive repetition that eventually succeed in exhausting their resistance to death and decay. The verbal repetitions that are a salient feature of Bernhard’s dramatic style are formulae uttered with compulsive energy in an effort to keep mortality at bay. Both the mad and the ignorant are locked into patterns of repetition. In the face of death, the great annihilator of all individuality, the division between the mad and ignorant breaks down. The anonymous subject of the Doctor’s autopsy is a memento mori, an invisible corpse that represents the future of all the characters. From the point of view of death, alcohol, the crutch of the ignorant, can be seen as “ein Kunstmittel” (p. 41; “an artistic device”); dissection, opera, alcoholism, cards, correspondence can all be reduced to the same end. As a result, there is little conflict in the play between the various types of characters; the major source of tension is the struggle of each individual with his own mortality.

Because this internal struggle is Bernhard’s primary source of dramatic conflict, he tends to neglect the more familiar tensions latent in his material. Although he establishes the animosity between the Queen and her father, they do not communicate directly with each other, but speak to the Doctor, who acts as a neutral figure between them. This mediation prevents the conflict from developing into a major source of tension. Bernhard also refrains from showing us the conflicts that the Queen undergoes with the other members of the opera company. He is not interested in a satire of backstage life; rather, he uses the perils of artistic performance as an image of the tension that exists between mortals and the structures they create to escape their own mortality.

This interest in the agonies of the performing artist places in the foreground the difficulties of performing Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige. In hearing the Doctor and the Queen rail against the stupidity of audiences, the spectator at Bernhard’s play may well be led to ask if the dramatist’s vision of the artist is not an evasion of the truth. The speeches on the agonies of the performer highlight the difficulties of performing Bernhard’s play: sustaining the Doctor’s lengthy anatomical monologues, supporting the repetition of phrases that threaten to lose any possible theatrical impact with one more repetition, and overcoming the paucity of traditional dramatic conflict. Bernhard makes his actors submit to a rigorous structure that requires great skill and virtuosity. His mode of virtuosity, however, is not that of the nineteenth-century actor, based on flamboyance and self-expression. He elicits, or, more accurately, he demands virtuoso performances from his actors, presenting them with difficulties rather than easy vehicles.⁶ As a result, histrionic virtuosity, achieved through material that might be considered static and untheatrical by some, becomes a testimony to the brilliance of its performers as well as an image of the impossible demands that intellectual and aesthetic structures make on our limited and death-ridden beings. Art becomes a form of voluntary servitude to an unrewarding master, an impossible task that exhausts the artist without recompense. It becomes, in short, a metaphor for the cruelty of existence.

Notes

1. Thomas Bernhard, Die Jagdgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), p. 69. All translations from Bernhard’s works are my own, and are included in parentheses after the German quotation.

2. For a detailed and lucid analysis of Heidegger’s treatment of death, see James M. Demske, Being, Man, and Death (Lexington, KY, 1970), especially pp. 5–73.

3. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Band 2 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), sections 46–53, pp. 314–354.

4. Heidegger, p. 410.

5. Thomas Bernhard, Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), pp. 97–98. Page references for citations from this edition will appear parenthetically in my text.

6. Bernhard has written certain plays with particular actors in mind. Minetti was especially written for Bernhard Minetti. Die Jagdgesellschaft was written for Bruno Ganz, who had created the role of the Doctor in Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige.