Tag: Austrian Literature

Correcting our Idea of Genius – Thomas Bernhard’s Correction

I am something of a Thomas Bernhard fanatic. After Woodcutters, the other Bernhard on this blog, I had a break until late 2023, when I read, in quick succession, Concrete, The Loser, Extinction, and Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Bernhard is a writer who is addictive in a quite unique way. His books are propelled by the bile and bitterness of his narrators and are inescapable thanks to their flowing, paragraphless prose, which offers no exit for someone looking to put them down and take a break. Entering Bernhard’s world means a total surrender to his aims and approach.

Correction, which I have now read for the second time, is to my mind the best Bernhard, and one of my favourite books altogether. It has a unique structure for the author, with two narrators, (even though one filters the other,) who take equal sides of the novel for themselves and who have slightly different voices. It also has the most interesting readerly experience, in that the novel’s journey is primarily one where we change our opinion about its central character, the genius scientist Roithamer, rather than one where something happens. All happening takes place before the book begins.

As with all Bernhard, the story itself is simple. Roithamer, a genius of sorts who works at Cambridge, upon the death of his parents inherits a lot of money and decides to use this money to build a Cone in the centre of the Kobernausser Forest in Austria for his sister to live in. Once the Cone is finished his sister dies, probably not of joy, and Roithamer then hangs himself. Our narrator, a friend of Roithamer’s, arrives at the house of a mutual friend, Hoeller, where Roithamer did much of his work on the Cone, to start putting Roithamer’s literary remains in order. The first part of Correction is an almost hagiographic portrayal of Roithamer by this friend; the second is Roithamer’s own literary remains, partly filtered. Chief among them is a manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone”.

In the first part of the book Roithamer is presented as a classical genius – what Bertrand Russell said of Wittgenstein is entirely appropriate here: “he was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” Roithamer is totally focused in a way that few of us ever are: “a topic he took up had to be thought through to the end”. The ultimate end, it turns out, is suicide, but before we get to suicide, this thinking is inspirational. Roithamer builds a Cone for habitation, something nobody has done before, and does so totally professionally, as the result of massive research and effort, and all this in the face of all manner of criticisms and accusations of madness.

He is also totally himself, totally dedicated. Quite frankly, I would rather be like this – more pedantic, more unbearable, more focused, than any of the human qualities those who know me would wish I had in greater quantities to balance out my already well-developed inhuman ones. Almost all I could think as I read these sections was how much I agreed with everything, how much I myself wanted to build my own Cone, or rather in my case a Cube, a white glass cube but also in the centre of a forest or failing that atop a cliff and far away from everything and everybody, my own “thought-chamber” where I would be able to work totally undisturbed and think better, cleaner, wiser thoughts than anywhere else. A place where I would experience the same joy as I had recently in the crypt at the cathedral in Münster, where I was alone beside silent stone.

We see Roithamer’s genius reflected in Bernhard’s prose. It flows, in long sentences, with a focus on choosing the right words. One of the things I love, you’ll have noticed, is Bernhard’s italics. He uses italics to make us read words and phrases we might otherwise pass over. Strangely, simple though it is, it works. But there are also the neologisms, obviously more brilliant in the original German where they can remain a single word, things like the “thought-chamber” above. This sentence-by-sentence genius can also be drawn out to the wider book, where we are constantly becoming more precise, more accurate, more truthful in our various assertions.

Here is an example. On page 1 we learn that Roithamer has killed himself. On page 53 we learn the location, on page 61 we learn the method, on page 81 we learn who found him. The whole book is structured like a spiral, as we constantly correct our initial view to be closer to the reality that once was. Spirals can mean madness, of course, the sense of one being trapped. But they can also be like drill bits, precisely what is needed to make a hole through something – some challenge or problem – otherwise impenetrable. That is the great test of genius and obsession – to fixate upon the right thing, not the wrong. I have a friend whose longtime obsession is Pokémon Pearl. I, fortunately, am more obsessed by books and terrible questions.

Our narrator’s obsession is Roithamer himself. This is, he notes, not exactly healthy. He describes being unable to think his own thoughts, because he is incarcerated “within Roithamer’s thought-prison – or Roithamer’s thought-dungeon.” This, naturally, makes the depiction of Roithamer we receive in the first part of the book slightly suspect. It also provides one of the novel’s mysteries. For the second part is a collection of Roithamer’s thoughts, as filtered through the narrator, yet the narrator is nowhere to be found. Even though he claims they were friends who went to school together, Roithamer doesn’t mention him once. In fact, Roithamer provides information that directly contradicts the narrator’s testimony. (The narrator claims Roithamer visited Stocket to see him, whereas Roithamer claims he visited Stocket to see an uncle).

The result of the narrator’s obsession is that he essentially goes mad, helped by working in quite literally the same room as Roithamer when he worked on the Cone. He is almost subsumed into Roithamer. Arguably, the second part of the book, where Roithamer’s voice is even more dominant, is just an extension of this – the narrator is totally crushed as a human being with any more existence than merely that of a bridge between the dead man’s words and our ears. Yet interestingly, his admiration for Roithamer, his Roithamer-obsession, is quite similar to what I felt.

One of the ways that Correction provides a journey for the reader is that it takes that attitude and forces us to amend it. Once we hear Roithamer’s voice, unvarnished, the genius becomes rather more petty than godly. “That extraordinary talent for life” which the narrator so praises becomes in practice rather pathetic. Roithamer absolutely hated his upbringing on the estate of Altensam. He spends page after page criticising his brothers, his father, his mother in particular. He describes endless squabbles and confrontations in which he himself is the instigator. For example, it was enough for him to return home from abroad and find that a barn had been painted to send him off on a rampage.

Given that, like a lot of people on the spectrum or whatever, Roithamer has a real dislike of hypocrisy, the sheer amount that we find in him soon comes to undermine him. Nobody understands him, yes, but he claims to have been observing his sister for years and years to create the ultimate habitation for her in the form of a Cone. Yet the result of this observation is a home so comically unsuited that she dies pretty much immediately. The repetitions of these problems, Roithamer’s total lack of growth, and indeed the way that his entire personality seems to have come from his upbringing even though he claims to despise it, all makes him look rather ridiculous. He cries about people who “never once seek a single cause of their unhappiness in themselves,” but it is he who is the first person who should consider this.

Bernhard is a hugely funny writer, which I have failed to indicate here thus far, but humour is another way that our thought-image of Roithamer becomes covered in cracks. As Roithamer’s own suicide approaches, he reels off a whole host of family members who have committed suicide, in a way that is too over-the-top to be upsetting. “…They shoot themselves, like my uncle, or they hang themselves, like my other uncle, or they throw themselves in front of a train, like my third uncle. … And didn’t our cousin, the only son of our third uncle, kill himself too, after he got married to a doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf on the Krems.” When we learn that one of these people literally threw themselves down the air shaft of a cheese factory our sympathy struggles to break through the snort of laughter at these words.

In fact, it is humour that keeps Roithamer alive. At one point he visits the cliff off from which one of his relatives threw himself and finds himself considering following suit, “but suddenly, when this idea was at its most compelling, this idea seemed ridiculous to me, and I took myself out of there.” We laugh, perhaps, but three of Wittgenstein’s own brothers died to suicide, so these numbers are not the mad inflations they might seem. And Austria did, for a long time, have among the highest suicide rates in the world.

By the time Roithamer reaches the idea of suicide, the final “correction” for “our entire existence as a bottomless falsification and misrepresentation of our true nature”, we are already no longer with him, but watching him, rather sadly, as the madman that others did claim he was. One of the key elements of cone-building, as we learn, is “statics”, basically how to keep things from falling over. In the case of Roithamer, this provides a beautiful metaphor. He tips and tips as far as he can into his thoughts, and done well he can make huge advances (as he does by building the Cone) without getting to a point where he loses his balance and falls over. But in the book, he does go too far, and hence falls. We, watching, do not.

Another key idea, understandably, is the idea of correction itself. Roithamer writes his manuscript about his childhood and then corrects it, making it much smaller and completely different, then does so again, then finally kills himself. Correction, when I reflected on it, really has two meanings or uses. It can mean to take something false and replace it with what is true, as in the case of an incorrect mathematical summation, or it can mean to take what is largely true and make it more precise. Correction abounds in the latter, but believes it is a tale of the former. One of the mesmerising beauties of Bernhard’s prose is its precision-fanaticism. Whether it’s denying one word in favour of another, “master builder” instead of “architect”, or its deployment of a huge number of words and phrases to create a more accurate picture than one or two alone could do, Correction aims at precision in a way that others might be willing to stop and say this is “good enough.”

Precision-fanaticism is another phrase for perfectionism. Nowadays, self-help gurus are all about the need to be less of a perfectionist, and Correction provides a dramatization of why we should heed them. Roithamer, finding error and inaccuracy everywhere, ultimately gives up on his connection to the source of all error – existence itself. For us, it need not be so. We can stop at a given sentence, just as I can give up on a given blog post, and say that this is good enough. Could be better, but won’t be. Thus we live to fight another day.

As much as this book ultimately becomes a criticism of Roithamer, indeed even a correction to our idea of genius, it remains mysterious to me because I am unable to shake my love of the ideas it represents and the way it represents them. Much as once upon a time I wanted to be Ivan Karamazov or Levin, I would want to be Roithamer if I could. At least the Roithamer that is represented in the novel’s first half. The Roithamer of the second, with his pettiness and pointless arguments with his family members, I fear I already am.

Where Bernhard is normally so negative and cruel that we normally come out of his books looking for things that might actually be affirmed in life, in Correction I actually heard something truly beautiful and admirable – the sheer, single-minded dedication to an arbitrarily chosen idea that we are willing to stake our entire soul upon. Yes, it’s mad, but I want to build my Cone. Better that than not wanting anything at all, and sinking into the grim mediocrity that Bernhard hates so much.

Peter Handke – The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which I read in the original German, is not a book that brought me much pleasure. It is probably the best-known work by the Austrian author Peter Handke, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Thankfully, it is quite short. I covered my copy with annotations, but with me, that is not always the sign of a good book. In fact, I was quite convinced the novel was a complete waste of time and energy until somewhere around the halfway mark when I began to perceive some actual sense in it and dutifully upgraded it to merely a book I will be glad both to have read and never to have to read again.

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is a novel about Bloch, a former goalkeeper who loses his job, murders a random woman, and then loses his mind, though possibly not in that order. The murder happens early on and after it, Bloch leaves town and spends time loafing about near the Austrian border. He gets into fights and flirts with various women, and he goes on walks and goes mad while looking at things. This is all that happens. From such nothingness, it is for us as readers to work out why the book has gathered the reputation of a literary masterwork. As much as I want to complain, I will try to turn my complaints into strengths for the book.

The way I found to appreciate this book was to consider it as part of the rather rich tradition of German literary works dealing with madness, such as Büchner’s “Lenz”, Hoffmann’s “Sandman”, and Heym’s “The Madman”. As a theme, madness is a rich one because it naturally turns itself around to raise questions about who is actually mad – Bloch, us, or society. At the same time, the particular form of Bloch’s madness, which so often seems to relate to perception and speech, connects The Goalie’s Anxiety… to the language crisis affecting German letters at the beginning of the 20th century, where Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler were only some of the big names that tried to consider our ability to represent anything at all with words.

Translations are my own.

Language of Experience

In a way, reading in another language gives you a sort of madness akin to the one afflicting Bloch. Much more so even than when we closely read on our own, we notice thingswhen we have to trudge through a foreign tongue. Words and phrases that repeat strike us, and odd formulations strike us too. From the beginning, The Goalie’s Anxiety… strikes us with its numbness. The very first word in German is “dem” – the dative, telling us that something is happening to Bloch, rather than the other way around. That something is his firing.

The passive voice we tend to associate with passivity and numbness, and that is the dominant note of the book. The language is simple, and the sentences are short. Handke’s narrator typically refers to characters with their roles, not their names. Even Bloch’s ex-wife and child are deprived of the emotional significance that a name would give them. Most of the dialogue is reported, rather than given directly so that it too is numb. When Bloch calls a woman, he has to talk for some time “until she knew who he was.”

This numbness is Bloch’s world. Sometimes he stretches out to play an active role, as when he commits murder, but mostly things happen to him, like random fights and his anxiety in the city. He reads a lot of newspapers but there’s no real sense that he takes anything in. It seems compulsive more than anything. But newspapers themselves, like the cinema that plays an important role, are sites where we are passive receivers rather than active agents. A newspaper tells you, in essence, that something was happening in the world, but you weren’t involved. Just as a film shows action you also can only see as a spectator.

This general numbness is what makes the book hard to read. There are paragraphs, but nothing like white space for pauses or chapters. This has, again, a levelling effect. Everything that happens, from murder to looking at a field, is equally important – or, we might better conclude, equally unimportant. It also leads to a certain perception of determinism because there are no breaks to the logic. One thing just follows on from the other, except for the “plötzlich” (“suddenly”) that begins the paragraph with the murder. In other words, the way the story comes to us makes us numb and feel our own powerlessness.

Bloch’s Madness

We never really see into Bloch’s mind, only as far as his perceptions of things. Unlike Arthur Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else”, where mental collapse is seen from within, here madness is seen almost from without – “Everything he saw disturbed him”. We learn, at other times, how things disturbed him. But the language is thoroughly unemotive. “Bloch was” either “excited”, or “not at peace”, or “disturbed” – this is a typical and repeated sentence. He does not have an inner world, at least not one that is revealed. Neither firing nor murder actually results in any feeling that we can see.

Instead, our understanding of Bloch comes from the surface, both from his actions and perceptions. The least interesting thing is that he struggles with any kind of commitment or acknowledgement of others’ existence – he is numb to the idea of it. He has no real friends; his marriage has collapsed; he organises meetings with women and then leaves the bar with another person before the original person arrives; he casually murders another woman after a night together.

More interesting, though is his perception of things. Martin Swales’ comment on Büchner’s “Lenz”, that it is the tale of “a mind already unhinged, in the sense that there is no coherent and sustaining relationship to the world”, is perfectly apt here. In that novella, there is no violence, but there is the same problem – a man walking about trying to make sense of things and failing utterly. (“Lenz”, about a poet who went mad, is more enjoyable to read for Büchner’s beautiful language, which shows that poetic mind at work.)

Bloch’s problems circle around sensory problems and odd fixations, but these specific problems change. At one point, he notices persistence – of urine on a market wall, of shells he was chewing the day before. At another, he becomes obsessed with asking the price of objects. At still another, he wants to find something that has been lost and refuses to believe that someone else has found it when he is told, as if he wants to be some kind of hero.

What links these oddities and all the others? Perhaps the key one to me is the idea of control. In the numbness of Bloch’s world, fixations – like murder – are a way of trying to impart a framework and meaning and personal presence onto things. They are a reaction to individual powerlessness. We read the word “wehr” (“defence”) more than a few times here in the context of Bloch’s attempts to survive life. He is actually trying to find some way of holding on to his grip on things, even if that way looks even more mad than what came before it to us.

Words, words, words.

Which brings us to the language problem. Ultimately, stories like The Goalie’s Anxiety… are made of words. So, madness must come to us in words. Bloch’s final collapse comes to us as a “Wortspielkrankeit”, a “problem of language games” or “punning”. He stops finding any meaning in language. He hears a woman scream and thinks it has no meaning, so he ignores it. He tries to tell a story but finds he needs to explain the meaning of every single word before he can use it, so he is unable to tell the story at all. Things swerve rapidly into an overabundance of meaning, however, when Bloch becomes paranoid and convinced that everything is a code only he can read if only he can see behind the language. Still, words are failing him – giving him too much, or altogether too little.

In Austria, at the beginning of the 20th century, something similar was happening. Language had been exhausted by realism, and poets like Rilke, Trakl, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal sought to recover the meaning of words like “spirit” from simple definitions that killed their significance. There was both a huge sense of hidden meaning, with Freud gaining popularity and showing hidden mental worlds even we could not access, and a striving to find meaning in the desperately desolate world left by god-killing thinkers like Max Weber and Nietzsche. Sometimes the struggle was too much. Hofmannsthal gave up on poetry with the fictional “Letter of Lord Chandos”, which shares much with Bloch’s own problem.

In that work, the fictional Lord struggles with the fact that he has “totally lost the ability to put anything coherent together in word or thought.” He has only a personal language, uncommunicable. “Words… break apart in my mouth like rotting mushrooms”. This is what Bloch has too. He stops being able to communicate, so he just becomes more and more isolated from others while his internal language grows stranger and stranger. He is left adrift in a world he cannot find words for, but nobody cares.  

Whose madness? Film and Society

The “Letter of Lord Chandos” is a letter, written by one man. The Goalie’s Anxiety… puts the same kind of madness into a social setting. How does that change our understanding of that madness? For one, we see that it goes beyond just Bloch. Near the end of the book he talks to a village schoolmaster who reveals that nearly all the children there are unable to create full sentences. If that is the case, then the problem is not just Bloch’s. We know this already, though. Bloch is subject to random violence himself, and on the streets, he greets people who don’t return that greeting. The world itself is numb and cruel. If it is so, then the same solutions – conspiracist thinking, odd fixations, and finally murder – may appear to others too. It’s not just noblemen who get word-sick.

Then there is the cinema, a modern intrusion Hofmannsthal did not have to worry about. Like the newspapers that Bloch is constantly reading, cinema runs through the book – the woman he kills works at one, and Bloch regularly compares things in real life with things he has seen in films. The significance of cinema, it seems to me, is twofold. I have already mentioned how it numbs the world by making it seem like life is elsewhere. For example, Bloch reads about the police hunting him in the paper, but he does not react to it – because it does not feel real, it feels like it is happening somewhere else. But then, films also represent reality without being a reality. They create a space for us to lose our sense that the world we see is the real world, and in that space Bloch wanders, unable to see sense.

Conclusion

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is thus a novel of madness and the breakdown of language, rather than just a boring story about a man who commits a murder and then mooches around. It sits in a tradition of such works in German literature and contributes to it by having a perspective – external and sensory rather than stream-of-consciousness as in Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else” – and a focus – language collapse as social rather than purely individual, as in Büchner’s “Lenz” – which sets it apart from other works. It is a strange little novel.

But reading it brought me no joy, and analysing it, now that I don’t pay professors to read that analysis and say nice things about it, was not very joyous either. If our world is as numb and miserable as Bloch’s, why read about it? As for Bloch himself, the perspective choice means that even if he were charming (Humbert Humbert was dead wrong when he said “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), we would hardly know it. Else is likeable – I feel sad when she goes nuts. Bloch was an empty, violent man from the beginning. His only character development consists of actually losing his mind.

So, interesting, but a tale that’s hard to recommend. “Lenz” is much shorter and more beautiful, “Else” much more emotionally impactful, and “Lord Chandos” more likely to come to mind when you try to live and say things in this world of ours. Handke kicks the ball, but it hits the post.

Chopping Down the Bourgeoisie – Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters

I am not, on the whole, a fan of what I would call “closed-box novels”. Those torturous first-person narratives which Beckett and Murnane and so many others like to write, where our main character is generally floating in space, very rarely lucky enough to be trapped in a small box. From within this cramped environment they ramble, complain, whatever. But given how far detached from our own world theirs is, I get very little from them. Such narratives neither bring us closer to our fellows, nor do they ever appear to have any positive message to impart at all. Just pessimism and cynicism. If I wanted that, I’d go outside.

Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters is in some sense one of these closed-box mysteries. The main character spends most of the narrative sitting in a chair at a party, reminiscing or else thinking ill of those around him. A little later he has a bite to eat, sits and listens to an actor discourse, and finally goes home. What action there is lies within his mind until very late in the story. Though it is unparagraphed, and though it has a certain peculiar disconnection from human life that reminds me of Beckett, I ended up enjoying the novel. There was some light within its caverns, and the writing is also (trans. David McLintock) far funnier than I had expected.

I suppose I would like to open the box, and explain briefly what value to us in the real world this novel might have.

Plot Introduction

Woodcutters is set in Bernhard’s native Austria, in the Vienna of the 1980s. Our narrator is a writer, temporarily back in his homeland from England, where he appears to be in self-imposed exile. While in Vienna he accidentally encounters the Auersbergers – a married couple and old friends from the 50s, whom our narrator now despises, and they give him an invitation to “an artistic dinner” that he somehow fails to decline. He also hears of the suicide, by hanging, of their mutual friend, a woman called Joana. The action of Woodcutters takes place during this dinner, the same day as Joana’s funeral – first as our narrator sits alone on his chair, then during the dinner itself. The guest of honour is an actor from the Burgtheater, the most important Viennese theatre, but he is running late. Among the various guests is also Jeannie Billroth, another writer who the narrator despises.

Joana

The narrator’s treatment of his old friend’s suicide is rather ambiguous. As with most of the people in Woodcutters, Joana had once had a great impact on the narrator’s life, but since been abandoned by him. She had had a hard life, coming from the countryside to Vienna to be an artist but then ending up simply doing movement classes with actors. She married, but then Fritz, her famous fabric-making husband, ran off to Mexico without her. And so she drank, and drank, and the narrator is more surprised to hear that she had recently still been alive than that she had died. Why exactly she ended her life is unclear – what final thing brought her to go to the countryside and hang herself. But the narrator says he had always known she would hang herself, because she had dreams and dreams are not fit for this world.

Joana had been the narrator’s friend, and he had taken no interest in her these past ten or twenty years. Whether or not there is any guilt there is hard to say, but the cynicism of the narrator shouldn’t be confused with authority. At the funeral, which takes place in the village where Joana grew up and died, the narrator encounters John, Joana’s companion. At first he hates him, considering him an ill-educated peasant, but as he recollects the funeral his opinion changes, and he realises that in comparison with the bourgeois trash that were also there, John was actually a good man. He had organised the funeral, he had done his duty and looked death in the face in the way that the endlessly posing Viennese never had. And that, of course, is better than nothing.

Auersberger

Just now looking through the German Wikipedia page for Woodcutters I discovered to my surprise and, I think, horror, that these characters all have quite clear analogues in the real world. In many cases Bernhard did not even bother changing first names. That is a surprise because Woodcutters is full of characters with changed names. Joana was originally Elfriede, for example, and Auersberger’s name has also been pruned by him to make it sound more aristocratic. Everyone here is trying to be someone other than themselves.

The Auersbergers, “Auersberger” and “his wife”, are the hosts of the party. They have not changed in the thirty or so years that the narrator has had the misfortune of knowing them. The man is a composer, from the school of Anton Webern; his wife is a singer. Auersberger had promise, had genius perhaps, but now he is simply considered one of Webern’s many successors. He has a drinking problem, and occasionally goes for drying-out cures.

Their marriage is not happy – none in the book is. They are sustained by her money and these social events. They are, to quote our narrator, “perfidious society masturbators”. They have destroyed an entire village – the source of her wealth – by their indolence. As they do no work, they are forced to gradually sell parcels of land from her inheritance, which leads to land development. And no doubt by not working they are also doing a lot of damage to their souls. Everything about the Auersbergers is fake, dishonest. I particularly enjoyed the several pages where the actor talks about The Wild Duck, the play by Ibsen that he had been in, and not one person save Jeannie and the narrator has actually seen it. But in addition to the fake names there are fake books, fake libraries, fake relationships. Their whole world is false.

Auersberger, though, is terribly funny. He has drunk far more than he should and his wife keeps trying to force him to go to bed, whereupon he kicks her. But the best line in the book, I thought, comes when the discussion turns to suicide’s prevalence among the Austrians at that time.

“The Styrians are rather prone to suicide, said Auersberger, who by this stage was just about totally drunk and had become highly agitated. He told the actor that he was surprised that so few Burgtheater actors killed themselves, since they had such good reason to do so. Saying this he burst out laughing at his own remark, though the others merely found it embarrassing and glared at him.”

This gives a good idea of the humour in Woodcutters. It is cruel, but it is also shockingly funny. Yet I cannot leave Auersberger like this, because his particular character goes too far. The narrator is cynical, is brutal. But Auersberger – at least to me, reads as someone far more sinister, considering the context of politically unrepentant Austria in postwar period. When he starts talking about how “the human race ought to be abolished”, or “we should all kill one another”, it suggests a kind of unreformed Nazi nihilism, at least to me. So too does his destruction of chairs and wineglasses. He is good for a laugh, but not when you start thinking about him.

Jeannie and the Actor

Considering it is a broadside against Viennese bourgeois society, art naturally enough sits at centre of Woodcutters. Our narrator time and again refers to the way that Vienna consumes talented artists and turns them into mediocrities – Joana and Auersberger are but examples of this. Only Fritz and – we presume – the narrator, were able to escape the Austrian capital’s pernicious influence, and then only by fleeing abroad. Jeannie Billroth, who the narrator once served as lover, is one who has not escaped Vienna’s clutches. Styling herself as the Viennese Virginia Woolf, she is in the narrator’s eye a phenomenal mediocrity. Her days, he suggests, are spent pandering to politicians to secure pensions and prizes. After all,

“Artistic life in Austria is a road built by state opportunism out of people’s baseness and mendacity, paved with scholarships and prizes, lined with decorations and distinctions, and leading to an honoured grave in the Central Cemetery”.

If Jeannie is as untalented and inauthentic as everyone else at the party, the actor is almost the opposite. He arrives incredibly late, pays decorum no heed, but though he is for the most part boring, he is nonetheless himself. When Jeannie asks him, not once, not twice, not even three times but repeatedly until he cannot ignore her any longer, whether he could say, “at the end of his life, that his art had brought him fulfilment”, he at last snaps. He hates the party, hates the people there, and hates Jeannie above all. What he wants, what he truly wants, is “to go into the forest, deep into the forest… to yield oneself up to the forest” and be a woodcutter.

The actor, who had described to the uninterested listeners how he had holed himself up in a mountain shack in order to learn his lines and truly feel his role, is the real artist. Of course, he is as petty as the rest of them in many ways, and he does appear slightly ridiculous. Here is the wonderful description of him eating. It is truly amazing how Bernhard manages to convey the rush of the artist’s spooning in his language:

“Ekdal, he said, spooning up his soup, has been my dream role for decades. And then he went on, interrupting himself after every other word to spoon up more soup, Ekdal—pause for a spoonful—has always—another spoonful—been my—another spoonful—favourite part, adding, after two more spoonfuls, for decades.”

Truth-telling and Cynicism

Why mention the spooning? Because it makes the actor look ridiculous. It undermines him, and Woodcutters as a whole is about undermining people. It is about, in some sense, telling the truth.

“For years, perhaps for decades, we may have wanted to tell someone the truth to his face, the truth that he has never heard because no one has dared to tell it to him to his face, and then at last someone does it for us.”

It is only, obliterated by another person, that we can ever reflect upon ourselves honestly and turn away from the incorrect path that we are on. Sometimes, not even that is enough. In another moment that had me write “big oof” in the margins the narrator turns to a very drunken Auersberger, quite randomly after the dinner, and say

“that he had made a mess of his life and dragged his genius in the dirt for the sake of a rich wife and high living, that he had destroyed himself in the process and made drinking the be-all and end-all of his life, that he had exchanged one misfortune, that of his youth, for a second misfortune, that of old age, that he had sacrificed his musical genius for his revolting socializing, and intellectual freedom for the bondage of wealth.”

Big oof indeed.

Can we ever break out of the cycles that we are in? Are we condemned to them until at last, confronted with the sheer awfulness of other people, we finally snap? The cynicism of the narrator is not without its purpose. There is at least a kind of hope, if only for himself, that life can be better than an artistic dinner in Vienna. And as the novel ends he runs – literally runs – determined to make something of his experience that isn’t just a complaint. There is something to be valued here.

Conclusion

Woodcutters is the first work of fiction by Bernhard that I have read. I remember once starting Frost and stopping, but after Woodcutters I have already ordered another novel. Woodcutters is not quite the closed-box I thought it was. It is hilarious in a way that is relevant to us all, living as we do in a bourgeois cultural milieu (you are on this blog, after all). It is not too long either, and easy to read. Bernhard’s style has his narrator constantly going in circles, searching for perfect barb with which to pierce his old friends’ bubbles. And these barbs are not the end. There is a sense, a limited sense, that underneath the cynicism and the misanthropy there is a good world and a good life to be found, just not the one we live in and not the one we’re living.

But that’s what we have books for. To show the way to something better.