{"id":279276,"date":"2010-08-04T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-04T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/08\/04\/prose\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:31:54","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:31:54","slug":"prose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/08\/04\/prose\/","title":{"rendered":"Prose"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone familiar with Thomas Bernhard\u2019s work can call forth a string of adjectives, one more off-putting than the last: bleak, anguished, splenetic, death-obsessed. Correction<\/em> is about a scientist who kills himself after spending six years constructing a bizarre monument to his sister. The Loser<\/em> focuses on a musician so lost in Glenn Gould\u2019s shadow that silence, followed by suicide, seems the only logical choice. The Lime Works<\/em> tells the story of the murder of a wheelchair-bound woman by her monomaniacal husband. And so on. Coupled with Bernhard\u2019s uninterrupted blocks of text and digressive ranting against the loathsomeness of Austria, these morbid plots hardly offer the most welcome invitation for those who don\u2019t habitually dress all in black or aren\u2019t given to self-flagellation. <\/p>\n

Fortunately, for all of its easily identifiable Bernhardian preoccupations—its suicides and murderers, its haunted characters—the previously untranslated story collection Prose<\/em> provides, in miniature, both an ideal introduction and a refresher to the work of one of the singular European writers of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

A typical Bernhard story (both in Prose<\/em> and in his novels) takes the form of a report or confession of narrator who witnesses the dissolution of another character\u2019s mind—as Ben Marcus argues, Bernhard is less a narrative storyteller than an \u201carchitect of consciousness.\u201d The narrator serves as a filter through which the victim1<\/a><\/sup> pours his defense, which, at this remove takes on a deeply ironic aspect. By keeping the subject at arm\u2019s length, Bernhard can create an at times unbearable tension: does the distance save the reader from identifying fully with the victim1<\/a><\/sup> or does it cause us to suffer more due to the fact that Bernhard\u2019s narrators are themselves sufferers by proxy, thus magnifying the amount of anguish a book can contain? <\/p>\n

The sixth of seven stories in this collection, the excruciatingly ironic \u201cThe Crime of an Innsbruck Shopkeeper\u2019s Son,\u201d offers a prime example of this technique. The titular character, the narrator\u2019s fellow student and roommate, is driven to desperation by being different, a dividing line drawn between him and his family:<\/p>\n

\n

Georg was an exception. He was the center of attention, but thanks to his worthlessness, thanks to the scandal which he represented for the whole family, always frightened and embittered by him, not least where they tried to cover it up, a horribly crooked and crippled center of attention, which they wanted out of the house at all costs. He was so greatly and in the most dreadful way deformed by nature they always had to hide him. After they had been disappointed down to the depths of their faecal and victual detestableness by the doctors\u2019 skills and by medical science altogether, they implored in mutual perfidiousness a fatal illness for Georg, which would remove him from the world as swiftly as possible; they had been prepared to do anything, if he would just die . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cscandal\u201d Georg causes, we find, is due more to his intelligence than a mysterious deformity: being born into a merchant family, this \u201cuseless, ever deeper and deeper thinking beast\u201d who \u201ceven wrote poems,\u201d deviated too much from the rigid stupidity of the shopkeeping class. As in a fairy tale, Georg\u2019s murderous family conspires to rid themselves of this nuisance. Despite his perceived monstrosity, Georg proves himself strong enough to overcome his family\u2019s evil designs and flees to Vienna.<\/p>\n

In a fairy tale, such an escape signals a happy resolution. In Bernhard\u2019s stories it signals the point at which any similarity to a fairy tale falls apart. There\u2019s no redemption in this universe. Escape is only exchange, in this case one prison, the family cellar at Innsbruck, for another: Vienna, \u201cthe most dreadful of all old cities of Europe . . . such<\/em> an old and lifeless city . . . such<\/em> a cemetery.\u201d And, since Georg once again finds himself claustrophobically entombed, he commits his final, and in the eyes\u2019 of his family, unpardonable crime.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Crime of an Innsbruck Shopkeeper\u2019s Son\u201d and five other of the stories in Prose<\/em> fall into the basic pattern above: a highly subjective secondhand report on the crime of a hypersensitive character. The irony being, of course, that the perpetrators of the so-called crimes are in fact victims of grave and at times obscure injustices themselves—and justice\u2019s blindness serves only as a convenient excuse for its idiocy. This is typical Bernhard, surprising only in its relentlessness.<\/p>\n

In the two remaining stories—\u201cThe Cap\u201d and \u201cJuaregg\u201d—Bernhard deviates from his typical distance (if not pattern) by presenting confessions without an intermediary. In \u201cThe Cap,\u201d the narrator, suffering from a \u201c_pathological nature_,\u201d is so incapable of action that even the decision to go for a walk proves to be an unrelenting torment. Even more unbearable than action, however, is twilight, at which time he flees the house in terror to walk in either of two directions: toward an ugly town or toward a beautiful town. Imagine then his overwhelming consternation when he finds a cap on the road leading toward the ugly town and assumes the proper course would be to attempt to return it to its owner. But to whom does the cap belong? Is it a woodcutter\u2019s or a butcher\u2019s or even a farmer\u2019s cap? And what if he puts it on? But he has no right to put it on, for he is not a farmer, a butcher, or a woodcutter. And what color is the cap?<\/p>\n

These questions cascade over him, inordinately agitating his already fragile mental state. He wants nothing more than a life without complications, but such an eventless existence is impossible for someone in his state. Like many of Bernhard\u2019s characters, the narrator in \u201cThe Cap\u201d suffers so much precisely because he is not mad. He believes that by going mad he would manage to escape his anguish:<\/p>\n

\n

But the truth is that I want<\/em> to go mad, I want to go mad<\/em>, nothing I want more, than really<\/em> go mad, but I fear that I am far from being able<\/em> to go mad. I at last want to go mad! I don\u2019t want to be only afraid of going mad, I at last want to go mad. Two doctors, one of whom is a highly scientific doctor, have prophesied that I shall go mad, very soon I would go mad, the two doctors prophesied, very soon, very soon; now I\u2019ve been waiting two years for it to happen, to go mad, but I still haven\u2019t gone mad. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This breathless, hysterical desire is merely another form of madness and bars the way to any escape. This is the fate of Bernhard\u2019s characters: a crazed desire for insanity or suicide, both options being viewed as an end to suffering. To go on living is possible, of course, but always with the awareness that \u201cWe are at liberty to kill ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

A friend and I, both booksellers, were recently discussing a curious compulsion we feel when recommending \u201cdepressing\u201d books: we find that we search, almost unconsciously, to find something palatable on which to focus our enthusiasm. This is natural enough in sales, I suppose, but nonetheless troubling. In the case of Bernhard, for instance, I find myself explaining that while his work is, well, almost unbearably grim, there\u2019s comedy and pathos in it as well. This is true—Bernhard is a savagely hysterical writer—but highlighting it obscures a fundamental characteristic of his, and many of our best writers\u2019, work: the acknowledgement that life is itself not particularly palatable. This isn\u2019t to say life, and by extension superior works of art, aren’t graced by moments of remarkable beauty, but by focusing only on the \u201cnice\u201d we risk shutting ourselves off from the fullness of experience.<\/p>\n

Bernhard offers us such a discomforting vision. In the story \u201cIs it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?\u201d his narrator offers an opinion that \u201cone describes best what one hates.\u201d Our literature is much richer for this assumption.<\/p>\n

1<\/sup> Everyone in Bernhard\u2019s fiction is a victim, whether of a bad childhood, failed ambitions, or simply of having been born: \u201cThe catastrophe,\u201d Prince Sarau reports in Gargoyles<\/em>, \u201cbegins with getting out of bed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone familiar with Thomas Bernhard\u2019s work can call forth a string of adjectives, one more off-putting than the last: bleak, anguished, splenetic, death-obsessed. Correction is about a scientist who kills himself after spending six years constructing a bizarre monument to his sister. The Loser focuses on a musician so lost in Glenn Gould\u2019s shadow that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[18116,5706,32176,34526,34536,25446,2426],"class_list":["post-279276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-austrian-literature","tag-german-literature","tag-martin-chalmers","tag-prose","tag-seagull-books","tag-stephen-sparks","tag-thomas-bernhard"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":347706,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279276\/revisions\/347706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}