Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften	17. Nr.	Februar 2010
Sektion 1.11.	American and Austrian Literature and Film: Influences, Interactions and Intersections Sektionsleiter | Section Chair: Donald G. Daviau (University of California at Riverside) Dokumentation | Documentation | Documentation

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American Writers Reading Bernhard

Francis M. Sharp (University of the Pacific)

Email: msharp@pacific.edu

In the “Special Thomas Bernhard Issue” that Modern Austrian Literature published twenty years ago, Don Daviau surveyed the early growth of Bernhard’s importance as a writer for American academics as well for a general audience reliant on English translations.  At the end of his informative essay, Daviau foresaw the need for further translations and an expanded advocacy for the Austrian writer to reach beyond the “select audience” to which his appeal was then limited (262).  During the past twenty years, American academics in German and Austrian studies have been joined by colleagues in creative writing programs—as well as young writers emerging from these programs—in further translations, reviews of translations, readings and other efforts that have broadened and solidified Bernhard’s reputation in the United States as a writer mentioned in the same breath as Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett.

Since 1988, Knopf, the University of Chicago Press, and Quartet Books in London have continued to provide excellent English-language translations which include his most important prose works, some of his dramas and a selection of his poetry.  Bernhard’s first novel Frost (1963) made its belated appearance in English in 2006 and created considerable resonance in such widely read media outlets as the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s and The New Yorker (Benfey; Cisco; Franklin; Lytal; Marcus “Misery Loves Nothing”; Parks). The internet has also acted as a catalyst in bringing Bernhard’s name and works to the attention of a worldwide English-language audience.(1)

A recent Google search for the three words “Thomas Bernhard writer” resulted in one hundred forty thousand hits.  Apart from the commercial sites, the first three pages of these results contained references in English to the following: online biographical references such as Wikipedia and the Britannica Online Encyclopedia, several short prose pieces excerpted from The Voice Imitator (“Five Stories”), the translation of a Bernhard interview in 1986 by Werner Wögerbauer in Vienna’s Café Bräunerhof, two online critical essays (Burgin “Reading”; Mitchelmore), and several reviews of recent translations.  A pictorial account of an excursion to Bernhard’s country home in Ohlsdorf (Tonnis) and an essay with a Bernhard photograph and translated excerpts from his works (Taylor)—provide at least a crude measure of Bernhard’s English-language presence in today’s electronic global village. 

Another hit in the Google search provided a more direct lead in gauging attitudes of contemporary American writers to Bernhard.  On February 18, 2007, “A Tribute to Thomas Bernhard” took place at at the KGBBar in New York City’s East Village neighborhood.  Jonathan Taylor, the reading’s organizer—an editor by profession and the author of the online essay  “Admiration Journey”—noted in the KGBBar’s announcement of the reading that Bernhard’s “influence among innovative writers is outsized (“Fiction”)(2)  Taylor had first come upon Bernhard’s name in 1996 in an article in the Village Voice Literary Supplement by the novelist Gary Indiana (“Saint Bernhard”).  Those invited to honor Bernhard by reading passages from his works included: Wayne Koestenbaum, Rhonda Lieberman, Ben Marcus, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Dale Peck.  United by their admiration for and appreciation of Bernhard’s themes and unique stylistic excesses—most by the recognition of his influence on their own writing—the five readers all have reputations as writers of fiction and poetry as well as literary, cultural and art criticism.  They work as writers, editors and professors of English, art and creative writing.

In interviews following the reading, both Koestenbaum and Marcus talked about their first experience with Bernhard’s prose.  As an unsuccessful pianist himself, Koestenbaum had identified personally with the narrator of The Loser who turns failure as a pianist into success as a writer.  For Marcus, the initial encounter was reading Woodcutters during graduate school, a work whose relentless monologue fascinated him in its paradoxical capacity to contain the fury of its themes with “such meticulous, precise language” (2.18.07).  Now chair of the Writing Division and the School of Arts at Columbia, Marcus had mentioned Bernhard in an interview three years earlier when asked about influences on his own writing.  He described Bernhard as:

the Austrian writer, who wrote long, angry ranting, very cerebral and difficult but wonderful novels.  He is a complete original; there is just no one at all like him. The degree of ferocity in his novels including Correction and Woodcutters is still a real inspiration to me. (“All Kinds”)

Significantly perhaps, Marcus pairs Bernhard’s influence in the interview with that of the widely read and honored Donald Barthelme, a major figure in twentieth-century American literature who, coincidentally, was born and died in the same years as Bernhard (“All Kinds”).  Barthelme’s legacy rests not only on numerous volumes of short stories, but also on his mentoring of creative writing students at several universities.  His syllabus of eighty-one recommended literary readings, still available online, lists Correction as well as The Lime Works (Moffet).  Such mentoring and recommendations have undoubtedly played a role in Bernhard’s popularity among younger writers.  According to the January 2007 issue of the British magazine Granta, fiction writing and publishing in America has increasingly been “seen as a career choice by Americans in their early twenties, who attend universities to learn it” (Jack  7).  Fourteen of the journal’s pick of the top twenty-one American novelists attended elite American universities while nearly all of them also have taken part in writing schools.

Almost exactly fifteen years prior to the reading last February, Pequod: A Journal of Contemporary Literature and Literary Criticism had sponsored its own “Evening of Thomas Bernhard.”(3)  That same year, the journal also published an eighty-page “Special Section on Thomas Bernhard.”  One of the readers at that earlier Bernhard evening was Harold Brodkey, a writer who won fame for his short stories in the early fifties as well as notoriety for the unfulfilled promise of a massive novel he never finished (Hildebrand).  Another was Stephen Dixon, writer and teacher at Johns Hopkins, whose novel Gould appeared in 1997.  In an essay that same year Dixon recalls a question about Bernhard’s influence that had arisen at a reading from his own novel.  He had discounted any such influence at the time but as he began to read Bernhard’s works more carefully, he became intrigued by the single-paragraph novels—admitting “that I can't write anything anymore but in a single paragraph”—the Austrian’s characteristic obsessiveness, and especially his boldness in the face of cultural power:

Amazing what Bernhard gets away with.  Imagine an American writer working into his texts such excoriations of other writers, including contemporaries, which Bernhard does too.  And knocking the Academy and prize givers, as Bernhard does in almost all his books: in America writers claw each other to get prizes and, you know, throw up on the hands that pin the medals on their chests and stuff the checks into their pockets. Some of his thoughts are a bit odd and wrongheaded if not occasionally loony . . . (“The Plug”)

Despite this looniness, Dixon counts Bernhard as one of the strongest literary obsessions he had known in his life as a writer.

Richard Burgin, another talented and much published American author and critic who also teaches, was another of the readers at the Bernhard evening in 1992.  Over a decade later in 2004 at a symposium where writers and teachers were asked to comment on either the most underrated or most overrated author, Burgin situated Bernhard in the loftiest regions of the world literary pantheon.  A peer of Borges and Nabakov, the Austrian from Ohlsdorf is “part of a tradition of brilliantly subversive 20th-century monologists that includes Proust, Céline, Beckett, Sartre and Camus—each of whom in turn drew upon Dostoyeskvy. . . ”  In focused comparisons, he finds Bernhard “more economical and earthy than Proust . . . more refined and intellectual than Céline, more of a storyteller than Beckett, and a more powerful writer than either Sartre or Camus” (“Symposium”  94). 

The tormented narrator of Bernhard’s novel Concrete, struggling in vain across the pages of the entire novel to pen the first words of his definitive scholarly work on Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, has attracted the particular empathy of at least two American writers. Three years ago, Koestenbaum declared Concrete to be one of his favorite Bernhard works, precisely because of its focus on the anguish involved in the writing process (“Ottava rima”).  The narrator of William Gaddis’s posthumously published Agapé Agape quotes freely from the first page of Concrete, interspersing the cited words with thoughts about his own physical and mental struggle to get his magnus opus onto paper before death overtakes him.  The extended passage that follows illustrates the self-reflexive voice and fractured complexity that Gaddis shares with Bernhard.  Not really a monologue, but a running conversation of the frantic narrator with himself, the novel begins as he notices blood on his wrist:

Where the tissues, just get cold water on it stop the bleeding, you see?  Scrape my wrist against this drawer corner tears the skin open blood all over the place it doesn’t hurt no, skin’s like parchment that’s the prednisone, turns the skin into dry old parchment tear it open with a feather that’s the prednisone, reach for a book reach for anything tear myself to pieces reaching for this book listen, you’ll see what I mean, opening page you’ll see what I mean, ‘From March to December’ he says, ‘while I was having to take large quantities of prednisolone,’ same thing as prednisone, ‘I assembled every possible book and article written by’ you see what I mean? ‘and visited every possible and impossible library’ this whole pile of books and papers here? ‘preparing myself with the most passionate seriousness for the task, which I had been dreading throughout the preceding winter, of writing’ where am I here, yes, ‘a major work of impeccable scholarship.  It had been my intention to devote the most careful study to all these books and articles and only then, having studied them with all the thoroughness the subject deserved, to begin writing my work, which I believed would leave far behind it and far beneath it everything else, both published and unpublished’ you see what this is all about?  ‘I had been planning it for ten years and had  repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition,’ but of course you don’t no, no that’s the whole point of it!  It’s my opening page, he’s plagiarized my work right here in front of me before I’ve ever written it!  (11-12)

Gaddis’s narrator gives the adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery a surreal twist here by first citing the beginning of Concrete at length and then by accusing Bernhard of anticipating his own thoughts by more than a decade.  The erratic mental flights of the writer writing—or not writing, as the case may be—exercised a powerful attraction on both Bernhard and Gaddis.

Winner of two National Book Awards and thus in the company of such American literary luminaries as Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamaud, Don DeLillo, and Susan Sontag, Gaddis seems to have discovered Bernhard in translation only near the end of his life.  His last work, Agapé Agape, actually had its origins in his longstanding interest in mechanization and the arts and he had planned to write a social history of the player piano.  Shortly before his death, however, he realized—as Joseph Tabbi writes in the novel’s “Afterword”—“that his own raillery on the subject was more interesting to him than ‘a dim pursuit of scholarship headed for the same trash heap I’m upset about in the first place.’” (102)(4)  At the heart of his novel is Gaddis’s brooding narrator, a figure in the mold of Bernhard’s Rudolf in Concrete in his obsessive single-mindedness.  While sifting and sorting through his own notes and scratchings about his topic, Gaddis’s narrator chances upon his copy of a biography of Glenn Gould, the genial and eccentric Canadian pianist.(5)  Within a few lines, however, the focus on the biographical Gould yields in the rapid flow of his thoughts to the fictional pianist Wertheimer in Bernhard’s tale The Loser, a character whose musical ambitions are crushed by Gould’s genius.

For academics in German and Austrian studies, the American writer Don DeLillo may be best known for his novel White Noise, the story of a university professor who has made his reputation as a pioneer in the field of “Hitler Studies,” a literary invention that surely would have appealed to Bernhard’s dark sense of humor.  DeLillo demonstrates in an essay published in 2004 that the appeal was genuine in the reverse direction (“Counterpoint”).  In the essay he draws connections between the fictionalized Glenn Gould figure in one of the movies in his title—Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993)—and Bernhard’s The Loser.  He is particularly struck—as many other American writers have been—by the lack of paragraphs and textual divisions and by the rapid, breathless pace of Bernhard’s language.  Fundamentally “anti-cinematic” (100), the Austrian “writes a prose so unrelenting in its intensity toward a fixed idea that it sometimes approaches a level of self-destructive delirium” (97-98).  Yet, as has often been remarked elsewhere, underlying his chronicles of “misery, illness, madness, isolation, and death” is an insistent farcical strain which at its extreme becomes “rackingly comic” (100).

DeLillo’s latest novel, Falling Man, plays out in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, but terrorism in the Middle East is intrinsic to the plot of the earlier novel Mao II as well.  A recent work of critical literature, Crimes of Art and Terror, includes both Bernhard and DeLillo—among numerous other writers and artists both past and present—in its discussion of “the disturbing adjacency of literary creativity with violence and even political terror” (2).  Underlying this proximity of artist and terrorist is what the authors label “transgressive desire” (4), the spur that motivates the terrorist as well as certain artists with roots in romanticism.  The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s reaction to the attack on the World Trade Center as “‘the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos’” serves them as an illustrative example (6).  Stockhausen’s remarks, the authors contend, are not to be found in psychopathology, but rather in the composer’s envy of the terrorists’ power to effect change through their spectacular but lethal performances, an inner change in the attitudes and perceptions of their vast captive audience.  Liberal citations from DeLillo’s Mao II, such as the following spoken by the writer-hero, support their thesis: 

There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists . . . . Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture.  Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.  They make raids on human consciousness.  What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (29)

While the transgressive writer is consigned to a past age by DeLillo’s fictional creation, the transgressive narrator became the signature figure of much of Bernhard’s oeuvre.

What DeLillo found exhausted and Bernhard practiced nearly to the end of last century has been called transgressive fiction, a fictional subgenre with roots in romanticism.  It issues from a deepseated desire shared by  writer and terrorist for a radical altering of consciousness of their readers or target populations.  An act of transgression originates by definition from outside the boundaries of that which is transgressed.  Social assimilation or cooptation spells the end of the transgressive artist.  At least some of Bernhard’s appeal for DeLillo as well as other American writers finds a locus of agreement in what can be read as his radical acts of resistance toward such assimilation.  DeLillo once told an interviewer that for American writers, “there are so many temptations . . . to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist.  American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous” (“Seven Seconds”  390).  In this regard, Bernhard’s rants against an unrepentant postwar Austrian society are exemplary.

Gary Indiana, whose fifth novel Depraved Indifference appeared in 2001, is sometimes listed as a writer of “transgressive fiction.”  In an appreciative essay on Bernhard, he expresses his deep affinities to the Austrian’s negative attitudes, particularly the excoriating prose condemning the state, its history as well as the cherished values of family, religion and traditional culture.  Ramping up his sense of identity with Bernhard’s disdain for his homeland’s political history and culture, Indiana writes: “The Austrians have National Socialism in their past and have never recovered, and we have National Socialism in our future” (“Saint Bernhard” 91). 

DeLillo dedicated his Mao II to Gordon Lish, one of the most important links in the network of influential creative writing teachers and mentors for young American writers now active.(6)  Formerly a fiction editor at Esquire and then a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, this self-proclaimed “Captain Fiction” has also had a successful career as a writer.  Both in his role as a mentor to others as well as in his own fiction Lish has displayed a high regard for Bernhard.  One of the younger generation described him as a “huge champion of Bernhard” to the aspiring writers “in his famous classes” and those under his editorship at Knopf (Evenson  “Re: Th Bernhard”).  Lish introduced his own collection of idiosyncratic prose pieces Zimzum with an epigraph from Bernhard’s Correction and ended it with a short piece that borrows the novel’s title (93-96).  Three of the narratives feature long, nonparagraphed monologue-rants stylistically in the spirit of both Beckett and Bernhard (9-20; 21-76; 77-83).(7) 

Bernhard is one of those writers whose powerfully insistent prose—even in translation—not only invites emulation but anxiety as well in readers with literary ambitions of their own.  At times, most prominently in Frost, Correction, and The Loser, his works thematicize this very kind of seductive yet overwhelming effect of genius or—genius mutated into madness—of one fictional character upon another.  In the foreword to Three Novellas: Amras, Playing Watten, Walking, the writer Brian Evenson singles out for particular emphasis this often mesmerizing effect of Bernhard’s prose: “to read Bernhard is to feel as if you have been possessed.”  With “no place to pause or breathe,” Evenson writes, readers “are swept along by the language” (vii and x).  Another of the American Bernhard advocates who combines writing and teaching, Evenson has an acute awareness of the location and contours of Bernhard’s presence in his own stories.  Beyond this awareness, however, is the self assurance that this presence is just part of a literary “conversation” and that Bernhard’s voice has not overwhelmed his own (“Re: Th Bernhard”)

Interviewing Evenson several years ago, Ben Marcus—a former Lish student—focused toward the end of their discussion on the effect of Bernhard’s influence on Zimzum and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.  Lish, they agreed, had been more successful in appropriating the Austrian’s prose style, not because of his consciously direct allusions to Correction, but in spite of them.  Their mentor represents an entirely idiosyncratic response to an extraordinarily strong literary model.  Evenson recalls that in his own early encounters with Bernhard, he had had the sensation of finding his “own syntax stolen by Bernhard” (56), an experience quite like that of the narrator of Gaddis’s Agapé Agape.  “Good borrowing,” he explains—resorting to the same metaphor that he uses in his foreword to Bernhard’s novellas—“is like demonic possession: you move into the body of the other and make it move according to your own will” (55).

The poem “Correction” by Daniel Borzutzky, a poet and college English teacher, takes its title from Bernhard’s novel although an online commentary locates it closer to his novella Walking (“Notes”).  Borzutzky has also contributed to the substantial review literature of Bernhard’s English translations and expressed admiration for his syntactical complexity in an online interview.  But titles can be misleading as my assumptions were about Bernhard’s relevance to Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, the winner of the National Book Award in 2001.  In reply to an email inquiry, Franzen admitted a certain fondness for Bernhardian humor, but firmly ‘corrected’ my erroneous assumption of influence (“From Franzen”).  His New Yorker essay in 2002 about two types of novels distinguishable by their implied relation to the reader and a rebuttal by Ben Marcus three years later helped ground this correction.  The exchange also clarified what has been called Bernhard’s appreciation in America as “a writer’s writer” (Anderson).

In his New Yorker essay, Franzen juxtaposes two models of fiction in their relationship to the reader.  His preferred model “represents a compact between the writer and the reader” according to which the writer is to supply the words that elicit the reader’s pleasure and sense of connectedness (“Mr. Difficult” 100).  The second model often shows apparent disdain for the reader with its unrealistic language and syntactical thickets, and is imbued with an aura of status that grants it independence from the average reader.  While difficulty signals trouble for readers of the first model, it signals excellence for readers of the second.  For the reader Franzen, Gaddis’s first novel The Recognitions ranks at the top of a personal list of most difficult works he has ever read—“voluntarily” at least (“Mr. Difficult” 101). 

Ben Marcus identifies Franzen’s first model as the traditional or realist model and the other as the model of experimental fiction for which he is an impassioned advocate.  Countering the arguments of the widely read, popular Franzen, Marcus writes:

While it might indeed be pleasurable to get what we knew we wanted—that is, after all why we wait in line to sit on Santa’s lap—it is arguably sublime when a text creates in us desires we did not know we had, and then enlarges those desires without seeming desperate to please us.  In fact, it’s prose that actually doesn’t worry about us, and I don’t find that ungracious, because novel writing is not diplomacy.  It’s a hunger for something unknown, the belief that the world and its doings have yet to be fully explored. (“Why Experimental”  48)

Proclaiming himself an avid reader of Gaddis, Marcus names an even more difficult writer worth every effort: Thomas Bernhard.  In a tongue-in-cheek use of “readability test(s)” (“Why Experimental” 47) actually used by American educators—the Fog Index and the Lexile Framework—Marcus pronounces his coup de grace with Bernhard’s prose leading the charge:

Thomas Bernhard’s Correction scores the highest Lexile I’ve ever seen, more than twice as high as Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and it should possibly only be read inside a steel cage after it’s been sprayed with Roundup.  According to the Fog Index, you’d have to finish 355 years of school before you could understand it.  I don’t even have a Ph.D., but I find this book to be extraordinary, menacing, brutally controlled, and one of the most memorable novels I’ve ever read.  Exhausting?  Hell yes.  I hope I never recover (“Why Experimental” 50).

For Marcus Bernhard’s greatest strength lies not in storytelling with clearly delineated plots and characters with which readers can identify, but in his radical honesty and sheer genius in rendering consciousness into language.  In his review of Frost in 2006, he aptly labels the Austrian an “architect of consciousness” (90), a writer who—Marcus wrote in The New Yorker—communicates in his prose “the way it feels to be alive” (“Why Experimental” 41).  More than ten years earlier in a review of Extinction, another critic/teacher had similarly pointed to Bernhard’s particular genius in externalizing consciousness onto the written page (Dirda  410).

While Marcus’s hyperbolic characterization of Bernhard’s Correction may not bode well for a posthumous invitation to the Oprah Winfrey show and the promise of a mass audience—as the American novel The Corrections did for its author Jonathan Franzen—the Austrian’s reputation as a exemplary writer worthy of emulation is secure among a generation of innovative American writers.  For these writers, many schooled in writing fiction as a learnable craft at the university and in workshops around the country, the recommendations and mentoring of an older generation of voices in the classroom such as those of Barthelme, Gaddis, DeLillo, and Gordon Lish has carried tremendous weight.  The widespread echoes of Bernhard’s presence among the more adventurous contemporary American writers must at least partially be ascribed to these voices.  Finally Bernhard’s strong appeal to this group of writers seems a pointed refutation of George Steiner’s negative prognosis in 1983 that Bernhard had little chance of literary success in the United States and Great Britain “because the Anglo-Saxon mentality differed fundamentally from the Central European" (Cousineau 53).

Notes:

1.11. American and Austrian Literature and Film: Influences, Interactions and Intersections

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