Give It Up!
On Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser" (translated by Jack Dawson)
Recently, there was a bit of online discourse about the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, about why so many authors today write like him, particularly Americans, which is I suppose an extension of every writer writing like Sebald for a while, and, as Geoff Dyer once wrote, Sebald was Bernhard’s natural successor, just a bit less venomous, a bit more essayistic, so if someone isn’t writing gloomy Sebald-like autofiction these days why not go ahead and write a voice-y Bernhard-like novel. Theories of the current Bernhard-mania — which I was thinking about last year when I reviewed Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins, but also applies to Emily Hall’s The Longcut, and Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s American Abductions, though he’s not from the US, and a couple other new novels I haven’t read yet (Sebastian Castillo’s novel Fresh, Green Life most recently) but surely enough examples to get people discoursing — ranged from the idea that Bernhard’s long, ranting, unbroken block-paragraph novels were something like a social media rant, that the platforms we have are more and more suited to this kind of expression (everyone has their own increasingly specialized niche from which to lob their monologic bombs), or that it was merely a distinctive and easily ape-able style for American writers who have no style, or that Bernhard’s style is particularly good for writers who hate the country they’re born in, and Bernhard really loathed the country he was born in (Austria) and we might be at a fifty year high of people hating the country they were born in (the United States). Or, a simple text-as-object kind of lesson: these books weren’t all widely available in the US until the late 2000s, so only now are we getting Bernhard’s first-generation of English writers who kneel at the altar of Bernhard. Dustin Illingworth had some good ideas about the form’s malleability in The Baffler, and so did Thalia Williamson in The Los Angeles Review of Books, but really these are unanswerable questions, it’s six of one and a half dozen of the other, I’m tempted to go with “it’s fun to write that way” and “a general air of bone-deep pessimism about the world” as the top contenders. Bernhard’s 1983 novel The Loser is a funny thing to read after all this chatter, because it’s a book (at least partially) about encountering a genius in your field and deciding, almost immediately, to just give up entirely. Maybe you’d read The Loser and decide not to bother aping Bernhard, or to even write novels altogether, but I suppose it’s a bit different when it’s a classical pianist (as it is in The Loser) as opposed to writers, who are a different kind of glutton for punishment, anyway. The genius of The Loser is Glenn Gould, the Canadian virtuoso who maybe played Bach better than Bach (a real person, though the details in this novel are mostly invented); the loser of The Loser is Wertheimer, another pianist who is… well, second best. A great player! Just not Glenn Gould, and he knows it, and so does Glenn Gould, who fairly quickly dubs him “the loser” during their time at the Mozarteum musical academy. (I don’t speak German, but apparently Der Untergeher has some connection to sunken objects, the left behind.) The third figure of The Loser is the narrator, a Thomas Bernhard stand-in (he did, in fact, study piano at an academy in his youth) who was friends with both Gould and Wertheimer and also decided to pretty quickly give up playing piano when faced with the overwhelming talent of Gould. Wertheimer dropped the piano and went into the “human sciences” (he bears some similarity to Wittgenstein, though without even Wittgenstein’s level of fame), while our narrator dropped the piano and became a philosopher/writer (he’s trying to write a book called About Glenn Gould). At the novel’s beginning, both Wertheimer and Gould are dead, Wertheimer by suicide, Gould by ‘natural causes’ at his piano, but, the narrator suspects, Gould’s was just a hidden kind of suicide, death by exhaustion “calculated well in advance.” Gould dies first, and then Wertheimer goes a couple weeks later, beat again, and its in the wake of Wertheimer’s suicide that the narrator is writing (or mentally inveighing?) his (distinctive, easily mimicked, hey I’m even doing it right now!) block of prose, his long monologue on the fraught lives of those who saw genius and realized they just didn’t have it, and never, ever, ever got over it. As our narrator says, via Jack Dawson’s translation:
I woke up one day in April, I no longer know which one, and said to myself, no more piano. And I never touched the instrument again. I went immediately to the schoolteacher and announced the delivery of my piano. I will now devote myself to philosophical matters, I thought as I walked to the teacher’s house, even though of course I didn’t have the faintest idea what these philosophical matters might be. I am absolutely not a piano virtuoso, I said to myself. I am not an interpreter, I am not a reproducing artist. No artist at all. The depravity of my idea had appealed to me immediately. The whole time on my way to the teacher’s I kept on saying these three words: Absolutely no artist! Absolutely no artist! Absolutely no artist! If I hadn’t met Glenn Gould, I probably wouldn’t have given up the piano and I would have become a piano virtuoso and perhaps even one of the best piano virtuosos in the world, I thought in the inn. When we meet the very best, we have to give up, I thought.
Here is quintessential Bernhard, the rhythmic accretion of distress, the anger, the flailing about, the spittle-flecked rumbling along. This swirling, many-claused portrait of obsession does have a narrative thrust, as the narrator travels to Wertheimer’s country lodge to try and get a glimpse of the work Wertheimer left behind, but discursion is really the name of the game here, with the narrator able to riff on the nature of genius, the inability of communication, and, his favorite hobbyhorse, the awfulness of Austria. Salzburg is
at bottom the sworn enemy of all art and culture, a cretinous provincial dump with stupid people and cold walls where everything without exception is made cretinous […] freshly painted even in the darkest corners and is even more disgusting than it was twenty-eight years ago, was and is antagonistic to everything of value in a human being, an in time destroys it […]
and of the Austrian people he remarks:
I am and love this people, but I won’t have anything to do with this state. Never before in its history has our country sunk so low, I said, never before in its history has it been governed by more vulgar and therefore more spineless cretins. But the people are stupid, I said, are too weak to change such a situation, they are always taken in by untrustworthy, power-hungry people like the one in government today. Probably nothing about this situation will change in the next elections, for Austrians are creatures of habit and they’ve even grown accustomed to the muck they’ve been wading in for the last ten years. These pitiful people, I said.
While this is all part and parcel for Bernhard — the world’s number one hater of all things Austrian, in his will he stipulated that “Whatever I have written, whether published by me during my lifetime or as part of my literary papers still existing after my death, shall not be performed, printed or even recited for the duration of legal copyright within the borders of Austria, however this state identifies itself” — it also fits into the greater schema of the book, Austria itself a loser country, the birthplace of Mozart and possibly classical music itself but outstripped in the end by some Canadian guy, and you can extend that loser-dom across the cultural and political sphere. (It’s also pretty funny to say this about the Austrian government after, you know, Anschluss, but that’s all part of the Bernhardian narrator’s special hyperbolic charm.) But even in the narrator’s most astringent invectives against, well, everything, you still get the sense that these feelings come out of profound earnestness and belief in what the world should be, and a profound disappointment in what reality has to offer; just look at that “I am and love this people” at the beginning of that last passage, as close as Bernhard (and his narrators) will ever get to national pride, just that he can also look around and see how the country crushes him and all his compatriots. The narrator of The Loser is also a true lover of the arts, in fact loves them enough to know that he can never be a virtuoso in any of them, but you still keep chasing some moment of transcendence, even if that is an essentially Sisyphean endeavor, well, “We run away from one thing into the other and destroy ourselves in the process,” what else can you do.
Many Bernhard books (and almost all of the ones I’ve read) are about someone going to or coming from a friend’s funeral (and sometimes both), and that friend’s usually dead by suicide, and everything else in the book — classical music and genius in The Loser, mathematics and genius in Correction, drama and genius in Woodcutters — is draped around that gloomy center. He’s always riffing on the same themes, so it’s interesting to see the little variations across the novels, the places where he goes off script, as it were. The Loser introduces a theme of incomprehensibility that is not as prominent in the other novels; this is in tune (sorry) with The Loser’s melancholy air of missed connection (only a select few are able to purely communicate via the piano, via art), but also gets at something more existentially haunting. Here’s Wertheimer (via our narrator):
But everything we say is nonsense, he said, I thought, no matter what we say it is nonsense and our entire life is a single piece of nonsense. I understood that early on, I’d barely started to think for myself and I already understood that, we speak only nonsense, everything we say is nonsense, but everything that is said to us is also nonsense, like everything that is said at all, in this world only nonsense has been said until now and, he said, only nonsense has actually and naturally been written, the writings we possess are only nonsense because they can only be nonsense, as history proves, he said, I thought […] But people didn’t understand what I meant, as usual, when I say something they don’t understand it, for what I say doesn’t mean that I said what I said, he said, I thought. I say something, he said, I thought, and I’m saying something completely different, thus I’ve spent my entire life in misunderstandings, in nothing but misunderstandings, he said, I thought. We are, to put it precisely, born into misunderstanding and never escape this condition of misunderstanding as long as we live, we can squirm and twist as much as we like, it doesn’t help. But everyone can see this, he said, I thought, for everyone says something repeatedly and is misunderstood, this is the only point where everybody understands everybody else, he said, I thought. One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding which we must put up with as a world composed solely of misunderstandings and which we depart from with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all, so Wertheimer, I thought.
From nonsense to misunderstanding, what a terror, so Wertheimer, I thought. Repetition can be an overused crutch (for both Bernhard and his imitators), but here it is a perfect usage of semantic satiation, all those nonsenses and misunderstandings and he saids and I thoughts pummeling a reader until those words themselves lose meaning, until it all loses meaning, until the block of text is truly opaque, just as opaque as life, where no one is able to ever say exactly what they mean, even if they did no one else would hear it quite right, back and forth with nothing to show for it. Whatever solace that might come from friends — someone to share all this misery with, maybe someone who can almost understand you — is gone for the narrator: “Friendship, artistry! I thought, my God, what madness! I’m the survivor! Now I’m alone, I thought, since, to tell the truth, I only had two people in my life who gave it any meaning: Glenn and Wertheimer.” Amid all of Bernhard’s narrators’ verbal circumlocutions and freewheeling rants, they have this mournfulness that seeps into everything, something that makes them fully human rather than a squawking monologic voicebox set off in one direction. This is the ingredient that makes Bernhard’s books so good, and what so many of his pale imitators lack: a beating heart. If you can’t get that in your Bernhard-inspired novel, well, you’re absolutely no artist!
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