The Loser (19 page)
Authors: Thomas Bernhard
But the analogy goes further. For it is not just Bach’s music that informs
The Loser
, but a modernist reading of Baroque music—Bach filtered through the aggressively atonal, mathematical formalism of Schönberg and Webern, whom Bernhard and Gould both admired. This is not the place to detail the considerable similarities between Gould’s musical views and Bernhard’s prose style. Suffice it to say that both artists appreciated the fugal nature of Baroque music, which mixes without dissolving the differences between two, three, and even four distinct voices. Gould’s uncanny ability to sustain the separation between voices in a musical composition bears a striking affinity to Bernhard’s narrative schizophrenia. Not surprisingly, both men were fascinated by the problem of impersonation, quotation, and artistic doublings. They also shared a dislike for individualist art forms (like a Mozart sonata or a Balzac novel) based on progression, climax, and reconciliation. Gould felt that “a sense of discomfort, of unease, could be the sagest of counselors for both artist and audience”; Bernhard enjoyed “shaking people up.” Finally, art was for both of them not an end in itself but a way of achieving an ascetic renunciation of the world. “Art should be given the chance to phase itself out,” Gould maintained in his self-interview, just as the artist himself should have the necessary inner mobility and strength “to opt creatively out of the human situation.” In his acceptance speech for the Austrian State Prize for Literature, Bernhard offered his public the Baroque wisdom that “everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death.”
In the final analysis, what matters is that in the
idea
of Glenn Gould Bernhard found something he could love and respect unconditionally, a touchstone with which to judge the world around him. “Those are terrible people,” the Jewish professor says to his housekeeper in
Heldenplatz
, “who don’t like Glenn Gould.… I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.… I also demand that my wife love Glenn Gould, in that respect I’m a fanatic.” To be sure, Gould is the hammer which Bernhard used to unsettle Austria’s complacent image of itself as the most musical nation of Europe, the birthplace of Mozart and Schubert. And the “fanatics” who love Gould as much as the narrator does in
The Loser
are also ironic figures, emblems of the absurd limits to which people drive themselves in the name of art. But in Gould Bernhard found a balancing force to the vitriolic satire he couldn’t help directing at his fellow Austrians, “with the subjectivity I personally have always detested but from which I have never been immune.” This saves
The Loser
from being merely an exercise in verbal wit, caricature, and (self-) mockery. Here we have Bach’s music, Gould’s artistic dedication, and finally the narrator’s confession of love and friendship for the two people who meant everything to him and now are gone. Neither Bernhard nor his narrator is prone to sentimentality—but beneath all their ironic laughter, that confession can still be heard.
M
ARK
M. A
NDERSON
Ernst Aichinger at the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York generously provided information for the present remarks; may he and his colleagues be thanked here. M.A.
From
THOMAS
BERNHARD
Frost
A NOVEL
Thomas Bernhard’s debut novel, published in German in 1963, and now in English for the first time. Visceral, raw, singular, and distinctive,
Frost
is the story of a friendship between a young man at the beginning of his medical career and a painter who is entering his final days.
Available October 2006, in Kardcover from Knopf
$25.95 • 1-4000-4066-3
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BOOKS BY
T
HOMAS
B
ERNHARD
CONCRETE
Instead of the book he’s meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph’s sister, whose help he invites, then reviles as malevolent meddling; his “really marvelous” house, which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and, finally, his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns our to be the site of someone else’s very real horror story.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7757-1
CORRECTION
The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone,” an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family’s estate in honor of his beloved sister. Not long after its completion, he takes his own life. As an unnamed friend pieces together the puzzle of his breakdown, what emerges is the story of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7760-1
FROST
Visceral, raw, singular, and unforgettable,
Frost
is the story of a friendship between a young man beginning his medical career and a painter in his final days. A young man has accepted an unusual assignment, to travel to a miserable mining town in the middle of nowhere in order to clinically—and secretly—observe and report on his mentor’s reclusive brother, the painter Strauch. Carefully disguising himself, he befriends the aging artist and attempts to carry out his mission, only to find himself caught up in his subject’s madness.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3351-5
GARGOYLES
One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim, mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7755-7
THE LIME WORKS
For five years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he’s conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork,
The Sense of Hearing
. As the story begins, he’s just blown off his wife’s head with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. The murder and the bizarre life that led to it are the subject of a mass of hearsay related by an unnamed life insurance salesman in a narrative as mazy, byzantine, and mysterious as the lime works itself—Konrad’s sanctuary and tomb.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7758-8
THE LOSER
The Loser
centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould’s incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other—the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator—has retreated into obscurity. Written in one remarkable unbroken paragraph,
The Loser
is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7754-0
WITTGENSTEIN’S NEPHEW
It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality—a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and great fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction,
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
is both a meditation on the artist’s struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and a stunning—if not haunting—eulogy to real-life friendship.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7756-4
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