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Feature [published February 1999]
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under
Stephen Mitchelmore reflects on Thomas Bernhard’s work on the tenth
anniversary of the writer’s death
“Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence
of a revelation which does not in fact occur.” (Borges)
Like Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, the novelist, playwright
and poet, died young. At this end of the century,
58 is young. He had been tubercular since his teens, so
it was no great surprise. Indeed, we are to be grateful
for his tendency to illness. It was TB, he tells us in his
remarkable autobiography, that took him to writing.
In a sanatorium – lungs drowning in sputum, aged 19
and expected to die – he began to write. He believed
it might have cured him too. I remember seeing an
obituary following his death on 12th February, 1989. At
that time I had not read any of his works. Just another
novelist I assumed, and did not read the obituary. In
the summer of the following year I found a copy of the
novel Concrete in the magnificent Quartet Encounters
imprint. I shall always associate that book with a park
in an otherwise squalid English city. It is a short enough
to be read in one place. And I have read it in many more
places since. Certainly it has death written through
it, but it cures too, almost. The rest of this will try to
explain why.
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Like Kafka’s, Bernhard’s writing is easily caricatured.
This is one of the main problems in the reception
of the best literature in this country. I have seen an
advert for Czech beer labelling Kafka “the monarch
of mirthlessness”, which told me that the copywriter
knows nothing of Kafka, and probably not of beer
also. Anyone who has read his work can testify there
is something oddly funny about it; A Country Doctor
will have you in stitches. Yet Kafka remains a byword
for depressive reading. The French philosopher Gilles
Deleuze, however, called him “a man of joy”. The
thing is, you have to be patient; he’s not Bill Bryson.
Though Bernhard has written comedically, notably in
the helpfully sub-titled Old Masters: a comedy, he too
is presented as one of those miserable Germans who
can’t accept that life is actually wonderful. This is so
wrong: he was Austrian.
Generally, we British assume you have be one thing
or the other. You’re either funny and disposable or
serious and difficult. I guess it’s partly to do with the
satanic rule of marketing strategies protecting niche
identity and such like, but certainly the culture cannot
076
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