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cate a need to efface the workings of the imagination.
This despite Carver’s fiction being renowned for its imaginative
empathy. Rudolf, the narrator in Bernhard’s
Concrete sees through the motives for appreciation of
Carver’s work:
‘People are always talking about it being their duty to
find their way to their fellow men – to their neighbour,
as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false
sentiment – when in fact it is purely and simply a question
of finding their way to themselves.’
Carver’s achievement was special, but flawed. It is a
literary equivalent of the self replicating its DNA with
serial partners; never mind the consequences. When
Larkin mordantly quipped “Don’t have any kids yourself”,
it was as much to do with poems as with children.
The problem is, what goes on in our heads is also
literature, in the sense that consciousness is already
distance. Any privileging of inside or outside means
a fundamental distortion. It means there is no simple
access through writing to what we want to write about.
When know-nothings like the BBC’s arts guru Mark
Lawson complains of writers writing about writers,
he misses this fundamental issue. The so-called selfreflexive
novel is more likely to get closer to the truth
than those effacing the conceit. This is why dominant
forms of fiction, and the journalistic definition of literature’s
relation to the world, needs to be set aside in
favour of a mediation between the world and the writer;
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and
an infinite mediation. Like Bernhard’s.
Ironically (as journalists are so keen to say in order
to assert their distant control) Bernhard began his career
as a journalist. After giving up his music studies
because of illness, he wrote short, precise summaries
of pending court cases for a local Socialist newspaper.
He developed a talent, and an offshoot can be seen in
the extremely odd book The Voice Imitator: 104 stories
in 104 pages. The musical background continued in his
early preference for poetry, but this soon merged with
the prose to produce novels. The mixing of opposites
might be seen as peculiar to Bernhard’s biographical
details: harsh reality with musical polyphony. There are
other details about his childhood even before the illness
that are just to depressing to repeat. For these, see his
autobiography collected as Gathering Evidence.
Harsh reality with polyphony appear in abundance in
the 1970 novel The Lime Works. It is about the death by
gunshot of a crippled woman. Her husband, Konrad, is
under arrest. The novel tells the story of the years leading
up to the death in a collage of reported statements
from local people. This is how it begins:
“… when Konrad bought the lime works, about five
and a half years ago, the first thing he moved in was a
piano he set up in his room on the first floor, according
to the gossip at the Laska tavern, not because of
any artistic leanings, says Wieser, the manager of the
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