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Mussner estate, but for relaxation, to ease the nervous
strain caused by decades of unremitting brain work,
says Fro, the man in charge of the Trattner estate,
agreeing that Konrad’s piano playing had nothing to do
with art, which Konrad hates, but was just improvisation,
as Wieser says, for an hour first thing early in the
morning and another late at night, every day, spent at
the keyboard, with the metronome ticking away, the
window open …” (trans. Sophie Wilkins)
It goes on like this for 241 pages. You see how multiple
perspectives are given, without any privileging of any
one in particular. The manic behaviour of Konrad, as
reported, is equalled by the persistence of the investigation.
As it details Konrad’s perceived descent into
madness and murder, it threatens the same for the
investigator. Thus the distant narration is implicated
in what it perceives. Objectivity, of course, is never
immune. It can never reach its object directly. This is
made clearer in Bernhard’s later novels because they
tend to play with very few voices. Yet despite being
powerfully subjective, they transcend mere egotism
transferred to the page (go to the Realists for that).
Realism’s need for the suspension of disbelief is not an
issue here: we are swept along by the narcotic prose.
Yet we are also displaced by what it tells us or what
it doesn’t tell us. Escapism isn’t possible in the usual
sense. It means there is always an uneasy edge to the
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and
pleasure of reading.
Bernhard’s definitive character is a Thinker overwhelmed
by something infringing on his intellectual
project; usually imminent death. There are scientists in
Yes and The Cheap-Eaters, philosophers in Correction
and The Loser. Rudolf, in Concrete, is a musicologist
trying to write a monograph on the composer Mendelsson.
However, he cannot get past the research stage.
He blames his worldly sister: “She’s always destroyed
whatever she’s touched, and all her life she’s tried to
destroy me. At first unconsciously, then consciously,
she’s set out to annihilate me. Right up to this day I’ve
had to protect myself against my elder sister’s savage
desire to annihilate, and I really don’t know how so far
I’ve managed to escape her.” (trans. David McLintock)
Rudolf’s monomania emerges in the very design of
text we are reading: Bernhard’s famous book-length
paragraphs. There are no natural spaces to stop and
reflect. Again, this just begs the question about what
is being avoided, left out, denied. The repetition of
“annihilate” in this fairly typical passage shows how
Bernhard’s language is literary, yet not to show how
sensitive the writer is, but to bring forth the way experience
is bound to literature, and vice versa. After
all, the only access literature has to annihilation is
the word itself, and perhaps is all we have also. In his
last novel Extinction, this is made wonderfully clear
in a favourite passage of mine, where the narrator,
079
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