Spike Magazine

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an ex-patriot professor based in Rome, talks about
the search for his childhood in an Austrian country
estate, Wolfsegg:
“In Rome I sometimes think of Wolfsegg and tell
myself that I have only to go back there in order to
rediscover my childhood. This has always proved to
be a gross error, I thought. You’re going to see your
parents, I have often told myself, the parents of your
childhood, but all I’ve ever found is a gaping void.
You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer
exists, I told myself. The Children’s Villa affords the
most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible.
You have to accept this. All you see when you
look back is this gaping void. Not only your childhood,
but the whole of your past, is a gaping void. This is
why it’s best not to look back. You have to understand
that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of selfprotection,
I thought. Whenever you look back into the
past, you’re looking into a gaping void. Even yesterday
is a gaping void, even the moment that’s just passed.”
(trans. David McLintock)
What Creative Writing manual would pass this
excessive, uncompromising, monological prose? And
there are another 334 and a half pages like this! One
may ask what’s in it for the reader – I mean, you’re not
going to learn anything about the world by reading this,
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and
are you? Well, you might learn how much you need to
fill your own gaping void by reading. Yet for all the
impression of suffocation this gives, there is a clear
musical rhythm to the prose. It does intoxicate; a popular
form of escape, yes, but not abused by Bernhard.
His form of prose weakens the need to choose between
utilitarian language or lyric indulgence. Bernhard said
that his prose rhythm owed a lot to music. Indeed, he
uses the life of a musician for the overall theme of one
of his best novels Der Untergeher. (Literally this translates
as “The Undergoer”, but this is ridiculous and
has been translated as The Loser. Unfortunately this
loses the allusion to Nietzsche – “Have you suffered
for knowledge’s sake?” – that is, gone under).
The book reads like a prose version of Bach’s Goldberg
Variations. And Bernhard uses the real figure of
Bach’s greatest interpreter Glenn Gould – “the most
important piano virtuoso of the century” – and the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (although neither is
by any means identical to the real person) to illuminate
the life of the writer; the Bernhardian kind of writer. In
the story, the Canadian Gould is a friend of Wertheimer,
the Wittgenstein figure, and the unnamed narrator. The
latter two, we are told, were themselves exceptional
pianists but after hearing Gould’s unearthly genius at
work, they give up hope. They could never attain his
“inhuman state”. In response, Wertheimer auctioned
off his piano, took up the “human sciences” and then
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