Thomas Bernard's Correction: a review

 

1931-1989

 

He looked a bit like James May, but Bernhard wrote dark shit nothing to do with cars or Jeremy Clarkson.

This novel, two long paragraphs recounting the work, life and death of a scientist-writer-architect-philosopher loosely based on Wittgenstein and written in 1975, is firmly within the dark (post)modernist wave of post-WWII art; a quintessentially unfilmable novel which escapes into the dark interstices where the writer melts into his subject matter as if he himself were a palimpsest and then breaches the overlay - be it reminiscences of youth or Roithamer's recondite script on his life, his family, the sister whom he loved and the mysterious edifice, the Cone - and surfaces again to remind us that this is a novel with an apparently reliable narrator.

The subject of the story is Roithamer. The nameless narrator and Hoeller, the childhood friend in whose garret Roithamer found the courage to complete the Cone, are merely wallpaper, Hoeller interesting wallpaper, whose pleasure is to stuff birds late at night in his workshop - or is it? Roithamer is no pointy-headed mentalist-genius in the Hollywood style (Shine, A Beautiful Mind, Pollock), but a man whose genius we are told to accept through his accomplishing the apparently impossible feat of building a cone-shaped structure in the middle of the Kobernausser Forest. And accept it we do, because - there is nothing else to grasp in this novel.

If the narrator is a palimpsest, ever abrading his will from the narrative, then Roithamer is a vessel for Bernhard's reflections on inevitability.

Napoleon said that the ancient concept of fate is replaced in the modern era with policy. Bernhard reminds us here that policy is determined fatefully - by quirks (by being born in Altensam), by predispositions (to over-analyse), by family ('the Erdfing woman'); that is, inescapably.



So far so bleak. Possibly more popular, but not as funny as Celine (but then Bernhard wasn't right-wing), Bernhard falls into the trap of all classically depressed/ dark artists - if he ever played a practical joke in his life his credibility would be over, instantly. Think Beckett (all turtle necks and fierce stares from that vulture-like visage), Robert Smith, Van Gogh, Schiele, etc., po-faced artists (and others) who, if they ever cracked a joke to their public, I mean a really funny, possibly even crass joke, they would be done. It wasn't ever inevitable that Bernhard would step outside of the aesthetic world he had created for himself and tell such a joke. After all, he stayed within his slightly abstract, nihilistic milieu right to the end.

This novel is beautiful like a plastic room designed by H.R. Geiger would be beautiful; but you wouldn't want to sit in it for long.

Neither Celine nor Bernhard had children. They didn't believe in humanity enough.

'The nights, Roithamer said, are always the worst. Everything is blown up out of all proportion, no matter how insignificant, at night it becomes monstrous, the most insignificant, the most harmless thing there is grows monstrous at night and won't let a man like me or Roithamer or Hoeller sleep.'



Some materials:

http://www.thomasbernhard.org/

http://moreintelligentlife.com/node/852