Three Novellas

THOMAS BERNHARD (1931–1989) was an Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet. English translations of his works published by the University of Chicago Press include The Voice Imitator (1997), translated by Kenneth J. Northcott; Woodcutters (1987) and Wittgenstein’s Nephew (1988), translated by David McLintock; and Histrionics (1990), three plays translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2003 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2003

Printed in the United States of America

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03       1 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 0-226-04432-7 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-226-07420-7 (ebook)

Amras was first published in German as Amras, © Insel Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1964.

Playing Watten was first published in German as Watten, © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1969.

Walking was first published in German as Gehen, © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1971.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bernhard, Thomas.

[Novellas. English. Selections]

Three novellas / Thomas Bernhard ; translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott ; with a foreword by Brian Evenson.

p.   cm.

Contents: Amras—Playing Watten—Walking.

ISBN 0-226-04432-7 (alk. paper)

1. Bernhard, Thomas—Translations into English. I. Jansen, Peter K. II. Northcott, Kenneth J. III. Title.

PT2662.E7A25 2003

833'.914—dc21

2002045580

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

THOMAS BERNHARD

THREE NOVELLAS

TRANSLATED BY PETER JANSEN AND KENNETH J. NORTHCOTT

WITH A FOREWORD BY BRIAN EVENSON

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO + LONDON

Contents

Foreword } BY BRIAN EVENSON

Amras } TRANSLATED BY PETER JANSEN

Playing Watten } TRANSLATED BY KENNETH J. NORTHCOTT

Walking } TRANSLATED BY KENNETH J. NORTHCOTT

Foreword

BRIAN EVENSON

The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is now the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German, wrote George Steiner while the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard was still alive. Now, more than a decade after his death, it has become increasingly clear that Bernhard was one of the strongest voices of twentieth-century European fiction, on an equal standing with writers such as Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil. Possessed of an eccentric syntax and an incomparably rhythmical prose style, Bernhard’s best-known works function as irony-ridden monologues and screeds against his native Austria. They submerge readers deep within a maddened or evasive or sophistic voice and hold them there, not allowing them to come to the textual surface for air. Bernhard’s sense of these voices is impeccable and unrelenting. Their habitual patterns of expression are so strong that to read Bernhard is to feel as if you have been possessed, as if the thoughts of others are worming their way into your skull and changing the way you parse and categorize the world. As the sentences stack up and logic begins a relentless and darkly comic spin, you are in danger of being crowded out of your head. This is a dilemma shared by Bernhard’s characters as well: Since my thinking had actually been Roithamer’s thinking, during all that time I had simply not been in existence, I’d been nothing, extinguished by Roithamer’s thinking.*

The three novellas gathered in this volume, Amras, Playing Watten, and Walking, offer a vision of a relatively early Bernhard. Of an artist whose major concerns—suicide, life as disease, the collapse of identity, the rottenness of Austria, the looming presence of death and madness—are already established, but whose style is still in the process of developing. These novellas provide many of the satisfactions of Bernhard’s later prose while at the same time suggesting other directions that Bernhard might have traveled, other likewise unique stylistic paths he might have pursued.

Amras (1964) was Bernhard’s second book of sustained prose, published shortly after his award-winning first novel, Frost (1963). Stylistically, Amras connects the earlier novels Frost and On the Mountain (written 1959, published 1989) to the novel that followed Amras, Gargoyles (1967). In Frost, a medical student is sent by one of his overseers to investigate what has become of Strauch, an ex-painter who has withdrawn to a mountain village. The novel, broken into twenty-seven chapters, which are broken in turn into standard paragraphs, is composed of the student’s letters to his overseer giving a daily accounting of his investigation. On the Mountain consists of the jottings of a court reporter: notes, fleeting ideas, descriptions of interactions, and so on. It is a single discontinuous sentence, a string of words broken into fragments as if (as Sophie Wilkins suggests) the narrator is in the grip of a fatal lung disease, struggling for breath.

Amras, on the other hand, is the story of two brothers, one of them epileptic, who have survived a family suicide pact and are now living in a ruined tower, struggling either to come fully back to life or to carry out their suicides. The setting is gothic, with the promise of death hovering constantly. The novella is narrated by one of the brothers, a former scientific researcher, in the days following the suicide attempt. Amras offers a synthesis of the severe fragmentation of On the Mountain and the epistolary and more conventional structural strategies of Frost. Its narrator slips from transcribed letters to elliptical and wandering paragraphs to the recording of his brother’s frantic jottings.

Yet Amras also possesses qualities that would come to characterize Bernhard’s later work. Like Gargoyles—the story of a doctor conducting a harrowing set of rounds in the countryside with his son, a set of rounds which culminate in their meeting Prince Sarau, an aristocratic madman—Amras employs an extended first-person monologue. Bernhard is already moving toward this narrative style through the medical student’s extensive quotation of Strauch in Frost, but here the monologue is sustained at length, though interrupted by letters and by the brother’s notes. In the use of monologue in Amras, Bernhard prepares for an even more extravagant gesture in Gargoyles, where Prince Sarau speaks with only minimal interruption for more than 120 pages. Amras employs monologue but does not fully pursue it, the voice periodically collapsing into fragmentation. It opts for the modernist solution of using a formal collapse to reflect internal collapse. Gargoyles, on the other hand, offers a voice that tears itself apart from within while leaving the edifice of monologue intact. We have the sense that, like Beckett’s Unnamable, Prince Sarau is probably only getting started.

Playing Watten, published in 1969, is more humorous, more lucidly written. Its narrator is a doctor who has lost his practice because of morphine abuse. As the book opens, the doctor has signed over his inheritance to the lawyer-mathematician and convict rehabilitator Undt. After accepting the money, Undt writes to ask the narrator to participate in his research by writing a report on your perceptions, over a period of several hours, of the day before the day you received this note. The remainder of the novella consists of the narrator’s description of these several hours. He records a visit paid to him by a truck driver trying to convince him to return to his old habit of playing cards every Wednesday, a habit which he interrupted when one of the other card players committed suicide.

The watten of the title is the name of a card game played in the Southern Tyrol. Most variations of the game demand four players broken into teams of two with teammates sitting across from one another. After the deal, players are allowed to inform their partners through little signs and gestures, as well as by speech, of the conditions of the cards in their hands. Some of the fun of the game comes in the verbal exchange that occurs, in the attempts to inform one’s partner without giving too much away to one’s opponent. As the rules of watten vary from locale to locale, the truck driver’s invitation to play watten is an invitation to the doctor to come back to local society. When the doctor suggests that watten is not enough to save him, just as it was not enough to save the player who suicided, it is shorthand for the failure of society to save the individual and, considering the Tyrolean origin of the game, the failure of Austrian society in particular: In this country there is absolutely no work for the brain, it is unemployed. In addition, the doctor’s long periodic utterances and the truck driver’s laconic responses are a sort of verbal game and can perhaps be read as watten played by means other than cards.

Playing Watten is thematically similar to the book that was published directly before it, Ungenach (1968), in which an expatriate Austrian, now a professor in the United States, chooses after the murder of his half-brother to divvy up his family inheritance among lower-class Austrians. Yet Playing Watten could not be more stylistically different. While Ungenach consists of disparate sections, lists of recipients of the inheritance, and so forth, Playing Watten introduces the nonparagraphing that would come to be Bernhard’s stylistic trademark (the technique appears as well in the earlier stories Der Zimmerer and Jauregg, but Playing Watten is the first time Bernhard uses the technique in a longer work). The novella consists of three sections, each a single, unbroken paragraph. The effect is a compelling one: after beginning to read, readers have no place to pause or breathe; instead, they are swept along by the language. Playing Watten paved the way for The Lime Works (1970), which is Bernhard’s first full-length novel to practice nonparagraphing. There, after ten pages of elliptical paragraphs of the kind found in Amras, the narrative offers a single paragraph, which is 230 pages long and is woven out of the many voices and opinions surrounding a murder, submerging the reader in a chaotic tangle of hearsay and madness.

Walking (1971), slightly more abstract, contains all the themes and stylistic gestures of Bernhard’s major fiction. In some respects the most overtly philosophical text in Bernhard’s highly philosophical oeuvre, it is a seminal work. It feels condensed and at times gnarled, as if Bernhard were trying to cram the thematic concerns of a longer novel into the smaller confines of a novella. In it, the narrator and his friend Oehler walk, discussing anything that comes to mind, but always circling back to their friend Karrer, who has recently gone irrevocably mad. The novella is a meditation on thinking, on the impossibility of truly thinking. The majority of the narrative consists of Oehler talking and the narrator listening, sometimes responding. But Oehler’s speech quotes Karrer and others, making the layering of the narrative both maddening and wonderfully complex. Four years later, after Bernhard loosened this structure slightly, covering similar themes but allowing them to develop over four times as many pages and with a more substantial narrative in play, he would produce his finest and most disturbing work, Correction.

Like Playing Watten, Walking is unparagraphed. The structure of both novellas is tripartite. The middle section in Playing Watten focuses on a story about the traveler who found the suicide’s body, while the middle section of Walking recounts the events leading to Karrer’s definitive breakdown. One is tempted to view this tripartite structure in Hegelian terms—as thesis, antithesis, synthesis—but if Bernhard employs such a model, it is fissured and cracked and ironized: the ideas of the sections bleed together and any synthesis is ultimately thwarted. The first and third sections in both novellas are sufficiently similar that they might also be read as a single section split in halves by a trauma rising through it. It is perhaps analogous to Hegel’s notion of the night of the world—the bloody head rising out of flux only to be swallowed up again—but twisted free of its philosophical significance and ultimate comforting contextualization: an eruption of a negativity through another negativity. In any case, Bernhard would not remain comfortable with the triad as a structural device (though he would use character triads); his later work moves away from structural triads toward dyads and monads, with longer works such as Extinction and Correction breaking into two long paragraphs, and shorter novels such as Concrete and Wittgenstein’s Nephew consisting of a single sustained paragraph.

At the heart of all three of these novellas lies madness. As the narrator of Playing Watten suggests, One moment I think I’m mad and the next I think I’m not mad. Madness is a fully instrumented score. In Playing Watten, madness becomes a given for the narrator—his only choice is whether he will go mad in a natural or an unnatural fashion, and if that process of going mad will terminate in suicide. In Amras, both brothers struggle with madness during their stay in the tower, imagining dead bodies swinging in the kitchen, fearing knives, hearing voices, struggling to maintain themselves as both connected to and distinct from one another. In Walking, Karrer’s own daily discipline had been to school himself more and more in the most exciting, most tremendous, and most epoch-making thoughts with an ever greater determination, but only to the furthest possible point before absolute madness. But the difficulty is that at any moment we can think too far. Thinking, in Walking, is like walking, and the characters think their ways along routes, with these routes leading sometimes over smooth ground and sometimes to the edge of an abyss. Suggests Oehler, It is absolutely right to say let’s enter this thought, just as if we were to say, let’s enter this haunted house. Indeed, language is viral, infecting through the ear the mind that takes it in: external words rewire internal thoughts. By entering into the thoughts of others we become possessed by their thoughts, potentially annihilating ourselves.

In the move from Amras to Playing Watten, and from Playing Watten to Walking, we can see Bernhard’s development in miniature. The arc pursued is analogous to the arc taken by Bernhard’s novels from Frost passing through Gargoyles and The Limeworks to reach Correction. Taken as an aggregate, these three novellas present a cross-section of approaches to Bernhard’s major themes, illustrating as well the development of his nonparagraphing and of his recursive and obsessive narrative voice. They provide the best introduction to Bernhard currently available, defining the writer’s concerns, preparing readers for the larger satisfactions—and the larger challenges—of Bernhard’s novels. In the progression, one can sense Bernhard the artist becoming more and more distinct, his vision more and more precise. Yet never is there a moment when these novellas seem undeveloped or immature; they are successful in their own terms even as they prepare for greater things, enriching and complicating our sense of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

Note

*Thomas Bernard, Correction, trans. Sophie Wilkins (1979; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 25–26.

AMRAS

TRANSLATED BY PETER JANSEN

The essence of disease is as dark as the essence of life.

NOVALIS

After our parents’ suicide, we were shut up for two and a half months in the tower, the landmark of our suburb of Amras, accessible only by traversing the large apple orchard, years ago still a property of our father’s, which leads up in a southerly direction to the primary rocks.

The tower, which belongs to our uncle, was a refuge to us during those two and a half months, protecting us from the clutches of people, sheltering and concealing us from the eyes of a world whose actions and perceptions are forever determined by evil.

We owe it only to the influence of our uncle, our mother’s brother, that in contravention to the crude Tyrolean health regulation concerning persons apprehended in the act of suicide, condemned to excruciating survival and thereby disfigured, we were spared consignment to the insane asylum and being forced to share with so many others, in the dreadful way well known to me, the fate of those from the Upper Inn Valley and from the Karwendel mountains and from the Brenner villages whose derangement and deformation was caused by that very institution.

Our family conspiracy had been discovered and made public two hours too early by a merchant from Imst, a creditor of my father’s: we had still, in contrast to our parents, never been dead . . .

. . . at once and, as our uncle did not shrink from telling us, completely naked, wrapped in two horse blankets and a dogskin, we had been taken that very same night, and still in an unconscious state, in a speeding car dispatched by our uncle to forestall the health authorities, from our father’s house in Innsbruck to Amras and thus to safety, out of reach of accusations and gossip and slander and infamy . . . Like our parents, we had wished our suicide and agreed upon it among ourselves . . . and on the third of the month had not wanted to hear of another last-minute postponement like those we had been forced to accept repeatedly in the course of the winter and each time owing to objections raised by our mother . . .

Left behind by our parents, forsaken by them, the two of us, Walter and I, from the very first moments in the tower during those days following close upon the night of the suicides, days described to us only with embarrassment, in bits and pieces, and therefore shrouded in obscurity, spent all our time lying on the straw mattresses apparently made up freshly for us in great haste on the middle floor of the tower, at first unconscious, later on silent and listening, and then, from the end of the first week on, just walking up and down incessantly, often holding our breath, occupied with nothing but our young natures, totally benighted, betrayed, not yet twenty years old . . . The tower, familiar to us from our childhood like no other building in all of Tyrol, was no dungeon to us . . . on the upper stairs and on the lower, groping and shivering, in our thoughts subjected to utter destruction by abject impulses from every point of the compass, we constantly obeyed our fateful, if sublime, sibling torpor . . . Our watchfulness weighed upon our mood and constricted our understanding . . . We did not look out of the windows, but we heard enough sounds to be afraid . . . Our heads, when we stuck them into the open, were exposed to the vicious gusts of the foehn; the welter of air hardly left us room to breathe . . . It was early March . . . We heard many birds and did not know what kind of birds . . . The waters of the Sill plunged into the depths before us and noisily separated us from Innsbruck, the city of our forebears, and thus from the world that had become so insufferable to us . . . Leafing through the books and writings belonging to the two of us, selected most thoughtfully by our uncle and sent up to Amras from Herrengasse while we were still comatose, probably completely out of it and unconscious, at death’s door, the scientific ones that were mine and incomprehensible to Walter, the musicological ones that were Walter’s and incomprehensible to me, meditating on our own history and that of others, general, universal history, which drove us to distraction, on the millions of snowstorms of unfolding events—we had always loved what came hard to us, despised what came easy—withdrawn ever more deeply into our raging heads, we padded our tower with grief.

To a letter from the Meran psychiatrist Hollhof, a friend of our father’s, which we had received only three days after our arrival at the tower, we sent the following reply:

Dear Sir,

The time has not yet come for us to inform you of the circumstances leading to the deaths of our parents, as you have requested, in particular to give you a description of the period between our parents’ (and our) decision to commit suicide and the execution of their suicides, with regard to ourselves, our rehearsal for suicide; we wish nothing more at the moment than to be left alone.

Thank you for your condolences.

K.M. W.M.

We sent a second reply, on the same day, to Kufstein:

Dear Madam, all claims you may have concerning our father’s business transactions are to be directed to our uncle, our mother’s brother, who is known to you.

SINCERELY, K.M. W.M.

Heartened only by the attentiveness of our uncle, who visited us twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday—his responsibilities would not allow him to come more often, on other days—always in high spirits, as it seemed to us, always bearing newspapers, information, tidings which, however, caused us nothing but dismay, thrown back solely on our dreadful characters, injured from way back, watchful, unpersevering, we suddenly existed in a darkness ever more conspiring against us, impairing our very ability to walk and sit and recline and stand, naturally our ability to think and speak, our general ability to reason, the darkness of the tower whose age, to us, spanned not centuries, but millennia.

Even there, Walter, as he had throughout his life, continued to receive the regular visits, essential to him and expensive, of the internist, an epilepsy specialist famous and infamous throughout the Tyrol, a brutal, excessively healthy man of forty who, though medically trained without compare through early application and subsequent cunning, had always been hateful to us, also had earlier been our mother’s physician . . . When in the tower we were as good as gone from the world and suddenly deprived of our parents and their gentle influence, Walter’s illness, from birth nothing but a constant source of chagrin to him, initially undermining only his disposition but later more and more thoroughly his intellect as well, advancing against him, it seemed, with logical cruelty, both furtively and openly, a disease completely unexplored to this day, had intermittently, as was observable in phases and stages, taken very rapid, savage turns for the worse and as a result exacerbated, to the limits of our potential, even our mutual relationship to each other, based as it was on sibling trust as much as on sibling overcaution . . . But we had to stick together, and thus we tolerated each other . . .

. . . . .

Immediately after the end of our barbiturate-induced coma, detoxified by two Innsbruck general practitioners with, as may be imagined, great solemnity, in the certain knowledge that we were forced to exist again, and against our will, thus all the more detestably, both of us had feared that Walter’s seizures, congenital to him, inherited from his mother, fostered by his exostosis, which from time to time molested him with lightning