Betty Falkenberg
THOMAS BERNHARD
"You know the great Cimabue
Crucifixion?"
Francis Bacon
says to David Sylvester in one of Ihe early interviews (1962). "I always
think of that as an image-as a worm crawling down the cross."
Between a
Crucifixion
by Fra ncis Bacon and Rembrandt's paint–
ing of
The Slaughtered Ox,
a third image intercedes: it is a photo
made by Thomas Bernhard for the film version of his fragment,
The
Italian.
It
shows a butcher slitting open the carcass of a huge ox, whose
entrails are pouring out.
"My first impressions ... " writes Bernhard, "my way to school,
the very first day, took me past a butcher's shop on whose open doors
hung hooks, hammers, knives, all neatly arranged in rows, the ones
bloody, the others sparkling clean-slaughterhouse apparatus ...
then from the butcher's shop a few steps on to the cemetery, the halls
with coffins lying on biers, the vaults ... and from there to the school–
desk ... a young woman teacher."
"Well, of course, we are mea t," says Francis Bacon, "we are
potential carcasses.... "
In a way and to a degree unequalled by any of his contemporaries,
Handke, Kroetz, the entire Graz or "Viennese Group" (Artmann,
Beyer, Achleitner) together, the work of Thomas Bernhard is unsettling.
Long exci uded from their ranks (Bernhard, a native Austrian, was denied
publication in the "organs" of both groups), he still remains, despite the
belated recognition of his genius, the loner he always was.
Long before literary critics began speculating about the influence
of Wittgenstein on Handke's ambivalence towards language, Bernhard
had incorporated the Wiugenstein k'epsis into his prose. "Words,"
says the protagoni t of his novel,
Limeworks,
"are made to degrade
thought, yes, he would even go so far as to say words were there to do
away with thought. "
The hero of
Korrektur (Revisions),
Bernhard's most recent novel
(197"5), shares certain biographica l facts with the master. Both are
Austrian scientists who feel stifled by their native homeland; both go to
