270
PARTISAN REVIEW
Cambridge, England,
to
study and teach. The hero of
Korrektur
reads
and rereads Wittgenstein " because he thought to recognize himself in
the writings of Wittgenstein who came from the same countryside and
who had always been such an acute observer of that countryside."
Madness and suicide are endemic
to
the families of both, as they are,
indeed,
to
post-Hapsburg Austria itself.
But it is not so much in statement as in style that Bernhard can
claim his forebear. His dogged rejection of ordinary speech in favor of a
quasi-scientific bloodlessness is one of the starkest examples in contem–
porary prose writing of pounding out an overriding obsession through
seeming objectivity. The closest parallel in German literature in this
respect is Buchner, who in Wozzeck touches most deeply when he is
being most clinical. In an age in which most affective speech has
become f.aded metaphor at best, this approach seems all the more
powerful. Bernhard 's prose is, moreover, the unclouded mirror-for all
its seeming quirkiness it is not murky-of his thought. Its rhythms are
integral to that thought; its breaths and breathlessnesses
are
compa–
rable
to
the long lines of a long Mozart aria. Bernhard has an infallible
ear for cadence, for building up tensions to the breaking point and then
releasing them for just an eighth-note rest before going on. He also
appreciates the comic effect of a comma. In fact, everything in Bern–
hard's prose serves a rhythmic as well as a narrative function. Take his
device used to set up distance between author and reader, material and
interpretation.
It
might be called-not station-identification, but
narrator-identification-and it arises out of another device characteris–
tic of him, namely to -tell his story through the account of at least one,
but generally two, third persons. After pages and pages of what may
remind some of Faulkner's, or more likely, Beckett's pauseless prose,
Bernhard will interject a punctuating note: "So Fro," or "So Wieser."
After a while these punctuating elements work like refrains, refrains
which can then be varied: "So Konrad
to
Fro, " or "as Konrad suppo–
sedly said to Fro," or finally, "as Konrad already in October said to
Fro." Coming, as they generally do, in the midst of some thoroughly
horrific episode, their casual banality offers a moment of comic relief.
It
is a tiny trick, but it is brilliant.
It
jolts the reader and causes him to
reflect on the absurdity of all things, even, or especially, the
condition
humaine,
in all its sordid as well as petty ramifications. Because all
Bernhard's books, all his plays, are really about one thing: death. Death
in death, death in life, the futility of all human contact or attempts at
understanding, the senselessness of all existence and the cruelty of
creating new life, the stupidity of all human beings, the futility of all
