BETTY FALKENBERG
271
systems, political or religious, both encompassing as they do the same
corruption and stupidity to be found everywhere else.
If
there is one
thing which can bind people together-and the nature of that bond is
at best ambivalent-it can only be the awareness of the total hopeless–
ness of all human endeavor in the light of the fact of death.
Handke has referred to the "idiocy" of language, and following
Wittgenstein, has tried to pursue the relation between language and
reality, exploring deracination and alienation from various vantage
points, often flirting, in the process, with current pop modes. What is
appealing about him is his willingness to be both patient, unetherized
upon the table, and surgeon, performing the operation himself.
Somehow he always manages to survive. At present, he seems to be
leaning toward a somewhat more conventional mode of story telling,
after having gone through the agonies of a self-inflicted Kaspar Hauser
cnSlS.
Bernhard never
had
any illusions to begin with. He never flirted
with any current idioms, pop or other. Rather, with a truly relentless
consistency, he set about doing what he had to do, and whether
ridiculed or crowned with prizes, he goes right on doing it. Bernhard
would go further than Handke, and declare
both
language and reality
"idiocy." Estrangement, "alienation," is the natural condition of man.
Writing itself is a disease, a tumor. No sooner does one think oneself
rid of it than a new one begins to grow ... "a novel ... in effect
nothing but a malignant tumor, a cancer ... and there is no hope and
no way out."
Bernhard's latest novel,
Korrektur (Revisions),
may be viewed as
an almost perfect inversion of the theme of
Kalkwerk (Limeworks),
in
which the protagonist is hindered by psychological blocks from
putting down on paper the results of a scientific study on hearing
which he has been carrying around in his head for decades.
Kalkwerk,
in turn, harks back to the still earlier novel,
Verstorung (Disturbances),
in which a mad prince paces his study, dreaming of the life he never
lived, the scholarly essays he never completed.
Konrad, in
Kalkwerk,
molds his entire environment to serve as a
laboratory for his experiments, ruthlessly disregarding human wishes
and needs. The Limeworks, chosen for its isolation and forbidding
exterior as the ideal setting for his work, is further transformed by him
into a jail-like enclosure.
It
is Konrad's belief that this work can be
accomplished only by the exclusion of every possible distraction. He
subjects his crippled and totally helpless wife to the same cruel and
austere discipline as he imposes upon himself. Long before he shoots
