BETTY FALKENBERG
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Brecht, et aI., by making what he most despises work for him. A similar
case may be made for Bernhard, both in his plays and in his fictions,
which he claims are anyway conceived theatrically. "In my books
everything is artificial, that is, every figure, every event plays itself out
on a stage, and the stage itself is total darkness. The work illu–
mines ... slowly, out of the background, words emerge...." Like
Beckett's, Bernhard's plays are generally enacted on bare stages.
Kroetz, the young Bavarian playwright, calls his work "A drama
built on silences. A theater of the inarticulate." This description may
again be applied
to
Bernhard's use of dialogue-with one difference.
Bernhard does not limit his notion of inarticulateness to one social
class as does Kroetz, but believes it inherent in human communications
altogether. Bernhard's characters are not really individuals, and their
speech is not really dialogue, but a monomaniacal talking past one
another. They exist as stylized versioHS of mental and physical basket–
cases, cut off from the very selves out of whose mouths the words
appear to come.
By bleeding his characters of their individuality, by antiseptically
draining their speech of all contemporary jargon, Bernhard achieves a
pristine quality that is strangely modern, deriving its very power from
its unsayingness. A few lines from
The President
may serve to illustrate
the point.
Sighs and groans from the president in the bathroom
President's wife, into the bathroom
My husband
has suffered a shock
The third assassination attempt
in four weeks
But he loves
to
go
to the Monument for the Unknown Soldier
looks in the mirror
Mrs. President
leans back and bursts out laughing
Mrs. President
grows suddenly silent and peers into empty dog-basket
speaking with the dog
See
puts on make-up
One red
One gray
One black
Another red
A gray
