On Thomas Bernhard and extinct dilemmas (1)

Dilemmas

Our salvation will only occur by destroying everything, by literally abolishing everything in the world. Destroy our origins, culture, religion, social institutions and so on (not sure about our nature, though) in order to start again and create a new world. Saving humankind is not about waiting for redemption or forgiveness; we have to destroy that idea as well. It is about undertaking a radical revolution. How? Nobody knows, but that doesn’t matter because human beings are still too feeble and unready to attempt such a change. This type of revolution is impossible at the moment and, hence, our salvation.

This is what Franz-Joseph Murau thinks, an Austrian intellectual of the 20th century, who could also be Franz-Joseph Kafka or Joseph-Franz Nietzsche. Murau’s revolutionary leitmotif is at the heart of Thomas Bernhard’s (1931-1989) last novel, Extinction, published in 1986 and translated from the German by David McLintock. The original German title is Auslöschung and is divided in two long chapters: The Telegram and The Will. The novel tells the story of Murau, who leads a comfortable and intellectual life in Rome but, suddenly and without any preamble, receives a telegram from his sisters, notifying that father, mother and brother have died. Incapable of knowing how to react to the tragedy, he is tormented also by the fact that he will become the master of his family’s farm emporium, as stated by his father’s will.

In consequence, he must return to his abhorred place of origin, Wolfsegg, located in Upper Austria. Wolfsegg represents everything that Murau hates: the countryside, the agricultural lifestyle, the culture and religion of Austria, its government and, last but not least, his sisters, the last remains of the family that rejected him as the unwanted son, the lost-in-life child and the ‘failed genius’. Hence, before discerning how to undertake the destructive revolution, Franz-Joseph has to deal with an unpleasant dilemma: go back and reign in Wolfsegg −which he swore would never return after his sister’s wedding, held one week before the dead of his brother and parents− or stay in his beloved Rome and continue his languid lifestyle, dedicated to the instruction of his pupil Gambetti? Either way, he will have to attend first the funeral at Wolfsegg, breaking his promise of never going back. In the morbid and theatrical scenery of his hometown, he’ll make his final decision which, even though unexpected, will show congruence with his beliefs and life philosophy, expressed without any pretentiousness along the novel.

While entrapped in his ‘existential’ dilemma, Murau informs the reader about his plan of writing a book called Extinction, where everything described on it will be extinguished, ‘everything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is’. Writing becomes, in this sense, an act of extinction of which Franz-Joseph has only been able to find the title. Despite having thought about this work for years, he still has a vague notion of its form, recognizing the hardships involved in the writing process, especially the trouble of putting together the first sentence. During the development of the story, Murau will provide more details about this hypothetical work, where he also intends to include the drama of a Jewish friend who survived the holocaust without receiving any recognition (to say nothing of reparation) from the Austrian government. Murau, then, is immersed also in the dilemma of how to write his long-expected extinction and the course it should follow.

Photographs

Extinction is written in the form of a soliloquy, where Murau gives free flow to the stream of his consciousness, confessing his thoughts and feelings −but careful of not being too intimate. Therefore, we are informed about the events from the sole view of the narrator, who engages in a harsh criticism of everything that surrounds his past and present life (including himself, amongst all). At first look, the reader might be tempted to think that Murau’s tale is nothing but a joke, due to Bernhard’s blank style, presenting the argument in a rather informal and ‘by the way’ tone. However, after the first pages, one can’t help but become involved in the story, intrigued by Murau’s character, his tragedy and, foremost, by how his dilemmas will unfold.

What makes the story credible, though, is Bernhard’s power of persuasion: sharp, bold and hypnotic and hence, difficult to explain. It just emanates from his prose and from the way he tells the story, counterpointing the tale of the tragedy with Murau’s digressions about memories from his childhood at Wolfsegg; the causes behind the split from his family; his opinion about the Austrian context (contaminated by the fallout of National Socialism); and the peculiarities of his passions, interests, and dilemmas. The persuasion of the Austrian writer seduces unrelentingly, like a magician that shows his tricks openly, for everyone to detect the secrets, and yet still enchants the audience, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.

In order to give a glimpse of this power, here are some excerpts, taken from McLintock’s translation, that serve as images of the writer’s persuasive theater:

About the lives led by his family (which Murau calls 'blockheads'), a statement that could be expanded to many:

…They made nothing of themselves, because they settled for indolence and were content with the daily round, which demanded nothing more of them than the traditional stolidity they were born with. They staked nothing, risked nothing, and chose to take it easy, as they say, when they were still young (…) They left it with their heads held high, clutching their graduation diplomas, which they regarded as lifelong guarantees of something extraordinary, when all they guaranteed was extraordinary mediocrity. They stopped in their tracks, and now, at about forty, they are still where they were at nineteen. 

-          On the deification of formal education and academic titles:

Taking humankind as a whole, then, we may say that most associations take place not between human beings, but between diplomas or titles. To put it baldly, human beings count for nothing: only titles and diplomas count (…) This addiction to diplomas and titles is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon: mankind has always suffered from it. Centuries ago human beings, having insufficient respect for themselves, decided to boost their self-esteem by presenting themselves in the form of diplomas and titles. 

-         Continuing with education, Murau says about teachers, following his uncle’s words (one must take into account that the narrator is himself a private teacher of one person: Gambetti):

They are moral cowards who took out on the pupils all the frustrations they could not take out on their wives (…) Teachers and judges, he said, are the meanest slaves of the state.

-         The view on his father´s work culture, the master of a prosperous farming business, which represents the working style in Austria and, perhaps, the rest of the world (especially among politicians):

Watching my father at work, I often told myself, He’s only acting, he’s not working at all, and the same applies to my brother. I don’t blame them for simulating work and hoodwinking the public, as the rest of humanity does, I told myself, but they really shouldn’t say at every turn that they’re working themselves to death, let alone that they’re doing it for the family and, even, on occasion, for the country.

-         About integrity, particularly in hard-times (referring to the tragedy experienced by Murau):

A so-called family tragedy, I told myself, doesn’t justify us in fundamentally falsifying the image of the family concerned, in yielding to an access of sentimentality and more or less giving up, out of selfishness. No tragedy, not even the most terrible, can justify us in falsifying our thoughts, falsifying the world, falsifying everything ̶ in siding with hypocrisy, in other words. 

-         On Catholicism and its lasting legacy:

Catholicism is the supreme annihilator of the child’s soul, the supreme inspirer of terror, the supreme destroyer of character. That’s the truth (…) The Catholic Church has the destruction of the human personality on its conscience (…) For the Catholic Church won’t tolerate any human being other than the Catholic human being. Its unswerving aim is to turn human beings into Catholics, mindless creatures who’ve forgotten how to think for themselves and betrayed independence of thought to the Catholic religion (…) Catholics allow the Church to think for them and consequently act for them, because this makes their lives easier and they’re convinced they can’t do otherwise. And the Catholic mind of the Catholic Church has a terrible way of thinking, I told Gambetti, wholly self-serving and inimical to human nature, conducive only to its own ends and its own glory.