Saint Bernhard

Greta Rainbow on the fashionable turn toward Thomas Bernhard.

Sitting in the window seat of a coach bus in Austria, heading west to Salzburg from Bad Ischl, I read a contemporary novel about a dinner party among artists in downtown New York. I did not want to read about the people of downtown New York while heading west to Salzburg from Bad Ischl, but because this dinner party novel is directly lifted from Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, a novel about a dinner party among artists in Vienna, it did not feel completely irrelevant to my position as a New York writer spending August among artists in Salzburg.

As I’m trying to demonstrate with these italics and commas, it’s hard to write like Bernhard but writers love to try. The newest book-length attempts are Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno, the dinner party novel, and Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo, which also unfolds over one night, on the occasion of a young man with a philosophy degree (despite falsifying the sources for his undergraduate thesis on Heidegger) invited to the home of his aging former professor. Dubno has described her debt to Woodcutters inside the book and in the press. Publishers Weekly said of Fresh, Green Life, “Fans of Thomas Bernhard will find much to love.”

It’s only the latest wave. Houellecbecq, Ben Lerner, and Tom McCarthy have all been compared to Bernhard for years. In 2011, Gideon Lewis-Kraus argued that Americans took to him because we are already comfortable assuming the role of audience to complain-y narrators like Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and Larry David—though these men hail from the Jewish school of deprecation, and Bernhard’s background is a Christian forced into the Nazi boarding school system as a child, who went on to dedicate many pages to his contempt for the morally bankrupt Catholic Church.

I think more contemporary literature than we realize employs Bernhardese because writers are more angry and bitter about the conditions of artistic life than we know, if that’s even possible, given how much we already complain about it. So his propulsive rants, which stay just this side of the very thin line of unreadably insufferable by flowing forcefully like a piece of music performed agitato, provide a model for ecstatic release, an outlet for the frustration we feel about having no money and very little status. 

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I thought about the stylistic tendencies contemporary writers borrow from Austria's national mascot of misanthropy, sitting in the coach bus window seat, and I decided the main thing is a thing for repetition. Writers really love to do this: to repeat the thing. They change the construction slightly and yet still, they repeat the thing, because repetition is potentially transgressive yet not too fussy a trick, lending profundity to the prose. It feels profound, to repeat the thing. Here’s Happiness and Love; Nicole is the host of the dinner party and was once a close friend of the narrator:

It was Nicole I felt sorry for, Nicole, who made nothing, who did nothing. She curated but she did nothing, nothing but walk from studio visit to studio visit buying artists lunch and buying artists’ work and trying to buy herself the feeling of satisfaction that comes from actually doing something.

You want more? Here are excerpts from three recent short stories I read in some alternative literary magazines:

I mostly talked about how I didn't have any good ideas for a novel and how I feel unsure I could possibly ever write a novel, actually, that I feel most novels’ plots are frustratingly contrived and artificial, and that I've never seen myself as someone having a long fruitful career writing novels.

We lived the lives we lived because other people lived the lives they lived.

It ages you backwards. It ages your face backwards, specifically, or maybe this is just because the face matters most when it comes to the thing of aging.

This linguistic circularity is meant to inspire nausea or claustrophobia, meant to make you feel trapped in a prison of words, because the writers feel this way—that is, trapped in their circumstances. And that’s Bernhard’s genius: a spiral is the perfect style for writing self-hatred. 

An editor of a respected art magazine in Vienna told me that Gargoyles, Correction and others were assigned reading in high school, and that Bernhard is quintessentially Austrian because he hates himself more than anything, except perhaps Austria. Sitting in the coach bus window seat, I thought about the way Americans hate, and how we are full of hatred but it’s more external—we hate our enemies. So to be allowed to shit on them from an intellectual podium? How delicious.

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