My long-postponed encounter with Bernhard got off to a great start with The Loser. Then somehow I got the idea that I'd get more out of Bernhard's novels if I knew more about his biography and, hey, where better to start than this kind of memoir? So in I dove.

And, as with most of these tremendously stylish, vaguely existentialist writers, the further Bernhard gets from fiction, the more insufferable his narrators become. There's no doubt that Thomas had a rough start to life; he's more than entitled to whinge and complain about it at great length, and, frankly, I'd be interested in reading any such rants of his, just because they'll be funny, snarky and well written.

But this becomes more of a problem when the narrator makes the by now very predictable move from "My life was shitty in the following ways" to "Therefore, human life is shitty." The feeling that life is shitty is certainly one worth investigating; dedicating one's life to "gathering evidence" of that shittiness so you can throw it all back in the faces of those Catholic-Nazi Austrians who had the temerity to try to teach you something or provide for your health, on the other hand, is more than a bit boring.

So this is half a great riposte to people who think Bernhard's writing is about madness (as he very reasonably points out, he's not mad, just 'realistic'); a fairly unconvincing indictment of the medical profession (I get the distinct impression that Bernhard the narrator and Bernhard the author could have stayed healthy if he hadn't been so pig-headed); and a perfect manual for late twentieth century quasi-philosophy.

i) I, the philosopher, am completely individual and original. Pay no mind to the fact that I'm just repeating what Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and their various epigones have said. I am immune to the "diseases of the mind" to which others are prone. (123) I am "accountable to no one." (136) "I have listened to everything and conformed with nothing," (206).

ii) Truth is an impossibility, as is communication. "Whatever is communicated can only be falsehood and falsification," (160). And attempts to 'teach' people the truth are just "cramming the pupil full of putrid, useless knowledge and so turning his whole nature into the antithesis of all that is natural." (134) "What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though ti never can be the truth and never is the truth," (161). [Presumably, given (iii), we can never know if we want to tell the truth, anyway]. "Language is inadequate when it comes to communicating the truth... language can only falsify and distort whatever is authentic," 314. "words merely infect and ignore, blur and aggravate, shame and falsify and cloud and darken everything," (405).

iii) If something looks good or beautiful, it must be hiding shit, and it's our duty to find that shit no matter how hard we have to work to find it. Because it's always there, and the shit is the real. Everything else is, ipso facto, a facade. "The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled... we know that all history is falsified and always transmitted in falsified form." (84) "Society cannot exist without one or more... victims... Morality is a lie," (138). "Human beings do not like freedom--to say otherwise is to lie," (179). "Getting a clear view of existence... is the only possible way to cope with it," (205). "we only have a right to what's not right and what's unjust," (406).

iv) Progress is not only a lie, it's impossible. "Human beings are as they are and cannot be changed," 212. "Absurdity is the only way forward," (306). "It is impossible to progress beyond nonsense," (206).

v) Philosophy is, at base, a waste of time. "Only theories can cripple us... all the philosophies and systems of thought which block the way to clarity with their unusable insights. We have seen through almost everything, and what is still to come will bring no surprises," (212). "Life [is] a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness," (403).

vi) Nature is good, because it doesn't lie: life sucks. "Life is nothing but a penal sentence I told myself... the world is a penitentiary where there is little freedom of movement... these precepts... have lost none of their validity... they embody an essential truth," 293.

vii) 'Science' proves all these ideas. "Life is only science now... we are suddenly taken up with nature... we have put reality to the test... everything will be clear, a clarity that increases and deepens unendingly, and everything will be cold, a coldness that intensifies ever more horribly," (402).

At times Bernhard tempers this impoverished liturgy with his own irony; "what a good thing it is that we have always adopted an ironic view of everything, however seriously we have taken it," (208). He occasionally protests that he's writing about the view he took as a child/teenager, and not the view he holds now, but his writings on the occasion of literary awards at the end of this volume suggest that there's no clear separation between the periods of his life.

The problem with this volume is that it encourages us to read what amounts to four novels worth of Bernhard consecutively. It's just too much. Yes, fanatics will say, you can't handle so much truth consecutively, you baffled sod! You need to look away from the abyss, need to lie to yourself, you inauthentic humanist!

But that's not the problem. The problem is that when you read the above ideas over and over, you realize that they're just a way for people with massive egos to believe that they have access to the real, whereas the rest of us - who happily go on acting as if things can be, and should be, better than they are - are deluded children.

But real immaturity, as a friend recently suggested to me, is stopping your intellectual development when you've learned enough to be cynical, but not enough to be human. Bernhard may have moved beyond that stage, but the narrator of these novels did not. ( )

I speak highly of both books here:

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/50658193755/my-accounting-of-thomas-bernhard ( )