itarian hopes the movement inspired appears to have been served by these be lost to us: a parr of the wonderful should be rejected. This was the cru- efforts. The kindest conclusion one diversityofhuman culture. cial period of Reconstruction and of can draw is that Dawkins has not ac- the ratification of the 14th Amend- quainted himself with the history of The fact that the Amish are pacifists ment to the Constitution, which es- modem authoritarianism. whose way of life burdens this belea- tablished the full rights of citizenship Indeed, Dawkins makes a bold at- guered planet as little as any to be to everyone born or naturalized in this tack on tolerance as it is manifested found in the Western world merits not country. Its passage was the work of in society's permitting people to rear even a mention. emancipationists, and it was meant to their children in their own religious Yet Dawkins himself has posited not create meaningful political equality traditions. He turns an especially only memes but, since these mind virus- for African Americans, among others. cold eye on the Amish: es are highly analogous to genes, a The vanguard in the period in which There is something breathtakingly meme pool as well. This would imply Huxley wrote were those Christian condescending, as well as inhumane, that there are more than sentimental abolitionists whose intentions he dis- about the sacrificingof anyone, espe- reasonsfor valuing the diversity that he missed as, of course, at odds with sci- ciallychildren, on the altar of "diver- derides. Would not the attempt to nar- ence. Huxley's racism, like Hitler's, is . sity"and the virtue of preservinga va- row it only repeat the worsterrors ofeu- nota standard from which ineluctable rietyof religioustraditions.The restof genics at the cultural and intellectual progress can be inferred but instead a us are happy with our cars and com- level? When the Zeitgeist turns Gor- proof of the power of atavism. puters, our vaccines and antibiotics. gon, the impulses toward cultural and Dawkins allows that our upward But you quaint little people with your biological eugenics have proved to be bonnets and breeches,yourhorse bug- moral drift is a "meandering saw- one and the same. It is diversity that gies, your archaic dialect and your tooth"-he is admired for his prose- earth-closet privies, you enrich our makes any natural system robust, and but he seems not to be alert to his- lives. Of course you must be allowed diversity that stabilizes culture against torical specifics. The United States to trap yourchildren with you in your the eccentricity and arrogance that never suffered a more grievous moral seventeenth-century time warp, oth- have so often called themselves rea- setback than when it allowed thinking erwise something irretrievable would son and science. • like Huxley's to make a dead letter of the 14th Amendment. As for the less- er issues of justice that arose in the wake of slavery, .Huxley had this to say: "whatever the position of stable ~lISERYLO\~S ~OTHING equilibrium into which the laws of so- cial gravitation may bring the negro, The inimitable Thomas Bernhard all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his By Ben Marcus hands of it, and the Caucasian con- science be void of reproach for ever- more. And this, if we look to the bot- Discussedin this essay: tom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy." Frost, by Thomas Bernhard. Translated by Michael Hofmann. Alfred A. Knopf. No, he wasn't joking. 352 pages. $25.95. Finally, there is the matter of atheism itself. Dawkins finds it inca- pable of belligerent intent-"why omasBernhard, the ranting, the dictum that his works could not would anyone go to war for the sake death-obsessed Austrian nov- be published or performed in Austria af- of an absence of belief?" It is a pecu- melist and playwright who died ter his death, as if to suggest that his liarity of our language that by war we in 1989, was the ultimate Nest- homeland was not even worthy to generally mean a conflict between beschmutzer, soiling his country with " bathe in his hatred. Although Bern- nations, or at least one in which screeds against the landscape, the hard's executors have sashayed around both sides are armed. There has been people, and their history. Not content his stipulation, his wrath has since ma- persistent violence against reli- with the limitations of his own mor- tured into something far more univer- gion-in the French Revolution, in tality, Bernhard darkened his will with s.allytoxic. In the end, Bernhard's con- the Spanish Civil War, in the Soviet cerns are not a single country and its Union, in China". In three of these Ben Marcus is the author of Notable political crimes but rather the sheer af- instances the extirpation of religion American Women, among other books. front of life itself, what the Romanian was part of a program to reshape so- His most recent article for Harper's philosopher E. M. Cioran referred to as Magazine; "Why Experimental Fiction "The Trouble with Being Born." ciety by excluding certain forms of Threatens Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, thought, by creating an absence of and Life as We Know It: A Correction," Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, belief. Neither sanity nor happiness appeared in the October 2005 issue" fellow countrymen of Bernhard's, re-

88 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2006 ported on this trouble also, but in ticularlv from someone who has not scape that seems carved out of a cruel prose that was far more stately, tem- seen his brother in years, and it creeps fairy tale. The language is gothic and pered, and quite less given to spleen. toward suggestingthat such cold, love- clinical at once, affecting the airs of Bernhard was altogether unconcerned less interest from a family member has anthropological rationality. When with immunizing a reader against his something to do with Strauch's mis- Bernhard imagines beyond reality, it is surgical attacks on humanity, and if he erable loneliness. It will turn out that to color the world worse,and he can be made a blood sport of novel writing, other forces are bearing down on very convincing about it: "Cities that he did it with a zeal and a gallows hu- Strauch as well, and that misery hap- are long since dead, mountains too, mor that is unrivaled in contemporary pens to be one of his guilty pleasures. long dead, livestock, poultry, even wa- literature. His formally radical novels, This is a man who excels at futility ter and the creatures that used to live which sometimes blasted into shape as and unhappiness, and the performance in the water. Reflections of our death- a single, unbroken paragraph, were of his grief will overpower every oth- masks. A death-mask ball." About his manic reports on such fixations as the er spectacle in the novel. dank, mountainous environment, futility of existence; the dark Strauch warns the narrator, appeal, and inevitable logic, "It's not possible to be so of suicide; the monstrosity healthy that being here won't of human beings; and the cripple you inside and out." abject pain of merely being Crippled inside and out alive. Bernhard's language is certainly a good working strained the limits of rhetor- diagnosis of Strauch, al- ical negativity: if his prose though geography, mutilat- were any more anguished, it ing or not, seems hardly to would simply transmit as blame, however convenient moaning and wailing. Build- a scapegoat. He is menaced ing interest in the grief ex- by headaches, convinced perienced by people who that frost is eroding his look at the world and find mind-a destroyed man it unbearable was a dark art whose hyper-articulate of Bernhard's, and his char- death throes seem to spout, acters do not resist the long without cease, not from the walk to death's door but run landscape but from his to it and claw at the surface, amygdala, the nut-shaped begging for entry. After all, cluster of worry in the brain says Strauch, the agonized that might as well be called painter in Bernhard's first the anxiety fountain. In- novel, Frost, "there is an deed, the treachery of land- obligation towards the depth scapes in Bernhard's work of one's own inner abyss," cannot compete with the even if meeting that obliga- poison and peril emanating tion destroys you. from within his characters. A debut work of nearly The narrator registersat the unbearable bleakness, by a local inn where Strauch is liv- writer who would go on to produce The narrator arrives in Weng and is ing and passes himself off as a student some of the most severely nihilistic soon promised that he'll "get to meet of law rather than medicine. As sub- literature of the twentieth century, a whole series of monsters," which terfugegoes,the deception provesmost- Frost, which wasfirstpublished in Ger- proves to be true: ly irrelevant to the novel, but Bern- man in 1963, isnot so much a novel as hard clearly requires some established a persuasive case against happiness, Ireallywasfrightenedbythislandscape, literary devices to keep the book from written .in the relentless prose style in particularthisonespot,whichispop- reading like a hatchet job on life itself. ulated by small, fully grown people that would become Bernhard's signa- Yet the only character who could pos- whomonecan certainlycallcretins.No ture. An Austrian medical student ac- taller than fivefoot on average,begot- sibly care about the narrator's secret cepts a perverse task from a teacher: go ten in drunkenness, they pass in and identity is Strauch, and he's too busy to Weng, where "the roadsides favor out throughcracksin the wallsand cor- combing his own hair shirt to detect promiscuity" and "children fall into ridors.They seemtypicalofthisvalley. the lie. Strauch would much rather sudden fits of weakness," and clinical- "make the world die in me, and myself ly observe Strauch, the teacher's es- Readers of Bernhard will recognize this die in the world, and everything cease tranged brother. "Watch the way my distottion ashis default, fantastical take as though it had never been." That's a brother holds his stick, I want a precise on the real world; the people who pop- pretty ambitious goal, and by the end of description of it," says the teacher. ulate it are crushed into grotesque the book a kind of success has been This is a perverse thing to want, par- shapes, colliding with a brutal land- achieved, as ifthe book has fallen on its

Illustration by Andrea Ventura REVIEWS 89 own sword. The world depicted by cian's scrutiny, which adds to his Strauch -becomes fairly cold to the mystery. Strauch, a failed artist who touch, and the narrator, not to mention only painted in total darkness, is op- the reader, issuckedheadlong and flail- posed to nearly everything, and lest ing into his death-ship perspective. you think he's a humanist at the core, with a fondness for the arts ernhard is an architect of con- (that classic virtue of the misan- sciousness more than a narra- thrope), he claims that "artists are Btive storyteller. His project is the sons and daughters of loathsome- not to reference the known world, ness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the stuffing it with fully rounded charac- original sons and daughters of lewd- ters who commence to discover their ness; artists, painters, writers and conflicts with one another, but to musicians are the compulsive mas- erect complex states of mind-usual- turbators on the planet." Yet there ly self-loathing, obsessive ones-and are even worse evildoers, in his esti- then set about destroying them. mation: "I've never hated anything Bernhard's characters are thorough as much as I hated teachers." A no- accomplices in their own destruc- table assessment, given that he was tion, and they are bestowed with a for a long time employed as one. Of language that is dementedly repeti- his students, he says: "I never told tive and besotted with the appurte- them the name of one single flower nances of logical thinking. The devi- or tree. Nor gave them one country ous rationality of Bernhard's of origin .... Because I am opposed to language strives for a severe authori- the enlightenment of children where ty, and it tends to make his charac- plants are concerned, in fact, where ters seem believable, no matter how nature is concerned." Indeed, he be- unhinged their claims. Phrases don't lieves that schools should be abol- get repeated so much as needled until ished and that young people should they yield graver meanings, with in- be required to visit slaughterhouses cremental changes introduced as instead, which can teach them far though a deranged scientist were more, and far more quickly: "The adding and removing substances in only wisdom is abattoir wisdom!" He the performance of an experiment. swears he does not exaggerate, and "You wake up, and you feel molest- that "imagination is an illness." On ed," Strauch says: his' own powers of observation: "I dis- covered that my surroundings didn't In fact:the hideousthing.Youopenyour chest ofdrawers:a further molestation. want to be explained by me." Which Washinganddressingaremolestations. doesn't keep him from trying. Having to get dressed!Having to eat Strauch is too deranged to make breakfast! When you go out on the sense, or, more worryingly, he's too street.youaresubject to the gravestpos- perceptive and intelligent to strait- sible molestations. You are unable to jacket his explosive declarations with shieldyourself.Youlay about yourself, coherence and consistency. Never but it's no use.The blowsyoudole out mind the beautiful paradox of Beckett's are returned a hundredfold.What are motto: I can't go on, I'll go on'. Bern- streets,anyway?Wendingsof molesta- hard's version of the phrase removes tion, up and down. Squares?Bundled togethermolestations. Beckett's compulsion to live: I can't go on, I'll kill myself.I am a coward for Without a story to drive it, Frost not having already killed myself. But builds not through unfolding events since all pursuits are futile, suicide isfu- but by telemarking around Strauch's tile. Better never to have been born. bitter cosmology while the narrator One of the unbalancing pleasures follows him through the woods, fat- of Frost is how frequently we can tening himself on the rage of his new change our mind about Strauch as he mentor. A chart of Strauch's world- himself obsessively changes his own view would produce a splotchy mind, shifting our diagnosis from Rorschach of points a~d counter- Angry Genius to Brain-Addled Sad points, contradictions, reversals, and Sack to Poet of Uncomfortable the occasional backflip, none of Truths. Not knowing the limits of his which could really hold up to a logi- hatred and fear makes Strauch fasci-

90 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/NOVEMBER 2006 PEOPLE I MET HITCHHIKING ON USA HIGHWAYS nating, and Bernhard, even this early has witnessed an atrocity that he will by ERIC CHAET (rhymes with fate) in his career, knew how to use char- never recover from-and we see that acters as shock treatments for the certain ideas can be so corrosive as to reader, dialing up the intensity before ruin the mind that hosts them. The boredom can set in. The most chill- novel closes with the narrator's "re- ing idea that recurs in Frost involves port" back to his teacher, a series of suicide, which is offered up by letters that regurgitatesomeofStrauch's Great Strauch as the one authentic solu- tirade with a degree of desperation, for the trip between eras: tion to the problem of being alive. strugglingto find a languagewith which But it is spoken of as such an in- to diagnose Strauch, settling finally on from the oppressive evitability-the question is only real- the awkward phrasing of "an amoral ly when it will happen for each per- interstitial thinking without any de- & unsustainable son-that it's considered "the clared purpose," a disorder that has thru the disturbing & denied decision of the father (first and fore- probablynot yet made it into the DSM. most) and of the mother (as well) to Banging his head against "the unre- into what is being born. sponsor the suicide of their offspring, vealing mysticism of one who ison the the child, the sudden premonition of run from clarity," the narrator in the 'having created a new suicide.''' Sui- end declares Strauch to be "much more cide is a project initiated by all par- miserably alone than one will be able Superficial resemblances aside, ents, and giving birth is likened to to imagine even after reading my re- nothing quite like it. plotting a death. It feels violent, and port." This isa beautiful bit of modesty violating, to have suicide threatened that defeats any sense that Strauch has in one's presence, even from a char- been exaggerating his condition, deep- acter in a novel, and to ignore it is ening the already terrible black hole Order from Amazon.com, like walking away from a drowning that surrounds him. It seems that or send $15 (Canada $20) to: person. If there's something voyeur- Strauch isn't the only one who paints Turnaround Artist Productions istic to this role we're forced into, it in total darkness. His creator is rather 1803 County 12 also imposes an unwanted responsi- fond of doing so as well. De Pere WI54115 bility, which is quite different from Bernhard's ambivalence toward the USA the routine empathy one might feel dramatic shape of a plotted story is toward a more typical fictional char- already in evidence in Frost, yet he acter. This difference of literary ef- hadn't quite determined how to sup- fect begins to describe how assaultive plant it, which leads to a static, some- Bernhard's work can be. Strauch times overexcited investigation of Our flattering, elegant Slimline European foreshadows the kind of character Strauch and his manias: a novel that Cape is made of 100% warm, plush Bernhard would go on to create in can function more as a perverse dis- merino wool, offering superior comfort novels like Woodcutters, The Loser, closure of a disease than as a sus- and protection from the Correction, and Extinction-a ranting penseful revelation of character. The elements. Finished with malcontent on a filibuster, staging subplots and secondary characters in three lovely pewter clasps, grand disquisitions on the awful dis- Frost-intrigue at the inn and the this distinctive garment is sure to tu rn heads. comfort of being human, frequently neighboring village, which Strauch Offerred in Black, Blue, endorsing suicide as not only appro- and the narrator sometimes gossip Camel, Charcoal, priate but desirable. He so loathes about-serve as peripheral animations Cranberry, Navy, the fact that he was born that he to throw Strauch's tirades into greater Purple, Teal, Black wants to erase himself. relief, but they also work to allow the Cashmere & Camel Cashmere. reader some much-needed rest from The Slimline ivewith rage and shouting in the scorched-earth intensity of European Cape our faces, a character of this Strauch's anger. The knacker, hauling 100% Merino Wool A:rt eats up so much of the stage around animal carcasses, is sleeping (Pet/Med/Long) $299 that story and plot are crowded out to with the innkeeper, whose husband XLong $320 the perimeter, obediently clamoring is in jail for murder; as characters they 100% Cashmere for attention now and again, but ap- are somewhat less than human, dri- (Pet/Med/Long) $795 pearing dim and perfunctory at best. ven entirely by their lower faculties XLong $850 The compelling happenings of Frost and made to seem unduly crass and are mostly interior, and the physical petty. A farmhouse bums, incinerat- world and its objects are rotelyattended ing the animals within, which prompts to. The narrator, innocent of the world a cheerful description of their burnt CASCO BAY at the outset, isso poisonedby Strauch's flesh. A woodcutter iskilled. But these WOOL WORKS perspective that he turns into a kind of characters, and their intrigues, are PORTLAND. ME destroyed madman himself-as if he more like hand puppets bobbing atop 1-888-222-WOOl (9665) www.cascobaywoolworks.com REVIEWS 91 cardboard scenery, a bit of over-rigged, cal specimens, they are among the encoded confessions that come to cartoon ish entertainment in between most dour, depressed, angry, and them, and it's often the patience and bracing doses of death talk. Bernhard alarmingly death-obsessed characters curiosity of the narrators, or their sim- doesn't seem particularly convinced in the history of literature; an anec- ple drive to listen, that slowly draws in of the dramatic potential of this ma- dotal assessment, of course, but if a readers, until our own powers of de- . terial either, and so it is only lightly device existed to measure the ni- tection are heightened and we can see and erratically sketched, while Strauch hilism of a fictional character, it is the delicately buried signs of anguish. is held in abeyance before he bom- hard to imagine that Bernhard's cre- It is as though authorial choreography bards us again with his rant against ations would not peg the needle of is not enough; an ally must be sent life. One senses the young Bernhard the machine. abroad into the text to witness the trying his hand at conventional nar- Bernhard's mortal impulses place characters' wounds firsthand. rative (an interest he would later aban- him in the company of another con- Bernhard, too, would prove to be don), dutifully serving up novelistic temporary German-language writer, obsessed with narrators who spy, ef- material to spackle together the far W. G. Sebald. Both were perfect ad- facing themselves in order to feed on more potent torment issuing from herents to Kafka's credo to pursue a vaster world of feeling. In Frost, what Strauch, but it's curious in a novel the negative, because "the positive keeps all of the madness and vitriol when adultery and animal fires,as well thing is given to us from the start." captivating is how elaborately it is me- as general mayhem in the Austrian Each produced portraits of devastated diated through the narrator, who forest, can serve as light comic relief. characters, ruined by both circum- breaks from direct quotation into styl- stance and self-generated torment, izedparaphrases, allowing the raw, spo- ernhard finds little use for but their techniques diverged in stark ken material from Strauch the refine- cheerful thoughts, happy ways. Whereas Sebald built a tran- ments and range of literary prose. Bpeople, or positive outcomes. quil moat around his characters' Strauch's consciousness is artfully Says the narrator of The Loser: "It's al- pain, Bernhard wheeled out the cata- parceled for us to sound both more de- ways correct to say that this or that pult and flung his characters into the ranged and more provocative than it person is an unhappy person ... fire, paying close attention to the would ifwe were to listen directly to his whereas it's never correct to say that sounds of their screams. In Sebald monologues. This is not your best this or that person is a happy one." the emotion is buried under the ve- friend's narcissism: boring and self- Facile reasoning aside, his characters neer of manner and etiquette, and its centered, repetitive, ignorant of its au- might be regarded as arguments, con- repression and concealment create dience. Yet whenever Strauch worries structed to stifle any possibility of an exquisite pressure. We tiptoe his wound for too long, the relentless- hope or joy, the opposite of what any- around his characters and their elab- ness of the wrath quickly becomes one-anyone, that is, with an interest orate denial, which, by its very ba- numbing and theatrical. It strangely in self-preservation-should want nality, suggests to us extraordinary loses its conviction. from a book. They petition, with a levels of pain that cannot be etched barrister's authority, a bleak space, in- in language. They are so obliterated rnhard would develop a keen terrogating the purpose of life and as to be beyond direct communica- instinct for techniques that al- regularly finding it hollow and terri- tion. Instead, they can talk about the Bowed him to complicate what ble. "Who had the idea of letting flora and fauna in wistful ways, they is sometimes the very basic message people walk around on the planet," can reminisce dully, and we are left of his books (i.e., it hurts to be alive, asks the narrator, "or something to infer the depth of their grief. Se- and we might consider killing our- called a planet, only to put them in a bald promoted his credo of subtlety selves). Frequently, he would pair his grave, their grave, afterwardsr' and indirection when he declared characters with mute sidekicks, like Who indeed? Yet the technique that atrocity could not be rendered the narrator in Frost, who absorb and precisely describes the kind of jeop- directly in literature, a rule that filter the rage into readable form. ardy in which Bernhard routinely would seem to stuff rags into the This is Bernhard's version of literary places his characters, choosing to mouths of Bernhard's characters, suspense: dangling his characters over notice them just when their suffering who are so far from standing on cere- sharp rocks, wringing from them their is at its most intense. This procedure mony that they may as well be crawl- tortured confessions, which are then allows readers the unusual experi- ing on their bellies through the dirt. corseted into elegant prose by able ence of witnessing people who oper- What does bind Bernhard and Se- chaperones. Frost is but a tentative ate under virtually no illusions, in bald, beyond their instinct toward the step toward the mediation and rage- the most extreme emotional circum- inner darkness, is an interest in narra- processing that Bernhard would con- stances, at war with fears that none tive techniques that moderate, and tinue to hone in his later work. In of us can rightly deny. These are offset, the pain and anguish of their books such as Extinction and Yes, characters without the routine pro- characters. Each frequently presents Bernhard's ranting narrators move tective carapace of denial and eva- narrators whose chief function is to away from their private testimony sion, and their raw assault on mortal listen in on characters in pain, har- and manage also to shoulder a story- problems can make them seem both vesting their suffering. Sebald's quiet heroic and doomed. As psychologi- narrators work like mollusks on the Continued on page 94

92 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2006 REVIEWS CLASSIFIED Continued from page 92

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