Harper's Philosopher E

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.

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