Yesterday’s note on finishing Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser was unserious; a gesture rather than a reflection. I hesitated before deleting it, unsure if the embarrassment was just part of the rhythm of trying to think aloud, or something else. It’s difficult to write about reading without slipping into the gestures of review, which feel increasingly pointless. But the act of writing (even in the private folds of a notebook) seems to alter the reading, to require something more exacting. The slight persistence of interest in this space gives me reason, still, to try and make that writing public.
The 1992 Quartet edition includes a short afterword by Mark Anderson, better placed at the end than an introduction, which I rarely read until later, if at all. Anderson writes that after completing his autobiographical volumes, Bernhard began to cast aspects of himself onto figures like Wittgenstein, Mendelssohn, and in The Loser, Glenn Gould. These later books, he suggests, become a kind of “imaginary autobiography” (a self rendered through artistic and philosophical doubles).
That tension (between the autobiographical and the fictive) gives the book much of its restlessness. The narrator is both present and displaced, serious and ridiculous. Irony blunts the tirade. There is little of Gould’s actual life in the book, enough to serve as a surface. Perhaps all lives are more legible in contrast.
Anderson also notes that both Gould and Bernhard disliked forms built around climax and resolution. It may be part of what draws me to The Loser, that resistance. The structure feels fugal, yes, though one reader makes a strong case against the metaphor. Still, Gould’s Art of the Fugue recordings remain central to the way I listen. The way I read, too.
I appreciate this post on The Loser. I have a love/hate relationship with Bernhard. I read The Woodcutters years ago, and I liked it but wasn’t bowled over by it. I started reading Extinction, but I have sort of stalled out. I can only read him for short periods before his writing becomes too much for me. However, I do find much of what he says to be so profound, and I am underlining so much of what he says. (He has a whole diatribe on the fact that photographs can be meaningless because they portray only the surface of life–or something to that effect–and I find that so prescient of our current shallow instagram culture.) And his take on the post war era is so insightful (along with Peter Handke, whose work I just discovered). I find myself interested not so much in writing from the period of the war (e.g., Primo Levi) but writing that deals with the aftereffects of the war. That’s why Bernhard and Handke are interesting to me. (Jenny Erpenbeck is another writer I would place in this category.) As an American, I studied WW I and WW II in College, but I think writers like Bernhard, Handke, and Erpenbeck offer some interesting commentaries (beyond just being great writers) on how Europe changed as a result of the war. And sometimes, I want to read books like these rather than books that examine relationships if that makes any sense.
You mention three writers whose writing I admire greatly. Bernhard may not be a writer for immersion, but I do wish to read everything he wrote, given time. It was Old Masters followed by Wittgenstein’s Nephew that was my entry-point..
I highly recommend his autobiography if you haven’t already read it. I read it after reading only a couple of his novels and found the background it provides to be invaluable during my subsequent reading of his remaining novels. Normally I wouldn’t do that with a writer, but with Bernhard it seemed to make sense.
Thanks, that’s a good idea. I started it once and got distracted.