“Ist es eine Komödie? Ist es eine Tragödie?” Ein Symposium zum Werk von Thomas Bernhard ed. by Attila Bombitz and Martin Huber (review)

The essays collected in this volume were originally presented at a symposium in Szeged, Hungary, on the twentieth anniversary of Thomas Bernhard’s death in 1989. Speakers and other contributors to the collection include leading voices in Bernhard criticism from Austria as well as a number of younger scholars from Eastern Europe. Several of the latter group had earlier honed their critical approaches to Bernhard with Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, to whose memory the symposium is dedicated.

What is perhaps the most outstanding characteristic of the volume as a whole is the stimulating variety of approaches taken by the fifteen contributors. Quite fittingly, the veterans and leading voices of Bernhard criticism deal with the broadest themes: these range from attempts to formulate the distinctive Austrian quality of Bernhard’s entire oeuvre (Hans Höller) to an essay on his novels by Martin Huber and Schmidt-Dengler, a reworked version of parts of their epilogue to Suhrkamp’s quarto edition Thomas Bernhard: Die Romane (2008).

Others focus on a particular aspect of his prose works in general—for instance, the “positiv konnotierte Bilder” (Dana Pfeiferová)—while several formulate close readings of individual works. The persuasive power of these readings depends largely on the individual scholar’s perspective, especially on his or her ability to communicate sometimes abstruse theoretical underpinnings and his or her dialogue with previous scholarship. This is not always entirely successful.

Gehen is the focus of two of the essays (Pecka and Mehtelli). Attila Bombitz, coeditor of the collection, begins his essay about reading strategies for Das Kalkwerk: “Es ist unmöglich, Bernhard zu entkommen” (59). Clearly captivated by his subject, Bombitz creates an immediate link to Bernhard readers, implying both the difficulties and the irresistibility of his prose. Auslöschung is central to one contribution (Görffy), but as Bernhard’s final novel and befitting its radical gesture of atonement for the Austrian past, it is prominent in several other essays. Three of the essays deal with Bernhard the dramatist as well: Eleonora Ringler-Pascu examines his mini-dramas (Dramolette) as a confusing mix of reality and fiction; Tymofiy Havryliv offers a convincing reading of Elisabeth II in his provocatively titled essay “Die Anwesenheit der abwesenden Figur.”

Manfred Mittermayer—a familiar name in Bernhard criticism—contributed the third essay on his plays. In sketching Bernhard’s “wechselvolle Beziehung” to the “Salzburger Festspiele,” Mittermayer traces the writer’s volatile relationship to Salzburg and particularly the Festspiele over the years. During Bernhard’s lifetime, five of his plays opened at the festival, a near-record for productions by contemporary playwrights staged at the festival, surpassed only by Hugo von Hofsmannthal. For the reader of this Austrian master of paradox, it should no longer come as a surprise that the young journalist Bernhard could write affectionately about Salzburg and the Festspiele in the Demokratisches Volksblatt in the 1950s while vehemently attacking them years later in his autobiography. Mittermayer narrates a fascinating subchapter of twentieth-century postwar Austrian literary history by recounting the highs and lows, the scandals, the rejections from each side as well as a few tangential but entertainingly scurrilous episodes: for example, the debacle of Bernhard’s audition as a singer with the conductor Josef Krips.

Taking her lead from Adorno’s position on the writer’s dependence on tradition—in contrast to the insistence of the postwar literary avant-garde on their absolute independence—Fatima Naqvi examines Bernhard’s literary dialogue with Robert Musil. She notes the paradox that it was precisely this recourse (“Rückgriff” 162) to the past—not any ties to the avant-garde—that made Bernhard’s prose seem so radically innovative in the 1960s. Naqvi makes her case with what she calls the “Weiterschreibung von Musils Konzept des ‘anderen Zustands’ in Amras” (162). The interplay of...