How We Learn Where We Live: Thomas Bernhard, Architecture, and Bildung by Fatima Naqvi (review)

From the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to Ambras Castle in Innsbruck, to the implausible sketches of Austria's visionary architects, to the dungeons and towers of Thomas Bernhard's texts, Fatima Naqvi's How We Learn Where We Live is about spaces and architectural structures—real, invented, fictionalized, and theoretical—and the possibilities for thinking and learning they engendered for Bernhard. An opening epithet from Verstörung (1967) offers the notion of the "Denkgebäude" as a central, recurring concept throughout Naqvi's book, which navigates the intersections of buildings and Bildung, edifices, and edification. Naqvi advances the claim that Bernhard's interest in architectural spaces and their frequent representation and important role in his prose texts are linked to mid-twentieth-century debates about Bildung. For Bernhard and his characters, Naqvi argues, architecture is a vehicle for self-exploration and self-realization. But instead of reducing the complexity of Bernhard's representations to a distinct, systematic set of claims, Naqvi offers the reader a hazy sense of the Bernhardian concept of edification, which, difficult as it is to pin down, is a hallmark of the writer's stylistic effects.

Naqvi focuses on the way that the structures in/of Bernhard's texts are intertwined in the models and antimodels of education, tutelage, and development within which many of Bernhard's characters, both pupils and pedagogues, are enmeshed. The introduction sets the stage for Bernhard's project by laying out debates and artistic interventions of the 1960s around the relationship between Bildung, Erziehung, and authoritarianism in connection to rural and urban planning in postfascist Austria. Entitled "The Floor Plan," the introduction opens with an analysis of Friedrich Achleitner's typographical experimentation with the concept of the Grundriss in quadratroman (1973), yet paradoxically withholds a conventional Grundriss of its own structure, e.g., a chapter-by-chapter summary. Naqvi focuses on the imbrication of humans with the built environment in "Ebene," Bernhard's epilogue to architect Walter Pichler's collection 111 Zeichnungen (1973), and suggests that the often nonsensical geometries of Bernhard's texts are informed by Austrian "visionary architecture." She focuses on Amras (1964), putting the claustrophobic isolation and immobility of the university into dialogue with a conceptual "mittleren Boden" where structuring binaries are subverted and learning is envisioned as "the movement into and through hollow, porous, intermediary space" (94). Naqvi then transports us from Ambras Castle to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Reger's method of teaching and learning in Alte Meister (1985), oscillating between the "quick read" and concentrated study, between dilettantism and taste, is concretized in the space of the museum, its seemingly constricting walls perforated by multiple entryways into galleries that allow numerous standpoints for observation.

A book about structures both architectural and cognitive, Naqvi's study has a noteworthy structure of its own. Four brief "Way Stations" between chapters function like interludes—or perhaps mezzanines—and treat a variety of topics: Bernhard's "Zwei junge Leute" in Ereignisse, the entanglement of architecture and textuality, the Wunderkammer of Ambras Castle, and Nicolas Mahler's graphic novel adaptation of Alte Meister (2011). The Way Stations project a conception of reading as a journey along a path, evoking the notion of the Bildungsweg conceived by Joachim Heydorn (13) and literalized in Verstörung (22). This path culminates in the conclusion, a chapter-length analysis of yet another text, Korrektur (1975); here, Naqvi's reading is informed by the architecture of the Wittgenstein House in Vienna and the debate around its proposed demolition. The typology of spaces and structures (windowless and hermetically sealed; open, perforated, and porous) that emerges throughout Bernhard's work is encapsulated in the range of architectural spaces represented in Korrektur: the childhood home of Roithamer in Altensam, the cone he conceives and builds in the Kobernaußer forest, and the "Dachkammer"-cum-Denkkammer in which the unnamed narrator attempts to order Roithamer's towering...