Die Geburt der Finsternis: Thomas Bernhards Roman Frost: Entstehung-Wirkung—Interpretation by Matthias Knopik (review)

In 2014, the Thomas Bernhard Archive in Gmunden, housed in a villa a few paces from the shore of the Traunsee, was abruptly closed after thirteen years of operation, following an undisclosed change in the terms of support by the State of Upper Austria. The archive had made possible, among other things, the publication of the twenty-two-volume edition of Bernhard's complete works (completed in 2015) as well as a short selection of Bernhard's unpublished prose from the early 1960s, when he was working on the novel Frost (the Suhrkamp volume Argumente eines Winterspaziergängers from 2013). Sadly, the scholarly potential of the archive—which is still set to open in Vienna in a new form—had only begun to be explored at the time of its closure. Only a handful of scholarly publications, such as Markus Janner's 2003 book Der Tod im Text, have engaged with the vast collection of chaotic drafts that Bernhard produced prior to his literary breakthrough Frost, including the project known as Schwarzach Sankt Veit/Der Wald auf der Straße, which was only accessible in the archive.

Matthias Knopik's ambitious new monograph Die Geburt der Finsternis is, then, among the last studies of Bernhard that could avail itself of the Gmunden archive. It is undoubtedly the most meticulous analysis of a particular part of its holdings, namely the folios containing Bernhard's drafts for Frost (1963). Knopik's book covers similar territory to that of Claude Haas's 2007 Kristevean study of Frost, Arbeit am Abscheu (a work he unfortunately does not cite), in its microtextual study of the dynamics of control and influence in the relationships between the novel's two main characters. Like Haas, Knopik is interested in how the apparently dominant speaker (the painter Strauch) controls or is controlled by the unnamed student who narrates and transcribes Strauch's monologues. Yet instead of understanding this relationship through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, Knopik takes a more stringently philological, textimmanent approach to the relationship between the quoter and the quoted, delving into the archival drafts of Frost to learn more about how Bernhard originally constructed this relationship on the page before it was cleaned up by the editor. Out of a comparative work with the published and unpublished versions of Frost, Knopik develops a compelling thesis: that Frost enacts, both on the level of story but also on the level of text, a narrative and poetological process of Verfinsterung. The specific associations of Finsternis are central to Knopik's argument, as the word refers not only to an absence of light but to something or someone that accompanies the "darkening" and so implies a subject for whom things are darkened; Finsternis is not only a visual phenomenon but also a psychic state. Bernhard enacts both in Frost's stringent negation of all clarity and orientation. To be sure, the idea that Frost is a novel that generates darkness is by no means new (see for instance Fellinger and Huber's afterword to Argumente eines Winterspaziergängers from 2013). Yet Knopik manages to show that Bernhard's drafts are oriented toward maximizing an effect of disorientation, both in the author's many deletions and in their profound ambiguities in marking direct speech (that is, who is speaking and quoting, and when).

In delineating this textual process of Verfinsterung, Knopik rereads a range of aspects of Frost in a new (lack of) light, from the relationships between student, painter, and the latter's brother, to the negative theological implications of the novel. Knopik is diligent in contrasting his readings to existing scholarship on Bernhard and deftly addresses the intertexts of Frost including Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Brueghel. However, in focusing its thesis on the veritable Tower of Babel that is Frost (Brueghel's painting is featured on the book's cover), Knopik misses the opportunity to put the Frost model of Finsternis in dialogue...