Thomas Bernhard’s Afterlives ed. by Stephen Dowden, Gregor Thuswaldner and Olaf Berwald (review)

Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) is one of the most famous writers to come out of Austria in the modern period—no small feat for a tiny country with more than its fair share of famous writers. But Bernhard, as all those who have read his novels know, was unique, deeply Austrian in his ennui (or, rather, malaise—called in this volume, after Jean Améry, morbus austriacus), yet cosmopolitan in his expectations. There are provincial writers, and then there are cosmopolitan writers whose setting is provincial. Bernhard—for whom Austria is small, pathetic, and (more or less) altogether malevolent, yet also the horizon of the universe—is distinctly the latter. There are no epic narratives of imperial or personal decline in his works, such as we find in the generation of Roth, Schnitzler, and Musil. Instead, we get a granular, deeply personal sort of specificity, like the camera angle in László Nemes’s Son of Saul, where, though in the midst of a world-historical event (in the case of the film, the gas chambers as Auschwitz), the viewer is forced into a perpetually claustrophobic condition, the broader horror of the situation known yet nearly unseen, and therefore not quite really there, the camera making it impossible to step back and see the world as it is in all its grotesque grandeur. Likewise, as Stephen Dowden writes, “It is as if Bernhard were the survivor of some nameless catastrophe that has left him in a landscape littered with frozen corpses, which he sees, though no one else does” (17).

In their new volume, Thomas Bernhard’s Afterlives, editors Stephen Dowden, Gregor Thuswaldner, and Olaf Berwald have assembled a masterful set of essays on Bernhard’s oeuvre, focusing especially on the unique influence his novels have had on writers inside and outside of Austria as well as on his work’s shaping of post-Holocaust literature—the writing about that which cannot be written. Bernhard’s effects on important contemporary German (Sebald), Hungarian (Kertész), French (Guibert, Salem, Lê, Huot), Spanish (Azúa, Marías), British (Dyer, Josipovici), Italian (Calvino, Ferrante, Magris), and American (Gaddis, Sontag, Roth) authors all merit substantive discussions or complete chapters, with certain major (World War II; the Holocaust) and minor (the Catholic Church; post-imperial provincialism) themes woven in and out of each contribution. Taken together, the eleven chapters of this book represent some of the best—and only—scholarship in English to date on Bernhard’s remarkable impact on the world of postwar European-American letters. (It is unfortunate, though due no doubt to linguistic boundaries rather than editorial oversight, that writers in Eastern Europe are not more thoroughly discussed.)

As a précis to the volume as whole, Dowden’s introduction, “The Master of Understatement, or Remembering Schermaier” (a reference to a minor character in Bernhard’s Extinction, discussed by Juliane Werner in the volume’s final chapter), is one of the most graceful introductory essays in a volume of this kind I have read in a long while. It succeeds at being substantive while also fulfilling the role of summarizing each contribution. Those new to Bernhard should read this first. Bernhard’s prose, Dowden writes, “has something monstrous and tyrannical about it. It has absorbed into itself the epoch’s negativity and barbarism. The spirit of destruction and ruin has seeped into its very syntax and its narrative form” (13). Yet as if in response to the unending and unacknowledged brutality of the world, Bernhard makes space for great empathy, or if not empathy, then humility in the face of those who have born a greater share of the era’s cruelties than he has: “[to] those who have been oppressed, silenced, and marginalized [ . . . ] Bernhard does not arrogate to himself the right to speak for them. His task is to allow us to catch a glimpse of them in their silence...