Thomas Bernhard: Extinction

George Steiner in his introduction to Thomas Bernhard's Correction complains that in his later writings Bernhard succumbed to "a monotone of hate (hate for Austria, for modern man, for the soiled materiality of being)." I think it is a very accurate description for Extinction (and indeed most of his other work too) which was the last novel he published before he died in 1989. A monotone of hate is a good phrase and even though Steiner uses it (slightly) disapprovingly I don't understand why it must be so. A novel by its very nature need not always be polyphonic. Also negation in itself doesn't mean nihilism. Hate and negation are ways of affirmation too. Specially after all the horrors of the twentieth century, what we need is negation, a relentless negation, unmitigated by any sentimentality or respect for conventions. This is reason why the affirmation of values as practiced by the conventional novel often feels completely anachronistic and sentimental, even when the writing itself is accomplished. (This is even more so after you have just finished a Thomas Bernhard novel.) I don't think there is a greater exponent of this type of literature, a literature of negation, than Thomas Bernhard along with perhaps Samuel Beckett (though I have so far been unable to really get into his novels).

Neither the content nor the style of Extinction will be unfamiliar to the reader of other Bernhard novels. It is also written in the form of a reported monologue. In this case the narrator is a professor of German named Murau who lives in Rome in a self-imposed exile from Austria. The whole novel of around 350 pages is basically just two unbroken and unparagraphed monologues. All told by Murau to his student Gambetti. So every utterance is followed by "I told Gambetti". Sometimes he just thinks so in that case it is "I thought" or "I told myself." Only in the first and the last sentence of the book we realize that Murau's monologue itself is being reported by a third person. (That's also where we learn his name.) There is also a small twist that we come to know only in the end. Murau reveals that he is suffering from some fatal heart ailment and only in the last sentence the third person narrator who is reporting Murau's monologue informs that he died on such and such date. In this sense the whole monologue itself feels like a negation of the ultimate negation (death). (Negation of the negation, I am told, is a Hegelian phrase by the way.) There is also another element of self-reflexivity in the narration. At couple of places Murau says that he wants to write a book which will "extinguish" everything that he writes about and will name it "Extinction." In that sense the book is about his own extinction.

So what is his monologue all about? Difficult to summarise here. It all starts with the telegram he receives informing him of the death in car accident of his parents and elder brother. But with Bernhard and his unrelenting negation, this is no occasion of sentimentality and sadness. Murau uses it as a pretext for launching his diatribe against his family, the life in the country estate, which to him meant slow spiritual death, the philstinism, smugness, shallowness and hypocrisy that forced him to flee that place which he says saved his life. His family of course is treated as a typical Austrian species so his invective is directed against the whole of Austria too at the same time. His two remaining sisters Caecilia and Amalia get a good dose of invective too. There are a few figures he admires however. His uncle Georg who, like him, fled from the country estate. Then there is a poet friend named Maria (based on Ingeborg Bachmann) who he says is the greatest poet of Austria and who like him lives in self-imposed exile in Rome. There is a roman-catholic bishop who is having an affair with his mother, or so he thinks. Murau is divided about him. He grudgingly admires him at a few places but otherwise mocks him too. In general he uses "catholic" as a term of abuse. For example "Austria is a catholic country" means it is quite bad. He often uses it in conjunction with "national socialist."

The book is of course full of hilarious rants. You won't know when he has left one topic and moved to another, everything told in as exaggerated a manner as possible ("Goethe is the foremost intellectual quack of Germany," he says at one place). He himself comments on his own style:

"I've always found gratification in my fanatical faith in exaggeration, I told Gambetti. On occasion I transform this fanatical faith in exaggeration into an art, when it offers the only way out of my mental misery, my spiritual malaise. I've cultivated the art of exaggeration to such a pitch that I can call myself the greatest exponent of the art that I know of. I know of none greater. No one has carried the art of exaggeration to such extremes, I told Gambetti, and if I were suddenly asked to say what I really was, secretly, I'd have to say that I was the greatest artist I knew in the field of exaggeration."

Of course one can't say if he is exaggerating here too!

In short it is an absolutely fantastic book. If you are not familiar this is probably the best book to start reading him. If you are already familiar with his work, you will no doubt agree about the addictiveness of his style. I have so far read The Loser, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Old Masters, Frost and half of Correction. This is by far my favourite of all. The Loser is very bleak and Old Masters is the funniest, this book has both in a good balance. I will probably copy a few excerpts from the book sometime later. For now a sample excerpt -- the gaping void. (Again it is the negation of the idea of retrievability of past common in so much of nostalgic and sentimental literature.)