Everybody Wants to be Thomas Bernhard

In a world where a work of literary fiction hasn’t topped the New York Times’s Bestseller list in over 20 years, the novel, the poem, and the critical essay have become almost inherently disconnected from the urgency and immediacy of social realities. Literary forms are seen as irrelevant and arcane, antiquated vessels unsuited to the job of carrying the spirit of the times, having surrendered the duty to short-form content and algorithmic feeds. To choose to write fiction in such an environment requires a nearly perverse determination since the social and cultural life of literature lacks the vivacity and luster of a true, active literary tradition for new novelists to situate themselves within. This might help explain a puzzling trend in the literature of the past few years, in which a slew of young writers have almost systematically rewritten the novels of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard — the three most notable cases are Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh Green Life, Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, and Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love, the lattermost being the only novel to explicitly bill itself as a Bernhard retelling, though the others do everything but. 

Before the rise of scrolling, art and literature had a defined and functional place in the world as the basic forms of entertainment. The members of Parisian societeé in the early-twentieth century read Balzac and listened to Wagner not only because they enjoyed these artists, but also because of their social utility, their works having become representative tokens of a shared artistic canon that allowed men to move freely within the upper echelons of European aristocracy; in a different social context, mid-twentieth-century hippies read Allen Ginsberg and listened to Jefferson Airplane for the same reason. It wasn’t even so long ago that literature held such mass popularity that critics like Normal Mailer or Jean-Paul Sartre were bona fide celebrities. In literate society, engagement with novels, poetry and criticism has always helped people form groups and differentiate themselves along lines of class and politics. With the newfound dominance of the internet, this is no longer the case: our extreme interconnectedness seems to preclude the need for rich subcultures grounded in the shared appreciation of art and writing— these have been replaced almost universally by shareable soundbites that require no labor other than attention. As trends in mass culture become more reducible to symbols and shibboleths (“aesthetics,” as they call them, which could be anything from “cottage-core” to “skinhead”), being a participant is less reliant than ever on building an understanding of any artistic tradition. Now, we concern ourselves with the re-generation and re-production of signifiers until they no longer signify anything at all, and then, bored without meaning, we move quickly onto whatever’s next. It would seem that contemporary culture moves too fast for literature to keep pace. 

The question that remains for would-be writers is how (why?) does one write a novel for the age of algorithm-culture? If the novel purports to structurally reflect the social or cultural logic of the time in which it’s written, then where, in a world abandoning longform narratives in favor of the anti-logical social media feed, can its raw, narratological building-blocks be found? Increasingly, the answer seems to be within the literature of the past. Literary adaptations are nothing new, and there is nothing inherently objectionable about revisiting an historical work of fiction in a modern context — if you do it thoughtfully enough, you might write Ulysses. Newer is the level to which the act of remaking has become the form of choice for large swaths of the contemporary literary landscape, spanning genre, language, and quality. Popular objects of retelling in recent years have included Mark Twain (James), Georges Perec (Perfection), Charles Dickens (Demon Copperhead), and Jane Austen (any of the dozens of Pride and Prejudice retellings on the romance shelves: A Kiss For Midwinter, Slightly Dangerous, or, of course, Pride and Predators). Stare at this blur of mimicry (“influence”) for long enough, and you’ll see a certain face over and over: Thomas Bernhard, perhaps now the brightest star on the adaptation walk of fame.

Bernhard was a literary giant in his time and counts among his admirers many of the best and most beloved novelists of the last half-century. At a glance, there would seem nothing odd about a resurgence in his popularity come the 2020s: among his American champions number the heady, psychological novelists Ben Lerner, Jonathan Franzen, and Don DeLillo, while across the Atlantic his influence rings loudly in that popular European genre of “depressing long-sentence novels,” one spearheaded by Nobel laureates Jon Fosse and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. This is not even to mention the modern German language literary tradition, much of which exists decidedly in Bernhard’s shadow, with some of its best and most recognizable novelists (Elfriede Jelinek, W.G. Sebald, Christian Kracht) either explicitly or implicitly indebted to him, Bernhardian both in their structure (tendencies toward winding sentences), and outlook (bitterness, despair, and a distinct lack of patriotism). Skeptics might claim that literary borrowings are unoriginal, but complaining that Bernhard’s impact on the contemporary novel amounts to a lack of innovation within our current literature would be akin to saying that all autofictionalists are just copying Proust. 

For the latest generation of Bernhardians, though, something much less subtle is happening; instead of the standard chain that links old and new generations of novelists, we are seeing a pattern of literary borrowing much closer to pastiche than influence. This has come to a head most recently in Happiness and Love, an explicit retelling of Bernhard’s Woodcutters by Zoe Dubno transposed from the original’s Viennese “artistic dinner” to a chichi Bowery loft party but otherwise following a near-identical structure: each narrator hates his pseudo-intellectual host, each narrator nurses simultaneously a fragile relationship with art and death. There’s also alt-lit kingpin Jordan Castro’s 2022 The Novelist, a restless monologue of a writer trying to begin work on what he understands to be a great masterpiece, but who remains too self-absorbed and distracted by the distasteful society surrounding him to commit to the project,choosing instead to write about his writer’s block. It’s Bernhard’s Concrete, through and through. Apparently it’s also Woodcutters:

I felt excited at the prospect of writing a novel like Woodcutters. I would talk shit about Eric and everyone else I felt unarticulated aversion toward, while inveighing against a certain worldview which had been infecting my peers like an intellectual plague. This plague spread on social media and throughout the universities and its symptoms included an inability to think deeply, speak honestly, or interact with anyone or any idea that tried to resist said plague, resulting in what seemed like severe brain damage, among other things. Woodcutters . . . I thought, sipping my coffee. Ah, yes—my Woodcutters.

Castillo’s Fresh Green Life similarly follows the rambling recollections and digressions of a health-obsessed social recluse (recalling Concrete’s Rudolf and his mortal fear of factory fumes) as he contemplates re-entering society to connect once more with an old flame, oscillating between worrying obsessively about his own social missteps to smugly inveighing against the exterior social world in a quintessentially Bernhardian mode — the narrator catalogs, scorns, doubts, and interrupts the flow of his thoughts, as his subject-self and object-self become hopelessly jumbled together. Banally repetitive constructions are strewn throughout: “So it was not entirely far-fetched, I found myself repeating while showering in preparation for the evening, not so entirely far-fetched, for Maria to spend a part of her New Year’s Eve at Professor Aleister’s”.

What ties these writers together other than their choice of subject is the fact that they’re all millennial tastemakers whose sensibilities have swept themselves into the currents of the contemporary online zeitgeist (Castro and Castillo are both prolific Twitter posters; Dubno was a frequent Vogue contributor, where she wrote about phenomena like “mancore” and the “tinned fish trend”). They’re all witty, intelligent critics who have become adept at diagnosing the cultural ills of contemporary society over the course of fairly brief tenures in the public eye, but they also all belong to the demographic perhaps most afflicted by the modern crisis of form: young elites who have been exposed since their teenage years to the full brunt of the internet content deluge, untethered from though perhaps yearning for a self-contained and tradition-rich literary scene in which to make their way. Archetypal novelists of the 2020s, these writers stand at the vanguard of a neo-Bernhardian canon, their writing characterized by a hyperabundance of Bernhard’s stylistic trademarks. Their sentences are often page-long, their paragraph breaks and quotation marks are few and far between, and they indulge in the proclivity to constantly italicize text to indicate that the narrator is really committed to what they’re saying, yes, that it’s something they truly believe unlike all that previous drivel. The popularity of these techniques is of some interest given how apparently removed from the unique flavor of our internet-poisoned society Bernhard was. An Austrian who likely never used the internet (having died two years before the first website was created) with no strong connection to the United States, he seems an odd choice for a literary polestar, yet there’s clearly something about his writing that feels urgently relevant to a new generation of writers who are mostly American, severely online, and very much alive.

Bernhard, who was described by the Times of London upon his death as “one of the greatest writers of the century”, was a bitter man who had little love for the people who surrounded him or for his homeland. Born in 1931, he was raised in Austria under the Nazi Reich. If his memoirs, published in English as Gathering Evidence are to be believed, his childhood unfolded in a Dickensian procession, provided you remove all of Dickens’ whimsy, wit, and optimism. He was taught by abusive schoolmasters — first Nazis, then Catholics, whom Bernhard seemed to despise in equal measure — and by his obsessive grandfather, who once described the act of suicide as “the only really marvellous idea there was”. These early influences, which engendered in the first instance a lifelong hatred of Austria, are visible through every part of his literary style — in his narrators’ indecision between feelings of nihilistic removal and feelings of intense despair; in their morbid knowledge that ending things is always an option. These dark feelings never seemed far from Bernhard’s mind. While he wrote thirteen novels in total, one could also reasonably say that he wrote the same novel time and time again. His protagonists are almost always socially maladjusted middle-aged men on the fringes of wealthy Viennese society, a social sphere which they claim to revile, but seem unable to leave behind nonetheless (Woodcutters’ narrator admonishes himself for having “let [himself] be invited” to the dinner he insists he wants no part of). Usually willing outcasts, most of his protagonists either live, have lived, or wish to live in self-imposed exile from Austria, a country they invariably detest and invariably return to. They possess confused yet intensely passionate relationships with art (usually music, though sometimes literature or painting as well) feeling at once slavishly devoted to beauty and incapable of fully inhabiting this relationship without their self-hatred or self-obsession interceding—the narrator of The Loser is a prodigious pianist but abandons his career when confronted with the staggering talent of his classmate Glenn Gould knowing he will never compare, and Concrete’s Rudolf spends ten years attempting to write a book on the composer Felix Mendelssohn but, blaming the pernicious interruptions of his socialite sister, is unable to get so far as the first sentence; unlike the narrator of Castro’s The Novelist, he doesn’t have a Twitter addiction to blame.

These narrators, not quite the author but rather projections of him from oblique angles, often blend together and move apart again throughout Bernhard’s oeuvre, sometimes feeling like distinct beings but always with fragmented and frequent allusions to the alternate versions of themselves. Rudolf in Concrete, for instance, seems through his recollections to be both the unnamed narrator of Woodcutters and that of Wittgenstein’s Nephew (he explicitly recalls meeting the young Wittgenstein, as well as Woodcutters’ Auersbergers). Around the narrator, a similar recurring ensemble populates Bernhard’s corpus. There’s the figure of the wealthy, pretentious socialite, usually firmly convinced of her own sublime taste in art while hostile and condescending to the narrator’s artistic intentions (the sister in Concrete, the parents in Extinction, the Auersbergers in Woodcutters); there’s the backward-thinking simpleton of the rural hinterland towns that always figure as the novel’s secondary center of geographic gravity (Kilb, Peiskam, Wolfsegg, Gmunden). Perhaps the most notable recurring archetype is the suicidé, who can be anyone from a successful pianist (The Loser) to a poor, young widow (Concrete), but is always a particular obsession of the narrator, someone he relates to more than the odious society creatures around him. These figures usually feel fuzzily defined, and are rarely granted explicit introductions or thorough descriptions, something they share in common with the characters of the neo-Bernhardian novels of today.1 Take Fresh Green Life, in which Maria, the love interest, feels less like a fully-fledged actor and more like a vessel onto which the narrator can project insecurities about his (formerly lacking, now excellent) physique. This typifies the Bernhardian mode of encountering the other, in which actions are almost never presented without comment and only the attitudes and aspects of a character that could possibly affect the narrator receive any scrutiny. 

In Bernhard's spiraling, obsessive screeds, themes and objects — a funeral, a chair, a passing remark, a mathematically perfect cone — are taken up, worked over, digressed upon, chewed up, vomited out just to be picked back up again to the point that their sense is almost destroyed, so familiar that they become alien. This structure is reflected at the higher level, where, through repetition of structure and content, Bernhard’s œuvre becomes a gnarled, hopelessly-entwined knot of thematic continuity, each novel enjoyable and analyzable on its own but ultimately linked in the construction of a greater architecture. Call it the Bernhard Variations, if you will — In the same way that Bach’s Goldberg Variations take an initially simple aria and iterate upon it in sublime, recursive patterns until the original theme reemerges in its unaltered entirety at the end, Bernhard’s variations take questions about the place of art in society, of civility in the wake of monstrosity, of the impossibility of perfection in a cruel world, and stretch them, reduplicating them and smashing them against each other (or twisting them into each other), producing no coherent answers but ultimately revealing far greater and more terrifying emotional truths. 

In this way, while Bernhard’s novels stand up perfectly well on their own, they are only fully understandable as part of a greater whole. His work defied the literary conventions of its time, eschewing the totalizing impulse of world-creation that drove much of the work of forbears and contemporaries alike (I think towards Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and Günter Grass). A single Bernhard novel seems daring and intentional, a challenge to the spirit of the German expressionist literary tradition from which he emerged. Taken as a corpus, however, the Bernhardian mode is so potent, directed and unstoppable as to nearly preempt any scrutiny of his unorthodox writerly method: it is a massive and continually unfurling, perpetually moving beast of spite and despair that rudely insists on its own legitimacy, one that we can’t see through or poke holes in as gimmickry or showmanship. 

The first time you read a Bernhard novel and you see him mention “sitting in the wing chair” or “walking down the Graben” five or ten times per page, it seems like a fun device of form and content, a literary party trick designed to render neuroticism on the page. By the end of the fifth or tenth novel you read, it no longer seems like a trick. His repetition moves from a literary device to an obsessive tic, imparting, as it unfolds, the sense that the narrator (or author) has no hold on it, that its driving force is stronger than any writerly intent The despair and confusion this communicates feel so immediate as to dissuade the reader from abstract consideration or critique of the form in the way one might for a well-formed classical dialogue or picaresque comedy. This is ultimately the source of the power and timelessness of his work, and what makes Bernhard such an appealing object of imitation for contemporary writers. Attempting to slot a contemporary novel into the existing machinery of a huge, powerful, literary structure is perhaps an easy way to bypass the work of justifying and contextualizing it, work that can only have become more difficult in the fast-moving age of the internet. Bernhard’s maniacal style creates an intense immediacy between reader and text insofar as it bypasses the well-ordered narrative constructions (logical plot, multiplicity of perspective, dramatic irony) which now feel like quaint or arcane modes of expression. Contemporary imitators correctly identify this style of immediacy as something that, if integrated into their own work, could help them out of their literary dilemma by bringing a sense of self-justification that’s difficult to find in the classical realist novel — The Novelist is the self-descriptive result of a writer failing to find cultural relevance or immediacy in the traditional form he’s trying to harness, and Bernhardianly searching for something with which to replace it. 

Unfortunately for these writers, it’s a mistake to believe that this secret sauce can simply be strained from Bernhard’s work and poured over their own writing, thereby imparting it with his same awful brilliance. Bernhard’s novels feel timeless. Their anger and self-absorption is so urgent and relatable that any material plot is rendered almost incidental. This is a mirage, however, a complete illusion. Literature is not timeless, but deeply and irreconcilably historical. It can convince us of its abstraction or idealism, but will always be indebted to the material circumstances of its inception. Here are some of the material conditions that defined Bernhard’s work: beginning with Austria, the setting for almost all of his novels, we find a country that looks very different from the U. S. of the 2020s. It’s something of a joke among Austrians that they are stuck in the past, a stodgy, conservative people who experience history with a fifty year lag. There’s a reason that even though most of Bernhard’s novels were written in the 1970s and ‘80s, they feel closer in affect to something from the early twentieth century than to their American contemporaries (the works of Thomas Pynchon, for instance). Stuck between a rapidly globalizing Western Europe and the communist East, Bernhard’s Austria was a lonely frontier community, a bastion of a buttoned-up, conservative Mitteleuropean way of life resistant to the visions of the future that surrounded it. It’s evident from Bernhard’s work that a characteristically pre-war vision of social hierarchy still dominated through the ‘80s in Austria, where inheritors of the titles and monies of the old aristocracy still held immense cultural caché, as is the case with the wealthy, landowning parents in Extinction, and that engagement with the so-called High Arts was non-negotiable for those who would purport to inhabit the upper echelons of society. 

Take the narrator’s sister in Concrete, whom he derides as a middle-brow social climber, but who has strong (if apparently tasteless) opinions about Mendelssohn and Mozart, attends the theater frequently, and makes continued attempts to read Proust in order to legitimate her claims to high social standing. In Woodcutters, the socially graceless Auersbergers whose “artistic dinner” the narrator finds himself trapped at are talented and classically-trained musicians — the husband is referred to constantly as the “successor of [Anton] Webern”. He is scorned by the narrator as artistically unserious, but only insofar as he failed to develop into a truly idiosyncratic musician, corrupted by the attention of the tasteless world of Viennese society to the extent that he must live forever in the shadow of a greater composer. The Viennese bourgeois whom Bernhard rails against may have been reactionary, scornful, repressed, boring, and afraid of change, but the social mechanics of this world at least required engaging with an incredible wealth of great art, immersing them in living artistic tradition. Attending plays at the Burgtheater or Operas at the Wiener Staatsoper were prestige activities, and fertile grounds for gossip and romance. The same can’t be said of the elites of contemporary New York, despite the amount of great art still being made. As the twin pillars of Silicon Valley and the banking-consulting nexus consolidate economic and social power, the path to success in society no longer requires any sort of formal education or taste in the arts, nor even the pretension of such. Living an artistic or literary life has become a choice, and it usually isn’t even a good one, at least as far as money goes. 

In Happiness and Love, which recasts the Auersbergers as Eugene and Nicole, a generationally wealthy and insufferably pretentious couple who enjoy nothing more than to leech off their more creative friends and present their ideas as their own, the potency of the hatred and anger that Bernhard spews at the Auersbergers falls flat. Granted, these people seem like total tools, and Dubno, an impressive prose stylist, does an excellent job of showing them as buffoonishly self-absorbed and socially cancerous. Despite this, one can’t shake the feeling that the Bernhardian rant is somehow inappropriate when directed at them. The world of pretentious wannabe-literati sitting around trying to demonstrate how well-educated and tasteful they are is so far removed from any true power, any of society’s real problems, that Eugene and Nicole seem neutered, impotent, and endearingly pitiable. As annoying as it might be, at least they pretend to care about art and literature in a world where fewer and fewer adults read for pleasure. 

It might be noted once more that most of the people in Bernhard’s world were Nazis (the real kind, not online LARPers). The clearest reckoning with this problem can be found at the end of Extinction, Bernhard’s final novel, when the narrator (Franz) inherits his Nazi parents’ massive estate following their untimely death and, after attending their funeral alongside dozens of their Nazi friends, decides to bequeath his entire inheritance to the Jewish community of Vienna, the ultimate rejection of the evil that has surrounded him for his entire life. Even when it’s less explicit than this, the spirit of this great, ultimate evil still lurks close beneath the surface of the otherwise banal social environments that populate the majority of Bernhard’s novels. It was generally safe to assume that the generationally monied elites of post-war Austria, the Auersbergers included, had more than a few skeletons in their closets. It is perhaps this more than anything else that makes Bernhard’s novels what they are. The proximity of this aberration, this indescribable monstrosity, to the uptight civil society that its perpetrators rushed to resume after 1945 writhes beneath its calm surface, and transforms his characteristic rants from ungrateful whining into the despairing gut-punches of societal indictment that they are. While contemporary American society is certainly embroiled in its fair share of evil, its atrocities don’t haunt the public in the way the totalizing, inescapable national shame that Naziism haunted Austria. 

The effect of this shame is most apparent when compared to something lacking it. Happiness and Love is full of witty, cutting observations about the young creative class (there’s the fashion editor who acts like putting Gramsci’s works on her office bookshelf makes her an emissary from the world of intellectuals among her lowbrow colleagues, the hilarious 30-somethings who keep a Tibetan singing-bowl full of ketamine on their coffee table), but without the deep, underlying sense of shame and dread, the penetrating knowledge that something horrific lurks beneath the civil structures Dubno lampoons, her critique fails to move beyond that of a lighthearted novel of manners. It seeks the potency of Bernhard, but it shows that, without a proper consideration of the full historical context of the original, one cannot simply peel a form or style off of a historical novel and paste it onto a collection of contemporary characters, settings, and dynamics to the same effect. 

In their mimicry, the neo-Bernhardians are either knowingly or subconsciously trying to hitch a ride on Bernhard’s wagon, using the tools he expertly developed to create novels that defy skepticism of the novelistic form in the way his do. There’s an implicit hope here that in their purported immediacy these novels will be protected from the prying eyes of critics, all too adept at picking up on the failure of the novel to truly relate to the contemporary world, but they misidentify the omnipotent narrator of the Bernhard variations, which devours all agency and reality of the external world with its relentless observation of the self, as a tool they can play with, or a role they can insert their own narrators into. Lacking the same generative conditions Bernhard enjoyed, thanks to the new social order of global capital and phone addiction, these attempts at mimicry do the opposite of justification, making us ask instead why on earth a writer should try and squeeze their often notable talents into such an ill-fitting form, instead of embracing the challenge of attempting a truly contemporary novel. In their hatred, immediacy, incompetence, and madness, Bernhard’s narrators give us the sense that whatever they may be, they would absolutely never, ever, do something so banal or stupid as to write a novel. The picture we get of the neo-Bernhardian narrator, on the other hand, is of someone trying really, really, hard to do just that.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Dubno, Castillo, and Castro are all interesting writers writing in an interesting time. And Thomas Bernhard himself wrote novels in a way that feel very online — his narrators are often self-obsessed social recluses who spend all their time fuming with rage toward society, and his success legitimated the idea that a novel could be so self-contained, so singularly fixated as to preclude the need for many of the normal trappings of realist literature like dramatic tension and expository dialogue. Contemporary writers should feel no shame in taking inspiration from his work, it’s simply that leaning on it so heavily doesn’t work —- not in the way they hope, at least. It’s not that it’s immoral, or that there’s no hope for contemporary literature; rather, it’s that directly aping a great writer in hopes of piggybacking on their genius is simply ineffective, a waste of talent. It makes for a bad read. The best contemporary novels will be those unafraid to confront the crisis of form head on, striving to find something new instead of running back to the safe, comforting embrace of the classics, that see the world around them not as set pieces to be rearranged according to someone else’s rules, but that try desperately to find new rules amid the chaos.