Tuesday, April 24, 2007
On the Mountain
The novel begins with the word ‘Fatherland’ – a word that resonates in all kinds of ways, with a particular historical weight for an author writing in the German language. Here its primary reference seems to be to a place: Austria.
And then a comma. This is a novel of commas. The entire novel consists of a single sentence. Commas break up the flow of the narrative. A comma divides. Commas allow a quick pause for breath, a moment to appreciate the difference between scraps of language. But a comma simultaneously connects: it insists on the maintenance of a flow of meaning. It denies a conclusion.
A comma is a language device for making a collage. And this is a collage novel. It slams dissimilar things together. The repetitious words of a lover and waking up in a bathtub. Filthy anthems beneath a filthy sky. Tassels, edgings, manure, scum.
A fiction of friction: the grinding together of a consciousness and everything that impinges upon it.
The narrative has a vexed relationship with commas. It cannot do without them but it is not happy with them:
everything is a lie, every comma is a lie, all of it nothing but an appalling babble, trivial, degrading, humiliating,
yet I cling to these few thoughts, and every letter matters, it comes down to every last letter, and to recognizing the stupidity of it all,
a storm comes and drives me into a building,
Language like a river, flowing, unstoppable. A babble alert to its own condition (in a way that soporific comfort fiction never knows that it is drugged and easy-dreaming). Every letter matters. A storm of consciousness, of language. It drives the narrator into society – into an Austrian condition – from which he (the gender is not in doubt) recoils.
The second word of the novel is ‘nonsense’. Italicised. Emphatic. What is it that is nonsensical? Clearly the word and the concept ‘Fatherland’ and all it denotes. This is a novel that mocks the state, its forms, its functions and functionaries. The final paragraph of the book begins ‘senseless seasons, formalities, slanders’, referring, I think, to the Austrian judicial system. We learn that the narrator is employed as a courtroom reporter, hence his disgust with ‘these infernal piles of documents against everything’. But the narrative also identifies itself as nonsense. It babbles. It refuses to participate in common sense, in good sense. It is disgusted with everything, including itself.
The novel is subtitled ‘Rescue attempt, nonsense’ which replicates (precedes) that opening strategy. What is it that someone is attempting to rescue? The Fatherland, from its own absurdities? The narrator, whose condition seems perilous? The genre of the novel? Whatever it may be, that object and that effort is immediately cancelled out, identified as nonsense.
Back to that opening page.
After nonsense a comma. After the comma: a void. A break. The line snaps, as if it was the beginning of a poem. The second line begins: ‘traditions keep using the same words’.
And this is a novel which detests traditions and their stale, second-hand language. The traditions of the state; the traditions of bourgeois society. But also, by implication, the conventions and language of what we might call, perhaps, the traditional novel.
On the Mountain denies the comforts of the well-rounded novel. Geography and setting are identified in the most perfunctory of ways: Paris-Lodron Street, the mountains, Vienna, Salzburg, the courthouse, the Gasthaus, the asylum, the market place.
The characters, too, are sketchy. The teacher. The teacher’s wife. The innkeeper. The carnival owner. The Fräulein. Not forgetting the dog. The narrator’s smelly mongrel dog is as important as any of the human characters in the book. It is an outcast, in this sense resembling the narrator.
There are stories which enlarge upon the presence of the various characters in the narrative but these stories too are sketchy, incomplete, inconclusive. There are gaps. And this is the other major formal device of the novel: spaces between the fractured, choppy paragraphs. Voids.
A kind of vertigo ensues. When the narrative rages against ‘a gigantic wave of price increases, a colossal wave of price increases’ is this the narrator’s anger or is he mocking the peevish complaints of the bourgeoisie? I don’t find it at all easy to decide.
The novel ends as abruptly as it started with a throwaway remark about the narrator’s dog.
Written almost fifty years ago, this novel is as fresh as if it was completed yesterday. It has a terrific narrative energy and force. And it has nothing at all in common with the artful constructions of contemporary literary fiction.
Thomas Bernhard (Translated by Russell Stockman), On the Mountain (1991)
