I recall a great line in a Tom Sharpe novel where the main character reflects "Schopenhauer hit a nadir of gloom that made King Lear sound like a hysterical optimist under the influence of laughing gas." After reading Gargoyles, let me modify this to: "Thomas Bernhard hit a nadir of gloom that made Schopenhauer sound like a hysterical optimist under the influence of laughing gas."
This is my first Thomas Bernhard. Since there are a number of excellent reviews of Gargoyles posted by seasoned Bernhard fans offering insights into the author's dark vision and themes of sickness, decay and madness and how this early novel compares to his others, in the spirit of freshness, I will shift my focus to specific passages and scenes within the novel's two sections: Part One: our twenty-one-year old narrator, a university engineering student, accompanies his doctor father as he makes his rounds in rustic German villages to attend the sick; Part Two: an extended monologue by a quasi-insane aristocrat inside his castle. I've also included details from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch to serve as visual counterpoint.
MAKING THE ROUNDS
Here's the novel's short opening paragraph that sets the tone: "On the twenty-sixth my father drove off to Salla at two o'clock in the morning to see to a schoolteacher whom he found dying and left dead. From there he set out toward Hüllberg to treat a child who had fallen into a hog tub full of boiling water that spring. Discharged from the hospital weeks ago, it was now back with its parents."
The narrator's (and indirectly Thomas Bernhard's) statement that dying, death, danger, accidents, sickness and suffering are undeniable realities plaguing human existence. His doctor father speaks quietly of the child as a beloved person but acknowledges the boy will not survive the winter.
I must say a young boy falling into a hog tub filled with boiling water makes for one powerful image. We can imagine a healthy youth, son of a miner and servant, running and playing joyfully in the morning and then, following the accident in the hog tub, all joy instantly vanishes, transformed into excruciating unending pain, weakness and eventual early death.
Next stop is at an inn where the keeper relates the drama: following hours of drunkenness, one of the miners, Grössl, struck his wife on the head. The other miners carried her up the stairs to her bedroom, bumping her head repeatedly against the banister. The doctor arranges for the innkeeper's wife to be taken to the hospital but detects the blow to the head will prove fatal.
Grössl was the kind of man who wouldn't leave a tavern without causing some sort of row or brouhaha. He must be hiding, so says a constable, but he can't hide for long. If this was a Georges Simenon novel, the first chapter would feature Grössl's act of violence and we would follow Grössl's plight to the last page where he would be either caught or kill himself. But since we are reading Thomas Burdhard, the doctor remarks to his son that it is a shame people go at one another without even knowing why and then the story quickly moves on to other horrors.
Other horrors and chillers as when chronically ill Frau Ebenhöh recounts her brother killing his fiancé and spending years in the Stein Penitentiary before returning to her home only to lock himself in the attic and three days later be found hanging from the window frame. Herself a refined, cultured widow of a schoolteacher, Frau Ebenhöh begins speaking bitterly of her son, her only child, who is a coarse, feeble-minded beast married to a woman who hates her; ah, this unwashed wife of his does nothing more than sit around the kitchen in a greasy housecoat and read novels!
Traveling from one home to the next, the doctor tells his son he hardly ever encounters a man who isn't repulsive; his district is a world of nothing but criminals; a world where violence, brutality and physical abuse are all the norm.
More horrors and abominations await the father and son in the gorge, among them a Turk made insane by the crying of birds in cages, until finally they come to the home of young Krainer, a man who once was an accomplished musician, playing Mozart symphonies by heart on the piano when he was eight and performing Béla Bartók on the cello as a teen and into his adult years. Now, crippled and half-insane, here is what our university student sees: "Young Krainer had much too narrow a cranium. His eyes seemed to be staring out of his head. When his sister drew the blanket away from his body, I saw that he had one long and one short leg."
The section ends thusly: "A person like young Krainer can live on to be terribly old," my father said. He was taking me with him for the sake of my studies, my father said. He repeated that again and again: "For the sake of your studies." We can only wonder if Thomas Burnhard wrote Gargoyles for the sake of his reader's studies.
THE PRINCE
80 pages into the 200-page novel, the doctor and son arrive at Hochgobernitz, the castle of Prince Saurau who, at the moment, is talking to himself while taking a stroll on the inner castle wall.
When the Prince sees the doctor and his son he barely acknowledges their presence as he continues his unending bout of logorrhea, jabbering about interviewing three men earlier that day who answered his advertisement in the paper for the position of his steward. In speaking with one of the men, it occurs to Saurau that he should definitely not mention the word mole, but, sure enough, the Prince finds himself saying: "That's a terrible place for moles, the Puschach area.
The more we listen to the Prince's monologue, the more we realize he has a real thing about certain words - as he tells doctor and son, always avoiding such words as sausage, Auschwitz, S.S., Crimean wine, Realpolitik. This to say, Prince Saurau is completely nuts.
The monologue continues, almost inflicting the novel with doses of paranoia and mania mixed in with the supernatural and Gothic.
The Prince on his own mental state: "Here in my head," Saurau had said, "there is actually inconceivable devastation."
The Prince on the state of humanity: "The truth is that I more and more believe I am everything, because in reality I am no longer anything, and in consequence I can only feel everything human, everything humanly possible as shameful."
'The Prince on the subject that obsessed author Thomas Bernhard: "Now, in the middle of the century, we have not been able to elaborate any other theme but that of suicide. Everything is suicide. Whatever we live, whatever we read, whatever we think - all manuals for suicide."
The Prince on his wife: "When she speaks I have the impression that the language she speaks has changed in the interval since her death, although she says the same things as she did in her lifetime. Her language, i think, is still aging while she herself is dead. Dead? She certainly is not one of those people who are completely dead when they are dead; she has died, but is not dead."
One reviewer referred to Gargoyles as Thomas Bernhard's philosophical novel of abject madness. I quite agree. If new readers would like to become acquainted with this Austrian playwright and novelist, Gargoyles is an excellent place to start.
Austrian playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard, 1931-1989
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