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  Like everyone else, my father found an aura of youth in Camus’s prose. I sense it still, though the phrase now reflects more than the age and outlook of the author. When I revisit his work now, it seems to me as if Europe in Camus’s books was still a young place, where anything could happen. It is as if its cultures had not yet fissured; as if contemplating the material world you could almost see its essence. This may reflect the postwar optimism, as a victorious France reasserted its central role in world culture and most particularly in literature. For intellectuals from other parts of the world, postwar France was an impossible ideal, not just for its literature but for its history. Today we can see more clearly that it was France’s cultural preeminence that gave existentialism and the philosophy of the absurd such prestige in the literary culture of the 1950s, not just in Europe but also in America and non-Western countries.

  It was this kind of youthful optimism that prompted Camus to regard the thoughtless murder of an Arab by the French hero of The Stranger as a philosophical rather than a colonial problem. So when a brilliant writer with a degree in philosophy speaks of an angry missionary, or an artist grappling with fame, or a lame man mounting a bicycle, or a man going to the beach with his lover, he can spiral off into a dazzling and suggestive metaphysical rumination. In all these stories, he reconstitutes life’s mundane details like an alchemist, transforming its base metals into a filigree of philosophical prose. Underlying it there is, of course, the long history of the French philosophical novel to which Camus, no less than Diderot, belongs. Camus’ singularity lies in his effortless melding of this tradition—which relies on acerbic wit and a slightly pedantic, somewhat authoritarian voice—with short sentences à la Hemingway and realistic narration. Though this collection belongs to the tradition of the philosophical short story comprising Poe and Borges, the stories owe their color, vitality, and atmosphere to Camus the descriptive novelist.

  The reader is inevitably struck by two things: the distance between Camus and his subject and his soft, almost whispering mode of narration. It is as if he seems unable to decide whether or not to take his readers deeper into the story and ends up leaving us suspended between the author’s philosophical worries and the text itself. This may be a reflection of the draining, damning problems that Camus encountered in the last years of his life. Some find expression in the opening paragraphs of “The Mute,” when Camus alludes, somewhat self-consciously, to the problems of aging. In another story, “The Artist at Work,” we can sense that Camus at the end of his days was living too intensely and that the burden of fame was too great. But the thing that truly damned and destroyed Camus was without a doubt the Algerian War. As an Algerian Frenchman, he was crushed between his love for this Mediterranean world and his devotion to France. Whereas he understood the reasons for the anticolonial anger and the violent rebellion it had unleashed, he could not take a hard stance against the French state as Sartre did, because his French friends were being killed by the bombs of Arabs—or “terrorists,” as the French press called them—fighting for independence. And so he chose to say nothing at all. In a touching and compassionate essay he wrote after his old friend’s death, Sartre explored the troubled depths concealed by Camus’s dignified silence.

  Pressed to take sides, Camus chose instead to explore his psychological hell in “The Guest.” This perfect political story portrays politics not as something we have eagerly chosen for ourselves but as an unhappy accident that we are obliged to accept. One finds it difficult to disagree with the characterization.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Reading Thomas Bernhard in a Time of Unhappiness

  I am hopelessly miserable and reading Thomas Bernhard. Actually, I did not have it in mind to read him. I did not have it in mind to read anyone—I was too unhappy to think so clearly. To open a book, to read a page, to enter someone else’s dreams—these were all excuses for dwelling on my own wretchedness, reminders that everyone else in the world had managed to avoid the well of misery into which I had fallen. Everywhere were people who flattered themselves about their successes and tiny refinements, their interests, their culture, and their families. It seemed that all books had been written in such people’s voices. No matter what they described—a nineteenth-century Parisian ball, an anthropological tour of Jamaica, the impoverished environs of a great city, or the determination of a man who had dedicated his life to the study of art—the books concerned lives whose experience bore no relation to my own, so I wanted to forget them all. Because I could find nothing in these books that remotely resembled my mounting misery, I felt anger both at the books and at myself: at the books because they ignored the pain I was suffering, at myself because I had been so stupid as to throw myself into this senseless pain. I wanted nothing other than to escape my mindless misery. But books had prepared me for life, books were mostly what kept me going, so I kept telling myself that if I wished to pull myself out of my black cloud, I would have to keep reading. Yet whenever I opened a book to hear the voice of an author who accepted the world as it was, or who, even if he wished to change it, still identified with it, I would feel myself alone. Books were remote from my pain. What’s more, it was books that had brought me to the idea that the misery into which I had fallen was unique, that I was an idiotic wretch like no other. This was why I kept telling myself, “Books are not for reading, but for buying and selling.” After the earthquakes, whenever books annoyed me, I found a reason for throwing them out. And so I was bringing my forty-year war with books to an end in a spirit of loathing and disillusionment.

  This was my frame of mind as I leafed through a few pages of Thomas Bernhard. I was not reading them in the hope that they might save me. A magazine was doing a special issue on Bernhard and had asked would I please write something. There was a debt I needed to discharge, and once upon a time I’d liked Bernhard very much.

  So I began to read Bernhard again, and for the first time since the dark cloud had descended, I heard a voice saying that the wretchedness I called my unhappiness was not as great or as bad as I thought. There was no particular sentence or paragraph that made this particular point; they talked about other things—a passion for the piano, solitude, publishers, or Glenn Gould—but I still felt that these were merely pretexts; they were speaking to my misery, and this perception lifted my spirits. The problem was not the misery itself but the way I perceived it. The problem was not that I was unhappy but that I felt so in particular ways. To read Bernhard in this time of unhappiness was like a tonic, though I knew that the pages I read had not been written to serve as such, or even as a consolation for readers grappling with depression.

  How to explain all this? What made reading Bernhard at a time of unhappiness seem like taking an elixir? Perhaps it was the air of renunciation. Maybe I was soothed by a moral vision, wisely suggesting that it is better not to expect too much of life…. But it might have had nothing to do with morality, for a dose of Bernhard makes clear that the only hope lies in remaining oneself, in clinging to one’s habits, to one’s anger. There is in Bernhard’s writing the suggestion that the greatest stupidity is to give up one’s passions and habits in the hope of a better life, or the joy of attacking others’ idiocies and stupidities, or of knowing that life can never be more than what our passions and perversions make of it.

  But I know that all attempts at formulation will be fruitless. This is not just because it is hard to find in Bernhard’s words confirmation of what I’ve said. It is also because every time I return to Bernhard’s books I see that they defy reduction. But before I begin again to doubt myself, let me say this, at least: What I enjoy most in Bernhard’s books is not their settings or their moral vision. I enjoy just being there, inside those pages, to embrace his unstoppable anger and share it with him. That is how literature consoles, by inviting us to fulminate with the same intensity as the writers we love.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The World of Thomas Bernhard’s Novels

  The history of literary
bias goes back more than two thousand years, and between the two world wars there arrived a new fashion for “economy” that continues to hold sway in the aphoristic tendencies of those who write introductions to writers. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other American writers who set the style of the interwar era established the literary precept according to which any right-thinking writer should write a scene in the shortest way possible, using the fewest words, without repetition.

  Thomas Bernhard is not a writer who wishes to seem right-thinking or economical. Repetition is the brick of his world. It is not only that his lonely and obsessed heroes repeat the same perversions over and over as each wanders back and forth, obsessively venting some furious passion; as he describes their progress with a shocking energy, Bernhard too will repeat the same sentences over and over. So when Bernhard speaks of the hero of Concrete, who gives many years over to writing a treatise on hearing, he does not, as a traditional novelist might, say, “Konrad often thought that society was nothing and the work he was writing was everything”—instead, he conveys this idea through his hero’s endless repetitions.

  His circular thoughts—these are not thoughts so much as angry shouts, curses, screams, and expletives ending in exclamation points—are hard for rationalist readers to absorb. We read that all Austrians are idiots and, later, that the Germans and the Dutch are too; we are told that doctors are uniformly monstrous and most artists idiotic, superficial, and crude; we read that the world of science is inhabited by charlatans and the world of music by fakes; aristocrats and the rich are parasites, while the poor are opportunistic swindlers; most intellectuals are birdbrains addicted to their affectations, and most young people are imbeciles prepared to laugh at anything; we read that the abiding human passion is to deceive, oppress, and destroy others. Such and such a city is the most disgusting city in the world, such and such a theater is not a theater but a brothel. Such and such a composer is the greatest so far, and so-and-so is the greatest philosopher, but since there are no other composers or philosophers to reckon with, they are all “would-be” composers and philosophers … and so on.

  When we read Tolstoy or Proust, who protect themselves and their heroes with aesthetic armor—thus safeguarding their fictive worlds from this sort of excess—we might see these attacks, in Bernhard’s words, as “the affectations of an anguished aristocrat or of a conceited but still sympathetic hero,” but in the world of Thomas Bernhard they serve as supporting columns. In the work of “balanced” writers like Proust or Tolstoy, we might view such obsessive repetition as “a leaf in the world of human virtues and frailties,” but here it serves the instantiation of an entire world. Most writers concerned with portraying “life in its fullness” consign “obsessions, perversions, and excesses” to the margins, but Bernhard places them in the center, while the rest of the experience we describe as life gets pushed into the margins, evident only in the little details involved to insult it.

  If I am drawn to these attacks and curses that draw their power from obsession, it is partly owing to Bernhard’s endless verbal energy, but the attraction also derives from the heroes’ situation. Anger offers Bernhard’s heroes protection against the evil, idiocy, and misery of the world. Bernhard’s heroes spout not such belittling curses as confident, successful, and refined people deploy to look down on those around them; this is anger born of face-to-face familiarity with catastrophe that may strike at any time, of having accepted the painful truth about what people are really made of—and it is their anger that keeps his heroes from collapsing, that keeps them on their feet. We read again and again that this or that person “has not been able to stay on his feet,” “was destroyed in the end,” “withered away in a corner,” “was crushed in the end, too.” For Bernhard’s heroes, hemmed in as they are by cruelty and idiocy, the destruction of others serves as warning of danger. In their language, this notion might be expressed thus: For those who would endure, carry on, forbear, and remain standing, the first imperative is to curse the world and the second is to turn this passion into a deep, philosophical, meaningful enterprise—or at the very least to give ourselves over to obsession. Once the obsessions come to define the world in which we live, we are reduced to those things we cannot give up.

  In Correction, the hero, who resembles Wittgenstein, is preoccupied with an unwritten biography that will take him long years to research, but his hatred of his sister, who thinks he is impeding his own efforts, preoccupies his thoughts. So it is with the hero of Concrete: Concerned as he is with his work on “hearing,” he is just as obsessed with the conditions under which he writes it. Similarly, the engaging hero of Woodcutters, having invited to dinner all the intellectuals of Vienna he most detests, directs all his hospitable energy to detesting them even more.

  Valéry once said that people who rail against vulgarity are really expressing their curiosity and affection for it. Bernhard’s heroes return continually to the things they hate most; they devise ways of fanning the hatred; indeed, they could not live without disgust and contempt. They hate Vienna, but they run to be there; they hate the world of music, but they could not live without it; they hate their sisters, but they seek them out; they abhor newspapers but couldn’t bear not to read them; they deride intellectual chatter, only to mourn its absence; they detest literary prizes, but they don new suits and rush off to accept them. In their struggle to set themselves above reproach, they recall the hero of Notes from Underground.

  Bernhard has something of Dostoyevsky in him. In his heroes’ obsessions and passions—their defenses against the hopeless and the absurd—there are shades of Kafka as well. But Bernhard’s world is closer to Beckett’s.

  Beckett’s heroes do not rail so much against their surroundings; they are less interested in the disasters they suffer than in their mental anguish. No matter how they struggle to escape it, Bernhard’s heroes remain open to the outside world; to escape the suffering in their minds, they embrace the anarchy of the outside world. Beckett tries to erase, as much as possible, the chain of cause and effect, while Bernhard fixates on these causes down to the last detail. Bernhard’s characters refuse to surrender to illness, defeat, and injustice; they carry with them a mad anger and a blind will to fight on to the bitter end. Even if they are ultimately defeated, it is not their defeat and surrender that we read about but their obsessive quarrels and struggles.

  If we were to look for another writer who might serve as an introduction to the world of Thomas Bernhard, Louis-Ferdinand Céline would be the best candidate. Like Céline, Bernhard was raised in a poor family that had to struggle to survive. He grew up without a father, suffered privation during the war, and contracted tuberculosis. Like Céline’s, his novels are largely autobiographical, chronicling a constant battle, full of obstacles, resentments, and defeats. Like Céline, who lambasted authors like Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, and who railed against Gallimard, his publisher, Bernhard fumes at the old friends and institutions that take him in hand and give him prizes. Wholly autobiographical, Woodcutters is about a dinner party Bernhard actually organized in Austria for some friends and acquaintances with the express purpose of insulting them. But while Céline and Bernhard burn with flames from their inner hells, they use words very differently. Where Céline offers up ever shorter sentences ending in three dots, Bernhard’s innovation is the sentence whose endless repetition of circular or, more accurately, elliptical insults refuses to submit to the paragraph block.

  When the mist clears, what we see is a string of lovely, cruel, amusing little anecdotes. Despite their endless diatribes, Bernhard’s books are not dramatic; instead, they pile one story on top of the other; the sense we get of the book comes not from the whole but from the little stories scattered inside it. If we recall that these are mostly made up of gossip, insult, and cruel descriptions of “so-called” artists and intellectuals, we can think that the world of Bernhard’s novels is not only shaped much like our own but that it is—at times—close to its spirit too. Voicing the cruel at
tacks and obsessive hatreds that we all indulge in when angry, he goes on to fashion them into “good art.”

  But this is the point at which his hatred of art runs into trouble. For the newspapers on which he rained insults take note of him more and more often, while the prize juries on whom he spat keep giving him more prizes, and the theaters on which he poured scorn are only too eager to stage his plays—and when readers come to see that the story they so desperately wanted to believe is in reality just a story, they cannot help feeling duped. So perhaps this is a good moment to remind the reader that the world in which a novelist lives is a different realm entirely from the world inhabited by his characters. But if you insist that this other world is autobiographical, and that it takes all its power from an anger that is real, you will, after reading each Bernhard novel, need to ask yourself why, when you search for a “moral vision,” you feel as if you’ve been pulled into a game with the novel’s caricatures, and even the novel itself.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature

  Is there such a thing as Third World literature? Is it possible to establish—without falling prey to vulgarity or parochialism—the fundamental virtues of the literatures of the countries that make up what we call the Third World? In its most nuanced articulation—in Edward Said, for example—the notion of a Third World literature serves to highlight the richness and the range of the literatures on the margins and their relation to non-Western identity and nationalism. But when someone like Fredric Jameson asserts that “Third World literatures serve as national allegories” he is simply expressing a polite indifference to the wealth and complexity of literatures from the marginalized world. Borges wrote his short stories and essays in the 1930s in Argentina—a Third World country in the classic sense of the term—but his place at the very center of world literature is undisputed.