[University of Chicago Press, 104 pp.]
An earlier work by Bernhard, and one of the few of his I hadn’t read. Laid out three unbreaking paragraphs, the novella primarily assumes a form Bernhard later used elsewhere—as Brian Evenson points out in his brief introduction, re: Correction, which I think was the first of his I read, and remains a favorite (though Extinction still tops that list)—where most of the body of the work is presented as thought delivered in speech by a character in relation to the narrator, creating a focused absence in which the ideas are allowed to resound. Thus Bernhard is able to have insane shit spoken, such as: “Anyone who makes a child, says Oehler, deserves to be punished with the most extreme possible punishment and not to be subsidized.” This logic becomes supported by B’s patented would-be ever-quasi-suicidal roving outlook wherein life is misery and no one actually wants to live their life, because nothing can be known or even spoken, where intellect is misused and passed over both by the state and by the people, and all are forgotten soon in death, etc. Mostly elementary viewpoints for anyone reading marginal Bernhard work, but still worth a chuckle and a nod along the way.
The middle and closing thirds don’t do much to extend these observations, other than providing fragmentary details about how a mutual friend of the two main characters eventually went insane trying to find something to hold onto in his thoughts, which is taken by Oehler as the obvious way all thought will turn out if pushed deep enough into. Meta-sentences calmly project a nearly farcical scene where the friend loses his shit in a pants store as he tries to insist that the pants are made out of bad fabric, to the point of being see-through, despite the pants’ maker’s insistence they are fine, erupting in a row that leads the thinker to snap and end up being committed. There is some talk over the uselessness of visiting that friend in the asylum where he now resides, suggesting that once a person has gone insane it is useless to try to visit them or find hope, again said by Oehler, which rang less true to me than his other dark positing; as even though perhaps the insane person is no longer able to identify or speak directly to a visitor, they do possess a more rare connection to the possibility of anti-logic revealing more truth than logic as it corresponds to reality.
I could not help but think of visiting my father in the rest home during his respite stay when my mom needed a break from keeping him at home, and how free he seemed unto himself spiritually there, released from the possibility of knowing or depending on anything, and relegating to speaking to carpet, to air, to others equally divulged of their ability to try to parse. Can’t hold that against young Bernhard, but something to be said of the idea of exploring a lifetime abandoned by its own reality, and thereby, if one is willing, being forced to face what madness might eventually come for you as well. How time changes in that conditioning; how one can unlock partitions in the self that have accrued there without their knowing, like a cyst full of data that only bursts when all other possibility of “competent” outward expression has been removed.
“For it is clear that, in this state, only what is stupid, impoverished, and dilettante is protected and constantly promoted and that, in this state, funds are only invested in what is incompetent and superfluous.” That would have really gotten me going in my early 20s, though now it seems like expecting to see Black Dice on the Top 40. It gets old, but then again I still find myself keyed up coming out of recent movies like the heavily lauded Parasite wondering what in the world happened to people wanting more from what they consume than memeable jokes and flat allusions to class revolution, when really the existence of such a film is a product of the contraption having caught up with the catchwords that make those who teeter on the edges of wayward enough to bring them back in just in time. It feels like the recent Domino’s ad where they are pleased to offer you “insurance” on your pizza order if they get it wrong, auto-correcting the possibility of their likelihood of getting it wrong and swearing they’ll take care of it as an asset they can use to sell you more pizza. Plain as day. Out in the open. Not even trying to hide in anything but the assets they know you’ll read and report the headline and won’t click. As if being exhausted could be a revelation. As if there could ever be an understanding of death among the living, no matter how many times you breathe it in. Be it to say: losing your shit over a pair of pants being made shitty won’t land you in the nuthouse any longer, because we’re all already in the nuthouse, and so long as your still capable of ending up in a store that sells pants, for whatever reason, you might as well be a fucking senator; there’s hardly a difference.
So is this a novella, by now, more about how we got here than where we’re headed? About how it was already too late before we even actually imagined we began on ground never so blank and built on holes? I guess, in that light, even young Bernhard is still Bernhard, the recursing meditative dickhead with ire to spare, and revisiting through echoes the earlier modes of thinking that helped bring one, in their best moments, from standing around with their head tucked under their wing, is the kind of work that needs to be on shelves, not yet a pill-form, and like the lip on a hole that you wouldn’t mind being back at the lip of rather than so far down beyond the bottom you no longer wonder when there’ll be a bottom.
Too, that the narrator never comes around and offers his opinion on Oehler’s speaking, that he simply absorbs it and moves alongside in seeming lockstep, feels about as accurate as hanging out with people has felt to me for some time; like wandering around as if at a disembodied window, buried beneath curtains, uncertain how or why to interject. It is nice how the work creates a space from which we can observe the ongoing without trying to press in, without being instructed or even presented information that we are forced to reckon with; that blank space feels like the most modern aspect of the work here, and the most likely to elongate if provoked, knowing nothing else, as we do, about who has been relating all this information, like any would-be person, including the apparition of a god who’s given up.