He could imagine, he said, that on the last day his father had been unable to get up and had only crawled around in his room. Quite aside from his madness, the weeks of strictly refusing nourishment had made him incapable of standing erect. “Toward the end he had no strength at all left, Doctor,” the prince said, “no strength at all.” It had not been hard, the prince had said at the time, to imagine, as he looked at his father laid out in the pavilion, all that his father had endured “in order to have the privilege of being dead at last. All over his body we discovered traces of cruel torments he had inflicted on himself,” the prince said. His whole body had been marked by self-inflicted bruises. “This highly intelligent person!” the prince said. “The crucial pages were ripped out of his favorite books, which he had taken from the library to his room. Pages from The World As Will and Idea, for instance. He had eaten them,” the prince said. “Schopenhauer has always been the best nourishment for me,” his father had written a few hours before his suicide, on a scrap of paper found by a member of the coroner’s commission. It was dated October 22, 1948.

Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

And while we’re at it, can we just take a minute to appreciate Bernhard’s repetitive dialogue tags? From Old Masters:

People always make the mistake in museums of embarking on too much, of wishing to see everything, so they walk and walk and look and look and then suddenly, because they have devoured a surfeit of art, they collapse. That is what happened to my future wife when Irrsigler took her by the arm and led her to the Bordone Room, as we subsequently established, in the most courteous manner, Reger said. The layman in matters of art goes to a museum and makes it nauseous for himself through excess, Reger said. But of course no advice is possible where visiting a museum is concerned. The expert goes to a museum in order to view at most one picture, Reger said, one statue, one object, Reger said, he goes to the museum to look at, to study, one Veronese, one Velasquez. But these art experts are all utterly distasteful to me, Reger said, they make a bee-line for a single work of art and examine it in their shameless unscrupulous way and walk out of the museum again, I hate those people, Reger said.

Six instances of Reger said in as many sentences. The format of the tag is no stranger to anyone who’s ever cracked open a novel and found their eye leaping past seas of he said, she said, the rhythms of dialogue ingrained so deeply in our reading minds we often take no notice of their presence. (Though their absence often makes itself painfully apparent, as any reader of Gaddis or McCarthy knows firsthand.) But like paragraph breaks, dialogue is another convention of the realist novel for which Bernhard has no patience. From Correction:

The question was not only, how do I build the Cone, but also, how do I keep the Cone, the building of the Cone a secret, so Roithamer. Half of my energies were concentrated on building the Cone, half of them on keeping the Cone a secret, so Roithamer. When a man plans such an enormity, he must always retain control of everything and keep everything secret, so Roithamer. First based on my reading, then on the basis of reading no longer taken into account, so Roithamer. My own ideas had led with logical consistency to the realization and completion of the Cone, when my sister was frightened to death, the Cone was finished, so Roithamer, I could not have taken her into the Kobernausser forest at any other than the deadly moment, she had dreaded this moment, when she dreaded it most deeply I took her there and so killed her, at the same time I’d finished the Cone (April 7), so Roithamer. For supreme happiness comes only in death, so Roithamer. Detour by way of the sciences to supreme happiness, death, so Roithamer. The experts, the critics, the destroyers, annihilators, so Roithamer. We always come close to the edge of the abyss and fear the loss of equilibrium, so Roithamer.

Ten repetitions of the same tag in only nine sentences, and the whole page contains sixteen. There are another twelve instances on the preceding page and six more on the following. Even for Bernhard, though, sixteen appearances of the same tag is an outlier; this particular passage appears at the end of the novel as the narrator closes in on Roithamer’s titular, inevitable “correction,” i.e. his suicide. The increasing frequency of tags draws in the reader by their repetition, implicating the audience in the narrator’s obsessive, ritualistic behavior; their place in each sentence is a mooring providing reader and narrator their lone anchor from tumbling into the abyss, and the closer looms the edge the more frequently they must be called upon to keep from falling. Tic or technique, it’s a strategy I’ve lifted before in my own writing.

Here’s the man himself reading from Correction:

Of course for every page with a dozen tags, Correction has as many with none at all. Four to five per page seems to be the standard distribution. If one were to perhaps complete a scan of not just Correction but perhaps Bernhard’s entire written oeuvre, one could perhaps even calculate the number of tags per page across his bibliography, perhaps coming to a figure such as 4.8489 tags per page, perhaps. But that would require thinking like one of Bernhard’s own obsessives. (Does this sort of thinking constitute a fingernail grasping to the last edge of sanity, or am I already in the pit?)

This crazy idea of visiting the hunting lodge had already occurred to me in Madrid. It’s possible that Wertheimer never told anyone but me about his writings (and notes), I thought, and tucked them away somewhere, so I owe it to him to dig out these notebooks and writings (and notes) and preserve them, no matter how difficult it proves to be. Glenn actually left nothing behind, Glenn didn’t keep any written record, I thought, Wertheimer on the contrary never stopped writing, for years, for decades. Above all I’ll find this or that interesting observation about Glenn, I thought, at least something about the three of us, about our student years, about our teachers, about our development and about the development of the entire world, I thought as I stood in the inn and looked out the kitchen window, behind which however I could see nothing, for the windowpanes were black with filth.

When Bernhard picks a tag he does not waver, as clearly evinced by the above passage from The Loser. Once you won’t encounter Reger said, you won’t find a said Reger. The same tag repeats without variation, hammer to anvil.

They cook in this filthy kitchen, I thought, from this filthy kitchen they bring out the food to the customers in the restaurant, I thought. Austrian inns are all filthy and unappetizing, I thought, one can barely get a clean tablecloth in one of these inns, never mind cloth napkins, which in Switzerland for instance are quite standard.

Traditionally, the dialogue tag is meant to be elided, and those writers such as the aforementioned Gaddis or McCarthy are held as outliers, prone to idiosyncrasy, making the reader perform their own work to determine speakers. But in Bernhard, the tags mutate and metastasize, multiplying and threatening to disrupt the sentences they are meant to moor. Unlike the stage directions of traditional he said she said receding into the background, becoming increasingly skimmable, Bernhard’s tags become more and more pronounced, literally and figuratively.

Even the tiniest inn in Switzerland is clean and appetizing, even our finest Austrian hotels are filthy and unappetizing. And talk about the rooms! I thought. Often they just iron over sheets that have already been slept in, and it’s not uncommon to find clumps of hair in the sink from the previous guest. Austrian inns have always turned my stomach, I thought.

Attribution tags proliferate across Bernhard’s work, constantly reaching for delirious extremes. At times he even doubles down on his own tic:

But Wertheimer often ate in these inns, at least once a day I want to see people, he said, even if it’s just this decrepit, down-and-out, filthy innkeeper. So I go from one cage to the next, Wertheimer once said, from the Kohlmarkt apartment to Traich and then back again, he said, I thought. From the catastrophic big city cage to the catastrophic forest cage. Now I hide myself here, now there, now in the Kohlmarkt perversity, now in the country-forest perversity. I slip out of one and back into the other. For life. But this procedure has become such a habit that I can’t imagine doing anything else, he said. Glenn locked himself in his North American cage, I in my Upper Austrian one, Wertheimer said, I thought. He with his megalomania, I with my desperation. All three with our desperation, he said, I thought. I told Glenn about our hunting lodge, Wertheimer said, I’m convinced that that’s what gave him the idea of building his own house in the woods, his studio, his desperation machine, Wertheimer once said, I thought. 

The increase to he said, I thought takes Bernhard’s attribution from insistent to gratuitous, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, the repetition growing longer, the phrases expanding inside the sentences. A character like Reger’s worldview is at first absurd, then turned around, re-introduced, examined from all angles, re-stated and taken to its most hilarious extreme. Even as he drives us deeper and deeper into these addled minds, Bernhard’s tags always drag us back to surface of the page, reminding us what we’re seeing is mere writing. His narrator’s dogged insistence on asserting themselves within the sentence serves instead only to draw more attention to their own fictional materiality. For the narrator of The Loser, is it through the kitchen window of an inn “behind which however I could see nothing, for the windowpanes were black with filth”? Or is it the page itself?

There’s a bit of Beckett somewhere in here; some spirit of “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” in the constant assertion of the individual even as he is crushed and ground again and again. Techniques of defamiliarization are often deployed in hope of opening for the audience some feeling of difference or the new, i.e. breaking out of traditional modes of thought, but at heart still in search of the moment of transcendence. Like Beckett, Bernhard chooses instead only to highlight sameness in itself, repetition in itself. His books don’t end. They simply stop. Beckett’s been called the last Modernist, which places Bernhard somewhere in the category Gass called “decayed Modern.”

He said, I thought. So Bernhard.