Ungleichzeitigkeiten: Class Relationships in Bernhard's Fiction

Summary

In recent decades, literary criticism has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of ideology. Critics have devoted attention to the politics of narrative texts in order to show that questions of class conflict are always present in novels, even if the texts themselves attempt to contain or conceal them. This is no less true of Thomas Bernhard than of any other writer. We shall see in the course of this essay that devices such as character configurations and structures of focalization serve to encourage identification with representatives of the upper echelons of postwar Austrian society. At the same time, however, other elements of the texts can be seen to call these class hierarchies into question. This happens in two distinct ways according to the class status of the main character in the novel concerned. In section one, I analyze three novels whose protagonists and/or narrators are descendants of the Habsburg aristocracy and continue to live, stripped of their titles, in the Austria of the postwar period: Verstörung (1967), Korrektur (1975) and Auslöschung (1986). In section two, I turn my attention to two texts whose main characters are members of Austria's Großbürgertum (grand bourgeoisie): Beton (1981) and Der Untergeher (1983). The thematic and structural differences between these two groups of texts entail distinct critical approaches. Section one is concerned primarily with the means by which class oppositions exceed the binary terms within which they are ostensibly constituted, while section two analyzes the means by which the explicit class hierarchies and value systems of the texts are implicitly called into question.

A preliminary general point that needs to be made is that Bernhard's novels are set in a world that is barely recognizable as that of the late twentieth century. With few exceptions his characters either walk from one place to another, or they take the train, the dominant symbol of industrialization and modernity in the culture of the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth. Other modes of transport may be mentioned, but journeys by, for example, car or airplane are seldom actually represented. In the rare instances where motor vehicles are mentioned, they are frequently agents of destruction (Ja, Auslöschung). In addition, long-distance communication takes place not by telephone, but by mail or wire.