Woodcutters (Holzfällen, literally: Woodcutting) is probably not Thomas Bernhard’s (1931–1989) best novel. Nevertheless, the scandalous 1984 book occupies a special place in the work of the “Master of Exaggeration”: the unexpected ban of this “key novel” in his native Austria made Bernhard—who was previously not unknown—truly prominent, which did not however help him when it came to the awarding of the Nobel Prize, since it wasn’t the brilliant Austrian Bernhard but the not-so-brilliant Austrian Peter Handke who received it. Still, Woodcutters is likely the author’s most widely read work.
In Woodcutters, Bernhard pushes the style of fictional autobiography that he had developed with such sovereign virtuosity two years earlier in Wittgenstein’s Nephew (Wittgensteins Neffe) to dizzying heights. A single literary human sacrifice is no longer enough for him; now, the guts of his entire Viennese circle are torn out in public. That much is more or less well-known. So enough with the introduction—let us get straight to the point, rise from our armchairs, and ask the simple question: why is it that this particular book is so popular with readers?
Bernhard, who received the most distinguished prize in German literature, the Büchner Prize, in 1970, belongs to the generation of authors who were socialized into literature in the 1950s—a period shaped by the dominance of absurdist writing and a deep mistrust of seemingly naïve storytelling. If there was one tacitly accepted dogma of that era, it was a disdain for any attempt to make things easy for the reader. No one objected to success per se, but to rely too obviously on time-tested popular techniques (such as extended dialogue, chatty omniscient narrators, or first-person narration), or to offer readers any opportunity for identification, was utterly taboo. And there it is—the dreaded word: identification.
Still, in the 1970s German writers gradually began to loosen their puritanical fixation on supposedly advanced stylistic devices—a phase that, after all, gave us Martin Walser’s remarkable novel Runaway Horse (Ein fliehendes Pferd, 1978). Bernhard, too, now began to move away from excessively austere narrative techniques and mannered avant-garde style. Of his generation, he was one of the few who managed to translate a previous convoluted logic into a simpler, far more effective, far more popular prose. The 1980 masterpiece The Cheap-Eaters (Die Billigesser) marks the midpoint of this development. Then in Woodcutters, and already in Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Bernhard succeeds in organically combining stream-of-consciousness with accessible storytelling.
Of his generation, Bernhard was one of the few who managed to translate a previous convoluted logic into a simpler, far more effective, far more popular prose.
Woodcutters’ story is as follows:
It’s 11:30 at night in an aristocratic Viennese home in the early 1980s. A group of people are awaiting the arrival of a famous dramatic actor from the Burgtheater, the guest of honor, who is coming from a performance of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. The house is that of the Auersbergers, a married couple whom the narrator hasn’t seen for twenty years: she’s a singer, he’s a “composer in the Webern tradition”.
While sitting in an armchair, and later at the dinner table when the actor arrives, the narrator observes the crowd around him, as he relives the last two decades, his connections and ties with the various guests, and particularly his relationship with a woman, Joana, who had committed suicide and been buried earlier that day. Eventually, the actor begins an aggressive rant at one of the guests, Jeannie Billroth, a self-styled “Virginia Woolf of Vienna” and the narrator’s fierce literary rival. He then becomes sad and reflective, and laments that he often believes he would have been better off to have lived a rural life and to have been a woodcutter. When the actor lashes out at Billroth, the narrator momentarily turns from derogatory to sympathetic, having previously condemned the Burgtheater actor as vapid and self-centered. The novel ends as the guests disperse, with the narrator leaving the dinner and deciding to write about it.
Of course, one must be cautious not to be fooled by the book’s supposed “new simplicity”, even if Bernhard does not shy away from using traditional novelistic techniques both routinely and effectively. That the Burgtheater actor features in a play of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck of all things—the ultimate drama of self-deception—before the Auerbergers’ artistic dinner is, of course, no coincidence.
And already in Frost (1963), Bernhard had used a first-person narrator, though one effectively downplayed through focus on the actual main character, the painter Strauch. In Woodcutters, the first-person narrator now conventionally merges with the protagonist and even offers the reader a banal opportunity for identification—which the reader, ungratefully, accepts.
I have, as is customary in feuilletonistic critique, called Bernhard a “Master of Exaggeration”. Strictly speaking, that’s nonsense. There is probably no greater mistake in reading Bernhard than not taking him literally, not taking him seriously in what he says: Bernhard does not exaggerate. Things are, more or less, exactly as he describes (avoiding the frowned-upon word “narrates”). Anyone who believes his reports on award ceremonies, boarding schools, hospitals, and psychiatric clinics are somehow “exaggerated” underestimates his literary concept: Bernhard earned the distinction of transferring the depiction of universal absurdity—a legacy of his literary upbringing—with utmost plausibility into realism itself. A singular achievement.
I have, as is customary in feuilletonistic critique, called Bernhard a “Master of Exaggeration”. Strictly speaking, that’s nonsense. There is probably no greater mistake in reading Bernhard than not taking him literally, not taking him seriously in what he says.
Even the grotesque Austrian specifics, which might not always feel familiar to the German reader, and much less to the English one, are—as I’ve been told by those in the know—entirely realistic, entirely “genuine”. As genuine as the revulsion, even hatred, towards the artistic dinner of the composer Auersberger and his washed-up wife in Woodcutters. This leads us to a peculiar problem: every literature student learns at the start of their studies not to confuse the author with his protagonist (something that is said to be difficult even in Goethe’s Sesenheim poems). And yet moral indictment—for let’s not kid ourselves: the man in the armchair is a moral misanthrope—presupposes a literary category as controversial as it is delicate: truth.
But of course, Woodcutters is a subjective orgy of hatred. Whether literature must afford an audiatur et altera pars (“let the other side be heard too”) is unclear. What I do know is that Bernhard was anything but an unproblematic character. Nasty anecdotes abound, and the correspondence with Siegfried Unseld (publisher at legendary Suhrkamp Verlag) doesn’t exactly cast a flattering light on the diva Bernhard. Great writers—with the exception of Wolfram von Eschenbach and the immaculate Walther von der Vogelweide—are nearly always of dubious character. For example, Thomas Mann’s brilliant novella Tristan ruthlessly throws his colleague Arthur Holitscher to the lions, in barely veiled invective. That wasn’t exactly classy. But on Thomas Mann, perhaps, another time.
