Bernhard thus operates according to a logic of inventive schizophrenia, splitting and doubling himself into a series of alter egos that are locked in a life-and-death struggle. The external narrative is in fact a metaphysical drama of the divided self. But there is also a third doppelgänger, Wertheimer, “the loser.” Though not directly modeled after any actual person, the narrator’s friend bears traits of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a figure who implicitly and explicitly informs a good deal of Bernhard’s writing since Correction. Like the philosopher, Wertheimer comes from a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, has a close but conflictual relationship with his sister, and writes fragmentary “notes” that in the novel are called Zettel—the title Wittgenstein used to refer to some of his late philosophical aphorisms. But Wertheimer, though undoubtedly brilliant, is an ironic caricature of Wittgenstein: an envious, weak artist who is destroyed by Gould’s superior talent; a sadist who keeps his sister locked up in a quasi-incestuous relationship; and finally a philosophical failure who burns all his notes before committing a spiteful, embarrassing suicide.
With these three characters in place — all of them drawn subjectively from the lives of Gould, Bernhard, and Wittgenstein — the author of The Loser proceeds to narrate the same story he tells in virtually every one of his plays and novels: a story of frustrated ambition and (incestuous) love, suicide, and the generally grotesque absurdity of existence. But if the form is the same, Bernhard’s genius consists in his ability to vary the main themes and settings for his work, which function as an analogue to his own writing — Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in Correction, the paintings of Goya and Brueghel in Old Masters, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck in Woodcutters. Here it is Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould, that provides as it were the basso continuo for Bernhard’s own deliberately droning repetitions and variations. With the monologistic, uninterrupted flow of its sentences, the novel conjures up the image of a singer fighting to sustain his breath to the end of an impossibly long, embellished aria. Or, to use the historical reference behind the novel, the image of an insomniac count listening to Goldberg play Bach’s variations over and over again. And everywhere we sense Gould’s dedication to this music, a dedication so fanatical and inhuman that it extinguishes all personal identity: “My ideal would be, I would be the Steinway, I wouldn’t need Glenn Gould, he said, I could, by being the Steinway, make Glenn Gould totally superfluous.… To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glenn in one, he said, I thought, Glenn Steinway, Steinway Glenn, all for Bach.”
But the analogy goes further. For it is not just Bach’s music that informs The Loser, but a modernist reading of Baroque music — Bach filtered through the aggressively atonal, mathematical formalism of Schönberg and Webern, whom Bernhard and Gould both admired. This is not the place to detail the considerable similarities between Gould’s musical views and Bernhard’s prose style. Suffice it to say that both artists appreciated the fugal nature of Baroque music, which mixes without dissolving the differences between two, three, and even four distinct voices. Gould’s uncanny ability to sustain the separation between voices in a musical composition bears a striking affinity to Bernhard’s narrative schizophrenia. Not surprisingly, both men were fascinated by the problem of impersonation, quotation, and artistic doublings. They also shared a dislike for individualist art forms (like a Mozart sonata or a Balzac novel) based on progression, climax, and reconciliation. Gould felt that “a sense of discomfort, of unease, could be the sagest of counselors for both artist and audience”; Bernhard enjoyed “shaking people up.” Finally, art was for both of them not an end in itself but a way of achieving an ascetic renunciation of the world. “Art should be given the chance to phase itself out,” Gould maintained in his self-interview, just as the artist himself should have the necessary inner mobility and strength “to opt creatively out of the human situation.” In his acceptance speech for the Austrian State Prize for Literature, Bernhard offered his public the Baroque wisdom that “everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death.”
In the final analysis, what matters is that in the idea of Glenn Gould Bernhard found something he could love and respect unconditionally, a touchstone with which to judge the world around him. “Those are terrible people,” the Jewish professor says to his housekeeper in Heldenplatz, “who don’t like Glenn Gould.… I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.… I also demand that my wife love Glenn Gould, in that respect I’m a fanatic.” To be sure, Gould is the hammer which Bernhard used to unsettle Austria’s complacent image of itself as the most musical nation of Europe, the birthplace of Mozart and Schubert. And the “fanatics” who love Gould as much as the narrator does in The Loser are also ironic figures, emblems of the absurd limits to which people drive themselves in the name of art. But in Gould Bernhard found a balancing force to the vitriolic satire he couldn’t help directing at his fellow Austrians, “with the subjectivity I personally have always detested but from which I have never been immune.” This saves The Loser from being merely an exercise in verbal wit, caricature, and (self-) mockery. Here we have Bach’s music, Gould’s artistic dedication, and finally the narrator’s confession of love and friendship for the two people who meant everything to him and now are gone. Neither Bernhard nor his narrator is prone to sentimentality — but beneath all their ironic laughter, that confession can still be heard.
MARK M. ANDERSON
Ernst Aichinger at the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York generously provided information for the present remarks; may he and his colleagues be thanked here. M.A.