Thomas Bernhard - Gargoyles

Prince Saurau said: “But I talked about the flood and not about the play, for what else could I possibly have talked about that day, if not the flood! Naturally I could not think of anything but the flood. And your father thought of nothing but the play. As I became more and more preoccupied with the flood, your father became more and more preoccupied with the play, and insofar as I, speaking of the flood, was irritated by your father’s speaking of the play, your father, speaking of the play, was irritated by me because I spoke of nothing but the flood. There was tremendous irritation!” the prince said. “Again and again I heard your father commenting on the play in the midst of my endless talk about the flood. The incredible, amazing thing was,” the prince said, “that as the time went on I spoke more and more about the flood and nothing else and your father spoke about the play and nothing else. And your father spoke more and more loudly about the play, and I more and more loudly about the flood. Loudly, equally loudly, at the same time, both of us, your father and I went on, he speaking about a tremendous play, I about a tremendous flood. And then,” the prince said, “there came a period in which both of us spoke exclusively about the flood, followed by a period in which we talked of nothing but the play. But while we were both talking about the play, I was thinking only about the flood, and while we were talking about the flood, your father was thinking only of the play; while your father thought of the play, my thoughts were with the flood. If we talked about the flood, I thought that your father wanted to talk about the play; if we talked about the play, I wanted to talk about nothing but the flood.”

“I wanted to compare the play,” my father said, “with a play I once saw in Oxford, and to discuss the qualities of English actors versus the qualities of our actors, as well as the difference between the English language and ours.”

The prince said: “Naturally I was completely obsessed with the flood, but your father was just as naturally not obsessed with the play.”

“When we talked about the play,” my father said, “you, Prince, kept exclaiming What expense! or Enormous expense! while I, whenever we talked about the flood, was constantly using such words as stage machinery, pantomime, dramatic climax, puppetry.”

“But basically,” the prince said, “no matter what we talked about on that day, we were really talking about nothing but the flood.”

“Immediately after the play,” the prince said, “I left the pavilion and walked on the inner walls, because despite the play my mind had not been rid of the noises. And I had been hoping particularly that the play would distract me from my noises. But in fact I could not find distraction from the noises on the inner walls either, and I went to the outer walls. For a short time on the outer walls it was possible for me to shake off the noises, and I looked down from the outer wall at the people who had come to the play and were now riding home. Some went down into the gorge,” the prince said. “I can’t imagine what for. To this day I don’t know why some went down into the gorge. Standing behind a large hemlock, I watched the people bidding good-by to my sisters and my daughters. This play,” the prince said to me, “is arranged by the women, of course. I really have nothing to do with the whole business, but the women put on such a play every year. They invite hundreds of people, people wholly uninteresting to me, and the majority of them repulsive. For the women the play, of course, is always a pretext to invite hundreds of people, who actually come, but then again the play is the least of the reasons for their coming,” the prince said. “The women merely use it to bring the people to the castle, and the people who come up to the castle for the play do not come on account of the play, but out of sheer curiosity. If it were up to me,” the prince said, “not a soul would come up here any more, not a soul, not a single person. I grant you,” he said, “such solitariness is a morbid state, of course. But society, and I mean the whole of society, but in particular the social class that comes to the play, consists of a despicable rabble. But I let the women have their pleasure, and they can invite whomever they like. Since I don’t want to see anyone at Hochgobernitz, the play is a horror to me. Actually,” the prince said, “I stood behind the big hemlock for a few minutes without hearing any noises at all. But in order to warm up, for I had the feeling I was freezing, I walked partway across the courtyard, finally ran a short way, and then, walking slowly, I repeated inaudibly several sentences from the play. My memory has not yet been destroyed, I thought, no, my memory is still intact, since I am able to recite whole sentences from the play, and what is more the most complicated ones. As I walked across the yard, declaiming sentences from the play, I thought that the women and also the young Pole, a relative of ours, had already gone to bed. I actually took pleasure in declaiming whole parts of the play, the longest roles, without a single mistake. Whole sections,” the prince said, “refreshing myself in the rhythm of the sentences. For over an hour I walked back and forth in the courtyard, once on the inner walls, once on the outer walls, without noticing where I was while I walked, and recalled to memory as much as possible of the text of the play. It actually is a good play, it seems to me,” the prince said, “written by one of my cousins, solely for this one performance. I tested my memory in the most ruthless way,” the prince said. “I did not spare myself, and I discovered that my memory is intact. Actually, Doctor, my memory was intact that evening. Suddenly it was absolutely intact. I reconstructed the play,” the prince said. “I was particularly interested in its innermost construction. The theatrical aspects. Suddenly,” the prince said, “I had the feeling that I could go to sleep, that feeling which has become utterly foreign to me, and I descended from the inner wall where I happened to be and went into the yard and started for my room. At first I did not intend to pass through the library, but then I went through the library anyhow; there was a book that interested me, and I wanted to start on it,” the prince said. “And as I entered the library,” he said, “I found the women. I was astonished that they were still up. The Polish cousin was there too. The whole company was sitting on the floor. It was four o’clock in the morning, I saw. The whole company was oddly motionless, sitting on cushions on the floor. There they sat, dead tired on their cushions, in a kind of sleepless tension, with their whisky. Suddenly,” the prince said, “I had the greatest desire to start a discussion with these people. ‘Isn’t it cold here?’ I said to them. ‘Isn’t it much too cold here?’ And I started at once talking about the antibody in nature. The subject sprang to my mind at once. I was able to develop my thoughts in the early morning chill very well and very rapidly,” the prince said. “I had good listeners; suddenly I felt: You haven’t had such good listeners in a long time, you’ve waited for years for such good listeners. To think that these people can listen so well! And also discuss! I thought. The young Pole discussed splendidly, splendidly,” the prince said. “But all at once, and now notice this, Doctor,” the prince said, “the noises came back. So all this while I have been able to suppress them only once, I thought, suppress them by means of the play. Yes, the play! The noises instantly destroyed my thoughts, changed everything inside my head into a chaos. Deafening. Naturally my listeners knew nothing about that. Naturally not,” the prince said. “They couldn’t look inside my brain, of course. But my listeners certainly felt that a wonderful orderliness inside my brain had suddenly become a frightful chaos, a frightful, deafening chaos. The pain at that moment,” the prince said, “when the noises started again and shattered everything inside my brain, was so frightful that I thought I would have to stop my lecture and therefore put an end to the whole discussion. But because, as I’ve said, I had not had such attentive listeners for years, such honest, exacting, and, so it seemed to me, such highly charged listeners, so splendidly equipped for discussion — because of this I would not give in and succeeded in restoring order in my brain. It was half past four in the morning and I spoke partly, because that was requisite, in Polish; above all I had to keep my attention fixed on the Pole. I spoke about the antibody in nature, I spoke on nature and on the antibody in nature, on nature and on the antibody and on the antibody that emerges from nature. While working out these ideas I probed the degrees of difficulty in my thinking contrasted with the degrees of difficulty in the thinking of my listeners. Probably because of the play,” the prince said, “this intellectual tension among us, which I had thought no longer possible, had suddenly become possible again. It was like a scientific conference. There developed an intellectual community that was the most concentrated thing imaginable, partly because of the Pole’s presence. At the climax of the discussion I told my listeners what a discussion is, told them that a discussion is something entirely different from what people nowadays think a discussion is. I had the impression that the people assembled in the library were completely transformed, that they were not horrible relatives, but receptive people, capable of thought, capable of trains of thought, capable of developing trains of thought, able to engage in discussion. I found them fundamentally changed characters,” the prince said. “They were all suddenly different! I had the impression that I was speaking to scientific minds. Pacing back and forth, I spoke to scientists! And all at once I myself no longer had a chaotic mind capable of registering nothing but pain, but a clear, scientific brain. Because my thinking was absolutely clear, when I gave examples of it, commented on it, it was steadily incorporated into my listeners, something I no longer thought possible. That morning,” Prince Saurau said, “we enjoyed exercising our minds, even as we enjoyed the dissolving night around us, the daylight coming from the east, the tremendous mechanism of frogs and crickets retreating into the gorge and the valleys. While dawn broke, we abruptly no longer felt ourselves destroyers of one another’s nerves. We had reformed. In all our faces I observed the tranquility of our feelings and mental states, for all that it contained elements of sexual awakening. That morning I realized that we are not yet entirely shattered. My son’s sisters,” the prince said, “fitted in just as well as my own sisters, subordinated themselves to my thought, which had seemed to all of them, in tranquility , a bearable and not an unbearable fantasy, because of the play. Thanks to the sudden clarity of our brains we were all suddenly moved by nature,” the prince said. “How rarely we are capable of tranquility. Suddenly we were all together capable of absorbing the tranquility that always prevails here in Hochgobernitz, and we all felt not the slightest antipathies or weakness. Without any one of them feeling the slightest faltering in their intellectual capacities, they all followed the explanation (as I also was able to observe with growing astonishment) of a monstrosity within the universal physical and chemical machine, a monstrosity that was steadily taking possession of all of us. But all the while,” the prince said, “there were those agonizing noises in my brain. While I led us with the greatest sureness through our thinking as through our own darkness, because I know it, I was constantly being distracted from life by the frightful noises in my brain. Among my own people I felt that I had long ago become invisible to all of them, and I felt so more and more. Suddenly I no longer existed for them at all, was no longer there . I tried to conjure up a mirror image of myself, which cost me the greatest effort, and I made them all look into this mirror image. I imagined,” Prince Saurau said, “that by remaining out on the ramparts and in the yard (after the play) I would once again be able to make a thrust into life there in the library; I seized the opportunity, but in reality I did not succeed. The noises in my head thwart me completely. For a long time I have heard them redoubling every day,” the prince said. “But my torment is a torment beyond your grasp,” he said to my father.