LOSER TAKES IT ALL

By Jane Mendelsohn

The Village Voice Literary Supplement, August 1991

The Loser

By Thomas Bernhard

Translated by Jack Dawson

(Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)

Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, first published in Germany in 1983 and now superbly translated by Jack Dawson, occurs almost entirely in the time it takes for the novel’s unnamed protagonist to enter a country inn. Written in Bernhard’s characteristic style, a relentless inner monologue unbroken by paragraph markings, this elongated moment has an eerie, suspended quality. It’s boring and compelling at the same time, like the mechanical hum of one’s own obsessive worrying. Unlike the average affliction, however, the anxiety described in a Bernhard book concerns suicide, ambition, incest, and art in a manner considerably more urgent that that of quotidian malaise, and often involves famous historical figures. The Loser, for example, freely grafts elements of the author’s own life onto the biographies of his two favorite alter egos, the concert pianist Glenn Gould and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Like Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, The Loser is an imaginary autobiography, a genre it seems Bernhard was forced to invent in order to write fiction in postwar Austria. Intertwining fact with fantasy, these novels are attempts to transcend “subjectivity,” that imprisoning, inspirational, Kafkaesque consciousness which The Loser’s narrator says he has always “detested” but from which he has “never been immune.” Bernhard — abrasive, repetitive, given to diatribe and excruciating criticism of the country which he said he despised but never left — has always associated subjectivity with Austria’s morally barren political past as well as with its celebrated artistic and intellectual legacy. In The Loser he manipulates this notion to create a complex counterpoint between reality and fiction, history and aesthetics, and the result is a jarring, original answer to the question of how to make art after the Holocaust.

The novel tells the story of three men locked in a hopeless struggle for artistic supremacy: the narrator, Glenn Gould, and Wertheimer, the loser of the book’s title. The most brilliant of the three is Gould, a fabrication based on the real pianist as well as on Bernhard himself, who studied piano seriously before becoming a writer. Bernhard’s Gould comes to life as a cruel, hermetic genius whose superior talent has ruined the lives of Wertheimer and the narrator, both of whom abandoned promising careers as pianists after hearing him play. The narrator, a philosopher and former musician, befriended Gould at a music seminar in Salzburg, where all three of the novel’s characters were students and lived together in the house of a Nazi sculptor. (There is no evidence that Gould and Bernhard ever met and they certainly never studied together.) The novel’s third player is the wealthy Jewish Wertheimer, driven to despair by the marriage of his 46-year-old sister and by Gould’s death.

Stirred to memory by Wertheimer’s suicide, the narrator relates the history of this gruesome threesome with a baroque precision reminiscent of Gould’s celebrated recordings. The book opens, and stays, with the narrator on his way from Wertheimer’s funeral to Wertheimer’s country house, where he believes he will find the unpublished fragments of Wertheimer’s great work, “The Loser”; the narrator has also written and unfinished work, an extended essay entitled “About Glenn Gould.” This doubling, and tripling, structures many levels of the book, including its grammar, which often dissolves the differences among the three characters by confusing pronouns and juxtaposing names within one grammatical unit. As the novel progresses, Bernhard increasingly blurs the distinctions among the kind of obliteration of personality that Gould describes when he explains: “My ideal would be, I would be the Steinway, I wouldn’t be the Glenn Gould.”

In the end, it’s impossible to determine to whom “the loser” of the books title really refers. With Wertheimer and Gould both dead, only the narrator lives on to tell their story, and in this sense he’s the winner, although as he sadly observes, “Now I’m alone.” There’s a great deal of pathos in his position as a survivor; “I only had two people in my life who gave it any meaning,” he admits. “Now Glenn and Wertheimer are dead and I have to come to terms with this fact.” Similarly, Bernhard’s novels are ways of coming to terms with his country’s buried history; they read like eulogies for Austria’s dead, and living dead, as well as for Bernhard’s particular fictional victims. The Holocaust rarely surfaces as a subject in The Loser, but it is the shadow in the past, like the deaths of the narrator’s friends, which necessitates as much as it renders impossible the telling of a survivor’s story.