A misguided, awful book

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Nicolas Mahler, the artist who drew this comic book version of Bernhard's novel, that Bernhard would have despised him.

There's a popular reception of Bernhard's "Old Masters" (the original) that sees it as a funny book, and it is, but it's important to ask what kind of humor is at stake. It is a "comedy" (Bernhard's word) in the way that "Leonce and Lena" is a "comedy," not in the way that Sunday comics are comedies. it is venomous, full of despair and

"Old Masters" is a parody of certain kinds of negative judgments, especially about visual art, but that does not mean the author is light-hearted. I think Bernhard would have hated this book with the same despair that he felt over contemporary theater (note the last line of this book!), contemporary music (he rejected even the canon of avant-garde composers, the ones Adorno triumphed, and prefered Hauer's monotonous endless dissonances), writers, (see his dismissal of Marianne Fritz, who was published by one of his own publishers, Suhrkamp), and painting. "Old Masters" rejects all of painting, except Goya and the one painting by Tintoretto, and it does not do that as a joke. The idea that his themes in "Old Masters" might in some way be light-hearted, subjects for an afternoon read and a laugh, would have made him even more dementedly angry than he aready was. This is a book written during a person tragedy: that should be enough of a clue that there's more at stake than a diverting jab a bourgeois taste.

I'll take just one example. There's a double-page spread with the following text, taken from "Old Masters":

"We could have accepted so many great minds and so many old masters as companions, but they are not a replacement for people, so said Reger, in the end we are, by all these so-called great minds and these so-called old masters, left alone, and we see that we will be mocked by these great minds and old masters in the most vulgar ways." (pp. 124-25).

Bernhard struggled to compare himself to "great minds" like Wittgenstein, and took their lack of companionship very seriously. This was a person for whom mostof human society was intolerable, and he hoped, repeatedly, that he could find some common ground with people he admired. So the sentiment in this passage is as serious as any could be for him: since people couldn't be companions, at least there could be solace in art--until, that is, it became apparent that even the great "old masters" would have despised him.

And how does Mahler illustrate this? With a scene on the left-facing page of Reger, sitting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, comically small on his museum bench, with a wide flat-brimmed Italian priest's hat. He sares out at a cordon, and beyond it, the lower parts ofseveral large, dark, looming picture frames, too high above his eye height to see. On the right-facing page, Reger and his bench have shrunk down to the width of a couple coins on the page. The cordon has moved and now it surrounds him. Except for that, the page is blank, except for the words "left alone" in a title box, floating in the air. It's sentimental and whimsical at the same time: two emotions Bernhard hated. "Old Masters" is acidic, as full of vitriol as a book can be, and its humor is pitch black. Anyone, like Mahler, who reads it as whimsical, poignant, or simply amusing, is misunderstanding Bernhard's serious and very hard-earned judgments against Austrian society: Mahler is exactly the kind of uncomprehending bourgeois whom Bernhard parodied in other novels, and in his prize acceptance speeches, a person who does not see the serious judgments behind the "comedy."

I'm sorry if this review seems too negative for an internet forum. I could feel Bernhard writhing as I read this book, and to be faithful to my sense of his accomplishment I felt I had to respond--useless as it is. And--of course--it doesn't matter if Mahler misunderstood Bernhard, because he has produced a book of his own, full of the easily digested light humor Bernhard did not intend. It's just not an interesting book.