Walking (narration)
Gehen is a 94 book-page story by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard , which addresses the causes and triggers of the maddening of the character Karrer , as well as general considerations about existence and thinking. It was first published in 1971 by Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt am Main .
content
The narrator and a certain Oehler go for a walk. Meanwhile, Oehler speaks continuously and the narrator reports this by quoting him partly directly and partly indirectly. The subject of Oehler's monologizing is the recent madness of their mutual friend Karrer, who is now in a psychiatric institution.
The search for the causes for this is an occasion for Oehler to argue about the nature of thinking and understanding as well as existence itself. Oehler's statements are mixed up with earlier statements by Karrer, which Oehler reports, and also with the reporting of his own earlier statements that he had made in conversation with Karrer's doctor, Scherrer.
Reflecting on the facts and conditions of the world would expose the catastrophic intolerance of existence: “ So every day becomes hell for us, whether we like it or not, and what we think becomes when we reconsider it, when we have the necessary mental coldness to do it and have sharpness of mind, in any case always towards something mean and base and superfluous, which depresses us in the most shocking way for life. "It is an art " to endure the unbearable and, what is horrible, not to feel horrible as such. "
Oehler sees the suicide of a close friend of Karrers, the gifted chemist Hollensteiner, as another cause. He was not sufficiently supported by the Austrian state, but did not want to emigrate because of his love for Austria, which is why he ultimately committed suicide ("If we offset the beauty of this country with the meanness of this state, says Oehler, we come to suicide") .
Oehler tells the narrator about the triggering event for Karrer's nervous breakdown: the visit to Rustenschacher's shop, which Karrer and Oehler entered after a walk. Karrer, already in a state of excitement, had the shopkeeper Rustenschacher's nephew hold countless pairs of trousers in front of the light, but found one or more "sparse spots" on each item . That is why he questioned the material quality of these pants, which were made of "first-class English fabrics" , but, according to Karrer's assumption, more likely to be made from "Czechoslovak rejects" . Even after this claim was denied and the high quality was assured even by Rustenschacher himself, Karrer did not allow himself to be changed and became more and more excited about this fact. He repeated his assertion over and over again until he finally apparently mentally collapsed and only stammered "these sparse places, these sparse places, these sparse places" in an endless loop.
As the final cause, Oehler thematizes the connection between walking and thinking, which he describes as an actually unfavorable one, since he would have driven Karrer and Oehler into a state of mental exhaustion during their weekly walks: "That this practice of walking and thinking makes the most tremendous nerve tension We had thought that we could not continue for a long time without damage, and in fact we were not able to continue the practice, says Oehler, Karrer had to draw the conclusions from this " .
Main motives
The motif of mental illness, here as a consequence of reflecting on the world and thinking, is the dominant one and can already be found in Frost , Thomas Bernhard's first novel.
The authenticity of thinking achieved through the seemingly literal quotation of the expressing people, which seems to be poured into language, paired with the meta-reflection and its consequences is a decisive motive in Gehen .
The motive of hating Austria is most clearly evident in his criticism of the Austrian state, which drove the figure of Hollensteiner to suicide by disregarding his achievements.
The negativism that runs through Bernhard's entire work is also the mainspring in Gehen and manifests itself most clearly in the postulated unbearability of all existence and life itself as a process of aggravation , which only leaves the way out to death ( Hollensteiner ) or mental illness ( Karrer ).
stylistics
In its stylistic constancy, walking is a prime example of the Bernhard style. Essentially, it is a matter of "a linguistic tendency that is strengthened here and thus probably reaches its extreme point in Bernhard's work."
The narrative model is that of an anonymous self who does not or only rarely has a say. Rather, what a second ( Oehler ) tells the narrating self or what a third ( Karrer ) has already told the second ( Oehler ) before or what the second tells the narrator, what the second says elsewhere, is reproduced in indirect, rarely also direct speech has said before to a third party. This "nested [...] structure of perspective mediation instances" can sometimes make the speaking subject unrecognizable .
As a result, inquiry formulas appear extremely frequently: "says Oehler" or "so Oehler", for example, appear a total of 474 times on only 94 book pages.
In general, repetitions of any kind are characteristic of walking : repetitions of single words within one to several sentences are common: "You change your habit, says Oehler, by walking with me now not only on Wednesday, but also on Monday, which means now alternately with me in one direction (Wednesday) and the other (Monday), while I change my habit by always going Wednesday with them, Monday but with Karrer, but now Monday and Wednesday and also Monday go with them and so with them Wednesday in one direction (in the east) and Monday with you in the other (in the west) direction. "
It is the same with parallelisms , which occur more frequently than average. Oehler is actually constantly afraid of having to freeze to death, while I am constantly afraid of having to suffocate.
Through this paradigmatic and syntagmatic repetition technique "literary speech hardly seems to move, circles [...] around individual words, accumulates [...] at certain points and obsessively attaches itself to them."
Even superlatives are often used exalted and seemingly for no reason: "The suicide of the chemist Hollensteiner had a catastrophic effect on Karrer," says Oehler, "had to have an effect on Karrer as it did on Karrer, in the most devastating way , chaotizing the most unprotected mental state of Karrers in the deadliest. "
Together with the often used absolutizing adjectives such as always, never, constantly, total, absolute, completely, natural, perfect, etc. and the auxiliary verb haben, the result is the strongly apodictic speaking typical of Bernhard .
Formally, the long, heavily nested sentences and the missing paragraphs (only two on 94 book pages) give the impression of a static block of script .
interpretation
Walking as an analysis of thought and existence
In an interpretation that is strongly oriented towards the content, walking is “the literary staging of that fundamental instability” , a mental instability that at any time, if you think too far, can end in madness: “If you go as far as Karrer,” says Oehler, “One is suddenly decided and absolutely crazy and worthless in one fell swoop.” It is thus “over long stretches a measurement of the sphere of influence of human thought, the mind and language” , it also shows the “impossibility of a smooth communication of mind and body and the difficulty of mastering both ” . As in the story, the situation in Rustenschacher's shop is of particular importance in terms of interpretation, since clothing (here: pants) "protects against the influences of nature, but also as a civilization-shaped edging of the naked body" and therefore themselves Karrer's inner excitement about their incorrectly reported quality can be interpreted as a “fundamental sense of existence of being exposed” . This theme is also continued in the figure of Hollensteiner , whose fate shows the “destructive behavior of a society towards an extraordinary individual” .
Walking as a linguistic experiment
Another way of interpreting walking is to focus on formal rather than content-related elements and properties. The content is “almost completely in the background in favor of the linguistic experiment [...]” and is sometimes even “taken to absurdity” . The aim of the experiment is to “make thinking visible” , that is, to transform thoughts into language, for which Bernhard developed an “individual narrative method ” (see stylistics).
Adaptation
Under the title “Izlaženje”, an adaptation by Barbi Marković was published by the Belgrade publishing house Rende in 2006 , which translated the text into Serbian and the Belgrade club scene. The translation back into German by Mascha Dabić was published by Suhrkamp in 2009 under the title “Ausgang”.
literature
- Thomas Bernhard: Go . Frankfurt 1971.
- Manfred Mittermayer: Thomas Bernhard . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1995, ISBN 3-476-10291-2 .
- Norbert W. Schlinkert : Wanderer in Absurdistan: Novalis, Nietzsche, Beckett, Bernhard and all the rest. An investigation into the appearance of the absurd in prose. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005. In it: speaking as a spiral. Thomas Bernhard's story Going , Bernhard's text passage as suction , Half a suicide as a whole thing? The separation of body and mind in Thomas Bernhard's Walk , pp. 101–114. ISBN 978-3-8260-3185-4 .
- Stefan Winterstein: Reductions, empty spaces, contradictions. A rereading of the story "Gehen" by Thomas Bernhard . In: Martin Huber, Manfred Mittermayer, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić (eds.): Thomas Bernhard Yearbook 2004. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2005, pp. 31–54.
- Michael Billenkamp: Thomas Bernhard. Narrative and poetological practice . Heidelberg 2008.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking. Frankfurt 1971. p. 10.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking. Frankfurt 1971. p. 12.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking. Frankfurt 1971. p. 37.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking. Frankfurt 1971. pp. 56-57.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking. Frankfurt 1971. p. 73.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking. Frankfurt 1971. p. 84.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking . Frankfurt 1971, p. 11.
- ^ Mittermayer, Manfred: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. p. 69.
- ↑ See Billenkamp, Michael: Thomas Bernhard. Narrative and poetological practice. Heidelberg 2008. pp. 190-202.
- ^ Mittermayer, Manfred: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. p. 70.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking. Frankfurt 1971. p. 8.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking . Frankfurt 1971, p. 9
- ^ Mittermayer, Manfred: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. p. 69.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking . Frankfurt 1971, p. 33
- ^ Mittermayer, Manfred: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. p. 71.
- ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Walking. Frankfurt 1971. p. 14.
- ^ Mittermayer, Manfred: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. p. 71.
- ^ Mittermayer, Manfred: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. p. 71.
- ^ Mittermayer, Manfred: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. p. 72.
- ^ Mittermayer, Manfred: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. p. 72.
- ^ Mittermayer, Manfred: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. p. 72.
- ^ Billenkamp, Michael: Thomas Bernhard. Narrative and poetological practice. Heidelberg 2008. p. 395.
- ^ Billenkamp, Michael: Thomas Bernhard. Narrative and poetological practice. Heidelberg 2008. p. 265.
- ^ Billenkamp, Michael: Thomas Bernhard. Narrative and poetological practice. Heidelberg 2008. p. 265.
- ^ Billenkamp, Michael: Thomas Bernhard. Narrative and poetological practice. Heidelberg 2008. p. 395.
- ↑ http://www.rende.rs/knjizara/?48,izlazenje--barbi-markovic
- ↑ http://www.suhrkamp.de/autoren/barbara_markovic_7631.html