Disturbance

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Disturbance is a 1967 novel by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard . It was first published by Insel-Verlag . As already indicated by the title, the motif complexes “Illness and Death” and “Madness and Suicide” typical of Bernhard's early prose are at the center of this text.

motto

The characters in the novel experience their Austrian environment as an increasingly disturbing, soulless and senseless “disaster context”. World and nature are presented in the hostility of their steady growth and decay as a continuous, non-intelligible monstrosity, through which every rationality is not only mocked, but gradually disturbed and abandoned to decay. In this respect, the motto from Blaise Pascal's Pensées , "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces makes me shudder", appears as meaningful as it is revealing. In the second part of the novel, the main character, Prince Saurau, suddenly cites it again in the original language (“Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraye”).

content

The novel is divided into two parts. The first, untitled and less extensive part consists of a retrospective report by the 21-year-old first-person narrator, son of a Styrian country doctor and student of Montanistik. He describes the events of a consultation trip on which he accompanies his father and in the course of which he meets a number of physically and mentally deteriorating patients. To a large extent the narrator reproduces the statements, reports and judgments made by his father. From these utterances, mostly conveyed in indirect speech, the reader gets the picture of a cruel, meaningless nature as well as a "thoroughly sick, violent and maddening" rural Austrian population. In the course of the plot, the reader learns, among other things, of a dying old woman, a literary industrialist living in complete isolation, and a mentally and physically crippled, but once highly musical young person. The cases of illness shown are becoming more and more severe from ward to ward. During the penultimate visit to the sick man in the “Fochlermühle”, the narrator also witnesses a scenario that appears grotesque in its drastic form: the slaughter of dozens of exotic birds by the miller's boys.

The father's utterances and the self-reflective narrative passages interspersed in the course of the plot also convey a picture of the complicated relationships between the first-person narrator, his father, and a sister of the first-person narrator who is increasingly falling into depression and illness. One learns from her mother that she succumbed to a "terminal illness" accompanied by depression.

The narrated time of the entire novel can be limited to the duration of the successive patient visits and thus to a period of about twenty-four hours. The scenes of the action are the Styrian mountain region, the places Voitsberg, Köflach and Salla as well as the fictional castle complex "Hochgobernitz". This is the residence of Prince Saurau, another patient of the country doctor. The delusional playful monologues of this figure, when played by the first-person narrator, form the content of the second part of the novel, entitled "The Prince". While the first part of the novel focused on the portrayal of the outside world and its influence on people, the second part, by shifting the focus to Prince Saurau's thought processes, takes a look into the depths of the human inner world. While the first-person narrator still appeared to be relatively present for the reader as a mediator in the first part, his utterances are now largely limited to the introductions to the speech: “said the prince”, “he said” etc. The narrator's speech no longer has any commentary function. At most, information is sporadically given about the spatial movement of the figures, walking on the inner and outer castle walls. Almost immediately, the reader finds himself exposed to the delusional solipsistic consciousness of the prince, whose monological, associative speaking constantly revolves around and varies a certain repertoire of topics. These subject complexes are, on the one hand, the natural omnipresence of death and the absurdity of human existence that follows, and, on the other hand, the impossibility of communication and knowledge in the medium of language. In terms of content, the prince monologue is initially about the three applicants for a managerial post, whose verbal disparagement the prince seems to like. This is followed by anecdotes and reflections on events in his life (e.g. the suicide of his father), a report on a flood disaster as well as dream depictions of the prince. An extensive dream report describes the content of an imagined letter written by the prince's son after his suicide. This expresses a fear of the prince related to the destruction of Hochgobernitz after his death.

interpretation

Gradation of the cases of illness as a structural principle

The cases of illness, as they are described in the first part of the novel, are not causally linked in their order, but, as already mentioned, increase in their drasticness. This is a kind of structural principle of the novel plot. The "gradation of illnesses or madness from station to station" becomes more and more obvious for the reader in the course of the first part. It finds its sad, but downright grotesque climax in the figure of Krainer, the last patient before arriving at the Prince's. The physical crippling of Krainer forces him - according to the narrator - to make "the movements of a giant insect". There is a subliminal connection between the increasingly tightening “tour de malaise”, as the narrator experiences, and the approach to Hochgobernitz, Prince Saurau's castle. This impression resulting from the narrator's descriptions is related to the peculiar topography of the area: the way to Hochgobernitz leads through an increasingly narrowing and darkening mountain valley. The Fochlermühle, the penultimate stop on the tour, is located “deep in the dark gorge” and “completely by itself, just below the Saurau Castle”. There is only a "dangerous path" on a "rock face" leading to the castle itself.

Narrative perspective

The protocol-like presentation of monologues or linguistic utterances by a first-person narrator represents a typical Thomas Bernhard experience, also in other novels such as B. “Frost” is the narrative construction used. The resulting, sometimes confusing play with perspectives is certainly one of the most interesting aspects of the novel from a formal point of view.

It is noticeable that the initially extremely distant narrative attitude of the narrator, his "cool reporting style", visibly changed in the course of the first part of the novel. While the narrator initially restricts himself to reproducing his father's utterances and descriptions, "hiding behind his father's statements, as it were", he reveals more and more of himself in the course of the first part. With the passages that reflect his relationship to his sister and father, as well as in the more subjective descriptions of places and people, the narrator indirectly characterizes himself and becomes more and more vivid as a figure for the reader - not least in his role as a son. In parallel with the increasing intensity of the experience, the narrator also relies more and more to his surroundings and the situations described. Its initial distance disappears. The mediated, indirect speech is replaced by one's own perspective, often introduced with “I thought”. He has the feeling of having to "suffocate" and states that he is "completely in harmony with the darkness in the gorge [...] depression". He also remarks: “Suddenly the world actually seemed to me to be uncanny; Never before had I found it to be so eerie as while we were driving further and further into the gorge. ”In the narrator's statements, an increasing disorder can be seen as a reaction to his experiences - which, by the way, are no less disturbing for the reader.

Insofar as the perspective of what is represented in the course of the first part increasingly invites identification with the narrator, the complete retreat of the first-person narrator in the subsequent description of the princely monologue is no small irritation for the reader. This in turn has a "disturbing" effect of the monologue on the reader and also puts the narrator in an increasingly puzzling light. For someone who asks the question of the possibility of reporting such a monologue from memory, the narrator must appear implausible.

characters

Patient

The sick people the narrator encounters in the first part sometimes have traits in common with each other and with Prince Saurau: They suffer from insomnia, show signs of madness in their nature and live in a forced or deliberately induced isolation. They thus fulfill a function that points to the prince. This “reference and mirror character to the prince” is of course only revealed to the reader after reading the book.

The father

The monologues and statements of the father conveyed by the narrator show striking parallels to the monologue of the prince. The comparability of the utterances consists in their apodictic and repetitive character as well as in terms of content. So share the two figures z. B. a radical skepticism of language, which manifests itself in the doctor's belief that "it is impossible to make yourself understood".

The Prince

The second part of the novel, entitled “Der Fürst”, consists almost exclusively of a long monologue by Prince Saurau, which Prince Saurau gives during a tour of the outer wall of his Hochgobernitz Castle. For Bernhard, Hochosterwitz Castle in Carinthia was the inspiration and model for the castle in the novel . The monologue revolves around the events of the first part of the novel and is characterized by misanthropic reflections on the possibility of communication through language and reflections on the necessary disintegration of all human efforts and the futility of all human actions.

The prince reveals his general criticism of the language in utterances such as "The time in which we live is obviously not enough to be understood" and "There is nothing to explain, there is nothing to enlighten".

What is striking is the eye-catching discrepancy between the apparent insight into the uselessness of the communication and the recognition of the impossibility of communication on the one hand and the excessive urge to communicate and excessive monological speaking on the other. Such a contradicting disposition is the typical characteristic of a whole series of Bernhard figures.

It is obvious that the similarity, yes: the mirror image of the two characters in their gloomy view of the world, as a narrative medium, is aimed directly at irritating the reader. The doctor's statements claim a certain objectivity, whereas those of the prince, as the narrator confirms, are delusional. However, to the extent that what is said by both characters appears to be interchangeable, "the boundaries between normality and abnormality, between rationality and madness [...] here completely become blurred".

A general feature of the novel related to the prince is the two-part conception of "disturbance". Insofar as the prince in his manic monologue constantly refers to the nature surrounding him, presented in the first part as a kind of 'death landscape', as well as to the universal context of suffering in human existence, the first part can be understood as an illustration leading to the prince monologue. At the level of the novel conception, the prince is given a stage for his “apodictic self-portrayal”, which contributes significantly to the persuasiveness, urgency and complexity of this figure.

Early reception

In the literary context of the sixties, Bernhard's disturbance was to a certain extent an “out of date novel”. Stylistically and in terms of content, the work can be placed in the tradition of existentialist and absurd literature since the 1950s , as its treatment of dark, existential topics such as "death", "madness" and "suicide" means that it differs from the predominant currents of documentary and politically committed literature of the sixties took off.

Against this background, a harsh contemporary criticism can be explained, as formulated, for example, by Herbert Eisenreich in 1967 in a review in Der Spiegel entitled “Irrsinn im Alpenland” . Eisenreich stated that in the monologue of the prince “an anti-rational, anti-civilizing, anti-urban affect becomes evident”, “which in the political sphere is the root of every (green, brown, red or other) totalitarianism”. He also emphasized that the “invectives against the idea and reality of the democratically organized state”, as they can be found in numerous numbers in the novel, “differ from those of certain ahistorically thinking young West German poets only through better German”, and finally to the judgment to get: "With Thomas Bernhard, the jungle has broken out again in the midst of the decidedly urban literature of Austria". Bernhard responded to this criticism with a letter to the editor to Der Spiegel , in which he asked that his next book "please be discussed by a chimpanzee or mole monkey who was of course also born or resident in Upper Austria".

Peter Handke wrote the text “When I read bewilderment by Thomas Bernhard” about his reading of the novel .

literature

Primary

Secondary

  • Sabine Hillebrand: Strategies of Confusion. On the storytelling of ETA Hoffmann, Thomas Bernhard and Giorgio Manganelli . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-631-33947-X .
  • Manfred Kluge: Thomas Bernhard. Disturbance . In: Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers new literature lexicon . Kindler, Munich 1989, pp. 599f.
  • Hajo Steinert: Writing about death. From Thomas Bernhard's disturbance to the narrative prose of the seventies . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-8204-5126-9 , pp. 106-139.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Manfred Kluge: Thomas Bernhard. Disturbance. In: Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers new literature lexicon. Kindler, Munich 1989, pp. 599f.
  2. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 5.
  3. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 173.
  4. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 8.
  5. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 20.
  6. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 76.
  7. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 59.
  8. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 5. 68.
  9. ^ Sabine Hillebrand: The narrative technique of Thomas Bernhard's disturbance. In: Hillebrand, Sabine: Strategies of Confusion. On the storytelling of ETA Hoffmann, Thomas Bernhard and Giorgio Manganelli. Frankfurt a. M: Europäische Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1999, pp. 106-139, p. 110.
  10. ↑ Hillebrand (1999): p. 114.
  11. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 5. 63.
  12. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 5. 73.
  13. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 5. 71.
  14. ↑ Hillebrand (1999): 118.
  15. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 29.
  16. ^ KunstHaus Wien: Bernhard's Austria, paragraph at the bottom
  17. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 5. 199.
  18. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 5.87.
  19. ↑ Hillebrand (1999): p. 131.
  20. ↑ Steinert, Hajo: Writing about death. From Thomas Bernhard's disturbance to the narrative prose of the seventies. Frankfurt a. M .: Lang, 1984, p. 31.
  21. ↑ Steinert (1984): p. 23.
  22. ^ Herbert Eisenreich on Thomas Bernhard: Disturbance Der Spiegel, May 1, 1967
  23. ↑ Der Spiegel, May 29, 1967, p. 23.

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