from Bernhard and Drama
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2017
This essay will consider the function of costume and performance in Bernhard's writing, focusing on dramatic works and shorter narratives where items of clothing take on a ritual, even fetishistic role. More particularly, it will discuss Bernhard's short narrative text “Ist es eine Komödie? Ist es eine Tragödie?” that features an unconventional and yet, I will argue, characteristic use of costume. Discussions of what Sebastian Neumeister has called Bernhard's dandyism have shown what store the author sets by codified styles of dress and social behavior. Adolf Haslinger, in particular, has suggested that the obsessive concern with modes of dress has to be understood as a distinctive form of textual behavior, tightly bound to Bernhard's idiosyncratic Sprechgestus (gesture of speech). The writer's attachment to repetitive habits of clothing is seen as a correlative of the narrative act of speech, of patterns of iteration and reiteration. My argument here will consider this correlation more closely by focusing on those types of clothing that are associated in one way or another with acts of transgression, such as imposture, murder, and suicide, which characterize Bernhard's fiction and dramas. Styles of clothing and of speech are conventionally taken as the distinguishing features of a personal identity. Here, though, by their implication in these transgressive acts, they challenge radically the sustainability of any stable notion of identity. In this way, the investigation of identity through clothing performs a key function in Bernhard's ontological and epistemological inquiry.
The essay takes its cue from the alignment of dress and style of writing that Ingeborg Bachmann notes in her draft essay on Bernhard. Bachmann cites, as an example of Bernhard's extraordinary attention to styles of dress, the diatribe from Watten on the profound lack of “Erstklassigkeit” or first-class quality in industrialized clothing. It is, therefore, not by chance that she describes the paradoxical quality of Bernhard's style of writing by analogy with elegance of dress. On the one hand, his is a style which is folded into itself, “sozusagen ein Stil der Unauffälligkeit — nach dem alten Satz, wer am besten gekleidet ist, ist unauffällig gekleidet.” At the same time, it bears the idiosyncratic marks of his “Eigenheit” which Bachmann recognizes in the compulsive repetition of a vocabulary of apostrophe and of terror. If the general style of the writing is one of unostentatious grooming, then these compulsive features also profoundly disturb it.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.