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Ungleichzeitigkeiten: Class Relationships in Bernhard's Fiction

from Bernhard's Social Worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2017

Jonathan Long
Affiliation:
University of Durham, United Kingdom
Mark M. Anderson
Affiliation:
Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University, New York, NY
Paola Bozzi
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of German University of Milano, Italy
Stephen D. Dowden
Affiliation:
Professor of Germanic Languages, Chair at Brandeis University, Boston
Ruediger Goerner
Affiliation:
Professor of German LiteratureSchool of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, Birmingham, UK
Gitta Honegger
Affiliation:
Professor of German, Arizona State University
Jonathan Long
Affiliation:
Lecturer in German, University of Durham, UK.
Dagmar C. G. Lorenz
Affiliation:
Professor of German at the University of Illinois, Chicago
Willy Riemer
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of German Literature and Film, University of Delaware
Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler
Affiliation:
Professor of German Literature, Chair at the University of Vienna, Austria
Andrew J. Webber
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in German, Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge
Matthias Konzett
Affiliation:
Associate professor of German at Yale University
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Summary

In recent decades, literary criticism has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of ideology. Critics have devoted attention to the politics of narrative texts in order to show that questions of class conflict are always present in novels, even if the texts themselves attempt to contain or conceal them. This is no less true of Thomas Bernhard than of any other writer. We shall see in the course of this essay that devices such as character configurations and structures of focalization serve to encourage identification with representatives of the upper echelons of postwar Austrian society. At the same time, however, other elements of the texts can be seen to call these class hierarchies into question. This happens in two distinct ways according to the class status of the main character in the novel concerned. In section one, I analyze three novels whose protagonists and/or narrators are descendants of the Habsburg aristocracy and continue to live, stripped of their titles, in the Austria of the postwar period: Verstörung (1967), Korrektur (1975) and Auslöschung (1986). In section two, I turn my attention to two texts whose main characters are members of Austria's Großbürgertum (grand bourgeoisie): Beton (1981) and Der Untergeher (1983). The thematic and structural differences between these two groups of texts entail distinct critical approaches. Section one is concerned primarily with the means by which class oppositions exceed the binary terms within which they are ostensibly constituted, while section two analyzes the means by which the explicit class hierarchies and value systems of the texts are implicitly called into question.

A preliminary general point that needs to be made is that Bernhard's novels are set in a world that is barely recognizable as that of the late twentieth century. With few exceptions his characters either walk from one place to another, or they take the train, the dominant symbol of industrialization and modernity in the culture of the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth. Other modes of transport may be mentioned, but journeys by, for example, car or airplane are seldom actually represented. In the rare instances where motor vehicles are mentioned, they are frequently agents of destruction (Ja, Auslöschung). In addition, long-distance communication takes place not by telephone, but by mail or wire.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2002

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