Cassandra Voices

Tag: Thomas Bernhard

  • The Austrian Mind

    There still exists – even today – a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness – or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ – had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe.
    Joseph Roth, On the End of the World (first published in 1933).

    Late last month 28.9% of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by Herbert Kickl, an avowedly anti-migrant, anti-Islamic party, founded in the 1950s by former Nazis. The governing conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) gained 27.5% lost 20 seats, while its coalition partner, the Greens received 8.2%, losing 10 seats. In third place, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) received 21.1%, marking its worst result ever. In fourth place, the liberal NEOS increased its share to 9.1%.

    We can only hope that the conservatives do not enter into a coalition with Kickl’s party as Hindenburg did with Hitler’s Nazi party. Perhaps a Dutch solution will at least dilute the forces of darkness. Kickl was formerly the speech writer of the now-deceased long-time leader of the Freedom Party, Jörg Haider, but Kickl is far less ambiguous in his pronouncements than his former boss.

    What’s clear is that the far right is on the rise across Europe, Ireland and the world. My own childhood in Ireland, as a half-Austrian, not unlike Hugo Hamilton’s experience as recounted in his autobiography The Speckled People, involved casual racism and bullying on account of my background.

    At one level Austria is among the most cultured of nations.  So, I defend it. Ma Vlast as Smetana said about Czech Bohemia, albeit a defensive posture often leads to a failure in understanding. Why Kickl? What is the Austrian Mind that has created this?

    Mozart family, c. 1780 (della Croce); the portrait on the wall is of Mozart’s mother.

    Mozart of Salzburg

    My family, who I am close to, hail from Salzburg, home of the Fespiele. Mozart was, of course, born in Salzburg where a little museum glorifies his brief tenure on Earth. Mozart’s music combines lyricism, frivolity and profundity in equal parts. What it points to in the human condition is not just chocolate-box fripperies, or the texture of lightness that is Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, but the darkness therein. Darkness threads through the Austrian mind, juxtaposed with light.

    Thus, Don Giovanni is about the destructive powers of rakish satanism, also evident in Stefan Zweig’s arguably best book beautifully filmed by Max Ophuls’ Letters from an Unknown Women.

    In Mozart also the incomparable Magic Flute splendidly rendered into film by Ingmar Bergman, is in effect about the dubious justification of freemasonry to which Mozart belonged; and also, a cri de coeur, in praise of enlightened and benevolent monarchism against the vectors of state and, in particular, church authoritarianism. This assertion of a wise moderation against extremism resonates today.

    The great enfant terrible of Austrian letters and its greatest post-war writer Thomas Bernhard was gloriously insulting about Austria. His masterpiece Woodcutters (1984) is about a man in a chair at a party sipping Champagne. Letting fly at Austrian bourgeois hypocrisy, he says:

    Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretence, never genuine, never real.

    In his will, Bernhard ordered that none of his works should be performed in Austria. This has been deliberately avoided. All cultures have their tropes.

    The Merry Widow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv1GNZCyL64

    Austrian Kitsch

    Culturally, Austrians, along with the Irish and British, have far too close a relationship with kitsch. The Merry Widow light operetta, like a jaded ritual, is still performed in the Lehrer Theatre in Bad Ischl and elsewhere. The Blue Danube is not unlike a classic Britpop song.

    The great Herman Broch was fascinated by kitsch, linking it correctly to a decline in values:

    The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.”

    In some respects, the triumph of kitsch paves the way for Nazism, as Broch and indeed Robert Musil have both argued. Radical evil and bad art is evident in our age too. This is a kind of camp fascism which Susan Sontag also identified.

    Beethoven was of course German, but lived and died in Vienna. His darkness is a counterpart to Mozart’s light. His deafness influences the isolated pessimism of the later atonal dark sonatas, and are close to the finality of expression in musical terms that Beckett created in language.

    His final string quartet is integral to Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, where the satanic composer, modelled on Heidegger, sells his soul to the devil.

    I have found that it must not be. The good and the noble, what they call the human, even though it is good and noble, what men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and in their moment of fulfilment, have jubilant proclaimed it is not to be. It is not to be, it will be taken back. I will take it back.

    Mann, the great German conservative, had the moral integrity to decamp to the U.S. and to Switzerland, but a crucial point to appreciate is that conservatism is not all bad if it conserves the good and the ethical too. So, the Christian Democrats in Austria have a stark choice, whether to embrace satanism or not.

    Sleepwalkers

    The rise of Nazism is also anticipated brilliantly in Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, one of the great novels of Austrian heritage. In the character of Hugenau, a man solely motivated by profit – homo economicus to use the term favoured by the nefarious law and economics movement in Chicago – we have a real sense in 1918 of a brutalised generation containing the seeds of fascism. The book culminates in the murder of a journalist and the rape of his wife.

    This is akin to neoliberal Europe today where meaningful journalism has been effectively killed and defiled, as state-sponsored criminals launch hatred at ‘the other.’ Off with their heads, or to Rwanda, or now Albania.

    The legendary Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke in The White Ribbon, based in pre-war Germany at the turn of the twentieth, demonstrated how damage had been done to a whole generation by a cruel form of authoritarianism. Today, social media has augmented the problem of semi-literacy. Strange fruit, as Billie Holiday would say, is ready for demonisation. In Ireland the neoliberal governing parties have generated the social conditions for riots and a new decadence.

    As for Italy, the land of Fellini and Da Vinci, where the far-right mayor of Monfalcone near Joycean Trieste has banned cricket as she does not like Bangladeshi people in her town; they only play cricket she says and contribute nothing. The fact that such football clubs as AC Milan was originally a cricket club seems lost on her. Mayor Anna Maria Casing, elected on an anti-immigration platform is now an MEP. Her far-right colleague, prime minister Meloni prosecuted Roberto Saviano the legendary journalist for calling her a bastard over her immigration policies.

    So, Austria is not alone in its infamy.

    The darkly pessimistic Herman Broch shows how the far right and populism go hand-in-hand with hatred:

    It is always he, unfortunate wretch, who assumes the role of executioner in the process of value-disintegration, and on the day when the trumpets of judgment sound it is the man released from all values who becomes the executioner of a world that has pronounced its own sentence.

    The Rathaus (City Hall), the seat of the local government.

    Golden Age

    The golden age of Vienna ended peremptorily with the dismembering of the Austrian empire, after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo sparked the inferno of World War I, when leaders sleepwalked into war. This is the state of somnambulism that Broch also identified evident in Musil.

    The word Kaakinen is Broch’s playful word for Vienna which, in effectively means shit. Thus, he writes in The Man Without Qualities:

    Stupidity is active in every direction and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

    In Zweig’s retroactive memoir The World of Yesterday there are references to Freud and Herzl (one of the founders of Zionism), among the titanic intellectual figures of pre-war Vienna. These are curiously name-dropped like the celebs of our time, but in a curious state of derealisation of how history is closing in. Freud, who was Austrian, died as an emigre from fascism in the U.K..

    Whether the concept of hysteria is sexual or not, no doubt this is a hysterical age where all sorts of fantasises are being sublimated into nefarious activities and agendas – and indeed where persecution delusions are omnipresent. This leads to the scapegoating of immigrants.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1930.

    The Sound of Silence

    Ludwig Wittgenstein is central to our age of distortion and manipulative language. The fundamental achievement of his Tractatus is a recognition of the limitations of language. It can only show and represent, he argues, and, within limitations, clarify. Thus, language is context-specific, self-limiting and denuded of ethical and moral context.

    Reading Wittgenstein, like reading Hemingway, Camus, and Beckett, clarifies how language should be used clearly, and is most useful for everyday life, but not ethics. The final line of the Tractatus has acquired a mythical status: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

    Silence is important, but when we can speak let us speak out ethically. A recent Austrian Nobel laureate is Peter Handke is a great writer, though not in Thomas Bernhard’s league. Handke’s flirtation with the Serbian cause, however well-intentioned and misconstrued, leave a degree of doubt, given the Austrian mindset, but there is a rich warm humanism in his work.

    Handke argues you must create silence or, rather, the effect of silence, through words. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams his recent recollections of his mother’s suicide is jaw-dropping, and among the best books published in the last ten years. So let us create the silence of words, before it is too late.

    Feature Image ‘Avenue in the park of Schloss Kammer’ produced by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt in 1912 whilst he was living near the village of Unterach on the southern shore of lake Attersee in Austria.

  • Restoring Wild Literature

    L’histoire naturelle, ce n’est rien autre que la nomination du visible.
    Michel Foucault – Les mots et les choses

    Walking with my dog this morning, I was struck by the various rewilding projects which certain aspects of my local community have been embracing. For example my twelve-year-old daughter’s primary school, in its wisdom, has decided to carve out niches in its grounds for ‘Managed Wildlife’, otherwise known as rewilding projects.

    What does this mean? Well, whereas previously the grass would have been meticulously trimmed like a tight haircut, thus permitting no wildlife to blossom or bloom, be it wildflowers or grass, the latest trends is to encourage the wild to grow again.

    Any botanist will tell you that in the absence of wild flowers and long stemmed grasses the biodiversity of our green spaces suffer. An absence of flowers lead to less insects and less insects to less birds, and on and on.

    Now, instead of regimented green empty spaces a profusion of wild flowers and grasses grow, roped off so school children cannot run amok, and destroy the phenomenal growth on display. I also noticed that the local council has adopted similar rewilding practices along the green spaces by the roadsides. This has increased bird song all around, which is really quite wonderful.

    While Argo, my Jack Russel of four years seemed quite content sniffing the blossoming flowers, and as I extracted the biodegradable poop bag in anticipation of his morning’s delivery, I couldn’t help but think how our own culture would benefit from a similar rewilding process.

    The Wild Ones

    When was the last time that you read a book that was described as ‘Wild?’ Yeah, that’s what I thought. We never read such an adjective alongside a work of contemporary literature any longer. And why is that? Why are there no more Flann O’Briens, Thomas Bernhards or William Burroughs? Where are all the wild men and women of literature?

    William S. Boroughs

    You don’t hear about them anymore. Why is that? And more importantly, what does this say about contemporary society? These are just some of the questions that I considered while looking at the rewilding projects this morning.

    One of the things you will read about, on a similar topic, in both the mainstream media and on social media sites is the apparent decline of Western culture. There is a lot of rhetoric, particularly promoted in far-right media that are waging a cultural war against what they see as the fundamental destruction of Western values by what they perceive as the inexorable rise of political correctness or ‘Woke’ culture. Why is this? And could there be any truth in what they are saying?

    Having completed the paragraph above, I now enter the political minefield of the culture wars. This article could be dismissed as yet another text advocating a far-right agenda, but hear me out, as I can assure you that I am not a Populist, and have nothing to do with exclusionary ideas, Yet nether am I an apologist for the political left. So, what am I then?

    I am, first and foremost, a Writer. Yes, with a capital W. And that means that I am a champion of free speech. This is extremely important as it seems to me that we are at a cultural impasse in the West because publishers are so afraid of the negative feedback that they refuse to publish anything deemed offensive,

    As a result, these days, there is practically nothing of any interest going on in contemporary literature. This probably sounds very polemical, but I ask the question again; when was the last time that you read anything remotely Wild lately?

    I am reminded of Rabelais, now, particularly. His bawdy sense of humour which was to cause so much shock, and yes, offence to some. That was the whole point! There was a time when to publish meant shocking people out of their comfort zones.

    If literature or writing could ever be described as having a function then it is to shock people out of their day-to-day existence, and get them to sit up and question it. That is to say, question the society in which they are living.

    But that is not the case today because there are no wild writers any more. They have all been silenced. The great blanket of fear has gently stolen over a whole civilisation, and now everyone is looking over their shoulders. Nobody has the guts to say anything difficult or troubling, without necessarily believing in it, any more, as no publishers has the guts to publish it for fear of a backlash from the politically correct ‘Woke’ brigade.

    How did we get here?

    It is a particularly disturbing phenomenon for me as an Irish writer who grew up in Cork during the 1980s, which was a period of incredible repression, mainly due to collusion between Church and the State.

    Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)

    I eventually escaped the awful cultural conformity and went to live in Paris like so many writers and artists before me. Globalisation and the boom eventually blew away that culture of fear, and I returned to live in Ireland on the eve of the millennium in order to experience first hand the most historic cultural shifts that have taken place on this island since independence one hundred years ago.

    The boom years had an enormous effect on every single aspect of Irish life, in particular the influence the Church which gave way to a newfound secularisation.

    But what has happened in the intervening years? Consider education and the huge changes that have happened there. I remember while studying for a PME in one of Ireland’s leading universities a few years ago being advised to drop history as a subject if I wanted to have any real chance of getting a job. Instead I was encouraged to train to become a religious teacher. It was as if we had come full circle!

    As an Irish writer, with over ten publications behind me, I seriously worry about the future. In the last couple of years, I have had to reject offers of working with commercial publishers, both here and abroad, who wanted me to make major changes to books that I had written as they were too scared to take them on in their current form. My best selling book, for example, More Micks than Dicks despite selling a thousand copies in its first year of publication remains out of print as the content is considered to ‘wild’ for current tastes.

    This is sad. The satirical book is a send up of academia in the spirit of Beckett and yet remains out of print as it may ‘offend’ certain sensibilities. On that basis, I ask the question: would Beckett have had a single one of his books published today? This question must be considered not only by the world of literature but society at large, if there is to be any significant change.

    Recently, I was looking at a European website offering courses for teachers and students alike which were being financed in part by the European Union. I found the contents of the majority of the courses truly shocking, as they amplified these newfound sensitivities. A lot of buzz words, without any real substance. You know you have a serious problem when your system of education is actually offering you nothing of any real substance.

    Of course, gardens and ideas, more specifically philosophical systems, have been around for as long as man has been cultivating nature.

    Royal Hospital Kilmainham.

    One only has to think of the exquisite formal gardens at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham here in Dublin. These formal gardens, the only ones of their kind on the island, are a beautifully ornate reconstruction of the gardens one would fine typically anywhere in Europe during the period of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.

    The gardens, rather like the rational mind, were symmetrically ordered into very carefully refined partitions, labyrinthian yet clearly purposeful and well-defined, so that in the botanical body we can find man’s most elaborate and refined expression of his development of order in nature.

    The grasses and hedges are so neatly trimmed, so tidy are they that a team of gardeners are required to keep on top of the work, ensuring that an apparently disorderly nature does not predominate. Indeed, one merely has to peer over the walls of the garden and look onto some of the common land that surrounds the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham to be reminded of a wilder nature when she is not maintained by man.

    And there you have a prefect illustration of the mind body duality characteristic of the Enlightenment. Nature on her own is chaotic and man, being a part of nature, must keep a firm hold on himself, subduing his wild passions. Such was the moral instruction, at least, behind the formal gardens at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham.

    But we should remember their historical origins also: the gardens were to be a place for peaceful contemplation for reposing soldiers recuperating from the various wars they had borne witness to. Indeed, one only has to visit the Hospital grounds and walk along its carefully laid out lanes to appreciate the solace and contentment that the gardens must have brought to the poor, suffering men.

    However, the appreciation of gardens and nature is a very subjective experience. What may bring clarity and peace to one – the formal garden for example – may be the stuff of nightmares for others.

    To get a better demonstration of the multiple facets of human personality, I would recommend a stroll through your nearest allotments like where my wife spends the greater part of her days. There, here again in Skerries, you can see the very rich profusion of plants in some of the organic plots.

    She cultivates numerous species of tomato growing in her polytunnel: Black Russian, Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Chocolate Cherry, Hillbilly, Jubilee, Ukrainian Purple and Old German each one as distinctly ornate and tasty as the next. The very diversity of nature, cultivated or otherwise, is simply remarkable. Surely a similar form of diversity should be reflected in our nation’s literature? Yet is it?

    And so I ask the question again. Where are all the wild women and men of literature gone? The truth of the matter is we are killing our Western Culture, just as we killed our environment. This is one of the principle reasons why the West is in decline, and it is in decline. You can see the evidence everywhere; it is in our schools, in our work places, it has even crept into our pubs, the places of our supposed relaxation.

    I shall leave you with a question: if you don’t have any freedom worth speaking of, any real freedom to speak your mind, what freedom are you actually fighting for? This is a very serious question and its importance, as far as I can see, is only going to grow in stature over the coming months and years.

    Here is another: where were YOU when it died? And another: what did you do exactly to protect her?