Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Thomas Cousineau
Department of English
Washington College
Chestertown, Maryland
Becoming Bach in Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser [long version]
At one point in Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser, the unnamed narrator, after noting
his habit of repeatedly reading the same books, rematrks that he “had developed the art of
perceiving the same thing over and over as something new, developed it to a high,
absurdly high skill” (41). We, in our turn, as readers of Bernhard either develop a similar
capacity for detecting novelty amidst repetition or complain, along with many other
readers, of Bernhard’s obsessive and unrewarding redundancy. In The Loser, we find, as
we already had in Correction, a protagonist whose attempt at emulating the achievement
of an admired model leads to his suicide and a narrator in the form of a “survivor” who
somehow avoids this tragic outcome. Additionally, Bernhard’s characteristically
repetitive style, his trademark invective against Austria, the motif of the manuscript to
which the protagonist had futilely devoted his life (in this case, an autobiographical work
entitled The Loser that Wertheimer burns before committing suicide), and the presence of
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a quasiincestuous relationship between the protagonist and his sister will all be familiar
to readers of his earlier novels.
In these novels, however, the quest undertaken by the main character had been
obstructed by some external obstacle – Konrad’s wife or various members of Roithamer’s
family who wanted to the protagonist to pursue a different course. In these novels, a
solitary protagonist is pitted against a hostile world. In The Loser, however, this “one
against many” model recedes, giving way to a predicament in which the protagonist is
not alone in wanting to fulfill a certain ambition: rather, he has rivals whose aim – in this
case, to become the world’s greatest piano virtuoso – competes with his own. The
adversaries that we find in the earlier novels are not, strictly speaking, rivals: Konrad’s
wife wants only to go to [ ] instead of joining him in the lime works, while
Roithamer’s brothers lived lives completely unrelated to his own. In The Loser, however,
Glenn Gould, Wertheimer, and the narrator all come to Salzburg to study with Horowitz
in the hope of becoming “the greatest,” a goal whose rivalistic implications resonate
throughout the novel. The narrator wants to achieve supremacy as a piano virtuoso,
Gould is the moregifted competitor who denies him his this achievement, and
Wertheimer is the surrogate upon who he projects the pain of his own defeat.i
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Bernhard reinforces the scapegoating pattern that underlies this first installment of
his artistic trilogy through two related means: first, he deprives Wertheimer, the character
who has been designated for a sacrificial death of any of the potentially ennobling
features that he had attributed to Roithamer and even, although to a lesser extent, to
Konrad in The Lime Works; second, he shows his narrator, unlike in particular, the
narrator of Correction, as forming bonds (both with Glenn Gould and with his audience
of readers) through his incessant designation of Wertheimer as “the loser.” Adopting
Aldo Gargani’s formula, we can readily argue that both Roithamer and Wertheimer die
“in place of” the narrators of Correction and The Loser. The greater prominence given
to the bonds that are produced within groups, both large and small, by scapegoating,
brings the Nazi form of scapegoating, which is never far beneath the surface of any major
work by Bernhard, more intensely into view.
As I shall eventually argue, Bernhard alludes to scapegoating in three distinct
ways throughout The Loser. First, on the most obvious level, he stages Wertheimer’s
suicide as a sacrificial death thanks to which the narrator is able to escape from his own
despair and devote himself to his literary work; the designation of Wertheimer as a “loser
“is shared by Glenn Gould, who actually originated the epithet, and by readers to the
extent that they accept the narrator’s account as reliable. Second, Bernhard invents a
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comic counterpart to the scapegoating of Wertheimer by staging, through his art of
hyperbolic vituperation, the “ritual slaying” of Austria. His constant resort to
exaggeration as the hallmark of this form of scapegoating, along with creating a good
deal of laughter, assures that the narrator’s unreliability will be clearly on display; the
narrator claims that Glenn Gould joined him in his aversion to Austria, but skeptical
readers are likely to doubt, as they may not with respect to Wertheimer, that Austria
really is such a “loser.” Third, through the implicit staging of the artistic trinity formed
by Glenn Gould, J.S. Bach, and himself Bernhard presents a model of human bonding in
which there is no “loser” at all; all three contribute to an inclusive union in which the
presence of each is necessary to the creativity of the others.
On the very first page of The Loser, Bernhard alludes to three of J.S. Bach’s best
known works: the Goldberg Variations, the Art of the Fugue, and Klavierexerzitiern.
We realize, after completing our reading of the novel, that this overlooked detail,
expressing as it does three facets of Bach’s creative genius, serves as model against
which the human tragedy that we have witnessed is to be judged. The three works, while
different from each other, are expressions of the same creative inspiration. Furthermore,
they coexist with each other in a perfectly harmonious way: the existence of one does not
in the least diminish the aura of the others. The use of music to suggest a perfectly
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harmonious trinity of figures is later echoed by the brief citation of the names of three
famous virtuosos: Horowitz, Markevitch, and Végh, who exist in splendid isolation from
the “deterioration process” exemplified Gould, Wertheimer, and the narrator.
In contrast to these three musical masterpieces, Bernhard creates a “fallen” trinity
by inventing three characters – the fictionalized Glenn Gould, Wertheimer, and the
narrator – who give expression to three facets, not of his genius, but of details drawn
from his life. He gives Gould his “lung disease” (5) as well as the “unbridled laughter”
(80) for which he was well known, and adds to these his perfect command of the German
language ( ). Furthermore, he has Gould die at age fiftyone, which was Bernhard’s age
when he wrote the novel and invents the detail that Gould lived as a recluse in the cabin
in the Canadian woods (he actually lived with his parents in Toronto. Bernhard himself,
to be sure, led the life of a hermit in his home in Obernathal. To Wertheimer, he
attributes a number of his own qualities, including his shoe fetish (44), his predilection
for workingclass people (53), and his love of Dosteyevsky (62). Finally, Bernhard
“expresses” yet another facet of his personality by attributing to his narrator his own love
of Spain and Portugal (48).
Unlike Bach’s three masterpieces, the threesome formed by the fictionalized
Glenn Gould, Wertheimer, and the narrator is profoundly dysfunctional. Whether
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Bernhard is stressing the common bonds that unite his three characters or the differences
that make them so unlike each other, he continuously alludes to the conflict,
aggressiveness, and destructiveness that are at work. The movement towards unity is
experienced as a destructive leveling of distinctions, while the presence of distinctions
inevitably implies conflict and opposition. The “threepersons” involved in this human
alltohuman trinity are first, a triumphant figure (who, miraculously has no rivel – unlike
the real Glenn Gould, who had Vladimir Horowitz), second, his unsuccessful rival, and
third, a surrogate upon whom the latter projects the burden of his defeat.
Upon further reflection, we realize that the harmonious relationship that prevails
among Bach’s three musical compositions – but which disappears from relationships
within his fictionalized trio reappears in the implicit relationship formed by Bernhard
and the two predecessors who were indispensable to the making of The Loser: J.S. Bach
whose fugal music provides the aesthetic model that underlies the novel, and Glenn
Gould, whose highly original interpretations of Bach, along with his legendary
provocations as a concert performer as well as his eventual abandonment of the stage,
inspired Bernhard both as a literary artist and as a notorious troublemaker in his own
right. At one point the narrator observes: “Every person is a unique and autonomous
person and actually, considered independently, the greatest artwork of all time, I’ve
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always thought that and should have thought that, I thought” (93). While the fictional
trio that Bernhard places at the center of The Loser would seem to disconfirm this
cheerful observation, the implicit trinity that underlies its inspiration and execution
confirms it. Wertheimer wants, pathetically, to be three different persons: Gould,
Mozart, and Mahler (93). Bernhard himself turns his protagonist’s emulative tendencies
to creative uses in his actual writing of the novel. Wertheimer wants to be Schopenhauer
II, so to speak, or Kant II, Novalis II” (108). Bernhard succeeds, thanks to the mediating
role played by Glenn Gould, in becoming Bach while also remaining unarguably himself.
* * *
Throughout the novel Bernhard takes advantage of multiple opportunities to
underline the ways in which the members of his trio tend to identify with, even to fuse
with, each other: some are quite innocuous, while others lead to destructive outcomes.
Among the former, we notice that they are bound together by the unsentimental nature of
their friendship (33), that they all like big cities (2425), and that Glenn (thanks, very
likely, to an authorial invention) shares his fellow virtuosos disdain for Austria: “Glenn
was charmed by the magic of this town for three days, then he suddenly saw that its
magic, as they call it, was rotten, that basially its beauty is disgusting and that the people
living in this disgusting beauty are vulgar” (12). They likewise share the bond of
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material wealth (whose consequence of unlimited creative freedom is – as we have seen
in our reading of The Lime Works and Correction – highly problematic):
Wertheimer, like Glenn was the son of wealthy parents, not merely welltodo. I
myself was also free of all material worries. It’s always an advantage to have
friends from the same social sphere and the same economic background, I thought
as I entered the inn. Since basically we had no financial worries we could devote
ourselves exclusively to our studies, carry them out in the most radical way
possible, we also had nothing else on our minds, we simply had to keep removing
the roadblocks in our way, our professors in all their mediocrity and hideousness.
(19)
We move away from the relative calm of these shared attributes to something a bit
more conflicted when we learn that all three had to contend with familial opposition as
they pursued their musical ambitions. The parents of the fictionalized Glenn Gould (as
an example of one of bernhard’s many authorial inventions) are dead set against this
choice: “they hate me and my piano. I say Bach and they’re ready to throw up, said
Glenn. He was already world famous and his parents still hadn’t changed their point of
view” (21). Bernhard creates this misrepresentation of Gould’s biography in order to
intensify his similarity to his two rivals: the invention of a hostile family for Glenn
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duplicates the detail of Wertheimer’s similarly antagonistic family. We learn from the
narrator that Wertheimer “had studied art and therefore music only to insult his father.”
Wertheimer himself had told him that the “fact that I’m studying the piano is a
catastrophe for my father” (21). The mirroring pattern made possible by Bernhard’s
transformation of Glenn’s family from supportive to antagonistic is reflected as well by
the conflict between the narrator and his own family. By his own admission, the narrator
decides “to enroll in the Mozarteum to show them, I didn’t have the faintest idea about
music and playing the piano had never exactly been one of my passions, but I used it as a
means to an end against my parents and my entire family” (19). Violent overtones
similarly characterize a related trait that they share in common: “All our lives the three of
us have shared the desire to barricade ourselves from the world. All three of us were
born barricade fanatics” (17).
Furthermore, all of the characters are equally subject to what the narrator calls
“the disintegration process.” The universality of this process, its applicability to every
human being without respect to individual distinctions, is first evident, in typically
Bernhardian fashion, in its effects on Austrians:
The climate in the lower Alps makes for emotionally disturbed people who fall
victim to cretinism at a very early age and who in time become malevolent, I said.
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Whoever lives here knows this if he’s honest, and whoever comes here realizes it
after a short while and must get away before it’s too late, before he becomes just
like these cretinous inhabitants, these emotionally disturbd Salzburgers who kill
off everything that isn’t yet like them with their cretinism. (12)
This is quickly followed by a portrait of music students who “tread the path of music
conservatory cretinism” (13) to their destruction at the hands of their incompetent
teachers. Even people who flee the debilitating effects of urban life do not escape from
this “deterioration process,” as the narrator reminds us in his assertion that
The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the
country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them
first into idiocy, then into an absurd death. To recommend country life to a city
person so that he can stay alive is a dirty internist’s trick, I thought. All these
people who leave the city for the country so they can live longer and healthier
lives are only horrible specimens of human beings, I thought. (28).
Surprisingly, Glenn’s genius does not protect even him from succumbing, in his
turn, to this process. The narrator calls attention to his vulnerability to equalizing and
leveling forces when he refers to the studio into which Glenn retreats to perfect his art as
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his “desperation machine” (38) a term that aligns it with the “existence machine” into
which, according to Wertheimer, parents routinely throw their children:
His mother threw her child into this existence machine, all his life his father kept
this existence machine running, which accurately hacked his sn to pieces. Parents
know very well tha tthey perpetuate their own unhappiness in their children, they
go about it cruelly by having children and throwing them into the existence
machine, he said, I thought, contemplating the restaurant.
The dissolution of the distinction between the anonymous group that succumbs
ingloriously to the “deterioration process” and a genius that towers above the crowd and
enjoys immunity from this process is further suggested by the narrator’s skepticism
regarding the presumed worth of the “masterpieces” of various great artists and thinkers.
Thus, he claims that “
Our great philosophers, our greatest poets, shrivel down to a single successful
sentence, he said, I thought. We study a monumental work, for example Kant’s
work, and in time it shrivels down to Kant’s little East Prussian head and to a
thoroughly amorphous world of night and fog, which winds up in the same state
of helplessness as all the oher, he said, I thought. He wanted it to be a
monumental world and only a signle ridiculous detail is left, he said, I thought,
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that’s how it always is. In the end the socalled great minds wind up in a state
where we can only feel pity for their ridiculousness their pitifulness. (66
Likewise, in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kleist or Voltaire we see only “a pitiful being
who has misused his head and finally driven himself into nonsense” (67).
As Gitta Honegger observes in her biography of Bernhard the German title
of this novel – Der Untergeher – creates a further similarity among the three characters
that is largely missed by its English translation. An “Untergeher” as not so much a
“loser” as he is someone who undertakes a journey to a predestined as well as to a tragic
end ( ). In this respect, the epithet that Glenn Gould bestows exclusively on
Wertheimer also applies to the Canadian virtuoso whose “piano obsession” leads
inevitably (in Bernhard’s fictionalizing of his life) to his death by stroke while in the
midst of playing the Goldberg Variations.
Even Gould and Wertheimer, so different from each other it would seem, are
brought by their mirroring deaths to a point where differences are largely dissolved.
The narrator begins his narrative by suggesting that the two men died in quite different
ways: “Now of course he [Glenn Gould] didn’t kill himself like Wertheimer, but died, as
they say, a natural death” (3). As we read further in the novel, however, we come upon a
number of details that tend to collapse this initial distinction. Glenn died while playing
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the Goldberg Variations, while Wertheimer died after listening to a recording of Glenn
performing this piece and then performing it himself on a ridiculously outoftune piano.
They both are the same age at the time of their deaths, And the deaths themselves,
although in both cases instantaneous, were also the result of the long and predictable
evolution of a common obsession with virtuosity: “suicide calculated well in advance,”
as the narrator calls it. He adds a further element to this mirroring relationship between
a natural death and a suicide when he interprets Wertheimer’s death – grotesquely
although no doubt validly – as an expression of his desire to die as Glenn had died:
Wertheimer always set about his life with false assumptions, I said to myself,
unlike Glenn who always set about his existence with the right assumptions.
Wertheimer even envied Glenn Gould his death, I said to mysef, couldn’t even
put upwith Genn Gould’s death and killed himself a short while thereafter and in
truth the crucial factor for his suicide wasn’t his sister’s departure for Switzerland
but the unbearableness of Glenn Gould, as I must say, suffering a fatal stroke at
the height of his artistic powers. (1478).
He even goes so far as to suggest that Wertheimer envied Glenn his death and wanted to
“acquire” it for himself. The deaths of Gould and Wertheimer are likewise reflected in
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the situation of the narrator who, although still alive, has fallen victim to what he
describes as a “deterioration process.”
* * *
Bernhard‘s representation of oppositions that separate his three characters, like his
treatment of their similarities that verge on fusion, is marked by destructive outcomes.
There are to be sure, some contrasts that, as we had already noted with similarities, are
entirely innocuous. Thus, for example, Glenn’s “AmericanCanadian” origins distinguish
him from the two Austrian virtuosos who first meet him in the maser class offered by
Horowitz in Salzburg. Similarly, the fact that he wakes up considerably later in the
morning than do either Wertheimer or the narrator (42) is a difference that has no
emotional reverberations. To this could be added small differences in temperament:
Wertheimer always had to know what people thought of him, Glenn couldn’t have
cared less, as I also couldn’t care less, Glenn and I were always indifferent to the
opinions of our socalled peers. Wertheimer talked even when he had nothing to
say, simply because being silent had become dangerous for him, Glenn was silent
for the longest periods, as was I, I who like Glenn could be silent for days at a
time, if not for weeks, like Glenn (87)
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Even in such an otherwise minor difference, however, we may already detect intimations
of the narrator’s tendency to align himself with Gould at the expense of his erstwhile
friend. This tendency is even more explicitly in evidence when the narrator comments
that, unlike Wertheimer, he and Glenn detested public performances (16). In a somewhat
different way, the narrator’s reference to himself as a “survivor” (32) who, unlike Glenn
and Wertheimer, has not yet succumbed to the “deterioration process,” creates a
comparably invidious distinction. Likewise, the fact that the narrator is working on a
manuscript unlike Glenn who never wrote anything (a flagrant invention on Bernhard’s
part, since the real Glenn Gould wrote copiously) and also unlike Wertheimer who
burned his manuscript before committing suicide – confers a mark of superiority upon
him. In a related way, the Goldberg variations which are associated with the deaths of
Glenn and Wertheimer (Gould dies of a stroke while performing them and Wertheimer
listens to them prior to his suicide) become, for the narrator, the inspiration for the
literary project that he is about to begin.
The characteristically Bernhardian tendency to automatically translate difference
into opposition and conflict is even more clearly present in details that make difference
the cause of aggressive and ultimately destructive responses. The first of these occurs
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when the narrator describes the effect of their encounter with Horowitz on their image of
all other music teachers:
Exactly twentyeight years ago we had lived in Leopoldskron and studied with
Horowitz and we (at least Wertheimer and I, but of course not Glenn Gould)
learned more from Horowitz during a completely raindrenched summer than
during eight previous years at the Mozarteum and the Vienna Academy.
Horowitz rendered all our professors null and void. (3)
This passage intimates two destructive acts: first, the one whereby Horowitz annihilates
all other music teachers; second, and less obviously, the parentical one whereby Glenn
destroys the aspirations to pianistic distinction that had brought Wertheimer and the
narrator to Salzburg. The description of Glenn as “the most important piano virtuoso of
the century” (3) turns out not be merely an historical detail. Rather, as we are reminded
throughout the novel, it provokes a lifealtering crisis in the lives of the two Austrians,
who decide immediately to renounce their initial career plans and to pursue alternative
careers for which they have, unfortunately, no discernable talent. As the narrator
concludes, “When we meet the very best, we have to give up, I thought” (9).
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Bernhard creates a comic twist on this motif of the utterly superior performer
destroying the competition when he transforms the real Glenn Gould into a fictionalized
native speaker of German:
He, Glenn, had learned German from his maternal grandmother, which he spoke
fluently, as I’ve already indicated. With his pronunciation he put our German and
Austrian fellow students to shame, since they spoke a completely barbaric
German and speak this completely barbaric German all their lives because they
have no sense for their own language” (22).
The aggressiveness inherent in this pattern – according to which difference is
equivalent to opposition – achieves its culminating expression in the singling out of
Wertheimer as the novel’s “loser.” In this respect, the central event of the novel occurs
when Glenn designates Wertheimert as the “loser.” The narrator tells us that
Wertheimer’s eventual suicide is fated from the moment that Glenn Gould resorts to this
epithet in designating him. The remark also serves to relieve the narrator of a burden that
could have fallen with equal justice on his own shoulders. He tells us repeatedly that
both he and Wertheimer have been made into failures by their encounter with Glenn
Gould. Miraculously, however, Glenn designates only one of them as a “loser,” while
attaching to the narrator the less wounding, and perhaps even flattering epithet of “the
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philosopher.” We see evidence of this scapegoating tactic in the narrator’s unexamined
belief in the legitimacy of the epithet that Glenn attached to Wertheimer and in his related
assertion that “Glenn just saw through Wertheimer the moment they met, he completely
saw through everyone he met for the first time” (42). It is worth observing, in a
symptomatic way, that the narrator never once gives us an example of himself becoming
the designated object of Glenn’s clairvoyance. The assumption of moral superiority that
underlies passages of this sort serves as a device (which mirrors in this respect Glenn’s
designation of Wertheimer as a “loser”) through which the narrator expresses his
willingness to absolve himself at Wertheimer’s expense of a humiliation that was equally
inflicted on them both by their meeting with Glenn.ii
In yet another key example of the way in which differences tend to translate into
invidious distinctions the narrator himself attributes to his own moral superiority his success
in surviving the encounter with Glenn Gould that Wertheimer so pathetically failed; he
claims, in particular, that he is free of the desire to be like someone else by which
Wertheimer remains entrapped. According to the narrator, Wertheimer – “an unrelieved
emulator” (93) was throughout his life driven by the yearning to be someone else. Having
failed as a musician, he turns to the writing of aphorisms where, in the narrator’s words, he
“[s]uddenly tried to make his mark as Schopenhauer II, so to speak, or Kant II, Novalis II,
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filling in this embarrassing pseudophilosophy with Brahms and Handel, with Chopin and
Rachmaninoff” (108). The narrator, in contrast, presents himself as a pristinely autonomous
person: “I never wanted to be Glenn Gould, I always only wanted to be myself, but
Wertheimer belongs to the kind of person who constantly and all his life and to his constant
despair wants to be someone else, someone, as he always believes, more favored in life, I
thought” (923).
Martine Sforzin, in her book on Bernhard’s novels entitled L’Art de l’irritation chez
Thomas Bernhard, embraces the narrator’s point of view when she argues that “unlike
Wertheimer, the narrator, is capable of selfanalysis and selfcriticism” (265). This character
trait, according to Sforzin, allows him to maintain a distance between himself and the
otherwise paralyzing emotions provoked by his encounter with an utterly superior rival.
Wertheimer, in so far as he lacks this distancing capacity, must fatally succumb to the
unbounded mimetic desire – leading eventually to his complete mental collapse – awakened
in him by his meeting with Glenn Gould. This interpretation ignores, however, the
possibility that what can be described positively as his capacity for selfcriticism can also be
described – less admiringly but with greater justice – as his readiness to displace the deadly
implications of his own encounter with Gould upon Wertheimer. The narrator survives, in
other words, not because he is superior to Wertheimer but because Wertheimer is
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conveniently there in Salzburg to serve as his surrogate. He is spared the consequences of
his mimetic desire precisely because Wertheimer has been burdened with them. In this
respect, Wertheimer may be compared the piano that the narrator allowed to be destroyed in
place of himself:
I knew I was giving up my expensive instrument to an absolutely worthless
individual and precisely for that reason I had it delivered to the teacher. The
teacher’s daughter took my instrument, one of the very best, one of the rarest and
therefore the most sought after and therefore also most expensive pianos in the
world, and in the shortest period destroyed it, rendered in worthless. But of
course it was precisely this destruction process of my beloved Steinway that I had
wanted. (7)
Throughout the novel the narrator will wish this same destructive process upon Wertheimer.
Wertheimer tries, in turn, to project the burden of his own sense of personal failure upon
his sister, although with considerably less success:
The sister had had to get up at one or two in the morning and put on her dressing
gown and go to his room and sit down at the harmonium in the unheated room
and play Handel, Franz said, which naturally resulted, he said, in her getting a
cold and constantly suffering from colds in Traich. He, Wertheimer, hadn’t taken
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good care of his sister, Franz said. He would have her play Handel for an hour on
the old harmonium, said Franz, and then the next morning at breakfast, which
they took together in the kitchen, he would tell her that her harmonium playing
had been unbearable. He would have her play something in order to fall back to
sleep, said Franz, for Herr Wertheimer always suffered from his insomnia, and
then would tell her the next morning that she had played like a pig” (161).
The narrator does not, however, join Wertheimer in disparaging his sister; she never
becomes a serviceable scapegoat because no one else ever bonds with him in finding her
contemptible. Wertheimer’s attempt to displace his trauma upon his sister is held up to
our ridicule, while the narrator’s comparable behavior succeeds because he is joined by
Glenn Gould and because he manipulates the point of view his narrative in a way that is
likely to gain the assent of inattentive readers.
Unlike Wertheimer, who never escapes from his designation as a “loser,” his
sister does manage to frustrate his attempt to use her as a surrogate by abandoning him
for “a thoroughly lowlife character from Switzerland who wore tasteless raincoats with
pointy lapels and Bally shoes with brass buckles” (45). As Michael Olson has observed,
the sister’s abandonment of her brother – in which Olson detects an allusion of
Bernhard’s own escape from the baleful influence of his grandfather Johannes
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Freumbichler – is treated positively in the novel. The narrator’s opprobrium falls, rather,
on Wertheimer himself, whose relationship with his sister the narrator repeatedly
ironizes. As Carl Niekerk has pointed out, the narrator adds to the catastrophe of
Wertheimer’s piano debacle and his troubled relationship with his sister, two other
aspects – his relationship with the innkeeper of the Dichtel Mill and his obsession with
death and eventual suicide – which add to his role in the novel as a figure whom the
narrator can portray in a conveniently demeaning way.
As the narrator himself admits, however, both he and Wertheimer were
devastated by their meeting with Glenn Gould:
Wertheimer and I, as far as our piano virtuosity and in fact music generally were
concerned, weren’t killed by Horowitz but by Glenn, I thought. Glenn destroyed
our piano virtuosity at a time when we still firmly believed in our piano virtuosity.
For years after our Horowitz course we believed in our virtuosity, whereas it was
dead from the moment we met Glenn” (15).
For this reason, the real challenge of Bernhard’s novel may not be in grasping the highly
dubious distinction between the narrator’s moral strength and Wertheimer’s weakness
but, rather, in detecting the sleight of hand that transforms this often repeated “we” into a
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designated “he,” thus creating for the narrator the possibility of a sacrificial catharsis in
which he projects his own suffering upon Wertheimer.
The narrator has survived this experience because, as it were, Glenn Gould killed
Wertheimer twice while he killed the narrator only once. The second murder of
Wertheimer occurs when Gould calls him (repeatedly) “the loser,” a designation that he
applies to Wertheimer, and only to Wertheimer: “my dear loser, Glenn greeted
Wertheimer, with his CanadianAmerican coldbloodness he always called him the loser”
(167). The fatal consequences of this verbal attack are revealed towards the end of the
novel when the narrator tells us that “Glenn mortally wounded Wertheimer with his
loser” 152).
Wertheimer’s status as the novel’s “loser,” rather than being an inherent
character trait, is, in other words, produced by the contemptuous judgement whereby
Gould applies this epithet to him. What appears to have been the story of failed ambitions
is actually one of a sacrificial accusation which, falling upon one character, grants a
reprieve to his companion. Thus, although both Wertheimer and the narrator are left
“dead” by their meeting with Glenn Gould, only Wertheimer is – in the narrator’s own
words a “typical deadend guy” (146). It is this second death (precipitated by Gould’s
cutting remark) rather than the narrator’s presumed moral superiority that effectively
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transforms a mutually condemned “we” into a uniquely designated “he.” Wertheimer
must commit suicide because, as the narrator remarks, thanks to Glenn Gould, “he had
run out of existence coupons” (39).
This singling out of Wertheimer is exemplified by the curious way in which the
narrator manages to suggest that the catastrophic meeting with Glenn, which happened to
both of them, also, as it were, “only happened” to Wertheimer. At the beginning of the
novel, he refers to this meeting in general terms: Gould is obviously the supreme piano
virtuoso and, once having heard him play, there is no point in either of them continuing
his studies. Towards the end of the novel, however, when the narrator describes the
actual scene in which they first heard Glenn play in Salzburg, Wertheimer is, oddly, the
only one of two who is actually there:
Wertheimer’s fate was to have walked past room thirtythree in the Mozarteum at
the precise moment when Glenn Gould was playing the socalled aria in that
room. Regarding this event Wertheimer reported to me that he stopped at the
door of room thirtythree, listening to Glenn play until the end of the aria. Then I
understood what shock is, I thought now. (156).
25
This scene amounts, in effect, to a highly dubious manoeuvre whereby the narrator
creates a satisfying, yet nonetheless illusory distance between himself and the traumatic
event that he recounts.
* * *
At the same time that he makes the ritual sacrifice of Wertheimer the endlessly
repeated main event of his novel, Bernhard also creates an alternative form of scapegoating –
“comical “in this case – through his equally endless denunciations of Austria. Already
castigated as a “nothing more than a rummage sale” in Correction, Austria returns in myriad
ways as the designated object of Bernhard’s vituperation. As many critics have noted, even
if there may be a certain element of truth behind these boilerplate allegations, none of them
can be taken seriously as an objective, balanced assessment. Consider, for example, the
description of Salzburg as a city “which at bottom is the sworn enemy of all art and culture, a
cretinous provincial dump with stupid people and cold walls where everything without
exception is eventually made cretinous” (1011) and of the lower Alps as a place that “makes
for emotionally disturbed people who fall victim to cretinism at a very early age and who in
time become malevolent” (12)..
This “critique” extends to the poor quality of Austrian inns, which, according to
the narrator,
26
are all filthy and unappetizing, I thought, one can barely get a clean tablecloth in
one of these inns, never mind cloth napkins, which in Switzerland for instance are
quite standard. Even the tiniest inn in Switzerland is clean and appetizing, even
our finest Austrian hotels are fithy and unappetizing. And talk about the rooms! I
thought. Often they just iron over sheets that have already been slept in, and it’s
not uncommon to find clumps of hair in the sink from the previous guest.
Austrian inns have always turned my stomach, I thought. The plates aren’t clean
and upon closer inspection the silverware is almost always dirty. (37)
At one point, he attributes similar misgivings to Glenn Gould, who “was always afraid of
the dampness of Austrian restaurants,feared death would claim him in these Austrian
restaurants, where the air hardly circulates or not at all. Actually death claims many
people in our restaurants, the innkeepers refuse to open the windows, not even in
summer, and so the moisture seeps into the walls for eternity” (42). In one final example,
Bernhard takes aim at kitchen windows in Austria:
I took a few steps toward the kitchen window although I’d already realized I
couldn’t look through the kitchen window because, as already mentioned, it’s
covered with filth from top to bottom. Austrian kitchen windows are all totally
filthy and we can’t look through them and naturally it’s to our greatest advantage,
27
I thought, not to be able to look through them because then we find ourselves
staring into the mouth of catastrophe, into the chaos of Austrian kitchen filth.
(50).
With such examples as these doubtlessly in mind, W. G. Siebald has rightly observed
that it is impossible to deduce a serious political program from Bernhard’s writings
(Chabert 107). A.P. Diereck has similarly argued that “The problem with Bernhard’s
unrelenting criticism of Vienna is that it results from a very personal starting point . . .
Bernhard’s criticism, legitimate or not, becomes even more problematic when juxtaposed
with his comment on other cities, for there is yet a further universalizing process involved
here. (8081).
In order to grasp the real significance of these diatribes and, in particular, their
relationship with scapegoating, we need to shift our focus away from Austria itself, as a
place that Bernhard either describes or fails to describe with some political pertinence,
and towards the Nazi propaganda – especially the element racial hatred directed against
the Jews – that he has subjected to a comic rewriting. Readers of The Loser who do not
have a copy of Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf at hand need only replace the “Austrians”
with their unappetizing inns and filthy kitchen windows with “the Jews” in order
experience something akin to an actual reading of Hitler’s own work. In Chapter X of
28
Mein Kampf, entitled “Causes of the Collapse,” Hitler sets out to explain to his readers
the reasons for the defeat of the Reich in World War I.
After dismissing as absurd the various rational explanations advanced by
historians, Hitler resorts to metaphors of “plague” and “disease” to diagnose what he
perceives as a corruption of the spirit of the German people, which he perceives to be the
true cause of the defeat. He then “discovers” that the source of the corruption is not in
the people themselves, but in a parasitic community living amongst them, a group of
people for whom Germany was “a mere stopover for making and spending money”
(226). After singling out the Jews as the true culprits, Hitler attacks them in terms that
Bernhard would have heard endlessly repeated during his childhood. Thus, for example,
after dismissing as a lie the view that Ludendorff was responsible for the defeat, Hitler
attacks the Jews as an inherently deceitful and manipulative people:
In this [blaming Ludendorf] they proceeded on the sound principle that the
magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the
great masses of the people n the very bottom of their hearts tend to be
corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore,
in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a
victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in such
29
little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were to big. Such a
falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe
in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous
misrepresentation n others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject,
they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of
these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie
will always remain and stick – a fact which all the great lievirtuosi and
lyingclubs in this world know only too well and also make the most
treacherous use of. (23233.
Following this sentimental tribute to the essential naiveté and moral innocence of “the
people” and the denunciation of the perversity of a restricted group of “lievirtuosos” (a
distinction that Bernhard, to his credit, never invokes) Hitler then assaults the Jews with
a virulence that Bernhard, for his part, “reserves” for humanity as a whole:
The foremost connoisseurs of this truth regarding the possibilities in the use of the
falsehood and slander have always been the Jews; for all that, their whole
existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious
community while actually they are a race – and what a race! One of the greatest
minds of humanity has nailed them forever as such in an eternally correct phrase
30
of fundamental truth: he called them “the great masters of the lie.” And anyone
who does not recognize this or does not want to believe it will never in this world
be able to help the truth to victory. (232)
In terms that uncannily echo the disease that brought an untimely end to Bernhard’s life,
Hitler then explains that the reason that the German people allowed the Jews to fester in
their midst for so long is that, like tuberculosis, the threat to the good health of the people
that they represented was slow in being recognized. Hitler’s “remedy” is, in effect, to
think of the Jews as a form of plague, which, as he points out, was eradicated long before
tuberculosis because its pernicious effects were recognized much sooner.
With the example of Mein Kampf in mind, it is difficult not to recognize the
astuteness of Suzanne Hommel’s comment concerning the relationship between Nazi
propaganda and Bernhard’s writing “He heard the screaming of the Nazis, and spent his
whole life counterscreaming in his writing” (Chabert 227). As I already noted in the
chapter on Correction, however, Bernhard’s “counterscreaming” radically
defamiliarizes the Nazi propaganda from which it draws its inspiration. Most obviously,
he never directs his diatribes against Jews. Instead he inverts antisemitic propaganda in
such a way as to attack every other conceivable target. In the absence of a designated
scapegoat, everything becomes a potential target of Bernhard’s verbal violence.iii
31
In his respect, The Loser itself may be thought of as an alternative (and, a very
humane one at that) to the kind of “art” produced by the Nazi sculptor into whose home
Wertheimer, Gould, and the narrator move during their stay at Salzburg:
For the duration of our Horowitz course we had rented the house of a recently
deceased Nazi sculptor, the creations of the master, as he was called in the area,
still stood all over the house, in rooms that were five to six meters high. It was the
height of these rooms that had convinced us to rent the house on the spot, the
sculptures standing about didn’t disturb us, they improved the acoustics, these
marble eyesores along the walls that had been created by a worldfamous artist, as
we were told, who had worked for years in the service of Hitler. These giant
marble protuberances, which the owners actually pushed against the walls for us,
were acoustically ideal, I thought” (7778).
The narrator recalls at one point the image of Glenn, who, late at night, had “draped
himself over the emperor’s feet [one of the pieces of sculpture], completely exhausted, he
with his Goldberg Variations, I thought” (8081). We, in our turn, may, as we reflect on
the place of invective in Bernhard’s literary reworking of the Goldberg Variations,
remember the “art” of Nazi oratory that he likewise reworks. Bernhard may also wish to
give us pause when he has his narrator mention in the latter part of the novel the detail of
32
Wertheimer’s Jewish origins. Even within prompting from this detail, we may be
inclined to wonder if Bernhard – in staging the narrator’s ritual sacrifice of Wertheimer
as his personal scapegoat – may be revisiting the Nazi persecution of the Jews and other
minorities, whose principal qualification for this treatment was, not any inherent failing,
but their vulnerability (political in one case, narrative in the other).
The effect of Bernhard’s strategy is to cast his condemnations in such a way as to
radically disconnect them from the traditional goal of the demagogue, that is, to enlist,
the support of a majority in persecuting a designated minority in the hope that some
“improvement” will follow. In effect, he aestheticizes hatred, allowing us to experience
it vicariously without directing it against any of the objects that he designates (since the
single object to which they all point is human existence itself). His diatribes against
Austria – like Wertheimer’s mistreatment of his sister – fail to create a bond with his
readers that is based on a mutually agreedupon exclusion. The effect of these passages
depends upon our responsiveness to Bernhard’s inimitable hyperbole, rather than on our
willingness to direct our aggression at his designated target.
Like demagoguery of any sort, Bernhard’s writing arouses violent human
passions while denying to them their usual, historically sanctioned outlet in acts of
violence directed towards vulnerable minorities. Nazi propaganda served a secular form
33
of sacrificial ritual whose purpose was to exterminate a designated people. Bernhard
returns in effect to this sacrificial scene but in such a way as to produce an entirely
aesthetic form of exorcism. The fundamentally cathartic nature of Bernhard’s comic
invective has been admirably expressed by Gerald Stief who maintains that “nihilistic
satirical writing possesses a remarakable cathartic function. Murderous impulses or the
longing for universal entropy that lurks within us is given satisfaction by symbolic acts of
sacrifice achieved by writing” (Chabert 106; my emphasis).
* * *
As I pointed out at beginning of this chapter, Bernhard turns entirely away from
scapegoating of any sort in his presentation of the inclusive, nonsacrificial bonding that
occurs in The Loser between Bernhard and Bach and Glenn Gould, which itself echoes
the three musical compositions by Bach to which the novel alludes in its opening lines.
All three members of the “fallen” trio formed by Wertheimer, Glenn Gould, and the
narrator want the same thing: to become the preeminent piano virtuoso of their time.
The narrator underlines this point several times, as when he tells us that “Glenn is the
victor, we are the failures” (21) and, later, that ”only Glenn succeeded in doing what all
three of us had planned” (56).
34
In the alternative, metafictional trio, however, each character is assigned a distinct,
yet reciprocal (as opposed to rivalistic) role: Bach is a composer, Glenn Gould a musician,
and Thomas Bernhard a writer. Within this triangle, emulative tendencies may be freely
indulged without their provoking the destructive passion of envy. Far from being
Bernhard’s rivals, Bach and Gould – each in his distinct way – provide him with models
whose influence is everywhere discernible in his own work. As Michael Olson has said,
“”Instead of analyzing Bach in song and music sheets, as he did in his youth, Bernhard
switched to writing types of fugues in his adult years. His typewriter, rather than his vocal
chords, became the medium with which Bernhard controlled his physical surroundings and
modulated his artistic sensibility” (78). In a remark that touches upon the theme of
competition with an admired model, Olson observes that “Bernhard outdid Bach by
introducing three primary lines as the foundations for subsequent variations” (79), a practice
that leads Olson to his concluding claim that “Bernhard has broadened the parameters of the
contemporary novel” (81).
René Bottlang describes the importance of Bernhard’s encounter with Glenn Gould in
a way that reads like an inverted image of Wertheimer’s experience:
He found a brother in Glenn Gould. It makes me think of Samuel Beckett’s
encounter with Bram Van Velde. Thomas Bernhard di not much care for other
35
people. He criticized everyone and everything – he extinguished, and that’s a
procedure that requires courage. In Glenn Gould he found someone whom he
couldn’t criticize, whom he respected and loved. For him, Gould was the greatest of
the great pianists. Even Gulda and Brendel came in far behind him; this is also my
opinion, because of the purity of his music. We see the same purity in Bernhard’s
writing, which continually refines itself until the essential thing appears. Bernhard
paid tribute to Glenn Gould by showing this essential aspect of things. (Salem 198)
Bottang further suggests that Bernhard may even have enjoyed a certain advantage over
Glenn Gould, since “unlike Bernhard, who was a creator,” Gould was a performer” (Salem
200).
According to Michael Olson, Gould’s influence on Bernhard was twofold: first, his
theory of the fugue as an open form that “invites the artist to invent a form relevant to his or
her idiosyncratic demands”; second, his discovery of isolation and solitude as the ideal
environment in which to pursue his aesthetic project. The home in Upper Austria where
Bernhard wrote replicates, in effect, the Toronto recording studio where Gould made his
interpretations of Bach. Olson also argues that Bernhard actually “outdid Bach by
introducing three primary lines as the foundations for subsequent variations: the first
“introduces the myth of Gould as well as situates the narrator’s relationship with Gould. The
36
second line introduces Wertheimer . . . .The third and final primary line document’s Gould
maniacal habits, while demonstrating that Bernhard quite consciously deviated from Gould’s
actual biography” (7980).
Edward Said, in an essay on Gould that mentions The Loser only in passing, makes a
number of observations that help us to appreciate further the highly original ways in which
Bernhard incorporated the figure of Gould into his novel. Of particular interest is his
discussion of the various forms of audienceprovocation that Gould brought to the concert
hall.
Gould belonged to no dynasty of teachers or national schools, and played repertory
(for example, Byrd, Sweelinck, and Gibbons) that had never been thought before as
furnishing staples for a piano recital program. Add to this his remarkably fleet,
rhythmically tensemethod of playing wellknown pieces, plus his core attachment to
the fugue and chaconne forms that are perectly embodied in the sarabande aria and
thirty variations of the Goldberg Variations, and, initially at least, yu have a totally
unanticipated talent aggressively challenging the placid and passive audience that has
learned to sit back and wait to be served up a short evening’s fare – like diners in a
good restaurant” ( ).
37
Said also calls attention to Gould’s palce in an historical process that – beginning
with classical composers who were also performers later witnessed the emergence of the
virtuoso performer who was not himself a musician: Glenn’s originality lay not in his
creating musical compositions that rivaled Bach’s, but in his own idiosyncratic recreations
of them. In effect, Gould excelled in an area that was, for Bach subsidiary. Bernhard, in his
turn, devoted his artistic career to the production of literary texts, an activity that played only
a secondary role in Gould’s career and in which he has not gained the renown achieved by
Bernhard.
Said’s application of the term “invention” to Bach and Gould likewise illuminates the
relationship between Bernhard and his two great predecessors:
Inventio has the sense of rediscovering and returning to, not of inventing as it is used
now, e.g., the creation of something new, like a light bulb or a transistor tube.
Invention in this older rhetorical meaning of the word is the finding and elaboration
of arguments, which in the musical realm means the finding of a theme and
elaborating it contrapuntally so that all of is possibilities are articulated, expressed,
and elaborated. ( )
Said then notes the importance of this term to Vico’s :
38
He uses it to describe a capacity of the human mind, an ingenium, for being able to
see human history as something made by the unfolding capacity of the working
human mind; for Vico, therefore, Homer’s poetry should be interpreted not as the
sage wisdom of a rationalist philosopher but as the inventive outpourings of a
necessarily fertile mind, which the later interpreter is able to recover inventively by
putting herself back into the mists and myths of Homer’s very early time. Invention
is therefore a form of creative repetition and reliving. ( )
To this, Said offers his own observation that the “special quality of Bach’s polyphonic
composition [was] his ability to draw out of a theme all the possible permutations and
combinations implicit in it” ( ) and that Gould, in his turn, relived on the level of
performance the example of his master:
To put it simply, this is exactly the kind of Bach that Gould chose to play: a composer
whose thinking compositions provided an opportunity for the thinking, intellectual
virtuoso to try to interpret and invent or revise and rethink in his wonway, each
performance becoming an occasion for decisions in terms of tempo, timbre, rhythm,
color, tone, phrasing, voice leading, and nflection that never mindlessly or
automatically repeat earlier such decisions but instead go to great lengths to
communicate a sense of reinvention, of reworking Bach’s own contrapuntal works.
39
The sight of Gould on stage or on videotape actually doing this, acting it out, gives an
added dimension to his piano playing. ( )
After crediting Gould’s way of playing Bach with “testify[ing] to how well he understood the
deep structure of Bach’s creativity” ( ), Said – in remark that has a profound pertinence to
Bernhard – says of Gould’s playing style that, in contrast to his own personal feelings about
his “unproductive isolation,” it was “nothing less than an argument about continuity, rational
intelligence, and aesthetic beauty in an age of specialized, antihuman atomization” ( ).
In his actual life, Bernhard was prevented from a direct engagement with Bach and
Glenn Gould by the pleurisy that attacked him as a teenager, thus putting an end to his
musical ambitions. In the novel, Wertheimer and the narrator, “attacked” in their turn by
Glenn Gould, pursue careers unrelated to their initial plans: Wertheimer studies the human
sciences and the narrator becomes a philosopher. Neither career leads, however, to any
distinction: Wertheimer kills himself and, after many years of study, the narrator, as he
himself admits, doesn’t even know what philosophy is. Shortly before committing suicide,
Wertheimer orders a piano from Salzburg:
When the notes were all burned, all that writing, as Franz expressed himself, he,
Wertheimer, called up Salzburg and ordered the piano and Franz distinctly recalled
that during this telephone call his master kept insisting that they send a completely
40
worthless, a horribly untuned grand piano to Traich. A completely worthless
instrument, a horribly untuned instrument, Wertheimer is supposed to have repeated
over and over on the phone, said Franz” (170)
He then bribes friends and acquaintances to come to his estate where, as the narrator tells us,
he “played Bach for them, Franz said, Handel and Bach, which he hadn’t done for more than
ten years. Wertheimer, said Franz, played Bach on the piano without stopping until finally
the company couldn’t take it anymore and left the house” (167). He then continues playing
until – in an act that emulates Glenn’s death – he blacks out (168). In commenting on the
bleak outcome of The Loser, Aude Locatelli (drawing equally upon Elfriede Jelinek’s The
Pianist) concludes that both novels subject the musical bildungsroman to an ironic rewriting:
Little by little, in effect, a lack of success seems to have been chosen as a touchstone
and Romain Rolland’s novel contains in embryonic form certain privileged themes of
Bernhard’s oeuvre, such as the hero’s painful consciousness of his imperfections.
The doubts and lack of selfconfidence that Jean Christophe experiences only
occasionally become chronic in Wertheimer’s case and lead to his irreversible
abandonment. If it is possible to speak in the case of JeanChristophe of the
vicissitudes of life – a succession of happy or unhappy moments that is ultimately
viewed in a positive way, it is likewise true that Wertheimer’s life is one of
41
unrelieved unhappiness. Art itself is not a salutary but instead a deadly path for this
character, who is fascinated by his own unhappiness, as is Erika Kohut [the
protagonist of The Pianist]. Overwhelmed by his weakness as well as by his
immodest ambitions, Wertheimer undertakes a long and fruitless “period of
mourning” after having lost his hope of becoming a great pianist and before ending
his life; his suicide constitutes the single and the final successful calculation of his
life, as the epigraph to the novel implies. (181)
Locatelli then concludes that, like Jelenick’s The Pianist, Bernhard’s novel amounts to an
act of “revenge against the utopian representation of the education of the artist that exalts the
figure of the genius.” Together, the two novels bleakly suggest the loss of a sense of the
future. At the same time, they resemble the two classic novels with which they form such a
striking contrast because, by appealing to our musical memories, they offer us a specifically
“musicalliterary” pleasure (182).
The narrator does not fall victim to “emulative” tendencies in part because
Wertheimer, his surrogate, is there to succumb to them in his place and in part because the
literary gift that Bernhard bestows upon him provides him with an alternative vocation.
Rather than attempting to become an epigone of Glenn Gould, as had Wertheimer, he turns
for inspiration directly to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The narrative that he produces makes
42
of him, as I had suggested earlier of Bernhard himself, a “Bach II,” but this designation does
not in any way diminish our appreciation of his originality. On the contrary, his “repetition”
of Bach in a the form of a literary composition is – as responses to Bernhard’s prose style
continually remind us – a profoundly original achievement. Unlike Wertheimer, who was
destroyed by a rivalistic relationship with Glenn Gould which he could not win and from
which he could not extricate himself, the narrator’s pursuit of his literary work helps him to
overcome his earlier, and necessarily futile, ambition of becoming the world’s greatest piano
virtuoso. He avoids competition, not only with Glenn Gould, but also with Bach himself in
the sense that he produces a work that, while modeled on the masterpieces of his
predecessors, do not propose themselves as rival works that intend in any way to eclipse the
sources of their inspiration.
From this perspective we see that Wertheimer’s fate was sealed when he chose as his
model not Bach (a composer) but Glenn Gould (a virtuoso performer). Glenn, on the
contrary, had as his model, not another performer, but the composer himself. He could
devote himself to performing Bach without ever becoming merely “Bach II” because, even at
the moment of his most intense identification, the distinction between the German composer
and his Canadian interpreter was guaranteed to remain firmly in place, thus preventing the
absorption of one by the other as well as guaranteeing that Glenn would never become
43
debilitated by rivalry with his master. The narrator, in his turn, implicitly discovers in his
relationship with Bach a form of identification that has been purges of all vestiges of rivalry,
not only with Bach but also with Glenn Gould.
As I suggested earlier the same avoidance of rivalry is guaranteed in the metafictional
triangle formed by Bach, Glenn Gould, and Thomas Bernhard. Far from being Bernhard’s
rival, Gould has shown him how to admire Bach, and even how to emulate him, while
entirely avoiding the otherwise tragic consequences of his emulative tendencies. In contrast
to “Der Untergeher” a term that applies equally to Wertheimer, the narrator and Glenn
Gould –the terms “composer, “virtuoso interpreter,” and “author” that designate Bach,
Gould, and Bernhard point to a firmly grounded triangular configuration (to recall the
epigraph to Correction) that is mutually crossfertilizing and productive.
44
45
46
i
ii
For an excellent discussion of projection as a selfprotective device to which the narrator resorts
throughout The Loser, see Carl Niekerk, “Der Umgang mit dem Untergang: Projektion als
erzählerisches Prinzip in Thomas Bernhards Untergeher.” As Niekerk observes: “Wertheimer . . . is for
the narrator a person upon whom he projects what he does not want to admit about himself; this process
proves to be not entirely unproblematic” (466). Niekerk also touches upon a central point of my own
analysis of exclusionary forms of bonding in the novel when he notes that the narrator “makes
Wertheimer laughable in the eyes of his readers” (467), a process that he analyzes in relation to four
aspects: first, Wertheimer’s total failure as a pianist, second, his troubled relationship with his sister,
third, his sexual affair with the hotelkeeper at the Dichter Mill, and, fourth, his fascination with death
as well as his ultimate suicide (468). One of the great strengths of Niereck’s reading of the novel rests
with his refusal to accept the narrator’s selfportrait at face value and his recognition of the sacrificial
subtext that underlies the narrator’s portrayal of Wertheimer.
iii