Jon Fosse on Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard and his Grandfather


...And so I decided I had to read Thomas Bernhard, and for someone who himself was more infamous than famous for writing novels in which there was so much repetition, it was a great comfort, and joy, to read Bernhard's repetitious, dark, strongly rhythmical and enormously beautiful novel writing...

Ritter, Dene, Voss [the Bernhard play] deals with a philosopher who is fetched home from an insane asylum by his two sisters, who want to try to keep him at home; this philosopher has certain features in common with Ludwig Wittgenstein, among other things, he likes to stay in a cottage in Skjolden, and even though Wittgenstein was never in a lunatic asylum, his nephew [Bernhard's friend] Paul was.  But most of all, the main character and the desperate and tragicomic dynamics of the play mark, at least that is my interpretation, Bernhard's great love for his grandfather, for Johannes Freumbichler, domestic tyrant author and pauper.  Bernhard grew up with this grandfather, after his mother, who was a single mother, was unable to look after him.  And to Bernhard, his grandfather became his one and only true friend, as he said himself, and besides, he saw him as a resounding 'spiritual being,' for his whole life, his grandfather had hardly any income, he sat there and read and wrote and forced everyone else to pay attention to his spiritual work, and the grandfather himself, like all the other family members, had to endure living on the little money Bernhard's grandmother managed to scrape together from washing work and other small jobs.  While growing up, on the one hand, Bernhard's days were rich in daily declarations from his grandfather about not being able to stand it any longer, now he would hill himself, on the other hand his days were, if truth be told, very poor on material items, apart from a few books and a typewriter, which Bernhard inherited from his grandfather, and then used for his writing, there was little of anything in the home, which also often changed, as they had to move from place to place, but this good-for-nothing grandfather and the young fatherless boy found each other in their respective despair, and the grandfather saw early that what he had not succeeded in establishing himself as, becoming a recognized artist, Bernhard was going to achieve instead...



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