Beckett Bernhard

Association of Austrian Studies
Beckett and Bernhard: A Comparison

Author(s): Martin Esslin
Source: Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1985), pp. 67-78
Published by: Association of Austrian Studies
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Beckett and Bernhard: A Comparison
Martin Esslin
It occasionally happens that I am asked to name some of the more

important continental playwrights. And occasionally, if I mention among
them the name of Thomas Bernhard and am asked what kind of writer he is,
I am tempted to sum it all up by saying: "A kind of Austrian Beckett." Like
all such attempts at a snap judgment, this is, of course, highly superficial.
But there is also a grain of truth in it. That is why it may be worthwhile
to go into the matter at a little greater depth and attempt something like
a comparison.
Certainly the parallel has been noticed more than once. In 1972 the
German magazine Der Spiegel summed it up in a telling, if somewhat cheap
jibe, by calling Bernhard - varying a famous Austrian play's title - an
"Alpenbeckett und Menschenfeind."
Bernhard is twenty-five years younger than Beckett, but like Beckett
he has written an impressive volume of poetry, narrative prose, and drama.
Like Beckett he first emerged as a poet, then as a prose writer and only
relatively late in his career as a playwright, and like Beckett he is better
known, at least outside the German-speaking world as a dramatist than as
a prose-writer (although, like Beckett, he takes his prose works more seriously
than his drama in spite of having since 1970 had thirteen major plays pro
duced, almost one a year).
But these are superficial parallels. There are some much more signifi
cant ones. First, however, I want to stress that I am not concerned with the
question of direct influence. Whether such a direct influence by Beckett on
Bernhard exists or not is a moot point, but one that is not only impossible
to verify as Bernhard's oeuvre is wholly personal in form and content, so
that any direct influence would have to have been exerted at second remove,
but also I think not a very important one. There certainly cannot be any
question of conscious imitation, not even in Bernhard's earliest phase. In
fact, according to the few people who have seen it, an early work by Bern
hard, Mrs. Nightflowers Monolog, which has remained unpublished, shows
some striking similarities with Beckett's play Happy Days. But the manu
script by Bernhard dates from 19581 (when he was twenty-six), while Happy
Modern Austrian Literature, Volume 18, Number 2,1985 67
68 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE
Days was not performed or published till 1961 - a clear indication her
the similarities were due to deeper affinities of temperament and at
rather than direct imitation or influence.
Bernhardt world, like much of Beckett's, whether in his poetry, p
or drama, is an essentially monologic universe, a universe of cha
caught up in the prison house of their own consciousness, compulsive
sistic talkers, experiencing their own selves, or rather, the hopeless
for their true identities, as an endless stream of language erupting fro
brains in the form of stories, stories made up of voices. In Beckett's
tive prose usually one voice follows another, as the narrator, in quest
own self assumes one fictional persona after another. Bernhard's tech
is different: his usually unnamed narrator carries a whole plethora o
with him, voices he quotes as the highly unreliable and contradictory
of his story. Take the opening passage of his second major novel Das
werk (1971). The book starts in midnarration, even midsentence, wit
dots followed by a clause in lower case:
... wie Konrad vor fünfeinhalb Jahren das Kalkwerk

gekauft hat, sei das erste die Anschaffung eines Klaviers
gewesen, das er in seinem im ersten Stock liegenden Zim
mer habe aufstellen lassen, heißt es im Laska, nicht aus
Vorliebe für die Kunst, so Wieser, der Verwalter der muß
nerschen Liegenschaft, sondern zur Beruhiguing seiner
durch jahrzehntelange Geistesarbeit überanstrengten Ner
ven, so Fro, der Verwalter der trattnerschen Liegenschaft,
mit Kunst, die er Konrad hasse, habe sein Klavierspiel
nicht das Geringste zu tun gehabt, er improvisierte, so
Fro, und habe, so Wieser, an jedem Tag eine sehr frühe
und eine sehr späte Stunde bei geöffneten Fenstern und
bei eingeschaltetem Metronom auf dem Instrument dilet
tiert..}
Over 270 pages the story is thus built up out of the reported speech of
various sources, both actual people and the consensus of public opinion in
a number of bars and cafes - "heißt es im Laska" - with the effect that
this novel, and many of Bernhard's other stories and novels, becomes a
veritable Babel of voices, uttering unverifiable and contradictory versions
of the same event and the opinions of various people. The manic, compulsive
power of this type of logorrheic utterance has a hypnotic effect, analogous
to that of the long and equally logorrheic monologues of Beckett's trilogy
Beckett and Bernhard 69
or his Texts for Nothing.

Beckett has, more than once, dealt with this compulsion to talk
In Beckett's radio play Embers (and his radio plays are in many ways th
most revealing, as radio itself is a direct concretization of such voices) the
leading character, Henry, hears a continuous roar, rather like the noise of
the tide flowing over shingle, in his head. To drown this out he must keep
talking incessantly. As his wife tells him:
You should see a doctor about your talking, it's worse,

what must it be like for Addie [their daughter]? Do you
know what she said to me once, when she was quite small,
she said Mummy why does Daddy keep on talking all
the time? She heard you in the lavatory. I didn't know
what to answer.
To which Henry replies: "I told you to tell her I was praying. Roaring prayer
at God and his saints." Ada continues: "It's very bad for the child. It's silly
to say it keeps you from hearing it and even if it does you shouldn't be hear
ing it, there must be something wrong with your brain."3
In another of his important radio plays, Cascando, Beckett reoresents
the human consciousness as divided into two voices, an "opener" who is in
partial control and opens a stream of continuous sound, consisting equally
of a logorrhea of words and a strand of music. The "opener" says:
What do I open? They say he opens nothing, he has nothing

to open, it's in his head They say that is not his life,
he does not live on that. They don't see me, they don't
see what my life is, they don't see what I live on, and they
say, That is not his life, he does not live on that. (Pause)
I have lived on it... pretty long. Long enough.4
And in one of his early poems Beckett speaks of "the sky / of my skull she
of sky and earth."5
Similarly, one of Bernhard's manic talkers, the Prince Saurau in his
novel Verstörung says: "Wie du weißt, sage ich immer zu mir, ist immer all
und alles immer in deinem Kopf. Alles ist immer in den Köpfen. Nur in alle
Köpfen. Außerhalb der Köpfe ist nichts."6 It would be tedious to quot
many more of the passages that show that Bernhard, like Beckett, conside
every individual's world to be confined to the inside of his skull, to exist
solely within his brain.
If the world can never be more accurately perceived than as the

jection of a single individual's consciousness, there can obviously
certainty, no solid framework to our understanding of the world. Ne
less in Bernhard's stories the principal character is frequently a sc
who is trying to unravel some of the secrets of the real world, natur
number of his stories, moreover, we find a pair of brothers, or a br
and a sister in the center, usually living in a lonely farmhouse, ca
tower, one of whom is an artist, often a musician or musicologist
the other is concerned with the real world, nature or business. (This is
analogous to the pairs of interdependent characters in Beckett, Hamm
Clov, Pozzo and Lucky, Vladimir and Estragon, who represent Be
conviction that one of the basic dilemmas of human existence is that ex
pressed by the Latin adage "nec tecum nec sine te," that is, the fact that
a human being cannot live alone but is also being driven mad by living with
someone else. In Bernhard's work the endeavor by the more creative partner
of these tragically interdependent pairs might presuppose the existence of
a solid outside reality. In fact it again and again turns out to be no more
than a conscious strategem by which the character concerned is trying to
invent a reason to go on living, a task to be fulfilled, while at the same time
he knows full well that all such projects are bound to be illusory, illusions
we merely create to infuse some sense into a senseless universe. Konrad, the
scientist and protagonist of Das Kalkwerk (who murders his partner, a crip
pled wife) is, for example, reported as saying:
Jede Erklärung führe zu einem vollkommen falschen

Ergebnis, daran kranke alles, daß alles erklärt werde und
in jedem Fall immer falsch erklärt werde und die Ergeb
nisse aller Erklärungen immer falsche Ergebnisse seien.7
Adding later that
Andererseits, soll Konrad... gesagt haben, wäre alles

ganz sinn- und zwecklos, man denke etwas und das sei
zwecklos, man tue etwas und das sei zwecklos, man unter
lasse etwas, und das sei immer zwecklos, sinnlos sei was
man denke, wie zwecklos sei, worin man handle.8
(Compare this with the first words of Waiting for Godot: "Nothing to be
done"!)
This solipsistic view of the universe, which Bernhard shares with
Beckett, logically leads to the conclusion that the fact of death which will
extinguish the world within the skull guarantees the ultimate futility of
all human endeavors. As the narrator of the story Amras puts it:
das Bewußtsein, daß du nichts bist als Fragmente, daß

kurze und längere und längste Zeiten nichts als Fragmente
sind ... daß die Dauer von Städten und Ländern nichts
als Fragmente sind ... und die Erde Fragment... daß
die ganze Entwicklung Fragment ist... daß die Vollkom
menheit nicht ist... daß die Fragmente entstanden sind
und entstehen ... kein Weg, nur Ankünfte ... daß das
Ende ohne Bewußtsein ist... und daß nichts ohne dich
und daß folglich nichts ist... .9
What, then, of the artist and his endeavor? Beckett has answered that ques
tion in a famous passage in the first of his three dialogues on modern painters
in which he describes the situation of the modern artist as having to face
"The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to
express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obli
gation to express."10 The "obligation to express" - here we approach the
root of the compulsion to talk in a meaningless universe, even if the im
possibility of success in expressing anything is only too apparent. In the
third of his Three Dialogues, the one devoted to his friend Bram van Velde,
Beckett speaks of the need for an artist to admit
that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that

failure is his world and to shrink from it desertion, art
and craft, good housekeeping, living ... all that is required
now ... is to make of this submission, this admission,
this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of rela
tion, and of the act, which unable to act, obliged to act,
he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its
impossibility, of its obligation.11
In exactly the same way Bernhardt musicologist who lives in a hate-love

symbiosis with a highly practical sister and is vainly attempting to write
an essay on the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in the novel Beton
says of it, "daß sie meine gelungenste, oder besser noch, die am wenigsten
mißlungene [Arbeit] ist."12 Thus Bernhard and Beckett share the same
paradox at the basis of one of the main themes of their work, the dilemma
of the artist in a society without an accepted and acceptable philosophy,

solid structure of its universe. Both Beckett's and Bernhardt protagonist
tend to be artists, philosophers, scientists engaged in such futile and par
doxical pursuits.
Their narrative prose is essentially monologic as the pairs of character
also obviously tend to represent parts of the same personality, in other wo
voices buzzing within the same head. Both Beckett's and Bernhardt world
could be described as essentially schizoid universes and as such illustrate
attempts by psychologists like Deleuze and Guettari to replace Freud
psychoanalysis by an antioedipal psychology, and to create a schizo-analy
instead, which would, by basing itself on the concept of alienation, comb
Marx and Freud. Many of the features of Bernhardt and Beckett's oeuvre
the diagnosis of a schizoid state of mind to perfection: the voices in the h
the logorrhea; the withdrawal from the world, in remote castles and towe
the compulsive need to enumerate and to permutate, the preoccupation w
counting and abstruse mathematical speculation; to name but the m
obvious.
Which, of course, is not to say that Beckett or Bernhard are sch
phrenics, merely that they tend to look at the world from the vantage po
of an extreme state of consciousness that approximates schizoid mentalit
which is precisely what enables them to arrive at insights that may be i
accessible to people enmeshed in the routine perceptions of everyday life
In that sense, all artists who experience life more intensely are exploring
extreme states of consciousness and awareness beyond the normal.
So much for a broad comparison of the two writers' subject matter;
perhaps, we might briefly turn to look at some of the formal aspect
their art, always remembering that, of course, form is content and cont
form, in this case more than in most others. For the alienation of the cha
ters in the work of both Beckett and Bernhard is closely reflected in th
use of language. It is in both their cases based on an intensive Sprachskep
a scepticism about language as an adequate instrument of expression
concepts or the existential reality of the individual. As the mad prince is
quoted as saying in Bemhard's Verstörung: "Die Wörter, mit welchen
sprechen, existieren eigentlich garnicht mehr, sagte der Saurau. Das ganz
Wortinstrumentarium, das wir gebrauchen, existiert garnicht mehr. Aber
ist auch nicht möglich, ganz zu verstummen."13 Beckett's attitude to
guage becomes particularly clear from an early letter of his which has o
recently been published in the collection of Beckett's rare theoretical pro
nouncement Disjecta. This letter dated July 1937, when Beckett was thir
one, was incidentally written in German and shows how brilliantly Beck
mastered that language:
Es wird mir tatsächlich immer schwieriger, ja sinnloser,

ein offizielles Englisch zu schreiben. Und immer mehr
wie ein Schleier kommt mir meine Sprache vor, den man
zerreißen muß, um an die dahinterliegenden Dinge (oder
das dahinterliegende Nichts) zu kommen. Grammatik und
Stil: mir scheinen sie ebenso hinfällig geworden zu sein
wie ein Biedermeier Badeanzug oder die Unerschütter
lichkeit eines Gentlemans. Eine Larve. Hoffentlich kommt
die Zeit... wo die Sprache da am besten gebraucht wird,
wo sie am tüchtigsten mißbraucht wird.... Ein Loch nach
dem anderen in ihr zu bohren, bis das Dahinterkauernde,
sei es etwas oder nichts, durchzusickern anfängt. Ich kann
mir für den heutigen Schriftsteller kein höheres Ziel vor
stellen. .. .14
Both in Beckett's and Bernhard's practice, thus, we are in the situation

described by Wittgenstein when he spoke, in his Tractatus, of his words
as a ladder which has to be discarded after one has climbed up on it - to
the point, that is, where language can be transcended after it has carried
the writer to its utmost limit. In Beckett's early novel Watt some critics
have actually detected allusions to that very ladder of Wittgenstein's. Bern
hard has never made a secret of his debt to Wittgenstein, quite apart from
his friendship with Wittgenstein's mad nephew Paul, which forms the subject
of his most recent autobiographical volume, Wittgensteins Neffe.
Another philosopher to whom both Bernhard and Beckett are deeply
indebted is Schopenhauer, not only as regards Schopenhauer's pessimism,
but also with respect to his aesthetics. For Schopenhauer the visual arts
represent the world of Vorstellung, the mimetic representation of its appear
ance, while music alone directly depicts the flow, the incessant pressure
of the compulsion "to be," the ultimate reality, which Schopenhauer calls
the "will." It is I think in trying to express this dichotomy that both writers
turned to the theater after they had already produced some of their major
works of poetry and prose. For the theater (or indeed drama in film and
television as well) not only enables the writer to escape the tyranny of mere
words, he can in performance reach an approximation to musical rather than
conceptual structures, quite apart from the fact that performance also allows
him to use music directly as an element in a complex contrapuntal dialectic
of visuals, language, and sound.
At first sight there may appear to be a contradiction in writer

solipsistic proseworks containing the manic monologues of character
prisoned within their own consciousness turning towards what seem
be the most objective of all artforms, the mimesis of three-dimens
human beings interacting, the theater. Yet both in Beckett's and in
hard's case this seeming paradox easily resolves itself: their dramatic w
are as monologic as their narrative prose; they are highly individual vis
in which the characters frequently are no more than concretizations of
voices that resound in the heads of the manic speakers of their monolo
And these visions are, ultimately, all metaphors, complex metaphor
clusters of metaphors for the human condition itself.
Thus both Beckett's and Bernhardt dramatic oeuvre concentr
on such images, complex structures of visuals, melodic patterns of lang
rather than conceptual argument, coalescing in scenic metaphors. Bernh
first play to get a major production Ein Fest für Boris (1970), for exam
deals with a rich lady who lost both her legs in a car accident. As she c
bear to be surrounded by people with superior mobility, she now m
exclusively among legless cripples, having made herself the patroness of
hostel for legless cripples. The image of a stage populated by thirteen w
chairs madly careering about is a very powerful metaphor of human frai
It can be compared to Beckett's image of Winnie, the heroine of H
Days sinking into a mound of earth in the first scene up to her waist a
the second up to her neck. In Bernhard's play Die Prominenten a group
eminent artists and writers is assembled, each of them accompanied
waxwork portrait of his ideal predecessor as tenor, writer, critic, etc. O
Die Macht der Gewohnheit we find a more complex image: the inside
circus wagon, where a mad circus director is forcing his clown, his bar
rider, his lion tamer, and his juggler to join him in the vain attempt for
hundredth time to rehearse Schubert's Trout Quintet, a grotesquely sar
image of the vanity of great art, which says more in a single moment,
reams of theoretical statements.
In his later plays Beckett has become ever more concise and his ima
ever more compressed; Bernhard's images also have become more restrai
but also more subtle. In Bernhard's more recent plays the image ten
concentrate on a central monologic character whose speeches have
almost all conceptual content and have become musical structures. In th
later plays, Der Weltverbesserer, Immanuel Kant, and Der Schein Tr
Bernhard constructs a kind of sonata form by using a limited number o
statements which are repeated, varied, combined, and recombined as tho
they were musical motifs. Analagously Beckett's latest dramatic works,
the stage play Rockaby or the television plays Ghost Trio or Quadrat I & II
have become almost entirely visual; and when using verbal elements, the
language functions mainly as a vehicle for pace and rhythm. Beckett's favor
ite actress Billy Whitelaw once asked me to decipher Beckett's handwriting
on a postcard he had written her after she had complained that she could
not understand the meaning of his play Footfalls, in which she was to play
the leading part. Beckett's reply ran: "Dear Billy, don't worry about the
meaning. What matters is the rhythm and the pace. The words are merely
what pharmacists call 'the excipient'" [from memory].
It is surely also significant that both Beckett and Bernhard like writing
for television and film - media even more independent of the spoken word
than the theater. Bernhard is a fully trained musician; Beckett a devoted
music lover, who is most meticulous in his musical references. It may be
no coincidence that both writers' favorite composer is Schubert, who plays
his part in Die Macht der Gewohnheit and in Beckett's Nacht und Träume
as well as in All that Fall, where the strains of Schubert's Der Tod und das
Mädchen are heard from one of the houses that Maddy Rooney passes.
Both Bernhard's and Beckett's dramatic oeuvre, however dark its
subject matter, is essentially comic, black comedy, tragicomedy, but ulti
mately comedy. Beckett has stressed more than once that he regards himself
as essentially a comic writer. In his famous list of the types of laugh in
Watt he speaks of the highest form of laughter as the "mirthless laugh"
which laughs at human unhappiness.
Bernhard's attitude is, it seems to me, wholly analogous, if even more
extreme. In his play Die Jagdgesellschaft a playwright is among the principal
characters assembled in a savage parody of Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, in
which the protagonist, a general who has been wounded in the war, not
only loses his political office as a member of the government, but also has
his beloved wood cut down, must learn of his wife's adultery, and hear that
he is incurably ill - an accumulation of misfortunes which is positively
hilarious (no wonder he shoots himself at the end). This general is aware
of the tragicomic quality of human existence and the ambiguity of the theory
of genres. He tells the playwright, who he knows is turning his life into a
play, the play that the audience is now seeing:
Der Schriftsteller in seinem Wahnsinn

schreibt eine Komödie
mehr eine Operette
und die Schauspieler fallen
auf diese Komödie
Operette
herein
Und dann glaubt die gebildete Welt
Es handelt sich um etwas Philosophisches
Der Schriftsteller attackiert die Philosophie
oder eine ganze Menge von Philosophen
und setzt den Schauspielern ganz einfach seinen Kopf auf
Und handelt es sich um eine Tragödie
behauptet er
eine Komödie sei es
und ist es eine Komödie
behauptet er
eine Tragödie
wo es doch nichts als Operette ist15
Both Beckett and Bernhard look at the world and at themselves in

a mood of savage black humor, gallows humor in the true sense of the word,
aware as they are of the inevitability of death and the eternal elusiveness
of human identity which turns each consciousness into a split self - an
observer who is constantly observing himself as his own object of observa
tion. This leads Beckett again and again not only to the monologues of
endlessly shifting selves or the image of old Krapp not understanding his
former self while listening to tapes he recorded decades ago, but also to
repeated self-parody. Bernhard's whole dramatic oeuvre is deeply imbued
with a similar self-parodistic element, witness the figures of playwrights
appearing in a number of his plays. He sums it all up in a significant passage
of the novel Beton:
... ich bin mein Beobachter, ich beobachte mich tatsäch

lich seit Jahren, wenn nicht Jahrzehnten ununterbrochen
selbst, ich lebe nurmehr in der Selbstbeobachtung und in
der Selbstbetrachtung und naturgemäß dadurch in der
Selbstverdammung und Selbstverleugnung und Selbst
verspottung zu welcher ich letztenendes immer Zuflucht
nehmen muß um mich zu retten... .16
While I have established a number of parallels and similarities between

Beckett and Bernhard, there are of course also some very big differences
between them. Beckett is an Irishman in exile; Bernhard an Austrian who
lives in a kind of internal exile in Austria. Bernhard's writing is far more
specific in referring to real locations, real geographical and political circum

stances, than Beckett's much more abstract approach allows him. Both of
them are nonreligious, but obviously marked by coming from deeply Roman
Catholic societies. But, whereas Beckett's attitude is deeply quietistic, Bern
hard is a violently aggressive personality, whose pugnacity frequently fills
the headlines, when, for example, he insults the members of the government
who are awarding him a literature prize or withdraws from the Academy of
Poets in West Germany, because they have given the ex-President of the
Republic, whom he regards as a philistine idiot, an honorary membership.
Bernhard also does not hesitate to involve himself in the politics of the
day; one of his later plays, Vor dem Ruhestand, is a savage attack on the
ex-Nazis who have reached high positions in West Germany. But his special
wrath is reserved for his native Austria, a country he pursues with the sav
agery of a rejected and deeply disappointed lover. His most violent love
hate is directed against his home town of Salzburg, the very beauty of which
he feels is sullied by the petty bourgeois philistinism and stupidity of its
inhabitants. In Bernhardt case the schizoid perspective of his work certainly
shades towards the paranoiac.
It is in this light that his dramatic oeuvre also assumes the aspect of
a gigantic assault on the bourgeois audience. Bernhard's prose and plays
are full of expressions of deep contempt for his audience; his dramatic
oeuvre is, among other things, a monumental example of what another
important Austrian playwright of our time has called "Publikumsbeschimp
fung." Bernhard's is the saeva indignatio of a great satirist of truly Swiftian
proportions. It makes his position in society truly paradoxical; a celebrated
and highly rewarded writer who rejects the very society which heaps these
honors on him, and yet by accepting the honors, however grudgingly, negates
his own negation of that society. In that respect Samuel Beckett, who refuses
to give interviews, to appear on television, and did not even accept the Nobel
Prize in person acts far more consistently.
I personally regard Beckett as one of the most important writers of
this or any other time. The fact that Bernhard can be compared to him as
the creator of an impressive body of work, exhibiting not only an analogous
fascination but also affinities arising from a deep similarity in temperament
and attitude, highly symptomatic of the position of the individual in an
alienated and ideologically vacuous society, shows, I think, that he too is a
writer of considerable stature and significance for our time, far beyond the
confines of his country and language. Thomas Bernhard deserves to be recog
nized in the English-speaking world as a major creative presence.
Stanford University
Notes
1. According to Manfred Mixner, "Vom Leben zum Tode" in Bernhard:

Annäherungen, ed. Manfred Jurgenssen (Bern: Francke, 1981), p. 90.
2. Thomas Bernhard, Das Kalkwerk (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 7.
3. Beckett, Embers, in Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces
(New York: Grove Press, 1978), pp. 111-12.
4. Beckett, Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces (New York: Grove
Press, 1977), p. 13.
5. Beckett, Poems in English (New York: Grove Press 1961), p. 21.
6. Bernhard, Verstörung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 139.
7. Bernhard, Das Kalkwerk, p. 82.
8. Ibid., p. 165.
9. Bernhard, Amras (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 78.
10. Beckett, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), p. 139.
11. Ibid., p. 145.
12. Bernhard, Beton (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), p. 50.
13. Bernhard, Verstörung, p. 146.
14. Beckett, Disjecta, p. 52.
15. Bernhard, Die Jagdgesellschaft, in Die Stücke 1969-1981 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 206.
16. Bernhard, Beton, p. 142.

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Association of Austrian Studies

Beckett and Bernhard: A Comparison

It occasionally happens that I am asked to name some of the more

Modern Austrian Literature, Volume 18, Number 2,1985 67

... wie Konrad vor fünfeinhalb Jahren das Kalkwerk

or his Texts for Nothing.

You should see a doctor about your talking, it's worse,

What do I open? They say he opens nothing, he has nothing

If the world can never be more accurately perceived than as the

Jede Erklärung führe zu einem vollkommen falschen

Adding later that

Andererseits, soll Konrad... gesagt haben, wäre alles

das Bewußtsein, daß du nichts bist als Fragmente, daß

that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that

In exactly the same way Bernhardt musicologist who lives in a hate-love

of the artist in a society without an accepted and acceptable philosophy,

mastered that language:

Es wird mir tatsächlich immer schwieriger, ja sinnloser,

Both in Beckett's and Bernhard's practice, thus, we are in the situation

At first sight there may appear to be a contradiction in writer

Der Schriftsteller in seinem Wahnsinn

Both Beckett and Bernhard look at the world and at themselves in

... ich bin mein Beobachter, ich beobachte mich tatsäch

While I have established a number of parallels and similarities between

specific in referring to real locations, real geographical and political circum

1. According to Manfred Mixner, "Vom Leben zum Tode" in Bernhard:

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