THOMAS BERNHARD: The Making of an Austrian

When Bernhard, arguably Austria's foremost and most controversial novelist and playwright, died in 1989 at the age of 58, his homeland was shocked to learn of his will's stipulations: his literary corpus could not be "produced, printed, or even just recited" within Austria for the duration of copyright. Moreover, he wrote, "I do not want to have anything to do with the Austrian state and... I reject in perpetuity... any overtures in that regard by this Austrian state concerning my person or my work." Such were the last stage directions to a life lived with serious theatricality. Honegger, an Austrian-born dramaturge, translator of Bernhard's plays and professor of theater, is less concerned with creating a typical biography than with locating Bernhard's works within post-WWII German theater and literature, and his sensibility within the Hapsburgian tradition of theatricality. Bernhard inverted this tradition to reveal his country's Nazi past, postimperial provincialism, legacy of anti-Semitism and hypercivilized hypocrisy. His plays, novels, editorial letters and interviews—notably the drama The Hunting Party and the novel The Loser—were calculated to disturb his audience and the peace. They earned him libel suits, inspired recalls from bookshops and brought denunciations from government cultural authorities and the literati. This controversial public role, Honegger argues, was that of a satirist who cast himself as court fool (a sign of upward mobility for the illegitimate child of a housemaid) and his commemoration of his culture's extinction as the funeral rehearsals of a chronic lung patient. Honegger's postmodernist and psychoanalytical interpretation of Bernhard's paradoxical life and obsessive art is altogether appropriate and effective. (Jan.)