The Art of Erasing Art.Thomas Bernhard

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Bianca Theisen

If there is an art of erasing art in what have been called the “self-eras-ing narratives” of postmodernism,1 those kinds of art call attention to the very form of art, as that which differentiates art from everything else, namely non-art. What postmodern art aims at, then, is art’s mode of presentation or of observation, which, as Niklas Luhmann has suggested, is to observe the unobservable. Art would be concerned with observing the blind spot or the form of other, first-order obser-vations. For Luhmann, art is thus a second-order observation which unfolds a paradox that itself escapes observation and, especially in modern and postmodern art, aims at being observed as an observer by unfolding such paradoxes of observation.2 Modern and postmod-ern art does not emphasize what it observes; it wants to show how it observes. These forms of art are no longer referential: they do not imitate nature or the world, they observe observers in a world that in its turn is constructed only through recursive observations. Art’s reference to “world” shifts with the transition from “object art,” which is still embedded in a representational world view, to what Luhmann calls “modern art,” which constructs a world that is contingent on its observations. According to Luhmann, this transition takes effect with Romanticism and its focus on the lacunae of cognizing cognition or presenting its own mode of presentation.3

1 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987) 108.2 Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995) 59.3 See Niklas Luhmann, “Weltkunst,” Unbeobachtbare Welt, F. D. Bunsen, N. Luhmann

and D. Baecker, eds. (Bielefeld: Verlag Cordula Haux, 1990) 7–45.

MLN 121 (2006): 551–562 © 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Drawing on the terminological register of the sublime and Kant’s notion of negative representation, Lyotard has also foregrounded the particular tendency of postmodern art to present its own mode of pre-sentation, to present nothing but its form. While modern art presents the unrepresentable, while it tries to make something visible which cannot be visualized—while it observes the unobservable, we could also say—postmodern art folds back on the modern, as it were, to present nothing but modernism’s mode of presentation, or, as Lyotard says, to put “forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself.” Postmodern-ism thus sets itself up at the heart of modernism, and what it represents is the very paradox of modernism, or “the unrepresentable of the form” of modernism itself.4 For Lyotard, postmodernism is thus not opposed to the modern, it also does not succeed modernism, marking its end, but it paradoxically precedes modernism in the temporality of a future anterior. It is modernism’s “nascent state.”5 If we define form with Luhmann as the paradoxical unity of the distinction between a distinction and what it distinguishes (or between a representation and what it represents), we can reformulate Lyotard’s notion of the postmodern as a second-order observation which observes the form of modernism, the operational distinction between representation and the represented unrepresentable, which for modernism itself remains a blind spot, i.e. remains unrepresentable.

Second-order observation which observes observations and distin-guishes distinctions can be seen as the basis of Thomas Bernhard’s literary techniques. From his early narratives Frost or Amras to his latest novels Alte Meister or Auslöschung, he creates narrators who, observ-ing others, observe themselves observing and whose observations are finally even framed by another narrator, who, appearing only at the margins of those texts, observes their observations in turn. Bernhard’s characteristic technique of narrated monologue is also indebted to this principle: a narrator usually cites someone who has said what someone else has said, and so forth. “In the last instance, everything that is said is quoted,” the narrator quotes in Gehen.6 If the narrator

4 Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1984) 81.

5 Lyotard 79.6 “Im Grunde ist alles, was gesagt wird, zitiert,” Thomas Bernhard, Gehen (Frankfurt/

M.: Suhrkamp 1971) 22. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the translations from the original are the author’s own.

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here quotes another character, Karrer, on the fact that everything is quoted, Karrer’s statement on quotation must in turn be quoted: and this line of quotations cannot be traced back to an origin, but is circular so as to suspend the distinction between quotation and non-quotation altogether. In addition to this citational technique within the narratives, Bernhard’s texts also set themselves up as second-order observations of the literary tradition. Citing and copying other texts, they intertextually reference “world” through recursive observations. Intertextuality in Bernhard does not only indicate such a shift of ref-erence from representation to recursive observation, it is also a space of cultural and literary memory,7 which it then erases. Auslöschung, a narrative that has been pronounced to be Bernhard’s literary legacy, programmatically captures the project of erasure with—and as—a title. Erasing the literary tradition from which it unfolds, the narrative also tries to erase its own operation of erasure, to which it in turn as a second-order observation would remain blind. As the narrative’s own form, the operation of self-erasure is unrepresentable. The narrative can, however, point to it. Or as Wittgenstein put it: “A picture cannot, however, depict its pictorial form: it displays it.”8 Bernhard’s narrative employs its difference to different media, photography and film, to “show” the paradox of its own form.

1

With Auslöschung, Bernhard takes up the story line and setting of his earlier film script Der Italiener. Ein Film, which was filmed by Ferry Radax and produced by WDR and Ifage-film productions. Both in the film script and in the narrative, Wolfsegg is the scene for a burial and the setting for the remembrance of a traumatic past. In addition to certain thematic recurrences of the earlier text in the later text, Auslöschung also transforms the directions for the camera shots into the narrator’s interior monologue.9 The narrator makes his observations

7 Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995) 395. See also Renate Lachman, Gedächtnis und Literatur: Intertextualität in der russischen Moderne (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1990).

8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (London: Routledge & Paul, 1961) 2.172.

9 See also Hans Höller, “Politische Philologie des Wolfsegg-Themas,” Antiautobiogra-phie. Thomas Bernhards ‘Auslöschun,,’ ed. Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995) 38–49; 45.

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on Wolfsegg from the same angles of Wolfsegg’s architecture and topology as the camera. Just as the gaze of the camera is doubled in the film script through the lens of a surveyor and his assistants, who observe the position of the camera as the camera in turn observes their position, just as the gaze of the camera thus reflects on itself and observes itself observing, the narrator’s observations are doubled through descriptions which always also revoke what they have stated. That the narrator blames film for a worldwide process of brainwash-ing and stultification should, therefore, not be taken at face value. Film is for him but the transposition of the photographic image into movement (A 646). And the photographic image, though also denounced by the narrator, is the matrix from which the narrative process of Auslöschung unfolds.

Bernhard’s novel draws on the distinction between text and the photographic image to situate itself in and to delimit itself from the novelistic tradition of narrative recollection. The title programmatically indicates the erasure of both an individual inheritance and a literary legacy. Franz-Josef Murau, the novel’s main narrator, has just returned to Rome after his sister’s wedding in Wolfsegg when he receives a telegram informing him about his parents’ and his brother’s death in an accident. He returns to Wolfsegg for the funeral and donates his entire inheritance to the Jewish community in Vienna. News of the accident triggers reminiscences of his past (the narrator’s childhood at Wolfsegg, his troubled relationship with his parents and siblings, his intellectual development with the help of his uncle and against his parents’ plans and interests), reminiscences which are delivered in a fractured form and circle back to the accident itself.

Murau’s process of remembrance unfolds as a description of three photographs he had taken of his family, the only photographs he has kept and which he now, having just received the telegram, takes from his desk. His present description doubles his past photographic perspective. In a photograph showing his parents at Victoria Station in London just about to get on the train, his father seems even more clumsy to him than he had been in reality, while his mother’s posture adds to the ludicrousness the photograph captures (A 24). Murau’s description collapses what he had seen in his parents in the past, as a young man, and what he sees in them now, into the contingent moment of the photographic image. What had been threatening and daemonic about his parents, Murau writes, has suddenly shrunk to the dimension of a pathetic photograph (A 25). Photography here seems to function as the technique of down-scaling that Benjamin saw

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as a characteristic of photographic reproduction.10 In a photograph which shows him in his sailboat, Murau’s brother is characterized as an embittered man who has been ruined through a lonely life with his parents (A 24). Murau’s reflections on these photographs and on photography in general state what they negate and negate what they state. Photographs, he claims, only show a grotesque and comical moment; they do not show the portrayed person as he or she had been in life: “photography is a perfidious and perverse forgery” (A 26). And yet, the photographs of his parents and his brother are said to be extremely characteristic: “this is them,” Murau claims, “as they really are, this was them, as they really were.” The photographs do not present an idealization of his parents and his brother, but “the true copies” of his relatives (A 27). Murau accuses everyone who takes photographs—and thus implicitly also himself, since he took the photographs he is now describing—of committing the meanest crime, because they turn nature into a grotesque and those portrayed into “pathetic, dismembered puppets, beyond recognition” (A 29). Photography, Murau posits in conclusion to these reflections on photography’s inability to represent the actual and the real, is “the greatest misfortune of the twentieth century” (A 30), only to then immediately refute his statement by suggesting that despite their distortion, the photographs of his parents and his brother show the “truth and reality” of those photographed behind all photographic distortion.

Through a self-referential oscillation between positing and negat-ing his considerations, the narrator uses photography to build up a representational paradox which he effaces in his very representation of it. If, according to Murau, photographic representation does not offer an analogue to reality, but a distortion, a grotesque disfiguration of reality, and yet shows within this very distortion the true charac-teristics of that which it portrays, it does so because Murau does not simply look at what the photographs represent, but at what he sees represented in them. His description of the photographs is a second-order observation of the perspective the photographs offer, which is not a perspective representing reality but Murau’s own perspective when he took the photographs.

10 Walter Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” Walter Benjamin: Gesam-melte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. II.1 (1991; Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1977) 368–385; 382.

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Photography here serves as the medium to unfold the distinction between original and copy and to address the very problem of rep-resentation—whether the copy can only forge or distort what it rep-resents, whether its deviance from the original necessarily produces a proliferation of false images, a world of simulacra. In Alte Meister, a narrative that is generated from its relation to the “old masters” of painting, music, philosophy, and literature, around the problem of their imitation, and the relation between forgery and original, an original, Tintoretto’s “White-bearded Man” in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is doubled. Another original appears in Wales, and the narrative suggests that “each original is already in itself a forgery” (AM 118).

But neither Alte Meister nor Auslöschung simply revel in a procession of simulacra with their reference to the representational problem of the false image. Auslöschung exceeds the very distinction between original and copy by obliterating its presupposition of a representable world. The world of Auslöschung is not Wolfsegg. It is what Wolfsegg meant and now means to Murau: it is a world contingent on recursive observations. When the world is no longer seen as an inventory of representable objects, it can only be constructed from observations and observations of observations. As observers, Francisco Varela states, we “distinguish ourselves precisely by distinguishing what we appar-ently are not, the world.”11 “In finding the world as we do,” he writes, “we forget all we did to find it as such, and when we are reminded of it in retracing our steps back to indication, we find little more than a mirror-to-mirror image of ourselves and the world.” If Murau’s project aims at obliterating everything that Wolfsegg “is” (A199), he thus necessarily also obliterates the very observations which obliterate Wolfsegg. Or, as he puts it, in effacing Wolfsegg, he effaces himself (A 296). Since this self-effacement—taken quite literally as Murau’s death at the end of the narrative—is in turn something that necessarily remains unrepresentable for Murau’s own narrative of “Auslöschung,” a second narrator, who appears only at the very margins of the text, reports in the style of an obituary or an epitaph carried to its utmost reduction that Murau, “born 1934 in Wolfsegg, died 1983 in Rome” (A 651).

11 Francisco J. Varela, “A Calculus for Self-Reference,” International Journal of General Systems 2 (1975): 5–24; 22.

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2

The description of a photograph, Roland Barthes argues in his essay “The Photographic Message,” adds a second-order or a connotative message to the denotation of the photograph, and to describe there-fore means to “change structures, to signify something different from what is shown.” In this early essay from 1961, Barthes still believes that photography offers an—imperfect and mechanical—analogue to real-ity, a pure denotation or a message without a code. The description of a photograph would supply a code, derived from language, for the codeless photographic message. Yet Barthes also sees a paradoxical re-lationship between a first and a second order within the photographic message itself, insofar as it foregrounds its mode of presentation over what it presents. This paradox, Barthes writes, is “the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art,’ or the treatment, or the ‘writing,’ or the rhetoric, of the photograph)” and it exceeds a mere collusion of denotation and connotation (which Barthes sees in all forms of mass communication), in that the coded message here unfolds on the basis of a message without code.12

In La chambre Claire, Barthes substitutes the indexical character of photography for his earlier notion of the photographic analogue. He now sees photography as a language of pure deixis.13 The doubling of codelessness and code, the paradoxical structure of first-order showing and second-order description, in some sense recur in what Barthes now terms “studium” and “punctum.” Studium is coded, it provides the cultural or sociological description of the photograph, while punctum is uncoded.14 Punctum disrupts and scans studium; it is that contingent element in a photograph which enthralls and ‘punctuates’ its observers. With punctum, Barthes extends the semiotic function of the uncoded message through the paradoxical temporal-ity of the traumatic moment. Photography does not refer to or copy reality, yet it is referential in that it captures the real in a contingent detail like a traumatic moment. And like trauma, its temporality is one

12 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” Image Music Text (New York: Noonday Press, 1988) 15–31; 18.

13 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Gallimard: Cashiers du Cinema, 1980) 16; Die helle Kammer, trans. Dietrich Leube (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1985) 13.

14 Ibid. 48, 84 (German 35, 60).

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of belatedness, as Freud called it, or of the future anterior, as Lacan described it: what has been comes out of the future. For Barthes, it is the temporality of the aorist. The photographic punctum positions death in the future when it presents the completed past of a pose. The paradox Barthes now emphasizes is no longer the semiotic structure of denotation and connotation but a temporal one: the photographic punctum faces us with the “secret of simultaneity,”15 when it presents us with the unity of the distinction between a ‘that will be’ and a ‘that has been.’ With this temporal structure of simultaneity, Barthes re-defines photographic reference. The photograph does not refer to something that was actually there. As in trauma, which according to Freud’s theory of belatedness has not actually happened but is con-structed after the fact through a later incident that gave the earlier one its traumatic character, reference in the photographic punctum is constructed, or, we could also say, it is contingent on observation. Punctum is the form of photography. It is its unrepresentable blind spot, to which photography, as a language of deixis and indexicaliza-tion, can only refer as to its own operation of reference. Since it does not refer to that which has been there, photography is not a form of memory, Barthes says. On the contrary, its temporality, the aorist, blocks memory. Collapsing and at the same time differentiating the three temporalities of the object, of the photographer, and of the observer in the simultaneity of the punctum, the photographic image becomes counter-memory.16

3

Through its use of photography, Bernhard’s Auslöschung simultane-ously sets itself up and delimits itself from the novelistic tradition of narrative recollection. The form of the photographic image becomes the medium in which the form or the unity of the distinction between narrative remembrance and narrative counter-memory can be rep-resented. In addition to the photograph he took of his parents and brother in life, Murau is fascinated but also appalled by newspaper photographs which show the dead at the scene of the accident and do not even stop at showing pictures of his mother’s decapitated body.

With Murau’s recollection being generated by those photographs,

15 Ibid. 130 (German 93).16 Ibid. 143 (German 102).

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Bernhard’s narrative seems to call up the founding myth of mne-motechnique, in which death sets off the work of memory. What is to be remembered in and for the present is disfigured: according to the legend of Simonides, as Quintilian renders it in his rhetorics, the dismembered bodies of party guests crushed by a collapsing building represent a past which, within the present, is defaced and beyond recognition. Since the very moment of dismemberment, the anatrope as a sudden transition from life to death, is unrepresentable; since the bodies’ past integrity is effaced in their present dismemberment; since the past, in short, can no longer be read or identified within the present, mnemonics restores face to the defaced by reconstructing their place in life. Because the very moment of shock and collapse, the incision of death into life, of present dismemberment into past integrity eludes representation, memory can only read or represent the (dismembered) present by simulating it as the past: it can para-doxically only give face to the faceless by defacing—misrepresent-ing—their defacement. The poet, as the only survivor, represents the dead as they had been in life and in the past so that they can be dead and buried in the present. It is through the relation to death that Siegfried Kracauer tried to differentiate the mnemonic from the photographic image. The mnemonic carries forth the remembrance of death. The photographic image, however, aims at eliminating the memory of death through reproductive multiplication. Especially newspaper illustration transforms the world into a present, which can be captured photographically and then immortalizes this present. But while photographic reproduction thus seems to wrest the world from death, it paradoxically abandons it to death altogether.17

Bernhard extends the founding myth of the mnemonic process through a technique of perspectivation and, one could almost say, of reproductive multiplication. He thus opens it up to a counter-memory which reconstructs, but only reconstructs observations of observations. He multiplies the accident by representing it through different perspectives. Murau’s two sisters, who identified the bodies, give different reports of the accident than his brother-in-law or the newspapers. Everyone, Murau says, “reports on his accident, as he sees it;” “they all report for themselves on a different accident even though it is the same accident;” and, “even though it is always the

17 Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1977) 35.

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same accident, it is always another one” (A 414). While one newspa-per shows a photograph of the mother’s decapitated body, another newspaper headline claims that all three bodies have been mutilated beyond recognition, and a third one writes figuratively that Wolfsegg has “lost its head” (A 406).18 The newspapers indexically point to the dismembered dead with photographs and headlines, but they also, just as mnemonics restores face to the defaced by reconstructing their place in life, hypertrophically represent Murau’s parents as a happily married couple who dedicated their life to the common good and were benefactors of the church, a representation which the newspapers, as Murau writes, in turn “mutilate beyond recognition.” The newspaper reports deface when they are writing about the defaced, reproducing the founding myth of remembrance as a hypogrammatic structure from which the overall narrative seems to unfold, but which it also effaces. While the newspapers point to dismemberment with their photos and headlines but then offer a laudatory representation of the dead as they had been seen as public figures in life, Murau’s account inversely points to photos of his relatives as they had been in life, but then defaces their memory through his overly critical, even spiteful, observations with what he calls the “effacement,” the “Auslöschung,” of everything that Wolfsegg has meant for him. Mnemonics made the illegible, defaced present legible by simulating it as the past, by creating a space of temporal duration beyond the sudden catastrophe of death. The newspapers, as a medium of the momentary and the current, ef-face the temporal aspect of mnemonic duration, but, replicating its paradoxical representational structure of defacing defacement, still make a disfigured present legible. Generated through reference to the temporal and representational paradox inherent in both models, Murau’s narrative remembrance exceeds both by trying to efface the past in a self-effacing present. In other words, Murau’s remembrance defaces the process of remembrance, in turn a defacement, which al-lows for representing, or giving face to, the defaced. Auslöschung thus does not indicate a process of forgetting, but a narrative remembrance

18 The fact that Muraus’s mother has been decapitated in the accident should not simply be psychologized as a phantasma of the bad mother and an aggressive or even sadistic relationship to women played out as a distinction between dominating (male) mind and subdued or destroyed (female) body, a phantasm which has been followed through Bernhard’s writings and traced back to his biography. See for instance Mireille Tabah: “Dämonisierung und Verklärung. Frauenbilder in Auslöschung,” Antiautobiogra-phie. Thomas Bernhards’ ‘Auslöschung,’ ed. Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995) 148–158.

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of the process and tradition of narrative remembrance. As a second-order observation of the process of literary remembrance, it effaces its tradition by effacing itself as the preservation of its tradition.

If we shift the direction of our question and do not ask ourselves whether photography is art but whether art is photography, Walter Benjamin argued, we will find a different, non-referential notion of art. Through enlargement or down-scaling, photography can make us see what we would not be able to see otherwise: the blind spot of our perception. Presenting us with what Benjamin calls the “optical-unconscious,” it can make us perceive what would elude our normal perception. Moreover, the reproductive technique of photography has changed our conception of great works, which are no longer singular but have become collective and need to be down-scaled in order to be assimilated.19 Bernhard’s Auslöschung also draws on “photography as art” to down-scale the multitude of great works it cites. The text obliterates the realm of cultural memory which it creates with an over-statement of intertextual references. To name just a few: Murau, who designates himself as a “literarischer Realitätenvermittler” (A 615)—a literary real estate agent, but also a mediator of literary realities—as-signs Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, Kafka’s Prozeß, Broch’s Esch oder die Anarchie, Musil’s Portugiesin, Thomas Bernhard’s Amras, and Goethe’s Wahlver-wandtschaften to his student Gambetti. He mentions Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and Kierkegaard’s Krankheit zum Tode. With Murau’s friend Maria and her bohemian poem, the narrative seems to refer to Ingeborg Bachmann and her poem “Böhmen liegt am Meer,”20 which in turn intertextually references Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. Intertextuality in Auslöschung, however, is not themati-cally motivated through such topics as anarchy, social critique, or a north/south differentiation.21 Nor does Auslöschung invoke its inter-texts primarily stylistically, even though such literary techniques as permanent digression or the author’s reference to his own texts within the literary text, techniques which for instance Jean Paul explored in Siebenkäs, resurface in the narrative. Rather, Auslöschung references its intertexts merely by indexing their titles, as if it were pointing to those

19 Benjamin 382.20 Holger Gehle, “Maria: ein Versuch. Überlegungen zur Chiffrierung Ingeborg

Bachmanns im Werk Thomas Bernhards,” Antiautobiographie. Thomas Bernhards ‘Aus-löschung,’ ed. Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995) 159–180.

21 Joachim Hoell, Der ‘literarische Realitätenvermittler. ‘Die ‘Liegenschaften’ in Thomas Ber-nhards Roman Auslöschung (Berlin: VanBremen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1995).

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texts as the newspapers were pointing to the dead with their headlines. Auslöschung, the 650-page account with which Murau wants to efface Wolfsegg, effaces itself. It is nothing but its own title. By the end, his report will have effaced what it reports; but even though Murau has repeatedly tried to write such an account, he has always failed with the first sentence. Murau is certain only about its title, Auslöschung (A 199). With its reduction of an intertextually referenced space of literary memory to a mere indexicalization of titles, Bernhard’s Aus-löschung is a counter-memory of its literary legacy. Effacing itself in a mere title, Auslöschung indexes its own form.