The Awards and Rewards of Thomas Bernhard

…because the thing about Bernhard, the interesting thing about reading Thomas Bernhard, is stepping into the stream of his thought, sliding into the slipstream of his consciousness and letting its current pull you to the end, or rather to the terminus because there is no end, just the terminus because “the end” suggests the closure of epiphany and resolution, one of the lies of literature, maybe the biggest lie, there is no closure or ending, there’s just the finish, and to have the courage to write not just a novel like that, but novel after novel like that, a whole career of novels like that requires a courage that most humans don’t even know is possible, novel after novel for a lifetime, which is a better word than “career” because that’s another thing the novelist is supposed to have like closure but doesn’t, not if he’s honest, so Bernhard in My Prizes: An Accounting takes his essential honesty and courage and converts them into candor, candor another thing the novelist is supposed to have, and often does, and he uses them to write about the awards he’s received, which is something that maybe a novelist shouldn’t have but does, sometimes because he needs the money but sometimes he doesn’t, but always he needs the attention or else he wouldn’t be a novelist, he’d be content to lay down facts like bricks and then mortar them with his precious sensibility, or just work in academia or some other more conventional field altogether, but he wouldn’t have to create worlds, he could leave the creation of worlds to the gods or at least to the kings, and he wouldn’t have to bother with his creations or with his prizes, they’re just undignified, these prizes, and the undignity of them never stops, it just terminates like the narrative does, and then only for their recipient, who in the case of Bernhard has written this book which is really a memoir told entirely through the lens of some of the prizes he’s received, and before you receive the prize you have to be nominated, of course, and one musician Bernhard lived long enough to hear, whether he actually heard him or not, once said that being nominated for a Grammy is thrilling at first but then you look at the name above yours and the name below and all the thrill is gone, and Bernhard would have appreciated the sentiment, not because he loved music, which was the other great obsession of his life next to literature, but because he would have appreciated the wit in the sentiment and its essential truth, after reading My Prizes you know he would have appreciated the sentiment and wish that he had spoken it himself, for he too had no use for prizes and their ephemeral honors, their honors so-called and the rest, they’re worth no more or less than the prize-money attached, because, you see, when Bernhard’s first novel Frost came out and was awarded something called the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, “I didn’t want anything more to do with literature. It hadn’t brought me happiness, it had trampled me down into that stifling, stinking pit from which there is no escape, or so I believed….I lived with my aunt and earned my living as a truck driver. I didn’t want anything to do with literature anymore, I had put everything I had into literature and literature responded by throwing me into the pit. Literature turned my stomach, I hated all publishers and all publishing houses and all books. It seemed to me that in writing Frost I had fallen victim to an enormous fraud. I was happy to let my leather jacket drop onto the driver’s seat and go thundering through the streets in the old Steyrer truck,” which was where his state of mind was at when the Literature Prize of he Free Hanseatic City of Bremen arrived, although “[i]t was not the prize itself that saved me from my emotional, indeed my existential catastrophe, it was the thought that the prize money of ten thousand marks would enable me to get my life under control, give it a radical new direction, make it possible again,” and later, after winning the Julius Campe Prize, he read his acceptance remarks in the next day’s newspaper and saw the accompanying photograph of himself, whereupon “I felt worse than I’d ever felt before. But suddenly I thought of my share of the prize, the five thousand marks suddenly dominated my mind, and I slipped on my jacket and ran to the offices of Hoffmann und Campe, it was a beautiful walk in the best air and I felt I was seeing the elegant world for the first time in my life,” all because of the money and not the prize itself, you see, for if the work is not the reward then the money is, and if the money isn’t then nothing is, that’s the thing Bernhard is telling us, and his obsessive protagonists, his obsessive procrastinators teach us that the road to perfection is the road to nothingness, the road to failure, they teach us that perfection, when it arrives, does so in ways often unsought and only when we relax in our seeking, that preparation is good but over-preparation just stalls and lets the tension accumulate, lets the fear of failure accumulate, the dread accumulate, that’s what his narrators teach us, in the form of object lesson, while Bernhard teaches it in the form of positive example, teaches us that the only way to get on with it is to get on with it, to splash the paint on the canvas and start painting, if you wait for their respect then you become reliant on their respect, it’s self-perpetuating and self-defeating, it’s a good thing there’s no prize called the Thomas Bernhard Prize, given year after year like literal clockwork, because an award like that would only suggest there’d ever been a writer like Thomas Bernhard or that there ever will be again…

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