‘The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter—that has always been my ideal’
After a pleasant talk about the unpleasantness of Austrian novelists with a bookstore clerk, I picked up my copy of Woodcutters in Vienna, and began it almost immediately. Thomas Bernhard’s late novel takes place over the course of a single night, through the eyes of a single narrator, in a single, hypnotic block of text. A middle-aged writer, the narrator is invited to an artistic dinner in Vienna thrown by his old friends and patrons, the Auersbergers, whom he has not spoken to in thirty years. The party is meant to celebrate the achievement of a famous actor, but turns also into a sort of wake for their mutual friend, Joana, who killed herself a few days previously. Sitting in a wing chair at the edge of the festivities, the narrator inwardly rants about the death of his friend, his fallout with the Auersbergers, and his general contempt for the literati of post-war Vienna.
The novel is seething with rage. It is spiteful, obsessive, irreverent. But at the heart of this anger is not a cool cynicism, but a blistering sense of injustice and mourning. The narrator harangues:
‘People like Joana kill themselves, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, while parasites and society apes like the Auersbergers live on and on and on, getting older and older and older, boring themselves out of their minds all their lives and remaining utterly futile. People like Joana end up with self-tied nooses around their necks and are stuffed into plastic bags and dumped in the ground as cheaply as possible, while people like the Auersbergers don’t know how many dinner parties to give for how many Burgtheater actors in order to survive their sickening boredom and their mindless world-weariness, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. People like Joana have to content for years with the bare necessities of life and finally kill themselves, while people like the Auersbergers have everything in abundance and reach a ripe old age to no purpose, I thought. A person like Joana is finally abandoned by all these people, because they can no longer be bothered with her, yet they continue to flock around people like the Auersbergers just as they did twenty years ago.’
Bernhard voices the outrage of a man disgusted by the pretentious socialites who he was once involved with in youth, but this outrage and disgust cannot be separated with the death of his friend. The narrator struggles to understand how frivolous people can thrive while others, whom we love, cannot. These two facts do not coalesce, and the narrator’s resentment is an entirely human response to this failure of coherence.
While in Vienna, I went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum for the collection of Bruegels, which includes The Procession to Calvary. Completed by the flemish artist around 1564 and bought by the Antwerp collector, Nicolaes Jonghelinck, the painting is typical Bruegel—a landscape capturing the approaching climax of the Gospels, doubling as a depiction of the crowds of the common people of 16th-century Europe. Although in the geometric center of the portrait, Christ dragging his cross is playfully obscure amongst the sea of people lazily streaming forward to meet him at his execution. In the foreground, Mother Mary weeps with Mary Magdalene and John the Apostle, while in the background, the two thieves already hang in crucifixion, waiting for their coming companion. Like all of Bruegel’s landscapes, this painting is riddled with details.
However, what is most striking to me is a detail that refrains from fully entering into the frame of the scene. A man in white garb with a pink hat watches the procession from the right-hand edge. Mournful, slightly bored, he gazes across the crowd towards Christ with an understanding countenance. This figure is believed to be a self-depiction of Bruegel himself; but in this ironic inclusion, I imagine the figure as the representation of God the Father at Cavalry. Knowing what is about to occur but resigned to see it through anyways, the Father watches the sad procession from a distance.
I bring this detail up for many reasons, most obviously because it is in this similar posture that Woodcutters constructs its narrative. Like the Bruegel/God figure of the painting, the narrator sits in his wing chair, experiencing the scene from the distances of space and memory. He is only partially present at the dinner—many of his thoughts flow back and forth through time as he remembers the wrongs that his old compatriots committed. Throughout the night, he knows what will be the likely result of the dinner—who will become drunk, who will mutter something inane, etc.—but he compliantly continues to watch just the same. There is something about the character on the outskirts, who is both intimate and outsider, that is incredibly alluring.
More importantly, however, both Bruegel’s landscape and Bernhard’s novel have been in my mind as I think about the failure, or the insufficiency, of endings. Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary marks the ending of Christ’s human life. His friends and family, weeping in the bottom of the landscape, experience his death as a failure of the promise of his life and miracles. It was entirely not the outcome they had anticipated. Despite our knowledge of the coming resurrection, the painting imparts that feeling of something going awry. In Woodcutters, endings define the narrator’s current relationship with those around him. He exits friendships abruptly, discontent with the vanities of others, and reflects:
‘We may be on terms of the most intimate friendship with people and believe that our friendship will last all our lives, and then one day we think we’ve been let down by these people whom we’ve always respected, admired, even loved more than all others, and consequently we hate and despise them and want nothing more to do with them, I thought as I sat in the wing chair; not wanting to spend the rest of our lives pursuing them with our hatred as we previously pursued them with our love and affection, we quite simply erase them from our memories.’
The narrator attempts to end his involvement with everyone he finds distasteful, but is unable to rid himself of them satisfactorily. He meets all these characters again, at the party; and even as the dinners ends, he fumbles, and in a moment of supreme self-betrayal, he tells the Auersbergers how good it was to see them.
Endings are often not perfect. We never say the right things, or act in the right way. And normally this failure weighs down on us, but now I wonder if it needs to proceed in this way. An ending needs to be awkward, surprising, unpleasant, otherwise we would engage in them too lightly, too often.
Or maybe that’s all nonsense. Maybe what is closer to the truth is the fact that, often, endings are rarely endings at all. Because of their failures to be perfect or decisive, they stick with us, whether in the mind or in the blood. We feel them forever. Two thousand years and we haven’t recovered from the ending that Bruegel depicts. Similarly, Woodcutters concludes with the narrator’s overwhelming feeling that he cannot run away from Vienna. Endings never end for us, not at all.
It is this tension in endings that drives much of Bernhard’s narrative for me. I keep returning to the quote from which the novel gains its title. Spoken by the trite actor, it surprisingly resonates with the narrator. The line suggests an Edenic or Arcadian ideal—one of aloneness in nature, away from the metropole—but one that is implicitly infinite. A ‘virgin’ forest, there are trees to solitarily cut down forever. There is always a purpose for a woodcutter with endless amounts of trees. Every tree cut down is an ending falling loftily, but these endings accumulate and reverberate with meaning forever.