ABSTRACT
Even the most cursory glance at Thomas Bernhard’s prose readily reveals the degree to which its author is committed to the narrative principle of exaggeration. Bernhard’s characters display a predilection for verbal brinkmanship and the superlative so routinely that many of Bernhard’s most vocal opponents can perhaps be forgiven for mistaking such excess and its effective dismissal of Austria in general and Salzburg in particular, of Stifter as well as Heidegger, of both artists and politicians, of clergymen and hunters, for a description of reality. The mistake, easily discerned by a reading of Bernhard’s text that attends to more than just the objects of his verbal assault, is that of missing the self-undermining character of exaggeration taken to its limits. The methodical destruction of such an object would demand the cessation of attack once the purpose of discrediting whatever is to be verbally annihilated were achieved. Bernhard’s narrators, however, never pursue so purposeful a path, choosing instead to exaggerate their claims past the point of peak efficiency so that they are allowed to erode the conceptual distinction upon which the attack was first predicated. In this way, the reality of a justified—or at least justifiable—dismissal gives way to an unreality that attaches itself to both sides of that distinction, and consequently to the narrative voice that presented the distinction as a standard for evaluation in the first place. The comparative opposition that Reger, in his quest, “alle Künstler immer wieder auf die Probe [zu] stellen” 1 [to put all artists to the test again and again], draws in Alte Meister between Stifter and Heidegger as purveyors of kitsch, each of singular ridiculousness in their respective domains of literature and philosophy, thus collapses upon the revelation that Reger himself is the tertium comparationis, since he, “grotesquely,” is distantly related to both of them by blood (AM, 95). His own aesthetic stance that would presumably enable one to reliably identify kitsch so as to safely distinguish it from its opposite, therefore, is to be perennially put to the test just as much as the aesthetic objects that Reger himself presents to the reader for critical inspection.
