Thomas Bernhard: The Arts Trilogy

Published between 1983 and 1985, Thomas Bernhard’s late prose works have been loosely classed as a so-called “trilogy of the arts.” Each novel’s composition is shaped by the medium it engages—The Loser by musical form, Woodcutters by the theater, and Old Masters the visual arts. Each, in classic Bernhard fashion, is a monologic torrent of reflection, with all the elements of his notorious style at peak intensity: long and labyrinthine passages of unbroken speech, unabating repetition, apodictic condemnation, histrionic exaggeration, nested attribution. The relentless negativity that comprises his social critique is likewise here in abundant evidence, his narrators issuing vitriol at, in equal measure, the Catholics, the National Socialists, and the Social Democrats. What distinguishes these late novels from the mordantly funny body of work that precedes them is, arguably, the grief that courses through them. Bernhard asks, differently in each text, what is the yield of aesthetic compromise? What happens to artistic commitments wrongly cultivated? And who and what suffers as a result?

In this course, we will read the arts trilogy in its entirety, placing Bernhard’s late work in literary-historical and philosophical context with supplementary readings that may include George Steiner, Ingeborg Bachmann, and W.G. Sebald, among his contemporaries, and Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Adorno, and Voltaire as philosophical interlocutors. We will explore Bernhard’s recurrent themes—ambition, obsession, friendship, memory, grief, and isolation—as well as one overarching question that his life and work both pose: in a literary tradition that invented the problematic concept of “inner emigration,” what does it mean, and what does it take, to stay in place and yet remain apart?