Thomas Bernhard and the Comedy of Contempt: Leeching the Seething in One Long Paragraph

Note: Barrelhouse first published this essay (in somewhat different form) in 2014, in their Issue 13, a few months after publishing Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters from Eyeshot Outbox, about two years before New Directions published my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador.

It surprised me how many happy vocalizations I emitted the first time I read Thomas Bernhard. The blurbs on my University of Chicago Press paperback had mentioned nary a chortle!

  • “In its obsessive, elegant rhythms and narrative eloquence, it resembles a tragic aria by Richard Strauss.”
  • “The great pessimist–rhapsodist of German literature . . . never compromises, never makes peace with life . . . Only in the pure, fierce isolation of his art can he get justice.”
  • “In his work, the nihilism of this century found its most uncompromising expression.”

I loved the repetitive ranting. I laughed at controlled theme/variation ranting about suicide in Woodcutters and The Loser more than when I read writers or watched television considered funny. The vocab also made me laugh, repetition of words like ruthless, relentless, obliterated, annihilated.
         
It’s difficult to scan Woodcutters for a representative passage that isn’t many lines long and comes off as funny out of context. It’s not like Bernhard delivers one-liners and zingers—there’s an accretive quality to the “humor”—but here’s a quotation that comes close:

“Vienna is a terrible machine for the destruction of genius, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, an appalling recycling plant for the demolition of talent.”

Compared to what I’d been reading circa 2001–2004 (George Saunders, T.C. Boyle, et al.) lines like these, slightly repeated and varied, seemed liberating, if not exactly hilarious. At the time, like fighting fire with fire, such negativity may have served as an antidote to airborne toxins expelled during George W. Bush’s first term. All of which somehow made me laugh.
           
Knockdown

He doesn’t resemble conventional comic writers on the surface but Bernhard sets ‘em up and knocks ‘em down just the same. The setup creates an expectation the knockdown undermines. The setup enters the recipient as an airy expectation that a sudden energy shift expels as a laugh. The setup Bernhard wallops involves the formal contrivances and expectations of conventional contemporary American literary fiction, the scenes involving familiar characters walking around indirectly talking about longing and loss, with their speech ensnared by quotation marks, with paragraph breaks, space breaks, chapter breaks, section breaks, the whole rise and fall (“arc”). Such an all-encompassing thematic/stylistic punch line is essentially set up by everything little baby Stewie satirizes on “The Family Guy” when discussing the dog Brian’s novel. Now imagine an entire 150-page, single-spaced novel of Stewie in the form of a smarter Austrian depressive berating a Brian who represents everything crappy about life on Earth.            

“How’s that novel you’ve been working on for three years? Got a compelling protagonist? An obstacle for him to overcome? Nice little narrative? Beginning, middle, and end? Some friends become enemies, some enemies become friends? At the end your main character is richer for the experience?”


Frustrated Idealism

Giddiness rose in me when I first read Bernhard in part because, despite rage and bile and darkness, his narrators never lose their shit. Their impeccably ordered prose feels organic and individuated and never rigid. It’s natural and flowing yet structured, an improvised fugue, a style with antecedents (some say Beckett, others say Walser) but never so exaggerated as in Bernhard. The style accounts in part for the humor but LOLs and other vocalizations are also compelled of course by the content.
           
A Bernhard narrator is a frustrated idealist releasing acerbic thoughts in something like a long, detoxifying therapy session with himself, not seeming to worry about how his thoughts are received. I had expected these novels to blacken bright days, but the meticulous, flowing language mainlining an obsessive’s agitated consciousness suggested a fantasy rant in which I let loose on everyone/everything that came within the crosshairs of my own frustrated idealism. Particularly in later books like Extinction, the narrator (mostly) spews dark ideation but never froths at the mouth or lapses into absurd divergence — a model for the psychological and emotional extirpation of bullshit. If you’ve ever giggled evilly after blurting something you shouldn’t have said aloud, you can relate.
           
In a controlled mode of attack, Bernhard takes off the gloves of civility to reveal the claws of what he really thinks. He goes for the eyes of the world, and does so not because of some typically Austrian version of Generalized Rage Disorder or simple sour grapes or an attempt to avenge a perceived insult. He does it because, when it comes to art and life and self, his narrators are Total Raging Idealists.

Key lines in the last pages of Wittgenstein’s Nephew:

“He both loved and hated nature, just as he loved and hated art, and loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.”

The Bernhard narrator fills the space between conceived Ideal and perceived Real, between love and hate, passion and ruthlessness with 150-page paragraph-less sheets of organically ordered sentences that flow across and down the page, that seem at best like buzzsaws downing towering conceptions of society and text.

Infectious Phrases

All of which sounds very nice but those who spend too much time with Bernhard are often in some trouble if they value their so-called happiness. Prolonged exposure to Bernhard leads to silent composition of gracefully modulated rants, statements phrased and rephrased, with certain key phrases italicized for emphasis. In fact, all those exposed to Bernhard’s prose are in danger of contracting a virulent language virus that presents in the reader as silent composition of organically ordered statements phrased and rephrased, with certain key phrases emphasized as motifs. The Bernhardian rant is a fugue that seems improvised and may have been improvised upon composition but has been worked until its final presentation in print seems organized and controlled. Certain key phrases, oft repeated, are like buoys in the whitewater of his sentences. In the agitated surf of his repetitions, certain key phrases provide a moment of respite, a safe base for a second until the sentence proceeds. Certain key phrases, in short, behave as rests, as silences in effect, and this approach is virulent because it mimics patterns of thought in the heads of obsessives ranting about everything they consider contemptuous, obsessives whose thoughts churn around the axle of certain key phrases that undermine a conceived ideal of what the world should be. To turn again to the common ground of relatively contemporary televised animated entertainment, relentless/repetitive emphasis of certain key phrases I find funny the way I find it funny when Sideshow Bob in the “Cape Fear” episode of the Simpsons, in a gag that works the longer it goes on, repeatedly steps on the teeth of rakes, causing the handles to fly up and smash him in the face over and over again (~10×).

~ur-ugh-gah (~10x)

Over time I’ve also found it funny whenever I discover that Bernhard has infected another great writer. In an interview on Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm,” W.G. Sebald, a towering literary artist if ever there was one, a German who lived and taught along the eastern coast of England in East Anglia, revealed himself as “yet another follower of Bernhard,” which is most evident in Austerlitz, wherein two characters discuss an absent third who has committed suicide. William Gaddis, author of two twentieth-century American doorstops read by ambitious/precocious male writers in their twenties, The Recognitions and JR, struggled for twenty-something years on a third massive novel about the player piano until he read some Bernhard and wrote a Bernhardian rant about trying to write a massive novel about the player piano, Agapē Agape. And Geoff Dyer, expert amateur par excellence, has cited Bernhard as an influence for Out of Sheer Rage, a memoir of sorts about trying to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, a tactic derived from Bernhard’s Concrete, a book about trying to write a book on Mendelssohn.

World-Historical Heft

None of this sounds particularly funny, I realize. Correction involves building a giant cone in the middle of the forest for one’s sister, which seems like a funny premise in theory but in practice the cone in the forest is surrounded by three-hundred pages of Bernhardian madness, which is rational and exacting as it deploys successive layers of civilization to suppress asocial urges raging in the blood.
           
For the most part, the controlled madness of Bernhard’s narrators can be read as a critique of the author’s spatiotemporal origin (WWII-era Austria):

“A basic trait of this country’s population is the constant thought of suicide, they might be said to take pleasure in thinking constantly, steadily, without allowing anything to distract them, about how to do away with themselves at any time. It is their way of keeping their balance, I said, to think constantly about killing themselves without actually killing themselves.”

This controlled madness perceived in fellow Austrians he also sees in himself:

“Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness; one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. Paul never controlled his madness, but I have always controlled mine—which possibly means that my madness is much madder than Paul’s.”

Controlled madness is an apt oxymoronic description for Bernhard’s approach. And such juxtapositions have also always been a comedic standby. YouTube vids abound of a scene in a film in which Hitler receives bad news and rants in apoplectic German as subtitles reveal that he’s super-pissed about a late-arriving pizza, farts, the iPad, DeSean Jackson’s glorious walk-off punt return against the Giants, and everything else inconsequential compared to failed plans for establishing that supreme example of controlled madness known as the Thousand-Year Reich.
           
The Holocaust was the most meticulous genocide ever — and a critique of the precise quantification of genocidal madness is suggested in the controlled madness of Bernhard’s prose. Thematic and stylistic audacity but also suggestion of serious world-historical heft (i.e., the relatively recent attempt to take over the world and exterminate/enslave all non-Aryans) release pressure caused by internalization of the enormity of what’s off-screen in his novels.
           
It’d be erroneous indeed to compare Bernhard with “Wedding Crashers.” But reading Bernhard somehow produces — for me at least — the sort of suddenly emitted vocalizations normally associated with the consumption of conventional American comedic entertainment. Which is amazing?

The (Likeable) Art of Exaggeration 

At first after reading Bernhard I thought I’d discovered a model for exaggerated/intelligent invective, an improvement upon Céline’s comparatively tame Journey to the End of the Night. I found Bernhard useful as I became more immersed in the so-called Literary World, especially as I started and finished an MFA and subsequently failed to attract literary-agent or small-press interest in a few novels and a story collection completed over the course of a decade.
           
With expectations dangerously raised, as I was repeatedly bashed in the face by the rakes of kind declines, Bernhard’s exaggerated monologues served as a palliative. If one exaggerates expectations, one can’t help but be let down, and since Bernhard’s narrators are extreme idealists and master exaggerators, they’re pretty much screwed, and therefore serve as therapeutic models for those with dashed expectations. Consider this longish passage from the end of Extinction:

I’ve cultivated the art of exaggeration to such a pitch that I can call myself the greatest exponent of the art that I know of . . . I was the greatest artist I knew in the field of exaggeration . . . But of course this too is an exaggeration, I realize as I come to write it down—a typical instance of my art of exaggeration. The art of exaggeration is the art of tiding oneself over existence, of making one’s existence endurable, even possible . . . Those who are most successful at tiding themselves over existence have always been the great exaggerators. Whatever they were, whatever they achieved, they owed solely to the art of exaggeration. The painter who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor painter, the musician who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor musician . . . With some, of course, the art of exaggeration consists in understating everything, in which case we have to say that they exaggerate understatement, that exaggerated understatement is their particular version of the art of exaggeration. Exaggeration is the secret of great art . . . and of great philosophy. The art of exaggeration is in fact the secret of all mental endeavor.

All life will be suffering if, as in Extinction, all writing fails to attain the level of Kafka (“even Thomas Mann and Musil in every line they wrote let themselves be dominated by three-ring binders”), just as all cities will underwhelm if compared to Rome, just as all music will fail to match Glenn Gould’s “piano radicalism,” just as all people will pretty much suck if compared to Extinction’s Uncle Georg, who introduced the narrator to “literature and opened it up as an infinite paradise.”
           
It’s this extreme, unrelenting, exaggerated demand for not just simple excellence but the finest achievements of humanity (the infinite paradise of lit) that makes Bernhard’s narrators likeable: “. . . as I see it only the highest can bring real satisfaction.”
           
Bernhard’s narrators could easily seem like elitist shits but instead are likeable because 1) they have exaggerated ideals when it comes to life and art, and 2) these exaggerated ideals produce exaggerated textual manifestations of suffering, which may come off as funny since the narrators aren’t dying of terminal illness but instead suffer from self-inflicted spiritual wounds caused by intolerance when it comes to others’ so-called taste.

Accounting for Taste

Taste is expertise developed through the cultivation of native and acquired sensibilities. But it seems like whenever someone suggests something like this, they’re shat upon from a great height by everyone with internet access.
           
Novelist J. Robert Lennon, for example, stated in an early 2013 post on Salon that “most contemporary literature is terrible: mannered, conservative, and obvious.” He concluded “let’s face it: literary fiction is fucking boring,” after suggesting that writing students would be better off paying attention to the world (“read instruction manuals, legal documents, restaurant reviews, and corporate newsletters” and “have lots of intense and ridiculous conversations with drunk people”) instead of immersing themselves in such crap.
           
Lennon’s statements triggered Twitter rebuttal I mostly ignored since it seemed like another opportunity for instantaneous commentary from omnipresent submediocrities online, humorless types whose literary careers have progressed largely because they’ve used social media to establish a network of friends/followers who “like” their posts and retweet their tweetage. But after Lennon tossed a little stone into the pond, the subsequent rippling of outrage and triage made me wonder what Thomas Bernhard might have made of the Lit World as it’s currently expressed on Twitter.

The Litter

Writing is one thing, reading is another, but the Literary Twitter is something else. At best it’s an improvised, collective, ever-updating fount of news, knowledge, and wit. At worst, it’s a column of ice chipped at by the axes of cutely compressed links to the world’s ever-expanding online literary content; endless self-promotion and sycophantic promotion of others; quipped opinion regarding live televised events (cable TV dramas, disasters du jour); public conversations better served by texts unread by thousands of strangers; declamations upon the craft of writing and everything else (as though there were anything else, ha ha ha); lesser-known writers retweeting better-known writers hoping to gain better-known writers’ favor; middling writers retweeting publicity staff hyping middling reviews in middling publications of middling novels; writers offering mash-up puns of canonical novel titles; writers tweeting daily pics of their word count function on their latest novel manuscripts; the whole damn #amwriting thing; pretentious young writers pitching surreal/absurdist novels or films or products or outerspace expeditions; famous novelists tweeting insights ripped from novels published long ago that no one reads anymore; writers with their Goodreads accounts synched with their Twitter so everyone can see they’ve given five stars to some non-fiction anthology published by their friends; writers who’ve tweeted nearly 50K times proclaiming their gratitude for writing and reading on the day of a domestic terrorist event; writers playing nice in the character-restricted sandbox but rarely letting loose and saying exactly what they think, that is unless their handle is @breteastonellis.


No Compassion

Thomas Bernhard as I imagine him on Twitter would defend against idiocy in all its forms, an avenging/guardian angel of invective, presenting unabashedly uncivilized commentary in sophisticatedly phrased tweets and comments that seem shamelessly thick-skinned when of course his skin is thin or else he wouldn’t register an army of Lit Shit encroaching upon the garrison of his ideals, a glittering city on a hill surrounded by heathens loading catapults with soul-sucking tweets, the character-restricted excrescence of a literary culture consisting of promotion and cronyism and tired bougie considerateness and/or mild condescension at most, all of which combines to smell like the sweat of something essentially human degraded thanks to overexposure to the scent of its own stink.
           
@ThomasBernhard—a demigod always at arms online, ready to attack idiotic tweets and tweet totalizing statements that identify an ideal by outlining its negative image—is wish fulfillment. For those suffering from the possession of highfalutin ideals, their protection from assaultive forces (be it mass-produced mediocrity or whatever else that grinds one’s gears) is essential.
           
Maybe what we need now is a model for scorn, disdain and contempt to overcome the civility and competence of the online hordes, whose catchphrase so often these days seems to be compassion. In her essay “On the Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor states: “So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.” Folks now treat her as a saint, but omnipresent sub-mediocrities freak when J. Robert Lennon states that “MFA programs  . . . have had the effect of rendering a lot of lousy writers borderline-competent, and many of these competent writers get stories and books published.”
           
Compassion, as it’s currently used in a literary context, has become a tepid if not yet noxious trend that Flannery O’Connor also identified in her day:

“It’s considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth and which no book jacket can do without. It is a quality which no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so it is safe for anybody to use. Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything.

From “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” [1960]

As an artistic practice it’s possible that compassion produces weaker work than does contempt? Compassion and contempt both derive from the same perception of something or someone seeming off. Etymologically, compassion approaches someone/something “with suffering” whereas contempt does so “with scorn,” although I’d also emphasize the tempest I sense in the word (“with storm”).

A Storm of Shit

Maybe I’ll load tweetable sentences from the end of Bernhard’s last novel, Extinction, into an automated tweeter thingy configured to expel a shitstorm of Bernhard pronouncements on such a regular basis that I inundate the handful who follow my recently reborn electronic evangelical outreach and interaction activities (@leeklein0) [note: indefinitely deactivated this “X” account in early 2025 after Musk’s Nazi salutes and related pro-Nazi posts there] with refreshing, revitalizing literary ideation like:

  • “I detest the majority of writers.”
  • “I can’t imagine anything worse than meeting a writer and sharing a table with him.”
  • “Writers are on the whole the most repulsive people.”
  • “Low, vulgar, stupid individuals who have attained a degree of literary fame but whose company I can do without because they have nothing to offer me but their mediocrity.”
  • “[Writers] are all basically simple-minded, like the books they write and put on the market.”
  • “We pretend we’re capable of the very highest achievement, but can’t even write down a word of the unique and tremendous work that we’ve just announced.”

I include that last one since it’s surely easier to wield a great hate, pretend to revel in an evil alternate world dominated by antisocial media, and ruthlessly and relentlessly obliterate and annihilate everyone and everything than it is to create something that meets and exceeds one’s ideals. Creating something worthwhile instead of destroying everything worthless is 1) no laughing matter and 2) so challenging that all one can really do is laugh, which maybe is why I — irrelevant submediocrity that I am — have found Bernhard so funny? What seems at first like destruction is really creation of the highest order?
           
So the moral of the story is something like this: if ever so worked up that you feel the need to harm someone or something physically or emotionally, you’re better off settling down with some Bernhard. Let him leech the seething out of you before you start researching literal and figurative pressure cookers.

For what it’s worth, the Boston Marathon Bombing occurred during the writing of this essay. Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon wish list included books about ID forging, fraud, organized crime, and voice lessons, but not a single volume of Bernhard. It’s possible of course that no Bernhard titles appeared on his Amazon wish list because Tamerlan had already read them all, but for the purposes of the conclusion of this essay the suggestion is clear: if Tamerlan and Dzhokhar had read Bernhard, the Boston Marathon Bombing would not have happened.

Similarly, if you read Bernhard, it’s possible that imagining @ThomasBernhard may help you from freaking out when exposed to online and offline obscenities not as easily ignored.

It’s a basic algebraic principle: when you multiply a negative by a negative, the product is positive.

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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).

Four Great Books by Julien Gracq, Supreme Prose Poet of Anticipatory Anxiety: A Balcony in the Forest, The Opposing Shore, The Shape of a City, and King Cophetua

I don’t know much about the French writer Julien Gracq (1910-2007) other than that he won the Prix Goncourt for The Opposing Shore in the early 1950s but refused the award. I started reading him because of a mention of that novel in an Enrique Vilas-Matas novel and then decided to read as much of his work as I could find in translation. The first novel below is a masterpiece of prose style in translation and anticipatory anxiety. If you were to read one of his novels, without question it’d be this one. Gracq, generally, is a great poet of the fear of future events, a semi-surrealist Cold War prose-stylist supreme.

Pic from NYRB

A Balcony in the Forest (1958)
Translated by Richard Howard

I love when Goodreads leads to masterpieces previously unknown to me. Stoner, most memorably, and a few others. Now this one. Sumptuous prose, never over the top as in The Opposing Shore (see below), steady, flowing, so clear its perception verges on surrealistic swervy poetry.

Gracq might just be the supreme poet of anticipatory anxiety, and seclusion in a dense forest with the pulse of bombs on the horizon like heat lightning is therefore maybe his ideal setting. As in The Opposing Shore, nothing much happens, which is the point for ninety-five percent of this as our man Lt. Grange (le focus of le novel’s close-third POV) waits for the Germans to come through the forest near the Belgium border and raid the blockhouse in the trees where he and three subordinates are stationed.

There’s a little forest sprite in this — an innocent widowed proto-hippie sexy child — who might turn off folks turned off by male writers writing about sexy little sprites, but Mona worked for me because she emerged from the forest and seemed descended from the sexy little sprite in Undine, a myth I read a few months ago about a lady o’ the forest who’s equal parts woman and brook.

It’s gripping toward the end as the war (early WWII, 1939) ramps up, but the prose is what happens in this one. Let’s just say that not in a long time have I thought about starting a book from the beginning as soon as I finished it. Felt it was perfectly weighted, paced, perceived. Can’t recommend it more highly to anyone who appreciates it when tip-top prose sans empty experimentation supports masterful evocation of a world and character/theme/forward propulsion. Language in this seemed always at the level of Salter or Updike but with a surrealistic sheen that elevates it.

Ordered four more short Gracq novels as a result.

Pic provenance

The Opposing Shore (1951)
Translated by Richard Howard

As mentioned above, I read this thanks to this bit in Enrique Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque:

“He’d published lots of important authors, but only in Julien Gracq’s novel The Opposing Shore did he perceive any spirit for the future. In his room in Lyon, over the course of endless hours spent locked away, he devoted himself to a theory of the novel that, based on the lessons apparent to him the moment he opened The Opposing Shore, established five elements he considered essential for the novel of the future. These essential elements were: intertextuality; connection with serious poetry; awareness of a moral landscape in ruins; a slight favoring of style over plot; a view of writing that moves forward like time.”

When I first looked to get it, copies cost more than $200 online. But recently I checked to see if a cheaper one had shown up and copies were available for a little over $20. Turns out they’re print-on-demand copies (look for the tell-tale ISBN on the last page), which look just fine. My copy even has a born-on date: “26 May 2013” — it was printed in Lexington KY, too, for what it’s worth.

So hard to do this one justice. Like a cross between Kafka and a super-French/semi-evil Updike?

To be added to a syllabus featuring Waiting for the Barbarians and The Tartar Steppe.

Totally humorless. Purposefully disorientating.

Set in a region engaged in something like a cold war for 300 years, in a somnolent, half-alive, yet peaceful state — the prose induces a similar state in a reader thanks to precise, decadent, sometimes Gothic (sometimes almost purple) prose always worth a second and third read to savor and store a sentence.

Sometimes I felt like I was reading blind, and then I’d have to read back up the page to see where I lost touch with a paragraph.

Best when read aloud since the sentences really flow and it’s easier to stay alert when reading aloud.

A psychedelic existential novel about pushing through and making contact and really feeling alive even if doing so is in no way in one’s best interest on a practical level (in the novel’s case, it might lead to full-on war) but is essential so life seems alive.

Worth going through again one day — like much of Faulkner, seems like much would clarify on second and third read. So many quotables, none of which I’ll bother to type up.


The Shape of a City (1985)
Translated by Ingeborg M. Kohn

Slyly impersonal post-Proustian impressions of city and self across most of a century (Gracq was born in 1910 and he wrote this in the mid-’80s, or so I realized after mention of a long-popular cafe where the kids these days all have “big hair”).

The way around Nantes.

Name drops all your favorite French writers: Rimbaud, Breton, Stendhal, de Maupassant, Balzac, Lautreamont, and Nantes’ own, Jules Verne.

Effluvial prose, rich in sediment flowed down river of memories vis-a-vis agglomerations of times past. (“Agglomeration” is this one’s representative word — shows up 17 times.)

Dense but with lots of space and chapter breaks. Like a humorless Sebald — if this included old postcards and images of bombed-out ruins replaced by office buildings it could sneak past most readers as a bit of posthumous Max (“W.G.”).

Mostly dispassionate, tranquil recollections uncoiled in streams of precise prose, often quietly surprising, and liable to submerge into the page if you’re not careful.

Always insightful and hypnotic, mature and nonsensationalist, unconcerned with entertaining the attention deficient.

Translation seems smooth and Gracq comes through as he does in the novels.

Get it as a gift for the urbanist aesthete in your extended family.

Recommended also for all fans of Sebald and Proust, a slant spoked psychogeo/autobiographical essay that’s not always “fun” but often seems fundamental.

Odd moments of double awareness walking and reading this through Philadelphia as Gracq traces circuitous overlapping paths now and then through Nantes, another secondary/tertiary city with a long history and a character unlike its more famous urban neighbors.

pic provenance

King Cophetua (1970)
Translated by Ingeborg M. Kohn

A dream-like exercise in Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood prose style infused with a heaping dose of Poe. WWI on the horizon, train travel, a villa overwhelmed by nature, the man of the house not returned, gunfire overheard all night, a beggar maid mistress, wandering dark passages, a crazy sex scene described like this: “The pleasure she gave me was brief and violent, but my memories remain a colorless blur, almost devoid of a sense of intimacy: nothing but that long body which seemed to come alive far away from where I was, eyes closed, gathering itself around a secret image, those noble legs which, during moments of pleasure, again seemed to animate the folds of the evening coat — that haughty docility, that distance which nothing could bridge.”

Love the atmospherics and the precise language that seems like its goal is to put the reader into a sort of aesthetic overload, dazed, entranced. Gracq really has a not-so-PC thing for the elusive beguiling lady love interests who emerge out of ether and retain their distance despite intimacies, sort of what it might be like to do it with an animated mannequin. Stylized dream lovers, not succubi.

I’ve also read The Peninsula and The Narrow Waters but don’t really recommend them. I own Reading Writing, too, but have only read a few pages of it — I will probably get to it in 2019.

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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).

The Rabbit Series by John Updike: Twentieth-Century Time Capsule of Restlessness in Southeastern Pennsylvania (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest)

There’s a Rabbit Run Road near where I live in Southeastern Pennsylvania

Rabbit, Run (1960)

I read a paperback of Rabbit, Run 20+ years ago, mostly sitting in the sun in a backyard in Iowa City. From that reading I really only remember a sex scene early on that seemed to do something to my lower abdominal area, like something had shifted downward — a really weird feeling, not turned on so much as something about the phrases affected, constricted, tightened the guts. Could’ve just been something I ate, of course — I remembering grilling trout a lot that summer.

I read a first-edition hardcover (dust jacket intact protected by mylar) of Rabbit Redux this past May and then, as soon as I finished, I pressed play on the audiobook version of Rabbit, Run on Spotify while otherwise reading Rabbit Is Rich in a first-edition hardcover (dust jacket intact protected by mylar). The opening scene playing some kids at a playground basketball hoop, I remembered, and listening to it again it was so vivid, the swish, the feeling of the ball on the hands. The line at the end of the section, the good kid who respected Rabbit because “real ones know,” seemed to suggest to the reader — or the listener — that the author is a real one and real readers will recognize the quality. There’s something about that line that creates a connection between author and reader, the confidence in Rabbit’s game redounding on Updike’s prose style.

From 2007 until recently my review on Goodreads noted page 17 as the home of the sex scene that created the effect mentioned above, but there was nothing ~17 audiobook pages into this that seemed capable of that. A scene with Janice seemed insignificant compared with what I’d recently read in Rabbit Redux, one of the most explicit novels I’ve read in the modern era, more so than Miranda July’s All Fours.

I listened to the section where Rabbit takes off in the car south while I was driving into Philadelphia from the southwest and laughed at the unrestrained negative descriptions of Philly while descending the George C. Platt Memorial Bridge, with a fantastic view of the city’s skyline, the marshy wasteland south of the city formerly marked by industrial smokestacks spewing obvious toxins replaced by acres of newly constructed AI data centers or maybe Amazon warehouses, a minor improvement I suppose. I definitely didn’t remember that fugue south and wondered if it had influenced a novella I’d written around that time involving a fugue south.

I also definitely didn’t remember the minister Eccles or games of golf with an almost abstracted, mythic, spiritual tinge to them or descriptions of Rabbit’s miraculous drive where the language hits a high. The scenes with Rabbit’s old coach I loved, how Tothero maintained his silence before responding, controlling everyone. Per Google, the surname Tothero is common in southeastern PA and derives from Dötterer, relating to poultry farmers who dealt with eggs, but “Tot” also means “dead” in German, so the coach’s name suggests “Dead Hero.”

And then everything with Ruth is fantastic, the sex scene done well, subdued compared with what’s to come in the second installment but surely shocking or at least alluring and uncommon for its time

The perspective shifts around this part of the novel to Eccles, and as in the second and third novels, I anticipated such a change, expecting that maybe 8% of the novel at most will be told from POVs other than Rabbit’s, an interesting intentional inconsistency that lends some perspective to the primary perspective. And then everything with Janice in childbirth, after the delivery woozy on pain meds, Harry having left Ruth after essentially forcing her to please him on her knees, followed by the horrific scene in which Harry wants just a taste even though Janice has been suffering episiotomy pain and breastfeeding all day, and it’s revealed to all really be about empathy, the perspective shifted to Janice as she repeatedly laments Harry’s inability to put himself in other people’s shoes (what they used to say before they relied on the word “empathy”), which opened up some space between the author and the narrative voice’s occupation of a not always so noble young man, not particularly educated, doing his best, following his instincts, trying to do what’s right but so often making the wrong choice. That is, the shift in perspective let Updike off the hook a bit since sometimes Rabbit’s perceptions are so precise and nasty or distasteful you naturally wind up thinking the author is somewhat of a sicko, but then the bit with Janice shows that the author all along has been trying to create an effect.

And then the novel reveals itself as a tragedy and generally elevated for me, taking on some more heft. The ending scene with Ruth too, when she essentially says divorce Janice and marry me or the baby she carries will die, is totally gripping, and the wide-open ending seems perfectly suitable and right, thanks in large part I suppose to the title.

Listening to the book you can’t of course see the prose and Updike’s prose is so much about vision, description, almost gratuitous, achieving an effect that transcends realism, ie, that’s so well-observed that the familiar seems if not strange than at least seen in a way that, after a dozen or so hours of exposure to its observations and perceptions makes you observe and perceive things if not more clearly than simply a little more. It’s clear that Updike practices a visual art form more than a sonic one, his sentences written for the senses they evoke, the words chosen not just for their meaning and sound but their shape and stance, their look and feel, a writer absolutely 100% aware of the texture of prose.

Thematically, compared with the other two novels set at the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1970s, this one set at the end of the 1950s doesn’t seem as obviously intended to serve as a time capsule or a core sample of its era, although of course it does seem to predict what’s associated with the ’60s, a sense of feeling trapped by family and church and town and expectation and running from it all, dropping out, yes, but not quite tuning in, turning on sexually, sure, but not quite psychically.

Rabbit Redux (1971)

A merry month of May study of Updike’s famous series feels pleasantly contrarian or unrelated or irrelevant or at least it did at first before this one started to unfurl all its gory ’69 glory, almost too relevant to 2020 social justice rioting after the murder of George Floyd, the wide-open racism in the mouths of the whites, the too-meaningful American flag sticker on the back window of the car. The phrase “make America great again” even makes an appearance.

At first Rabbit’s racist thoughts on the bus are too much, almost impossible to imagine in a novel nowadays, trigger warnings galore for sex, drugs, the N word, the C word, all the off-limits words and their related thoughts and spirits spelled out, drawn in bold, emphasized, streaked in graceful attentive consumable flowing surprising changeable language serving for the most part a story naturally unwinding, eventful, alive, human, sometimes so active the text takes on a swerve that almost feels pointillistic, all its details slanted in the direction of where the story’s going across and down the pages.

Sometimes seems to almost follow a formula of a set-up or introductory establishing shot followed by straightforward dialogue-replete scene followed by interior passages, the perspective deepening from surfaces to consciousness, sentence fragments, oft poetic.

And the sex.

There’s a lot more sex than I’m used to reading, loins described as swamp and earth, that sort of thing, gumdrops, but really this is the social justice education of Rabbit (36) with two kids half his age, an 18-year-old white rich girl junkie runaway hippie-type and her young friend, a black Vietnam Vet a little more than half crazy on the run from the fuzz. Sometimes felt like the precedent for Franzen’s recent Crossroads, or I could recognize this one as an essential underlying structure for that one.

Generally, just fully enjoyable reading, immersive, high-def, psychologically and emotionally and socially mature and insightful with its ideas about America 1969 totally embedded in the characters and their interactions, all of them, even the minor characters like a Vietnam Vet who threatens Rabbit about Skeeter staying at his house, so clearly drawn, so patiently and thoroughly described without Henry Jamesing it.

At most at times the expected rotation to passages of interiority seems a bit automatic and too much, but always seemed worth it, and of course there’s the setting, the town of Brewer, essentially Reading, the fifth-largest city in PA, near where Updike grew up in Shillington, where I intend to drive the child to this summer for an hour-or-so outing by car to the northwest of where we live.

I read Rabbit Run 20+ years ago in a backyard in the sun. Had the Everyman’s Library omnibus edition of all four Rabbit novels and read the first page or two of this one a few times but never could manage more. Acquired the old original Knopf hardcovers for nearly nothing at the local library book sale over the last few years and it makes all the difference, the linotype set in Janson, the thick paper, the comfortable margins, the legible size of the text.

Rabbit Is Rich (1981)

There’s something pleasant about Updike’s consciousness and prose style descending to inhabit Harry Angstrom. There’s a slight dissonance, in that we know the author is smarter or more worldly or at least certainly better educated than his character, but the author inhabits the character with grace, giving Harry the benefit of the doubt, albeit a little too often making him seem like a sex-obsessed pig, a little too quick to use the C word. I liked when Harry was seen through Thelma’s eyes, rounding him out, the appealing perceptions counterbalancing everything we know of him.

Sometimes felt like this one corrected for the second volume which corrected for the first volume, in that this one focused more on family and interpersonal dynamics, whereas the second volume was more about the influence or the integration of new societal trends into one’s consciousness, whereas the first volume was more about a young man’s attempt to break free of traditional values of church, coach, wife, family, anticipating that trend in the ’60s.

Like the title indicates, this one is richer than the first two, longer, more populous maybe, the interest introduced in the beginning of Harry and Ruth’s possible daughter used to gracefully herd the novel’s episodes along, like Fritze the collie maybe, intermittently there in the back of this reader’s mind wondering when we’d get back to it.

Got a little frustrated through the bits too often focused on Nelson, although the payoffs with the convertibles and the scene at the party (as they leave) were worth it and solid (I yelled out during the latter). Posted an update about how the novel had lost all narrative drive midway through during the marriage scene but I trusted it would pick up, assuming it would return to Ruth’s daughter, but appreciated how she emerged at the party, Nelson’s curiosity, her white pants, how he wanted to cover her up when she was passed out in one of the bedrooms, a sort of instinctual sibling tenderness. And then things really picked up once Harry explored Webb and Cyndi’s upstairs alone — Updike defaulting to his primary interest in sexual activity — and pretty much maintained that clip to the end.

The final 150 pages or so when Harry and Janice go on an extended triple-date Caribbean vacation worked wonderfully well to get them out of Brewer and change the atmosphere but more so to differentiate the side characters and give them depth, particularly Thelma and Ronnie her drape-head “playmaker” husband who’s been a hairy loud annoyance ever since the first book. And of course there’s the very much unexpected ’70s-style open-mindedness among the three married couples including an even more unexpected instance of extra-marital action, although I suppose it was maybe inevitable after Harry’s intriguing discovery while snooping around upstairs at Webb’s.

Loved how the Webb’s upstairs bathroom (the blue shag toilet cover, the little Hollywood-ish lightbulbs around the mirror) dredged memories of a neighbor friend’s bathrooms from the late 70s — and unlike the first two novels I was alive during this one’s time frame, watched the Rams/Steelers Super Bowl the novel ended on, saw George “The Iceman” Gervin play in person versus Dr J and the 76ers at the Spectrum, appreciated mentions of Phillies (Rose, Bowa) and Eagles players (Jaws) — if set in 1980 instead of the late ’70s, all Philly teams would’ve made the finals — and I remember hearing about inflation for the first time in my life and seeing an expletive preceding “Iran” (which I only associated with a popular Flocks of Seagulls song at the time) spray-painted on the cement under an overpass.

Generally enjoyed reading this — again, in part thanks to the old hardcover.

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Loved this last major installment for the riveting, so well-executed/vivid scene on the little sunfish sailboat with the granddaughter, for its patient final movement echoing the fugue of the first book, for its penultimate scene echoing the opening scene of the series, and for the consistent evocation, reinforcement, and animation of the characterization, particularly the primary family players, not to mention the setting (Brewer PA, as well as Deleon FL).

I’ve always thought of Updike as a supremely graceful liquid lucid sentence writer, who in his essay “At War with My Skin” (in Self-Consciousness) says he smoothed his prose to compensate for his psoriasis. But the take-away from this series more so is his facility with dramatization, the general palpability, the vitality, the simple LIFE of his scenes, the unforced, natural dictation of the dialogue replete with unspoken asides and associations, which over the course of four novels between 300 and 500 pages accretes so Harry’s memories serve as pleasant reminders for readers.

This installment, early on it was pretty obvious we’d be dealing with heart trouble for Harry and a coke habit for Nelson, and the full-on revelation of both issues about 100 to 150 pages in proved fully satisfying and propelled the novel across the somewhat longer, denser pages. This one felt more fully from Harry’s perspective, without, to my memory, the intermittent POV switches to other characters, literarily gaining perspective on Harry’s actions, as in the others. It feels more fully seated in his mind, presenting his thoughts and observations in an accessible way, more in complete sentences than artful “stream of consciousness” deep-POV fragments.

In a comment on an update I posted to Goodreads after reading the first twenty pages or so, a respected friend who had given this one-star wrote: “everyone keeps telling me that Updike is a super-serious major American author, and I just keep assuming that they have carbon monoxide poisoning or something.”

I agree that he’s not “super-serious” — there’s something more “joco-serious” or seriously joking or joking seriously about the narrative stance. There’s a playfulness that’s not quite satire but not NOT satire, almost like Thomas Mann’s characteristic “gentle irony,” that’s by nature accessible and American in a way (not too staid or full of itself, pompous high Euro style), the way Steinbeck is accessible down-to-earth American, or like Steinbeck slanted with some of Nabokov and Joyce’s enchantments?

There’s a smile on the face of the writer as he writes, appreciating his creation, trying to please, neither writing down to his mass audience nor trying to impress them with fancy literary pyrotechnics. You can’t tell these books from their iconic striped covers (I read inexpensive first-edition hardcovers with dust jackets intact in mylar covers), but you can tell them from the author photos below, with Updike serving while playing tennis, or smiling as though he’s just done something naughty, or covering most of his mouth with a hand.

Also interesting is the influence of these books on the next generation, particularly Franzen, DFW, and Nicholson Baker (U & I). Updike’s flag is firmly planted in the family saga, replete with sexy bits time-stamped with the prevalent rabbit ears of the era and the post-Pill prurience of Penthouse Forum cast as sexual liberation. But there’s also an unfurled endurance to the prose, a covering of bases (and outfield, scoreboard, dugout, mound, bleachers, foul poles etc), a super-generous semi-indulgent accessible maximalist realism, unlike the excessive essayistic questioning “hocking” of Roth for example, that set a standard for the next generation of accessible yet often somewhat unconventional maximalist realists, more so I’d say than Nabokov, Roth, or Mailer and Bellow (who I haven’t read much of but will soon).

On the continuum, Updike is a click or two left of centrist Steinbeck, leaning in the direction of Faulkner and Joyce. There’s still that well-made American craftsmanship (in my Goodreads review of East of Eden I compared Steinbeck’s “brand” to Fender and Levi’s), but there’s an artistic ambition to relay a particular quality of perception of reality that can extrapolate out to seem representative or at least symptomatic of its larger societal temporal milieu that makes things somewhat more unconventional than Steinbeck, the sex of course but also the interiority and the almost unhinged excessive deployment of detail — yet still nowhere near as elaborate or extreme as Joyce or Faulkner.

Harry’s libido in this one has thankfully diminished, the C-word only appears once or twice (always shocking and repellent, as with unfortunate yet characterizing racial and ethnic observations), but the scene during the storm alone at home after the heart attack with Pru was, as the unexpected action with Thelma in Rabbit Is Rich, deliciously audacious, the dictionary-definition of “surprising yet inevitable,” and fit perfectly in the climax slot, more so in this volume since it compelled the ending.

Along the lines of Harry’s diminishment, this installment really emphasizes the importance of proper nutrition and exercise. I’m the same height as Harry, a few years younger than he is in this one, but in no way is my memory beginning to slip or do I or anyone else really consider me anything like a grandpa, but then again I run, walk, am engaged in the world beyond my employment and family, and eat a whole lot better than Harry does. Harry seemed more like a man in his mid-to-late sixties than his mid-fifties, although this was written by Updike (born in 1932) in his mid-to-late fifties. But maybe that’s also the point — he’s retired too early, without pursuits, his arteries clogged, his life mostly in the rearview, old before his time . . .

Temporally, this one’s set in the late ’80s, when I was toward the end of high school, so I remember everything mentioned pretty vividly, particularly the sit-coms (Cosby, Cheers, Roseanne) and of course the athletes (Michael Jordan, Deion Sanders, Mike Schmidt, Randall Cunningham).

At one point he tellingly states he prefers the graceful, effortless Schmidt over Pete Rose, saying if you have to do it with “hustle and grit” you shouldn’t be in the game, suggesting I thought something about writing, that he himself (Updike, not Harry) was akin to Schmidt, although maybe it’s just further characterization reinforcement, with Harry associating his old high-school hoops style with Schmidt more than the Ronnie-like Rose. I also loved the influx of candy and fast-food and the general franchising of Brewer and Florida, seen as an incursion and flattening over the course of the overall timeline.

I also tried to read the novella Rabbit Remembered in the story collection Licks of Love but quit after about 100 pages, thinking that the movement was a little too off the old man’s fastball, but later this summer I’ll re-read Rabbit Run in print (read 20 years ago and listened to this past May) once I get my hands on one of the two old hardcovers my mom says are in her bookshelf.

That’s something too about Updike I’ve always known and considered something of a given: these Rabbit books were always on the built-in bookshelves around the fireplace in the living room of the house where I grew up. I have always known about them, ever since I could read and became aware of the titles, which I used to look at all the time and once tried to catalogue (giving up after a few shelves). Updike was always something my parents had in common — they both read all the time but on either end of the spectrum, with my dad reading more genre stuff like Stephen King or Michener and my mom reading more “serious lit” (Beckett, Handke, everything Sontag recommended et al). So, reading these books, it was interesting for me to imagine my parents reading them as they came out via Book-of-the-Month club or from the local public library while I was pre-extant (the first two), a sapling (the third), a high-school senior (this one).

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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (from New Directions). Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox (from Barrelhouse). Or The Shimmering Go-Between from me (Atticus, the publisher, is kaput).