Stendhal famously defined the novel as a mirror that its author has taken out on his walk along the high road; sometimes it reflects the azure of the heavens, sometimes it reflects darkly the mire. English classes in American public schools may no longer teach mimesis, but readers nonetheless know it when they see it. Imagine a novel describing a sunset: “The sun shone low in the clouds like stray embers in scattered ashes.” A novel is a mirror, faithfully, comfortably reflecting the world. What, then, is a reader to make of an encounter with this? 

After a mild pulmonary infection, tended too little and too late, had suddenly turned into a severe pneumonia that took its toll of my entire body and laid me up for at least three months at nearby Wels, which has a hospital renowned in the field of so-called internal medicine, I accepted an invitation from Hoeller, a so-called taxidermist in the Aurach valley, not for the end of October, as the doctors urged, but for early in October, as I insisted, and then went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret, to begin sifting and perhaps even arranging the literary remains of my friend, who was also a friend of the taxidermist Hoeller, Roithamer, after Roithamer’s suicide, I went to work sifting and sorting the papers he had willed to me, consisting of thousands of slips covered with Roithamer’s handwriting plus a bulky manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone.” 

So begins the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s third novel Correction (1975, translated in 1979 by Sophie Wilkins). The sentence is typical of Bernhard, widely regarded by critics as the most important postwar writer in Austria, whose influence has been observed in contemporary writers from Michel Houellebecq to Ben Lerner. What is this so-called mirror held up to, and why? If, as Matthew Arnold had it, “a style is the saying in the best way what you have to say,” then Bernhard had a lot to tell, not show. His novels, bereft of plot development, often take the form of repetitive screeds overflowing with dyspeptic hauteur. Indeed, his biographer Gitta Honegger describes his stylistic approach as the “performance of a solo mind refracted through several mirrors,” though none are like Stendhal’s, which only reflect. They may have been borrowed from Saul Bellow, who wrote that “death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we’re to see anything on it.” And it’s true that Bernhard himself almost died a pulmonary death as a teenager, first from a severe case of pleurisy, then from the tuberculosis he contracted during its treatment. His habit of imbuing the inhabitants of his fictive universes with lung diseases is an autobiographical tic concomitant with his tendency to split himself into his few characters—trompe l’œil in Honegger’s hall of mirrors. 

Lung problems would plague Bernhard all his life. But his real disease, the one that infected his work, was what Jean Améry called morbus austriacus, a peculiarly Austrian disease of which the primary symptom is a deep loathing of Austria. Bernhard gazed into the mirror and saw reflected back at him an Austrian abyss. He disdained his home country. His novels, mostly remembered, and his plays, less translated into English and little performed after his death, were unrelenting attacks on the moral, cultural, and governmental decay of his homeland. All his life he held against Austria what he saw as its unrepentant Nazi complicity, its dereliction of duty to resist Hitler’s Anschluß, its bloated postwar bureaucracy, its stifling, philistine, self-congratulatory cultural mediocrity. The joke about morbus austriacus is that it isn’t a joke at all. Bernhard is, with Arthur Schopenhauer, the German language’s great pessimist, and, with Emil Cioran, twentieth-century literature’s complainer par excellence—an unapologetic snob and anarcho-nihilist who comically delighted in detailing what he saw as the unmitigated misery and hypocrisy of postwar Austria. Refusing exile, he was tagged by his compatriots as a Nestbeschmutzer (literally, “one who fouls his own nest”) and hammered with libel suits for both his public statements and his works. He seemed gleefully intent on proving Montaigne’s maxim that “there is a great deal of self-love and arrogance in judging so highly of your opinions that you are obliged to disturb the public peace in order to establish them.” 

It is not difficult to understand Bernhard’s grudgy apostate anti-patriotism. Born out of wedlock in 1931 to a mother working as a baroness’s cook and a father who refused the responsibility of his paternity (ultimately fleeing to Nazi Germany, where he committed suicide), Bernhard was raised by his anarchist layabout grandfather, the novelist Johannes Freumbichler, whom he revered as his “true father.” As an adolescent he was sent to Nazi boarding schools and was forced to join the Austrian Hitler Youth, where he was bullied mercilessly by his fellows and superiors alike. It’s as though his insistence, nowhere put more forcefully than in his final novel Extinction and his last play Heldenplatz, that Austria remains filled to the brim with Nazis is his revenge for the involuntary dictates of his youth. Bernhard, it nearly goes without saying, did not live to love, and his public persona does not seem to have been a façade; his half-brother Peter Fabjan described him as a “demon,” and besides Freumbichler and his Lebensmensch (or “life person”) “Auntie” Hedwig Stavianicek, thirty-seven years his senior, there seem to have been few on whom he did not eventually turn his back. He was an unabashed solitary and a lifelong bachelor.  

The paradigm of his novels was the soliloquy of the isolated genius on the cusp of, or in thrall to, madness and suicide, whether immediately or at a narrator’s observing remove, the latter a favorite idiosyncrasy. The prose style he consciously evolved resembles music, a register of locutionary repetition and revision that sometimes crosses the border into obsessive-compulsive territory. The obsession is always genius, and the compulsion is always to talk about it. Typically, though not as a rule, the genius is based on the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and destroys those who don’t have it, as in the novel The Loser’s two burgeoning concert pianists whose passion for music is obliterated by their encounter with Glenn Gould (who did not have the lung disease ascribed to him). And the so-called plot of Correction, the desire of Roithamer to build for his sister a perfect Cone to inhabit, mirrors Wittgenstein’s exacting construction, for his sister, of a modernist house in Vienna, now home to the Cultural Department of the Bulgarian Embassy.  

Bernhard, trained as an actor but an autodidact as a writer, knew what he was doing. He worked within an old Austrian form to subvert his countryside from the inside. The Heimatroman, or homeland-novel, is a minor genre of rural folk stories, and his method—he called himself an exaggeration artist—was to refract it through a dark lens of gothic horror. Correction may be considered the manic fructification of his high style, but the seed of his mature novels was planted in the tundra of the first, Frost (1963, translated in 2006 by Michael Hofmann), in the character Strauch, a misanthropic painter languishing at an inn on the rural fringes of Austrian society. Frost’s narrator is a medical student who has surreptitiously been sent by Strauch’s brother to report on him. Gradually, however, Strauch overtakes both narrator and narrative with his unrelenting pessimism, and the entire book becomes his icy diatribe against humanity: “The crowd is a phenomenon, the phenomenon of the man in the crowd has always fascinated me. The crowd exerts a morbid pressure on the individual to want to join it, to have to join it, you know. . . . Disgust at being a part of it, disgust at not being a part of it.”  

In Frost, the inn-folk have something of the flavor of Van Gogh’s Potato-Eaters, but by his second novel, Gargoyles (1967, translated in 1970 by Richard and Clara Winston), they have become a collection of deformed rural grotesques examined like specimens floating in formaldehyde, a “sick populace given to violence as well as insanity,” among whom the young narrator accompanies his father, a misanthropic doctor, on his rounds. It is desolate reading. “For the sake of your studies,” his father says, “for the sake of your studies.” This journey through the Styrian underworld culminates in an ascent to Prince Saurau’s Hochgobernitz Castle, overlooking the countryside through which they have just traveled. Prince Saurau is found on the inner wall of the castle, walking and talking to himself. It is no surprise, in Bernhard’s breakthrough, that it is Prince Saurau who delivers the brunt of the novel in a 126-page monologue against Austria and against life: “I cry out, and I say: I hope this state expropriates itself soon. I hope it commits suicide as fast as possible, I cry! . . . This ridiculous Republic, I said. Expropriated! . . . The state is rotten, I say, in all seriousness the Republic is rotting. . . . The state is rotten. Everything is empty, I say to Huber: The Reds are empty and the Blacks are empty, the monarchy is empty of course, and of course the Republic is empty.” Here the legacy of the Habsburg monarchy chokes to death on its own bile. In the figure of the prince, Bernhard plays a fortissimo variation on a theme of the mirrors-for-princes genre, and in the process discovers his own voice. It is this voice, this ranting aristocrat of the soul, which populates his novels thenceforth, having dispensed with such realism-tethered perspectives as Frost’s medical student and Gargoyles’ doctor’s son. Gradually, too, he outgrows the gothic element. 

Bernhard’s books were celebrations of himself and his opinions. Not content solely with winning a smorgasbord of literary prizes, including the Georg Büchner Prize, he wrote a book about accepting them all: My Prizes (published posthumously in 2010 and translated by Carol Brown Janeway) do not, however, include the Nobel. Bernhard’s notorious talent for provocative and alienating statements extends into the entirety of his acceptance speeches. “There is nothing to praise,” begins his address to an audience of cultural elites upon receipt of the Austrian State Prize, “nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks about death. . . . We’re Austrians, we’re apathetic, our lives evince the basest disinterest in life, in the workings of nature we represent the future as megalomania.”  

The playwright Heiner Müller contended of Bernhard that it was as if the Austrian government had hired him to write against Austria. “It should qualify him for a pension,” he said. When Bernhard died in 1989, his will strictly forbade the publication or performance of his works in Austria for seventy years, or the duration of their copyright. He was not joking. Yet the paradox of reading Bernhard is that his immense gusto is the joie de vivre opposite of nihilism, and for all his mad pyrotechnics of style he remains eminently readable. His rancor is the opposite of bitter, and his unrelenting bleakness turns positively comic in its excess. Morbus austriacus is, in the end, very funny—and an affirmation of life.