Thomas Bernhard: Heldenplatz

2015 ◽  
pp. 169-187
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Annau ◽  
Hannah Strutzenberger ◽  
Joachim Viehböck
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Bernhard

scholarly journals ON THOMAS BERNHARD’S NARRATIVE THINKING: «ETERNAL RETURN» AND A POLYPHONIC WRITING

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-54
Author(s):  
V.V. Kotelevskaya
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Narrative Thinking ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Thomas Bernhard ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The One

The article explores the typological principles and genesis of narrative thinking of Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989). It reveals the paradoxical nature of his writing, which combines, on the one hand, archetypal structures, implied ‘genre memory’, and on the other hand, a unique, innovative style. Bernhard’s constructive principle is repetition, which allows the embodiment of the idea of «eternal return» (Eliade) throughout the poetical structure, whether it is a sacred event of a myth or an «obsessive repetition» (Freud) of the traumatic memories of the protagonist or the narrator. The fragmented world is under constant reorganizing with the help of Bernhard’s polyphonic writing, which finds itself mostly in the imitation of the non-figurative, purely expressive, self-referential «art of fugue» (Bach), oriented to the cyclic, rather than linear-historical concept of time. In contrast to the literary interpretation of the «polyphonic novel» (Bakhtin) with its coexistence of multiple points of view, our attention is shifted to the musicological interpretation of the fugue’s polyphony as the embodied idea of the continuity of time, the closeness and infinity of the divine universe.

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